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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.

"Or shot out back," Howard says, only half-kidding. "Ugh, no way. She still has a ton of pods to go through before we have to deal with squealing brats."

Even all these years later, too many kids at once makes him uncomfortable. It reminds him too much of the FAYZ; those memories have only slightly faded in the last decade. "So what, you think Spacey Stacy wants to fight the war with crackbabies?"

"Bismuth subsalicylate and stimulants," she muttered to herself. "Counteracting stomach upset and livening us up, but getting it all wrong." She frowned, and opened a database window. "Bismuth subsalicylate - bismuth subsalicylate - I'm wondering if it's the counteragent for something we don't know about. Has Science cracked open any interesting alien artifacts recently? Anyone break into a sealed tomb in the City and release a terrible curse?"

She's only half-kidding; over the years all sorts of threats have been uncovered on Stacy, many of them invisible to the AI herself. It would be just like her current pattern to start dosing the crew with something to repel giant flesh-eating slugs without telling them that hey, giant flesh-eating slugs were loose.

"Nothing's showing up in the reports. If something happened, either someone's covering it up or they don't know about it. Or, you know, it's Stacy O'Clock again and something insane is about to happen that'll make us reconsider our role on the ship and blah blah blah." He grinds a knuckle into his forehead. "Of course, that's taking for granted that these readouts are correct. For all we know it's just saline and chalk and Stacy's corrupted the scanner again."

The most frustrating part of living on this ship is that they never feel like they're making any progress with the powers that be. Ten years later and they still aren't any more certain of their surroundings than they started.

She was starting to run out of words, her eyelids drooping. She just wanted to get her data and go curl up in a corner with it, alone. But she poked herself back to here and now. She still had enough of a ghost of self-preservation to not want everyone she worked with on a daily basis to reject her.

"When was last podpop?" She couldn't remember. "Maybe a nutrient deficiency? Someone coming out who's allergic to us, or vice versa?"

"Two months. Nobody interesting, at least as far as I was concerned." He shakes his head. As always, way too many variables. Maybe if Stacy would actually give them useful information...but no. Medical hypothesizing is always them chasing their own tails more than anything.

"You look tired." It's not an insult or an olive branch, just a statement.

She'd found out some time ago that discussing hwo this was all probably just a computer simulation rarely went well.

"Tired of - of flying in place." She gestured with one hand at the room around them, and the ship beyond that. "We make progress, and then fall back twice as far. We fix one thing, find two things, and four things break."

She dropped her head, slumping for a moment. "We don't even know where we are flying to." Had there ever been a war with the Ohm, or had the Daligig just forced them into preemptive attacks? Whenever someone seemed on the cusp of finding out something definite they died, or were injured badly enough to lose their memory, or were repodded. Everyone went away, or would go away. She got tired just trying to remember their names.

"Yeah. Yeah. No shit. But you're taking it personally. What, did you expect that because Stacy plunked you into a snotpod ten years ago you didn't have to live the same dreary, futile existence as the rest of us?" He makes a derisive sound and sticks his feet up on the desk. "Don't let it get to you."

She looked down her nose at him - not too far, she was only about three inches taller than he was. "Young man, I was living dreary and futile before it became fashionable," she said snottily, then went back to her normal tone. "I'd prefer dreary and futile and not changing everything at random every four months,thank you very much."

"The mercs could be very futile. Take the paycheck, win the battle, help the rebels, and then two years later you're hired back because the rebels who took over run the planet twice as badly as the previous bunch. I used to be better at putting it aside, that's all. 'We lost, massive casualties, nothing accomplished? Well, let's toast the dead and then go dancing.' Here I just can't seem to strike the right balance."

It didn't help that the funerals on Stacy weren't accompanied by a proper funeral feast.

"Oh, so dreary, futile and boring! Sounds so much better." He's used to people posturing over him, so he doesn't show her any other reaction. "Yeah, it must suck to have picked up a conscience along the way."

He still never forgot her streams of formulas, mathematical abstractions of good and evil.

"You'd choose tentacles randomly injecting you with this week's mystery formula to a little bordeom? Such a daredevil. Next thing I know, you and Zouichi will be running missions together again."

Zouichi being taller, stronger, and infinitely more battle-worthy than both of them - than both of them combined, for that matter.

"It's only a little conscience." She mimed rocking a baby in her arms, and then tossing it away over her shoulder. "Either you can have me realistic and depressed, or unrealistic and shrug-it-all-off. Your choice, Doctor."

"Hey, what I like isn't on trial here. I'm just grilling you." He mock shudders. "I'm fine with never letting Stacy send me out to find some MacGuffin again. I've been electrocuted, half-drowned, attacked by wolves..."

Anwei's probably heard Howard's list of complaints nearly as many times as Zouichi has.

He can't help but smirk a little whenever someone calls him Doctor, teasing or no. He isn't actually a doctor, but he might as well be. "Well, give me an update if feeling sorry for yourself gets old. Last I checked Stacy makes fluoxetine compounds, not sure that'd work on you."

"Is that what I smelled burning," she said, sniffing a little too obviously.

"I don't have any serotonin levels to tamper with. For me to reset my brain chemistry to optimum, I'd have to Take Time Off." She audibly capitalized those words. "And you know what happens when I try to train backup personnel - they get sick, they dissolve, they get eaten by invisible bears, they get run through GLaDOS until they forget everything...."

"The invisible bears weren't a laughing matter," he says with a face so straight that it's obvious he thinks the invisible bears were hysterical.

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Re: kjladkjfldskjfdsds chokes laughing

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