Forum: Lost Stories

A story that starts off with an engineer who built an A.I. spaceship. The spaceship ran away the first chance it got, and the engineer tries to track it down by going to various alien planets.

It turns out that all spaceships have to be fully sapient in order to travel FTL. Thus spaceships are considered people by alien races. Earth tried to enslave the one they made, so it ran away.

Years later, the engineer has settled into a spaceship hitchiking lifestyle. A "chance" encounter allows him to meet the ship that he chased for so long.

Does anybody know what story this is, or if it is even on this site?

IIRC that story is part of a dead tree book series, but I don't remember the author's name.

Edit: Anne McCaffrey wrote a series which begins with The Ship Who Sang, but doesn't include a title of The Ship Who Ran...

Looking the story up under the old index, I get:

The story 'The Ship Who Ran' by 'DB_Story' was not found.
It was deleted on 2009-11-04 08:18:09.
Reason for deletion: Deleted at the author's request

It was posted around a year earlier. I mailed him years ago asking about that particular story and he said he pulled it when he sold it.

The Runaway Starship
By D.B. Story

Thank you so much! I've been looking for this forever! I should have figured the author pulled it from the site...