Blue
Lady Devinity
It's embarrassing to admit this but he didn't pick blue out of nowhere. Alexander had always planned for ANNET to be a feminine presence, something warm and motherly. In those early days though, long before he was thinking of her human avatar, he'd thought that the neural interfaces would glow orange. It was his favourite colour after all. Or maybe they'd be made of pinks and reds and purples: warm, feminine tones. No, blue hadn't been on his mind then.
ANNET was dreamt up in a time when the GOOD directorate already existed and the wasteland and the pollution too. The cities were made up of steel and concrete and neon glow. The wastelands were gray ruin. And Alex had never seen a blue sky.
No, the first time blue was even a possibility was when Alex first came to Eureka from Moscow. He'd been young and full of dreams for a neural connection between people and he had taken the subway. He wasn't famous then. Alex had sat in the only free seat, directly across from a dark haired young man who happened to be reading. Reading, in the traditional way, using a book. Alex was thinking 'someday people will be able to directly download books into their brain with my ANNET' when the reader briefly looked up and met his gaze. And Alex nearly gasped aloud. He had never seen eyes so intense and bright and blue. They were eyes you could fall into. But the train had stopped and the reader disembarked before Alex could talk to him.
And ANNET had been blue ever since.
X
Five years later found Gromov in a very high position in the GOOD directorate, almost as a literal god. Everyone was using the neural network now, expect for a few unconnectables. ANNET had become Annie and in the process people had stopped calling Gromov by his first name.
Oh, and he had been given a list of all his subordinates who were also unconnectables. There was only the one but he looked like all the others Gromov had ever seen. Sleep deprived, unshaven and far too thin. This one though, this one, was something else. For one thing, Gromov had never seen eyes so intense and bright and blue except for on a train one day long ago.
Gromov looked at the data file on his computer. The unconnectable reader of actual real books was called Charles Snippy. And he'd been the one who had sent all those emails accusing Gromov of being in love with Annie. He was the one that had just requested a transfer to the Dead Zone tour guide position.
He was the one who might be a temporal anomaly.
Gromov sighed. He really knew how to pick them. Maybe it would be a good idea to assign a drone to the unconnectable for… security purposes. It wasn't like Gromov was interested in knowing more about the last blue eyed reader of actual books in the world.
X
It had been a wild couple of months between returning to Earth after being on the moon to reattaching Pilot's head to his body. Engie felt a little bit bad for the whole bee situation even though it was apparently a pineapple bomb that scrambled Pilot's brain. Between Echo, Kittyhawk and Photoshop on the one side and the sentient cup on the other, a lot of information had come to light about their little group. Engie still hadn't told anyone about the nuclear strike that he had ordered and Captain was as much a mystery as ever. Yet they had learned so much about Pilot and Snippy was opening up in response.
Not that Engie didn't already know everything about Snippy. Well, everything about Snippy that was not about being temporary undead at least.
Most importantly, Snippy had seemed to learn to tolerate Engie somewhere along the way. The engineer would not go so far as to say that the sniper liked him but… maybe they'd get there.
And the next time Engie saw those blue eyes looking at him, without the googles and mask in the way, well… Alex had been waiting years for the chance to kiss a blue eyed stranger who rode the subway and read actual paper bound books.
END
It's been a long time since I've written for any fandom, let alone ROMAC. So here's a little writing exercise to stretch those muscles. I imagine that Snippy was the type to prefer actual books to Kobo readers even before tech ruled the world.