cause for this silence, this absence of activity. Tia was gone. Either the BB authorities had found out about how he felt, or Tia herself had complained. They had come and taken her away, and he would never see or talk to her again.
As if to confirm his worst fears, a glint of light on an open plexy window caught his eye. Theodore Edward Bear was gone, his tiny shrine empty.
No. But the evidence was inescapable.
Numb with shock, he found himself walking towards his own cabin. Perhaps there would be a note there, in his personal database. Perhaps there would be a message waiting from CS, ordering him to report for official Counseling.
Perhaps both. It didn't matter. Tia was gone, and very little mattered anymore. Black despair washed into him, a despair so deep that not even tears would relieve it. Tia was gone...
He opened the door to his cabin, and the light from the corridor shone inside, making the person sitting on his bunk blink.
Someone sitting on my -
Female. It was definitely female. And she wasn't wearing anything like a CS uniform, Counselor, Advocate, or anything else. In fact, she wasn't wearing very much at all, a little neon-red Spandex unitard that left nothing to imagine.
He turned on the light, an automatic reflex. His visitor stared up at him, lips creasing in a shy smile. She was tiny, smaller than he had first thought; dark and elfin, with big blue eyes, the image of a Victorian fairy and oddly familiar.
In her hands, she gently cradled the missing Ted Bear. It was the bear that suddenly shook his brain out of inactive and into overdrive.
He stared; he gripped the side of the door. 'T-T-Tia?' he stammered.
She smiled again, with less shyness. 'Hi,' she said and it was Tia's voice, sounding a bit, odd, coming from a mouth and not a speaker. 'I'm sorry I had to shut so much down, I can't run this and the ship, too.'
It was Tia, Tia! sitting there in a body, a human body, like the realization of his dream!
'This?' he replied cleverly.
'I hope you don't mind if I don't get up,' she continued, a little ruefully. 'I'm not very good at walking yet. They just delivered this today, and I haven't had much practice in it yet.'
'It?' he said, sitting heavily down on his bunk and staring at her. 'How-what-'
'Do you like it?' she asked, pathetically eager for his approval. He wasn't sure what he was supposed to approve of, the body?
'How could I not like it, you,' His head was spinning as badly as it had a few hours ago. 'Tia, what on earth is this?'
She blinked, and giggled. 'I keep forgetting. You know all that bonus money we've been getting? I kept investing it, then reinvesting the profits in Moto-Prosthetics. But when we got back here, I was thinking about something Doctor Kenny told me, that they had the capability to make a body like this, but that there was no way to put a naked brain in it, and there was so much data-transfer needed to run it that the link could only be done at very short distances.'
'Oh.' He couldn't help but stare at her; this was his dream, his daydream-his,
Nevermind.
'Anyway,' she continued, blithely unaware that she had stunned him into complete silence, 'it seemed to me that the body would be perfect for a brainship, I mean, we've got all the links already, and it wouldn't be any harder to control a body from inside than a servo. But he was already an investor, and he told me it wasn't likely they'd ever build a body like that, since there was no market for it, because it would cost as much as a brainship contract buy-out.'
'But how,'
She laughed aloud. 'That was why I took all my share of the bonuses and bought more stock! I bought a controlling interest, then I told them to build me a body! I don't need a buy-out. I don't really want a buy-out, not since the Institute decided to give us the EsKay homeworld assignment.'
He shook his head. 'That simple? It hardly seems possible... didn't they argue?'
