Isabella Marie Swan ᗜ "Aegis"

Aegis is puttering around in an anonymous patch of vacuum. Jane is eating up the news that has passed in their absence and feeding Aegis a steady stream of it by brainphone so she can catch up, while she waits for Sue to get back from teaching the other Jokers to freecast. (Or "teaching them to freecast", whatever.)

She still hasn't gotten any welcome-back kisses. Hugs, yes, but not kisses. Probably this is going to require a conversation.

Unfortunately, when Sue comes back from Alethia, Peace is still empty of Aegis. Jane is still down.

Aegis has pretty thoroughly demonstrated to whom it may concern that she can teleport, "just like" (well, not exactly) Sue. Everyone finds this terrifying and prefers to believe that they cannot do this. (Except for the colonists, who are more than happy to keep quiet about her appearances and the fact that she arrived with their deceased comrades in tow.) Therefore, when Aegis and Sue are supposed to show up to meetings of the admirality on this or that space station, they travel by shuttle. Aegis consents provided she's allowed to drive. They let her.

"Undocking," says Aegis to the station operator, coppered hands flying over ship controls. She doesn't need the copper anymore - she's better without it now than she ever was relying solely on it - but she doesn't need to reveal all her secrets, so she still wears the parts that show beyond her uniform. She's used to it, anyway. "And we're detached - maneuvering - and we're clear."

"Safe trip, Admiral," says the station operator over the comm.

"You know it," she replies flippantly. She punches a button and flicks a wireball control, and they're off.

They stay linked up for a few hours more, maneuvering between buggers and fleet-colony and Solside military types late into station night, and finally the colony is getting started on building houses.

Amusingly, they're going to build one house, and then some bugger workers are going to build more the same for them as shown, while the humans work on securing their food supply - they can't use unmodified bugger crops.

It reminds Aegis of showing her critters things and then watching them pick up the tools themselves and continue.

The buggers were by far the most puzzling and difficult critter-people but now they're hers, her little sisters, even if she has to share with some other people.

She pushes that at Sue, when they're all done, when they're out of link except for just the two of them and she can't quite reconcile herself to being in her own comparatively small and slow brain just yet, when they're on their way back to their room.

Sue graduates from Tactical School a year early, he's barely fifteen. He's toned down the flirting - he treats Aegis completely platonically, in particular - and has cut down on the unhealthy amount of sleeping-with-everything-that-wants. And he's apparently, via his independent study, gotten far enough through the curriculum that they're nudging him along to Command.

They've given Sue a strange old man for a tutor, who appeared in his room and started a physical confrontation, which Sue won; Sue related this story to her with something between amusement and irritation.

And a quicker-than-average flurry of notes has been piling up in the psych data since about that time, according to the timestamps.

Aegis knows before they tell her that they're going to send her to Command early too. She's just barely fifteen herself when she gets another update of the psych files and sees that Sue's had - well, the files aren't terribly clear, some of the communication is happening via in-person conversation and memos that don't get stored in these folders, but Sue's had some kind of breakdown and the only things they can think of to get him out of it, get him back into shape to train and fight, are her friendship and Howlett. They have mixed feelings about both - Howlett's insubordination problem; their bewilderment that Aegis and Sue can be so close when "she's the one person he can't link!" - but they're desperate.

Bird? They don't talk as often over the long distance, just as there was a lull when he went to Tactical ahead of her; their schedules have nothing in common and their contexts less. But he knows her, and he can reach this far if he tries. And she wants to know what's wrong.

Because there are so many fewer diversions on this station than on the previous one, Aegis takes to those that are offered with more of an open mind than she might have done before. For instance, she stays after personal combat sometimes, to watch Sue sparring with Howlett. Now and then she takes a turn herself. Today she's just supervising.

Sue turns twelve. He spends two months as a twelve-year-old in command of Phoenix Army, and then he graduates to Tactical.

The fantasy game is emptier now. But he finished her castle first. And all the space stations are on the same time zone, so Sue knows when to knock on her glass wall and see if she'll let him by.

Flame changes commanders again. The new one doesn't want a girl in his army - thinks she damages unit cohesion or some kuso like that - and he trades her to Rabbit, which would have been great ages ago, but Rabbit now has a different commander too. This one is clever enough - or has enough inertia - to leave her in toon leader position based solely on seniority (she is eleven, now). He gives her the boys most recently out of launch - the vets go to the toon leaders who curry more personal favor - and she trains them into a squad of formbusters and sharpshooters who inexplicably start coming to her about their personal problems too. She helps as best she can.

When she is eleven and a half, she receives command of Asp Army. She scopes them out and sees that she needs to reorganize the toon leadership completely - Asp's previous commander was an idiot, saved from last place only by good footsoldiers who could take vague or outright mumbled orders and turn them into reasonable objectives. Asp's record is still one of the worst in the school; it's ahead of Dragon (cursed), Echidna (they keep getting matched against the stronger armies but as far as Aegis can tell are intrinsically just mediocre), and Rat (the commander has checked out so completely that he's only still there because they haven't decided whether to ice him or take a chance on graduating him).

She trades the whining Asp toon leaders - one has the good grace not to whine - and their disgruntled seconds. (She doesn't demote them first: she wants good trades, and she can get more for a toon leader than for a former toon leader.) She promotes some of those good footsoldiers, trades in Qiaochu and a few other old friends with solid skills and gives them a week to get to know the boys and settle in, and then - unprecedented - lets them submit requests for their own underlings.

Everyone gets the toon they want, except for a couple of leaders with overlapping tastes in soldiers who she has to break ties on. That popularly requested handful (the ones with good records and charismatic smiles) she sorts by skill, not aiming to keep the toons all the same size: if Qiaochu wants to command fifteen men and Blue Moon wants a surgical force of four, she'll let them. The six soldiers no one asks for, she keeps for her own squad of cover fire and scouting; if she can't make them into something either, she'll trade some more.

Her six-man squad is called the Medusa in flat hours after she starts training them separately - if you so much as look at the Aegis, you'll be turned to stone! her soldiers repeat to each other with hysterical laughter. The other toons have roles too. Qiaochu's boys learn to move like a flock of pigeons, pushing off each other gently en route through the battleroom to make it hard to take steady aim at just one. Blue Moon's boys get Aegis's formbusting training. Emilio's learn hand-to-hand engagements - with strict cautions about how hard a blow a flash suit can absorb without injuring the child inside it - and Screwdriver's are a team of sharpshooters. She makes sure they each have seconds and that Qiaochu's huge toon also has a third and a fourth, so they aren't directionless if something happens to their leader. She makes sure that Medusa can be absorbed into the nearest available toon usefully if she's shot and their cover fire is no longer necessary. She experiments with combining toons, putting Qiaochu's flock around Screwdriver's gunmen or Blue Moon's formbusters on an assisted mission with Emilio's hand-to-hand (the skills are related, but not identical).

She has her army for a month, she gets a battle against Tide, and she wins it.

She doesn't win everything. Rabbit's good, Eagle's good, she gives them a hard fight for their winnings but eventually they both beat her (and she has to face Rabbit twice). But she wins most. Asp climbs the standings steadily from its miserable origins until her twelfth birthday, on which she receives an assignment to Tactical.

She sends Beri a message.

I wish to requisition a copy of my save file for the fantasy game. I have put a considerable amount of time into it. While I don't expect to have the software to run the game at Tactical, it is not impossible that I will eventually be in a position to revive my villagers.

The project to build a dam at the river pass is going well. This was entirely my idea in the first place but I think the game must already have known how dams work - maybe there are beaver-people somewhere I haven't explored yet - because the bears got the idea very quickly. Once I have a dam I'm going to try generating electricity with it and then electric lights. The day/night cycle follows station time so I never see night, but sometimes if I play in the morning I find that something probably related to it being dark happened. There are burnt out candle stubs and stuff around even though they get stung when they get wax from the beehives. (The bears less than everybody so I have them getting the wax and giving it to the other three kinds for other stuff.) So it would be nice if they could have lights without getting stung.

The game didn't come up with anything that new for me this week but since this is the first report I should go farther back than a week. Last week I found an abandoned mine. All the nearby villagers acted surprised when I showed it to them. But it'd been mined before and there were supports and old pickaxes of a different design than the ones the bird blacksmith or the antelope blacksmith make. I think the game wants me to think about the place as having a history even though it's generating it as I go. (Right? I think it's actually generating it as I go.)

Everybody else's fantasy game has characters that talk but for some reason mine doesn't - I mean there's sort of an incomprehensible background chat going on when the villagers talk to each other, they transmit information amongst themselves, but they almost never talk to me, they just mime like I have to and when they talk to each other it's offscreen and quiet. Maybe it's doing this because it'd feel less like I was directing things if they were much better at communicating than I was. As soon as I showed up the first time they've been happy to do what I show them to do; I didn't show up like a refugee or a traveler, I was pretty much right away the bird empress and it didn't take much to get the antelopes and the butterflies and the bears on board too. They don't seem to be able to read what I write, though.

It's about due to give me a new species if the patterns from before hold. I wonder what it'll be. I don't know why it's giving me a bunch of different stuff - no, wait, I do. It's easier to figure out what the problems they have with each other are if they're based on visible stuff instead of invisible cultures a bunch of different groups of just birds could have. It gives me a fair chance at figuring out stuff like how they might not like how each other smell. If they were having religious arguments or something instead I couldn't tell unless they talked a lot more. I think that's why. If my avatar could talk I bet the animal-people would talk too and they'd get more complicated cultures instead of just being all different species.

"You wanted to see me, sir?"

"Yes, it's your unmonitored mutie kid, the one you did all that extra paperwork to get."

"What about her? Isn't she doing well?"

"More than well. But we're not getting psych data on her anymore."

"...Sir?"

"She gave us less than four hours of play with the mind game before she quit, and when she went back, she bypassed the Giant's Drink with a loophole that's supposed to be impossible to reach with her copper thing, you remember? And now it's turned itself into some kind of civilization-building simulation and we have nothing."

"...She's not building a civilization, then?"

"Oh, no, she loves it, she's in there every day teaching animal-people to underwater basket-weave, and the other mutie -"

"There are four known mutants in Battle School, and more who'll manifest after they reach puberty. Sir."

"The telepath kid, the one she rescued from the older children, you got the report about that since you're listed as interested in her."

"Yes, sir."

"The other mutie got into her game. They share a play environment. It's not supposed to happen."

"She did briefly play his login, didn't she? The game would have recognized the speed at the controls as hers. It's clever enough."

"She played six others in her launch group too. The game spat them back into the normal spaces and they've been operating normally since. It put her and the telepath in their own unique, unprecedented environments, and then it fused them together."

"So you don't know how to interpret the results anymore because it's made itself multiplayer and put her in a civ-building sim, that's the problem? I'm not impressed with our psych people anymore if they can't tell anything about her from how she runs a civilization."

"We can make guesses, but they aren't derived from past data the way our usual results are."

"I still don't see why this warrants a meeting, sir. Doesn't she write her notes anymore?"

"She's started doing them in gibberish - don't laugh. We break codes all the time, kiddy ciphers that they sometimes start journaling in are just automatically cracked by computer. This one isn't. Every analysis we run on it shows that she might as well be typing random letters and numbers rhythmically and drawing dots by poking randomly at her screen. There's no consistency day to day or from one ten-minute block to the next."

"I thought something like this might happen eventually. Something happened to her that she's not willing to take the risk of someone reading. Or she knows now that she's getting read, one of the two."

"We know that. We don't understand how to crack it. She's one of yours, figure it out."

"I'm not going to be able to -"

"We'll give you a cryptanalyst of your very own tied up in ribbon."

"Sir, that won't help. It's not going to be a cipher. She doesn't take notes so that you can read them. She doesn't take notes so that anyone can read them. Their primary purpose is to put her thoughts somewhere outside of her brain, and they only need to make sense to her in that format long enough for her to inspect them. If she types an asterisk, it means something to her, and she can hold that correspondence in working memory long enough to serve her purposes, and it will never, ever yield to cryptanalysis. I'm sure it's more comfortable for her to work in English or Stark, easier for her to refer back to past work, but she's apparently decided that - for reasons of content or risk assessment - it's no longer worth the hazard to her mental privacy."

"If we can't get psych data out of her from the game and we can't use her journal -"

"You can get psych data from the game. I don't see how you could fail to get psych data from the game. It gave her a civ-builder. What did she do with it?"

"She built a civilization. I told you."

"What's her friend doing?"

"He's not your concern."

"He's interacting with her game."

"He builds arbitrary things. Sets stuff on fire. Watches procedurally-generated landscape scroll by. Teaches her subjects to dance. Follows her around to see what she does, when they're on a the same time, he helped her make a crown to put on her avatar. We've got other people figuring him out. It's her I'm talking to you about."

"So she didn't, say, slaughter the inhabitants of the civ sim, like half the little psychopaths you collect up here would, she didn't ignore it until the game offered her something else, she spends lots of her free time teaching virtual creatures to make and do things."

"Which is uninformative, which was no problem until she started typing nonsense into her journal."

"Well, if you can't figure out who she is by watching her play princess with game critters, and if she hasn't convinced you that she is who she is in the two years and change you've had her, you could always do something ludicrously old-fashioned."

"What?"

"Talk to her."

"We'll consider it. What's your advice on how to approach her?"

"Don't give her any bullshit."

"You think she's a lie-detector as well as an untelepath?"

"Not especially. I think in the event that she finds out that you're willing to lie to her, she'll become so paranoid that you will never learn anything from her again. She might become unusable."

"Fragile."

"Self-possessed. She respects herself more than eight-year-olds normally do. Did you read what the psych boys generated from her notes?"

"Skimmed it."

"The what do I want, what do I -"

"I remember that, yes."

"If you make it clear that she does not have reliable information, at least from you, the answers to her questions won't be ones you'll like. She's not intrinsically contrary or uncooperative. She doesn't even have an objection to being understood, as long as she knows what's going on. But she's not suited for being a blinkered pawn, either, not in any context that matters to her."

"I don't know why you pretend you work for us. We ask you for pawns and you hand us a queen."

"Someone has to fetch up a few children who aren't sociopaths in training. A little balance."

"She's fallen in with the craziest kid we've ever launched."

"Maybe she'll build him a civilization, too."

Bella's routine carries on, though her classwork advances and the birds (and antelopes, and later bears and butterflies, so far all ultimately peaceful after she solves their respective puzzles) develop more of a civilization under her direction. (With random changes that Sue sometimes makes to the landscape; she'll log on one day to find that he's put up a dovecote-tower on a mountain or left a stack of firewood where a forest used to be or taught her birds a choreographed dance.) She has basic infrastructure under control by the time she's seven and has to work out how to solve more social issues: the bears don't like how the antelopes smell, the butterfly eggs can't survive in the northerly villages she shortsightedly settles a colony of them in and the birds won't look after them for free, the antelopes want open spaces and object to urban development, the birds seem to think she's theirs because her avatar is one and she found them first and they sometimes get into spats with the others over this, a butterfly is orphaned in a rockslide and starts following her around like she's his mommy. It's challenging and it's surprisingly devoid of war, but she supposes they handle her training for war in other settings besides this one.

They don't see each other outside of the fantasy game, so they don't talk (though she can write words, sometimes, if there's a reason). He goes into an army - Condor to start, he's traded to Meerkat soon after. He's a little before the rest of his launch.

She's a little before the rest of her launch too; she's getting restless playing in the battleroom with people who've had only as much chance to practice as she has. She gets promoted when she's not quite eight yet, and goes to Flame.