Unfortunately, her mind would not stay on the work problem.
Family.
What a hassle that was. When it came to ignoring how much their continued absence hurt, some days were harder than others. She didn't need some overly concerned boss telling her to go visit them. They could visit her, if they cared at all.
Sure, she was the one who had left. Sure, they would have had to search a little to find her. But if they had wanted to find her, they could have. It had been four years, and she hadn't heard a word from any of them. Not Vash, or Meryl, or Ace. Or Knives. So they obviously didn't care. Which was fine by her. Really.
It just showed that she had been right, in not telling them that she was a plant. She knew that they'd have cared then. She hadn't said anything because she wanted to know if they cared for her at all as a person, and now she had her answer. Obviously, they didn't.
She worried at the old pain, the sharp hurt having dulled with time into a ache of the soul. No one cared. Not for her. No one ever had. No one ever would. She sipped at her coffee. Not even Effie.
Damned bunch of racists on this planet, anyway. Why should it matter if she was human or not? Effie hated plants, hated them with a passion. She had worked hard to get in on the experimentation that went on in this lab. She would do anything to reduce human dependency on plants, to be able to see the day when all the plants would be deactivated.
That was her goal, at least. Hers, and some of her friends. Anne had started to work at the Plant because this was where the last of the Lost Technology resided, but she had found more than computers and databases. There was a substratum of workers here who hated the plants. They feared the power they possessed, feared what ends that power could be turned to if they ever got out of the bulbs.
When they got out of the bulbs, that is. She hadn't tried to learn too much, but from clues her fried had dropped, she surmised that her group was comprised in part of the people who had held and used Ace for the first few months of her life. Draining the dregs of her cup, she wondered if it would ever be delivered to her laced with something, a poison or soporific. Maybe she would drink it, and the world would turn black, and she would pass from this world, or awake to find herself trapped somewhere again.
She looked at the mug musingly, then set it down. Not today. Maybe tomorrow. She tried to turn her attention back to her job, but the caffeine or the lack of sleep was playing merry hell with her concentration. The only thing she could think about was her family, or the closest thing she had to one on this planet.
The plants. Working here, she had seen innumerable abuses heaped upon the bulbed workers. Most of them didn't care, having passed beyond that point years, decades, even a century ago. But some did, and if she listened closely, she could hear them complain, a thin network of thoughts that was less now than it had been even two years ago.
They had never been intended to be used like this. Anne had made a careful study of available records, wondering just what she was now, and what she had found dismayed her. The plants were used now as fusion reactors, and that is what they were designed for, but the manner in which they were used had changed drastically.
The theory had been that the fusion reaction would be best controlled by a intelligent mind, one attached to a body that produced the reaction. The mind could control the reaction, and by keeping it within a body they could use the kinesthetic sense, among others, to help regulate the output. If something began to go wrong, a body had many different ways of informing the mind that something is in error. True, sensors and an artificial intelligence could also perform the deed, but why try to recreate the advances of nature? Instead, various human genomes were altered. Genius was added, to help the monitoring of the fusion reaction. Various gene combinations that she recognized from Genalt configurations were grafted in to help control the energy flow and flux. The bulbs were created as an environment that was most conducive to the control of the new creatures. Computer systems were configured to ease as much of the burden on the plants as possible. If needed, the plants could perform all tasks necessary to control the reaction in their bodies, but to do so was incredibly taxing and tiring, and led to failure in the plants themselves if allowed to go on for very long.
Computer systems had been failing all over Gunsmoke for the past decade. They were beginning to reach the end of their projected life, anyway, having not been designed to be self-replicating systems when manufactured on Earth. Add to their age the less-than-ideal conditions on the planet, and the fact that every system had already been stressed by the Great Fall, what you got did not paint a pretty picture for the future.
And that was if she didn't care about what happened to the plants at all, and only worried about the humans. But she did care about both. Cared more than she would have thought she could, which was why she was here, taking her best stab at a real job, working out alternate forms of energy, trying to find a way to reduce or eliminate demand on the plants.
Because they were people, and they deserved better than to be shut into a bulb and left to rot, slaving away for people who never knew just what really powered their lives.
It was slavery, and just because the plants had been created for it didn't make it any less wrong. They had been bred and designed to be machines, but they weren't. Even the bulbed plants had personalities, or at least those who had not yet given up on life had. Granted, they weren't humans, but they shared the same basic genome. They deserved better treatment.
Anne rubbed the back of her neck and snarled at her monitor. Dammit, why did she have to be the only one trying to fix things?