[02] Elite: Nemorensis by Simon Spurrier Page B

nutripack in silence. That had been down to Lex too – a diplomatic reminder, a few minutes earlier, that she hadn’t eaten anything for a day. Watching the footage through again now, while chewing, SixJen told herself it was for precisely that type of practical organisation –
eat, sleep, crap
– that she kept Lex around. Of course one didn’t have to be a genius, let alone a microscale supercomputer, to figure out the same duties could’ve been handled by a less …
well
—
    Eccentric? Opinionated? Annoying?
    —a less
human-seeming
companion.
    But still, but still. Even with a double emphasis on the ‘seeming’ part of
human-seeming
, even with Lex’s shrill idiosyncrasies being no more than impersonations codified by his manufacturers, still the suspicion troubled SixJen that she tolerated him due to some deep-rooted need for human contact, ersatz or otherwise.
    The Voight-Comal C-902 Personal Companion, after all, nicknamed the ‘Culex’ for its mosquitolike size and voice, was designed for the sorts of lonely nobodies for whom an abrasively needy gadget might constitute perfect company. (He probably had a vibrate setting, though she’d never asked.) At root, Lex represented an aggravating, infuriating little pet – an entity dichotomously programmed to be submissively
owned
and yet aggressively challenging all at once.
    And so the real truth? The truth which she always seemed to recall at times just like this, then studiously forgot for the sake of her own sanity, was that even though he could be deconstructed to a bundle of metals and quantum charges, even though he was non-sentient and unremarkable, Lex was still more innately attuned to humanity than she was.
    More alive than she was.
    Sometimes that came in handy.
Sad eyes
, he’d said.
She has sad eyes.
SixJen hadn’t even thought to look.
    She switched off the feed and drummed fingers against the controls. Finished chewing her last bland mouthful of nutripack. And then, as if unable to bear the gloom and silence (though in truth simply averse to inaction), went back to roaming through the reams of stellar reportage she’d already guzzled and dismissed during the journey to the Tun/Ton system.
    The media condemnations continued apace. If such a thing were possible they seemed now even more abject, more shrill, than before. The footage looped on and on: ships crumbling, lovers talking, lasers firing, journos fucking.
    (Expert Opinion, incidentally, had reached consensus in the hypothesis that the fugitives must have released a sex drug into the air of the conference room to cause such extremes of indignity and indecency amongst blameless members of the journalistic community; and hence had chemical assault to their numberless crimes.)
    Yet a countersignal was growing too. A backwash of honest opinion which troubled SixJen far more deeply, at some not-quite-understood remove.
    They were youngsters, mostly. Kids secretly phoning the microwave shows while their parents slept – to confess they’d donated their pocket creds, their allowances, their savings (and in one giggling girl’s case the contents of her dad’s retirement fund), in the ungainly name of Destructertainment. On another channel, a lank-haired poetry star, fashionably androgynous and openly bombed on something which had turned the whites of hisher eyes a brackish green, cawed and honked through a specially-improvised piece called
Free To Destroy
. The commentary feeds of every two-bit journal on the local net spumed illiterate scrolltrolls word-wanking over ‘Tasty Teesa’. Inevitably-named ‘Tee-shirts’ had already infected the designer sites, and even the pomp-cliques and culturecrits of the artshows had found a way – ‘
inspirational living-installation’
; ‘
neo-po-mo expression of retrogressive (and hence, ahaw, progressive!) nu-nihilism
’; ‘
sub-subversive manifestation of the kitsch brutalist enlightenment!
’ – to transform the gratuitous into the