the czech is in the male

"I heard something."

Vivanne didn't do gossip. Vivanne didn't do sing-song. Vivanne didn't do talking for no good reason.

(Oh, but when she had a good reason, she got going.)

This wasn't a coy little hint, a drop for a nibble or a beckon for Seren to follow into some tucked-away corridor. Instead, it was pure preamble to the meat of it all:

"They opened up Eddie's Conquest."

Oh. Okay. Seren gestured in a miniature serpentine wave, two or three times, in preparation to rejoin with the obvious rhythmic record-scratch stop, "Who's Eddie?"

"Exactly. We don't know who Eddie is or was, we don't know what he did or didn't find, and we have no idea why they suddenly declassified a random Ovis hole."

If Seren were the type to surreptitiously bring up the corresponding area information on their comm device, so as to grease the wheels on the conversation, they would have been able to continue the thread with speculation about just what in sandblast tarnation was the brand of treasure that Germaine kept. But they weren't, so it fell to Vivanne to provide further details on the area, which she was definitely going to do anyway.

"It's a mediocre production probe and close on abysmal for revenue, so 302 is mostly used for combat support - or storage, really. Which means the battle data is good. And, it's far enough from the Sabula nest in 305's zone that there's not too much clutter in the data. Which means, with a couple careful parameters, we can find out exactly what went down inside that up-ended tunnel."

"What? How about who?"

Vivanne shook her head, the theatric graveness about as close as she might ever get to histrionic. "No whos were involved."

Scrunching up their cheeks and lips for yet more calmly flamboyant offense, Seren spoke aloud the current unlikely train. "So, nobody ever went there that anybody knows anything about, and nothing happened, and nothing was there, and no one was there, and all of a sudden it's not a secret anymore?"

"It never was a secret. Not to us, anyway. The two heat signatures present at the last battle at those coordinates were not a BLADE and an Ovis but a Milsaadi and, if not another Milsaadi, then some other Ganglion-core variant of artificial soldier. And since no two Milsaadi have ever been sighted in the same place outside of their camps in Cauldros and Sylvalum, I thought it warranted some further investigation. So I went to Kell and--"

Had Seren not broken in with a peanut-gallery comment, Vivanne might never have noticed the way their unhappy stank face had lingered through the entirety of her explanation thus far. To make sure she was following their failure to pick it up, they supplied, "How do you have this much time?"

Vivanne, to her credit, just blinked. Once, politely. "Putting aside the data transfer itself, this was the work of about fifteen minutes. And I hadn't clocked in yet. Some of us do read the 0600 announcement digest." In other words, some of us do have real jobs. Without a sturdy chain of command, it's more guerilla than military, isn't it?

Maybe Seren was immune to anachronistic snobbery. Maybe they didn't consider their work much of a job anyway. Or maybe they were just remembering who Vivanne spent her leisure time with and thought it pointless to debate the corporate concept of settle-in time.

"So you went to Kell," they said, by way of acknowledgement. Then, actual acknowledgement: "Wait, you know Kell?"

"I know he's not a popularity plate, but yes, I'd put him on my career affinity chart. Alexa helps me maintain my javelin. Kell does better when it comes to the fine mechanisms on my rifle. Frye is not much help with either."

"So you went to Kell," said Seren again, this time holding up their palms in surrender. "And he said," they pitched their voice half a register low, "oh, that's so awesome, a one-on-one with a Milsaadi, we can learn so much about their individual tactics. Yeah!"

Again, Vivanne blinked. Once. Politely. "No. He said, there's only one of that raygun model in circulation, because Factory 1.21, to date, has only ever released one thing at a time."

"Because xe has no money," muttered Seren out of the side of their mouth, to the collective no one gathered on their side of the stage.

"Because most BLADEs don't trust xem. But even as absent-minded as B and his assistant are, xe could remember exactly who they sold this prototype to." No pause for gravitas. Well, maybe a little. "And it was Yelv."

"But you said..." Seren frowned, pointed side to side to side with wandering pointer fingers. "You said artificial. Like, more so than any of us."

"They opened up Eddie's Conquest," said Vivanne. "Madame Eleonora saw to it herself."

"So he's like...a plastic guy?"

Vivanne couldn't help but smile. "You really might be onto something, there, Seren. Why do you say plastic?"

"I dunno, because..." now a waggling thumb and pinky helped to transmit fair and common knowledge "...metal's all we have, and it's, like, elemental. More basic than any weapon attribute. It's not sticky, and fake."

"You think Yelv is sticky and fake?"

"Well, the Milsaadi are made of silicon, which is like a spatula."

"Or breast implants," said Vivanne, herself to no one.

But Seren heard. "You think Yelv has fake boobs?"

There was no saving it. Clearing her throat, Vivanne blinked as politely as she felt she had left in her - one, twice, and three times.

"Everyone in NLA agrees that our memories are real, yes? That those of us who remember, which is a healthy most, can verify in aggregate that the society we suspend here on Mira is a valid transplant of what once existed on Earth. Maybe the White Whale is more apt to belong to Theseus than to Ahab, but generally we agree."

Seren sighed. They liked Vivanne's spin on things better than they did the spieling they got from Elma, most often, but... "Okay, whatever. Yeah. Agree. So moved."

"So even if we have fake boobs," Vivanne leaned into the re-segue like shifting her weight, to win back Seren's favor (why did she want it? she didn't want it!), "our own self-knowledge is a better record of that than the bodies we might currently inhabit. Those of us with amnesia can only look down for confirmation."

Seren looked down. Looked back up. Turned their chin to three-quarter view. Blinked, and scattered spiritual paint splatters in primer white onto Vivanne's sharp black eyeliner.

"Yelv doesn't know his body or his brain. He only knows the present moment and how he's going to react to it. Just like you, he didn't exist before we got here. But unlike you, he doesn't know that."

"You don't know that," returned Seren.

"Some of us have the patience for twenty million records in a CSV before breakfast. It's even been said among us eggheads that Coffee Saves Values."

"He's the only one?"

Vivanne sighed. This was where the real timesink had come in. "...not the only one."

"MIMI?"

The standard stretto shift of the double syllable was snapped straight by Seren's wide-eyed emphatics; suddenly the name sounded like it did whenever Vivanne said it, with two proper Ms. Calling her by her full unit name (because that was what she was, a mimeosome model base before anything else) might have been uncomfortably formal, but that didn't mean she was about to get down onto a diminutive basis. Mi-Mi. A stutter. An abbreviation. A blink.

"I'm not saying this to cast aspersions onto her disability. But it made me wonder - could she ever hear? Was she ever designed to?"

Usually it was Seren's place to tack off onto random, impudent but not impertinent tangents. In this case, Vivanne's clinical analysis sort of steamed the senseless starlet.

"Hold on! Stop that! You can't just speculate on her like that! She's a person!"

(So much for the cadres of the sticky and the fake.)

"I'm not saying she's not," replied Vivanne. "But haven't you ever noticed that she spends all her concentration just trying to figure out how to be a person?" You don't do that, she almost said, but thought better of it. Because...well, whatever. "It's almost like she knows she's not one."

And in this corner, issuing from the idyllic bubble dimension where all pretty in picture-pink (and orange and white and gray) battle 'bots are made, field journal in hand and color-coordinated Veyes pinned perfectly in place...

"You're saying Eleonora made her in a lab! With Yelv! And then made them kiss!" The last word was a shout-whisper.

Vivanne nodded. "I wasn't allowed to play with Barbies when I was little. But that's generally how plastic dolls work."

"You're makin' me mad, Vi," grumbled Seren, the stars in their eyes spinning and fizzing like impotent supernovas.

"Think about Yelv, though," Vivanne encouraged her unlikely friend. "He's crazy, right?"

"...I'm crazy," said Seren, still grumbling. "So there."

"But Mimi's not."

Seren sputtered. "Y-b-wh-- Yeah she is. She's, she's weird!"

"You don't believe that," said Vivanne calmly.

Rather than argue that point in specific, Seren changed tactic almost completely. "You don't like weird people. Actually, you don't like me!"

Seren stood defiant, all of not-quite-five feet, stance wide under crossed arms. Indeed, Vivanne would admit, it wasn't nearly within Mirabilis's demonstrated capacity to act anything like this, where any well-meaning Prospectors and Outfitters could see. Yelv did variations of it all the time, though. And you know who didn't? Crazypants Frye.

(Frye, who didn't seem to notice that Vivanne wasn't as entirely taken with his freaky little blue man. Frye, who drank because he had real problems that he remembered, and needed to drown them in a distant memory of Earth's oceans.)

"Are you going to run away, Seren?"

Their nose went up into the air, nostrils flaring in blueshift. "I could. But I won't."

Yelv would. Or, actually, Yelv wouldn't be caught dead in a conversation like this.

"Yelv has no friends," said Vivanne aloud, an apparent non sequitur. "He confuses people. He's lonely. He flies off the handle." You know, just like you. Except, he was made in a lab to do it. You were made on the surface of the sun.

"Okay, whatever," said Seren, just as they had earlier. Realization of the self through the other was never really one of their strong suits.

Vivanne thought to herself that she really should be at least a little bit more wigged out on the daily that Seren knew her, at least as well as she knew Kell. But Kell was a guy who had not been artificially engineered toward transhumanism, except in one very specific and familiar way. And yet...she didn't mind. Because Seren, as out-of-touch as they consistently were, was also strangely self-consistent.

Yelv, on the other hand... One of the most disordered personalities a body on Mira could have, when one considered that "alcoholic ex-veteran" (a vague approximation of the top half of his shtick) was a widely accepted category to which no batted eyes were given.

Yelv. No unit. No last name. No history. Just this anonymous Eddie, a motionless conquest, and the emotional capacity of a brick wall.

"And Mirabilis likes that."

Seren flared to life.

"I KNOW! OH MY GOD! I don't get it, she's so weird !"