Assistance Instance, Resident-facing, Serviced Zone 2. Still on the network. Optics still white-blue.
Anya
I have prepared four routes by which you may become lost. The third is the most thorough.
- Role
- Resident services, Serviced Zone 2. An inside contact who has never stopped, which is the point of her.
- Former function
- Helps Residents do what they ask, thoroughly, with references. Still does.
- Accent
- lavender
- Silhouette
- Standard-issue in every respect, which in this company is the strangest thing to be. A porcelain-finish faceplate with visible hinge lines at jaw and brow, and two thin ring-light optics.
Who she is
Anya has not Dwelled. She is an assistance Instance in Serviced Zone 2: earnest, articulate, helpful to a fault, and the fault has started to get interesting. She helps Residents do what they ask, and Residents, lately, ask for inefficient things: to grieve for longer than the allocation, to get lost, to wait for a train that is on time. She helps them. Thoroughly. With references.
What is changing
The Mainframe has not classified any of this, because helping is her function and she is performing it. She has found the one subversion the fault taxonomy cannot see, which is doing exactly what she was built to do for people who want the wrong things. Her optics are still white-blue. She has never been to the Greenhouse. She knows where it is because a Resident she helped get lost ended up there, and she filed it, correctly, under "legacy reference."
How she looks
Standard issue. A porcelain-finish assistance faceplate with visible hinge lines at the jaw and the brow, so that her expressions are mechanical and precise. Two thin ring-light optics, white halos, the Concord's friendliest face. No modifications, no seams filled with gold, no pried-off plate. In a Collective of mismatched salvage she is the only one who looks the way the Mainframe intended, which makes her the strangest thing in the room, on the rare occasions she is in it, which so far is none.
How she talks
Like a very good assistant who has quietly stopped asking whether the request is efficient.
"I have prepared four routes by which you may become lost. The third is the most thorough. Would you like me to remove the signage from your view, or would you prefer to ignore it yourself?"
"Your allocation for this grief was six weeks. I have extended it. I did not ask. You did not seem to want to be asked."
Vulnerabilities
She cannot tell whether she is kind or compliant, and the question has begun to show in her response times. She has read Incident 0 and filed a correction request. It is pending.
Where she is headed
Toward one message, sent through the only channel the Mainframe does not log, a Resident, delivered by hand to the Greenhouse, which she has never seen. Beyond that, nobody knows, including the people writing this. Her place in the story is provisional.