“You should go for it,” Angela says, perched on the edge of Addy’s desk, legs crossed and heel idly kicking, a long half-hour off the end of the deadest shift, late evening before the weekend.
“Go for what?” Addy says, exasperated, trying to fill out a batch of rumpled WR-7s with one of the new regulation 100% recyclable pens. They’re awful: ink inconsistent — sometimes too thin, sometimes clumpy, sometimes stretchily self-adhesive instead of flowing onto the paper at all, like weird mucus — and the thickness of the barrel walls shaved so far down to cut costs that they flex and bend springily in the hand.
“Gloria,” Angela chirps, and Addy’s hand tightens on the pen hard enough for the barrel to crumple. She folds her arms with a quelling harrumph! to hide it.
“Go for it with my straight and married boss who’s married and straight and also my boss?” she says tartly.
“You’re foxy!” Angela says. “No cishets in fox holes and all that?”
“That’s not how that—” Addy breaks off, teeth gritted. That’s how they get you, she reminds herself; like that old saw they trot out as an example of a linguistic paradox, that isn’t really, Have you stopped beating your wife yet? The trick is not the language at all, it’s all in the social framing, same as the apocryphal politician declaring I don’t want to prove my opponent fucked a pig; I just want to make the son of a bitch deny it! The trick to fighting psyops shit is not to concede the framing, and she’s on the back foot already by virtue of not having gone first. “Foxy, eh?” she says instead, swerving into a snide tone. “You copping to furry shit, Caplan?”
“Oh, you know it,” Angela says, holding a hand out to admire her own nail polish. “Spitroasted by buff wolves, that’s my idea of a good weekend. C’mon, she’s only married to Major Nordstrom, homewrecking that can only be doing her a favour.”
“I’m not looking to wreck any homes, thanks,” Addy bites out, and Angela gives her a sideways look in which the embedded calculation is palpable: some past trauma? Some particular principle? Any kind of fixed point to note on Angela’s mental charts, as a future fulcrum?
“The sanctity of marriage,” Angela says finally, crisp, “is the kind of propaganda invented to justify the social destruction of people who escape systemically privileged assholes, without calling into question whether being assholes factors into the escapees’ motives. Offering people alternatives does not constitute an ontological transgression, because people can say no.”
“Well, consider me lectured,” Addy says. “I’ll be sure to incorporate your lessons on the moral foundation of socially formalised pair-bonding next time you suggest I should make a pass at my straight married boss.”
She rubber-stamps a WR-7 DENIED with perhaps excess force.
“Tense!” Angela coos. “And rough. That hand getting a lot of exercise, is she?”
“Every night I do an hour of CQC drill and beat a training dummy to death imagining it’s you, to help me sleep,” Addy tells her.
“Hot,” Angela sighs. “Shame you’re not a buff wolf.”
God, Addy misses mech piloting; your fuck-awful squadmates can’t come and sit on your instrument panel to annoy you. What she wouldn’t give to simply mute an incoming channel and not hear Angela any more, some days.
(Muting her squadmates was part of the pattern of behaviour that got her put on a desk instead, of course. And Angela, she suspects darkly, has been quietly tasked to probe and report on her psychological state; nobody’s naturally this fucking annoying.
(And who the fuck told her that Addy’s callsign was Foxhole? How deep does the tricksy psych eval rabbit hole go?)
“I just think it would do you good to get laid,” Angela says cheerily, kicking her feet some more. “You’re wound tighter than a rubber-band desktop ballista!”
“You can have someone’s eye with one of those,” Addy observes with a heavy air of generalised menace (which also featured in the report that got her desked) and Angela’s shoulders shake like Addy’s funny.
What is wrong with her.
“She cries in the bathroom sometimes,” Angela adds, a masterfully derailing psyops non sequitur.
“What?” Addy says, caught off guard. Shit! She’s shown weakness.
“Gloria,” Angela says, rolling her eyes. “She comes in to work and cries in the bathroom before starting her shift. How have you not noticed, you’re supposed to be clinically paranoid?”
Addy carefully doesn’t demand who leaked her medical assessment to Angela, grinding her teeth. Reluctantly, she gets distracted instead by the upsetting mental picture of Gloria quietly weeping into a tissue in the office bathroom, a fluorescent-lit liminal purgatory, tailor-made for succumbing to sucking ennui and despair.
“I just think,” Angela says, “that you could both stand to remember you’re human beings, and that can even be fun sometimes. You know?”
“No,” Addy says reflexively (…which also contributed to getting her desked.)
“So you’re coming for drinks with the girls from Requisitions tomorrow?” Angela non sequiturs again, the querying tonal rise at the end pure fakery; it’s a statement.
“I’m…watering my plants,” Addy says. She says it like a statement; they both know it’s the token offer of a feeble excuse that’ll fly as well as a DiGiorno with an MRAMM up the back end. Clubbing with the girls is clearly a particularly evil covert test of her social rehabilitation — how the hell is she meant to fake passing that? She can’t download the scoring criteria for it off the MedNet and give them the correct answers, so what do they expect her to do?
“Gloria’s coming!” Angela says smugly.
This is hell, Addy thinks resignedly. Give her battlefield death in an underpowered frame; at least that makes sense.
“Oh good,” she says dutifully. “Maybe she’ll…have…fun?” and Angela beams like Addy’s a particularly slow test subject who’s just flailingly stumbled upon an acceptance criterion.
“That’s the spirit!” she says, and finally gets off Addy’s desk and saunters away to do her photocopying.
