Dinar and I were too tired, when we finally got in, to explore the exotic details of our hotel room beyond confirming the presence of beds. Windows polarized against the dawn as soon as we lay down; a few hours later they cleared on a cirrus-streaked late afternoon.
“Why are the windows being mean?” muttered Dinar blearily.
I rubbed my eyes, frustrated that I couldn’t take sufficient advantage of my first night in months without a crying baby. “Maybe it’s time for that banquet they warned us about?”
On a normal trip I’d stay in a neighborhood guesthouse, or with a family from the host network. During my Transit Year I slept on the train, draped next to whoever I’d been talking with when I ran out of steam. The hotel seemed like something out of a historical novel, luxurious and anonymous. Velvet draped beds and windows; an old-fashioned hard screen hung from the gilt-crusted wall. Images from century-old films adorned the rest of the room, long-haired actors locked in denim-and-sequin embraces.
I rubbed my eyes again, feeling out of sync with the world. My mesh lay beside my pillow—I hadn’t even removed it properly when we got in, just let it slide off. I let the familiar weight of fine, chain-linked sensors spill over my palm. Redbug had promised that it would be secure, interfacing only with our own towers around the fenceline. It shouldn’t even be compatible with anything other than a dandelion network; the corporations used an entirely different format that worked with their implants. But something had crossed that gap, and we still didn’t know how.
Looking at the gilded room, the effort Asterion was going to for Dinar, it occurred to me for the first time that “how” might be a human who already had access to our networks. Surely Redbug, more expert in this type of paranoia than I, must have already thought of that, must be scanning their team members for any hint of corporate seduction.
Of course they had. And found a match for their suspicions in Dinar.
I gave up on second-guessing my own equipment and set the mesh cap on my head. The cool weight lay comfortably against the fuzz of my scalp. I’d neglected to take my lenses out before I went to bed. I’d need to clean them later, but for now I waited as data trickled in, slowed by distance as well as the ongoing malware recovery. I wished for more sensors in the ground, the full team of investigators that none of the networks had organized well enough to send. Even more than the slowness, that failure of organization suggested some taint unpurged from our code. I pressed my scarf to my nose, breathing in the trace of baby-scent where I’d held Dori against it.
Dinar was still offline, fussing with her arm.
“Did you forget to take that off last night too?” I asked. “I mean, this morning?”
“Time is an illusion,” she said mournfully. “And no, I can get this thing off and on in my sleep. What I can’t do, apparently, is correctly hook it up to an unfamiliar energy grid in my sleep.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I’ve got enough charge to make it through the day. But please ask Carol about power conversion when you’ve got your messages synced.”
I shot off the question, accompanied by promises of love and of solidarity in sleep deprivation. My inbox was full of queries about the trip. Some were genuinely concerned, but most were thinly veiled objections to me, Dinar, and even the Ringers going at all. What they expected us to do about the latter I had no idea. Nothing from my parents, of course, who knew more than I ever would about technological paranoia. The bot remained a lump in my pocket. Every time I thought about it, only every couple minutes or so, I felt irrationally insecure about my own equipment.
But I did get one happy message—Carol had managed to get Rhamnetin online. I ran a half-conscious hand over my mesh, feeling it shift against my skin. I had no idea where Rhamnetin’s people kept the neural signals of interest and recognition and unconsidered bias that the mesh was designed to pick up. A good Ringer mesh would probably take either decades of research or a deep dive into their own neuroscience. But Carol had kludged together a set of chain-link bracelets around his upper limbs that did something.
This is like looking at the Rings, and trying to see all the connections at once, he wrote. Carol says no one person needs to track it all, but I don’t know how you resist. What happened on your trip?
I sent the record of our flight—and more importantly, the conversations during it—to the already-acrimonious thread on the Asterion negotiations, and pinged Rhamnetin with a pointer. Separately, I sent him and Carol my own thoughts: about Adrien’s politically tinged flirting, about their irritation at my lack of interest, about Carnitine’s willingness to flirt back, about trying to read every nuance of the food and the room and the buildings stretching skyward. I hesitated, glancing at Dinar, but included her and Athëo in the message. It wasn’t like she, or Cytosine for that matter, wouldn’t notice us pulling Rhamnetin in. And this discussion wouldn’t make the situation more awkward for her than it was already.
It was getting more awkward, too. Several threads treated this trip as a failure not only of our negotiations, but of every place where the watersheds had bound ourselves too closely to the powers we’d supplanted.
I caught the slight jerk of Dinar’s arm as it finally answered to her nerves, interface between flesh and synthetic not quite as smooth as usual. I resisted the urge to help as she got her own mesh on. She grimaced as she found the same threads I’d been poring through. “What do they think we should have done? It’s never been realistic to treat fencelines as a perfect quarantine, or to think we’re safer acting like they’re some sort of black box. The root of the problem is here; Redbug’s not going to solve it patching leaks at home.”
“I know. But a lot of people think this whole situation proves the risk of keeping corporations around at all.”
She glared, either at the room that illustrated Asterion’s solidity or at her mesh’s projection within it. “They lost any legal existence outside their own territory a long time ago. But we need the work they can do. And if we don’t want them to be corporate forever, we need to keep reminding them of alternatives. You can’t make people stop affiliating.”
“You can’t.” I found the absolutists ridiculous—no power in our world had ever died away completely. Even the divine right of kings still echoed in our rhetoric, every storm a sign of failed stewardship and every successful mitigation demonstrating Nature’s sovereign approval of our networked decisions. The tatters of power might be repurposed, but they never fully decomposed back into fertile soil.
But I understood why the absolutists thought the way they did. At the fourth power’s peak, corporations and states had agreed on ostensibly safe levels for arsenic in drinking water. Then, having shown that the threshold was an arbitrary decision, they’d raised it; the more poison companies could release, the greater their profits. There could never, in fact, be a truly safe level.
The door chimed a chord as baroque as the walls. Dinar went to get it, and I closed the great pile of critiques to draft a new thread, ready to gather quick input.
Adrien strolled in, more confident and forceful in their home ground. “I hope you slept well. I’m here to help you get ready for tonight’s party.” They’d changed again, this time into a black leather jacket and pants, a gaudy necklace of blue and red blown glass, and red stilettos that made me wince with imagined stumbles. Adrien somehow didn’t totter, but pushed aside the decorative curtain, unnecessarily but with ostentatious grace, to look fondly out the window. “It’s good to be home—now it’ll be boardrooms and ballrooms all week.” They abandoned the cityscape and turned to grin back at us. “I hope you packed well.”
“We brought our best outfits, if that’s what you mean.” I readjusted my scarf, and the pins holding it in place. “They’ll be different from yours, but that’s fine. We’re different sorts of people.”
Adrien sighed. “So we are. And you don’t play games. Would you like to know the rules everyone else will be using?” They leaned back against the windowsill, arms crossed and head cocked, silhouetted by reddening light. “I’m trying to help, I promise. Even if you aren’t playing the game, it’s still possible to lose.”
Probably even with Adrien’s help; telling us the rules was almost certainly some move of their own. My head hurt.
“Are you giving this intro to the Ringers, too?” asked Dinar.
“Of course. Well, the associates are.”
“You got stuck with us instead,” suggested Dinar.
“Hardly ‘stuck.’” That irritating grin again. “Though I’m sorry to miss their questions. What pronouns do you think you should use for me?”
The question caught me off guard. I’d been defaulting to “they” for far longer than was ever necessary with watershed members. “I’m sorry, I have no idea. And it would be rude to guess.”
“Not around here.” Adrien frowned. “I suppose that’s why you wear those pins, and the same ones all the time. If getting it wrong is so awful, you’ve got to pick one set and stick with it to avoid disaster.”
“Not everyone uses the same ones all the time,” said Dinar. “But yes, that’s why we badge: to be polite and avoid mistakes that hurt people.” She shot me a look.
“So what does it mean, that you’re”—Adrien squinted at my pins, exaggerating for effect—“female?”
This wasn’t the conversation I’d expected, and I found myself curious how it would tie back to the night’s corporate games. Curious, and apprehensive—were they preserving old prejudices here, old rules about how women could be treated?
“It means being a woman feels right to me—it matches my own idea of myself. My soul, maybe. I guess practically it means I’m comfortable with a certain balance of hormones, more estrogen and so on.”
“Powers!” Adrien’s eyes widened. “If I had to change my hormones every time I shifted, I wouldn’t want to do it often either. I wouldn’t want to walk around with my soul on my collar, either.” They twined glass beads around their fingers, looking thoughtful. “Here, my hormones are my doctor’s business. The shape of my body under my clothes is my lovers’. My inner self … if souls are real, they don’t seem like something I’d want to advertise to the world—and even more so if they aren’t real, if they’re something you manufacture for yourself—far too dangerous to share. My true self, assuming I admit to having one, is for me alone.”
It seemed like a disturbing thing to keep private—as if here, even one’s closest friends might exploit any vulnerability. “What should we call you, then? Aside from your name? Is the default ‘they’ rude?”
“Rude, no. Wrong, I’m afraid so. Our pronouns don’t reflect any inner essence, gender or otherwise. They shift with our presentations. Let me try this a different way. Do you non-game-players have chess?”
“Sure,” said Dinar, who played regularly at the library, and beat me in about ten minutes every time I gave her the chance.
“Presentation is like if you could pick, at any point, whether you want to play a bishop or a knight or a rook. Even a queen, if you time it right.”
Dinar opened her suitcase and began hanging clothes in the closet, giving undue attention to each shirt. “And some people are stuck being pawns?”
“It’s not an exact metaphor. None of the presentations are bad to play, or no one would play them.”
“And how do you win?” Dinar switched the position of a couple of hangers. “It doesn’t seem like much fun to be a king, either.”
“There’s no definitive winning, or losing. That would end the game. You try to get concessions for your bosses, or your company—or tonight, your species.”
“You never said what presentation you were—playing. What we should call you.” I blushed, reminding myself that it wasn’t rude.
“Tonight I’m playing holo. A lot of people will be; it’s sort of a party presentation. You mix your signals, and you can use just about any strategy. Pronouns are ‘e’ and ‘em’ and ‘eir,’ which I know is the part you really care about. ‘Tha,’ ‘thon,’ ‘thos’ are the rasa pronouns, for when you haven’t seen someone in a few hours and aren’t sure of thos current presentation. You never use that one to an adult’s face unless tha’s naked or in the process of shifting.”
“And what will people expect from us, openly presenting as women?” I asked, still worried that the answer would suit the aisland’s twentieth-century aesthetic.
“Woman’s not one of our options. Some people might treat you as rasa, like you aren’t dressed at all. Tania … no, it’s the same pronouns, but you don’t act the part at all. Holo would be the most polite assumption.”
Dinar finished her own clothes, and went to unpack mine. I let her; at least my presentation wouldn’t be “wrinkled.” “So what are all these strategies holos are expected to use? And what’s ‘tania’?”
Adrien laughed, apparently on more comfortable ground. “Okay, so there are three levels outside of holo and rasa, and two styles for each. I’m not going to try and explain styles; you can really only get that by watching, and level has more effect on strategy anyway. For prince and princess, your main strategy is wit. I was playing princess the first day you met me.”
I vaguely remembered a flaring tunic, and nodded. I was beginning to see what Mom meant about selling wardrobes.
“Butch and femme are sexy.”
“You were … playing … that earlier,” I said.
“You noticed!” E shifted for a moment into eir overly seductive body language from the shuttle, then let it drop. “You can flirt with anyone playing butch or femme; don’t try it with princes or princesses unless they start something first. Though that doesn’t seem like your preferred strategy anyway.”
I tried to decide how to respond—it hardly seemed worth explaining that I’d be perfectly happy to flirt with my sleeves rolled up at the aquaculture farm, with someone who knew and cared about my wife and co-parents and who had their own family waiting at home. And who didn’t think of it as a “strategy.” “Not on this trip.”
“Right—I’ll just think of you as sort of prince-y, then. Finally there’s obre and tania—those’re straight-up power plays, advantage through asserting dominance. You can try them at any company rank, but no one’s going to hold back because you’re an intern. Unless you’re really good, you’re likely to get eaten alive.” E sounded like e relished the idea—but there was an edge of bitterness, too.
“How long have you been an intern?” asked Dinar.
E shook eir head. “Long enough. I’m ready to move up. It’d help if I get Asterion a good deal out of this business—want to help me out?”
Wit? Or power play? I ignored the lure. “And how should we recognize all these … pieces … when we spot them?”
“I’ll point a few out till you get the hang of it.”
On the elevator up (I couldn’t even see where the stairs were hidden, though I charitably assumed they existed), I wished I could’ve seen the Ringers react to that same lesson. For the plains-folk, as far as I could tell, gender was a privilege that you won; for the tree-folk a birth assignment stricter than anything humans had ever enforced. Strange as Asterion’s way seemed to me, masking private selves with viciously enthusiastic role-playing, the Ringers must be even more bewildered. And eager as Asterion was to get our cooperation, they’d play that much harder against (with? for?) the Ringers.
But those answers I could, and would, get from Rhamnetin. The other thing I realized on the way up—the thing we should’ve pushed on—was that we’d asked how you win the game, and not gotten much of an answer. What we hadn’t even thought to ask was how you lose.