Soap. That was the other thing she missed. She showered as often as the water supply would allow, but she could still smell herself, sour and musky. The dogs were way worse, but they weren’t so different. Mammals smelled, Owl had said. That was just the way of it.
Jane hadn’t smelled bad when she was a kid. At least, she didn’t remember smelling bad. Her body had changed a lot, and Owl said it would keep changing for a while. Still, though, Jane hadn’t been changing in quite the way Owl had said – not like other Human girls did. She’d gotten taller, sure, and she had to make new clothes a lot. But she wasn’t all curves and circles like the pictures Owl had shown her of adult women. Jane was still as skinny as a kid, and she didn’t have big round breasts – just small bumps that ached all the time. Her hips were wider, kind of, but sometimes she thought she looked more like a boy (except for the whole between-the-legs thing, but that was just a big bunch of weirdness no matter which bits you had).
Jane hadn’t started bleeding, either, but Owl didn’t think she would. They’d figured out from her med scans a long time ago that Jane had a single chromosome, which was apparently one short from the usual. So, probably no bleeding, which was fine, because that sounded like the absolute worst thing ever if you didn’t have meds to shut that down, and she obviously did not. Oh, and she couldn’t make kids. Bleeding was a maybe, but kids was a definite no. Owl had been kind of cagey when she’d told Jane that, but it was hard to care about not doing something you didn’t know you could do in the first place. Jane had learned that she couldn’t make kids in the same conversation where she’d learned that making kids was a thing. She hadn’t been made the way most Humans were, which had weirded her out at first, but was no big deal, really. There’d been a stretch when she was a kid where she’d been real curious about how and why the Enhanced had made her the way they did. She and Owl had puzzled it out together then – Owl using what she knew about Enhanced Humanity societies, Jane telling her what little she could remember about medical stuff at the factory, both of them looking at samples of Jane’s spit on the little scanner. Jane didn’t have any huge tweaks, chromosomes and no-hair aside. She had a super-buff immune system, though, which was not a usual thing, and it also made Owl stop caring so much about getting the decontamination flash working. All in all, the Enhanced had probably cooked her up out of some grab-bag gene junk and pulled her out of a gooey vat, along with the other disposable girls. The Enhanced. What a bunch of fuckers.
Owl had given Jane access to sims meant for adults, and that was how Jane had learned about swearing. Owl had said it was important to know how swearing worked, and it was okay under the right circumstances, but that Jane shouldn’t swear all the time. Jane definitely swore all the time. She didn’t know why, but swearing felt fucking great. Owl only had eleven adult sims in storage, but Jane didn’t mind playing them again and again. Her favourite was Scorch Squad VI: Eternal Inferno. The best character was Combusto, who used to work for the Oil Prince but was a good guy now, and he also used to be a pyromancer in a previous life – which was true for everybody on the Scorch Squad, but let’s be real, Combusto was the one who took the oath most seriously before he was reincarnated – so he had visions of the past sometimes and his eyes caught fire when he got mad, which was all the time, and his ultimate attack was called Plasma Fist, which made bad guys explode. He also had the very best swears. Jensen, get your fucking helmet on before they blow your skull out your ass! Yeah, that was the stuff. She could play that sim all day.
Or, at least, she would play that sim all day if she didn’t have stupid bullshit she had to do instead. She’d noticed, in the sims, nobody else had to find scrap and eat dogs. Nobody else made clothes out of seat covers. Nobody else hauled around water in old fuel drums. She couldn’t wait to get the stupid shuttle working so they could get to the GC. There’d be people there, and toilets you could flush any time you wanted to, and food that wasn’t covered in buggy fur. The people were the thing she was looking forward to most, obviously. Owl always made her talk in Klip. They hardly ever spoke Sko-Ensk any more, to the point that Jane couldn’t always remember words. Sometimes, Owl put on different voices so Jane would get used to talking to other people. But Jane always knew it was really Owl. She wished she could talk to someone else.
The wall screen switched on as Jane picked at the stupid red bumps all over her face (Owl said those were normal, too). ‘Jane, you should check the light panel in the kitchen before you go out today,’ Owl said. ‘I think it’s got a damaged coil.’
‘Yeah, I know.’
‘How do you know? It just started flickering.’