Bip's never done anything wrong in their life.
Also, to be explicit about it: Bip's English pronouns are they/them. They are a genderless entity made of qubit-encoded data. Within the setting, they are just coincidentally interacting with an Anglophone human culture that automatically defaults to those pronouns for non-humans... and tbh I don't think Bip would care much about being referred to with gendered terms (especially if it makes a joke land better). But I've noticed that if I don't point this out, new commenters will universally assign Bip masculine terms and pronouns. Which bugs me. If you're gonna gender this sapient pile of phones for funsies consider occasionally mixing it up with some feminine terms.
Transcript
Gillie appears bemused and impressed.Gillie: (ASL) Yes…
Talita: You want something from us. What is it.
Bip: Isn’t it obvious? I’m in quite a predicament!
Bip uses the projector feature on Talita's tablet to display an image on the wall behind the tablet. It's a diagram of the Runaway, showing the location of Bip's servers in the upper habitat capsule, the location of the fuel cells and communications systems below it on the spine of the ship, and the severed electrical lines between the two.
Bip: Right now, I’m stranded outside my own brain. (Nice projector, by the way.) I was left for dead after the projectile that punctured the habitat cut off my access to communications. It would be simple enough to fix.
Talita: And you’re talking to us instead of the authorities because… you have a record?
Bip: What record?
Gillie: (ASL) Wait, wait. You’re in a grounded ship?
68 thoughts on “Runaway to the Stars: Page 64”
The Hollymonster
Bip is a:
❌ Man
❌ Woman
✅ What are you, a cop?
evileeyore
One thing I find interesting. Bip is alive right now only because Talita is a good person. She wanted to see if the phones could be //returned// to their owners. By almost all salvage law I know about, the company owns those phones, and had someone with less “pay it forwardness” (or more “I can get a bonus from the company” mindedness maybe) had found them, they’d have been wiped for resale.
Claire
Taking a closer look at the ship and referencing it with early pages…
Is that forward disk just shielding, or is it shielding and water storage?
Kata
The idea of a phone being all screen except for the one tiny little camera port bothers me so much.
Jay Eaton
My phone is like that 😭
Spinland
Mine, as well.
Redacted
Bip have you killed a man.
Bartimaeus
TBH I strongly, strongly suspect Bip’s pronouns are also “you little shit—”
Redacted
Also responds to “This Fucking Thing”
Mr. Skeleton
Bip the unassuming triangle.
Gar G
“What record?^^ ”
Bip seems trustworthy XDD
(And agreed, people always seem to default to male if the gender is ambiguous. and I’m guilty of this myself, but yeah, come on, why *can’t* an asexual entity like Bip be seen as feminine?)
evileeyore
“What record?^^ ”
Yup, nothing says “I’ve already erased my criminal record from this system’s data” like a super cute icon trying to be super cute.
Septemberdale
Because Bip is deliberately-annoying in ways that people rarely write feminine characters be and thus reads as masculine by process of elimination. I’m myself unfortunately guilty of contributing to that trend, I have a space lizard in a story I’m writing whose main personality trait is “likes motorcycles and bad jokes” and he’s very male.
Greebs
Gimme da link to your story NOW!
hal9000
commander shepard? what are you doing in the runaway? (nice pfp)
Septemberdale
Well I’m now only in the early stages of writing it. My sincerest apologies. Also, I think you’d be disappointed anyhow, he’s only a side character unless things will change drastically.
hal9000
also im very interested in this story too (imagine eyes emojis here)
ammoth
something i’ve been wondering about – does Bip change their avatar to better match the emote preferences of the spevies they talk to?
The current avatar is a bug ferret that emotes with eyes and hands. This is a very human-friendly way to emote, which suits us, the readers, very well. And also suits talita & friends.
But Bip’s crew was all(?) centaurs, and centaurs emote primarily with their trunks and mouths. Would Bip still favor the cartoon-eyed ferret look, or would they change for a more centaur-friendly avatar to better convey emotion? Bc they sure like making cheeky faces (unlike some other AIs we’ve met that were perfectly happy w/o a visual component), I’d assume they’d want the faces to translate to other species as well.
zaratustra
Note Bip has a noodly bug ferret body but six limbs.
zaratustra
whoop didn’t notice bug ferrets are six-limbed sorry
Bay
it’s funny you say that tho your icon is a bug ferret haha
cola
i used xey/xem on the last page (or the page before?), which is listed as a set of pronouns for them (though in a specific english language). is that still okay?
Jay Eaton
Oh yah that works, it’s just Martian English dialect. Any gender neutral neopronouns is fine for Bip honestly
Ruby
Oh Bip, in what kind of messes have you gotten into? Moreover, in what kind of messes will you get our girls into?
Wasper
I didn’t even think of that until now. Do we even know how the law functions for this universe in general? I imagine just that’s complicated enough…
Maditox
i have a question about how you draw bip.
are you hand drawing their graphics or are you using a vector program with a bunch of their assets already made?
Jay Eaton
Their head is a raster image and the rest of them is a collection of vector layers with an outline effect. I usually do some drawing over it in areas that I need a more complicated overlap. This is all in clip studio paint.
EveryZig314
You know I’m curious what would happen to Bip if the authorities DID find them. Would they be put to death for being a pirate? Or is there AI jail?
Ruby
They’d be transferred into an apple product as a punishment
Zidane
Naughty AI get sent to Siri duty as punishment
Liza
A fate worse than death!
kage
the fact that bip downloaded an entire language file just so gillie could be included in the conversation has endeared them to me
hal9000
i think AI tend to be gendered as male since so many in popular culture are, such as HAL9000, AM, Data, Terminator… while ironically IRL most AI assistances are given a feminine voice as its more marketable for women to be in service roles (except when giving commands, where people are more likely to listen to male voices. its why in the London Underground, station names are read by a woman, but the Mind The Gap command is jarringly male).
its also a general feature of the English language to gender things as masculine by default. unless it’s a vehicle, in which case its feminine. so i suppose BIP is in the perfect pronoun intersection there- both an AI and a vehicle
anyway, bip, you delightful little space criminal. i want to drag you around my desktop. im a major sucker for AI and have been waiting patiently for the space worm’s debut (although i have developed a surprising affection for Calcery)
evileeyore
“i think AI tend to be gendered as male…”
It’s also because until recently(ish), “male pronouns” are also neutral in English. It wasn’t until the past 200 or so years that we (the ‘english speaking group’) started to care about any gender that wasn’t either ‘generic person’ (assigned male at pronoun) or female (‘needs protection’), and it’s been a bloody mess since. There is still a strong linguistic rut of just presuming “male” is also genderless, since ‘male’ is not something you need to be protective of, and should be wary of if it’s an unknown or has unknown qualities or characteristics.
Bip is super shady and very pushy, and it’s easier for most people to slightly vilify but also “enjoy the villainy from” a male (“I can fix him” or “I can’t fix him but I sure can [CENSORED] him”), rather than a female character in whom it would just be vilified completely (it’s a holdover kneejerkism that’s still clinging on in our society, it’s almost gone, but you still find it often enough we can’t say that bit of misogyny/andry has been slain).
Allosauropteryx
…I’ve always tended to drift toward feminine pronouns for Bip. They have a very feminine way of playing “I’m such a little shit… but I’m cute so wygd? ^u^” At least in my experience I’ve only seen women/girls/femme guys do it…?
Also, Talita, perhaps because the authorities didn’t bring Bip’s hoard-of-phones into their room to charge and you did? They seem pretty impatient to get going. Gillie, also, looks pretty intrigued…
Origamigryphon
The equivalent of a shit-eating grin on an entity without a mouth
Claire
/’|’¸’¸’¸’¸’¸’|’\
‘-,;¸,..-··-..¸;,-‘
,_;,_¸ ¸_¸;_
|´¯O ´¯O,-´ — They/Them or Xey/Xem
|¸’¸’¸’¸’,-´
|¸’¸’,-´
|¸,-´
Claire
Bips delightfully animated eyes are so hard to convey in ascii… im still trying to figure out a way to get that bubbliness down
notanocelot
I am enjoying all of the bip ascii content
Tero
bip’s gender identity is agent of chaos
ilvos01
I’ve noticed that people tend to subconsciously assign gender based on the character’s role in a story. The very presence of a new character alone makes people think masculine, particularly if they’re a the focus of attention. Like a peacock.
It’s rare to see people assign “female” to a character’s role. Usually you see it if the character is lying wounded, or protecting children. That’s not fair, of course, but that’s what I’ve noticed.
Rpob90
lol I’d have to say for Bip here, I automatically tended to more feminine role. They just look like a little evil goober.
Tyrone the Miner
“what record?”……..Riiiiiiiight !!! I think ALL warninglamps flash brightly red several places in the Universe when the name “Bip” is mentioned!I really like the little rascal more and more!
Think this is gonna be “Fun on the Bun” Bender style. =)
the Inmara
We suspect that what Bip is saying is that they have made sure that there are no records of their piracy. That they are too skilled (or full of themselves) to have a record.
Bravo
The best pirates are never known to the authorities.
DasGanon
I do love when an AI/Computer/Machine is a large array of something, so that their pronouns are they/them (plural)
persimmon
goddddddd gillie is so pretty on this page i love the way you draw her hairrrrrr
Apollo235
Gillie makes so many good faces
https://jayeaton.site/Art/RttS/Comics/MinsBabyPictures
her reaction here is one of my favorites
Pocket Whale
That is the cutest chicken nugget i’ve ever seen! :’D thanks for sharing the comic!
evileeyore
Gillie is so feral! I love her.
Apollo235
Projectile, not debris. Unless this is just a random difference between Jovian and Modern English, Bip was in a fight…
CatLovingCreature
Part of Bip’s dialog seems to be off the screen Is this just a mobile problem? Or just me specifically lol.
AnormalADN
Nah it’s normal, Bip is transcribing what they’re saying on the screen for Gillie to read
Maia
It could still be a piece of debris, or a rock, or something. It just means that they got hit with *something* and it wouldn’t necessarily even have to be all that big looking at the hole it left. If that’s the case then I wouldn’t be surprised if Bip ends up with a lot of guilt for that. Something that big would likely have been picked up by the ship’s navigational system unless they were flying dark.
Jay Eaton has expressed disinterest in combat and warfare a couple of times. I wouldn’t jump to that being the most likely thing narratively, but I also wouldn’t rule that out either. This setting is rich with complex societies with a lot of friction both internally and externally. It might be disingenuous to just hand wave away that this sort of thing never happens. After all it is a pirate ship smuggling something *someone* doesn’t want smuggled. Easy to miss a ship that likely only sometimes has its equivalent to AIS on.
Whatever hit them was compact, dense, and fast. Puncturing multiple bulkheads without leaving much spalling and shrapnel. Could be an especially metallic iron/nickel meteorite. Could be debris from another ship or leftover construction. Could be intentional kinetics. The ambiguity of what that was is likely intentional, and the specifics are not important yet anyway.
Either way, that was likely a very sudden and very bad day for the crew.
Chrysalis
Yet another innocent bystander who got shot by the Asteroid Belt.
Apollo235
Yeah whatever it was is defo gonna have a story behind it, given that its a pirate ship its possible that it was an attack. Whatever it ends up being I’m giddy to find out.
Septemberdale
Rival pirate gang? That’s not warfare, and it wouldn’t exactly be easy for even a normatively pacifistic society to entirely eradicate issues of petty criminals squabbling with one another seeing as criminals are already by definition hiding on the fringes and also by definition have lower-than-average aversion to risk.
Trees
I also raised an eyebrow at Bip’s choice of the word ‘projectile’. As Maia says, it seems the object was a) small and dense, and b) neatly severed power and communications which also suggests an aimed shot over astronomically unlucky debris strike. Obviously, all this speculation gets us nowhere but on the other hand speculation is fun!
I very much hope Bip was the only crew member but likewise they used the word ‘habitat module’ rather than something more clinical and lifeless like ‘server module’.
hal9000
i believe its mentioned in the early pages by Calcery that the reason the ship’s scrapped at all is that it is the habitat model, where people (centaurs) lived, that was damaged- Talita enters it to collect the phones, and some water jugs & other personal effects can be seen. which uh. doesnt imply great things for the previous crew.
Apollo235
Hell yeah speculation *IS* fun!
evileeyore
My yarn-web says Bip was shot at, probably by rivals. But, then again, my tinfoil bandanna might be to tight, that happens…
waterfan2
Actually, who are the authorities on Dirtball? Mel is the supervisor of operations, I think, but if someone is too rowdy who throws them in the drunk tank?
Probably the other reason Bip doesn’t talk with authorities is that they’ve only been awake for 15 hours and only have a third of their brainpower.
Trees
I imagine Ohwitiil just relentlessly screams at wrongdoers until they leave the planet.
Redacted
I guess they’d defer to the Jovian and Tiilitian governments for laws, but idk how they’d deal with capital C Crimes.
feesh
probably just jovia at this point, i don’t think dirtball technically belongs to the dominion of tiliit anymore. though regardless i gotta imagine it would be Really Annoying to deal with actual honest-to-god Criminal Activity on a barely occupied moon 1 jillion miles away from your actual territory. someone’s going to be making some really annoying phone calls lol.
1d4Nadg
Talita has a projector on her tablet? Just for such an occasion? I love it!
Septemberdale
She’s a centaur. She probably uses it to watch TV but Bigger And Further so she doesn’t need to keep the glasses on at all waking hours.
ArBe
That’s a good point, I wouldn’t have thought of that!