Three mech-dancers in the building is critical mass for some kind of happening, a spontaneous party or poetry recital or orgy or bitter screaming multi-way meltdown, or several of the above in serial or parallel.
Kassidy lets herself be drawn into it as if simply by the inevitable pull of the mech-dancers, the messy gravity well of fast-burning stars. One of the newer recruits, hair colourlessly brittle from an endless slow rainbow of bleach and dye, is showboating in one of the concepting studios, high and topless and hammering out an endless drum solo on a no-expense-spared government-budget kit, and another is sprawled on a dragged-in sofa, dressed only in skinny jeans and a feather boa, a crystal candy dish of emoji-printed tablets in his lap, offering them as a leering benediction to all comers.
All very rockstar.
All very second-rate look at us, see how Qo Scanlon we are?
The happening exerts a negative pressure on the base personnel, and Kass lets it pull her into the room as if she's just a helpless bystander, like the other upstairs techs drifting awkwardly on the outskirts or stumbling out to find somewhere to puke.
The third mech-dancer on base is Shine. She knows this. Shine ignores the tablets and the other drugs constantly, ambiently available to them; she knows this.
Shine stands within an accretion disc of her own, refusing to hold court. She holds a glass of red wine and looks like she's listening attentively to the drumming.
Accretion discs are made of debris. Kass is not on the contact corps programme to be debris. She circulates.
Washing her hands in a government-building-bathroom sink, she finds the mirror joining her gaze to Shine's.
"You fixed the audio latency bug they've been telling us we imagined for six years," Shine says.
Kass is full-multimedia-stack. She's here to clear some tickets, because it was in the budget to get an extra pair of eyes on the backlog. She spent her first month on something hard-to-diagnose, repeatedly closed and re-opened as the devs and the Diva Factory fought over whether the problem really existed. She hasn't exactly made herself friends with it, upstairs.
"That's me," she says, and Shine's reflected eyes look right through her.
"Who are you trying to impress?" Shine says. She says it with the total, even-toned neutrality of a professional expert in saying the precise things she wants to say, in precisely the tone she wishes to convey it.
"Why would I be trying to impress anyone," Kass says, and behind her, in the mirror, Shine sips her wine and lingers on her gaze a moment longer, then walks out of the bathroom, without having done more there than speak to Kass.
When Kass rejoins the crowd, the two younger pilots are having a quiet, vicious argument over the top of the drum set, and everyone wise and sufficiently sober is drifting away before things hit rock bottom.
Shine is long gone.
