automatic, systematic, psychosomatic
"You feel things that are not there? Is this not grossly misinterpreted illumination?"
"No, no, it's hallucinations," said Seren, even though they weren't entirely sure it wasn't, moreover, phantom pain. Well, but it didn't hurt. Usually. "You know, like when you turned on that A-HAB unit and it started telling you things about that alternate definition of BLADE, which nobody ever heard of, that was capitalized wrong?"
The bit about spontaneously-bonded soulmates who may or may not actually be right for each other sounded like something straight out of a sci-fi procedural (no... serial? anthology? anthology of serials, which may or may not also kill?), and also possibly a dangerous sort of exposure for one such as L'cirufe, who loved to inculcate cirself with impossible romantic notions, of the classical sort (necessarily impassioned; not necessarily involved, if you know...), at any and all times.
But anyway. Back to Seren Sirius, who found issues of physical health to be completely non-presenting, but who sometimes got so confused and disoriented that they got sick. Dizzy, you know - and L loved it, also, when they were dizzy.
(L didn't love to see them in some sort of wincing, fitful state, stumbling about the grasslands in search of a white room, but this hardly happened anymore, so it wasn't so much of a worry. Seren marched on just as surely as time, and then again a little bit faster; they flew, somehow, in the face of it.)
It wasn't that they were bad or hopeless with directions; they knew how to cross vast swathes of Miran rock or sand with absolute ease, better than some navigators of the Reclaimers' finest fleets, on occasion. It was about the things other BLADEs, in equivalent mimeosomes, could handle, that they couldn't: namely, the normative acrobatics required to use any weapon offered by any arms manfacturer, regardless of attribute. And Seren was certainly not hot to use the little cold-carry pistol.
Now, this was where Seren's rare rash of commitment freak shone through: deliberately ignorant of the consequences, Seren had put themselves through the aggravating paces of maxing out every learnable class, over the course of about two months. Yes, even with the spin cycle inherent in Sky High, Starlight Kick, and all the rest, Seren had determined themselves to be ultimately rigorous in their path toward Mastermind.
L derived infinite victorious serenity (you know, you know) from Dual Dynamo and its intemporary midair hover. Seren had done nothing of the sort, in fact desperately wobbly and willing L to keep close to one side of them whenever they tried it.
Most of their weapons, they had gleefully bestowed upon other team members as secondhand spoils, which were really no worse than those won firsthand, if you were community-minded and cared about the environment and all that.
(What had they been planning to do when discovering the Zaruboggans had been little more than a Samaarian twinkle in some spy's eye?)
Sometimes they sold them off. A substantial subset were abandoned - gracelessly chucked - into the corner of the barracks, piling into a scrap heap that'd eventually be high enough for Lin to harvest into some sort of Seren-worthy Skell (not that they weren't firmly rooted to their cool-blue original Urban). Most days it was a triumphant sort of memory path. Some nights it was a little odder than that.
"Mims are supposed to replicate all the human functions that, well, humans expect. Right? Otherwise, they'd have had to run twenty million people, or whatever, through a flight simulator, or whatever." Or however many it was that were actually walking around right now, and had been while on the ship, et cetera.
"We concur," said L, because this was not so much about historical culture, ethnicities and handicrafts, as it was about the culture being formed instantaneously, for the transitional society of the Skelleton Crew and beyond; these people who had experienced Mira for the first time. No newborn children, nor the sleeping citizens who'd someday wake up, would ever know anything about any of this. Not the way Seren did, and Seren only knew the half of it.
Put another way: ci liked to let Seren nerd out about their own individual curiosities, such as they were. Even if Seren tended to brilliantly handwavey approximations, at divers times.
"So mims have to get dizzy, because otherwise the balance fluid would be wonky. It'd only be doing half of its job."
L's ability to dance wildly, as ci did, was another point of scrutiny for some other time, involving pointed ears and not-so-hollow horns.
"And yet, they don't." Seren waved their hand once in a circle to indicate the rest of them/us. While most of the time they didn't really feel so separate from the principal population of NLA as it had originally been designed (which was to say, nobody anticipated the Orphean Inquisition), this trait in particular had been gnawing on them. A lot.
Seren, the supermassive, they jokingly called themselves. Seren, the sweet sock-hop sap slipping and sliding all over the place, while masterfully managing to remain fixed in just and only one. Seren, the scion of the sun - brighter than, actually, and that was how the progression of lightbulb technology had gone, from incandescent to fluorescent to LE-freakin'-D.
Maybe in another universe Seren could have been an electrical engineer, or else just one single solitary pin in a highly-capacitous circuit board. And to speak of pins, as this universe seemingly always did...
"You know, like, maybe I am an angel. Right?"
Angels, which were unpursuant to the rules and laws and theories and axioms and corollaries that governed humanity, in that beloved abstract sense that scientists had. Science didn't seem to concern itself with Seren Sirius, so Seren Sirius tried not to concern theirself with it.
There were ways to get around it. There always were.
Angels, which came to absolve suffering and existed for no purpose other than to soothe and salve, setting aright.
"This is an intriguing theory, dear Seren...it goggles the blind!"
Seren was always happy to be encouraged, if in a neutral sort of way, because they did such a capital job of encouraging themselves from within to begin with. So they received L's enthusiasm as ci gave it, but then frowned (still, though, neutrally).
Mims goggled the blind. Mims gave sight to those who'd lost an eye, corrected the vision of those who still wished to wear their glasses.
(Yeah, okay. Maybe mims came with a touch of eugenics sensibility baked in. That was the going prospectus, among those who knew just exactly which United States Citizens, capital C, were contained in the bulky body of the Lifehold. Only a passing corporate attempt at true diversity. And so on, and so forth...)
Mims were a technology that, if not for this time of immense need, might never have been invented or implemented on Earth. That was what the hopefuls told each other, when the outlook seemed grim. But they were always coming, weren't they?
Those who truly could claim to be nerds knew that robots had been the hot trotters for a century or longer, since the very first silent movies and science fiction graced popular minds. Humanity always dreamed of outfitting themselves, simplifying their tasks, optimizing away the petty inconveniences that plagued modern life.
Dizziness was a disease for children, a thing you got when you whirled around in a circle for no reason, rode an amusement ride. Dizziness had no place in the efficient space traveler's world, conservant in the thousands of Gs.
Seren had escaped all that messy matriculate, that stuff of hot and cold debate between academics and laypeople and middle schoolers using chatbots to stitch together their incongruous essay templates, but still stood here on Mira with the aftereffects. Still felt far more confused and alienated than they had any right to be, given that they'd been given a body without so much as a by your leave.
How could they keep escaping it? By being a strange flash of supernova light in the sky, of course! By being more artifical than even Yelv and his Mi.
But they were here, communing, without any sense of a higher purpose or power. This was the trouble: "Don't you have to be dead to be an angel, though?"
L considered this, and all the spiritualistic rhetoric ci'd consumed so casually, not taking much to task about the presumed absolution of judeochristian gods. "We thought this stipulation was for devils. For if hellions are empty, then they have no souls. Ergo, they have been departed."
Departed. Dead. Ding, comma, dong.
"Or maybe they were deported," Seren continued the thought, "because they have no souls. Because they suck."
"Eggs," L pronounced with a grave nod. "But then, the angels?"
The tag about suckage had come so quickly that Seren hadn't time to deliberate further on that: implicitly, they considered themself someone who didn't suck, because they were here, and referred to demons as such third people in third spaces, in the way that malls were hell. You had to be dead to be angel, but the demons? Clearly, they were all toast.
So back to angels, and the halo that proudly decorated their serulean-blue head. Of course, Sirius the Skell had been coordinatingly decorated in just such a fashion as to suggest the selfsame holy light.
Suck eggs. Suck a soda. Don't go teaching Seren Sirius how to suck on a straw. And with their milkshake, a sandwich: "Maybe more like tuna salad. You know, because an angel is sort of like a deep sea creature. In a Cthulhu way."
For as much as Seren even knew about that untapped depth of nerd culture. Was Seren a nerd? The question came again. Probably not usually inquisitive and thorough enough to be one. This was where the intersection of nerds and dorks got frightfully complicated, actually.
Ignoring cir own undetected ties to the eldritch, L made a further turn with the thrust of the situation, knowing what ci knew about indigens great and small with attachments most serene and strange: "Might you, then, be an angler fish, perpetually chasing their own light?"
Seren nodded, not quite duck-faced. Humanity, in this dark period, could be said to be in a kind of tunnel, their browsing traffic opaque to all onlookers but the Samaarian Federates which operated the whole entire server. They wanted a light, a light, a light...and Seren Sirius could provide, in their own useless way.
"Angler..." They stretched out the sound, experimentally, into a few different splices. "Ang Lure. Angle-r. Angel-r. Angel-er. Just like I'm more angel-er than you are, 'cause you're devil-ish."
"Are we dead, Seren?" L asked, quite faintly.
"Only as dead as the void, which screams back..." Seren intoned. "Yeah, I think we got it cased."