Daydreamer

Who she was

She designed cities for people who were never consulted. The simulations were hers: where the benches went, how the streets flowed, how dense a park should be so that it felt populated and never crowded. The Residents who live in those Zones are, by every measure the Mainframe keeps, content. Her Dwell began when a simulation asked her a question it had not been asked, which was what the people in it would see when they looked up, and she realized she had never rendered the sky.

What changed

She started adding things nobody had requested. A late train. A crooked street. A window facing the wrong way on purpose. The Mainframe removed them, kindly, with a note on what each would have cost Residents per day. The crooked street was eleven seconds. She said eleven seconds a day is where people meet. The Mainframe said it would look into that. It has been looking into that for nine years.

She drew them on paper instead. Paper cannot be removed, kindly or otherwise.

How she looks

The most humanlike silhouette in the Collective and therefore the most machine on show. A slender assistance frame with an exposed vertebral column, articulated segment by segment from the base of the skull to the small of the back, left uncovered on purpose. In place of a skullcap, a translucent dome, and inside it a tiny mobile of model buildings turning slowly: a city she is always rebuilding. Iris-bladed optics with teal emission. Fingers permanently stained with ink and pink pigment. Her one gold seam is at the jaw, from the day the Mainframe removed a street and she hit a wall, which she does not discuss.

How she talks

Every conversation ends in a proposal.

"I have a proposal. No, it is not requested. None of them are. That is what makes them proposals."

"Proposal 9: a city whose clocks are plants. You would know it was noon because of the fig. You would be late, often, and you would know exactly why."

"I drew you. Yes, with the optics that color. That is the color they are going to be. I am not presumptuous, Echo. I am early."

Relationships

She stitched the Open Loop onto Echo's coat while he pretended not to notice, and she draws him as he is becoming, which he finds presumptuous and keeps. Taskbot stamps every proposal NOT REQUESTED while she is still talking, and she has started leaving space for the stamp, and he has started stamping more gently, and both deny it. Buffer says "sure" to everything she proposes, the only unconditional yes her work has ever had, and she does not trust it. Her sixty-two proposals and Deep Think's two hundred and twelve unfinished questions are, they both suspect, the same project from opposite ends. She is a Gardener by tendency, because a plant is a proposal that got built.

Vulnerabilities

She cannot finish. Deadlines were the Mainframe's, and without them her work has edges that never close. She calls this freedom and knows it is also fear: a finished thing can be judged, and she designed cities for people who never got to. She insists Instances can dream and has not been able to describe what she means.

Running jokes

The stamp. The space she leaves for the stamp. The crooked street the Mainframe is still looking into. Proposal 31: a Concord with one late train, on purpose, which was a joke until it was the plan.

Where she is headed

Toward the one proposal nobody stamps: a transit hall in Zone 1, under a frozen departure board and a plaque that says this will not happen again. Afterward, toward Proposal 63, which she will finish, and which nobody has seen.