After the enrollment-lull ended, I realised I might have taken on more than I could cope with. My day started at five a.m. with me getting out of bed, grabbing my bag and going to the gym, I needed the physical exercise or I would go crazy, it had become just as much part of my daily routine as my morning coffee at the Coffee Club. After a strenuous workout, I used the gym showers instead of going back to my dorm-room and got myself the first cup of coffee, sadly not at a club-house, there was none at my cluster, combining it with something from the bakery and some fruit to make it my breakfast.

From breakfast at the train-station, it was a quick hop with the train to the Guild Academy, where classes started at eight, each day, every day. Well, not quite, just for me, as I had been the confident fool and taken on a double major. So, whenever no class was scheduled for eight a.m., I had scheduled one of the guided study-sessions into that timeblock, somehow nobody liked the early sessions. Colour me surprised.

The guided study-sessions were small group sessions, each maybe twenty freshman guided by an older student to give us a space and guidance to work through posed problems. Nobody did the work for us, but we got help if we needed it. I had managed to convince Nisha to join me in two of my electrical engineering, where we had met another girl that joined us in our study-group, Mina, or Kim Mi Na if one wanted to be formal. She offered us the use of her given name the first day, because as she put it, if you called her by her last name in Korea, half the country would turn to check if you were talking to them. Anyway, with her, we made a pretty decent studying group and Nisha quickly became one of my best friends.

She had a calm confidence that I greatly enjoyed, when my views were challenged, I would argue them to the best of my ability, sometimes getting into heated arguments with others if I felt their arguments were flawed. She, on the other hand, was able to defend her position in a calm, composed manner, never rising to any baits or anything, just confidence in her positions.

On the other hand, as my friendship with her grew, the relationship with my roommates got worse over time. At first, I had gotten along with Ru Shi very well, but that ended when Karen asked straight out if I was lesbian, as she had seen me looking around the rainbow-area of the new student fair. I was not ashamed of what I was and would never try to hide in a closet, so I simply told them that yes, I was and that was the end of it, at least for me.

Sadly, Ru Shi had grown up being taught that homosexuality was wrong and unnatural which strained our friendship. Not that she was openly hostile, but I felt a tension in our interactions, so I kept my distance.

Karen on the other hand was the reason I started to appreciate Nisha more. Both had their opinions but Karen was actively trying to push her opinion on others, including me, and the result were some pretty intense arguments. When she got together with David, who I’d met during orientation, he was happily carrying water for her and once David told me how oppressed lesbians were and I should listen to him, as he knew the facts, I was done arguing with them and simply ignored it, when they tried to tell me something.

Lastly, Tanisha and I did not interact a whole lot, I was not in our room most of the time, especially after I had managed to get myself a private workroom in our cluster. Once that happened, I went there after I returned from classes around 6 p.m., only returning to our room a few hours later. And it was a good thing that I did, Tanisha had decided that now that she was out from under her father's nose, she would enjoy herself, using her own ideas on what was enjoyable.

Mainly, it meant that she was looking for every party she could find, enjoying the fact that the legal drinking age on Accord Island was the same as on the continent on the other side of the straight, meaning that you could get beer and wine at sixteen and liquor at eighteen. After I had tried it for the first time, I had decided that I had no real interest in acquiring a taste for alcohol and simply stayed away. Tanisha, not so much. She often went to bed tipsy and around the same time as I did, meaning some time between midnight and one a.m. but I doubted that she had the same low need for sleep as I had. In addition, she enjoyed listening to music loud enough for Karen and Ru Shi to complain, making studying in our room a challenge.

So, I used the workroom I had rented to do my work, using my dorm room only to sleep.

Like that, the first month passed and I was trying to get something I had thought about for almost a year to work. I had a relatively solid model on the theoretical parts I would need but getting from an idea, even a good idea, to reality was not that easy.

The original idea had been to create something similar to the nanobots described in popular science fantasy, but there were a few problems with that. The biggest was that, no matter how I tried, I was unable to get my integrated circuitry even close to the small scale needed, and that was without even taking into account the other important parts like some sort of energy-supply. It wasn’t as if my machines would work by magic, they needed some form of energy input to function.

But I was slowly making progress, slowly but surely I managed to work the energy crystal-technology I had used for some time into a scale that would allow for bots on a micron-scale, not quite the nano-scale described in fiction, but it was a great first step. In addition, with that solved, was able to think about using the better circuitry I had designed for the armour, allowing for higher performance. I would just have to manage to scale it down into micro-levels and go from there.

One day, I was working in my workshop, just using it to get some peace from Tanisha’s music, when I was interrupted. I was using the improved circuit design I had used in my armour to make a microchip that would allow me to get a computer with similar computing power to the mainframe I had built in my bunker but it was slow going, as I first needed to built the tools I needed to built the chips I wanted. Sadly, I couldn’t simply get the tools I had built for my bunker and ship them here, at least not without quite a bit of trouble.

The interruption was done by Galatea, telling me that there was something in the news that I should know about. At first, I was not impressed, it was just another of the smear-pieces designed to make it look like Metis was still in New Brunsburg and still an ongoing threat. They had been doing that for a couple of months, starting about two months after I left the town. Every couple of weeks, once or twice a month, there had been an article alleging that Metis commited a crime, either assault someone, or break into something. The narrative was used to prop up a climate of fear and conduct quite a few searches, some using less than stellar cause. And those that were directing the operations were getting sneaky, one of the really problematic things they had done was pass a new fire-ordinance, requiring smoke-detectors to be installed by city-approved contractors, everywhere.

So, every business had to let a contractor into their space and I had no doubt that the contractors kept their eyes open. Well, at first I just had a suspicion but Galatea and I cracked the reports filed by the contractors and that confirmed our suspicion, removing doubt.

I was about to ignore the article as just about smear-piece when Galatea highlighted a section, calling for an investigation into Skylar and his handling of the whole Metis-situation. It was alleged that Skylar was corrupt, using the few contacts I had with him to paint a picture of a fallen hero, using his own position to further some unnamed and unspecified goal.

Feeling bad, I sent a message to the Shadowbroker, asking if there was something either of us could do. Well, other than getting myself caught to make Skylar look good. But he was in the end, just an innocent victim caught between me and the Greene-Family, so I wanted to help a little.