trans_9 | There are worse things out tonight than vampires

"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."

Well, that sounded like a familiar run of events. He sighed. "I understand; something similar happened on my world. But the existence of alien life sounds a little difficult subject to keep under wraps; if your Earth is anything like my Earth, people spent centuries craning their neck up at the skies, formulating conspiracy theories, and arguing that they couldn't be the only sentient species in the universe. And our nations' governments could never agree on anything, let alone whether to conceal the existence of alien life."

Zouichi frowned. "Anwei, I don't know what sort of mistakes you feel you've made, and I understand it's not my place to offer you advice, but... is it really that important to leave your past self behind?"

"That's... true, in some ways. But I believe you're giving me a little too much credit. N5S caused virulent mutations in its human hosts, so the ability to counteract novel combat situations was one of my most important design considerations. And as you pointed out, much of the current crew is human. So in a way, my mission has not really changed. I am still what I was created to be." For now, anyway -- he had an unsettling feeling that he was becoming more and more unlike his past self with every passing day.

"I very much doubt they agreed to conceal what little information they had. More likely they all just blundered along, hoping that the truth wouldn't come out until their group were out of office. And the Earth I was on was just starting to experience the consequences of widespread digital manipulation of information. Even if the truth came out, there would be a hundred ways to bury the truth in carefully prepared disinformation."

She stared up at the tentacled ceiling for a moment, listening to his words, light printing against the tense muscles of her neck. But when she looked down, her face was calm.

"My past self - before I left the path that was laid out for me - would have been a horror. The mistakes that I made in leaving that path are not the sort that you make and then can say that they are over, they are done. Some mistakes don't die like that. They propagate."

The cleavers never stopped falling...

Her tonguetip flickered between her teeth for a moment, in anger. "I would prefer to keep the absolute maximum distance between myself, and my past self and her - my - mistakes."

She relaxed a little more. "I hope that you are comfortable with who you are, that's all. Especially in an environment like this, which is almost guaranteed to change us all."

"Ah, I see. So we were a bit more backwater when you came to visit us. It would have been difficult to keep information secret for long where I came from -- everything is interconnected."

Zouichi took a step back, a little taken aback at her anger. What could she possibly have done? Was it worse than the DRF's humanity conversion plan? Was it worse than the CEU? Why else would she think of her past self and her present self as different people?

He looked away. "I am sorry. It appears I have indeed overstepped my bounds."

"...I would say that so far, it is other people who seem uncomfortable with me. Or not me, exactly, but what I represent."

"The connections were starting to form when I arrived - if I'd been fifty years later, it would have been much more difficult to keep concealed."

She held out her hands, palms out. "You have trod on a very sore subject for me - that's all. And I suspect it's the sort of thing that many people here will dislike; having people pay attention to their past lives. My bounds are just - touchier than some." She smiled, and rigidly controlled herself so that her smile did not get too wide.

Now she widened her eyes. "You represent a stunning achievement: a sentient lifeform trained to defend his creators, and partnered with an AI. All that and grace too. Or is it that they find the task you were created for upsetting? Anti-terrorism, biological weapon suppression? For all we know, some people here may have been created as biological weapons."

"I... see." He wasn't sure if she was angry at him or not, but it was extremely difficult to extricate himself politely from the conversation when they were the only two people in the room. At any rate, it was probably best to move the subject away from her past.

"...'Grace'?"

He shook his head. "No, although people seem to misunderstand what I am, they seem fine with what I was designed to do. It is... recently I spoke to Alex; he was extremely insistent that I grow 'beyond' my initial role and take this opportunity to become my own person."

If he was willing to move away from the subject, she would be more than happy to go along with it.

"You are physically graceful, but I meant more that you seem to have a - wholeness about you. Knowledge of self. You are meeting these new experiences and new people and handling them with great aplomb, in a way that is distinctly personalized - even if you have never encountered anything like this before." She would have liked to shake the hand of his coders; they must have been tops.

"I can't really be the judge of growing like that. After I joined the mercenaries, my growth was very, very slow and that was fine by me. You should do what feels best to you."

She looked up at the screen. "You seem to be coming to the end of this film. Do you want some recommendations for future viewing?"

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