trans_9 | There are worse things out tonight than vampires

"Have you heard the saying: Be careful what you wish for, you might get it? At best, we can certainly expect Stacy to eventually release a new group of people who will need to be told what's going on. At worst - well, worst could be anything we could imagine, I think."

Anwei stared off into space for a moment. "I'm glad to hear you say that. I've met programmed sentients who had 'people must not be harmed' burnt so deep into their programming that it paralyzed them; you could paralyze them entirely simply by threatening yourself. Your makers obviously took more care with you."

He nodded. "Yes, I understand. But I cannot pursue my original mission, I cannot leave the ship, and there is no one upon whom I can "vent"? It's... a little frustrating."

"I'm sure there are people who would be much more comfortable if I were subject to something like the laws of robotics." Of course, he wasn't a robot, but the same principle probably applied. "Are those limitations standard across the worlds you've visited?"

"Do you mean verbally vent, or something more action oriented?" She supposed the Sensoriums could become tedious, when you knew that any threat could be neutralized with a thought.

"There are no standards," she said, shaking her head. "Every world and ship and space station is different. But I would like to say that the overall trend is towards more freedom, not less. For every world that locks down its AIs so they can do nothing but follow the rules, there are two that prosper by letting them become full citizens, able to contribute everything they have to society. There are the occasional AI criminals, but there are also AIs who will hunt them down. It all balances out - I hope."

How to say that you kind of miss leaving your footprint on people's faces without coming off completely violent and unstable?

"Action-oriented," he said, finally. Might as well be frank about it. "I miss doing what I was created to do."

"I see. So may I assume that Horanckk is also granted freedom in his actions?"

"More missions coming up, hopefully? Ones that require a little more firepower? There are recordings in the Media Library of the Ohm attacks; perhaps you could have the Sensoriums recreate them, and join in as a combatant. Or pull up data on weapons you have never used, and get familiarized with them."

Actually she needed to do that too.

"He was scarily free," she said, with a glint in her eye. "I gave him complete control over himself, and despite what many AI experts say and sell, he did not immediately become an amoral machine. If anything," she sighed, "I regret not giving him more freedom earlier." How many things might have been different, if he had been totally free...well, that was all washed away with Time, mostly.

"I was thinking something along those lines. Although I am a little leery of using them for extended periods of time. And there is one other thing -- training with illusions isn't quite the same as real battle."

He shrugged. "If you accept that AIs are people, with motivations of their own, it stands to reason that some of them will be good and some evil. They are the same as everyone else in that regard. But there's no need to regret your actions now, is there? Horanckk is free to choose as he wishes now."

"That's the way it is, a lot of the time. Make do with what you have, hurry up and wait...learning to wait efficiently, maintain your readiness, is as much a part of the fight as the actual combat."

"Yes, but," she looked at the screen, where streamers of blood flowed down white stone walls, "he was given to me with many, many constraints built in. And there are times when I made mistakes that he could not prevent me from making, because of those constraints. It must have been so frustrating for him." Like watching someone drown under glass, and being unable to save them.

Zouichi regarded her with a look of dry humor. "You sound like you're speaking from experience."

He looked curious. "What sort of mistakes are we talking about?" Horanckk's actions would have had to be limited indeed if he couldn't so much as offer advice to Anwei.

"Oh yes," she said, equally dryly. "You run and run and run, to get where you need to be, to take advantage of a moment's weakness...and then you have to wait, on the edge of the action, for the perfect moment. And you can't rest because you need to be ready to move, and you can't move because you'll be attacked...And sometimes you can't wait for the perfect moment. Sometimes you just have to go, or you lock up and die. What this crew needs for practice is a nice game of freeze tag with live weapons fire thrown in for extra stimulus," she joked. Maybe.

"Mistakes," and she seemed to drift, her eyes rolling slightly outwards. Without her appearing to notice it, her hand dipped into her pocket and pulled out a slip of paper. Twisting and knotting it between her fingers, in a few moments she held a distorted and spiky but recognizable flower. "Mistakes made because I was acting on incomplete information, or on lies, and Horanckk could not tell me the truth." And some of those lies had come from the inside of her own head, oh yes...

"Fuyu was kind enough to deliver your gift to me," she added, looking up from the flower to his eyes. "It's beautiful. Thank you."

For someone who rarely saw combat, Anwei certainly seemed to know a lot about it. She might have been joking, but at the mention of a weapons fire exercise, Zouichi looked thoughtful. "I'm not sure if trusting everyone with live ammunition would be wise, especially those who aren't used to using firearms, but..."

He watched as Anwei twisted the slip of paper. She was quite clearly withholding information, but if she wasn't willing to discuss it, it really wasn't his place to pry.

He nodded almost absently, still frowning faintly at the paper in her hands. "I'm glad you liked it. There isn't much in the way of clothing choices on the ship, and I thought the color might suit you."

Anwei has lived and breathed the mercenary life for close to two decades now; some of their attitude was bound to wear off. "Perhaps not live ammunition, but something to make the sting of failure actually sting...Maybe someone could cook up some permanent skin dye that could be dispersed via a fired capsule? Being painted orange for a few days would be a good incentive to duck."

She wasn't used to withholding information, either. She came from a dimension where all her mistakes might as well be painted on her forehead in blood. But it would probably be better that when it all came out, Zouichi would be able to honestly say 'I didn't know; she never told me.'

"It does. And Fuyu was kind enough to send me instructions on wearing it. Perhaps, if times stay peaceful, I will actually get a chance to wear it." She squeezed the base of the paper flower and it opened, petals suddenly looking like fangs, and then closed.

Semi-permanent paintball. Well, it was certainly an idea, though he had no idea how popular it would be with the rest of the crew. "Is that something that the Mercenaries practice? War games?"

Zouichi watched as the flower bloomed into a thing with teeth in Anwei's hands. "You're quite good at that, you know. If you ever get tired of balancing accounts, maybe you could make a living as a magician."

In the non-magic sense, of course.

"Practice makes perfect - and knowledge shared is knowledge multiplied. Unfortunately I think a lot of the crew aren't really motivated to practice, or to train. And I don't think I am the one to inspire them." She cocked an eyebrow at him. "Too short. You, on the other hand, I can definitely see leading the troops into battle."

She looked down at the flower in her hand as though she wasn't quite aware of having made it. "Oh? Somehow I doubt I'd hold my own against the magicians here." She flexed her fingers again to make the flower gape and close. "This actually is used as a sort of wrapping paper. For giving tiny presents."

He shook his head. "I appreciate the vote of confidence, Anwei, but I doubt I'd make a good leader. I'm too impulsive. And there were Synthetic Humans far better suited than me for such a job." There was one other thing -- he wasn't sure he wanted to take responsibility for looking after anyone else, at least not in an official capacity. He'd feel doubly at fault if anyone were harmed.

"Maybe. But in worlds without magic, I'm sure you'd be quite a hit. Where did you learn it?"

She gave a toss of her head that was not quite a shrug. "If you're looking for leadership training, though, you have a fascinating group of people to choose as role models."

Her fingers started to unravel the flower as she spoke, turning it back into a crinkled sheet. "Oh, I learned all sorts of little skills from my parents. Little skills, not big ones; very few of them turned out to be practical once I left Fle. That's a problem with old, entrenched civilizations; they teach their children only what they think is useful, and no more. They even teach them that they are the only civilized ones." Her fingers smoothed the paper, folded it in thirds, and tucked it back into her pocket.

"Little skills can make quite a large difference, though," he said. "For instance, being able to read body language, or determine when someone is embellishing the truth. Even whether or not you can trust an individual."

He thought back to Howard -- maybe if he'd grown up in the presence of more human beings, he'd have been able to put his finger on why Howard's speech sometimes made him uncomfortable. Judging a person's character, of course, not was he'd been raised to do, but outside the confines of his mission, it was something he had no doubt he'd have to do much more often.

"Is your expressiveness one of the things that they taught you?"

"Body language takes a long time to learn - and it varies from species to species, individual to individual. You might see me standing with my back stiff, and interpret it as rage - while it might actually be fear, or simply that I have a sore back. Some people never learn to read it, and some people lie with it very well."

She laughed almost silently. "A lot of Living People expressions don't carry over very well to humans - too much lip, literally." She yawned as though to demonstrate, her white smile opening like a snake's and then closing. "No, I was taught to act by my parents: to pretend to be sad, be happy, be content. I gave up a lot of that when I left, and I don't really regret it. I'd rather be myself, as I made myself, and not as they made me."

He shrugged. "Among humans at least, I hear it's harder to fake one's emotions. Many aspects of body language are involuntary. For instance, I was told that a sign of honesty was baring your palms to the person you're addressing. But people who make use of this gesture to deceive often end up telling the truth significantly more often than if they'd never tried to deceive the listener at all."

Anwei certainly had a wide smile. "That seems to be a common sentiment among the people on this ship. A wish to be true to oneself, regardless of upbringing or circumstance."

"Whereas when I bare my palms to someone in a conversation, it means that I don't have a weapon in my hands, and I am not threatening you. With a mixed species crew, hopefully we can develop a sort of mutual body language that everyone can understand, or at least not misinterpret."

"It is a very good sentiment, I think," she said softly. "Here we are, cut off from everything and everyone who made us - so now we can choose what we are. To a certain extent."

"I believe that that gesture is something we actually have in common. At any rate, context is quite useful in providing meaning." In fact, it was pretty much the only way Zouichi knew how to interpret some of Anwei's more alien gestures.

He blinked. "Many members of the crew were free to choose their course of action before coming aboard the ship; this hasn't changed. But... I suppose it is quite a shock, psychologically, to realize that most, if not all, of your concerns from your previous home are now gone. Perhaps this is somehow freeing."

"I familiarized myself with Earth customs before I visited there - as I recall I didn't have to purge too many gestures from use. Although I did have to practice for a long, long time, with a peg held between my teeth, to keep from grinning wider than a human does." Yes, and she'd lost all that training in a breath as soon as she arrived here, and grinned wide enough to scare everyone, hadn't she? Fortunately those habits was coming back, as she slowly adjusted to the disturbingly mostly-human crew.

"Concerns are gone, and also expectations. In theory at least you can be judged solely as to what you are here and now," she tapped down with one foot, the noise muffled by Stacy's leathery flooring, "and put aside what people believed of you in the past. That could be very freeing."

Zouichi blinked. "Ah. You do have quite the grin. But aren't you more at ease when not hiding it? I'm sure the other crew members would adjust fairly quickly."

"Maybe so," he said, "But somehow I cannot quite reconcile the idea of breaking with one's past. The past is what makes us who we are. It shouldn't be... discarded, like a loose shell."

"This is a little different," she sighed. "This crew knows that aliens exist - on Earth at the time I visited, it was a closely held government secret. So there were real risks in revealing my origins. I can relax some of that discipline here, but I'm fine with staying within the human limits for facial expression."

Also, an ear-to-ear smile did not mean 'I am very happy' for her species. It either meant 'I am panicking' or 'I am about to bite and hopefully eat you.'

"Your past is not nearly as easy to discard as that. It's not a shell, it's a mold that shapes us. But sometimes you have to grow outside the confines of the mold. Which can mean keeping parts of you unchanged, or it can mean changing everything about yourself."

"A government secret? How curious. It seems like there would be an enormous amount to gain from contact with alien civilizations; isolating themselves from the rest of the sentient universe sounds short-sighted." Which... would not actually be out of character for the human race, come to think of it.

Well, they could argue the intricacies of metaphors forever here, but it wasn't really his strong suit. "Are we talking about anyone in particular?"

"The gain would be tremendous, in the long run. In the short run there would be chaos, panic, perhaps even war. No government would want to be the one who started that - not unless they were certain they would come out on top. I imagine that they just kept postponing the revelation. Just until the next election, just until this scandal is over, just until the harvest is in; and on and on. And the longer they hold the secret, the more they have to hide."

"I was thinking about myself - and about you. Toha Heavy Industries probably did not create you to fight giant insects in outer space, or to guard aliens. But you are here."

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