"Why'd they have to put me in here with you?" complained Cassandra for the seventh time. Whatever progress Keri might have thought they'd made over the past few days was shot to pieces by what was happening to them now. Apparently the ink-men hadn't even bothered to interrogate the others, simply throwing them into the cells below.

Cells. Actual cells. Keri was in a jail, something she had never quite believed existed, though she knew logically they must. To her they were a story from the threads, places to wait with the heroes of vids and holos before the inevitable prison break.

She wondered how you went about organising one of those.

Still, at least it was better than the bars and concrete of the older vids. The room would have actually been rather comfortable for one person, a wide open floor with plain but functional furnishings, a single stickscreen on the wall locked onto an info-channel repeating the highlights of the day's news.

The problem was there were two of them in here.

Clearly Keri hadn't been far off the mark in considering such places a thing of the past. Even in this multi-story building the cells took up only a small fraction of the below-ground floor. She had seen three or four on the way down, as she was half-dragged by the bruiser who had brought her here, and they took up a single musty corridor that was clearly little used. Where clean, stark contrasts of black and white covered the walls and floors of the rest of the facility, the stairs that led to this section were narrow and dark, and the whole corridor had paint that flaked and dust collecting in the corners.

Their cell also had the feel of a last-minute thought. The second bed had clearly been brought in only a short while ago, nothing but a recyc-paper mattress above a wire frame that contrasted strongly with the at-least-tolerable first one upon a solid wooden[1] base. Cassandra had already made clear who would be sleeping where.

She had seen the others on the way here, Anisa and Eu in the cell next door, Andreas the one before that, but the rooms were sealed up in a way that prevented any communication between them. There was no way to call out through the opaque, locked doors. Cassandra had tried slamming on the walls in the futile hope that the thudding would carry, but the material was far too solid.

"You know, since we met you we've had a Butcher try to kill us, a madman try to squash us, a tech-head try to hold us hostage, and now ink-men locking us up for who knows what reason. Do you get a kick out of spreading your malware, or what?" said the larger woman, heaving herself onto the first bed with a sigh.

"Oh, this is hardly my fault," snapped Keri. "It wasn't even my idea to come here. How am I to blame for any of this? It was your damned lot that decided to steal the plans."

"We didn't steal anything," snapped Cassandra right back. "We copied something, yes, but it's not like we knew the Terminal was going to be attacked. All we wanted was a look, that's all. Just a copy."

There was a long pause.

"You know," said Keri, a sudden chuckle rising in her throat. "This might be the most serious case of digital piracy ever."

Cassandra laughed despite herself, a fatalistic chortle that was suppressed quickly.

"So, what's the score with you anyway?" asked Keri in the silence that followed.

She tensed as she spoke, but she was fed up with treading on eggshells around the other woman.

Cassandra rolled over to look at her, a questioning expression on her face, saying nothing.

"I mean, what is it with you? You don't seem to like anyone, even the others. Except Eu, of course, and she..."

"Don't say anything about her you'll regret," said Cassandra suddenly. There were daggers in her voice.

"...she could get on with a hormonal cage-gorilla[2], I was going to say. She gets on with everyone."

Keri watched Cassandra turn onto her back and stare at the bare white ceiling.

"She really does," said Cassandra after a while. "She's the best person I've ever met. And I mean best as in decent, kind, generous. As in forgiving. She'd give you the skin off her own back[3] if she thought you needed it."

"So the exact opposite of you then."

Cassandra made a sound that was difficult to interpret.

“Careful.”

"What's the relationship between you two, anyway?" asked Keri, subdued now. "I can't figure it out at all."

“They say that once this AI is born we’ll have a working theory of consciousness,” said Cassandra. Keri didn't see how this could be possibly related. “An actual scientific explanation for that strange phantom behind the eyes, all bundled up in a nice collection of numbers and figures. Cogito ergo sum, made equation.”

“I really don’t…”

“Do you think they can explain me, though? Or you, for that matter, or any of us? What does it matter where our thoughts come from if we can’t control them?”

Keri sat down on her bed, listening. Cassandra was going somewhere with this, and wasn't about to be interrupted.

“Have you ever seen a photo of a wave crashing over rocks? Not a vid; a photo. Frozen, the surf hanging in the air above untouched rocks. It's beautiful. Life's like that, I think. Every moment is perfect; it's time that fucks it up.”

She sighed.

“I was like those rocks; I didn't even realise I was drowning. I thought I’d figured it all out the day I had my corps cut out. I was going to escape the cold, empty people obsessed only with what was inside their own heads. I didn't realise that it wasn't only people with a corps that were like that.

“By the time Eu found me I had given up. I was living like a… like a… what did they call it? A vagrant. She turned up just in time to save me.”

“Save you?”

“Hm, yeah,” replied Cassandra with a wry smile. “I was done. It was pure luck that she found me when she did, slumped on the floor of an alley near the Kingdom. These scars on my wrists aren't only from the corps.”

The room was silent for a while, Keri trying to process what she was hearing. Attempted suicide was not a topic she had much experience with.

“There was nowhere I belonged before that,” Cassandra said after a while. “I had left everything, everyone, time and time again. I never felt accepted, and I had nowhere I could call home. Oh, there were plenty of open habs I could have ‘lived’ in, of course, but a home is more than just a place where you sleep. The Kingdom is that to me, because they accept who I am.”

“Who you are?”

Cassandra rolled over and gave an incredulous grin.

“You really are sheltered, aren't you?” she said, sitting up with a shake of her head. “You honestly haven't noticed, have you?”

“Noticed? Noticed what?”

“You… I… look, for real? You genuinely think I'm…?”

Keri frowned, looking at Cassandra in puzzlement.

“I'm not a woman,” Cassandra said, before pausing. “Well, I mean, I am, but I… look; I was born a man, alright? It's sweet that it didn't even occur to you, but…”

Keri blinked in surprise. She peered at Cassandra.

I suppose she could be a little…

“Don't do that, alright? Don't look at me like I'm some kind of bug to be studied.”

“So, you, uh, you had surgery or…?”

Keri trailed off, unsure of what she was saying. That sort of surgery was heavily restricted in the post-Butcher era. It was seen as anathema. Nothing so close to the actions of a Butcher could be allowed.

“No. I couldn't if I wanted to, but I don't want to. That's what most people don't get. I don't need to change anything about myself; I know who I am and I know what I am. It was people trying to ‘help’ me that pushed me into that mess anyway. Always thinking they had an answer, as if I were a problem to be solved. Well, I'm not...”

“I don't care,” said Keri.

Cassandra’s words were stopped in their tracks.

“What?” she said.

“I said I don't care. Why would I? Do what you like. Do what makes you happy.”

Cassandra blinked.

“You're not going to try to… to tell me how I can help myself? What I should do? How I can fix myself?”

“No,” said Keri succinctly. “Why would I?”

“I think…” said Cassandra slowly, “that you are in a minority of tech-heads there. I spent half my life with amateur psychologists trying to tell me what to do. Everyone thinks they know everything there is to know about everything, these days. They only see what they want to.”

“Ha,” scoffed Keri. “I think I've learnt a little about that these last few days. There's stuff going on here I wouldn't have believed was possible a little while back.”

Keri stood up.

“So,” she said. “How exactly are we going to get out of here?”

[1] Though she automatically assumed it was merely a faux-wood style. There would be no reason to go to the expense of real wood for… ha… prisoners.

[2] Not that anyone really fought caged primates for sport, but the simulated online version had been all the rage a few years back.

[3] The metaphor had changed somewhat since this was now literally possible.