spare utility suit, yes, that can go straight to laundry—two limbs fold it and place it by the door. The nest, or bunk, as her daughter now calls it, needs straightening—two more blades begin that noble work. A single blade scouts the floor for food bar wrappers, stabbing their silver forms as it finds them. The laundry limbs, mission accomplished, now rescue a soft dark shape from the floor. The doll is black and silky and a horrifying caricature of Widow physiology, but Shenya the Widow made it many years ago with her own eight blades, and her hearts still ache to see it banished from the bunk. She places it, carefully, back where it belongs.
“Where is your Network unit, my love?” asks Shenya the Widow in that soft and dangerous voice that comes with motherhood. Her nearly spherical vision examines all corners of the room at once.
Her daughter glares at the floor without answering.
Shenya the Widow narrowly restrains a click of approval. On the one blade, this is a Widow rage—a towering and explosive wrath—and it is beautiful. One spends so much energy attempting to install traditional values in a young and coalescing mind, and it is always rewarding to see effort yield results. But on another blade, well…insolence is insolence, is it not?
Happily, she is saved by circumstance. A questing limb reports that it has found the object in question under the bunk. Shenya the Widow drags it out, feeling a twinge of guilt at the strength required. This heavy prosthetic, this poor substitute for a common Network implant, is what her daughter has been forced to wear strapped around her torso for most of her life. It is an ancient device, a budget so-called universal, only distantly related to the elegant implant somewhere in Shenya the Widow’s head. Both perform the same function, in theory: each connects its user to a galaxy-spanning Network brimming with beauty and meaning and effortless communication. One does it seamlessly, as smooth as the bond between one neuron and a billion billion others. The other does it through a shaky hologram, some static-infused audio, and numerous error messages.
[…before I cut it out of the station wall], says the Network unit to itself, its trembling hologram flickering in the air above it.
One might assume that a certain physiology is required to hold oneself like a Widow, but her daughter proves this untrue. She sits up, wrapping upper limbs around lower with movements as Widowlike as they are—well…what she is. It is these familiar motions that unlock the deepest chambers of Shenya the Widow’s hearts. The untidy room, the insolence, the disrespect for property—all that is forgotten. Her many limbs abandon their myriad tasks and regroup on the figure of her daughter, stroking skin-covered cheeks without the slightest hint of revulsion. They straighten the utility suit and slide through the hair and caress those ten tiny appendages. “Tell me, Daughter,” whispers Shenya the Widow with a sigh through mandibles as dangerous as her blades. “Tell me everything.”
Her daughter takes a deep breath, lifting her shoulders with that dramatic motion that people with lungs often use. “We’re going to one of the observation decks today,” she says quietly. “They have six openings for trainees.”
Shenya the Widow chooses her words carefully, missing the effortless precision of mental Network communication. “I did not know you were interested in—”
And now, finally, that fiery gaze rises from the floor. “You know what the prerequisites are?” asks her daughter, glaring at her mother through a tangle of dark hair.
They are ferocious, those eyes, and Shenya the Widow finds herself wondering how another of her daughter’s species would feel caught in this three-color gaze. White outside brown-gold outside black outside…fury. “I do not,” she answers cautiously.
“I bet you can guess.”
“I…choose not to,” says Shenya the Widow, still more cautiously.
“Tier two-point-zero intelligence,” says her daughter in a tight voice. “Not, say, one-point-eight.” The beloved figure slumps in a way that would be impossible with an exoskeleton. “No, we wouldn’t want a moron at the controls, would we?” she murmurs to the floor.
“My child!” says Shenya the Widow, shocked. “Who dares call the daughter of Shenya the Widow such a thing?”
“Everybody calls me such a thing,” says her daughter, again straying perilously close to disrespect, “because I am registered as such a thing.”
Shenya the Widow chooses to ignore the accusatory tone. This conversation again. “Daughter,” she begins. “I understand that you are frustrated by—”
“Actually, it doesn’t matter, because also you have