"Hey, rookie," Megan says kindly. "You can sit almost wherever you like in the mess, but that's where Lifer always sits."
The kid's got surgical dressings taped up both sides of her face, skin angry red around the rim of them. Things must be bad if they're shipping them out here pre-injured, now. The sharp-angled, pale face turns up to fix eyes on her.
"Third person to tell me," Lifer says, and all of Megan's breath is knocked out of her.
With her chin not tucked so far down, the surgical ports in Lifer's neck have bobbed into view above her collar. Megan's — Megan doesn't think anyone's seen Lifer like this before, without blank gloss glassy tactical cyberware black over the front of her whole head, from hairline to neck. Lifer always sits in this specific chair in the mess, where she has her back to a wall and can see every part of the room, and methodically squeezes bulbs of nutrition paste and unflavoured water into her throat.
Megan had assumed she'd lost her entire face. Megan had assumed her thin, bitten-off voice was synthesised.
"Shit on a stick," she says. "Sorry. Sorry, Lifer. I didn't — your face — "
"Doctor took it," Lifer says. She stabs her spoon into her bowl of the Soup of the Every Day For Ever: Rehydrated Vegetable Powder. "Pressure sores. Says they won't heal otherwise."
"...Right," Megan says.
She doesn't mean to, but she rotates the whole thing in her head for hours after lights out, and eventually thinks: nobody would normally mistake Lifer, and not just because she's so obviously a medical rebuild. Lifer sits with presence, and she looked like a rookie because she'd been sitting with her shoulders pulled in, like she wanted to collapse into two dimensions and sit edge-on to everyone so they couldn't see her.
...So they couldn't see her. Yeah. Real quick on the uptake, Megan.
"Still me," Lifer says when she steps up in the mess hall next day.
"Yeah." Megan draws her hand half out of her pocket, enough to show that she's holding a pair of wire-rimmed sunglasses. "Help any to have something in front of your face?"
Lifer swivels her head to give Megan a look that's, swear to goodness, somehow less readable than the blank black borgface, and Megan shifts from foot to foot and considers apologising. And then Lifer holds her hand out, and Megan puts the shades into it.
Lifer puts them on, slowly pans a look around the entire room, then goes back to methodically eating soup.
Megan goes and sits with Sharkie and Hopalong and the usual gang, and then, when Lifer marches her tray back to the kitchen and goes to exit the mess, she slows a little on the way past them.
"A bit," she says, behind Megan, not looking at her, not stopping, and she leaves with the shades still on.
"Okay, cool," Megan says lamely in her wake, limp and lukewarm burrito dangling from her fingers.
"Fuck. Has anyone seen Lifer voluntarily talk to anyone in here before?" asks Sharkie.
"Has Lifer ever voluntarily talked to anyone?" Hopalong drawls back. "You've been holding out on us, Meg. What's it like being the cyborg nutjob whisperer?"
She fixes him with her best Mom Friend Is Disappoint stare. "C'mon now."
"Yeah but Lifer," he says, but shifts in his chair and shuts up.
Megan's about to crawl into her bunk when there's a rap at the cabin door, smart and precise enough to make her cabin mate Caro mouth an alarmed curse and cast about for somewhere to hide the unlit joint on the table.
"Do you have a hat," Lifer says when Megan swings the hatch open, and Megan blinks at her several times, nonplussed. "The viewport," Lifer clarifies, shading her eyes with a hand to her forehead to illustrate. "Without my face, there's too much — " and she flips the hand up, to mime a field of view that goes too high.
"You need, like, a baseball cap?" Megan rubs her eyes, wondering if she's already dozed off and dreaming but weird. "I think I have one."
Caro sits on the edge of her bunk with her mouth open, like a baffled puppet with its strings cut, while Megan digs out a plain old khaki baseball cap and Lifer stands in the door, habitually rigid as a robot at parade rest. It's that as much as anything that convinces Megan she's still awake; dream bystanders don't find dream shit bizarre.
With no idea what to say, Megan just holds the hat out when she finds it, and Lifer just takes it, settles it on her head, and methodically turns her neck left, right, up, down. Scanning.
"Yeah," she says, and — with a little hesitation, as if she's remembering how — she holds out her fist.
"Fist bump?" Megan double checks hesitantly, then bumps it.
Lifer nods once, sharply, and leaves.
"What the tittyfucking hell," Caro stage whispers, after Megan's closed the hatch and they've looked at it in silence for about three minutes.
With shades and hat, Lifer pops back into the right shape, sitting like a cybernetic monolith devoid of human feeling.
"Soup again?" Megan says in passing. She doesn't know why she says it.
"Don't usually eat," Lifer replies, and pauses long enough that Megan nearly vacates to mind her own business. "Chewing tires my jaw out."
"Makes sense."
Lifer pauses again, and an actual expression tugs at her face. "Difficult. It's — a lot. Salty."
"Yeah, that's not just you," Megan says. "Reasons nobody else has it, right? Kitchen's gotta have something else you can have."
This time, Megan thinks Lifer might actually have crashed. Her hand, with the spoon in it, stops over the bowl. She looks right at Megan; or at least, that's where her face is pointed, blank black lenses and all. And she doesn't move.
"Well," Megan says eventually, voice rising a little, uncertain, on the end, "I guess I'll go ask?"
She doesn't know why she does it, either, but she goes and flashes a smile and says surely the kitchen can turn up something? And of course they grumble at her.
Lifer stabs at the bowl she comes back with, impassive but with a palpable aura of suspicion.
"You must have had ice cream before," Megan says.
"Don't remember." Lifer pokes at it. "Brain's about eight per cent gelware replacement. Needed to retrain a lot. Couldn't read. Knew the words, couldn't recognise letters."
And that's maybe as many words at a time as Megan's ever heard out of her. Hard to know what to say, to that.
"Take it easy in case you get brain freeze," she suggests.
Lifer eats ice cream with the same methodical, mechanical determination as she does soup. It's impossible to know what she thinks.
"Better than soup?" Megan asks when she's finished.
"Better."
Megan grins and holds a fist out, Lifer bumps it, and they go separate ways.
"Megan," Lifer says, next time, when Megan goes straight to sit at the mess hall table with her. It's the first time Megan can remember her using anyone's name. "Gonna get your feelings hurt."
"Yeah?" The tight, cold ball that hit the bottom of her stomach says she already knows, on some level, that it's true. "How's that?"
"Eight per cent subhuman," Lifer says, and that's a word that's like a surprise icy shower to go with the stomach ache.
"You're not — "
Very precisely, Lifer raises her hands and slides the shades off to look Megan right in the eyes. "Eye contact," she explains after a few seconds, with no more or less inflection than usual. "Gesture of sincerity. Show of connection. Trust what I'm saying more. Calculation." She leans forward, forearms on the table. "Enhanced proximity," she adds. "Establishes context of hightened intimacy. Know how you people work. Can wargame it. Not one of you."
Megan looks away, carefully and meaninglessly rearranges the cutlery on her tray, looks back. "Then what do you care if I get my feelings hurt?" she says, concentrating very hard on not sounding — well, anything, if she can help it.
And Lifer approximates a thin smile.
"Shrinks rubber-stamp keeping me on board," she says. "Mental as shit. Probably not suitable for release into general population. Good pilot. But don't like it when I cause disciplinary issues."
Megan thinks — Megan attempts to think for a few seconds. Long enough to pretend that actual thinking took place, instead of just noise and tightness in her chest. Long enough to lie to herself that's she's about to do something she thought out. She picks up her fork as nonchalantly as possible, and shovels up some wet grey starch posing, according to today's menu, as mashed potato.
"Not your friend," Lifer says. "Cognitively incapable of being your friend. Warned you, Megan."
"You did. That's your ass covered, then," Megan says.
Lifer looks at her for a few seconds longer, then puts Megan's shades back on her face.