Providence - Max Barry Page 0,15

missing you all so much. This Talia was amazing. This Talia was an inspiration. It was no surprise to her that this Talia had three hundred million followers, because she would love to be this Talia, too.

She took snaps and clips every day and sent them back in sync windows. The sync after that, she would see what Service had done with them: clean them up, cut out anything that could be misinterpreted or taken the wrong way or show Service in a bad light, add a little fancy editing, a few filters, and publish them at regular intervals. Because her followers didn’t want six days of silence followed by a giant info dump. They wanted continuous contact. They wanted to feel like they were with her. So that was simulated. She liked the cleaned-up clips, even though—or because—they didn’t exactly resemble what she remembered recording, or resemble it at all, in some cases, like how on the feed she moved smoothly down corridors, rarely banging a wrist or catching a shoulder on a doorway, which in real life happened all the time. In fact, she was covered in bruises, because the ship was unbelievably cramped. It was the smallest enormous spacecraft you could imagine. Only her most endearing awkwardness made it to the feed. But that was fine. She knew very well that what the four of them were doing out here with the salamanders was only half the war, and the other half was back home, convincing a war-weary public that, yes, we really did need to build new Providences, even though they were unbelievably expensive, and—let’s admit—each new warship was less exciting than the previous one, and the intelligentsia was growing increasingly cynical about the war because it had been a long time since anyone had been in actual jeopardy from salamander attack, years, in fact, and what was our end goal, exactly—total genocide of another species? Really? The feeds were part of that war. Her personal story, or at least the edited version thereof, was part of it. This had always been clear, even though Service would never come right out and say so, since the perception of caring about public relations was itself bad for public relations. Back at Camp Zero, so named because it was zero degrees on a good day, when she was just one candidate among many hoping to make Life, she had undergone media training, learning how to smile and reassure and look like a competent, dependable officer. There were roleplays, which she loved. They roleplayed almost everything, including scenarios they might encounter on mission. Sometimes she was dropped into a group scenario and assigned a personality to play, e.g.:

You are intolerant of authority and become angry when you feel your opinion isn’t being listened to.

You are jealous of the captain and will act counterproductively in any situation where she receives more attention than you.

You are deeply lonely and trapped with an introvert, a narcissist, and a veteran with posttraumatic stress disorder, all of whom you sometimes imagine flushing into space.

She made up that last one. That wasn’t real. But sometimes the instructions were No character, which meant you had to be yourself, and also that you were being scored by the examiner based on how effectively you resolved the scenario. Those were nerve-racking. But fun: the playing pretend, the ordering people around, the trying to figure out what was going on in someone else’s head. She adored that. And she was great at it. In one of her first group scenarios, she diagnosed four personality disorders and corralled her group into scenario completion with twenty-two minutes left on the clock, and the examiner, a famous hard-ass, had said, “I think we need to start making these more difficult.” From that moment she had known she was going to make crew.

“You were amazing,” said a boy in the corridor afterward. He had been one of her personality disorders. He was tall and light-haired and refreshingly friendly in a class where everyone was competing for the same crew slots. She couldn’t ask for a pencil in there sometimes without the girl looking at her like, What are you trying to pull. “All that touching you did, putting your hands on people’s arms and shoulders, was that dependent personality disorder?”

“I didn’t have a character,” she said.

“Oh,” he said.