trans_9 | Bad Handwriting and Everything [Open]

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Bad Handwriting and Everything [Open]

The upside to using paper and pen instead of data pads for taking notes on patients is that it's intuitive and you can fiddle with things. The downside is that, at the end of a shift, a lot of the notes have to be shredded for privacy reasons, and the details have to be entered into the data pads anyway. Despite his usual devotion to efficiency, Howard doesn't mind this. It's a nice way to review the day and cement anything he might have learned.

The Quarantine's mostly empty now, which is a definite plus. All those kids were getting Howard crankier and antsier than usual. He brought in a box of toys from the Warehouse, though he didn't bother to check the age ranges for them, so he hopes someone who cares a bit more will take out all the choking hazards before any of the children regress to toddlerhood. He doesn't want anything to do with children; he had enough of that back in that dystopian nightmare he called home. All they do is cry and scream and demand things and kill each other and eat all the food and lie and burn down buildings and generally make life unpleasant. Not that adults are always better, but at least someone's around to enforce order here.

He hums a snippet of Cliffs of Dover to himself, chewing on the end of a Tinker Toy, and starts typing in his notes.

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"Can't say I blame you." The game-playing that Anwei's parents had practiced with their daughters had been painful and humiliating; she had no desire to find out if she was capable of being a good parent. The thought of taking custody of any of her descendants made her extremely anxious.

She nodded in agreement. "Well, you work with someone for twenty five years, you start to be able to anticipate what they would suggest. I did a lot of my programming learning with Horanckk, and he was always with me when I worked with other AIs. Without him," she looked at her hands as though they were something apart from her, something useless, "I don't know a quarter of what I should. Because he remembered things for me, and I always thought he would be there."

Her mouth thinned. "It would not surprise me to find out eventually that he has been here, all this time, in data stasis: because he was too dangerous to let out."

"Yeah, you don't really strike me as the mommy type."

He nods, thinking about Orc as she speaks of Horanckk, just because there'd been a similar feeling that things would never change. He'd never have to learn to defend himself because Orc would protect him. But that's just muscle memory he has to build up; he never relied intellectually on Orc, not like Anwei apparently relied on Horanckk. He has to learn to punch, not how to remember, not how to think and organize his own thoughts. It's a frightening prospect and one that, in a nicer person, might breed some compassion. "Learning's hard, isn't it, Maw? So are you just going to stick around and wait?"

"I'll take that as a compliment." Picturing her mothers - stretched tall by surgery, tight skin and long limbs and mad eyes enhanced by cosmetics, every gesture and word and thought perfectly planned and exquisitely beautiful - always made her feel very small. Very unlike them.

"Stick around as opposed to what? Jump ship on a random world in a random universe and start wandering? Any traces I've managed to leave behind point to this ship, so I'll stay here, and learn, and help, and somehow, someday, be a part of recreating my universe. I'm so looking forward to it," she gibed, clapping her hands slowly.

And if Horanckk showed up and she wasn't here to meet him, he might get upset.

"You know what I meant," he says. "Are you going to learn to live without or are you going to pine?"

Howard takes a third option - stick to not thinking about it as much as possible.

"What, can't I do both? Get along for thirteen days twenty three hours, then go off and pine for an hour? It's not either-or."

Maybe she could add 'pining' as a recurring appointment to her schedule.

"Well, you can, but it makes the pining kind of useless if you're working around the reason to pine, in my opinion."

She smiled, too wide. He was still so young.

"Sometimes you have to bottle it up inside, and pretend the pain isn't there, and only let it out when you're alone. You can almost enjoy your misery, knowing that you're just going to feel this way for a little while and then you can put it aside until next time. And how much better you'll feel when you are not being miserable!"

"And besides, I swore an oath to have a long life and an interesting death - can't imagine that I'll find an interesting death if I have to preface it with 'And then I spent two years moping'."

Anwei had been separated from Horanckk for a year before she came on board Stacy. She'd gotten a lot of her grieving out of her system.

He snorts at her comment about 'almost enjoying' her misery. Anwei may not enjoy her misery, but she certainly capitalizes on it. And who's she to lecture him on misery, anyway? As if she has the monopoly on yearning and suffering, pain and want?

"You could still have a totally interesting suicide."

Step 1: Monopolize yearning and suffering, pain and want. Step 2: ? Step 3: PROFIT!

She laughed, just a little deeper than a human. "Really? I'm on a mentally unbalanced ship crewed by a mix of people with various compatibility levels; the ship is controlled by an alien race with mysterious motives; we're supposedly fighting yet another alien race with even more mysterious motives; and the ship likes choosing random people from the back-end processes department to perform dangerous missions? And you think I need to arrange my suicide? I'm pretty certain the universe is lining up something interesting for me - and probably for all of us."

"And if I need to cheer myself up, I can always think of ways that this could all be worse." She gestured, inviting his input. "I'm sure you can think of some, too."

"I didn't say you need to, I just said if you wanted 'and then she moped for two years' to be the lead-up to an interesting death, you could have an interesting suicide. Jeez, Maw, it's not like I'm telling you to kill yourself."

He shakes his head at her and glares. "Don't tempt fate like that! You know better!"

"That's it! Accountant, programmer, medical secretary, and greatest moper on the ship!" She snaps her fingers, then darts a glance to her screen - no, that was Nurse Williams' notes, they would pour into the system smooth as sweat. He did have such good spelling, too.

A bit more seriously: "I'd much rather my story go something like 'spent two years helping fight the good fight, eating the free food and breathing the free air, and then fixed everything and got a shiny medal.'"

She strokes her chin thoughtfully for an instant, letting all sorts of awful ideas pass through her head and over her face. "Are you sure you don't want to try pre-feeding fate all the worst options in advance, in hopes that she'll choke?"

"Oh, I don't know. You might have some competition for greatest moper on the ship. You're not the only one who spends half their time being gloomy." He snickers a bit. "And good luck on that medal. If anything Zou's going to get it for sheer nerves of steel."

"A heh heh. Ah heh heh heh," he laughs, in the most incredibly sarcastic manner he can manage. "No. Fate doesn't choke. Or fate chokes and then spews it all up back on you. Seriously, get your jinx magic away from me."

"Literal nerves of steel, you mean. And he clearly has an unfair advantage, because he doesn't sleep." She looks sad for an instant, then smiles. "And I want all the unfair advantages to be with people on our side."

"Fate has an eating disorder, from the sounds of it...But I don't know any fate jinxes, actually. Magic wasn't very big in my universe."

Time to change the subject. "So, enjoying the quiet?" She gestures at the Med Bay, remarkably free of small noisy child-type people.

"Are they literally nerves of steel? I haven't been able to see his med file. I think he put a block on me seeing it because, you know, we're so close," he says sarcastically. "It was a joke. Although knowing this ship there might be actual fate jinxes. Who knows?"

He closes his eyes and nods, a lot less chipper about it than Anwei. "Definitely. I thought I was going to go crazy if I heard one more person whine about how they're however many years and a half."

"Steel isn't the best conductor," she says thoughtfully. "I don't know if he's got a boosted organic system, or some sort of hardwired system laid over that. I don't suppose it matters - although it is interesting that someone who thinks that privacy about personal talents is an issue puts a block on his medical file." Although she supposed it was just to keep the file from being casually accessed.

"Be glad they weren't children of my species. We have a rather compressed childhood, so they'd be whining, 'I'm eleven years three months, I'm fourteen years nine months,' and so on. Oh, and howling their heads off when people didn't obey their slightest whim. And fighting each other. And - well, just be glad that I'm the only Living People here." And that there were notes on her file to absolutely confine her if she somehow regressed below the age of ten.

"I think he just blocked it from me," Howard says with a shrug. "And honestly, I wouldn't blame him. He told me he's got some systems in there, so it's not just that he's superhuman."

He rolls his eyes. "Man, your people just get better and better, don't they? But honestly, I think I'd still rather have them than human kids. Maybe when they fight we could take bets on them and put them in little rings. Human kids just grind my nerves."

If Anwei was a more romantic person, she would probably say that it was sweet, the way that Zouichi and Howard kept little secrets from each other, like tiny treasures waiting to be uncovered.

Instead she says, "Well, he certainly recovered quickly after being in that fight with Kain. I think he's vitroborn, like Superboy, so he could be cultured to have multiple enhancements."

"What is it with fighting in rings for so many species?" she asks, rolling her eyes right back. Her species fought anywhere: at table, during business meetings, in bed. The idea of an arena just for fighting was bizarre. "But I think you'd like our children less when they got young enough to start growing moustaches. And all their teeth turned pointy. And they went from omnivores to carnivores. And - best of all - when they lost their self-awareness and speech, so you couldn't even tell them No! before they attacked."

"I'm going to pretend I understood what you just told me and go 'oh, yeah, sure he's vitroborn, that makes a lot of sense', if that's alright." What the heck is 'vitroborn', anyway?

"Oh, great, kids eating each other. I've never heard of that before," he says, face severe and humorless. He hasn't been able to look at Anwei the same way since knowing she could be cannibalistic, and this just reminds him of that. His stomach turns. "Can we just agree that anyone not old enough to drive a car is the scum of the earth? Because I'd be cool with that conclusion."

"Vitroborn just means not born from an organic womb - usually. There's all sorts of debates about whether it counts if a robot decides to nano-assemble a baby inside an organic shell, or if an artificial womb is transplanted into a living person. Sometimes people use it as a slur, like, oh, left-handed or something."

She arches an eyebrow at that next statement, though. She'd taken a driver's license test on Earth, and it hadn't had any extensive morals testing component that she remembered. Maybe he was from a different Earth? "Is there a lower or upper age limit there? When do they stop being scum of the earth?"

"Yeah. Calling someone a leftie is the worst sort of slur in my world. I mean, I've been called a lot of things, but 'leftie' is the only one I'd punch someone's mother for," he deadpans. "You have to be fifteen to get a driver's permit where I'm from, so yeah, when you hit that point I stop hating your guts and just start being run-of-the-mill annoyed."

No matter what situation, a teenager can find a reason to be misanthropic.

She shrugs. "Insulting someone's limb-dominance probably makes as much sense as insulting people for which way their heart leads them, or their complexions. That is to say, no sense at all. Besides, what if they have two or more hands on the left side, and none on the right?"

She leans back a little bit from her desk. "Dare I ask how old you are, and if you can drive a car? Since that seems to be the dividing point." She actually doesn't think this a very strange idea; many species have abrupt changes during their growth

"Are you seriously saying the only racism that existed where you're from is whether or not you come from a womb or a baby-making microwave? That's...new." It's not like he hasn't run into people from places where racism was a more distant problem, or over more absurd things, but it still always surprises him. For some people on the ship, they really don't see his race. It's different than his Earth, at least. "I'm fifteen, and yeah, I can drive. Never did driver's ed or anything, but I figured out how to carjack after all the adults disappeared. We needed to get those cars off the road if we were going to transport water."

"No," she pauses for a moment, then goes on more slowly, "I think it's more that I was raised in such an absolutely racist culture that maybe I don't notice...But the Vizsnunishne have a firm anti-bias policy; they have to. Open enlistment, any species can join. And if you start letting them snipe at each other, they'd never get together and pull in one direction."

She cocked her head. "The adults disappeared and left their cars everywhere? Wait, that sounds familiar...was it some sort of mass departure?" She's seen paintings of the Rapture in pamphlets on Earth, but the name of the phenomena dances frustratingly on the tip of her tongue.

"So what, you just let them all stew with resentment? How does that work?"

He gives her a funny look as he tries to figure out what she's saying. "You mean...wait, you're talking about Rapture? Yeah, that wasn't it. Plenty of people who weren't good Christians went up too, unless God's somehow working with an age limit now. It was a clean dividing line, under fifteen and over fifteen, and when you turn fifteen you get tempted to step out."

She gives him a droll look. "We try to screen them out in the pre-hire process, actually. There's plenty of other merc organizations they can join, if they really can't stand working with other sentients based on how many horns they have, or which hand they wash their faces with. It's a big universe, after all. Well," her mouth twists, "it was, anyway."

Her eyes go wide as she tries to picture this on her world. All the adults gone...the children would run wild of course, you'd have to start culling right away, take down as many of the untrained children before they all went feral - and what if the underclass children decided to open the cages.

She visibly shivers. "That must have been a nightmare." She looks at Howard with a little more respect now; he must be tough to have survived something like that. Even if it was with human children. "Was it worldwide? Any unusual solar activity beforehand, or maybe reports of scientific breakthroughs?"

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