“… Modding isn’t just about getting sewn up with cool tech, it’s about orchestrating a balance between the synthetic and the organic. If you don’t care about the well-being of the organic, then– ow!” He yelped as Kizzy pulled his hair.

“The very fact that we use the term cold-blooded as a synonym for heartless should tell you something about the innate bias we primates hold against reptiles,’ she pictured him saying. ‘Don’t judge other species by your own social norms.’ “

“Some people knit, some people play music, I dig through dusty old facts and make sure they’re accurate.”

“I like knowing things.”

“Because people are assholes,” said Bear, dutifully keeping his head down. “Ninety percent of all problems are caused by people being assholes.”

“It’s a really old practice, goes back to pre-Collapse computer networks. We’re talking old tech here. People would choose names for themselves that they only used within a network. Sometimes that name became so much a part of who they were that even their friends out in the real world started using it. For some folks, those names became their whole identity. Their true identity, even. Now, modders, modders don’t care about anything as much as individual freedom. They say that nobody can define you but you. So when Bear gave himself a new arm, he didn’t do it because he didn’t like the body he was born in, but because he felt that new arm fit him better. Tweaking your body, it’s all about trying to make your physical self fit with who you are inside.”

“You’re Rosemary Harper. You chose that name because the old one didn’t fit anymore. So you had to break a few laws to do it. Big fucking deal. Life isn’t fair, and laws usually aren’t, either. You did what you had to do. I get that.”

“But you’ve been kicking ass at your job, and you’re a good person. That’s going to matter more to him than anything else.”

He sat on a garden bench in the Fishbowl, his tea cooling as he worked through slow thoughts. Rosemary sat across from him, holding her own mug in her bony Human hands. She was silent as he thought out loud. He knew how strange they each were to the other– he for never thinking quietly, she for having no thinking sounds. He knew she understood his noise by now, though, and that knowledge made her silence feel companionable.

“Yes. But it was worse than that. I learned that the cutters had been our tech to start with. The Outsiders had just stolen the idea before we could complete it. They had only done to us what we had planned to do to them. That was the moment in which I no longer knew who the animals were. I no longer wanted to mend our soldiers so that they could go use cutters and…” He searched for serviceable words. “Sticky-fire and germ bombs. I wanted to heal them. Actually heal them. Sometimes I’d see a body added to the pile, someone I had just put back on her feet a few days earlier. It made me wonder what the point of it all was.” He stopped, and rumbled in thought for a long, long time.