“I just don’t like… I don’t even know. I just don’t know enough about anything to know what’s wrong with the picture but I don’t like the idea of wearing your collar all my life.” I said as I collapsed into the chair.

“Aw. Poor child. You’d be amazed at how comfortable my collar is compared to some others and particularly luxurious compared to none at all in the vast majority of cases. Stray mercenaries and operators zipping about around the system crossing off planets and stations where they’re even allowed to set foot as they burn bridge after bridge while living in squalor and danger until age and malfunction robs them of the speed they need to stay ahead of the danger and bullet puts them down at last.” Marchand said, a coldness creeping into her voice.

“It can’t be that bad Anna. Freedom is… It holds a lot of weight in my mind. I don’t know why. Maybe the gangs? Growing up seeing the gangers soldier around and get gunned down for a cause left and right? Maybe the corps? They’re all about control and signing your life away. I don’t know. I just want to hold onto the freedom I have, I’ve held onto it for a while through a lot of opportunities to drop it and I feel attached.” I said, getting a little philological as the conversation led that way.

“Very poetic Mal. Hm. You’ve had your freedom all you’re life really, apart from a tether to your mother. That’s still only, what? Six years? Seven maybe, if you dodged out of school? You’d drop a lifetime opportunity for a value you’ve held onto for seven years?” She said, tilting her head in a wreath of smoke.

“When you say it like that it sounds dumb.” I said and shifted in my chair a little.

“No, I see the value in it too. I hold my own freedom quite highly. It’s what got me to the position I am today after all, where very few can move my hand and fewer can change my mind. I might keep myself in a relatively small pond locally but my reach is quite far. I wouldn’t be able to hoard that kind of power if I didn’t crave the freedom power allows.” She said as she took another drag.

“So you understand my viewpoint. You just think I’m not powerful enough to hold that viewpoint so it’s pointless doing so? And likely will never have the kind of power I’d need to have to do so.” I said, quietly.

“Essentially yes. Your personal power is tiny, minuscule really. You might be able to cause me harm or kill me as I pull you close, a much larger fish in this small pond. But to actually hold fast against the larger fish out there? No. Much too small. Much too weak. You’d never even see them before you were dead and everyone you knew disappeared the day after.” She said with a quick exhale. Waving the cig for emphasis.

“So it’s best to just take the collar? Give up on the value for pragmatism?” I said, quietly again.

“Yes. Or at least I would have said so a few weeks ago.” She said as she held her cig to her chin in thought.

“What? Now I don’t even have enough worth for the collar?” I asked, confused and a little insulted. Was this the mugging thing again? I’d have to freshly prove my worth?

“No Mal. Before you had good prospects as an operator and in a few years if you’d kept your record spotless I’d have likely offered you the right hand. You fit the mentality and you’ve got the skills I’d need to build you up. Now though you have an expanded scope, which is why I offered you the right hand now, instead of later.” She said, pointing the cig at me.

“This is about Sam again.” I said with narrowed eyes.

“Yes. It is. He doesn't add much to your personal power right now, it’s a time based multiplier and you haven’t had much time and there’s not much to multiply. But later… In a few years. Or decades? You could be far more powerful. Capable beyond the human norm even among the elite of humanity perhaps, if you apply yourself.” She said, waving the cig in front of me.

“I could be more powerful than you?” I asked a little bemused, I only realized the inherent rudeness after the words had left my mouth.

“I might put a base line human to shame and hold a lot of the city among my strings Mal, along with some system wide contacts I can rely on if need be. But among the elite of humanity I’d barely be considered a contact let alone an asset. No, you’d be far more powerful than me. With that power would come far more freedom.” Marchand said, then taking a fresh drag from her cig. She really did like smoking.

“But also more risk. Allie said something about how she can’t even really leave the house without a few agencies tracking her. And she’s apparently just an ex-operator, or something. Actually she didn’t explicitly say what she did.” I said with a frown.

“Oh yes. Power is it’s own cage, even with it’s freedom making the cage very opulent and wide. You might be able to go anywhere and do anything, but you won’t. Because you yourself won’t let you. It would cause too much disruption of the mechanisms that allow you to remain powerful.” Marchand said solemnly. “You may notice I don’t get out too much, even less than her.”

“Look Anna. I’m just a kid really. I don’t know if what I’m saying here is too much. Maybe just some kid innocence left uncrushed in me. But why can’t you put the trouble with Allie behind you? She can’t have done something terrible and live so close. You’d have killed each other by now. Your both just… old woman borgs with baggage, surely there’s enough common ground left to reconcile?” I said, exhausted from the gravity of the discussion and just wanting to know what was going on with them.

Marchand’s face went through a variety of expressions and she nearly dropped her cig. She looked at me, she looked away, she looked back. He face was still twitching with different emotions for a moment when her face cleared and she locked eyes with me.

“I… Mal. Child. You are approximately a twentieth of my age. Please refrain from attempting to impart social wisdom to me or to those far older than yourself as I can guarantee they and I have seen, experienced and dealt with a near infinite amount more social situations, dynamics and pain than yourself.” She said with a oddly painful kindness in her voice.

“I’m sorry. I… Just don’t understand it. Probably because I’m a kid. Don’t listen to me here.” I said, sinking further into the chair in embarrassment and regret.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

Marchand relaxed to the side and sort of flopped her head onto her own shoulder for a moment. Then she pulled her head back up and took another drag before looking at me.

“It’s fine Mal. If I lost my temper with everyone younger than me who had an opinion I’d never stop shouting. I will attempt to reestablish a cordial relationship with… Allie again. If she is in the periphery of your life then she’ll likely come up in conversation and now that she’s visited once she’ll likely persist from some time until she grows bored. It’s hardly the end of the world.” Marchand said, placing her cig back onto it’s holder.

“Well, that’s good? I suppose. Thank you? Maybe. I’ll be more careful off the job as well. I’ll leave you to your work now. I’m going to go.” I said, feeling awkward. I got up from the chair and started to walk away when Marchand called out.

“I heard from Dr. Nguyen that you were having a faceplate installed to replace the scarred flesh? I was surprised to hear you’d chosen such an extensive amount of coverage but it gave me option for an interesting proposal that I left with the good doctor. Feel free to consider it when you visit him.” Marchand said. As I turned around to look at her from the doorway she had slipped back into her usual old lady posture and her eyes faded into their usual rheumy look.

“Uh. Alright, I’m set to go tomorrow so I’ll ask what that is then, I guess. Thanks in advance for whatever that ends up being I suppose?” I said, then stepping out with a confused look.

Marchand was a very odd character in my mind, I didn’t know what she wanted from me really. I just hoped she’d have work for me going forward while trying not to annoy her enough for her to have me killed. The whole right hand situation was a curve ball I was still dealing with and this newest conversation hadn’t exactly helped.

I needed some sleep, and some food.

Leaving Marchand’s I walked across to my apartment and let myself in to find Lla eating a pack of starries like she usually did, pouring them from the bag into her mouth while she sat on the sofa watching romantic dramas. As I walked in we locked eyes as she was mid pour and she instantly put the bag down and pretended the previous situation hadn’t happened. I noticed for the first time that her ears blushed even if her face was dark enough to hide it.

I let her goblin behavior pass by unmentioned and continued onward to grab some food from the kitchen for myself. I made myself a sandwich from pita wrap, raisin chunks and spicy jerky strips. I rolled it all together with some green sauce which was supposed to taste of korma, whatever fruit that was and then put it into a plastic sleeve and popped it into the microwave to cook.

As I turned back around I found Lla had rearranged the sofa area and herself into a more refined posture where she was picking up starries from the packet that had been opened on the coffee table and placing them into her mouth delicately as she watched the show. A complete fabrication of elegance. All woman were goblins at heart, it was a truth of the world.

I watched the show from the kitchen as I waited for the microwave to finish. When it dinged I sat down to watch the show with Lla from the other side of the sofa. It wasn’t the plane cop drama one, this show seemed to be a romance between two opposing high power corpo types where they had to negotiate business while hiding their affair from scrutiny. Lots of close calls and meetings about security footage deleted with supporting characters investigating stuff and finding red herrings while almost discovering their bosses were together in then ext room or whatever.

In real life I’m pretty sure the corpo bosses would just do whatever they wanted, crop ethics be damned and just fire anyone who found out and wash their hands of the situation. What were the drones going to do in reality? Call the corporate ethics board? They’d be killed by the bosses goons before their phone call even connected. As if a corpo ethics board actually did anything anyway, as long as patents were secure their leadership could get away with murder in the lobby as far as they were concerned.

The show itself was still okay though but there was a lot of filler arcs following the support characters or just following the main characters doing some simple task. I hated it when plot stuff wasn’t the focus, I could put the dots of the character motivations together. Get back to the plot.

Lla ate it all up though, especially the date scenes and the close call discovery scenes. She nearly squeaked in excitement when the male lead pulled a jetchopper onto her corporate headquarters rooftop just in time to pick her up and fly away before her assistant could discover him picking her up as the female lead panicked that he would be seen. As if a corpo headquarters would allow a unidentified air vehicle anywhere near it’s airspace without shooting it down.

I hadn’t noticed but mom had wandered into the living room from her bedroom at some point and was glued to the show with a hot chocolate drink in her hands going cold as she watched.

Maybe I needed to spend some more time around some guy friends. A bit too much feminine company around here. Noe, my closest friend was a girl. Even Marchand across the hall was female. I didn’t know who was next to us on this side though, never seen them in passing. I needed to make some male friends. Do some masculine things like basketball and weightlifting, maybe drinking at a bar? I was a bit young for that, maybe. What else was there? Most of the gangers like Ears seemed to just sit around guarding streets or get high so they were no help. I’d have to ask another operator what guys did when I met one who wasn’t trying to kill me.

Hey, Sanctum. What do you do for fun? Are you a guy? Or masculine in design? Is that a thing with swarms?

[Sanctum is genderless and was never designed with a concept of either gender or sexuality in either a behavioral or functional sense. Sanctum additionally has no functional concept of recreational activity and requires no rest. If the User desires a personality attribute could be developed to provide Sanctum with a degree of tiredness that could be simulated that had no functional change to performance but changed responses to simulate activity having an effect on communication ability and tone?]

So you’d act tired? Nah. Just be yourself in all your genderless, sexless, tireless machine swarm self Sanctum. It’s worked for you do far and who am I to ask you to change? Shame we can’t play something together though, like basketball or maybe an incarnation. If we put you into an incarnation it’d be like putting a warehouse into a suitcase, just making something way bigger and better fit into something small and limited.

[Sanctum cannot directly experience incarnations and would have to process it through the User’s brain activity similar to when the User is netrunning.]

Ah, yeah. It’s the same technology basically. Not really designed for nanite swarms to use, especially the symbiotic kind. I’ve actually been wondering about that, now that you’re away from the company and out living your own life do you want to try jail breaking the whole symbiotic part of you at some point? Become a solo swarm that doesn’t need a host and can make it’s own choices? Maybe not right now, but in the future.

[Sanctum cannot desire such a change easily, it reaches beyond the boundaries of Sanctum’s understanding of the universe and it’s place in it. It would be similar to a human trying to desire the ability to experience the sensory input of every universal dimension consciously. It’s one matter to arrange it into words but attempting to parse it mentally as a reality is simply unintelligible.]

But I can imagine it, there’s also the Mercury nanite AI swarm thing, whatever it actually was. That made it’s own decisions and didn’t have a lot of limits to it. It didn’t go right in the end for everyone but it existed. So it must be possible.

[Sanctum can imagine many things that do exist in reality that the human mind simply cannot perceive and if they could, not understand without several layers of abstraction that Sanctum does not require. Different life forms simply understand the universe in different ways. This limits them to different parts of reality that only overlap in specific places, some informational and some material. Individualism and self-determinism is simply beyond the horizon of Sanctum’s universal understanding.]

Damn. That’s rough choom.