That They Could Have A Guiding Satellite

[Ashlie Minamida]

In Ashlie's apartment...

The once immaculate and barely lived in apartment of glass-and-metal design aesthetics is in a lot more general disarray these days. Generic pictures of landscapes and abstract art still dot the walls here and there but now there's the detritus of life all around. Some dirty dishes left in the sink, books left on a table and the couch, decorative bowls no longer sit perfectly aligned on a dining table that's never been used, instead a jacket has been haphazardly tossed onto it. The cushions on the couch have mostly been shoved into one corner to create a kind of space of supreme comfy-ness. Shoes lie where they've been kicked off. And then there are the more unusual bits, like a set of unrolled blueprints or a soldering kit along with simple circuit boards and various other electronics.

Ashlie walks past all of it. It's not as neat as it used to be but there's a part of her that enjoys the little signs of life, be they from her or (as most of them are) Heather's doing. After Ashlie's miraculous re-emergence the young Technopath had showed up at her door and decided to move in while simultaneously giving her a cold shoulder the way only teenagers can say 'I missed you and I'm mad you disappeared in the first place'. But either way Heather had decided Ashlie would now fully get to play the role of surrogate parent and Ashlie had been glad to.

Not that it's easy, as Heather has so skillfully demonstrated in the workshop. She's full of repressed anger, abandonment issues, paranoia and an utter lack of boundary issues that come with being a child dependent on Miranda West for a decade and a half. She's yelled at Ashlie, staunchly refuses to do any chores, locks herself in her room at the slightest mishap and constantly combs through any electronics within reach, including Ashlie. A non-insignificant part of network maintenance is ironing out the glitches and non-sense left behind by her chattering with computer processes. Once Ashlie had to spend an hour restoring the grading records because somebody had managed to convince her to change their exam scores in the system.

But underneath that Ashlie could see the brilliant girl shining through. She is compassionate when she manages to let herself care about someone like her friend Nina and she'd gone well beyond what anyone could expect of a teenager when she'd saved Ashlie by going up against a fully-grown adult man. She could tell that given the chance she would be extra-ordinary. Eccentric, almost certainly, but who is she to judge. When allowed to talk to computers and tinker she opened up and she'd obviously been excited about showing her something when she'd run into Lisette and her. It had taken a while but Heather had finally gotten over her perception that modifying electronics intrinsically meant harming them and genuinely enjoyed putting together things that 'sing right'. Which didn't always mean they did something productive or retained whatever function they'd had before she got her hands on them but they always functioned with incredible efficiency and more importantly made her overjoyed to explain what she'd done to Ashlie.

Except today she'd been denied that by circumstance. Holding the now cracked walkie-talkie in her hands Ashlie gently knocks on Heathers door and then sits down with her back to it. She knows she's not going to let her into the room right this second but that's okay. "I have your walkie-talkie. The case cracked a little but I patched it up. Want to tell me what it does?"

[Heather West]

For a long, drawn-out minute there's no response. Then a quiet "It's a paired radio. It's scrambled and only works when I'm the one using the other half." Heather's voice crackles from the walkie-talkie. Followed by a delayed "Over."

[Ashlie Minamida]

Ashlie can't help but smile a little. "And you put that together all by yourself? That's pretty amazing. Over."

[Heather West]

"It's just a radio." Pause. "Over."

[Ashlie Minamida]

"Still. I'm sorry you didn't get to show it to me proper."

[Heather West]

A long pause, then an exasperated "You forgot to say over. Over." with just a hint of amusement, followed by the soft whir-click of the door's magnetic lock unlatching.

[Ashlie Minamida]

Ashlie slowly gets up and opens the door. The curtains are drawn, plunging the room into a kind of moody gloom but there's a glow of an electronic screen coming from underneath the bed. Ashlie carefully sits down on the foot end of the bed and let's a couple of minutes pass in silence, interrupted only by the occasional clicking of Heather awkwardly fiddling with a knob on her own radio.

"You know I would never bring anyone I didn't trust down to the workshops, yes?" It's not a lie on a technicality, though the few people Ashlie had disapproved of being in the Point she hadn't been in a position to deny, be it for being shackled to her programming still or lieing semi-dormant within a swarm of nanites. She certainly hadn't brought them there and both of them she'd chased out as soon as she'd been able to.

[Heather West]

"But she's...!" comes the almost immediate response as Heather pushes herself out from underneath the bed on her back, like an engineer on a rolling board coming out from underneath an engine.

[Ashlie Minamida]

"Heather." Ashlie cuts in gently but firmly. "I'm not saying whatever you saw isn't true. I know she's not who she says she is now, but--"

[Heather West]

"I've seen her with--" Heather tries to cut in again.

[Ashlie Minamida]

"But. Many people have things they'd rather not be dug up. We talked about this. Everyone gets a second chance because the data never tells you everything. You thought I was a trick of your brother's. I've dismissed Will's opinions on hurting his satellite friend. Miss Kinney has done awful things for the US government. None of those things weren't real but all of them were what?"

[Heather West]

"Not the whole story." Heather mutters as she dejectedly gets up from the floor and plops down next to Ashlie.

[Ashlie Minamida]

"And we give people a chance to show us who they are." Ashlie says and puts her arm around Heather's shoulder, pulling her into a one-armed hug against her side.

[Heather West]

"But what if she's bad? Like really really bad and she'll only show you when it's too late?" she asks, picking up on Ashlie refusing to listen to what she knows so instead she decides to talk in hypotheticals. "Like how you said my Mom tried to get me to do bad things."

[Ashlie Minamida]

"Tell you what. If she does anything bad now and you catch her I promise I will listen but if we judge everyone by what they might do nobody could ever be friends with anybody and it's up to us to be better than that, no matter how scary it is. Do you really think she'd be able to sneak something past me and you? Not to mention Natalie, Will and everybody else?"

[Heather West]

"Maybe. If she's sneaky enough..."

[Ashlie Minamida]

"I know it's hard to be brave sometimes. That's why it's so important we try as much as we can and to help each other to be brave. Doing the right thing is difficult and we don't want to make it worse for someone who's trying."

[Heather West]

"Even if they might be bad people." she frowns.

[Ashlie Minamida]

"Especially if they might be 'bad' people who are trying not to be." she nods.

[Heather West]

"That sucks!" Heather eloquently deduces.

[Ashlie Minamida]

"It does sometimes. It really does." Ashlie smiles a bit ruefully and ruffles Heather's hair, much to the teen's chagrin.