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Anwei has not aged well; she is still well-muscled and solid under her plantsuit, but the long lines of her mouth are stamped deep into her face, and she can no longer pass for human. Her species is not a long-lived one, and she is bleakly aware that she might die of old age before this war ends.

She doesn't talk much, anymore. It had been ten years without Horanckk, ten years without a trace of her best friend and confidant. And as time went by, more and more time without him, she found herself less and less able to connect to the people around her.

She's worked in every department, a year here, a year there, and improved every one with her work. She keeps working, new projects and plans all the time. And when the battles thunder around them and the non-combatants flee to the shelters, she is often first there – to spend her time sitting in the corner, staring silently, wondering which one of them is tasked to kill her if the Vizsnunishne were to arrive and try to save her. She knows too much about how the systems work to be allowed to leave, surely.

Right now she is far in the back of Medical, working on a fist-sized robot that can monitor people on the battlefield, remotely broadcast their location and condition, clamp a wound or provide oxygen or dispense any one of a dozen necessary drugs. And explode, violently, if it is captured or tampered with.

"Hello, Anwei. What are you working on today?"

Zouichi has suspected that there has been something not-quite-right with Anwei for some time, but she's an exemplary crew member and 'I think she misses her AI too much' isn't exactly hard evidence. Many of the crew members have dealt with the years in one way or another; maybe this is simply hers.

"Medicalbot," she replies, her voice a little raspy from disuse. She holds it up in one hand: a smooth oval with glittering jointed legs and a head of lenses and needles. "Human-oriented."

Zouichi would need something very different, if she was going to make him a robot.

"Ah." For a human-oriented medical bot, it looked a little sinister. "I'm sure it'll be extremely useful in treatments."

Anwei was... not as talkative as she had been. He wasn't sure which Anwei was more troubling.

"I haven't seen you in a while; how have you been?"

"Needs to integrate with the suit better," she said, plucking absently at the sleeve of her plantsuit.

"Hotswap OS for the Gundams is done. Macross Quarter systems are backed up. Finished the Medical inventory. Engineering next." All these are recited flatly, as though reading off a checklist. And none of them have anything to do with how she is. Just what she's doing.

"Anwei..." He wasn't even sure he should be saying this, but he didn't like watching her do this to herself. He had to do something.

"I know you miss Horanckk. But there are people on this ship that care about you. And throwing yourself into your work like this isn't going to bring him back."

She looked at the robot for a moment, pushing one of its little legs back and forth with her thumb to make sure the joint was operating smoothly. She kept her eyes moving in parallel more these days, taking on that human habit.

Then she looked back up, expressionless, and ran her finger along her face, letting the wrinkles crease deep. "Shouldn't care," she said flatly. "No time."

When you're used to having an immortal best friend, when you were expecting to transition to the world of AI someday, your long-range plans got a little distorted. What was the point of having a friend for a year or so, when they would only turn away, or get repodded, or die? And when you knew you would die soon, anyway?

He sighed, tried another tack. "Anwei, you once told me that the Swift Death of Eight Wings asked you to live. To live fully, so you could tell her your stories as she brought you home. Do you think she'd be pleased with the stories you have to tell now?"

Her eyes didn't move, but they suddenly gleamed as though with tears.

"I can't tell those stories alone," she said. "I can't - connect to anyone, not without him to help me." Him being Horanckk, of course. Always Horanckk.

"Who wants to hear this story?" she snapped, waving her hand at the tentacled walls with eyes staring out here and there. And beyond it Stacy, the endless cycle of podpods and battles and Punishments. "Trapped, lost, hurt, no end to this war - it's not worth telling!"

"Anwei. Sooner or later, alive or dead, you'll be reunited with Horanckk. The only question is what you choose to do with the time up until then. You can change your story, but hiding behind programming and medical projects and avoiding everyone else on the ship isn't going to do it.

"Stories aren't only for people who are free and whole. Sometimes they're about people who are lost and keep going despite it."

"I don't want to change," she said, in the stubborn voice of a child. Didn't want to admit she could be happy without him; didn't want to do things that she was only going to have to repeat to him, second-hand, not being able to have him right there right now to experience them with her. Didn't want to risk falling in like - or worse love - with someone who was not him.

"I am going!" She flicked on the holographic display for her terminal - nothing but the best for her - and showed her schedule for the next week, the next month, the next year, the next five years. Barring a battle or other emergency, she could place where she would be and what she would be doing for the next decade.

There were notes through the later part of her schedule. 'Possibility of senility >20%', 'Extended exertion impossible; change exercise program', 'Food requirements decrease; cut back on meal schedules', and so on. The notes got thicker and thicker, until in about thirteen years they said 'Possibility of death >90%; transition all projects'. And then nothing.

"Going? No, you're standing still. People tell me that I'm stubborn, that I've refused to change. That I should take control of my life, become more than I was created to be. But you... you use Horanckk as a crutch. As a shield. When someone attempts to connect with you, you point to his absence and wail, 'How can I ever be happy now that Horanckk is gone? How do you expect me to go on?'

You hide behind your duties and call it 'progress', but the truth is, you haven't made any real progress for yourself for years. Maybe even since you've gotten here.

You don't want to change, because that would be moving on. Because it would mean admitting that the universe doesn't revolve around you and the drama you've created around yourself, the drama that can't continue without Horanckk.

Progress? All I see is a petulant child who's seated herself in the middle of the road and refused to move from her spot. You're the only one on this crew that hasn't bothered to take a single step forward. You might as well still be stuck in one of those pods. And those plans that you keep on your terminal? They're proof. You haven't been planning out your life, you've been planning your death. You've been dying for ten years, and you plan on dying for ten more.

Congratulations, Anwei, I'm sure your friend would be proud of you."

"I am that I am," she said, eyes frozen on Zouichi's face. "I am someone who had a voice in her ear twenty seven hours a day, seven days a week, for twenty five years of my life. And now that voice is silent, and no matter how I shout I can't hear myself. And you can say that Horanckk carried me for too long, and let my spirit atrophy; but I say that if he had not carried me, I would be dead or worse now. And then one of you heroes would have to do your own damn inventory, wasting valuable time that could be spent training and wooing and all those heroic things."

"I have tried, again and again, to touch people here. But I don't have the right words, or the right face," she pointed at herself. "Or I try and they are repodded, or they find anouther friend and turn away from me, or they die. I'm no good at friendship. I'm a creep, Zouichi. Always have been, always will be."

"And maybe that's exactly what I'm here for, did you ever think that? Maybe I'm here just to grind out my life in the gloom, someone that nobody will care about. Someone that nobody has to waste their time caring about."

"Now, if you don't mind, I do have work to do."

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zouichi.livejournal.com - 2011-05-13 19:13 (UTC) - Expand

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8wings.livejournal.com - 2011-05-13 19:34 (UTC) - Expand

Somehow, they're coworkers again. Howard doesn't mind that much; though he and Anwei have had their rough patches, he generally understands what makes her tick, and that makes her almost comfortable to be around. Besides, it's not like he doesn't understand having difficulty connecting to other people.

"What are we going to do, throw that at someone?" He peers around her at the little robot.

"Medicalbot," she says, holding it out. "Battlefield monitoring." She touches a sensor on its back and its carapace opens, showing circuitry and tiny vials of chemicals, ready to be mixed and dispensed.

"Needs more syntheroin," she says, and holds it out to Howard with a lopsided smile that looks even worse these days. She'd been in trouble before, for suggesting that people going into battle should be allowed to bring a suicide dose with them.

Howard had actually agreed with Anwei on lethal dosage - if someone would rather opt out than be tortured at enemy hands, or be rescued but live in crippling pain, they should be allowed to ask for a suicide pill to take into combat. As their Medic, he should be allowed to give them one to take with them. But neither his beliefs nor Anwei are worth making waves over, so he never backed her up beyond registering his opinion.

"Cool." He takes the bot and turns it over in his hand, then hands it back to her. God, she's looking old and wrecked these days. "Can you bypass the syntheroin rules with a morphine-cycloderin cocktail?"

She reaches out to the computer beside her - there's always one within arms'-reach, either a terminal of Stacy's or one she's built herself - and types in a few lines of code. She reads the results for a minute, for three, her total focus on the text scrolling by and not on the young man standing beside her. It's as though Howard had ceased to exist.

With a little jerk, she pulls herself back to the present. "No," she says dryly. "Intent." She could include both substances in the medicalbot, but she couldn't see a way of writing the program so as to allow the person to ask for self-termination that wouldn't make it obvious that the programmer had put it in there. The intent to provide a lethal dose would be discovered, with accompanying Violations, if not Punishment.

"Who says they have to be able to ask for self-termination? Could you, I don't know, just not put in a failsafe that would keep the combatant from combining them himself? I mean, it'd take time on their part, and the combo isn't common knowledge...," He doesn't even need to add 'but it could be'. Most of the people who ask him for suicide pills are subtle enough that he could see passing information about medication mixing. Although, he probably wouldn't suggest it if it were his neck on the line if it got found out.

She tapped her fingertips together, then reached out without looking and cleared the terminal records. Any terminal that she handled could be set to erase what it had done from the network, and she did so.

Anwei hadn't quite understood privacy when she arrived on Stacy, but after ten years under the watchful eye of an AI that blatantly refused to do what she wanted it to do, she was more than willing to deceive the system. She could enter the information about what to combine and how, but make it look like an archival record. And make sure it couldn't be deleted.

She gave Howard a thumbs'-up gesture, but didn't smile. She knew that smile made her look even worse these days.

Howard makes a gesture for her to give him a low-five. He fully plans on disseminating that information to the people who ask for it. He and Anwei, with their nonchalance about working around Stacy and their combined brainpower, don't necessarily have to work within the rules. "Mind taking a look at some of my readouts? I'm trying to figure out what that pink goo Stacy keeps trying to inject people with is, and everything that's coming up looks like Pepto Bismol mixed with cocaine."

She gives the low-five, and wonders when she'd last touched a person.

"Your readouts or hers?" Anwei had brought in medical monitoring equipment, again and again, but somehow after it had been on board long enough, the imported equipment always ended up being perfectly in sync with Stacy's reports - even if Stacy was wrong Stacy must be grabbing the equipment when they weren't looking and modifying it. One of the things that made Anwei just want to take the AI and strip her code until she screamed.

It says a lot about how comfortable Howard is with Anwei that he offered that high five. Most people he still doesn't do physical contact with, unless it's in some way to annoy them.

"Hers, duh. The last monitoring equipment we had that she didn't corrupt was like, four weeks ago." He can't keep the acid out of his voice when he mentions Stacy. He's still not happy with her, even after all this time.

Anwei had long ago classified Howard in her mind as 'not to be eaten,' which probably went a ways to why she was willing to accept the slap-salute from him.

Anwei gritted her teeth, more carefully than she used to; her teeth were not what they used to be. She didn't care what Neuropathy said; there had to be some block of neural tissue somewhere on Stacy that connected to the main whole with a tentacle at irregular intervals and dropped in fresh batches of corrupt commands. Why else would they be unable to comb her straight after all these years?

"Have we found any matches between the people she's trying to inject? Maybe she'd misreading them as having a calcium deficiency, and we need to purge and restart the medbay sensors again." That was always a nightmare; tentacles flailing everywhere while the doctors stood outside and hoped that Stacy didn't dismember all their equipment.

Howard would answer "because Stacy's working against us" but that's always his response. He knows it's better not to bite the hand that feeds him but in Stacy's case, he can't help himself.

"None yet. I haven't gone through the data on who she's injecting yet, I'm just trying t figure out the compound for what it is. But it may make more sense to work backwards, because I'm pretty sure this readout is inaccurate. Unless her sensors are picking up a lot of cokeheads with ulcers." He hands Anwei a clipboard with his printout. "Maybe Pepto Bismol and crack is the secret to eternal youth."

Or some power bloc within the Daligig was transmitting new command code that got munged in transit, and they couldn't figure out how to block it. Wrapping Stacy in tin foil wasn't practical, and building a large enough jammer would require too many resources - resources that the Council would notice. And the Council still thought the Daligig were on their side.

"Cokeheads with ulcers shouldn't get injections, they should be force-fed the stuff," Anwei replied absently, her eyes scanning the data. "All human or human-hybrid, all above puberty - ah. Check to see if they've all gotten The Shot or not." The Shot being Stacy's contraceptive of choice. "Maybe Stacy's decided to go back on letting people have kids here."

Which would be fine with her. Kids gave her the willies.