“Yes, ma’am. I caught a zango.”
She shook her head sadly. “You caught and ate a wild animal. Have you no respect for the goddesses’ creatures?”
“The logo said it was a Callisto Creations creature, ma’am.”
Her lips pressed together so hard they went pale. Oops. I probably shouldn’t have said that.
“We are all Gaia’s creatures, young lady. So Dika climbed up to see what you were doing?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And when she returned to her room, like a girl with at least some faint shred of common sense, you then overheard her conversation with Ulin and Kovy?”
I nodded.
“Then would you please explain, Alice, exactly what possessed you to attack two members of our community?”
Why had I done it? It seemed a little over the top, after Kovy’s explanation. I could have just glared at them, and they would have backed off. But I hadn’t seen two overly enthusiastic schoolgirls being a little pushy. I’d seen… something there wasn’t a word for in Standard Newspeak. The closest that could get was ‘ravish’, which meant something like ‘to be delightfully pleasured by a forceful partner despite your insincere protests’.
Had I been wrong?
No. I knew better than to believe anything Kovy said. She was a social predator, and she was fighting to protect herself now.
I lapsed into the Classic English that I’d been born knowing. “Ma’am, I came through the window to find these two practically raping my roommate.”
Ulin and Kovy didn’t speak English, but Dika and Matron Gisel did. Dika gasped, and turned to stare at me.
“We speak Standard on Felicity, Alice,” the matron snapped.
“Is there a word for ‘rape’ in Standard, ma’am?” I replied, still in English. “Ulin was keeping her pinned so Kovy could scramble her brain until she stopped struggling, ma’am. I took one look and my combat instincts activated. I almost killed them both. But then I remembered that we’re supposed to be a community, and community members don’t hurt each other. So I held myself back, and stopped them without doing any real damage. So you could decide what to do. Only you aren’t even going to punish them, are you? You’re actually buying that load of self-serving nonsense Kovy made up.”
Matron Gisel went pale. “Enough! Speak Standard, or don’t speak at all. I won’t have you poisoning these innocent girls with your outlandish foreign nonsense. How do you even remember things like that? The Adjustment when you came here should have taken care of it all.”
I remained silent.
“Well, I’ve had enough of this foolishness from you. The path of least intervention is all well and good as a general rule, but not when it harms the community. Security, put a call in for a medical team to review Alice Long’s case. I don’t care how cleverly that computer in her head is hidden, there has to be a way to take it out.”
“Compliance,” the bot behind me said.
“Good. Dika, I’m sorry we had to put you with such a troublesome roommate. I’ll see what we can do to fix that, and provide you with a healthier environment in the future. But you still should have known better. I’m going to have to give you a time out in the Quiet Room, so you can think about how to do better in the future.”
“But, matron, Alice is my friend,” Dika protested.
“Not any more, child. Now wait here, and a proctor will be along for you shortly. Ulin, Kovy, come with me. You’re both going to serve detentions for your part in this mess, but I want the docbot to have a look at you first.”
She was halfway to the door when the security bot spoke.
“Matron Gisel, Doctor Yarik of the Spinsel Medical Grove has accepted your request. She offers to send an orderly to retrieve Alice Long for a preliminary exam this afternoon.”
“Good. Warn her that the patient is antisocial, and she’ll need to be restrained.”
“Compliance.”
Gisel nodded. “Come along, girls.”
She led them out of the room. Kovy gave me a smug look behind her back, just a momentary flicker of expression before she went back to playing innocent. Ulin was less restrained. She actually sneered at me, and waved goodbye.
I really wished I’d broken her arm. Maybe her neck, too. The docbot would have fixed it, but at least she’d have suffered a little first.
“I’m sorry,” Dika said miserably. “I didn’t mean to get you caught. Crash, I should have just given them what they wanted.”
“Don’t say that,” I said sharply. “I’m the one who messed up here, Dika. I could have stopped them without scaring them so much, and then I’d just be getting another Adjustment that won’t do anything.”
We sat in silence for a moment.
“Are you going to be okay?” She asked. “I know you’ll lose a lot if they take out your implant computer.”
I sighed. “I don’t think they can do that without killing me, Dika. You know how I’ve got a clock in my head? I can watch the milliseconds go by one by one if I want to.”
“Oh.” She bit her lip, and gave me a concerned look. “You never told me that. But what does it mean? Organic brains don’t run that fast, but you can’t be an infomorph. There’s no way they would have missed it.”
According to the Church of Gaia sapient AIs are practically demons, and uploaded humans aren’t much better. But she was right about it being weird. There was a pretty normal-looking human brain in my skull, and no one had noticed anything odd about it the few times I’d been given medical checkups. Or when I’d been Adjusted, for that matter, and you’d think a brainwashing machine would watch its victim’s brain pretty closely.
“I don’t know what it means, Dika,” I admitted. “But I’m scared of what they might find, if they look at me too closely. I don’t know what they’ll do with me if it turns out I’m… not what I look like. Matron Gisel thinks I’m dangerous now. What if they decide there’s no way to make me safe?”
We both knew the answer to that. Felicity is supposed to be a safe little bubble of perfect conformity, where no one ever has to think about anything unpleasant. If they decided there was no way to make me fit in, well, then for the good of the community Alice Long would have to quietly disappear.
“Dika, I think you can guess what I have to do now.”
The security bot was still listening, so I couldn’t just come out and say I was going to escape. Fortunately bots aren’t very smart, especially the cheap ones the orphanage used for security. It wasn’t going to figure out what I meant unless I actually came out and said it.
Dika gave the capture web a dubious look, and glanced back at the security bot floating silently behind us. “Are you sure, Alice? There’s no other way?”
The last thing I wanted was to make her worry. So I mustered up my best cocky grin.