“I mean, you might murder the wrong people, or too many people—”
“Almost certainly. You know what it’s like when the righteous fury is upon you. Once you begin—”
“It’s hard to stop,” Sarya the Daughter says quietly. She takes her mother’s blade in her hands and caresses it, watching her own eyes in her reflection. “At least, that’s how I imagine it.”
Shenya the Widow allows her daughter a moment of reflection. She herself has always found fantasies of mayhem soothing; she assumes the same is true for Humans. “It would comfort your mother,” she says after a moment, “if, before you left for your field trip, you would correct your earlier statement.”
Her daughter sighs and rises to her feet as her mother’s blades retract from around her with eight distinct rattles. “I am Sarya the Daughter,” she says softly. “Adopted, of Shenya the Widow. My species is—” She sighs. “My species is Spaal.” With one hand, she signs the Standard symbols that she has used her entire life: I’m sorry, my tier is low. I don’t understand. She looks disgusted with herself, standing in the center of her quarters with her shoulders bowed. “Happy?” she asks.
And that is that: another trans-species child-rearing triumph. A marginal success, perhaps, but a parent must take what a parent can get. And now that the crisis has passed, Shenya the Widow may turn to a happier subject. “Now, my daughter—” she begins.
“I don’t even look like one,” her daughter mutters, turning away. “Anyone who thinks so is the moron.”
“Daughter,” says Shenya the Widow. “I would like to—”
“Did I tell you I have an interview at the arboretum?” her daughter interrupts, lifting the prosthetic off the floor with distaste. “Yeah. Even a damn Spaal is overqualified for that one, believe it or not. I think most everybody down there is actually sub-legal, so I could actually be a manager or—”
“Daughter!” hisses Shenya the Widow.
Her daughter turns, expectant, blinking against Shenya the Widow’s exasperated pheromones. The Network prosthetic dangles from one hand, already displaying a new error message.
“Perhaps you should leave that here,” says Shenya the Widow, gesturing toward the unit with a gleaming blade.
Her daughter laughs a short Widow laugh with the corners of her mouth. “I’d rather go naked,” she says, holding down a control to reset the device. “You think this is bad, try going without any unit at all. I tried that once and—”
“Take this one instead,” says Shenya the Widow. With a smooth movement, she reveals—finally—the tiny device she has been holding behind her thorax this entire time.
Her daughter stares, jaw dropping downward with that peculiar verticality that once so disgusted Shenya the Widow.
“I was going to wait for your adoption anniversary,” says her mother, almost afraid to judge this reaction. “The waiting, however, proved to be—”
The prosthetic hits the floor with a weighty thump as Sarya the Daughter leaps forward to seize the gift. “Mother!” she breathes, fingering the tiny locket and earbuds. “How can we afford this? This is—I don’t even—this is amazing. It’s perfect!”
“I had it customized,” says Shenya the Widow, allowing her own pride to seep into the words. “I even installed your little friend on it to help you get accustomed. They say if you cannot have the surgery—” She hesitates, now feeling her way forward. Because someone might discover your species is the exact type of phrase that could ruin all her hard-won progress. “Then this is the next best thing,” she finishes.
Her daughter says nothing in words, but her disregard for her own safety says it all. With a wild Human laugh, she flings herself into razor-sharp limbs, arms outstretched. With skill developed from long practice, mother catches daughter in a net of softened blades and flat chitin.
“These are the good kind of tears, correct?” asks Shenya the Widow, stroking the warm face with the flat of a blade.
“Yes,” whispers Sarya the Human. “Thank you.”
Yesterday, Watertower Station was a blank and nearly silent orbital station. Its color scheme could have been described as industrial, at best. Its thousands of walls, floors, and ceilings were an interchangeable gray save for the painfully orange warnings marking the areas where a resident might encounter dismemberment, asphyxiation, or various other discomforts. Not that its residents ever glanced at those warnings. No, they were too busy milling through colorless corridors in equally colorless utility suits, eyes and similar sense organs focused in the middle distance. There was very little sound on Watertower yesterday, just twenty-four thousand citizens and visitors from hundreds of species, all in mutual pursuit of silence but for the unavoidable: the sound of footsteps, wheels, treads, the rustle of utility suits, the occasional uncomfortably biological noise. Gray on gray on gray, silent as the void and nearly as interesting. That was Watertower Station, yesterday.
But this is today.
Today, Sarya understands. Today, Watertower Station is an eruption of light and color and sound like nothing she’s ever experienced. Everywhere her manic gaze falls, something leaps out at her—often literally. She forces herself to keep her mouth shut and does her best to avoid physically dodging away from every image that flits by. She touches the tiny Network unit at her hairline and taps the earbuds farther into her ear canals; she’s been wearing this thing for less than a Network Standard hour and already she’s utterly convinced. This is real, these projected images and sounds, and the gray walls that have enclosed her entire life are the illusion. She can’t even see them anymore; they’ve disappeared behind landscapes and artwork, behind hues and patterns and corporate slogans.
Goddess. She couldn’t remove her giddy grin if she tried.
She keeps to the tail end of her group as it threads through the labyrinth of Watertower Station, the better to gape uninterrupted. Not that she cares what a collection of strangers thinks of her. She is a transient here, a short-term transplant from a lower-tier class who was probably assigned to this particular field trip through some Network glitch somewhere. Why else would she be visiting a place where she can never work? But she’s here, and she has just as much right to be here as the rest of her temporary cohort. If they don’t like it, well—they are free to borrow one of her blades, as the Widow saying goes.
She does know a surprising amount about these people. Her knowledge is now amplified, extended into the near-infinite space of the Network, and her access is no longer limited to a few cubic centimeters of malfunctioning display. Now she is crowded by names and public biographies that appear next to citizens as soon as her eyes land on them. They drift as delicate scripts or heavy symbols, colored and/or animated according to their owners’ preferences, each adding to the greater cloud of color and light that is the Network. Even with her new unit’s efforts in tracking her gaze and fading items in and out of focus as it guesses her intent, she is very nearly overwhelmed.