[RFC][Story] Mission to Arcadia

[Dartz]

-----This is definitely turning into a chronicle of 2024.

Ford's got her own episodes coming up. And that's before we even get to Detroit. Or the Great Lakes and Titanic. The Ultima 500. Or Arcadia. Or how it all gets out.

Anyway.
Cresting the Hill
Convention, 2024.

Daryl marched ahead of the swarm of bloggers, struggling to outpace them through the crowds. One of them with a recording quill slipped through the throngs in the hall, keeping easy pace with her. Bloody tomcats.

"Because it's my life and I thought the rewards were worth the risk."

That was the answer she gave . Simple as. She wasn't an idiot. She knew what she was doing. Why wouldn't they leave her alone? Idiots seemed more concerned with the potential of an engineering scandal reminding everyone of two major space disasters, than the fact that they came within licking distance of a record. Even if they weren't trying to break it.

It wasn't reckless. It was only reckless if you risked someone else's life in the process. What she did with herself was her own right.

But the catboy with the quill was insistent.

"So then, Last question? Why do you keep wearing that flightsuit? Is it some sort of fetish?"

That drove in deep. She stopped in her tracks, snapping around to face him. He stopped, waiting patiently, slitted-eyes bright and waiting the blockbuster answer. Grey-furred ears swivelled forwards. His tail perked up. His whiskers twitched as he sensed the air, just in time to catch a whiff of the anger he'd stirred up.

"Hey, fuck off asshole!" And she drove it home with the tip of her finger drilled right into the catboy's chest. "Don't you fucking accuse me of…."

Daryl was interrupted by a sharp blow to the cheek, rattling her thoughts. She staggered a little, taking a moment to gather herself and get ready to come out fighting whoever'd decided to punch her in the face.

She was met by a short-skirted cosplayer with an especially oversized fiberglass prop of a scissor-sword.

"Oops, sorry. Didn't see you there honey," the cosplayer offered an apologetic smile.

Daryl growled at her, crushing all the little frustrations down into a ball beneath her feet. It was still a public place, and letting it all out in public would just make a spectacle of herself.

The cosplayer didn't get the message, instead her face shifting to show genuine concern.

"Ooh sweetie, your eye's gone red….."

Daryl blinked. Then blinked again to be sure. Her hand snapped to cover her eye on instinct, panic rising in her throat. It was gone.

"Shit!. Shit!."

She scanned the floor, searching for it. Where did it fall? Where did it fall? Feet trampled dangerously close, bodies jostling into her personal space. If she didn't find it soon it'd be crushed and then everyone would see. She shoved the catboy aside.

There. On the floor. Shattered white plastic. The idiot had stepped right on it.

Daryl swallowed. They all stared at her, begging faces expecting some interesting newsworthy explosion of emotion. They encircled her, waiting. Staring. Pinning her on the spot, expecting the scoop on the big explanation, to be the first to post the information in the wild.

Daryl ran for it.

----------

Jet found herself up on top of Lun's tail, sitting there watching Convention traffic in Titan's orbit. Saturn loomed fat and happy in the distance. Kotono's Bolitho offered a not-inexpensive taxi service for people journeying between the ship and the convention. A few of the fellow travellers had hitched a ride to watch Lun's debate with Marsden, growing out of an argument when they'd met.

The livestream was in the back of Jet's mind somewhere, while the tight flightsuit the puppet wore grasped for her attention, along with a few people who insisted on telling her to the puppets face how dumb that stunt had been.

The worst thing about doing something stupid was that people like to remind you how stupid it was as if they were the only person in the universe who thought it was a bad idea. The temptation to dig her heels in and tell them all to fuck off burned, backed by a dozen post-facto justifications.

Jet had taken to hiding up on the tailplane to keep them from bothering her in person. That still didn't stop them from trying her personal comm's. A simple loopback allowed her to fake a busy signal and force them to voicemail.

Another one burst into her mind, demanding her attention. It came within moments of being shunted to voicemail like all the rest, before she thought to check the origin. It continued to ring in her mind as she vacillated between answering it and taking it on the chin or letting it slip to voicemail and taking it worse later.

She braced herself and answered the phone.

"So, you want to explain why people think I need to know how reckless my partner is?"

Ford was exactly as pissed off as she'd expected.

"We knew what we were doing."

Wrong answer, but she just couldn't stop herself. The first instinct was to defend. It had the benefit of being true.

"And that's what makes it so stupid. You went and did it anyway..... and did it so stupidly obvious people started mistaking it for performance art."

"I don't need to keep being told how stupid that was..." A note of frustration edged the synthesised voice on Jet's comm. A cold snarl rose up the back of her throat, exhaling through her nose as a frosty haze.

"Yeah, you do." Ford cut back "If you didn't this sort of thing wouldn't keep happening. Or do I need to break out the list. Let's start with the reason you're able to sit out on the hull and move forward from there..." Momentum was building behind her like a train speeding down a hill.

"And I never hurt anyone but myself, did I?" Jet fired back.

"And what about the people who actually might give a crap what happens to you!" The radio crackled as Ford's voice hit the limits of its circuitry. "Did you ever think about what happens to them? How they feel?"

"It wasn't like we had a choice! If we say we're going to do stuff and get all these people to watch, and we cancel because of some minor fuckup, nobody's ever going to believe we can do anything. We had to do it..."

Simple as that. Call off a stunt for what sound like minor reasons and people start to wonder if you're even worth their fleeting interest. Sometimes reality had to give way to public relations, when public relations was what enabled you to keep your program moving forward. Even if that stunt in and of itself was nothing more than whiteout to hide what they were really doing in the dark behind it.

"And if you fuckup big in front of a thousand people and kill someone then they're going to start wondering if you should be allowed to do it."

"What about the Highway Star? And that journo we put in the hot seat?"

"He knew the risks!"

"So did Daryl. And we both agreed it was worth it."

"That wasn't what it sounded like from my side of the radio." Ford snapped back. There was a pause, punctuated by a sharp intake of breath. "I'm pretty sure that wasn't what anyone else heard either. I think they heard someone who clearly knows better recklessly convincing someone else to do something dangerous against their better judgement..."

Jets answer died in her mind.

"It makes me wonder how someone with all that technology ticking away between their ears can be so fucking stupid!"

That's probably where Jet would've felt the sting of palm on her skin. She brushed her cheek with her own cold, metallic fingers, bringing her own train of thought to a screeching, crashing halt.

Because I'm only human was the first thing that came to mind, but that was proved wrong immediately by the frames of data running through the back of her mind from her sensors. Or the simple fact that she'd kicked back on the outer hull of a spaceship near Saturn for some peace and quiet. The puppet itself stood beside the Kulbit racer on a single-bay stand down in the hangar - away from the main flow of traffic, hemmed in by the spacecraft beside it , the fascia for the stand and the steel roof of the building.

She let out a long sigh from both bodies, running two sets of fingers through two heads of hair, her puppet mimicking her actions. Polymer-clad fingers glided through the puppet's silken hair. The joints on her own hand tugged and bit at her own coarser locks.

"I just wanted something to go right this year," both of them breathed in unison, the puppet getting a funny look from a passer by for its trouble.

"You're still an idiot," Ford answered after a while. Her tone had softened, at least.

Across the hanger, her puppet could see Bellecomb's VF-9, covered in lush tricolour bunting, teasing her. It'd taken them months and millions to do what'd taken her years. Along with it there were the usual prototypes and concepts from the bigger design houses taking centre stage, with most of the smaller garagistes and first-timers moved out to the edges, alongside herself.

Above her, Saturn's vast atmosphere churned, clouds the size of planets scudding along riding thousand kilometre an hour winds. The gas-planet's own rings hung silently, reminding her of an ancient record player with its banded tracks. She ached to just launch off and play in the debris, streaking trails through the dust or just languorously bathing in the warmth and majesty of open space in a way that never ceased to feel like an utter privilege.

Thousands of people milled through the hanger, swarming over the new metal - more than a few of them thinking to wear AR ID tags that hooked into their network profiles and feeds . The puppet in the flightsuit drew more than its fair share of attention from the passers. Daryl didn't like it - the racer having her own ideas of self respect, but the puppet was nothing more than a mannequin anyway.

Thousands of craft ringed Titan, sparking in the sunlight, most offering their transponders as soon as the VI running her comms detected her passing interest and interrogated them for her. She was ware of her own pinging away to inquiries before she shut it off, letting the pure silence of vacuum close in

"Um... excuse me?"

It took her a moment to realise that someone wasn't standing on the tail beside her, but was actually trying to talk to her puppet, and were starting to get irritated at it's vapid stare. She pushed more of herself into its empty body, leaving behind the peace of space for the chaos of the con.

"Somebody wants to talk to my puppet…." she broadcast to Ford, quickly

"I've got to handle the next Motorcon announcement. We'll talk later."

He stood eye to eye with the puppet, though still struggled maintain eye contact. His baseball-cap and mock flight-jacket seemed to have been sown together out of dozens of sponsor patches - there was very little if any sign of the original jacket left beneath. She recognised him long before the software in her mind had a chance to do an image search on his face, and found herself suppressing a grimace.

Jet took a pride filled breath, choosing to take a leaf from Daryl's book and act like she just didn't care what she was wearing - as if the full flight suit was nothing more than a baggy pair of jeans and a t-shirt.

She forced herself to smile. "What can I do for you?"

Telling him to fuck off, while satisfying, was probably exactly what he wanted her to do. Goad her into snapping off at him, then running to the wide interwave with video or audio of Jet Jaguar being an angry bitch. (And Oh look at how awesome the tits on the puppet are in that flightsuit).

"Look," he began "I want my team to be competitive next year. So, what'll you do me for two of these yokes, with a spare-parts contract and flightsuits for a year? Or will I have to go to Bellecomb?"

On Lun's tail, Jet herself struggled to swallow a burst of laughter. She struggled not to just say 'Really' and blink owlishly. She thought maybe there was some deeper joke to it all - given that the most outspoken opponent of the Kulbit-series was standing in front of her, asking to buy two of them.

"Oh, and what part of the flightsuits can you make transparent?"

That proved he was on the level - Saruwatari team had their reputation to maintain, after all.

-------

"So, Daryl, you want me to take a look at that eye?"

"It's fine."

"You've been covering it for the last ten minutes."

"Some idiot caught me with his elbow. It aches a bit. No big deal."

"If it's still aching after this long…"

"Alright Kotono. Get off my back damn it!"

"Of course, Priss."

The rest of the trip back to Lun passed in terse silence.

Daryl didn't even bother paying for it. She fetched a small case from her locker, pushed past the fellow travellers who'd gathered around the galley to watch the feed from the Lun (Alekseeva) - versus - Marsden debate.

Daryl made straight for the crew shower on the lower deck, dodging questions along the way. She didn't take her hand from her eye until the door was safely locked behind her. Built out of an old storage locker, it was small with the showerhead right above her and the drain in the centre of the floor. Steel walls closing in around her, pushing in on her shoulders. Her reflection in the mirror glared back at her, one eye its usual shade, the other now a deep blood red. The face was a mask of deliberate, controlled anger, her body shaking inside.

She took a long, deep breath, forcing the lump in her throat down before she pulled out a small collapsible sink and placed the case on it.

It'd been close, but she'd gotten away with it

Practiced fingers easily removed the second lens. She looked down at it for a moment, resting on the tip of her polymer finger, before carefully placing it back inside the case along with her spares.

She'd bought the autocontacts from a good cosplay vendor when she'd first noticed the change setting in, months earlier. Almost impossible to distinguish from natural eyes, they tracked the iris behind and adjusted themselves automatically to match. They were so good, supposedly SHIELD used them. After that came the hair dye, blending in over time as the change grew in, slow enough that nobody had noticed anything different.

All it took was constantly reminding herself of what had happened every single morning.

She glanced down at the facsimiles of her natural eye colour

That was where everything she'd been holding in for the last few months finally burst out.

-----------

Next. Whisky. Revenge and Frustration. Over the hump. Pool testing....
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--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?