Stef Mimosa vs. The World - Chapter 1

I'm an agent.

And this is news?

Yeah...everyday.

Stef stared out her office window, wondering if the suits - lawyer-business-men-suits, not the good agenty-narcy suits - could see into the Agency from the surrounding buildings, or if the glass was mirrored and impenetrable, or if there was some sort of magic projecting a facade of normalcy to the world.

And then there was the issue of- SQUIRREL!

Pigeon, you idiot.

It demanded my attention, therefore SQUIRREL!

Stop the brain, etc, etc.

You are such a spoilsport.

The SQUIRREL!/pigeon had gone by the time she looked again. She stared at her HUD, and sighed as she fought the urge to adjust it, there was no more tweaking she could do to make it easier to handle. More apps and widgets, sure, but nothing that would really help - it was already on the lowest setting.

It was embarrassing to think that she, world-class hacker extraordinaire that she was - or wasn't - couldn't handle having an actual computer in her head.

She'd tried max setting for five minutes before running back to the minimal settings and lying down with a headache. It had been Lucy in the factory with the conveyor belt: too fast, too much, impossible to handle.

Even on the low settings, it was still a massive amount of data. Worse than the overload of data was that it made her notice everything. It forced her to pay attention - walking down the street was no longer an easy-ish task, now she automatically watched the crowed, tooltips appearing as she looked at people, the scanning and face recognition software kicking in if she looked at people for more than a few seconds. At least staring at the ground was no longer dangerous to do whilst walking - there was some sort of auto-program that let her easily avoid walking into people... or traffic.

But even staring at the ground, movement made her attention shift - even if it was only a pigeon, or an odd-shaped piece of trash. It was ridiculous. It was extremely cool, but it was taxing. It was part of being a narc.

Requiring was second nature now. Shifting was becoming easier. But... being made to snap-to and notice everything like a real person was difficult. It also made long sessions of coding hard - the world didn't just slip away like it used to. So much harder to be a code monkey. So much harder to be a hacker. So much harder to be herself. It wasn't fair, but she had no basis for comparison.

There was a knock, and she spun to face her office door. Curt.

She lifted a hand and the door popped open. 'Yeah?'

Curt stepped into her office, his uniform all nice and pressed, putting her nascent professionalism to shame. 'You were supposed to meet me in the gym forty-five minutes ago.'

She tried to look innocent. 'Was I?'

'Newbie...'

'I was doing paperwork!'

He crossed the room and looked at her desk. 'These are,' he tilted his head to look at the "paperwork", 'gaming mags.'

'Correction,' she said, 'they're back issues.'

He stared at her.

She leaned forward, letting her elbows rest on the desk. 'Dorian hired me, then I was a recruit, then I was dead, then I was out of the country, then I was out of the country in another country.'

She heard his foot tapping on the soft blue carpet. 'So?'

'Do you know how many magazines, blogs, webcomics and memes I've missed?'

He flipped the closest magazine closed. 'Duty first.'

'If I get up and do my duty, that will consist of you beating the crap out of me for an hour, and-'

'Yeah, Stef, because I've got such warm fuzzy memories about Russia.' He required a chair and sat opposite her, stacking the closed magazines into a small pile.

She stared at him for a moment. 'I'm not talking about that.'

He gave her an incredulous look. 'You're not?'

'I've told you. Eighteen times. I'm over it.'

'Yeah. Right. So what are you talking about then?'

'What I do when you hit me.'

'Your agent training.'

She shook her head. 'It isn't training, it's programming, and I'm not part of it. It'd be different if I knew what was going on, or what I was going to do next, but it just completely bypasses me and does as it pleases. I didn't tell you, my external training,.. In Hyde, my contact glomped me and I tried to choke her out because it was construed as an attack.'

'Wow.'

'It's not just hurting innocents though, it's the actual process. It's so weird, it's... you know that ugly feeling you get in your brain when you're about to fall? It's that, but for as long as the program is in charge.'

'You'll get used to it.'

'Can't I just shoot everyone? At least I get to be in control for that.'

'No, newbie, that would be bad. We need some people alive, remember, some people are reasonable, and others just have really good info that we need.'

'You aren't going to leave me alone are you?'

He smiled. 'Not unless you order me to, ma'am.'

'And then you'll run to Ryan and tattle on me.'

He nodded. 'Damn straight. Half an hour, then you can go back to your geeking.'

'Curt, you're a Trekkie, you've got no right to look down on my geekery.'

'Vulcan chicks are hot, it's like the ultimate repressed librarian deal.'

She slapped herself, and let her mind restart. '...wow, TMI.'

He stood. 'Now, newbie, or I'm going to Ryan.'

'Is there anything I can guilt trip you about, blackmail you with, or otherwise convince you not to?'

'No.'

'Crap.'

She stood and followed him, dragging her feet the entire way to the gym. He cleared the few recruits from the gym with his usual orders, and closed the doors behind them.

'Taylor has his own gym,' she said, 'I don't see why I can't, even if it's only a tiny one.'

'I've been over this.'

'And six months is ages!'

He pulled off his jacket, his formal uniform morphing into his training uniform, then began to stretch. 'When you say things like that, it makes it hard for me to remember that you outrank me.'

She smirked. 'I've also got a massively larger IQ.'

'Yeah well I've-' He coughed. 'I think it's only fair to warn you,' he said. 'People are going to talk.'

'People do that,' she said, 'duct tape helps.' She waited for him to hit her, so that her programming could kick in, but he stood there, looking at her expectantly. 'Did you mean about something specific?'

'About us,' he said with an awkward look. 'We kick them out of the gym to be in here by ourselves, or we run sims, just the two of us. It's inevitable.'

She stared at him, trying to process what he'd said. 'Oh. Ohhh. I get you now. Oh. Ew.' She made a face. 'Seriously?'

'It's how people think.'

'Well people are stupid and wrong. Well, that's a good general rule anyway. Argh, if I say anything, it'll be "oooh, the lady doth protest too much". See, this is why I shouldn't train. Or leave my office.'

'It's not your fault.'

'Oh,' she said, 'believe me, I'm not blaming me.'

He leaned forward. 'Trust me, this is better than the alternative.'

'Which is?'

'If you were, ah, training with Ryan. They'll assume, like I used to, that you two are-'

Emergency Protocol One.

'Lalalalalalala!' she screamed as she pressed her hands to her ears. 'I can't hear you!'

'Sure you can,' he whispered.

She dropped her hands and pouted. 'I can't help the way my stupid body works. And if I'm bugged, I wasn't impugning Jonesy's work.'

'...why do you think you're bugged?'

'I'm literally property. I'm an experiment. I have no human rights. If I was them, I'd bug me.'

'Stef-'

'And why would people, or you, not that you're not people, you know what I mean, assume something like that?'

'Because it was the most logical reason as to why he was keeping you around. If you pick one word for the combat guys, it's "jocks", "geeks" for the techs, for us...it's harder. We've got to be a combination, but we're also the public face on the incident level. Clarke's only if it makes it to the media, but when we're out and about on a mission or whatever, we're the sensible people in suits that people want to talk to. That doesn't exactly seem to be your strong, ah, suit.'

'Being sensible or being a person?'

'You punched Brian in the nuts!'

'He provoked me.'

'Yeah, and if you're wearing that suit, you can't rise to the occasion like that. You didn't seem to have any of the other qualifications either. That combined with...seeing him come out of your room on phoenix night, and you pretty much telling me as much the next morning...can't blame a guy for assuming.'

She blinked slowly. 'I told you what?'

'This was before I understood that you really don't do double-entendres and innuendo. You were all "ooh, I was flying" - points for Freud, and "amazing" and all that.'

'And you thought...' she required a cookie and quickly inhaled it.

'Yeah, well, sorry, ok?'

'And did everyone else think that as well?'

He shrugged. 'Don't know, newbie, you really weren't around long enough to make any kind of lasting impression.' He paused for a moment. 'If it had been a rumour though, I would have been kind of glad, for once it would have been a rumour about Ryan that wasn't a defamation of character. It would have been... normal. Hook-ups and who's sleeping with who, that's supposed to be the normal caliber of Agency rumours. That, and maybe speculation as to what's in the basement. Not...how many innocents the boss has killed or if he did off his girlfriend. Gossip here feels...dirty, and not in the good way.'

'I don't like rumours,' she said, 'or gossip, it's all so...horrid.'

'Get used to it, Stef, you're a femme agent, there aren't too many of those, so people are going to spread rumours, make up theories and probably...' He pulled a small notebook from his pocket and flipped it open. 'Rule 34 you.'

'...ok, I'm going back to my office now.'

He grabbed her arm, just long enough to stop her from walking away. 'Get over it, newbie,' he said, 'there's a lot worse things in this world than to be the subject of fetish and rumour.'

She stared at the ground. 'I'm not built to handle this kind of crap.'

He took a step back, then slowly circled her, giving her a critical eye. 'Sure you are, ma'am. Agent software version 3.5, upgraded to 4.2, just like every other agent here. So you are in fact, built to deal with whatever's thrown at you.'

'Why don't you be the agent, and I'll be the bossy recruit?'

'You want this, right? To be wearing the suit, to be conscious, to be alive?'

'...yeah.'

'Then actually act like it,' he snapped. 'I've got Aide clearance, and I've read your file, the parts that aren't classified anyway, and they can pull the plug on your project at any point. If you aren't doing your duty, if you aren't showing willingness, if you aren't good enough, you...die. Or get recycled, or locked up in the basement.'

'I know,' she said, 'you don't need to remind me.'

'So hit me.'

'Stop telling me to hit you. Just hit me.'

'We might, with a decade, be able to get you to throw a decent punch on your own.'

'Weak hacker arms are weak hacker arms.'

'I will get you to run laps if I have to.'

She punched him in the chest, and he brought his arm around to hit her. As she saw this, the program kicked in, and she dodged. He required a gun and aimed it at her, which she quickly knocked out of his hand. A fast, flat palm to his chest knocked him back a few feet...just far enough to let him require another gun and fire it.

The shot hit her in the knee, and it collapsed from under her, two rounds to the chest finished her off, and she disappeared from the gym. A few boring seconds later, she reappeared.

'Gun play,' she said, 'that's new.'

'You're an agent,' he said, 'people are going to shoot at you.'

'My favourite Captain is Archer!'

He shot her again, and this time, she dodged.