1984 in space

	Chapter One
	When Alex Regis was three, she bit a girl for calling her fat. Reclamation was a fairly metropolitan station, and so a human caretaker took Alex to a private room and began talking to her about how what she did was wrong. While this method was almost universally praised over the more frontier “stun-baton conditioning”, Alex would have appreciated a prod from an AI servitor's electric rod more than she did the lecture. The caretaker droned on and on about responsibility and other buzzwords that Alex, at three, understood about as well as she did at twenty three. Then the caretaker asked Alex why she did it. Alex replied “I'm not a fat. She's a liar. Liars get bitten,” a quote which let to a mass inquiry on who, exactly, let Alex at the pre-Exodus gang crime vids. Alex never got into the pre-Exodus gang crime vids. This was an organically derived moral structure that arose independent from any corrupting influence. And as flawed as it was, Alex stuck by it. People who did things wrong to her ought to be bit for recompense. The caretaker sighed deeply and made Alex toddle to the other girl and explain how sorry she was. Alex refused, citing a desire to remain unbitten. She was put on time-out while everyone else did arts and crafts, which suited Alex perfectly fine. She didn't care at all, really, about things like that. She would continue not caring at all about anything artistic until she turned nine, and used the arts class fabricator to print a metal bludgeon so as to punish a boy for kissing her. The fact that she had initiated the kiss against his protests was irrelevant- she didn't enjoy it, and so he ought to suffer for it. The bludgeon was taken away from her, but not after she managed to break the boy's arm, requiring a grand total of fifteen minutes of medical attention from a reparation swarm before he was ready to play zero-gee football again. Alex spent that time in time-out too, which suited her just fine. She bit her tongue, because that was a lie too. She did enjoy sports, and did recognize that it was probably going a little bit too  far to break his arm. She apologized, publicly, to the boy, explaining that she had really only meant to bruise him a little bit, and he wasn't that gross anyway. She backhanded a kid who looked at her funny to reclaim her machismo, and then walked over to the naughty corner herself.
	She turned twelve. Everyone, of course, turned twelve at the same time, being as they were decanted on the same day. It was a tremendous day, because that was the day everyone would say their tearful goodbyes to the caretakers that had policed their life for the last twelve standard Earth-Sol orbits, and begin anew in secondary school. The secondary school you went to was of tremendous import, as that would determine whether you made it rich and uploaded at seventy or if you were doomed to live out your life farming algae around Alpha Centauri until your heart gave out at a hundred and twenty. They'd taken the test before, and now had the list of secondary schools they qualified for. Alex's list was short. There were only five or six schools on the list, compared to some kids who managed to get twenty schools on theirs, not counting the ones they would never in a million years want to go to. Alex's list was short, and the schools on it predominantly Somatic. Somatic schools were supposed to be about training one's mind to control one's bodies, but to Alex all the spiritual rhetoric was a nice way of saying “You're going to be doing manual labor in a backwater colony somewhere until you die”. There was one that wasn't a Somatic school for the “gifted”. The Steven Fomalhaut Military Academy was looking for cadets. That suited Alex just fine. She left Reclamation to a backwater system orbiting a nondescript red dwarf. The first day there, they lined up in the rain and the dark and an instructor went down the line and insulted them. She heard enough vitriolic statements from the instructor to damage even her weak sense of propriety. He came down the line, got to Alex. Called her fat. She cracked him in the jaw, and then prepared for whatever godawful punishment they'd inflict upon her here. The instructor smiled, said “That's more like it,” and continued down the line. Someone tried punching him, after the sexual tendencies of her mother (“Mother,” Alex thought, “Who the hell still has a mother?”) was called into question. The instructor dodged and broke the fat, white, weak girl's spindly wrist by squeezing it for a few moments. She was taken to the infirmary, and nobody else tried punching them. Alex grinned. She'd like it there.
	She graduated at the top of her class in everything but tactics and leadership, but even the later didn't do terribly poorly. And that same day, before she had even left to figure out what to do with her life, she was told that there was an Braith Terra to see her. Her breath caught. She asked the courier if he had, perhaps, misspoken, and that it was Terra, with two “Rs”? He confirmed that it was, in fact, Terra, with two “Rs”. He averted eye contact and the building.
	“Terra,” she thought to herself, “for real. What does an Immortal want with /me/? Was it that guy whose lung I punctured, because I apologized for that at length and I actually meant it.” Her internal monologue getting her nowhere, she turned on her retinal screens and allowed locally available network resources to tell her where she ought to go. The academy was a freestanding torus, rotated for very light gravity. This means that all Alex had to do to arrive at her destination was exit the building, follow corridor around the circumference of the station, and turn left when prompted by the arrow graphics in the corner of her field of vision.
	She entered a nondescript office. The walls were tiled in plastic compounds like every other room Alex had ever been in, and a board secretary half-sat, half-floated at a chair behind a lightweight desk of aluminum piping and rigid plastic surface. She was filing at her nails, the low gravity environment sending tiny fragments flying hither and thither. Alex cleared her throat, a sound that approximated that of a fabricator struggling to take apart a slab of particularly dense regolith. That got the secretary's attention, and she set aside her deep, personal mission to spread organic debris all over the station to do her job.
	“You got an appointment?” She said, her outskirt drawl pricking Alex's brain's “this annoys me more than anything I've ever seen” center.
	“Yes, I do. Alex. Regis.” She said, having little to no idea if she actually did have an appointment. It was an Immortal. She was reasonably certain they'd pull some strings if it was necessary. The secretary's eyes grew duller and more unfocused than even before. Tiny, staggered finger twitches indicated that she was accessing some computer or another.
	“Oh. Right. You've got the appointment with that Immortal, right?” the secretary said at length.
	“That's me,” Alex replied. “Where's the door?”
	The secretary just grunted, and Alex's retinal displays highlit in bright red the door she ought to go through. Alex hadn't seen it before because it was located up from her. The gravity was light enough, and Alex more than strong enough, that she easily jumped up, grabbed the door's handle, causing it to spring open, and hoisted herself up through the office's floor.
	The office astounded Alex, as much as she was capable of being astounded. It was tiny, certainly, but it contained more wealth than Alex thought possible. There was a desk made of real wood- wood! Alex had never seen such a thing before in her life. The dark, wooden desk had a globe of Earth on top of it, also made out of wood (“and probably painted with natural pigments or something just to make it more expensive,” Alex concluded silently) alongside a folder full of papers. Alex had seen something that passed for paper before, once (some kid she beat up kept a little scrap in her shoe for good luck), and thought herself unusual. But that was paper thinner than what Alex assumed an onion's skin was. Certainly thinner than the algae sheets they tended to eat, and certainly thinner than the thick, glossy, white paper that poked out of the folder like the sliver of bone she exposed when she broke her arm sparring. She shook her head- it wasn't gruesome like that, it was...
	“Decadent, that's what it is,” said the woman sitting behind the desk. Alex had been preoccupied with the wood and wood-by products to an extent that prevented her from noticing the person who likely made it all happen. “The desk, the carpet, the globe- wasteful to the extreme.”
	Now that it was mentioned, Alex realized that the floor wasn't even tiled- a thin carpet, coated in intricate designs from some pre-Exodus civilization. She noted the figure like a snake impaled with two spears, which she dimly remembered as being from one of the greatest. “If these carpets are made of actual, honest to goodness sheep's wool I'm going to have a conniption.”
	The woman behind the desk waited patiently while Alex put the pieces together. The telltale shock of a sudden realization, muffled by Alex's stubborn pride, darted across her face, and Alex realized what she'd been missing. “The papers aren't a waste?” She asked suddenly.
	“No. Expensive, but not a waste,” replied the woman at the desk, “because there's some information we can't trust to data blocks and retinal screens. Can you read?”
	“Yes,” Alex lied. She didn't have much of a moral compunction against lying when she wasn't on the receiving end. A more accurate answer would have been “A little,” or “Enough,” or “If I have to,” or “Well I can have the station resources find me a reader AI if it's that important.”
	“Oh dear. If you can't read, Alex, you're not going to be nearly as useful as if you could. You should work on that, if you can,” said the woman.
	“Yeah, yeah. So, who're you?”
	“Braith Terra. I trust that you were planning on enlisting as soon as you can?”
	“I was. Why?”
	“No college?”
	“Don't need to go to college to kill people, do I?”
	“That's what I'm here to talk to you about.”
	“An Immortal wouldn't come here to hock universities at a backwater academy’s best recruit.”
	“You think this is backwater?”
	“I know this is backwater, and that's why the lady at the desk down there can't speak proper Esperanto.”
	“Well, yes. It's located, in terms of jumps, as far away from Fomalhaut as it gets. But that's for a reason.”
	“... Steve F School for the Socially-Maladjusted is not a top-secret training post for elite super soldiers,” Alex said, patiently disbelieving.
	“No, it's not. But it is a reasonably good school, located far enough away from Fomalhaut that nobody's going to be poking at it if we don't make it an obvious target.”
	“Didn't think so.”
	“You, on the other hand, are already well on your way to being an elite super soldier,” Braith said as though she had just told Alex that the weather on Fomalhaut was unseasonably windy.
	“...What?”
	“You were born to fight, Alex. We didn't do anything to your DNA because we're not Posthuman monsters, but the genes came out in your favor anyway. You can do things we need done. It's as simple as that.”
	Alex liked simple. Braith nodded, and pushed the folder to her. “There's a private reader AI in this office. Use it.”
	She did. The folder contained information on what she'd be expected to do. It was ten pages of dither and prattle, in her mind. “You want me to get augmented, go in there, and break some buckethead brains, yeah?” She asked. Braith chuckled.
	“That's about it. In exchange, you'll be my pedagogue. I'll see to it that you take your place in the upper echelons of the fleet, with the rest of the Immortals.”
	One did not say no to an Immortal's offer of pedagogy. Alex's signature was on the form before she realized that there was a pencil in her hand. Braith smiled. Her teeth were full of wires.
Chapter Two
	Five years later, she stood in that same office. Her regulation military jumpsuit was adorned with a tiny pin, denoting rank. Alex didn't actually know who she outranked and who she didn't, being accustomed to the assumption that she outranked everyone who didn't put up too hard of a fight about it. Braith, in the same mildly unsettling mechanical body, sat in the same way behind the same desk. Alex's first impulse was to remark that she was the only thing in the room that had changed, but that wasn't true at all. She might have grown a few inches and gotten a fancy black pip on her sea of regulation white, but she had also very nearly failed to graduate from the Institute because of “Sociopathic tendencies”. She tossed her head at the thought. As though they knew anything about her mind!
	“Alex,” Braith began, “It's certainly nice to see you in person again. Pardon the cliché, but you've gotten so big!”
	Braith, with her plastic-white hair and her red eyes and her teeth full of coppery filaments was not so nice to see in person. But Alex lied and said, “Thanks, you too.”
	Braith scowled. “So, Alex. Have you been keeping up with the war effort?” she asked.
	“Yes,” Alex lied again. She skimmed the news feeds every so often, and of course had the newsfeed AI set to ping her when if she or anyone she knew was mentioned but did not, strictly speaking, follow the war effort. The stretchy polymer casing of Braith's face artificially contracted, painting the semblance of worry lines. Her scowl deepened slightly.
	“I wish you wouldn't lie, darling,” Braith said. Her voice was obviously overproduced, synthetic, the result of a clumsy machine translating the elegant impulses between the brain and the tongue and the throat and the lungs to create speech into audio files at breakneck speed. Alex liked Braith (more than she'd ever admit to anyone, least of all herself), but the synthetic shell she rode around in aggrieved her. “I can't believe that's going to be me, after this is all over,” she thought. She started. Braith had been talking to her.
	“Wasn't lying, ma'am,” Alex said, and that was another lie.
	“You certainly were. I can tell these things, you know,” Braith said with a harsh, metallic sigh. Everything about her body's synthetic nature was an irritant to Alex, and she had difficulty recalling how she had failed to notice it during their first meeting. Braith rolled back in her chair, kicking her feet up onto the desk.
	“Young lady, do you understand why it is we fight this war?” She asked, sternly. The question made Alex vaguely uncomfortable in the same way that old caretakers' questions about her motivations failed to.
	“It's not really important for me. All that matters is my part in it,” Alex responded, hoping that her answer would be parsed as correct. She vaguely remembered something along those lines at one of her secondary school or freshman classes being said by someone, which was a tremendous improvement over her actual opinion on the matter.
	“That concept, while popular in tremendously outdated literature, has no grounding in reality. Alex, you need to understand what you're fighting for, so that if it comes down to it (god forbid), you can be prepared to sacrifice everything in pursuit of victory. Do you understand?” Braith said, slowly, like she was tutoring a eleven year old on why they would use algebra in their daily lives and not a twenty three year old on the moral implications of taking the lives of other sentient beings without an adequate justification.
	“No,” Alex said. That was true.
	“... This is why I advocate childhood conditioning against Posthumanism. Alex, do you at least understand what we're fighting against?” Braith asked. There was a note of worry in her voice, Alex thought- although her voice was scratchy enough that it could easily have been her imagination.
	“Yeah. Any year seven moron could tell you as much. Bunch of wackos, all Immortals, believe in forking, ruled by an insane rouge weak AI named Bandersnatch or something,” Alex said, drawing on memories of lectures slept through, recorded with her subdermal throat mic at low quality and then listened to late at night while studying frantically.
	“Jabberwock. And yes, everything you said is true,” Braith said, “after accounting for bias.” Alex had no idea why people insisted on saying things like “after accounting for bias” or “discounting personal perspective” or similar such phrases. She understood that it was important to filter objective data away from subjective opinions, but since any toddler could do that in her sleep it never failed to irritate her that people had to rub in how “objective” and “unbiased” they were.
	“Right, so isn't that enough reason to blow them out of the universe?” Alex asked. She was sick and tired of the conversation and strongly wished to have the conversation where she learned who she was expected to kill and told where to go to make that happen.
	“...Alex, people holding opinions you disagree with is not a valid reason to kill them.”
	“I know that!” Alex said. That was a lie, on a very basic level. While Alex could readily produce the deeply ingrained rhetoric about the comparative value of all sentient life and how that meant that murder was never justified unless the best settlement of a negotiated agreement was almost mind-numbingly bad, but she found it difficult to accept on a deep level, where her animal brain told her to kill all the creatures who would do harm to her and hers.
	“I have no doubt that you are aware of this information, Alex,” Braith said very delicately. “And that's why you have to understand what they're doing that's so wrong. No, strictly speaking, running another instance of yourself, or even a third or a fourth or a twentieth contemporaneous instance of yourself is not intrinsically wrong. Suffering from the machinations of a broken coordination program like Jabberwock is not intrinsically wrong. What, then, are they doing to deserve to be destroyed?”
	Alex thought about that for a long while. Braith seemed to be satisfied that she was getting through to her, but in reality she was trying to remember what happened the last time she had this conversation. It came to her in a flash of lightning. “Sol,” she asked, as though she didn't already know that that was the correct answer.
	“Yes,” Braith said quietly, crossing her chest in reverence to a deity Alex had never heard of out of remembrance for a home Alex had never been to. She remembered then what an extraordinarily long time three hundred years is for a human to live. “Sol. Destroyed, the whole system. The Posthumans say that bioconservative ideology is to blame- they say that the humans of Sol failed to adapt to changing conditions and died out like a pack of animals. What they forget is the probes. Every time we've sent a probe to Sol, regardless of if it was through a gate or a subluminal craft from Fomalhaut, it's failed to return. No natural disaster destroys only probes, but fails to extend beyond the confines of a gate system. It's the former inhabitants. They've done something to themselves to render themselves unrecognizable and loathsome. The people, Alex- I suppose it's not common knowledge, but, there've been human explorers who thought they could communicate to the exhumans of Sol. They didn't come back.”
	Alex processed all this. “So, what you mean is that the Posthumans want us to wind up like Sol. All of us. Dead.”
	“Or worse, yes. Do you understand why it's so important that we fight, even as the threat to us and ours grows larger. We're losing the war right now, Alex- did you know that?”
	Alex did not. “No,” she said honestly.
	“We are. Why do you think that is?” Braith asked. Alex was sick of being told to think. She wanted to do. She wondered for the thousandth time whether or not she would have been better served in one of those Somatics schools.
	“They have better weapons,” she said definitively, being as that's the only reason she could conceive of herself losing a fight.
	“We have the better weapons, Alex, but they have something far better. If we destroy a hundred of their ships and they destroy one of ours- it's still a net gain for us, of course. But they lost only a hundred ships. We lost a ship full of people. They can instance those ship's crews again, and have them go out and use another hundred ship fleet to blow up another one of our ships. But we can't. At your rank, you're qualified to serve as a junior officer on a capital ship. It took you twenty-one years to reach that point. If you were to go on a capital ship, serve as a junior officer, and then die horrifically, it would take us twenty-one years to get a replacement- and this is assuming that you're a completely average officer. If you're a genius, if you're brilliant, then we lose you forever. That brilliance dies. And what's worse is that they target our manufactories. They kill our children before they can grow up to be soldiers. Do you understand why we are fighting a losing battle?”
	Braith might have used a lot of rhetoric that Alex didn't pay much attention to, but she got the impression that they were fighting the kind of monsters that the AI bots were programed to remind her every night do not exist (not that she had through for a second that they'd be able to harm her if they did). “Yeah. How are we going to win this, then?”
	“They destroy our manufactories so we can't make more soldiers. Wouldn't it be incredible if we could do the same?” Braith said. It was a leading question but Alex had no idea what she was implying.
	“Yeah, it would,” Alex said, hoping that Braith would just get on with it.
	“They don't use manufactories, of course. But they do have the backups. They keep their eggs in one basket, and Jabberwock can use them to instance a legion of soldiers with a thought.”
	“So, what, we blow it up and then he can't do that anymore?”
	“It's a start.”
	“Then let's go already! Build the gate, send in the fleet!” Alex couldn't believe that they were still sitting here, having this conversation.
	“We have no idea where that basket is. And that's where you come in.”
	“What am I supposed to do?” Alex asked.
	“I don't know precisely. That's why I'm not going. But you are. You're going to infiltrate their stations and figure out where they're keeping it, so we can build a gate and send in the fleet.”
	Alex was floored. She had, after all, just graduated, and failed to understand how she had any relevant experience whatsoever. “I'm the best you have?” she said flatly. Braith smiled, stood from her seat, walked around behind her, and whispered “cochlear saliniferous cromlech lark.”
	The fuck, thought Alex, were those words. And then she remembered why, exactly, she had so few memories of either attending a college class or of what she did when she cut.
	“Was that /really/ necessary?” Alex asked. Training. She remembered training. And something else. Doing something she couldn't quite remember. She shook her head. It would come to her.
	“Well, we did need to test if the conditioning would work.”
	“Having a whole conversation on things you knew that I knew but was completely incapable of remembering wasn't helpful at all.”
	“It was not necessarily necessary. But, it's not as though I'm above fucking with you.”
	Alex remembered dimly what she had thought when she was being talked to. “Was I,” she thought, “really that big of a bitch before all the training?” She doubted it. It was probably just the suppressed memories messing with her. “I'm full aware of how qualified I am, now,” she said as she remembered vividly what had happened the only time she'd ever been caught- she crushed the metallic berserker shell like it was a macrogravity aluminum drink container, “and would very much like to continue with the mission.”
	“I'm sure you do. Everything's almost ready. You just need to meet your partner,” Braith said. This intrigued Alex. She had never had a partner before, and caretakers at the manufactory had learned rather quickly to program the AI to let her work alone. She was not entirely incapable of cooperating with others, but her abrasive personality made such cooperation rather distant and quiet.
	“Partner?” she asked. A certain individual jumped into the office with a muffled bump. They cleared their throat. “Yes,” said that certain individual, “Partner.”
Chapter Three.
	When Tony Versailles, born Tony Abel was three, she read The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet. In the original English, nonetheless. Some of the vids in the library were old and in English, and so it was from those that the caretakers and the manufactory Immortal assumed that she had learned the language, although they were at least caught slightly off guard when she came to one of them, crying about how it wasn't fair and that Romeo and Juliet loved each other and had to die for it and that the play was stupid because Shakespeare hadn't let them be together at the end. Flummoxed caretakers tried to explain to her, in the most haphazard of manners, literary theory and emotional catharsis and every other shred of knowledge they could extract from the one caretaker who had taken a fairly high-class Academic secondary school. While this did little to alleviate her angst, which would persist into her adult life, it did teach her something she hadn't quite understood before. When the servitor bots had set everyone down for their nap, she stayed up, and by the time it was over, a very bleary-eyed Tony had produced her own Act V, Scene iii, where Romeo realized that killing himself wasn't how Juliet would have liked him to act, only to be overjoyed when she came back from the dead. They eloped on a unicorn. It was rubbish, but still enough to impress her caretakers considering her age. The manufactory Immortal decided that she was clearly what was called “advanced” and deserved intensive education. While the rest of the kids learned their ABDs, Tony was taken on a whirlwind tour of literature, from Homer to Cervantes to Tolstoy to Antonissen. At age nine, her Immortal tutor finally acceded that she'd read every book of even remotely import, including the nonfiction. This made Tony sad, although she didn't quite understand why. Her peers, still studying the barest rudiments of everything, had nothing to interest her. She did the work expected of her in seconds when it ought to have taken her hours. She was resented. Kids called her names and hit her, and she would cry, and seeing them taken to the naughty corner provided her conscious only slightly more comfort than the forced apologies.
	She turned twelve. Everyone turned twelve at the same time. She was qualified for every single school of Academics and Art, and quite a few Social. The choices were paralyzing. Before she made one, though, the manufactory Immortal called her into confrere. She entered an office adorned with wooden furniture and decorations, which Toby found distastefully wasteful. The Immortal sat behind a dark, wooden desk.
	“You're exceptional. You know it, right?” The Immortal said.
	“I suppose I am, if only because everyone keeps telling me that,” Tony replied.
	“Do you know why?”
	Tony thought about that. “No,” she replied truthfully, “and I don't suppose there's even a 'reason' so to speak.”
	“Sometimes, there's not. Not now. Tony, you've always known yourself to be different from the other kids, right?”
	The question made Tony uncomfortable. She wondered why. “Yes,” she said, and that was the truth too.
	“Most kids feel like that. But in your case, Tony, it's true. The other ninety-nine people in the Abel decanting group were grown in vats after combining synthesized male and female genetic material. You were not. Tony, you were programed, and your head's a computer. The little boy who once occupied your body was brainpeeled away, and you were put inside.”
	Tony said nothing, because there was nothing she could have said.
	“I know, it's strange to hear. Or. Maybe it's not. I don't pretend to understand. But don't worry. Even if it gets rough, we're all ones and zeros on the inside. I'm proof.”
	The immortal was right. She didn't understand. But that was okay, thought Tony. She was the same person she always was, and even if she happened to be a computer program she was still just that- a person. Her future crystallized around her. She'd take Art. She'd learn how to express this to the rest of the world. She felt as though she owed it to them. She smiled weakly, and the Immortal smiled in return. Her teeth were full of wires.
Chapter Four.
	Something was off about the room's third occupant. They certainly appeared to be real, but Alex's finer instincts took over. She turned off her retinal screens out of reflex. The figure disappeared. She heard a clear voice in her head.
	“Now, that was rude,” said the voice. She turned back on the display. The individual snapped into existence an inch from her face. They were short, lithe, pale, with short brown hair and dark blue eyes. Overall, they were young. Alex wondered what kind of a sick bastard would chose for their AR avatar a fourteen year old whatever-it-was. Alex could not for the life of her gender them, and it wasn't like they had correct anatomy for her to peer at.
	“That's better,” they said, “Tony Versailles. You?”
	“Alex Regis. Are you a dude or a chick or what?” She asked. Tony took this to understand that she did not mince words.
	“The latter, I suppose,” Tony replied. Alex took this to understand that she did mince words.
	“What, then? Why is this a hard question?” Alex asked. Tony shook her head.
	“I'm a Versailles. The concept doesn't really strongly apply to me. I don't have sexed neurology like other people do,” Tony said, hoping that was adequate explanation on a topic that she was rather uninformed about herself, having expertise not in data structure or in neurology but in three dimensional animation and literature.
	“So, your gender is 'robot',” Alex said. Tony nodded.
	“I mean,” she continued, “I prefer 'Versailles' or 'AI' or even better 'Strong AI' being as I lack a physical form-”
	“Yeah, right, Asimov,” Alex interrupted. Tony made a distinctively nonhuman whirring sound. “So, what're we doing, where're we going, why the hell are you here?” She continued. Braith cleared her throat.
	“We've found a weakness in the Posthuman link network. An assault gate they thought destroyed that wasn't. We can slip in an infiltrator to take down information on where their homeworld might be located. That's you,” she explained. Alex nodded.
	“And the calculator?” she asked. Tony scowled.
	“She's here on- I explained this all to you already, Alex. Don't you remember?” Braith asked, cocking her head.
	“You locked up all that information since the day I graduated from Steve F. I remember up to that fire drill that turned out to be real from two years ago. It'll come to me, but I need an adequate explanation in the meantime,” Alex said.
	“It really shouldn't be taking that long. I wonder if it's all alright. Well, no matter. Tony's coming with you on leave from her Art school because we need a Versailles to break through Jabberwock and she's the only Versailles who happens to be my pedagogue.”
	“...Art school? She's a fucking teenager.” Alex said.
	“All Versailles are fourteen years old at the moment, Alex, and so it's not like there's anyone who would fit the bill that's not a teenager.”
	“Right, yeah. Take a teenager into a war zone, sounds about right.”
	“'s not like I didn't sign up for it, you know,” Tony said. Alex payed her no heed.
	“We're going to steal a bunch of data out of whatever station they sent some botched attack from and its nearest neighbors and then get the hell out of Dodge. I don't see why we need a tag-along kid for this, as brilliant and talented as I'm sure you are, Tony.” Alex said.
	“Jabberwock's going to expect you to be a simulacrum. Given his network of social manipulation and knowledge, there's no way you're going to be able to masquerade as a Posthuman because he'll have no data on you. But he'll try frying your brain first and replacing it with an Immortal. He won't know that you've got a non-broadcasting unhackable meat brain until he tries and fails. By substituting an implanted module running Tony for your brain, you'll be able to appear to be one of them while maintaining your ability to act in our favor.”
	Alex considered this to be an awful plan. “You're suggesting that we let him delete Tony instead of me so I can fool them. This has the rather obvious downside of resulting in the death of a teenaged... girl, thing,” she said. Braith laughed.
	“Tony's not going to die. The implant's bifurcated, and she'll be running parallel. Only one side broadcasts, and only one side can be deleted. This is also the side that's not capable of acting in any capacity,” Braith said. The hard-set lines that had been developing in Alex's face smoothened a quantum.
	“Right. Why can't we use a normal Immortal instead of a teenager for this?”
	“The hardware we Immortals run on is far too big to be implanted while keeping you at a state that's even vaguely physically able. Tony's also faster than any of us could be and can guide your social interactions using reaction cues from whatever poor soul you catch while simultaneously crunching numbers and analyzing behavior patterns to ensure that your cover remains absolute,” Braith said. Tony beamed with pride, both figuratively and literally- her AR avatar was emitting visible sunbeams. Alex looked at her.
	“You can do all that, kid? You're in Art school,” she said as though the statement was tautological. “Art kids can't do war stuff” is a thought that had never crossed a younger Alex's mind because there had never been any reason to assume otherwise.
	“You were in Social school,” Tony reminded her.
	“I was,” she acceded, “But Steve F was a training school for future officers. All the 'Social' I did there was yelling at the other schmucks or getting yelled at. I'm assuming you're not in the Art school where the art they teach you is 'Demoralizing Music' or some other thing.”
	“No, I'm not. But this is all stuff I can do  easily because of my nature as a Versailles. It would be like asking you to tie a bunch of shoelaces while someone carried you around. I mean. That's if you can tie your shoes,” Tony explained.
	“Of course I can tie my shoes,” Alex said without mentioning that she hadn't been able to since the second year at Steve F. “Alright, fuck it. I'm convinced. When're we heading out?” Alex asked. Braith looked off into space for a few seconds, and then said, “Two minutes ago. Better get going! Come back in one piece, and knock in some heads for me!”
Chapter Five?
	They ran through the central corridor of Station eight-double oh-U-eight, a station only relevant for their well-advertised but poorly-known militarism academy, displacing pedestrians in a flurry of knocking and rude gestures. Or, more accurately, Alex ran and knocked people over while Tony's AR avatar, invisible to everyone but Alex, flew on beautifully designed wings and simply phased through pedestrians and other trivial obstacles.
	“So, you're downloaded into my head already?” She asked.
	“Well, your chest cavity, anchored inside your ribcage. But yes,” Tony replied.
	“Huh. What else've I got in me?”
	“The standard. Aside from your preexisting retinal screen, implanted haptic interface, recharging port, antenna, and mini-PC, you've got motor-enhanced limbs, galvanizing pads on your fingertips, and a very small industrial grade laser. And I think there's a port by your clavicle where you can fire a knife from but I don't really have functions there.”
	“I can punch hard, electrocute people with a touch, fire a laser from my hands, and also maybe launch a spring-loaded knife out of my chest? Neat. Anything else?”
	“Oh, a capacitor at the midbrain that can be used to kill you just in case and a bigger battery to accommodate all this new hardware.”
	Alex found the revelation that she was just one command away from permanent death only mildly unsettling. She did, however, find her list of augmentations a bit short, and resolved to have that fixed expediently. They reached the gateway at the end of the hall, in a room hermetically sealed against the rest of the station. This gate would lead to another gate, any number of light-years away, on another station, around another sun. That station would have other gates, and eventually, if they kept following the gates, they would find themselves at Fomalhaut Beta, the new homeworld of humanity. From there, they could follow more gates, and arrive at any station in the galaxy (and their few extragalactic ventures). Excepting those controlled by the Posthumans, who had their own gate network that presumably centered around their rouge planet base.
	The gateway was a circle seven feet in diameter. The room it was situated in was a stark, medical white, and banks of computers stood around the loading platform in a semicircle. Two hinged arms emitted five feet straight up, and then bent. The tops of the arms were telescoping rods, currently mostly-retracted. Around the gate, there was the peculiar dim brown glow of a fraction of the emissions of every luminous or reflecting object in the universe. Through the gate, another walkway like the one Alex now walked along jutted. She took a step at the threshold, and then stepped through. No jarring change, or moment of darkness. One moment she was on a station built around an asteroid orbiting a dim red dwarf star, and then she stepped through the door to a station built on an asteroid orbiting a fiercely glowing binary system of two blue giants. Not that she could tell this, since no moron builds windows on space stations. That station had the same incredibly light gravity of Steve J, and she trotted easily to the next gate, nearby, which brought her to a station with no gravity at all. It hung limply over a dim gray planet, far enough away that the star they orbited was a blue dot in the backdrop of the night sky.
	They took an elevator down to the planet. This planet, one of the first discovered since the Exodus, was named after the perhaps the greatest writer of the twenty-first century, Dutch futurist Dirkje Antonissen. While visually unimpressive, it was a quiet and untroubled planet and thus relatively easy to live in if you discounted the negligible gravity and the lack of atmosphere. It was like Earth's moon, but smaller and covered with life-sustaining ice. Thus, it was one of the largest human settlements, outside of Fomalhaut. The city they came down to had four portals of its own, one of which led directly to Fomalhaut.
	Fomalhaut was nothing like Antonissen. It was an enormous, gaseous planet of an ugly color. What was more interesting was its absolutely massive ring system, bigger even than the Sol system's Main Belt. The fine dust and ice crystals that made up the rings were perfect fodder for autonomous assembly by robots, and there was as a consequence twelve massive, slowly growing O'Neil cylinders in orbit around the planet, slowly rotating to provide Earth-strength gravity. Networked together very carefully though wormholes, they created a massive metropolis that hosted almost a million human beings.
	At the microgravity that the previous stations maintained, Alex could not properly appreciate just how easy movement had become for her. Implanted motors in her legs carried her across lengths of station in pursuit of the small gate they were looking for effortlessly, with none of the jelly-legged swaying to be expected of macrogravity acclimation. They found the tiny gate, and stepped through.
	They were on a tiny pod. The entrance to this gate was only five feet in diameter, and it was clear that the construction was makeshift. The computer bank hummed, and white jumpsuited technicians chattered quietly in rushed tones. On the other end of the walkway was a small wheeled box, a foot to a side, with four hinged manipulator arms and a large screen on a pole that showed an unnervingly close picture of a man's face. Tony noted that she could likely begin counting nose hair.
	“Thaddeus Terra!” boomed a voice from the box. While no speakers were visible, it was clear they had to be there somewhere, as the sound was absolutely massive. The voice was tinny, like the voices of all Immortals were.
	“Yes, sir! At attention, sir!” Tony said. Alex chuckled, since it wasn't as though Tony could speak except for through her earbuds.
	“I'm in command of our intelligence operations. All of them. And this thing you're trying now has been done before, lassie. By older and better trained men than you, at that.”
	“I was in training for this mission for five years. I sincerely doubt it,” Alex said. The screen zoomed in closer, giving a disturbing visual of the man's cataract-laced, veiny eyeball.
	“I was not talking to you, Regis. I was talking to your friend!” He shouted. He reminded Alex of a particularly nasty drill sergeant, and Tony of SHAKESPEARE CHARACTER HERE.
	“I'm well aware of that, sir, but with all respect due to the lost, none of them were Versailles,” Tony replied.
	“Yes, and none of them were fourteen year old boys, either!” He yelled, louder. Tony worried terribly that the vibrations from the speakers would destabilize the gateway and trap them there, forever. Alex wondered where they put the speaker on her person before concluding that it was probably where Tony had thought the knife port was.
	“Yes, and we can fight about this all day, or we could go in there and do the thing I've literally been training for five years to do.”
	“You've been training for three years, Regis,” Thaddeus said.
	“I graduated Steve F at sixteen and I'm currently twenty-one,” she said. “While I admit that my math scores were sub-par, I can still count.”
	“Yes, but apparently you spent a good two years of that either studying at the college you're supposed to have attended or in cryonics,” Tony said though her earbuds.
	“Never mind,” Alex said in the same breathe. Using her haptics, she opened a text editor and wrote out “WHY THE HELL WAS I IN CRYONICS QUESTION MARK”. Tony's avatar shrugged. “I don't know. If we were allowed to know, I think we would.”
	“Good. Any questions?” Thaddeus asked.
	“None at all.” Alex replied before Tony could say anything.
	“Follow me, then,” Thaddeus said. He wheeled himself down the walkway, away from the gateway. The walkway terminated at an airlock, which opened at his approach to revel a cramped closet of a room which likely would not be big enough to fit the three of them. Then, Alex remembered that Tony didn't actually take up any physical space and consigned herself to cramped quarters with Drill Sergeant Wannabee.
	They opened the other side of the airlock to a room exactly like  the one from which they had just left, except that the arms of the gateway were down, forming two perfect right angles as the needle-sharp points of the telescoping ends of the arms just barely failed to touch in the center. As they approached the gateway, the arms retracted, and the gateway swelled to a narrow three foot diameter with a tremendous flux of air.
	“The air on the other side's just thin, not unbreathable. You'll be fine!” yelled Thaddeus. Alex jumped through the gate without any second thoughts.
Chapter Six?
	The other side was a room entirely unlike what they just emerged from. However Posthumans operated their gates was beyond Alex or Tony's ken, but it wasn't with arms. The room they emerged in was rough-hewn iron, dimly illuminated by red emergency lights. The gate closed behind them
	“Pickup's in five days, although I'm equipped with a quantum com to Miss Braith's office to confirm or reschedule,” Tony said. Alex grunted. Adrenaline trickled into her blood as she assessed her surroundings. No gate techs, which was fantastic. No gravity either, which was okay. The walls didn't appear to have much in the way of surveillance equipment, and it seemed to be for all intents and purposes a very large, empty sphere. On one wall, there was an airlock. Floating aimlessly in the middle of the sphere, Alex couldn't really hope to reach it without something to push off from or otherwise propel herself. She agonizingly used air resistance to orient herself to face the opposite side of the sphere.
	“Okay. Go. Knife. Launch already. Tony. Shoot the knife,” she said.
	“You don't actually have a knife,” Tony reminded her, having discovered the lack of a knife when she discovered the presence of a speaker. She failed to discover why she assumed it was a knife-launching port in the first place. “Luckily for you, I've already called in and requested some supplies. I cannot believe that they sent us without supplies.”
	The gateway opened again, in absence of any arms, and a small, faux leather case drifted through. There was a note, on paper, that read “Just fucking with you,” and signed Braith. Tony groaned. Alex opened the case. There was a hand railgun and a military-style laser pistol, in addition to miscellaneous supplies Alex couldn't be bothered to inventory and Tony was busy inventorying. Also, a jetpack. Tony's avatar grinned wildly as Alex hooked it on to the loops on the back of her white, multipurpose jumpsuit, grabbed the pistols and put them in holsters on the sides of her shins //also revise b/c idk how to anatomy// and finally clipped the bag to her side. The jetpack greatly added her travel towards the airlock. She fired her jetpack, drifted towards the airlock, and then spun around and stopped herself so that she collided with the airlock with a feather-light touch.
	“There blasting paste in that bag, Tony?” She asked. The airlock refused to open.
	“Yes, actually.” Tony replied. Alex slathered the thick, gelatinous, sticky, incredibly explosive on the airlock, jetted a little bit backwards, unholstered her laser, and fired. The explosion would have been deafening if her earbuds hadn't soldiered as to block out the sound completely, only relaxing when the last aftershocks had faded. Where there had once been a door, there now a jagged, deeply penetrating, and incredibly dark hole. The metal of the station was thrown aside entirely in places, but instead of showing space (and also probably ending Alex's training) Alex could see brown regolith.
	“Why's the station in an asteroid?” She asked aloud as she drifted down the hole.
	“There's any number of reasons. Let's find some people so we can fake our deaths as soon as possible,” Tony said. They drifted down darkness.
	“Hey, why do you think it's so dark?” Tony asked as they drifted.
	“Probably whoever works here can see in the dark. Or doesn't have to see at all,” Alex explained. She breathed deeply. The air was terribly too thin. She dared not use the flashlight on her laser in case she startled the enemy before she had done all the damage she could- the initial phase, before they were spotted by Jabberwock, could provide useful information all its own. She kept her AR network ap, looking for the thin, straight red line of an exposed network connection. None showed other than the false Tony link.
	They collided with a wall. Having nowhere to go in the pitch black, Alex finally turned on the light on her laser to the absolute dimmest setting. Image inhancing software, likely installed somewhere in her cranial storage while she wasn't paying attention, took the tiniest bit of light and used it to throw everthing into supersaturated sharp relief, laid over her vision. A tiny picture-in-picture window in the bottom right of her field of vision indicated what she was actually looking at, but she could see quite well in the gloom of her tiny light.