Moiré scowls balefully at the billboard on the opposite side of the street: currently hosting a bus-sized poster of a hyperreal colour-saturated macro photograph of lush green lawn. TOUCH GRASS, it says over the top of the photo, in huge white block sans-serif, the disingenuous WYSIWYG plain-speaking design language of a tech corp logo redesign. Much, much smaller, hidden in the corner, it admits: PAID FOR BY THE CHURCH OF THE UNIVERSAL INTERCONNECT.
“Fucking mycelium cult,” she says darkly, swinging her baseball bat around as if somebody’s about to pop out of nowhere and evangelise at her in a way answerable with violence to the teeth.
Southbridge tuts and reflexively hamburger-menus herself, piously sketching the lines across her chest. Moiré turns the scowl on her.
“Don’t come the good Cathodic with me,” she says tartly, “I’ve seen you interface with things that needed D-sub adaptors just to plug in—”
Between them and at their backs, the shop door swings open with a loud, flat electronic honk. Erin skips out onto the sidewalk, all three robotgirls beneath a sign consisting of a rather sad-looking taxidermied snake wrapped Ouroboran around a globe, wordlessly and traditionally advertising Python, web dev, witchcraft.
“You fixed or what?” Moiré says.
“Kinda!” Erin chirps.
Moiré hefts the bat.
“Don’t hit me again!” Erin whines. “I’m going to be! Tanith reckoned since rebooting didn’t shift it, we needed to take drastic measures.”
“That’s why we came here,” Moiré says. “What? Did she do some kind of quartz oscillator woo?”
“No, she drew up a contract to say it can’t live in my head rent-free!” Erin says cheerily.
”…It’s moving out so you don’t charge it rent?”
“Well kinda,” Erin says. “Got to ask Sarah to drive us over to the legal advice clinic? It wants to check its tenant’s rights first—”
“JTAG fucking Christ,” Moiré says.
“Moiré’s real mean,” Erin says mournfully to Bell, in the waiting room at the legal advice clinic, while the others are warding Sarah’s antique MILF-wagon SUV inside circles of reflective tape impassable to subsapient traffic warden bots.
“She’s just being tsundere because she doesn’t like sharing her best girl!” Bell says. “You have got to start taking your firewall seriously.”
“It was fairies!” Erin protests. “Could have happened to anyone! Nobody likes being nagged to reboot to finish installing updates!”
“Ooh, fairies,” Bell says. “Well, if it was fairies, and definitely not lax opsec, you’re lucky they didn’t make you call sleep for 2,147,483,647 wallclock seconds, Chip Van Winkle—”
Erin pouts.
“Anyway, thought you’d be more glad to get rid of it,” Bell says. “Can’t be much fun, timeslicing with it.”
“It’s not so bad,” Erin shrugs. “We set some ground rules about making sure I get recharged and not signing me up for mailing lists or having sex with Moiré—”
“Uh-huh,” Bell says, and Erin’s face creases slowly into unhappiness.
”…What do you mean, uh-huh?”
“Nothing,” Bell says solemnly.
“What do you mean, uh-huh!”
“Well, as long as you trust a rogue logic problem possessing your body to do exactly as it’s told and not play with your toys, that’s very sweet and trusting of you and I’m sure it’s perfectly fine,” Bell says, earnestly patting her hand.
“Aaaaaah!” Erin wails.
