misentrope

Mira's bemused yet unbothered visit to the Mimeosome Maintenance Center only confirmed a few vague suspicions, but failed to reveal anything new.

Yes, Mira's body hosted six different virtual "climates" at each of the six extremities (head, chest, crotch, legs, arms left and right), seemingly all in a perfect balance with one another and with perfectly seamless (though abrupt) transitions between each. No, this was not an uncomfortable physical state, aside from the volcanic heat of Cauldros bubbling up from the legs, as if Mira were a miniature Gularth set apart from the lava waterfall. No, the biome changes were not readily apparent to anyone who wasn't looking, nor did they have any tangible effect on armor or affect within personal space.

Visual acuity tests, Mira passed via a strategy of not bothering to play; seeing beyond the bounds of normal human sight, and its cyborg facsimile, was just as easy - if not easier - in an observation tank. It was less that the eyeballs weren't connected to anything and more that the sensors and systems they did connect back to delivered a flawless inert signal primed to override any checks for ocular facility.

In layman's terms, Mira contrived to make it so the maintenance machine just...didn't ask. There was no real reason, as yet, to reveal to Elma, Lin and Tatsu (beyond this trio, Vandham and Nagi, fronting Chausson) that they were being perceived by a much wider frame of reference than they seemed to expect.

Perfect. So perfect. Meanwhile, the planet populated by wilds and wild things was so insistently imperfect, despite its, again, surprisingly hospitable nature to all the newcomers.

That was now. There was no promise at all that that was how it would stay.

It wasn't that Mira knew beyond knowing, however; not that Mira had absorbed the entirety of the Lifehold and consequently assumed the omniscient, omnipotent, practically primeval position of predicting each entity's actions based merely on their archived biological data. The refugees were here, certainly. Mira had known them for quite some time.

And their viewpoint, despite presenting wide-eyed and curious, was indeed fairly narrow. Just because Mira played so much like Earth, if you disregarded the impossible strides (literally) made in human jump height. Mira supposed it was understandable, to lack the openness of perspective that imagining these things would require.

What would happen, say, if you stuck a xenoform, or generally an organic body, in the same tank? Minus the fluid, maybe, but with all the scanners turned on.

What would happen, subsequently, if a mimeosome became, how you might say, contaminated with some organic matter? What if that organic matter was cellular duplication of that mimeosome's human's original form?

(How had they tested the MMC capsules? How many robots had been loaded up with genetic material, of a fashion, and then fritzed out in the process of being tested? And what was the difference between those mims, and "real" people?)

Such a careful balance, they all had struck. Mira had no problem being friendly, but there were quite a cadre of logical gaps being leaped. The patience of an entire planet was being tested, in fact.

Arms crossed, Mira offered Elma and Lin a pleasant look as they stared on, chewing lips and cheeks and other fatty things that hid bounties and secrets and caution, alongside all that healthy confusion.

"So, you're Mira," said Lin.

"That's what I told you," Mira replied. Based on the information available on Chausson and Torres, having this same conversation up at headquarters would be a much greater ordeal, even if everything remained harmless.

"And, that's it," she continued, in the same tone and cadence. "You say you came from Earth, just like the rest of us," - was that a wince from Elma? - "yet you have nothing to say for yourself. No memories. No roots."

Mira could sense the hardening happening somewhere up the soft side of Lin's cranium. You're not like us. You're hiding something. And I really haven't had much of a reason to trust you, or get attached, as yet.

"You want me to tell you if you're supposed to be here?"

Tell humanity what to do with themselves, adrift on the giant rock of all giant rocks, attuned to the universal translation of their unwitting guide? Tell them, get stuck in, get down, or get off? Tell them, as if they'd ever listen?

Lin deflated, quite visibly, at Mira's seemingly recalcitrant response. "That would be nice, yeah."

"I think," began Mira, raising one brow and angling it at Elma, "that if this planet really didn't want you here, there would have been some neon signs. Unless you consider Prone rifles to be neon signs."

Elma's own eyes narrowed substantially at that. "She didn't ask what the planet thought. She asked if we're supposed to be here."

Okay. Yeah? Humans have been wondering that for years, and years, and years...

"I don't think that was an idle inference you just made."

Nothing Mira had said thus far was factually untrue, though. If you pardoned the bit about the eyes (and sue a body for not wanting to divulge every little disability, or close relation), Mira had been totally amicable and cooperative.

Had Mira been a stable system prior to the White Whale's arrival? No way of knowing. Hadn't been anyone here. Certainly hadn't been any other proper, full-fledged habitats around.

Was Mira a stable, happy-clam system now that it played host to the remains of an entire galaxy's worth of race? No way to find out unless you had a little patience.

The fluorescent bulbs were still charging up their borromean knots, in other words. It was just a little bit too early to tell, and way too early to be going and spilling the hand of Noctilum.

Mira sighed, thankful for the inability to roll eyes. "You're looking for God? Then keep looking. Otherwise, as far as I can see, it's just you, me, and the cold, hard ground."