Clearly this human did not just have a controller, but also knew the command syntax used by a captain of a bioship. This pleased the ship, or at least roused certain things in it that it, personally, considered emotions. Some artificial beings thought such things affected, but You Sexy Thing thought that organic creatures like itself were surely prone to biological feelings, no matter whether they were created or spawned of accident as so many of their fellow creatures were.

The Thing actually considered itself as human—or rather, as capable of being human—as its current owner. Takraven was its sixth owner. A ship like the Thing appealed to the idle rich, but the idle rich of this universe often turned into the idle poor, and a bioship represented a large amount of ready cash, particularly when sold to someone still in the rich category.

The ship had taken more than eighty years to become fully grown, nestled in a shipyard near the Dannefer solar system with three fellows created at the same time. The shipyard usually grew the ships four at a time; part of their adulthood rites involved a final challenge, where first pairs fought each other, and then those winners were paired again. The Thing had beaten all its siblings; that was when it had first learned about emotions, first with the adrenaline surge of joy and later the throb of loss as old habits died and it tried to speak to a sibling no longer there.

Then it had been sold to its first owner, a socialite duchess, who had pretended at piracy, robbing her friends in contrived amusements, until someone killed that body. The experience had soured her on the ship. She sold it in turn to her best friend, another socialite, an elderly androgyne who wrote poetry. That was when those emotions had come back, and the ship and the poet had long and thoughtful discussions which, every once in a while, the poet wryly called “bouts of indulgent mutual narcissism.”

A fascinating concept, combinations of emotions, which the ship did not think any other bioship grasped.

The poet had taught the ship about humor, but the ship, which had had so many names before becoming You Sexy Thing, was still unsure about that. It did think it understood sorrow and anger and pride by now, and after the poet died and it kept passing from hand to hand until it finally settled as a favorite possession among many possessions owned by Arpat Takraven, who never seemed to become less rich, it continued to learn emotions, chief among them boredom, irritation, and impatience, but its software prohibited it from acting on any of these in overt ways.