Non linear arcs

If I have learned nothing else during my time on the Rim, it is that nothing ever works out entirely as planned. Not for me, not for anyone. Now, it's not always bad. It's just that chaos seems to have an undue influence on Human events in the outer reaches of the 34 Tauri system.

Since AuroraBlue's 'departure' and Lily's return, I thought things would start to return to something resembling normal. Normal for us out here at least. Actually, to be honest, I didn't actually think things would return to normal. I just hoped things would.

True to form, life continues throwing curves.

Take the situation with Lily and Cody for example. According to Cody, someone had "shut Lily down." How, and who, were never quite detailed, other than the implication that she'd somehow done it herself. Cody himself seemed to be having some physiological difficulties of his own, which, given the history he had as being a test subject, didn't surprise me much. I checked his vitals and they were all elevated, but it would take a real doctor to sort that out. Blue was somehow involved this too, asking Cody questions that sounded like riddles. Not that I was especially surprised by that. Blue had his way.

I'd have asked him myself, if he was talking to me. But that was Blue's nature. Some folk liked to say he was everywhere and, in some ways, he probably was. Mostly everywhere at least. There were a few places even he couldn't access, but the effort needed to keep him out was extraordinary. Still. A girl sometimes likes her privacy. Thing was, he didn't always bother answering when you tried to talk to him. Whether he wasn't paying attention, or choosing not to answer, or just wasn't there, I never questioned. I just accepted it.

What am I going to do? Ground him?

x0x0 seemed to think it was a mistake, what Cody was saying. She'd had some perishables shipped direct to Hale's, care of me. Some kind of biologicals I wasn't delving too deeply into. Again though, she kept getting diverted before we could actually talk about the situation. She'd send her girl, Emma, by to check on the package but she didn't know anything about it either.

And then there was Gallagher. Or not Gallagher as the case appeared to be. Some time back, there'd been a KM series mechanical with an semi-organic "wrapper" posing as Gallagher. The KM's were pretty versatile that way. The core chassis was slender enough to wrap a more or less Human looking skin around it. Most of them used one like Krenshar's. Kind of a semi rigid rubbery industrial sort of thing that worked well for field use. There were softer skins that got used in the service industry, and the rare and expensive semi-organic ones that'd pass for Human if you didn't look too closely. The Gallagher replica had one of those, and was programmed to act like him. At least as near as the Expert System code in a standard KM could pull it off.

The machine seemed to be back now. Saying there could be only one Gallagher, and he was it. Whether he, it, whatever, was speaking truth I couldn't tell. It was a reskinned KM that looked like Gallagher, but whether Gallagher himself was actually dead, or just half way to Beaumonde, I didn't know. The idea was just so incongruous that it seemed more like someone was pulling a bad prank than an actual fact of life. For the time being, I'd go along with it. There were a few people I could tap to see if the Doc was actually ok or not. But I wasn't going to dwell on it. While I respected Gallagher, I wasn't keeping him in my personal loop. He'd given me a measure of plausible deniability with his Dharma activities. I was keeping him, and most everyone else, out of my professional business. Safer for everyone that way.

Now though, I was back to figuring out where all the curved paths were going to converge. Because inevitably, the paths would converge once again. Only question was what fresh new particles were going to spin out of this particular high energy reaction.