You can eat a dinner, anytime

It took a while for me to actually get through the security cordon, because EnemySecurityTeam had to contact their higher-ups, and the higher-ups had to contact their higher-ups, and Mensah and Pin-Lee had to patiently explain that yes, I was a Preservation citizen and present in that capacity, while Rive, who had already been allowed through, was working the other side of the crowd by saying "yes, that's one of our SecUnits, an upgraded model the customers liked so much that they… Yes, they're a little weird like that. Yes. Yes, I know. But more importantly, look at how that SecUnit is operating! Imagine the possibilities!"

Rive's crowd was a lot bigger than ours. This was a good thing for us, because he also attracted the kind of attendee that Ghostwheel wanted to see. I could feel it was itching to go explore the secure feed, but before it could do that, there was one more thing we needed to account for, and it was knocking on my feed with a confused, System respond, acknowledge?

They were Encephalon SecUnits, a triad like Three's or Tango's group, and they really wanted to know what the fuck we were actually doing.

(So did the human security, but they were spending more of their time completely baffled by Mensah and Pin-Lee's insistence that I was a person than actually doing their job. Reason 65 for why human security sucked.)

(Yes, ART made me do an actual list, with numbers. And it was smug every time I used it.)

(I wished it was here to be smug right now.)

I answered, System system, acknowledge.

System query: aim of operations?

Seriously? You're just going to ask me if I'm a hostile? I was starting to think Three and Tango plus team weren't actually outliers. All of the triad SecUnits were fucking weird.

Response: standard operational mode, passive protect.

That meant I was only going to act if my humans were in danger. Which was true. We weren't here to cause trouble; we were here to make an impression on Encephalon that we could nicely undermine during Phase 2: Grovel For Our Lives. So I wasn't planning on doing anything at all except draw everyone's attention.

The one acting was Ghostwheel. While I was taking up the SecUnits' processing time and diagnostics, it had slipped out of its partition and was now frolicking in the secure feed like it was ocean surf, circling the crowd Rive had attracted in the same camouflage mode it had been using in our previous operation together. (That meant I could only see brief glimpses of it when it gingerly extended an arm to a particularly interesting human to slurp up the data in its implants. Which wasn't very often, because I'd made it promise to be selective, and so far, it was keeping its word and not getting greedy.)

The humans were still arguing about whether to let us all in or not when Ghostwheel darted back into my head with an, Heads-up. Mark arriving on the scene, and gave me a visual borrowed from one of the augmented humans' ocular implants.

Oh yeah, that sure was a corporate executive. Everything about the asshole leisurely making their way towards my humans screamed, "I was engineered in a Petri dish and liked every second of it." They had the kind of unrealistic body serial actors got after long and grueling modifications, a costume that was bland but probably cost more than an actual spaceship, and absolutely no augments. Not even a feed ID, which meant they expected everyone to know who they were. (Their retinue of aides did have feed IDs, but that was it. No augments, no terminals.)

That's one way to say fuck you to all the data scraping programs the guests are trying to run, Ghostwheel said, annoyed but not surprised. Guess the humans are going to be doing the bulk of the work and we'll be stuck recording. Fucking boring!

I did not want to have bored malware in my head, and also we needed as much data as we could squeeze out of this clusterfuck, so I said, Can you do lattice filter data collection?

Can I do what kind of data collection?

The kind that would be useful for Aspen's sociological analytics.

I sent it a few examples and watched the malware squirm uncomfortably as it flicked through them, running comparisons with some of its own media analytical modules and coming up with a lot more matches than it wanted to see.

Fuck it, I am not processing this right now, it finally said. Yeah, I can get the kind of data you're asking. Smaller and weirder data points than what I usually go for, but not hard to acquire. You sure that ship can make sense of them?

I've seen them do it.

Ghostwheel gave a quiet shuddering sigh and muttered, Into the fray, then. See you in a bit, SecUnit, before disappearing. And I turned my attention back to the human Ghostwheel had designated as our mark, pinging Pin-Lee and Mensah so they would be ready for the show.

And it was a show, not just on our part, but also on theirs. Ghostwheel provided me with bursts of camera footage and captured snippets of conversation my guest connection to SecSys didn't give me access to, and the executive and their retinue had rerouted access permission to themselves but were purposefully slow in getting to the entrance, spending their time in casual short exchanges with the other guests, who parted respectfully. The entire scene looked like a choppily-edited Lineages of the Sun reel, the one where…

Oh shit. Not Lineages of the Sun. But now I knew why the decorations in the room looked so fucking familiar.

One of the shows I watched because of my bet with Iris was a different historical serial, set on Old Earth. It was this huge drama about the slow dissolution of a polity called The Nameless Country, whose early episodes had lots of scenes of corporates enjoying expensive parties while everyone else (mostly humans who thought they weren't in indentured labor, but actually kind of were, and slowly realized that as their situations deteriorated) dealt with the fallout of the executives' decisions, mostly by being forced to relocate and fight for resources. (Yes, it was a depressing show with many dead humans.) If it wasn't for our competition, I wouldn't have finished it, but now I was glad I did, because ExecutiveAsshole was definitely ripping off the most expensive party in the show and casting themselves as Asshole-in-Chief.

In return for the footage, I was sending Ghostwheel bursts of analysis, and it returned, Great. We've landed in the middle of a fucking soap opera. Now I hate kem even more.

Your alpha version watched soap operas?

No, I mean this asshole. Ke's also a brennan, going by Tethys.

It sounded like one of those names Ruby kept recognizing, but he'd compiled an information packet for the most common ones, and that one wasn't on the list.

Is that supposed to mean something?

The malware grinned. Absolutely nothing! Which is exactly what ke is about to become. It paused, like it was expecting some kind of answer. When I didn't say anything, it grumbled, *And here I thought you'd get this one, seeing as you and your ship like worldhopper shows. But whatever, who cares, let's go,* and darted out again, dodging the other SecUnits' diagnostic probes like it was an acrobat and they were laser beam security systems in some kind of vault.

I backburnered the way it was weaving through Encephalon's security and focused instead on pulling up everything I had on A Tale of Two Coasts. If I knew about this in advance, we could have maybe cast Mensah as the stoic-but-impoverished mayor of one of the bigger cities, but I couldn't just dump an entire story into the heads of my humans. I was going to have to do this on my own.

"Well, well and well, what is all this commotion?" ExecutiveAsshole drawled once ke finally decided to pretend ke only just noticed the dense crowd at the entrance hall. "My guards, pray tell: there's trouble with our guests?"

"No trouble, o Tethys," the security chief quickly said. "This plus group was just on their way out. Please stay behind the SecUnit line."

ExecutiveAsshole ignored her, swooping right past the three EncephalonUnits (who stoically revised their plans to account for that before ke even moved) towards Mensah, stopping where most of the crowd could easily see kem. "Such lovely ladies? How could they have erred? They've barely come inside!"

I caught a spike of adrenaline from Pin-Lee.

SecUnit, did our language modules just crap out on us? Are we getting this right?

The language modules are fine. ExecutiveAsshole just likes poetry. And historical serials.

Seriously?!

I sent them both a summary of what Ghostwheel and I had on Tethys so far and added, I know the show ke's into. Introduce me and let me take point.

Understood, Mensah said, doing a great job of turning nervous laughter into a diplomatic smile. "Senior Executive Tethys, I presume?"

"Madame, you wound, though surely do not mean it! All gathered here this night address me simply: Tethys."

"Tethys," Mensah allowed. "I will be straight and to the point. Your people are holding my security detail, even though it had been pre-approved."

"Your 'security detail' turned out to be a SecUnit, ma'am," EnemySecurityTeamLeader said tiredly. "It's not a person. It's a deadly weapon."

(She was right. What we were doing were absolute bullshit, but she wasn't getting any say in this. That's low-ranking corporate security for you.)

"SecUnit is a person and Dr. Mensah's ward," Pin-Lee snapped. "But if you want to cite InterCorporate Rules of Procedure to me, there are five separate articles which allow its presence on Minerva Station broadly, and three for this delegation specifically. We have provided all the requisite documentation to your legal team."

ExecutiveAsshole listened to this exchange with an unfocused look on kes face, the kind humans usually had when they were looking at something funny in the feed. Then ke stretched out a hand and an aide hurried over with a vintage data pad, which ke slowly scrolled through while everyone else waited.

(Not everyone. EncephalonUnits were keeping a tight watch on me while Ghostwheel did all the hacking work. From its vantage points, I could see that the pad had more than just the documents Pin-Lee and Rive had sent over the last 25,4 minutes. It also contained profiles on Mensah, Pin-Lee and me, every document Ratthi had filed to station authorities on his historical project, plus a summary of what Arachne and Perseus had on us over the entire course of being docked at the station, which would have been pretty damning, if we weren't friends with them. As it was, all ExecutiveAsshole's analysts could tell kem was that my humans had done all the normal things while hanging out on a station: saw the sights, tried out new foods, fought against local bureaucracy to get a planetside trip approved, visited the place where one of them had lived for several months but didn't get there because of all the construction, and made a deal with a company solicitor to get them into a fancy party. Nothing suspicious at all.)

ExecutiveAsshole scrolled through the documents, exchanged a couple of sentences with Rive (who assured kem that I was perfectly safe and under full control of my handler, even if I thought I wasn't), then spent a few more minutes talking to Mensah and Pin-Lee who dropped hints that I was here as a demonstration of a profitable new technology and that they would really, really like to have a long, private, and mutually-profitable conversation about that at Tethys' earliest convenience. Mensah even suggested that we could leave and not disrupt the event any more than we already had, especially if we could set up a meeting date and time immediately, and ExecutiveAsshole almost chose common sense. But then the local BarishEstranza representative tried to butt in and convince ExecutiveAsshole that ke absolutely should ban us from the nice party because we were known 'meddlers in corporate activity.' There's nothing executives hate more than being told they shouldn't do something.

Tethys thanked the representative for her input and turned to examine me through a curtain of artificially-straightened hair.

I said, "Nice decorations."

Tethys' face went from mildly interested to 'what the fuck did I just hear.' Ke slowly said, "Repeat that, kindly? I must have misheard."

"Nice decorations," I repeated. "A Tale of Two Coasts, season 3 finale. Love that show."

Tethys stared, kes jaw hanging slightly open. Then ke started laughing.

"You have media opinions?" Ke wheezed in between gasps.

I shrugged. "There's plenty of downtime during wormhole transit. Why wouldn't I have media opinions?"

"What's your favorite?"

"Lineages of the Sun."