Chapter Text
Sekai, Asa, and Elane discussed the punitive fines they’d been hit with for nearly contaminating the incinerator with Sekai’s dead body.
“I cannot fucking believe this shit,” Elane was saying. “I was so close to having the money saved for my teethwork, and they went and scooped my account. That’s robbery.”
“There’s an opt-out clause to slow down insta-fines,” Asa told her, “I’m paying mine off in installments.”
“Well goodie-for-fucking-you for reading the twenty thousand words of fine print on every mandatory agreement form you ever touch,” Elane hissed. “This is all your fault, by the way, if you hadn’t gone and tried to murder Sekai—”
“Stop joking about that, it’s not funny,” Asa said, with real distress. He glanced to Sekai, then away again.
Sekai picked at her lunchgreens. They were barely green, what with all the processing and re-processing they’d undergone. It was anyone’s guess as to whether they’d ever actually been green plants in the first place, or whether the green was dye added to imitative microbial sheets. Maybe they would be greener, if it was dye.
To think she might have died yesterday if the creepy SecUnit hadn’t been stationed right there to jump down and fish her out of the incinerator.
“Do you think they talk to each other?” Sekai asked.
“Who?” Asa asked.
“SecUnits.”
Elane grimaced, and exchanged a weary look with Asa. “Sekai, they’re bots. They don’t talk.”
“It talked to me,” Sekai insisted.
Elane and Asa exchanged another look.