The onboarding tour comes, after an endless succession of offices and here-is-a-fire-exits and conference rooms and audio labs, to one of the rehearsal hangars. Kassidy's mentor pauses, on a catwalk above the performance space, and Kass leans on the railing, peering down. One of the mech-dancers is wired in, a concert-stage-sized projection on the wall behind showing a simulated mech in kinematic wireframe. She's in a leotard, bare-footed, bags under her eyes, wearily disagreeing with someone from the choreography team.
"The spinal column on the current model diplomatic mechs has over ten thousand moving parts," she's saying, voice effortlessly clear and carrying, with the air of someone who's going through the argument by rote. "And every spine assembly needs a complete maintenance refit after every contact performance. It's not whether that sequence will over-stress the spine in isolation; you have to consider it in context. Some of the contact routines go for eight, nine continuous hours — that's by the book, without any improv for the stargod's reactions. You have to think of it as spending from a limited budget of mechanical stress—"
The choreo tech says something angry.
"Look, I know." She holds her hands up. "I know. It's a good routine, and ideally...but I can send you links to the engineering issue tracker; the mechanical engineers have wanted to improve the spinal resilience for years. Last estimate, the R&D alone would be a three trillion nuFranc project, and nobody can wring it out of the politicos. We tell them it'd help communicate better, enable new choreo, and they go aha, but we've got choreography at home. Why spend it on contact, when it could subsidise a few billionaires' personal fortunes and a pork-barrel fighter carrier?"
"One of the new choreographers," Kassidy's mentor says. "If you think code review on this project is bad, just remember you could be working downstairs in the Diva Factory. Fifty different kinds of handpicked genius creatives."
"Ego problems?" Kass says, with the right note of ingratiatingly disparaging sympathy, watching the sweat-glossed dancer nod and gesture and say quiet meaningless mhm and sure and yeah kind of things to the tech's complaining.
"Sure, that'd be another term for the pack of them." Her mentor points with her chin. "Here we go, she's about to drop some knowledge, this will be worth watching."
"You can use the sim's visualiser tools," the dancer's saying, below, clicking simulator settings. "Here, like this." The big delta robot above the rehearsal floor hums, shadowing her from console to console, keeping the cables docked to her skull untangled and out of her way, reeling them out to just the right place and length to make her look like the lure on some govermentally overspecced cat toy.
The projected mech skeleton strips down to just the spine assembly, flexing as the simulation tells it how the mech would move around the dancer, were she walking around in one right now, as she queues up a 30-minute segment of choreo and posts up a bank of bars and graphs, walks to the centre of the performance space.
"In five," she says, "four," and lets the silent countdown on the screen tell the rest for her, and then the music starts and she begins to move.
It's one of the B-side fragments from Canon of Dead Men, one of the last finished Qo Scanlon pieces, a cutting room floor snippet that never made it into contact use.
"Mistress i am lichen sun," Kass whispers, though the lyrics are missing; perhaps never recorded, cut before reaching that production stage; and her mentor gives her an arch look, like she's letting the side down by knowing or caring about any of the final product.
"That's her, you know," she says. "Shine."
"That's Shine?" Every move she makes on the floor makes the simulated spine sway with her, individual components taking on a red blush as they accumulate mechanical stress. Bar graphs tick upward for the dozen or so most-stressed components, indicating estimated percentage of their lifetime stress endured toward mechanical failure, and a constantly recalculated estimate of how much of the routine can be completed before something catastrophically breaks.
She works through five minutes, pauses it, points out the numbers. "Now with that move you want," she says, resetting and restarting the routine.
The choreo this time is off-book, clearly an improv, more-athletic version of the library movements. Seven minutes in, the simulator announces a rapid domino of mechanical failures estimated prior to the end of the routine; the 30-minute routine, an unused excerpt from a piece whose production edition runs six hours.
"I thought she was offworld," Kass says, as Shine talks the flushed choreo tech through the cumulative stress failure pattern. "And — I didn't think she was quite so tall."
"A fan?" her mentor says, in a studiously neutral way that Kass suspects is gathering gossip ammunition.
"Well, it's Qo Scanlon, isn't it," Kass deflects, and the senior dev snorts.
"Open secret, in here," she says. "By that time he was too busy being the famous Qo Scanlon to write the fucking poetry. She was writing more than half his words for him. Lichen sun's all hers."
Lichen sun; all B-sides, all somehow judged superfluous.
"You'd think that's why she did it," Kass's mentor says, and Kass thinks of photographs from the early days of the mech-dancer programme, of Shine visibly, adoringly wasting away on diet pills and party drugs, poet-genius Qo Scanlon's muse, the barely seventeen-year-old dancer-pilot he set on fire to write by the light of.
"No," Kass says, because more secrets than that are open, since he died on the end of Shine's knife. Other, adoring, secrets; ages teetering downward the more his reputation soared, the more he could get away with. Not that Shine ever visibly begrudged him any bed he ever fell into, anything else that ever fell into his; he was Qo fucking Scanlon; but finally, Kass thinks, Shine balked all at once at any other young thing's vitality being fed to the man unfortunately attached to the poetry. "Plenty of other reasons."
Below the catwalk, Shine stretches, a dark strip of sweat-soaked fabric sticking to the visible knots of her vertebrae. In the unpaused simulation, the supple movement reds out five more components.
