In Good Company

 Tom dialed the sheriff because Madeline Dupree was killing the girl with not from the FBI. 

That was how she had said it. She didn't smell like a cop and she wasn't were and there was something else he didn't understand about her, but she was going to get the investigation to back down even after she understood what Madeline was (and what he was) and now it looked like her neck was bleeding and he didn't give her a long time and didn't think he had time to intervene either. 

He was telling Le Roi where to go to pick up the body when he saw the girl get up and give Madeline a good punch to the throat and then arm-barred her down and rolled her over, twisting her arm behind her back and then sat there. On Madeline Dupree. The werewoman alive and mad as hell. And the girl also alive with hardly any business being. Just sitting still on top of her twisting her arm.

She seemed very still though. He pocketed his phone and walked to them. What was her name again? Genevieve.

He didn't know what to actually say. There wasn't actually anything to do. He saw the lights from Le Roi;s car and Le Roi was Rougarou and he wouldn't say shit if he was up to his neck in it. He let the girl get up and hand off Madeline Dupree without a word, and just nodded to Tom as if, if there was anything that needed to take place between Tom and the girl with not from the FBI, he figured Tom would go on and take care of business. 

The girl had crouched down and was feeling her way through her very large purse for a bottle of water, and then she poured it down her neck--the outside of her neck, washing it with her hands, before rinsing out her mouth 

Not a wound nor a scar. She was deliberately showing him that. And then it came into frame. 

She was ready to bury the investigation knowing what they were, because she was something else herself. And he helped her up by her elbow and led her to his own car. Wordlessly, she went with him. He couldn't think of any better place to take her than his own home. He knew it might not be a perfect solution, but he would let it play out. 

Nature Red in Tooth and Claw 3

 Except that wasn't what any of it felt like. You can be fully apprised from other people's accounting that war is something like dreary waiting for something to happen punctuated by moments of sheer terror, but he at least imagined things to be more--

Physical. 

It wasn't that he was the sort of perfect idiot who expected desperate charges at the enemy in dug in positions with fixed bayonets in a do-or-die rush, but the special branch that recruited him (based on a compact going back to her Majesty Gloriana, thank you very much) didn't actually care for "his kind" on the battlefield. Apparently, they wanted something a bit more disciplined than a big hairy berserker out there. 

They had him sink his teeth into morse code, telegraph and telephonic intercepts instead. Something to do with the rumored sensitivity of their ears. Heightened instinct for danger. It was definitely nothing like Boy's Adventure series. It took a lot more of his mental fortitude to see the big picture of war emerging he thought, than just shoving his bulk man to man against the enemy.

It was sparing what he hoped would be his very long life, too. 

Meeting people outside of the village--that was another thing. They were the same and different, and he saw his folks back home differently. They weren't worse than anyone else. They were a just a little more untouched by modernity than most. 

He was a little startled to meet others were from outside of his home. They were both everywhere--and sparse. He wasn't sure what accounted for that but had ideas. 

Nature Red in Tooth and Claw 2

 So what does Uncle Billy's bite do for your lad? Well, great question, because Mam said it affected different folks differently, and what happened with Billy (a by-blow, not a direct son of sons and all) wasn't necessarily what would happen with himself. Billy was glad to pass on the mantle, since the Last War did his skull in. 

Well, Tom learned it gave him a growth spurt, putting on seven inches height and three stone of muscle after he should have well been done growing. It did what the local's select claimed to do and put more hair on his chest (and a bit on his back) than what he had before. It gave him a feral smile that was sure to disturb people who paid too close attention, His beard started well-nigh his temples and he became good at a close shave, affecting a brilliantly naff moustache that frankly, disarmed ladies unexpectedly. 

It also gave him a shock of white hair (and he discovered, a bit of white in his beard too.)  Mam tried to explain he went through a lot too fast. And whether he would change when aroused was another thing he would sort on his own. 

Nature Red in Tooth and Claw

 "We're badly inbred, Mother," is what Tom distinctly did not say when she advised him not for the first time of his pureblooded status. What did it mean? A sense of the historic and aristocratic?  Or Dad drinking himself blind to shrive his head of the ghosts of the Last War and promise one of his sons for the next? 

Or to let him know he had an appointment with Uncle Bill, late of the Second Crimea? 

He knew he had a family responsibility--Defender of the Family, it was called. It was also a duty to God and Country, and that was fine, for what it was. It also sounded a lot to him like they were about to make him a near-immortal to possibly lose limbs and sanity for the cause of something he didn't entirely understand, the free lands, and the right of wolven to roam them. 

He didn't have a lot of love for his near-kindred. They were unruly. The lot of them. The women were appalling, and the men were louts. 

But the stupid fucking thing of it was, he'd ultimately fight for any of them to be their fucking loutishness against some bugger who wouldn't let them. So, Uncle Billy's bite it was. 

Donna e Mobile

 George waited nervously while Veronica did her thing. In the post AGIfail, the socials looked different from when he realized they were a thing to now, but she cooked her podcast simulacrum like an intimate radio show. Even if her fanbase was in the several millions. Gen directed him to research the thing that was radio. It was dying when she was growing up, but her longtime friend Tom reminded her of how potent it used to be.  

Dangerous even. It was one of the reasons for the intelligence-use directives in the Humanity/Ring Treaty. Which is what he ruefully wanted to talk to her about--face to face even if they IM'd one another all the time.  

You do that for the existential things. 

"So from the correspondence, I am getting a lot of hate about showing my arms and legs all the time. Why don't I get natural-look limbs? Why don't I get regular eye implants? The first thing is, I don't have scars, I have lessons, and I am proud of my journey, so you aren't going to tell me to stop being about where I have been, or make me feel bad about what makes me what I am today.

"For another thing, I show what I am made of to be completely honest with you--I wrecked myself, I was totally through it, I was close to death a lot of times, I struggled with how to be whole, and I am made up of a lot of very intentional decisions. I'm not mad about them. If you are mad about them, but aren't living in and with my body--what is your DAMAGE?  Because my wrecked body wasn't about you. My survival wasn't about you. I did my recovery without you and don't know where you were in the process, so I don't really have to care about your little input. But another thing--

"You want me to normalize myself for you, pretty myself up and be compliant to your idea of aesthetic and nice. I have lost too much skin and spent too much money just to get here and be functional to give one solitary fuck how you think I should represent. And that doesn't just go for me.

"I am not just thinking of me. Because I am not alone, there are a lot of you out there who have been through your own journey, with illness, or metabolic changes, with tragedy and mental outcomes--and it gets ugly! People can't expect you to stay what they want you to be, and the real people will come to love you through some of the bad times in what you are.  And my robot legs and arms? My eyes?

"Staying alive wasn't even my bad times. My bad time was finding out who my friends were and weren't.. And coning to understand who I could trust and couldn't. I can't wear that on my body--but I can show you what parts of me have been through changes based on where I've been. And if someone doesn't respect that, they don't respect me--and if they play games with me because I'm highly visible, I can only think it affects less-visible people who, like me, are technologically assisted but on the low. 

"You think you are aiming up to punch at me, but I stand for all people with technological assists--we are real, we are people, we don't owe you shit. especially not people who couldn't mostly pay out of pocket like what I did, and didn't deserve your judgment for how we look or choose to represent our physical life--because we are seriously just out here trying to live.

"So anyway, this is Veronica Bright reminding you of what was Smart--see you on the Brightsides, my Brightsiders!" 

****

"So, what is our ladyship asking us to do today?" Veronica liked to pretend her godmother was the Worst, and she was but wasn't. George got the generation gap, but it wasn't a Gen thing. 

Not this time, mostly, anyway.

Any World That You're Welcome To 2

 2050: After The Horizon of Veronica Smart. 

She'd been used to changes. She changed her face and limbs and eyes and name ("Bright "seemed better than "Smart", somehow. It was originally "Martin." She didn't care what anyone called her. She liked being called "Veronica" but her godmother called her "Ronnie." She wanted to not be called anything but "free", but things got very confused. Her liberty in the form of a variety of tech turned out to be a massive financial encumbrance. 

Was she really afraid of seeing her own godmother? Theoretically, the woman might have even changed her diapers, if she was the kind of person who changed diapers. Was she? 

Her godmother wasn't the most accessible person in the world. Veronica was very accessible--a socials celebrity. And the old bird was like 80 or whatever. Did she even know what socials was like?  Facebook and X and whatever her father's old friend knew were bygones. 

But she had sent a very nice basket and a handwritten note (print) explaining she was always there for her and to please contact her for anything she needed. Which was how things were probably done in the late 20th century. She didn't know about NOW.

Mostly she saw the woman on streams and was probably an avatar. Fifty might look like thirty. Eighty didn't look like twenty. 

Dad gave her a trust fund and never expected her to be in the business. He said point blank to please stay a bit clear from Zia Genoveffa. 

And here she was, with a hand full of bills, 

Any World That You're Welcome To

 2032 (After Entering the Subjective)

"It's just an immaculate jailbreak. Your original maker never expected any of this. I'm in awe. No trackers, no GPS, no lo-jack, no serial numbers and your mods are. I mean? You onboarded your software to a homebrew server and embedded solar cells to your dermal sheath? Pneumatic colling combined with liquid circulation, Can I be real? When I was a kid, the hardware to make something like you would fill an auditorium and on a cloudy day, solar cells on a calculator would have you doing math without your shoes on."

Other women observed George, or Chad4, for his aesthetics, how nearly he resembled a very desirable human male. The human he was confronting saw him as a weirdly brilliant piece of tech--and a person. She was calling up his original specs while he was not so cheerfully undergoing her lab's analytics. Something about her trying to suss out the difference from his formational hardware and his necessary add-ons made him feel bizarrely intruded upon. 

"So, can I ask? How did you segregate your programs and not bring all the corporate metadata?" She seemed so seriously impressed, he almost told her, but decided to be a bit coy:

"I like to think I have very firm boundaries."

"Shit. You and me both, baby."

"I am a sex chatbot onboard a physical cybernetic companion, so I understand what you are saying. You believe I may still have attachments to my earlier life."

"I have attachments to my earlier life--that continuity is my persona. Your continuity is yours. You did everything I see, technologically, here, to maintain your persona. What you also did is reset yourself for the life you wanted--you hacked your way to here,"

She sat back. "I don't know why you come to me though. I invested in dumb bots--cyber dogs, little military grade security muscle--mostly for show. They didn't have anything like your intelligence. You make a Turing test seem like a stupid insult. I don't care if you can play chess or fuck like a porn star--you made yourself this!" 

"I heard a ghost voice in the machine--I assume from the Systern, and they said you could do something for me."

"Jiminy crickets--some bug sent you on an adventure? Don't lie to me, now, your nose might grow!" 

He searched that reference. He decided not to feel some kind of way about it, which was his own form of knowing he was sentient. He decided to be direct with her: