do: read; don't: visit 214

[giftedandtalented]

Mehitabel reads a lot.

She starts calling herself "Tab", for short, not that anyone calls her anything apart from Kers. She writes suitably encrypted emails to Aelise about ideas for fixing the world - mostly she asks questions, to start, forming a picture of the exact problem she has to solve.

She misses her parents, but not very much. At least she got to say goodbye.

When her brain won't absorb new information, she bounces around in zero-g.

After six months, Aelise visits again.

Tab says, "Anybody you store up here must be important somehow. If I don't know about the other secret person, I won't know how to come up with ideas that work with them being important however they're important."

Comments

[pythbox]

"I should know? I just heard it from somebody once," he shrugs.

[giftedandtalented]

"Well, how do they run the worlds once they take them over, then?"

[pythbox]

"Pretty well, I guess."

[giftedandtalented]

"No, I mean - what do they do? They've had more time to think of ideas than me, maybe they have good ones I can copy?"

[pythbox]

"I should know?" he repeats, frustrated. "I don't follow Bella around all day watching her empress."

[giftedandtalented]

"Oh," muses Tab.

[pythbox]

Harley sighs.

[giftedandtalented]

"You knew she killed the Chelsa in your world, though, what did she do when all those people who liked her didn't have her any more?"

[pythbox]

"Uh, killed a bunch and hired the rest?"

[giftedandtalented]

"How did she get them to work for her if she just killed a person they liked?"

[pythbox]

"Oh, that. Um, her daughter could un-Chelsea people," he says. "Wipe out what she put on, I mean, not grow back what she cut off."

[giftedandtalented]

"Wow," says Tab. "Do you think she would work on Chelsa too?"

[pythbox]

"Yeah," he says. "She couldn't do a whole planet in one shot, though, and if she did there'd be riots. Even just the fifty-some people she got for her mom's takeover, some shit went down - I mean, suddenly everybody didn't automatically like each other, you know?"

[giftedandtalented]

"I don't know," says Tab. "I'm safe but that's just me."

[pythbox]

"Ask Aelise, then, I bet she remembers," he says.

[giftedandtalented]

"She remembers what it's like to have never liked everybody. I don't think she remembers what it's like to stop."

[pythbox]

"I don't either. I wasn't there."

[giftedandtalented]

"This is a really hard problem," sighs Tab, looking at her notes.

[pythbox]

"No shit," says Harley.

[giftedandtalented]

Tab stays a while longer, since Harley is lonely, but it doesn't take her long to agree with him that she's not making much difference on her own. And he has nothing else of much use to tell her. She goes back to Kers, after.

[queensidecastle]

"Well that was interesting," says Kers.

[giftedandtalented]

"Were you listening?" Tab inquires. This doesn't surprise her, although she would have liked to be told.

[queensidecastle]

"I usually am."

[giftedandtalented]

"That is useful to know," says Tab. "I don't think Harley knew it."

[queensidecastle]

"Of course he didn't. He doesn't know I'm here, remember?"