The gigantic arcology pillar on the dark surface of Titan approached rapidly as Kurzweil IV still decelerated from re-entry – commander had bounced the spectrum adjusted and zoomed visuals to the screens in the passenger hold. The permanent hurricane-grade winds shook and threw around the massive craft to the discomfort of its crew and passengers alike. The two bald neotenics of indeterminate gender in Extropian corporate garb occupying the opposing seats did not seem to mind though, carrying on their silent, private channel conversation. Someone in the behind of the hold could be heard vomiting - not close enough to be worrying Dee, who with her eyes half-closed was letting her mind run in neutral gear, her Lunar make positronic brain carrying out its sleep-equivalent process.
And it was not pleasant. Dee was feeling old. It wasn't about aging, her shell was untouched by the passage of time and eternally 30 by the human standards of her youth, today maybe 50. The reason was another and more serious one - from the world around her she was able to comprehend less and less, it seemed to accelerate day by every fucking day, taking increasingly more effort to make even the slightest sense. She had realised for a while she was lonely – and the only people she felt attachment to right now were not of this world.
They blunted the edge of it but in the end it turned out to be a collective form of loneliness. The surviving Laughing Owls, a remnant of an violent conspiracy within a long-dead urban tribal culture, once the self-appointed sword of justice and executioner's axe of their kind, numbered only six – herself, the beautiful, fragile Tellie, the black-winged Kurai gliding across the dark Lunar skies, her One Straight Exception© Ayidan in the red deserts, the adorably wrong- looking Amal currently stationed with her unit somewhere here in the outer systems, probably Xiphos - and finally the girl who could give even Dee and Amal lessons in non-humanity - AT, standing for Abnormal Termination, living nowhere and everywhere, the Mesh her only true home. They had all been lovers at one point or other over the 138 years of the existence of LOCas - and continued to share that bond even now that the Concord was no more - but they were all of that, other world, made of blood and shiny metal, with no nanoswarms buzzing around, no seed AGIs and no Exsurgent plagues. 'Pre-fall', the term for current generation's idea of the past was so hopelessly inadequate in describing the vast timespans weighing on her.
And while she enjoyed casual fun just like everybody else and probably more frequently than anybody else, she had not managed to form any emotional attachments, unlike others (at least Dee thought - or hoped - so). The rest of the people were them, the hostile world outside, the same world Ultraviolet preferred to deal with exclusively in the currency of her Gatling lasers. It's not that Dee wasn't aware she was wrong -but so far she had not managed to act on that understanding.
'Please brace yourselves for the landing…it can get somewhat rough over here.' the commander's voice intoned as turbulence began to shake the craft more violently, it's speed falling to subsonic.
'The fuck I was thinking…' Dee said to herself, regaining her emotional composure after the less than helpful standby sequence. 'I'm on the top of things – dangling my legs, looking down…at least towards the local centre of gravity… and spitting on the passersby. As it should be. All I could have ever asked.'
Body servos….99%...check
Main sensory channels….check
Sheath sensory grid response….98%... check
Gatling motor …check
Lasers …1…2…3….check
Blade extensions …1…2….check
Shock capacitors…check
Looking at the diagnostics running always had had a calming and centering effect on her. In the end Dee smiled and requested her muse to replay a particular holo message as a vision overlay. Quantum-encrypted, with some sort of additional code which Grace had nevertheless acknowledged as clean so it probably was remnants of even more encryption, one would think it would be something of system-level importance. It had a jerky quality frequently dissolving into static and came in bluish monochrome. A woman with white waist-length hair wearing something consisting solely of thin straps of material woven in a net-like pattern stood beside a drone the size of her head floating at about her thigh-level. 'Help me Shinylights, you are my only hope. For tonight anyway,' she said in a wispy, theatrical voice as the hovering sphere projected 'NH, Ascendancy Dome, 204/15/100, temporary access 124a7c25fd0c'.
Dee giggled. She barely remembered enough to recognise the archaic reference – but she did, and found it amusing. The shuttle clanked against the docking fastenings and with a mild impact came to halt. She did not get up until most of the people had left the hold and got over the usual. 'The usual' in docking bays being the profound incompatibility of the concepts 'queue' and 'neo-avian'.
Otherwise it was a short walk from the shuttle airlock to a security checkpoint. She was greeted by three officers, a neo-bonobo sitting on the top of the luggage conveyor belt scanner and directing some sort of sensor device towards each passenger in turn. A silvery android wearing the navy blue armour with the golden star of Commonwealth police was supervising the equipment while a similarly equipped fury idly watched the stream of arrivals.
'Heh now that's true socialism - a gold star for everyone. ' she made a remark in her thoughts. 'Mine was only ever Technetium-99 and even then it didn't last past 5 or so drunken parties. Where was Commonwealth when I was growing up, I'd have loved one.'
The bonobo pointed his device at her. 'Please stand still ma'am' he said in Norsk, which Dee had checked in her AR tag.
Suddenly Dee had a feeling of trying to plot shuttle trajectories in her head – or calculating PI to the precision of several billion decimal digits….the world itself seemingly slowed down as she could not spare enough processing power for even her basic senses. She shook off the sudden pressure but then her visual field had its turn to glitch, sliced and eaten by interference static. She must have stumbled as the neo-hominid had descended from his perch and was holding her hand. The picture slowly returned to normal.
'You not feeling well? What happened'
'No idea, officer. Just dizziness for a moment. And I'm not even high…' she rolled her glowing purple eyes.'
He looked in her eyes and pouted, the neo-primate equivalent of a smile 'Maybe you're just coming round to some common sense. Cultural common sense, adopting the more advanced and enlightened elements of one's closest allies, general progress…'
'TITANs only know, darling…I mean, officer. I sure hope it's just that.' Ultraviolet chuckled, her purple eyes returning a strobe sequence. 'Seems I'm ok again…and thank you.'
'Sure. My pleasure.' He looked at his device 'now it seems the sensor array has glitched. Will reboot. And welcome back home, ma'am.'
Dee exited the tunnel into one of the passenger dock waiting areas of Nyhavn, still puzzled about his last phrase. Home? Sure she had been on Titan some years ago and liked it here – but she was patently unsure of said liking being mutual, at least if she decided to stay long enough.
The lift to 204th took a good ten mins – as she neared her destination she was becoming more excited and impatient, forgetting the lift acceleration should be suitable for bios, not just her. Her companions, a bunch of humans of varying degrees of cyberenhancement wearing Commonwealth government service silvery gray were engaged in conversation and studiously avoided being caught staring at her shell and its running lights. Silly people. Dee wouldn't have added the lights if she did not mean for others too look at them. The whole point of having a shell…
Soon she exchanged the lift cluster for a high speed walkway, taking her to sector 15, via one of the most remarkable features of Titanian cities, a real park. Even the walls were a living bark instead of steel here – and she had to admit it was breathtakingly beautiful. She raised her hand and touched the blooms of wisteria trees hanging over the walkway….it was so alien and so unlike her native environment, the Scum barges - but the stream of swirling colours was captivating her and somehow imbued her with a sense of lightness and safety. Titan was still too reglamented for her liking but that didn't mean she didn't wholeheartedly enjoy the upsides.
The moving path brought her towards another section of plastic and metal – in a clever design the park served as a hub joining the 40 radial sectors – and this was hers, the 15th. They must have upgraded the security systems since the last time, the automatic cameras were locking on her and giving her a green light before she even approached the gateway instead of the couple of minutes of biometric scans she remembered. Nice. Also her central processing system diagnostics she had activated after the incident at the gate returned the data, she had 86% of the power back. Still it suggested a minor flaw but she was going to look at it tomorrow – for tonight she had different plans. And she wasn't the only one to have them – she reminisced about her only real-life encounter with the fascinating and mysterious Verna Rytter with whom her path had recently accidentally or non-accidentally crossed – and whom she was going to pay a long overdue visit at last, this time absolutely not in a business capacity.
She could not recall feeling anxious over meeting someone within the last five decades, but to her surprise Dee caught herself on it.
Excited and anxious.
Needless to say the cynical, jaded Scum woman experiencing anxiety was something as unlikely to happen to as a Mercurialia celebration event on Liberty.