Mirror: Chapter 16

"Congratulations on your victory. That said, great job shitting it up."

Alita's grin faded into a frown as the praise transformed into a reprimand.

"What's the problem?" she demanded, "We won, didn't we? Did you not hear the judge's verdict? We'll rocket right out of intermediate in no time!"

Coach passed a cellophane printout to Alita, bearing the official Motorball Commission letterhead.

"Infraction?" she yelled, "What for?"

"It's not for you, it's for him," Coach spit, "You'd think you'd know better, Mr. 12."

"Is someone going to answer me? For what? What did you do?" Alita gripped his coat sleeve and gave it a yank to get Adem's attention.

He tried to tug his arm back, but once again she refused to relent. So, he passively accepted it before destroying the clothing.

"Kid," Coach said, separating her off of him when the silence built up, "Motorball is entertainment first and a sport second. Zalem sends the commission quotas on the number of games and average minutes per game to be played."

"So what? He took apart Devil Knives the same way, right? Nothing happened then."

"It wasn't the same, and you know it. That aside, it's like fishing, sometimes they reel you in, and sometimes they don't. They try to balance the team talent so they can manage the playtime and only care about the rules when you screw their quotas. That's the reason Mr. 12 here never had a coach, too."

Alita backhanded Adem's shoulder and held her hands up as if expecting him to say something in his defense.

Instead, he continued to stare off to the side.

Coach said, with a final warning, "You do something like this again, and you're off the team."

"Understood."

Alita grit her teeth, "Okay, so, he can still race?"

"You two got lucky. He's not barred."

"Good, we'll be in for the practice run tomorrow."

"Don't bother. The infraction still carries a punishment. Team Battle Angel is fixed at final pole position for the rest of the season."

Coach followed up, "I hope you're prepared because the games are established in ascending talent. Since the other contestants know you're a threat, they'll be strategizing against you. If you don't have your own strategy by then, you're going to lose."

---

Her first stop was Adem's apartment. After getting no answer, she went back outside and scaled the wall to the third story. Wiggling the burnt window was no effort on her part, and she quickly broke in.

"You're crazy if you think I'm going to let you slink off," she muttered with a bitter tone.

Her mouth dropped at how unexpectedly bare it was. The spare parts disappeared, the furniture missing, and the cabinets and walls scrubbed clean. Nothing remained, even the holocard of Sarah and the sketches were missing.

She set her jaw to the side and furrowed her eyebrows.

A half-hour later of flipping over rooftops and Alita landed on the clinic roof. She immediately checked, his sleeping cot was gone.
No amount of her convincing could get him to sleep inside, he claimed he liked staring at the stars since it reminded him of swimming as a child.

While opening the closet door downstairs, she held her breath.

A sigh of relief escaped her when she spied his neat blankets and the dismantled cot.

"Your fastidiousness is starting to annoy me," she hissed, "Where did you go?"

If you're practicing, but you're not at the practice track, then where are you? The defunct aqueduct? That would be too sweet and corny for a cool guy like you, right?

Alita bit her lip and snatched up her skates.

When she saw Adem in the distance, running laps in a short section, she smiled, facepalmed, and shook her head at the same time.

Then she dropped her hand and squinted like a hawk about to rend apart a rodent that offended her.

What the hell was he doing?

Every time he coasted down a section of the duct, now bonedry from a lack of rain, a cloud of hot dust followed him.

Then he would stop by a metal drum, which he tied a rope around, grab it, and then start spinning until he could fling it as far as he could.

Is he practicing Panzer Kunst? I've never seen a move like that, but he did invent the counterweight idea just by studying, so who knows?

She could see him down below, shaking his head in dissatisfaction, while she balanced on the overlapping industrial piping. The barrel landed beneath her after one of his throws.

That's very neat and all--however!

She hopped down and crushed the metal barrel by landing on it.

Adem swallowed, "Hi, Alita."

She crossed her arms and arched an eyebrow. After a few moments of silence, she burst out, "And where have you been? If you tell me that you've been tossing this drum all this time, I'm going to make you eat it."

"I've," Adem hesitated, then took a deep breath before spilling it out all at once, "been tossing this drum around all this time."
Alita clenched her fists and lurched forward.

---

The two of them skated through the Iron City streets, easily shuttling through traffic. Every once in a while, Alita would shoot daggers at him from her eyes.

"So, your apartment's empty?"

"I sold all the junk and let it go. I hated that place anyway."

"And your sleeping cot was put away?"

"Of course," Adem said, tilting his head, "I don't want to be a messy guest."

"That's true," she forced herself to sound neutral about it.

That's right, he's a guest. I'm Ido's family, but it's Ido's clinic, and he's being patient with Adem's presence as it is.

"Going to get a new apartment?"

"Yes, after the motorball season."

"Oh, I see," she said, superfluously checking the nails on her cybernetic fingers, "And are you just going to disappear again?"
Adem winced.

He rolled to a stop at a food cart and ordered a drink. After popping the bottle cap with his thumb, but before he could take a sip, Alita snagged it and downed a swig.

"Thanks, it was refreshing," she beamed, then shoved the bottle back into his hand.

"You're," his eyes slid to the side as he lifted the bottle to his lips because she was watching him drink it, "welcome."

"So why did you take off?"

"I needed to think," he said, after a minute, "And when I'm around you I can't."

"Gee, thanks?"

"You're welcome, again," he said, smirking, taking another sip.

She slugged his arm. He pretended it didn't hurt but struggled to hold the bottle.

"I take it you had an idea about the next match, and it involved the barrel somehow?"

"Yeah, that and something else I need to talk to Ido about."

---

Alita extended the EM-locator to Ido. It looked like a blindfold several millimeters thick, smooth on one side and a complex interwoven set of circuits and cables on the other.

"Not a chance," Ido said, looking between the device and Adem.

Adem shrugged as if expecting this response.

"Why do I always feel out of the loop?" Alita stomped her foot, "Just a minute, dad. This is like me in the berserker armor. He's going to need that edge in motorball. We already called Coach--"

"Yes, I'm sure you did, or at least you did," Ido said, motioning to his daughter, "And this is one-hundred-percent not like you and the berserker. Reinstalling the EM-locator alongside his visual optics is a reckless, and even dangerous, idea."

"Why, exactly?"

"Catastrophic interference," Adem rubbed his forehead.

She looked between them, prompting one to explain.

"It is a phenomenon of neural networks, regarding the information limitations," Ido explained when Adem refused, "Human minds are amazing at drawing associations between categories of information, because of their architecture. But, like any other computing machine, they have limitations on the amount of information they can store. In this case, if you put too much in, then something is lost. That's catastrophic interference."

"That's why you don't see cyborgs with multiple sensor inputs for the same sensory experience," Adem finally spoke up, "I was going use only one at a time. The side-effects would be minimal."

"It's still a bad idea swapping them," Ido said, "Thankfully, this isn't sports-level surgery so your coach and yourself can't do it. What you're talking about is committing to the left side of the valley, and you will lose your humanity over it. It's not a question of if, it's a question of how much. Your mind has already had tremendous strain put on it."

"I can handle it," he said, holding his hand out to Alita for the EM-locator.

She leaned her head to the side, then hid the device behind her back, "Were you going to keep the side-effects a secret?"

He didn't answer.

After closing her eyes she shook her head, "I can't support this. Is this why you were gone? Trying to find a way to sneak it by me?"

"I ran the numbers," Adem's hands were clenching and opening, "We're at a serious disadvantage if I can't play at my previous level. I'm not the only one trying to sneak things by--"

"Please don't," she said, "I'm asking you."

"Alright, fine," he said, deflated, "I do have another idea, much less intrusive--"

"No cybersurgery."

The techno-fibers in his jaw flexed. A second later he was gone again.