Busy keeping her tusks from looking downright peculiar on the feed, he gave a startled laugh. "Sadly, when faced with things on fire, I run the other way. Generally. Straight talk and some good paydata, though? That'll get me charging in. Or at least my mods."
Fate had mastered multitasking at the ripe old age of five, when he'd gotten an implant in his left eye socket that let him escape into the Net while he attended "school". School, in his case, being a small satellite classroom and a jarring experience that involved destroying bell curves and spending countless days locked inside too-small containers. Until at age 9, he got a second implant that helped him muck about with in-range gizmos. More than once he'd been self-rescued by a janitor 'bot.
The jack on the right side of his neck, somewhere around age 14, helped him lose all sense of time as he immersed himself in the grids and codes and etiquette of the cyberworld. So sadly, by the time he discovered muscles, he was highly malnourished and already well on his way to being sense-deprived. Which is when the governments started calling, and, after half a year of that nonsense, why Fate no longer troubled himself with 99.9998% of people at all.
Headaches just weren't worth it.
Circuits lacked the sentience component of gizmos, which made dealing with wires and boards a refreshing physical challenge--and a pain in his backside. "Laser rats will be inconvenient at best. No plans to let an exterminator in any time soon, so they'll just be shooting up all my gear. And then me. Don't mourn too long, now."
He made a tsking sound. "What happened to all that faith?" It was unusual to work with someone who didn't trust his skills implicitly. Of course, he hadn't worked with anyone new in a long time. Trust had to start somewhere. Fate added, ostensibly to reassure, "Even if this goes horribly, horribly wrong, you'll get to that room one way or another. Eventually."
The suggestion that beer might best be chewed brought his senses back online. Starting with his tongue, which curled at the imagined horror. Then his nose wrinkled in dismay. "I cannot imagine a galaxy where that's even passably edible. But if you go for that sort of thing, who am I to judge?"
On that note, his humor flared with a vengeance. To the side of his HUD Fate began reviewing and discarding eating establishments on the station, casting about menus for anything beer-battered or -baked. No soups, it seemed, but anything obnoxiously not-actual-beer would do.
With a start, he watched her shift routes. "Did they pull something?" Fate blinked at the screens, more distracted by the fact he may have missed a signal of attack than by concern, nor by the fact he now had to give directions. He panned backward, didn't see anything on her heels. As he strode back to his desk he finally flipped to a blueprint of the languishing mess of a building she'd entered because here, the haze was thicker, the vidlinks sparse. "There's a stairway in front of you, take it up a floor."
Fate had mastered multitasking at the ripe old age of five, when he'd gotten an implant in his left eye socket that let him escape into the Net while he attended "school". School, in his case, being a small satellite classroom and a jarring experience that involved destroying bell curves and spending countless days locked inside too-small containers. Until at age 9, he got a second implant that helped him muck about with in-range gizmos. More than once he'd been self-rescued by a janitor 'bot.
The jack on the right side of his neck, somewhere around age 14, helped him lose all sense of time as he immersed himself in the grids and codes and etiquette of the cyberworld. So sadly, by the time he discovered muscles, he was highly malnourished and already well on his way to being sense-deprived. Which is when the governments started calling, and, after half a year of that nonsense, why Fate no longer troubled himself with 99.9998% of people at all.
Headaches just weren't worth it.
Circuits lacked the sentience component of gizmos, which made dealing with wires and boards a refreshing physical challenge--and a pain in his backside. "Laser rats will be inconvenient at best. No plans to let an exterminator in any time soon, so they'll just be shooting up all my gear. And then me. Don't mourn too long, now."
He made a tsking sound. "What happened to all that faith?" It was unusual to work with someone who didn't trust his skills implicitly. Of course, he hadn't worked with anyone new in a long time. Trust had to start somewhere. Fate added, ostensibly to reassure, "Even if this goes horribly, horribly wrong, you'll get to that room one way or another. Eventually."
The suggestion that beer might best be chewed brought his senses back online. Starting with his tongue, which curled at the imagined horror. Then his nose wrinkled in dismay. "I cannot imagine a galaxy where that's even passably edible. But if you go for that sort of thing, who am I to judge?"
On that note, his humor flared with a vengeance. To the side of his HUD Fate began reviewing and discarding eating establishments on the station, casting about menus for anything beer-battered or -baked. No soups, it seemed, but anything obnoxiously not-actual-beer would do.
With a start, he watched her shift routes. "Did they pull something?" Fate blinked at the screens, more distracted by the fact he may have missed a signal of attack than by concern, nor by the fact he now had to give directions. He panned backward, didn't see anything on her heels. As he strode back to his desk he finally flipped to a blueprint of the languishing mess of a building she'd entered because here, the haze was thicker, the vidlinks sparse. "There's a stairway in front of you, take it up a floor."
Dreams come in a size too big so we can grow into them.
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