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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"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?"

"Yeah, it was pretty fun. Nothing like the whole world going to Lord of the Flies to really make the middle school experience," he says, staring holes into the desk. "Don't know. Big electrical walls went up around a ten-mile radius of the town. We didn't know what's outside them since they weren't see-through. We found out later that the government knew some of the kids in Perdido had powers and were testing on them, but we don't know if that's why. Supposedly there was trouble at the nuclear power plant when it happened too."

He shrugs. Trying to figure out the FAYZ was always more of an effort in futility than anything yielding satisfying results. He likes to think it's just the real-life incarnation of Murphy's Law.

She has no idea what Lord of the Flies or middle school are, but they both sound bad.

"Electrical walls," she taps her fingers randomly on the keys, and then hurriedly erases the string of gibberish that results before it gets saved. "It doesn't sound like any experimental set-up that I know of, but - it might not be the same universe, of course."

She looks at her screen, making sure she hadn't dropped an extra character in somewhere, then back at Howard. "And then after that you end up here...I can see why you don't want to invoke fate." Because fate certainly seems to have drawn a target-map on him.

"Might not be an experiment. Might be an accident. Might be magic. Might just be a really bad dream that leaves really real scars. Some kid had the idea that since we're all sinners we broke the laws of physics. For all I know she's right, but whatever, I don't believe in sin." He sucks on the tip of the Tinker Toy again, looking anxious. "It gets worse, because, I mean, why not. We ran out of food a month in, then electricity, and we were running on bare minimum water and fuel before I woke up here. And talking coyotes, flesh-eating worms, crazy people with superpowers and messiah complexes in charge, a zombie in the basement. I'll have to write it down in a memoir someday."

She lowers her eyes at his intensity. "The best definition I ever heard of sin was 'being unhappy unnecessarily' - which doesn't sound like it was the case for you and the other children." A twist to her mouth that was not a smile. "The only consolation I can think of is that if you came from there to here, there was probably not the afterlife."

"Maybe you did write a memoir, after. And someone read it, and spread your story. Which at least suggests you will survive...But it doesn't sound like a place to look forward to returning to." Obviously.

"Plenty of kids thought it was hell or purgatory. I never really bought into that. Besides, people still died there, so that'd make too many afterlives." He bites down on the toy. "I was joking, about writing memoirs. I'd mostly rather not revisit it all that much."

He shakes his head. "I've got reasons to go back if I have to. But I'd rather take a third option, if it comes down to it, if we win and save the day." He'd go back for Orc. He's accepted now that Orc would not go back for him. He's putting off considering if he should change his stance.

"Sometimes people write things out to forget about them." That little toy stick was going to be whittled away to nothing if he kept nibbling on it. "Pour it all out onto the screen, freeze it in one form, so that it stops living in your head."

"I've thought about that myself. My universe was a pretty dark one, in a lot of places. The Ninth Empire was vile, tyranny and rot thousands of years old. I don't think that I could see that universe remade and then walk away from it; not if I could find a way to change things instead. I suppose it helps that my best friend is extremely portable - if I can find him."

She casts an appraising eye at the Med Bay around them. "Lots of information you could bring back with you, if you decided to go. Maybe some heavy GIA weaponry, and a backpack power plant?" She is sort of not kidding.

"I'd forget something and it'd bite me in the ass a few months later. There was a lot of stuff wrong with the FAYZ." He tilts his head at her. "That's why your whole cannibalism schtick bothers me, turns out. Zou and I talked about it a little bit earlier. One of the kids I used to hang out with, this guy Panda, he got eaten."

Not to mention that other kids are fairly low on a long list of things in the FAYZ that'll eat you. At least kids'll wait 'til you're dead. "You think you're going to be the one to save your universe? That's pretty presumptuous."

"Hey, maybe I could even bring some reasonable adults back," he says, but his glum tone says he doubts it. He wouldn't try to sabotage the war effort against the Ohm, but knowing he'll probably head back to the FAYZ has certainly disincentivized him.

"Yes, I understand that it's a rather strong taboo in the Earth culture that seems to have caught on here. Hardly universal, though. Some species would be horrified at killing an enemy and leaving them to rot." She casts a glance at Howard, but it's a neutral glance. She actually doesn't go around thinking about eating everyone - at least, not once she can put a name to the face.

Unless they've very well built, of course. Howard is still on the skinny and small side.

"I think every rebel group in the Empire contacted the Sissies at one point or another," she says, looking frustrated. "And they were all uncoordinated idiots. Choosing their leaders based on who had lost the most to the Empire (as though they all hadn't lost far, far too much), no backup plans, no treasury, no idea what they would do if they won, not that they would...we actually had one group insist that we should spent ten thousand lives to kill one regional governor. Because then one hundred planets would be free, you hear me? FREE! - for about three days, until the assistant governor took over. I just looked at them and thought, I could do better than this."

She frowns. "The adults might vanish too, unless you can figure out what makes people vanish at fifteen. I," she sighs, "I don't think there's anything I can suggest that would make it right. Unless you decide to go to another universe, or stay on Stacy if she gets fixed. Or jump back in time."

"Yeah, I'm just saying. I probably wouldn't have cared if it wasn't something that happened back home. But since it did, it's just like..." Howard pantomimes a very convincing shudder and a gagging face. Possibly best not to mention that Anwei's been making some cameos in his usual everything-going-to-eat-me nightmares. Their relationship is already strange enough to define, not quite friendship but some sort of camaraderie.

"Seriously? That's some of the dumbest shit I've ever heard. And why would you choose a leader based on who couldn't defend their own stuff? That's not just stupid, that's counter-intuitive." Maybe Anwei's sense of purpose isn't so silly after all, if that's what she's up against.

"We figured out how to stop it. When you turn fifteen, time slows down and you get tempted to ditch everything by a hallucination. I stuck around. Guess that was too much to ask of the people in charge." Why no, that's not bitterness in his voice at all!

"Guess I won't invite you to any of the better restaurants I know," she jokes. "Just as well. People would gossip."

"Ah, by stuff they meant family members, usually. Wives, children, parents: shipped to different counties or continents or planets, sent away for training or war...The problem was, after a few centuries of the Living People killing off anyone who raises their head above the mob, what you get are very uninspired rebels. There were - a few that showed potential. I helped where I could, but the math always hung me up. Aid these rebels, they'll destroy this spaceport...and this many natives will be worked to death rebuilding it. Every life spent repaid with five deaths or more. I usually gave them information. Ways of hiding and distributing what they knew. And I hoped that someday a leader would rise." And hoped as well that the leader would not be her.

"It might have been worse for them, you know. Maybe it's twice as tempting when you're sixteen, three times that when you're seventeen, and so on." She eyes him. "Or maybe you are stronger than all of them."

"Take Sampire instead. He might like it." He raises his eyebrows. "Gossip like...oh hell no. Don't even joke about that."

He shakes his head. "God, it almost sounds like everyone would be better off if the rebels got wiped out. Not because they're wrong, but because their mistakes punish everyone else." There's heavy disdain in his voice, even a little for Anwei for having aided that ind of idiocy, but then again he doesn't know everything.

"No, a bunch of people hit fifteen and stayed. Just not in the first round. Maybe it was different for them, I don't know. They tempt you pretty hard," he says, grinding his teeth down on the Tinker Toy and feeling splinters come loose. It's easier to just hate all the adults that left them. It's easier to just blame them and feel abandoned and unwanted than it is to not have anyone to blame at all.

She shrugs; depends on how he likes his clots.

"If anyone asks, just say that you're clearly much too good for me." She does not wink.

"They were wiped out, over and over again. But they kept coming back, just to be put down by the Empire or even by their fellow slaves. Someday, the Empire has to fall; after all, if it's eternal and unending, why is it the Ninth Empire instead of the First? I just hoped I could grease its shoes a bit."

"Easy with that," she said, reaching out at the sound of splintering wood. "Do you really want Stacy doing dentistry on you with her tentacles if you crack a tooth?"

Howard wrinkles his nose at the idea at all.

"So why didn't you be a tactician for them? Since it seems like all their strategies ended up hurting more than they helped. Or is that what you meant by information?"

He pulls back from her reach. "If you haven't noticed, Maw, I'm fine taking care of myself."

Bad Handwriting and Everything [Open]

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