:AAO: Curtains Shadow, ch2

 -The Shadow-

//autobiography, draft

Val was a street kid, skater slag from a half empty mag but with swag. She had a circuit tester on her hip and a firm handshake. Born human, still human, she feels like it. Of course, no one has called her that for a very long time. She only uses her handle, V:O, short for her first initial : and the tag O. O probably stands for organism, but people have said otherwise. Humans, clones, passing cybers. The ratio of purebred humans has gotten slim, V just sticks with :O because to get a custom handle gets complicated. Every galaxy, almost every planet has so many call signs it is impossible to not ping off someone's radar.

V:O gets high data/per second on metrics. Old gear makes more sense than state-of-the-art hardware. V:O gets a job, and does the job justice. Not all work makes sense, not every lead is safe. Sometimes it is a talking slug overlord who is benevolent but distracted. Sometimes it is a thruple in a sleeper cell, merging half a dozen personas into a sudden burst of communication. 

So she got good, learned the kit, honed skills on the slow mobs. Graduated to articulated matrix combinations with gradated cells. Killer blues playing in her headphones while shrapnel blew through VR space past her periphery. Dissociating into love with the tatsmis engines, their keen use of brass and seed oil to be absorbed by the heartlike core. Val became a very busy bee, learning and turning gears, turning 21 was the best time of her life! V:O got a lot of miles out of early tatsmis models, the 077 was a perfect trainer.

// "Well, that is not too bad for a bio. I think we left out some important details though, did we not?"

:O?

V: "I fell off a ladder. Did we forget? O my little body, how easily we forget, but the skin tells a tale. Scars tell stories, not only of our growth spurts, but of our mistakes as well."

//I can't//I have a scar on my head, from where I fell a great height. The Chirurgeon and Apothecary did their best, there are some details I forget.

V:O "We glitch, we remember things that could not be right, like the sailing ship in the shadows on the ceiling, like the dreams of nomads who forgot their homeworld."

"We have been in this coffin, in this ship, for however many years it took to pay off our own bounties. O, did our body become frail? Oh, did our sense of self dissolve in the microtransactions, the work culture? Who is our crew now? It was Mr. B, Julia, and a lad I dimly remember was called Al. But what day is it? When we go off grid, spacetime gets silly, my body has been in cryo for so long I do not really know my age."

//Tatsmis model 077 was introduced in 4086, on earth. My introduction was simultaneous in ###### cluster of the ###### nebula, so that makes me roughly... an adult.//

V:O "I can't sleep, CS give me the seaside shanty, I'll go data mining for a while."

//There is no day/night cycle on our ship.