"You ask him."
"Hell, no. What if he says yes? Let's just go down without him."
"You big baby."
"You weren't there when he tailed us to the pub. He wouldn't shut up. Got kicked out for asking the bartender too many questions."
"Maybe he just likes his booze. Lots of people are nerds about that."
"He was asking her questions about dark energy."
A pause.
"He can't be that bad, can he?"
"Have you even met the guy?"
On that ringing endorsement, the footsteps in the hallway grew louder and came to an awkward pause at the door to Conrad's office. The advantage, he figured, of being the sort of person people avoid was that you got your own office, even if you were just a grad student and everyone else was crammed six-to-a-room. He'd totally been doing it on purpose, being obnoxious and hard to like. Totally. No question.
He stretched his aching shoulders, waiting for Smith and Lau out in the hallway to quit their whispered bickering and come in, and glanced down at his omnitool's chrono. Fifteen minutes to midnight, already? He was still two chapters behind on his thesis, after that whole misunderstanding with the collaborating author who didn't seem overly fond of him, and he hadn't made much progress in the past two or three hours, judging by the blinking cursor on the blank page. Yeah, okay. Maybe a distraction was overdue.
The whispered voices faded, and a knock heralded the end of the argument. Conrad shut down his terminal, propped his feet up on the desk, and called out, "Come in!"
Lau and Smith sidled in nervously, Smith looking around like he was expecting an ambush, Lau with a fixed grin that made her look vaguely sinister. "Hey, Conrad!" she chirped. "Still working, huh?"
"Yup," said Conrad.
"Uh-huh," said Smith. "So, uh. I guess there's a New Year's thing going on downstairs. Lots of drinks, watching the vids of the ball dropping in New York, the light show out at Arcturus Station, that sort of thing. Old school, y'know? So, uh, if you're not too busy…"
"Sounds great!" said Conrad, with his biggest, brightest grin, and popped to his feet.
The crowd parted before him, a bit, when they got down to the main lounge—there was the professor he'd cornered for a three-hour chat this morning, the teaching assistant who'd slammed a door in his face the tenth time he came to her office in five hours, the asari from IT who'd explained to him slowly, using small words, why she'd had to cancel her always-on-call status after his fifteenth request for optimization of his already optimized computing system. He smiled and bounced a little on the balls of his feet. Sometimes it was kind of nice just to be known.
Smith and Lau ditched him almost immediately, their odious task complete, but he didn't mind, making a beeline for the snack table, which he had all to himself once enough people looked up and saw him coming. The big holoscreen that took up one wall was, for once, not covered with the scribbles of baffled undergrads and still-more-baffled professors. This time, there was a feed of some press conference or other, people in uniform in the foreground and cheering revelers in the background, and he moved closer to listen.
"-very pleased to wrap up what's been a banner year for the Alliance fleet," a man was saying, some grizzled veteran obviously chosen for his photogenic smile and still-more-photogenic row of shiny medals, "and I hope we'll see more of this fantastic promise in the new generation. Speaking of which," he added, with a little wink at the camera, "I think it's time to introduce our next big hero. Lieutenant Shepard here is well on her way to a fabulous career, and I think it's safe to say that she personifies the best of the new generation of humanity. Lieutenant?"
Lieutenant Shepard looked a little nervous, but there was a sardonic glint of humor in her eyes that said, very clearly, I am reading cues from a monitor and have no idea what I'm saying, how are you all this fine evening? "Thank you, general. And thank you all. I hope everyone out there has a wonderful year ahead of them, because I know humanity will. We can all do our part to integrate into the galactic community. We can all be heroes."
"Aw, c'mon, enough of that propaganda shit," someone yelled from the back of the room, and the vid feed wavered to a more traditional view of the flashy, festive deep-space maneuvers of the Arcturus fleet.
Conrad stared as the fighters bobbed and weaved in devilishly complicated formation around the great hulking mass of the dreadnought, but his heart had been racing for several minutes already, since he first saw that bright and penetrating stare. It was a cheesy speech, no question, but something in Shepard's voice had made him believe.
We can all be heroes, he thought, and smiled.
Nos Astra's Fiscal Year-End parties were restrained enough, despite the absolutely massive number of intoxicants involved, that Gianna felt a bit like the awkward poor kid again, stumbling among all these glamorous and shining people, any one of whom had enough money to buy and sell her a dozen times over. The temptation was nearly overwhelming to just pile a napkin high with hors-d'oeuvres and hightail it back home. That was one of the advantages of finally having enough cash to grease a few palms, right? You could get away with things you'd never ordinarily consider. Hell, she'd be out of a job otherwise.
Grinning, she snatched a slice of bright pink vegetable, roasted to perfection, from a plate of similarly artistic snacks, and carefully folded it into a napkin, dropping it into her purse. Okay, so she had a fully stocked kitchen, now. She had an apartment on one of the richest planets in the galaxy. But there was something wonderfully nostalgic about the furtive moment. Auld lang syne and all that.
An asari matriarch was watching her with a vaguely scandalized expression that was a little flattened by what looked like a hell of a red sand buzz, and Gianna offered her a cheerful wave that she automatically returned, looking puzzled. Gianna had managed the impossible: getting into a Nos Astra party without anyone knowing exactly who she was. They were all tiptoeing around her, especially since she'd already entertained herself for hours by hailing assorted partygoers like they were old friends and then standing back and watching them backpedal frantically to try and place her. Didn't work on the salarians, of course, but a whole lot of folks in this particular crowd considered humans to be mostly interchangeable. She'd already secured two invitations to dine at restaurants way the hell outside her price range, and she was half-tempted to take them up on the offer, just to see how far her bluff could go.
She'd finally found herself a nice, dark corner to lurk in when her omni-tool pinged, indicating unscheduled financial activity on one of her bugged terminals, exactly one hour after close-of-business. Her smile broadened as she followed the tracking signal to another shady corner in the same room, where a salarian was typing away with the galaxy's worst poker face. A whole lot of people took advantage of the year-end shakeup to try to slip a couple of doctored books under the wire, and this guy wasn't exactly being subtle about it. He'd probably managed it many times in the past. Just his bad luck that, this year, a rival company had hired one of the most inconspicuous investigators on the planet to ferret out secrets just like this one.
He'd keep until the end of the party, anyway. It was always more fun to nail 'em just when they thought they'd gotten away with it, and besides, there were always more snacks to pilfer. She dodged around him, planting a tracker more out of habit than any real worry he'd make a break for it, and climbed up to the highest balcony, the one with the best view of the party.
There, she leaned over the railing, her elbows pressed into the cool metal, and watched the little groups of people below form and reform, always moving, always shifting, always changing. Always under her watchful eye. She saluted them all with her napkin-wrapped snack: the inept criminals, the well-meaning philanthropists, the smarter rule-benders who'd still be operating here centuries from now. For now, nobody was looking at her, nobody suspected, and she was content to watch, to learn.
Whole room full of people who'd made a living being better than the other guy at predicting the future. Whole room full of 'em, and they were never gonna see her coming.
"It's way past your bedtime, kid," Abee said, and he so didn't get it, did he? It was the new year! Everyone stayed up late at New Year's. Besides, she'd been up this late before, exploring the woods behind the school buildings with Sam and Aedah, but he didn't need to know that.
She rolled her eyes and plunked down on the floor amid the herd of relatives watching the vidscreen, the year-end wrap-up of some political program that called itself "hard-hitting" in very dramatic tones, with a sparkly graphic and lots of musical cues.
Almost immediately, Teta reached over and dragged her into an uncomfortable little-old-lady hug, pinching her cheek and cooing at her long braid, but she gave up on that approach when the only reaction was a death-glare, and released her quarry with a longsuffering sigh.
There were still a few treats on the coffee table, and she swiped a handful of marzipan chocolates before settling back, this time well out of reach of any particularly grabby elderly relatives. After a couple minutes, she recognized the guest star on the show as a prominent politician who'd been advocating human isolationism for as long as she could remember. He wasn't terribly bright, and made up for it by being perfectly well-dressed and endlessly charming. "Oh, I like him," someone murmured, and there was a general rumble of agreement.
"We have to stand strong," he said, and the interviewer was nodding solemnly like he was imparting some great truth instead of a bunch of buzzwords. "We'll lose what makes us human otherwise."
"Well said, sir," the interviewer murmured, looking about to swoon at the feet of his idol.
Still gnawing on a chocolate, she said, "That's not an interview. That's him soapboxing while everyone nods along!"
Abee scowled. "Hush. We're trying to watch."
"No, but really!" Warming to her topic, she shuffled to her knees, blocking the screen. "If they want to call themselves journalists, or hard-hitting, or whatever, they have to at least make it hard for him! That way, either he exposes himself as a do-nothing fraud-" The relatives' restive fidgeting babbled up into a disgusted murmur, and she raised her voice to cut across it, "-or he defends his position and he makes his point that much more strongly! Nobody's served by a press that just… just grovels at the feet of the people who make the news."
Everyone was quiet, now, watching her with expressions ranging from vague horror to vague contemplation. A little intimidated, she plunked back down on the floor. "Anyway, that's just what I think, is all," she muttered, and they went back to watching.
The next day, in the New Year, her parents surprised her with a real journalist's omni-tool, and she terrorized the neighborhood with hard-hitting questions of her own devising about the community swimming pool and the stray cat problem. And she took it pretty seriously, because being twelve meant she really wasn't a kid anymore, so she didn't do anything silly like hand-draw a newspaper or interview her puppy or anything like that. She definitely didn't hide in the bushes for hours on end waiting to catch someone doing something suspicious.
And she absolutely didn't stand in front of the mirror, didn't stare herself in the eyes, didn't practice saying, in a clear, clipped tone, "This is Khalisah bint Sinan Al-Jilani, coming to you live."