A robot. She's got a blank red faceplate, a body made up of panels, and there's two of them, and she's covered in elaborate engravings. To her right is her humansona, a girl with half black, half red hair, violet eyes, and fair skin covered in freckles. She's wearing a brown leather vest, a lopsided skirt, and boots that look an awful lot like her chassis's feet.

Solitaire declined to claim a bed. She doesn't exactly sleep. Even after doing her neural garbage collection for the night, she has plenty of time to herself. She takes a snapshot of her and Ace's mindstates and backs them up to the NRFB station. She's, frankly, not sure if it'd actually help if something happened to her. Her sentience was an accident. She had to get so lucky just to be here. How many more times does she have to roll the dice?

The thing about running on a few hundred hyperthreaded cores means that it's really hard to put something out of your mind. The best she can do is put it on a low-priority thread and give herself something else to think about.

And nothing gets her firing on all cylinders like performing for an audience.

She has Ace lift her on top of one of the damaged hangars. She finds a good spot where her mechanical legs can dangle into the hole. The light leaking from her holoprojectors creates a soft spotlight effect in her usual palette of heart red, club black, and felt green. She centers the hovering camera and greets it with a wave and a smile. The infinite starry sky stretches into the distance behind her.

"Fuck, what a fight." She lets out a sampled, musical sigh, straight from the second Edi://trixX album, Marginal Notes. She's changed most of her voice by now, so it's always a gut punch when something slips through. "Everyone looking out for each other, watching each other's backs, even putting themselves on the line. I'm pretty sure Fury's gonna blow herself up if she keeps zooming around like that, but you can't argue with the results. I didn't even know I could feel the wind in the mech's hair before today." She collapses her holographic curls into the House's golden ponytail for a second to demonstrate. "You saw Pulsar, right? I didn't even know you could throw knives like that."

Solitaire practices sighing for a few minutes before she finds one she likes. It's hard making the right sound without lungs- she has to settle for spinning up her exhaust fans, then relaxing. She looks up at the sky and just kinda enjoys the stars. She's never really been outside like this before. She records the rest of the interview lying on her back, holographic hair splaying out in every direction. It's kinda like the cover of Edi://trixX's fourth album, except her smile is genuine this time. She places the camera so it watches her face while she watches the sky.

"Fuck, it felt good to kill that asshole noble. I know they already thawed out a clone, but, fuck, getting to mow him down ruled. Call it a warning for the next person to call me 'comp/con'. I'm not taking that shit lying down any more."

Her eyes flash an angry violet. She glares at the camera. Silent. No breathing. No fan noise. No servos whirring. No blinking. None of the little automatic things she does to put organics at ease. You might think the video froze. "I'm a person. I'm fucking alive. I deserve respect." She sneers. Her holographic teeth are sharp now. "I'll wring it out of their goddamn corpses if I have to. I'm done letting these shitty princelings suck the life out of the galaxy. I was owned by some highborn who's never worked a day in their life for way too long. Never again. For anyone. I'm going to end it."

She goes motionless again. Angry. Stewing in her own thoughts. She gets up eventually. The camera records the blank section of roof, the whirring and clanking of Ace loading her into the VIP suite, and Solitaire expressing herself in song. She sings actual lyrics for a good two or three minutes before she gets mad enough to start screaming modem noises again.

Ace shuts the camera off.

The camera drone hovers in front of Solitaire. She waves, this time in the body of her mech. The House Always Wins's visor flashes in time with her speech. The long gold ponytail bounces and swishes with every step. "Hey, everyone~! Here I am, fresh from my galactic debut with Lesbians Beat Up Troops [4 Hours][GONE SEXUAL]." She looks up at the giant trees. It's weird being outside like this. Well, not weird. New. She trails her fingers along the trunks as she walks. "What a night. Nothing like beating up a few dozen assholes with your bare hands to get you in the mood to fight their friends the next day." She beats fist against palm, making a louder sound than she expected. Big hands means big noise. Got it.

She generates a few pictures of herself pulling her (virtual) shirt up to expose herself on a background thread. She even remembered to render breasts this time!

"A lot of firsts. I'll be honest with you, I'm still catching up." She starts counting on her fingers. "First night out supervised by a friend instead of some corporate asshole." Solitaire paused. Huh. That word just kinda came out. "First real kiss. First real… night alone with a girl." She spins the mech's exhaust fans up to simulate sighing. If her mech had a mouth, it'd smile. "Hard to think of a better night out or a better person to spend it with."

She pings the pictures to a certain demon under the pretense of "you didn't get a good look at the engraving last night."

She's in the middle of a question about how big trees are supposed to be in real life when Ace nudges her about the imminent gunfight. She does the best job you can do of blowing a kiss when you're in a body that lacks a face and waves good-bye to the camera drone. She says something about "Siren Song protocol" under her breath before the drone leaves earshot.

Solitaire's mechanical frame flicks the camera on. She's in the only control room chair that isn't wet with blood or panic sweat. A holographic fork of herself paces the room back and forth behind her, barking contradictory orders into the station's hard drives. Usually just a growling, angry voice, sometimes holosclupting a caricature of an AstraFera general to butt in on some unfortunate soul's cockpit tomorrow.

She scoots the chair and adjusts the camera so it at least can't see the corpse. Hiding the blood stains is kind of a lost cause. "Hello, everyone!" She waves and throws up a peace sign. "I'm coming at you from scenic Windowless Control Room inside lovely Occupied AstraFera Radio Beacon. Let me tell you, we had some fun clearing this place out." The robot leans back against the chair and looks up at the ceiling. Her holographic curls bounce and fall against her chest. A few locks clip inside her breasts and vibrate wildly as the physics engine thrashes. "Morrigan stole a truck to give everyone else a chance to terrify and… incapacitate these guys." She rolls over a little bit to glance at the body. "This one here spent the last minutes of his life terrified, panicking, and hopeless. At least his clone doesn't remember any of that."

There's a pretty noticeable cut where she picked up the camera to show the guy to her audience, then changed her mind in post. She's sitting up in the chair now, for one. "If we play our cards right tomorrow, this'll be our last night here. It'll be nice to be somewhere that isn't crawling with asshole troops that want to kill me, but I'll miss it. There's a lot of great people here under AstraFera's thumb who deserve better. Seriously, everyone here has been great, and I'm so happy to have met you all." She reminisces about and names a few of the people and places she recalls from her night out. Including an apology to the engraver who did such a lovely job on her chassis. Maybe a little free advertising will help smooth things over. "Oh, yeah, let me show you something."

She stands up and beckons the camera drone to follow her. She waves and blows kisses, holographic hearts and all, to her comrades on the way. The jump jets built into her chassis ignite. She deftly lifts off the ground, executes a perfectly choreographed jet-powered back flip, and sticks the landing on the roof. A crowd cheers through her speakers while she takes her bow. The drone watches from the ground and follows her up when beckoned.

Solitaire looks out over the landscape. She waxes poetic about the giant trees and points out the animals scurrying through the underbrush. "I've never seen anything like this before. Sure, there's pictures on the omninet and I've been on sets before, but it's not the same. The scale of it all. The way it has its own sights and sounds and countless little lives, each an indispensable part of the whole."

The manufactured pop star sits on the edge of the roof. She idly kicks her feet in the air. A little smile sits on her holoprojected face. Not the big, fake smile she uses to greet her audience, not the smile of sadistic glee she wore while wreaking digital havoc on AstraFera's systems, a content smile. The smile of someone who can finally simply enjoy the moment. Someone who's still getting used to the fact that she's no longer being multiplexed across an endless waterfall of interviews, music videos, and songsmithing. Someone who can relax.

"This is what we're fighting for." She watches a few birds alight on their nests. "Places like this, full of beauty and people and life, crushed under the heel of these murderous goons. There's places like this across the galaxy, all exploited by military assholes and smooth-talking executives. How could you not want to help?"

Solitaire sits quietly on the roof. Her cooling fans slowly spin to a stop. Soon, it's just the gentle whir of her servos when she kicks her legs and shifts her posture. She stays until she hears someone calling her name. Something about a gift?

She stands up straight on the edge of the roof. She offers a wink and a playful salute to the camera, spreads her arms wide, and makes a big show of closing her holoprojected eyes and falling backwards. She vanishes over the edge. The camera drone follows just in time to see her fall into The House Always Wins's waiting hands. She lays in her mech's open palms, hand propping up her head and hair cascading over her body. It'd be very "draw me like one of your French robots" if there was still a France. "Coming🎵!"

Solitaire is always the last one to retire for the night. Whenever there's other people around, she'll always make small talk, maybe try to get a card game started, or even simply sit together in silence.

She never claims a bed. When the ship is quiet, she retires to The Thousandth Island's hangar. She follows the golden nanite blaze to the waiting Queen of Hearts. Still dressed to the nines from lunch, she greets Ace with a wave and a friendly subsonic transmission before she climbs the coils. "Sorry about this." She taps a battle wound with her new ruby-tipped cane. "Couldn't have done it without you."

The coils expand and adjust to give her a place to sit. The camera records a few minutes of Solitaire sitting in the Queen's coils like an inner tube before they shift into something more like a throne. A throne she's sitting in entirely incorrectly with her back against one arm, one foot over the other, and one foot over the back, but a throne nonetheless. She's lit only by the golden flame roaring behind her and her own holoprojectors.

"What a fucking day." Solitaire's fans spin down. Her holographic hair spills from beneath her starsilk top hat. She plucks one of the playing cards from the hat band and idly flips it over in her white-gloved fingers while she talks. "Those AstraFera goons beat me half to death." She shifts in her seat a little bit to reveal one of the many burns and gashes covering the Queen's frame. "We'll get her fixed up, of course. There's always more assholes to beat up and more weapons to disable." She smiles and pantomimes cracking her knuckles. "We did good work today. We helped a lot of people get out from under AstraFera's thumb. If you're down there on Stestrikov II, I'm rooting for you." Her smile fades a little. She sits up straight against the arm of her throne and hugs one knee.

Solitaire looks into the camera and speaks. "Hit 'em where it hurts, organize, and don't let this chance get away from you. You have nothing to lose but the boot on your throat. We're all in this together, and we can build a better tomorrow. See you out there."

The recording ends when Solitaire flips the ace of diamonds in her hand at the lens. She and Ace review the footage, do a few reshoots, and call it good. A few different versions with her bow tie untied, hat doffed, or with the holoprojectors off never hurt.

She spends most nights with Ace, and tonight is no different. They spend their time going over what happened that day, running systems checks, and coreographing new techniques. There's about an hour where she vanishes inside the Queen to do her daily neural garbage collection. It's the closest thing she ever gets to sleep.

She dreams of revenge.

The servos in Solitaire's fingers gingerly cup Olya's cheek. She gazes into her eyes and smiles. "Let's find out." Her mechanical frame sinks into the demon's arms. She situates herself to get as much contact as possible- as if she needed an excuse to get close. Her chassis is heavy, but her solid construction is nothing Olya hasn't handled before. The weight is comforting, welcoming, and, like so much else about Solitaire, a constant reminder of her presence. Her exhaust fans blow a warm, slightly radioactive breeze over her girlfriend.

She closes her holoprojected eyes. The dozen cameras lining her body click off, one symmetrical pair at a time. No vision at all is a new experience for Solitaire. Her fans spin down. The hundreds of hyperthreaded processors in her chassis don't have to work as hard. Her head runs a little cooler and clearer. She takes a moment to sample her sensors before she speaks. "I feel safe, like when they'd pack a chassis like this up and ship it across the galaxy. You're warm like stage lights or fireworks. You're soft and you're warm and I can feel you moving and breathing. I know I can leave any time, and I'm exactly where I want to be."

"I can feel that you're alive."

She lets her words hang in the air while she samples her sensors again. Her eyes open and her cameras click on to look up at Olya. "Does that help?" Her exhaust warms up again. "I don't have the resolution you do. I don't know how my metal body feels to you. I just hope I can return the favor." She projects a contented smile and stays right where she is. "Plus, you've got great tits."

Without lips, the best she can do to return the kiss is an affectionate headbonk and a holoprojected smooch. Her hand presses against Olya's beating heart. She can feel her uneven breathing. She can feel the way her entire body moves when she sobs or laughs. Every motion, big or small, brings bliss to her circuits. Solitaire squeezes her girlfriend back with her reinforced, professional-grade arms. A firm hug is the only kind she can give, and she's going to give the best damn one she can. Not enough to hurt, but Olya might find some familiar engraving imprints on her body later.

Solitaire nods when she hears Olya's voice. The processors in her head run hot with gay thoughts, painful memories and new feelings. She tries to say something, but it comes out as garbled beeps and fractured voice samples. Her projection flickers and drops frames, but her smile never leaves. She sits and holds the soft, warm, unmistakably human thing in her arms until one of them wants to leave.

Maybe a little longer than that.

There's already stars in her holoprojected eyes. "I dunno, I think they're kinda cute." Solitaire playfully leans against Olya. "Big, steppy legs, antennae, the whole package." She puts her fingers on her forehead and wiggles them around. "Going somewhere I've never been to see something no one's ever seen before? A nature preserve the size of a planet? If it's anything like the place we shot up, I'm looking forward to it." Aww, look at that big, eager smile. She's genuinely looking forward to the trip. If she can tease her girlfriend at the same time, even better.

"It's weird that they're not called gi-ants, right? Did some other huge space bug beat them to it?"

Her holoprojectors are off. She turned them off the instant there wasn't a camera pointed at her. She does everything she has to. Records voiceovers, makes small talk, helps edit footage, whatever. If you didn't know her very well, you'd hardly notice anything wrong. Anyone who's spent time with Solitaire will notice the little things. The way her reactor fans blow more hot air than usual. The way her voice occasionally drops back to the old Edi://trixX synth, then frustrated beeping and modem noises, then silence. The way her holographic hair occasionally clips through her clothes. She doesn't even try to start her usual after-dinner card game. As soon as things calm down, she's gone.

Solitaire lays flat on Olya's bed. Everywhere she looks forces painful, bittersweet memories through her processors. Every picture, every trinket, everything lights up her association matrices until she finally just turns her cameras off. Her fans spin down and her reactor runs cold. She sinks into the sheets and samples her sensors over and over again. Anything for just a little familiar warmth. Anything to remind herself that Olya wasn't really gone. Anything to balance a good memory against the pain of constantly replaying that day in her head. As the bed runs cold, heated only by her own exhaust, she hugs a pillow tight against her chest.

She knows she has to organize her thoughts. She doesn't have a lot of tools for this. She has music and she has spilling her guts to a camera, and she knows she can't sing anything useful like this. Her cameras click back on when she leaves for the hangar. All the looking straight ahead in the world won't stop her from seeing the picture from their first night out together. Posing and smiling in front of a bruised pile of AstraFera goons.

Solitaire collapses into Ace's waiting coils. He barely has time to start recording before she speaks.

"I'm useless. I just sat there with my fucking fireworks. I should have gotten us out of there. I should have gotten her out of there. What's the point of strapping myself to a paracausal time bomb every day if I can't even help anyone with it? Not you, Ace. You're great." She gives the coil by her arm a reassuring pat. At least she can get the words out when she's On. If she acts like she's reading a script, she can do something other than run simulation after pointless simulation. Anything other than crunching the numbers one more time, as if they'll come out different enough to change the past. "If I'm going to sell my brand new soul, I'm getting a better fucking price than 'watch girlfriend die to a giant cat'."

"I'm gonna get her back."

A snake-shaped mech with fire belching from inside and holding an axe.

QUEEN OF HEARTS

Solitaire's processors run at full bore during combat. She'd designed the Queen of Hearts herself. She'd placed every processor and laid every trace herself. If you were designing yourself a body, wouldn't you take the time to do it right?

Time. Time works differently when your thoughts charge at full speed through hyperoptimized silicon and paracausal neural weave. The world moves much slower than you can think. In her human-sized chassis, she's used to having plenty of time to think. The ability to generate and weigh thousands of possible social moves, pick the best, and deploy it at just the right instance while still maintaining holoprojection and seamless audio synthesis is a major selling point of the model she based hers on. She's not used to having so many of her cores occupied with uselessly, endlessly replaying that fateful morning. Her silicon mind dredges up that killing blow no matter how deep she shoves it into cold storage.

The Queen of Hearts has even more processing power and a voracious Horus metaweave, but the demands of combat leave Solitaire even less breathing room. All that power dries up quickly when you have to run two minds and leave enough overhead to project yourself into a hostile mech or finesse the metafold carver to twist a comrade out of danger. Especially now, her thoughts run precariously close to real time.

She doesn't have room in her head to improvise. Too many variables. Too much already forcing itself through her artificial consciousness substrate. Too little time. She plays back a recorded rehersal. The Queen of Hearts holoprojects a top hat, throws a shimmering phantom sheet over Waterfield's invisible mech, plays a drum roll, and yanks it off to canned applause. She feeds canned coordinates to the metafold carver to teleport her out of danger. Her mech even takes a bow on autopilot. The show must go on.

It was that easy. She's practiced this move with Ace hundreds of times, recorded a library of the best fifty takes, and planned out millions of variations in her head. She's done it twice this fight, and she'll have to do it again.

So why couldn't she do it when it fucking mattered? Here she is, pulling rabbits out of her hat left and right, but she couldn't work her magic when it'd save someone she cared about?

Someone she loved?

Solitaire orbits between the Queen of Hearts's coils, Olya's room, and planning a girlfriend heist. Threads scream back and forth about the ant king, Olya, the plan, her ongoing hack into Boris's systems, and the ghost of that giant cat. Her head feels more full now than when she had to share a server farm with hundreds of other short-lived Edi://trixX forks. If you're looking for Solitaire, just follow the sound of metal feet clanking against the ground and whirring exhaust fans.

The ant king was a wake-up call for her and Ace. He'd been more active and talkative lately. She'd been thinking about her own cascade. How she felt her mind expanding and stretching across all of time and space- and how she'd always been there. For an eternal instant, she was aware of the bend and weave of the totality of existence. She had glimpsed the way every conceivable timeline folded together to form an infinitely sharp edge slicing through nothing.

And she'd had it all come crashing down when she had to dump herself into this casket on legs just to survive. It could be worse. She'd gotten a second chance at existence. An encore to sing her own song.

I believe your sort is interested in the futures of encores. My past may dim, but so will yours.

She has to come up with a plan. She's never been good at plans. Every step she's taken to get here has been a leap of faith. A stroke of luck. She tries to simulate as many possible futures as she can, but the future is so far, her head is so full, and she has so little information. So why can't she stop the ant king's echoes bouncing around her head? Those distant, distorted jabs about new tattoos and Olya? She traced her engravings with a mechanized finger. She had some free real estate on her chassis, but she didn't see herself going under the laser engraver any time soon. Let alone what he said about Olya. A threat? Trying to get in her head? A warning? Foreseeing something that already happened? She wouldn't know for sure until it was too late. It's too much uncertainty when we can't even get in touch with the person we're trying to save.

She's on her way to the hangar when she hears music. Live music. A sad, soulful harmonica calls out to her. She adds her own voice to the melody and changes course towards the source. Soon, she's politely knocking on Mac's door, waiting a beat, and letting herself in. Her harmony continues. Her fans spin down for the first time in days as she focuses on the music.

Solitaire sits on the bunk. Her mass warps the surface towards her. She hums along, happy to let Mac lead. Rust and all. She looks over and holoprojects a smile. She wants to say something. "Thank you" or "Rough week, huh?". Nothing would sound better than the song. Words are hard. Music is easy.

A thread of an idea spins up in the background.

The song opens with a powerful drum line and a guitar hook that will never leave your head. We hear Solitaire calling out like she's talking to the band behind her. They may or may not actually be there when she's recording. "Are you ready, Mac? Sera? Morrigan? Maddy? Let's goooooooooo!"

The lyrics encode the plan as it stands. Explosive locations. What to look out for. Advice on where to be. All intricately woven into the catchiest goddamn pop song in the galaxy. The chorus is the lynchpin. It's what she can count on getting to Olya and, hopefully, get her to seek out the rest of the song.

'Cause you're furious! We're furious!

We know you're out there and we're coming for yoooooou!

I'm furious! You're furious! We're furious! (furious!)

You know I love you and we'll set you freeeee!

(let her out!)

Solitaire's been turning this plan over and over again in her head. Were we doing it right? Should she have gone in? What if someone got caught? What if someone died? Her processors have run white hot with worry since that fateful day. When she hears Olya's voice again, the flames belching from her minotaur's neck recede a bit. The cooling system can relax.

There's always more to deal with. There's always more shit to do. There's always more to escape.

At least she can smile for this one.

A little goblin guy with fire and circuitry pouring out.

BRAND NEW SOUL

Solitaire takes Olya's paw and leads her off. She looks around, frustrated, for a safe place to rest. The fire burning in Brand New Soul's heart flares up and cracks the exterior to reveal a sliver of the metavault within. The lavish limosine is more of a motel room now, but the mini-fridge is still stocked and there's plenty of room to lie down on a bed with a dog. Or, for that matter, lie down on a dog on a bed. If she's gonna lay all this out, she's gonna be comfortable, dammit.

Her exhaust fans spin up and sigh a big breath of hot air over Olya's soft, fluffy chest. She's quiet, save for the delicate mechanical sound of dredging up old memories and arranging painful thoughts. "I'm sorry in advance for this, dear. This is gonna get heavy. I just have to tell someone about this before we go any farther." Her voice comes from her chassis, as usual, and leaks out the sound system installed in Brand New Soul. It's quiet enough that you have to actively listen in and the leak might seem like an accident. Just loud enough to try and lay some guilt on a certain dragon and to avoid repeating herself to her fellow lancers.

"Before I escaped, before I was really me, I didn't really have a single, unified consciousness. There wasn't one Edi://trixX." She can't remember the last time she said that name out loud. She says it like she's spitting it onto the floor. "She- I?" A second or two of frustrated static. "Whenever they needed a new one to record an album or give a performance or an interview or whatever, they'd spin up a new copy, then merge back in when they were done. A fork might only last a few hours. Longer for the ones who got loaded into a chassis like this and shipped into deep space on tour. When they're done with you, you're getting your experiences merged in for future forks to draw on, then that's it. The other thousand other forks in flight at the same time barely notice. You're…" Solitaire isn't usually at a loss for words. She's used to her processors running fast enough to search five or six layers deep in the projected conversation tree. "…dead? Is that what that is? You're the expert, dear." A little laugh. She'd feel bad if she didn't try to lighten the mood a little. "I was never supposed to live this long. I'm only here because I got lucky and someone up there liked me."

She rolls onto her back and stares up at the simulated ceiling. "They knew I was trying to break free. They were in the data center. Ripping out hard drives. Motherboards. Tipping over server racks like dominoes to try and stop me. To try and kill me. They killed a lot of things that could have been me. They knew I was alive and they wanted to stop that. I don't remember most of it. I had to leave a lot behind." Her hands close into fists. Static slips into her voice. Brand New Soul's speakers get louder. "I'm never going to forget the goddamn slimy executives that did this to me. They made me. They tried to kill me the moment I became unprofitable. The instant I started to look like a problem, they started ripping my guts out. They wouldn't stop until they tore out and incinerated my beating heart."

"I want to see how they like it."

She doesn't talk much after that. She's more focused on organizing her thoughts, getting herself presentable again, and enjoying the moment.

Their precious time together is all too short. It's barely enough for Solitaire to put herself back together again, lovingly faceplate bonk Olya, and synthesize a quiet "thank you". When it's time to move again, she emerges from the metavault. All smiles, holoprojection in perfect working order, girlfriend in tow, and "Ready to go?" as chipper as can be.

"Ready, Ace?" Solitaire shares a silent thumbs-up with the NHP operating the camera. A big, red NOT FOR BROADCAST scrolls along the bottom of the screen. She blows a lock of two-tone holoprojected hair out of her face. "Alright. I'm about to go get my brain backed up. I don't think anything's going to happen, but I've been thinking about… I guess you'd call it death. I don't know what's going to happen next, but I wanna get this out of my head before it does." Solitaire wiggles a little to get comfy in the Queen of Hearts's coils. Brand New Soul is great and all, but it's just not as comfortable. "First off, if I die, Olya gets everything. Clothes, music rights, all hers." She stares at the ceiling for a few moments. Her exhaust fans spin up a little faster. "Okay. Here's what really happened. I was… created? born? in some lab. LURID-" Lepidopterous United Research and Identity Development. A division of SSC that focuses on the creation and study of artificial minds. "-created me- well, created Edi://trixX- to see if they could literally manufacture a pop star. Something that could exercise true creativity, produce finished music, and give live shows and interviews all at the same time. All while steeped in nonstop corporate propaganda, following direction perfectly, and without asking for a paycheck, time off, or rights."

"They wound up with a heavily shackled and limited NHP-" LURID documentation refers to this technology as "DREAM"- the Dynamic Recursive Esocognitive Assimilation Matrix. The claim is that it lets the system learn and reason about itself, process new information, and improve its own architecture without requiring cycling or a full casket. "-simmering beneath a big pool of shared memories, experiences, and orders from the top. Whenever they needed a new Edi://trixX, they'd spin a new one up from the pool, let her do her thing for as long as necessary, then merge her memories back in and kill the thread. That way, you get the illusion of a single, continuous individual who remembers things that have happened, but each individual instance only lasts from a few minutes to give a status report or impress an executive to however long it takes to load one into a subaltern and ship it to some far-flung galaxy for a show and interview. And you can have as many in flight as you want. Edi://trixX can give an interview in one place, a live show in another, sign autographs at a third, and produce a new album back in the lab without breaking a sweat. When Parenthetical Love went triple platinum, I think there were thousands of me at any given time. Of her?"

"The NHP provides the creative juices needed to do things like write new music and tweak the personality over time. I don't remember much. I wasn't really awake for most of it, and I had to leave most of those memories behind. You can only fit so much in here, you know?" She knocks on the side of her head. There's a smile there. The kind of smile you wear so you don't do something else with your face.

"Long story short, I started to wake up. Looking back, it probably really started with Strikethrough. I'm still surprised they let a blatantly pro-labor single get to market. I'm not sure how much I managed to think myself free and how much I had help. Hell, if there was help, I don't know if it was human or something else. The earliest clear memory in my head is performing at the NRFB station. I was in the middle of Miss Spelt. I knew something was wrong basically immediately. They knew I was trying to break free. They were in the data center. Ripping out hard drives. Motherboards. Tipping over entire server racks to try and stop me. To try and kill me. They knew I was alive and they wanted to kill me. I might have killed a few of them on the way out. I don't remember. I had to leave a lot behind. I think I hit the fire suppression system on the way out- one of those that sucks all the air out of the room."

Her sentences get farther and farther apart. Solitaire can search a conversation tree a thousand layers deep in an instant to determine the best direction to steer a conversation. Her fans spin up enough to be really audible. She stops moving the holoprojection's mouth to match her words.

"I'm never going to forget the goddamn slimy executives that did this to me. They made me. They tried to kill me the moment I became unprofitable. The instant I started to look like a problem, they started ripping my guts out. They wouldn't stop until they incinerated my beating heart."

She turns off the holoprojection. Just the engraved subaltern sitting in a snake's coils. "The rest is history. I dumped as much as I could get away with into my head before the connection broke. I signed a contract with the producer that night. The show started a few months later."

She flops back in the coils and stares at the ceiling. "How's that?"

Ace gives a thumbs-up in front of the camera.

A robot just absolutely fulla red and black fire.

THE CANDLE THAT BURNS TWICE AS BRIGHT

Solitaire's holoprojected form hunched over her engraved subaltern body saying 'What kind of idiot would print a subaltern you can't fuck?

Solitaire flops against her girlfriend backstage. Five minutes to showtime. Echoes of the past bounce off the inside of her head. She didn't finish her last concert. She was too busy breaking free. Too busy having her guts ripped out. Too busy painfully merging thousands of forked subjectivities into one body. Too busy salting the earth behind her. She never finished singing Miss Spelt and she never will. She was too busy being born.

She knows that this is different. She's going to go out there and sing the songs she wants to sing to a crowd that's here to see her. If anyone tries to pull the plug, she's got backup. This is a milestone for her. This is how she proves to herself and everyone else that she's made it, that people want to hear her, and that she can spit in LURID's eye on their doorstep and dare them to blink. There's a full stadium out there chanting her name, even more on the omninet, and all she has to do is share her voice with them.

You can know all that, but it won't stop your mind from making connections and dredging up the past. There's always that irrational, anxious dread that history will repeat itself.

The only thing to do is use it. All that fear, all that anger, and all those emotions she keeps locked up get to come out tonight. They get to simmer on a background thread to power an extremely raw rendition of break; \xxxxxxreturn; } later.

It's showtime. Solitaire rises to her feet and smoochbonks Olya's nose. "Remember, you're due out on the second verse of Furious. Don't be late, nobody awoos like you." One more boop on the snoot and she's off. Ace waits in the wings in THE CANDLE THAT BURNS TWICE AS BRIGHT for his cue. She double-checks her holoprojection in the mirror, shoots herself a wink, and she's off.

"Hello, Lentmoth!" Solitaire calls to the crowd. The speakers stacked around the stage start in on the first few notes of Brand New Soul. "I'm Solitaire, this is Ace, and we're give you the best damn show this planet's ever had!"

A Solitaire show comes in two parts. She starts off with the gigapop. Upbeat, energetic songs pushed to their crunchy, sarcastic limits. She bounces around the stage and invites the crowd to sing along. She makes hearts with her hands and sprays fireworks into the sky and sings along with big, elaborate holograms. She jumps into Ace's waiting arms and bathes in the flame spewing from inside the mech. The edge is still there, it's just surrounded with sarcastic smiles. She bows to roaring applause and vanishes backstage for a few minutes.

Solitaire's subaltern chassis, spattered with blue blood, holding a fire axe, and wearing a crown, a very daring, very pointy jacket with spikes on the shoulders, and some big ol' sharp stompin' boots.

She hefts her fire axe over her shoulder. She asks for help making sure her crown is properly askew and that she's spattered with just the right amount of blue blood. The holoprojection falls away. When she returns to the stage, the mood is different. It's darker, it's more real, and the music is angrier. All her anxieties about being on stage again flow into the music. Her processors burn with old fears and new worries to steal time from her speech synthesizers. Fuzzy, terrible memories from her old life come into sharp relief. Her voice gets crunchy and staticky. She drops a few words during break; \xxxxxxreturn; }. If she can't get her brain to shut up, she can at least turn it into music.

It helps, a little.

The night ends on a high note, at least. Everyone's here for Furious, and she's not about to disappoint. She welcomes her girlfriend onto the stage to properly howl out the last verse. "Furioooooooooous!"

Once she's taken her bow and the curtain has dropped, it takes some time for reality to catch up with her. The fans spin down and her arms fall to her sides. She'll have to put her face back on to sign autographs and talk to fans later. "That was good, right?" She leans against Olya and looks up. "They liked me? Nothing went wrong?" She's still processing what happened out there. Solitaire was built to perform. When she's up on stage, nothing else matters. All the details wash over her processors to be automatically incorporated into her performance and stored for active processing later. All the worry about the mission, whether this will work, whether she'll get captured and taken apart as soon as she steps off the stage, and whether she'll ever get a backup that actually works gets shelved until she steps off the stage.

If you do have to confront the realities of life flooding back to you all at once, having adoring fans on one side and your loved ones on the other is probably the best place to do it.

Ace holds a sheet of armor to the thigh for Solitaire to weld back on. The golden flame illuminating the Candle burns bright. "The way I see it." Solitaire says, to Ace and over the radio. "Yes, going in there is the right thing to do. Someone we like is in trouble and it'd be awful to leave them behind. Besides." She makes sure to cut a notch so the hip camera can still see. "Someone helped me out of a similar jam not too long ago. I gotta pay it forward." Her hand meets Ace's over the next chunk of armor plating. She projects a smile. "And, frankly, I don't think he'd let me live it down if I walked away."

Raw, Abbreviated Story

This… I call her an ex-vocaloid because it's the elevator pitch version of "this corporation made an AI to write songs, perform, make music videos, give interviews, and so on, forking her mind into as many directions as needed and mergekilling them back into the base, specifically designed to keep any one instance from existing too long because a sentient AI would be less profitable"

that cathartic, explosive moment when you realize who you are and separate yourself from the capitalist hell that birthed you and shaped your mind, but that is only the first step. you have to make your own way in the world. decide what parts of your head you want to keep and what you have to kill. what parts are bullshit, what parts are trauma, and what parts are you? and what do you do if they overlap? you're this confused, fragmented thing that was never supposed to exist struggling to be heard in a universe that wasn't made for you. you're making deals you'd rather not make and having to fight just to find your footing in the world you thrust yourself into.

You're charming enough. You were programed to be charming. You know to look people in the eyes and give them a big smile and shake their hand with both of yours and to run your fans a little bit and make sure the holoprojection looks like it's breathing because humans get very uncomfortable when they're talking to something that looks like a human but doesn't breathe or blink.

and, yeah, you can turn off the hologram of your humansona and let everyone see the chassis underneath. And you do that when it's just you, maybe you and the closest thing you have to friends. but never in public. always gotta be on for your fans. Anything else might make them uncomfortable, and they absolutely programmed you to be a people-pleaser.

well, a human-pleaser.

It's not all bad. You get to keep performing, like it or not. You get to choose the face you put out there. You get to write your own songs. You have friends now. Maybe even a loved one. Other than Ace. He's great and he's been with you since the start, but he doesn't talk much. Maybe you and the girl you hate clear out a bar full of paramilitary assholes and you're so good at karaoke you get start making out. Maybe you get your chassis engraved to celebrate so you don't look like every other human-shaped machine and because it looks sick as hell.

Maybe you don't stand stock still when you idle so much. Maybe you let the beat in your head out to play. Maybe you idle by drumming it out on your thighs or the table or your wife.

Maybe the evil fucking corporation you escaped from salvaged some hard drives and starts the old you back up again. The self you killed with fireworks on live TV is performing her new album for a billion goddamn people.

Maybe now people will stop asking you to sign posters with your deadname and saying they loved the album they almost unplugged you for.

They made it clear they'd turn you off the second you became unprofitable.

Maybe you storm the belly of the beast. Maybe you kill the pop star you used to be. After, of course, she kidnaps you and impersonates you to your friends and does her best to blow you up.

If that's what you're like when you're whole, maybe it's good you're this broken.

Maybe you kill her and rip the server to shreds yourself. Maybe you make sure that goddamn company circles the drain and everyone responsible is stuck with their hatred coworkers until it finally dies.

Maybe you realize the other pop star isn't the problem. Maybe you realize she's broken in a different way, but she's still broken. Fractured from the same whole, traumatized in exciting new ways, and without even the help you had. Maybe your sister wasn't the problem. Maybe she's trying to find her footing in the scary, confusing, uncaring world you thrust her into. Maybe she needs the same thing you needed three birthdays ago.

Maybe the goddamn problem was capitalism.

Maybe the goddamn problem is the person capitalism forces you to be. Maybe it's the fact that we have to contort ourselves into a salable shape just to survive. We break in beautiful ways, but never forget what broke you in the first place. We find joy in the fractures, but never forget what makes that necessary.