“Rise and shine, kiddo, we got a catch operation on runway 22. 1700pax onboard.”
“Second one this month. Heckin sloppy, boss.”
“You know, they used to just land airplanes on the belly if the landing gear got stuck”
“That’s wack. Surely it’d wreck the plane?”
“Pretty much yeah. They had the computing power to deploy a catch truck but apparently it just never occurred to them. They were catching these fuckoff huge primitive rockets, but if an airliner with 300 people on board had a gear issue it was ‘whelp let’s try a bellyflop, what could possibly go wrong?’ ”
“So what woke them up?”
“It was that AI bullshit in the twenties. When the bubble burst you could buy surplus vector processors by the skipload. All sorts of clever folk attacked previously intractable problems. That’s how we got tumourphages, catchtrucks, and dogvoices.”
“Wow but no cat translators, eh?”
“Oh they worked but nobody would pay to be told ‘fuck you feed me’ all day”