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Chris Marsden leant forward in the driver’s seat, peering up at the cruiser suspended from the gantry crane above, still with a missing nacelle.
There was something vaguely unsettling about being in a small RV, in a massive landing bay that should have been full of people milling about working. There should’ve been heavy-haulers driving up from below, while the crane above loaded a bulk carrier with raw ore.
“It’s a damned shame what happened to this place,” he concluded.
Yayoi looked at him over the top of her eReader. “I’m just glad we made it here as fast as we did.” Considering the faster alternative being the Virgil Samms.
Rei was her usual conversation self, sitting in back waiting patiently with a book on her lap as the landing bay repressurised. Inside the insulated passenger compartment it sounded like a jet airliner passing distantly overhead.
Chris checked the gauges on the instrument binnacle, watching the pressure slowly crawl back up. He tapped at it impatiently, eager to get out outside the RV that’d been his prison for the last two days.
Rei stood up. “She’s here.”
The knock at the door came a moment later.
“I’m right outside,” her voice hissed from the radio.
“Let her in Rei,”
The blue-haired girl hadn’t waited for Marsden’s order before opening the outer door. The cyber’s feat thunked into the airlock. The outer door latched shut, air hissing into airlock. The inner door opened a moment later, the cyber carefully picking her way aboard the RV. There was something mildly comical about her trying to pick her way through the RV’s interior without smashing anything.
“Jet, it’s good to to see you again,” Yayoi said.
“Likewise. Thanks for coming so fast,” Jet responded. Her expression was a tired crossover between relief and gratitude.
“Rei insisted on meeting him as soon as she heard,” said Marsden, standing up. He performed a Picard maneuver to adjust his jacket .”And I can’t refuse a request from her.”
“Where is Ikari?” Rei asked. Everyone looked
“He’s with Nené Romanova and Anika up in Anika’s apartment right now. He’s probably staying there overnight.”
Marsden checked his watch. “It’s midday.”
“We use Martian standard time here,”
Yayoi made a quick calculation. “Well, that suits me then. It gives me time to catch up and get ready for tomorrow.”
Chris nodded. “Yeah, I’d like to get some rest after such a long journey.” He took a deep breath. “And it’d be nice to stretch my legs.”
Jet offered a wry smile. “I know that feeling well. We just need to wait for the pressure to equalise before the doors can be opened. Then I can show you up to your apartments.”
“You can fill me in on what’s happened today along the way.”
Jet nodded. She gave a tired sigh. “It’s been a long one.”
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Anika dangled what looked like a plain ordinary wrist-band in front of Shinji. It seemed to be made of stretchable pink fabric he couldn’t identify, with a single metallic plug sewn into it.
“It’s a VOIP communicator. I built them for myself to interface with my dataport so I wouldn’t have to wear an ugly headset. It works over the local network.”
“Go on, try it,” Nené urged.
He tapped open his wrist and slipped it on. The plug snapped into the socket on his wrist.
It burst into his mind, configuration data racing through his thoughts. In microseconds he felt his mind reach out, interrogate it. It answered with a burst of data, flooding his awareness with installation data, then chasing it with the information on how exactly to use it, followed moments later by his own I.P address, hostname and the fact that he was online and available.
A small widget popped up into his peripheral vision, picked out in green wireframe, letting him know his own status, location, while offering him a few settings to play with at a thought.
Anika Daini. Loc: Apartment. Status: Online Busy.
Jet Jaguar: Loc: Tunnel 01 | Control Room. Status: Online.
Ami Shinohara: Loc: Apartment. Status: Sleeping!
He blinked and flicked at the corner of his eye to try and clear it before realising it wouldn’t go away. Shinji took a sharp intake of breath, giving wide eyed glances at the women looking at him expectantly.
It was running, right there, as unignorable as an itch. He scratched at the pink band instinctively, confirming that it really was connected to him.
“Welcome to a wider world.”
Anika’s voice burst through his awareness, clear and crisp. Her lips never moved. She was just smiling softly at him. Nené watched expectantly.
Shinji swallowed, opened his mouth to speak, but wasn’t quite sure what to say.
“This is strange.”
It was as easy as speaking. Just fire a thought at her.
>>“You can also use text messaging. If you’d like."
It was raw text, flashing through his mind. He read it in a microsecond, and understood it fully an instant later. Shinji glanced at the timestamps appended to the messages, and saw that less than a second had passed since he’d come online.
“I’m a machine.” He barely heard himself say it. The others didn’t
“You are an android,” Nené corrected
“I’m an android,” he stated. “I am an android.” He tried the phrase on for size. It wasn’t right.... but it was less-wrong than it had been.
“I’m an android.” He meant to broadcast it to Anika alone, realising moments after sending it that it’d gone out onto the wider network
“Congratulations,” Anika smiled
“He’s an android and he’s okay,” Nené sang along to a tune Shinji failed to recognised. “He rides a bike and.....” she trailed off completely, unable to think of any way to finish that line. Her cheeks started to go a little red.
Shinji gave a light chuckle.
She pouted, placing on hand on her hip. “I’d like to see you do better.”
Shinji’s response was interrupted by another voice bursting into his mind.
“Thanks for waking me up!”
Ami Shinohara. The cyborg from earlier. He didn’t need to recognise the voice, the owners identity was carried with the metadata.
“Sorry. I’m not used to using this yet.”
He hoped it sounded as apologetic as he wanted to.
“Be careful next time then, okay? Some of us are still human enough to need sleep.”
“Okay. I’m sorry.”
He could feel his cheeks starting to warm.
“What?” the others enquired. They seemed to loom over him, like predators sensing weakness.
He shrunk down into himself .“I accidentally woke someone up.”
For a moment, he swore Anika’s attention had been somewhere else, but where he couldn’t tell. She gave him an amused smile, but Shinji could tell it was almost forced. She glanced at Nené who seemed to genuinely find his little error mildly amusing at best....
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Why do I do this so late?
Hopefully I'm getting everyone right. Writing other people's characters is hard. (At least when they can complain). And, in case it matters, the original mine failed because of chronic poor management.... they didn't invest in new mining processes when they had the money to do so, and got caught out when the large deposits dried out. They struggled to modernise and start digging smaller pockets economically, but failed to get up to speed in time and the banks called in the loans.
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--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?