Congratulations Sentient Boat!

Being a sentient boat is great!  You get to spend time out on the water, the rush of movement is an incredible rush.  Each wave on your hull is like the stroke of a hand on your genitals.  If boats had genitals, that is.  Every day is a series of pleasant, nigh ecstatic moments arrayed in rapid succession.  The world is beautiful.

Spare one thing.  Sometimes, people come inside you.  And when they’re inside you most of the time they’re just having a good time, playing board games and chatting up a storm.  But sometimes, when they’re inside you they take shits.  Sometimes those shits are huge.  Gargantuan, mammoth shits.  Shits that could drown kittens.

Today will be a particularly bad day for shit.

Today your boattender will arrive with a collection of other two-legged vertebrates.  They’ll scramble all over your deck and inside your hull laughing and carousing and making out.  Then they’ll cook a massive chili dinner for one another.

The fallout will be epic.  One after another after another.  One man will spend nearly twenty minutes inside your head, shitting so fiercely that you’ll worry that the fabric of your holds will tear.  You’ll want to weep, but boats have no eyes.  The closest thing to weeping you’ll be able to do will be expelling bilge water back out into the sea in a cry for help.

Eventually today will end, but you’ll never be able to look at your boattender with trust again.  We’re sorry this happened to you.  It’s not your fault.

Congratulations Sentient Boat!

Congratulations African Queen!

Boats sometimes grow consciousnesses. Everyone knows it but not everyone likes to talk about it. That’s why we name boats, so they’ll have a sense of who they are when they come to life and, as a result, won’t murder everyone on board them with their fucking boat magic. But there’s a downside: sometimes people name boats wrong and those boats attain consciousness and they’re furious.

Today this is going to happen to you.

You’re a stately little steam powered river cruiser named The African Queen in reference to the boat from the classic film that you strongly resemble. But you have self-esteem issues (you think you look too heavy, even though everyone else thinks you look just right and they’re totally correct) and you don’t like being named after a boat, however venerable that you see as fat as well.

In retaliation to your owners, roughly twenty minutes after attaining sentience you’re going to lose your shit and totally make your boiler explode, beginning a cascade of explosions that will wreck the hull and kill most of the crew on board at the time. The survivors will flee into the river, where crocodiles will devour them.

All this just goes to show: self esteem issues hurt more than just the person who has them, it hurts everyone that relies on that person and, in the case of boats, can also prove damaging to the environment!

Congratulations African Queen!