[application] i am frightened by the liquid engineers
PLAYER INFORMATION
Your Name: Phoenix
OOC Journal:
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birdburningUnder 18? If yes, what is your age?: 21, so no underaged worries.
Email + IM: birdburning@aol.com + birdburning on AIM
Characters Played at Ataraxion: None
CHARACTER INFORMATION
Name: Libby
Canon: Original
Original or Alternate Universe: N/A
Canon Point: The end of her history.
Number: 189
Setting:
The year is 2084, the place is the Consolidated Nations of North America, and the world greatly resembles a cyberpunk nightmare with a specific bent to genetic engineering. It's not entirely a dystopia, but the gap between the rich and the poor is enormous, and there functionally is nothing like a middle class in the CNNA. But people get by.
The nations of North America - Canada, the USA, and Mexico - consolidated in 2045, under pressure to compete with the growing influence of South Africa and its allied nations and the economic domination of China. the EU still exists, but if anything it's worse than the CNNA, which occupies a standard of living for most people that would make the nations under it's banner 'developing', if they weren't doing most of their development backwards. Scientific and cultural advances don't take place in the CNNA, anymore, instead coming out of Chinese labs and South African industrial innovation. People in the CNNA, especially in the USA, still cling to an idea of themselves as a first world power, but the reality is that most of what they produce is entertainment, cheap overseas labour, and a small niche in information technology. The current President of the CNNA, Eleanor Gelt, is working on economic reform, but even the most optimistic political pundits can't see it leading to any sudden revolutions in their world standing.
But what wealth there is in the CNNA is concentrated in the hands of a few, and they spend it lavishly. The corporation is king, and savvy business people remain invested in overseas endeavours that make real money and remain in the CNNA to take advantage of ample tax breaks and a familiar culture. With communications being what there are there's no need to move in order to conduct business, and the CNNA is almost desperately devoted to keeping the wealthy in the country with the hope that some of their assets will trickle down eventually. As a result, they're allowed to do just about anything they want--which has always been true for the rich, in all places and times, but in the CNNA they're allowed to be brazen about it. Conspicuous consumption dominates their social milieu, while the poor look on with a mixture of envy and fascination at these gorgeous, casually cruel people. Being famous only requires money, and gossip shows and blogs proliferate. A lot of children in the CNNA couldn't say who the Vice President is, but almost all of them can name the ten most eligible billionaire bachelors.
So it goes, and it's not all that different from how things were sixty years ago. Just bigger, brighter, and much more bold.
There's always competition to do better, to one up the Joneses next door. Body modifications are rampant, involving cybernetic implants that serve a host of purposes. The wealthy can afford to genetically prescreen and design their children, creating an overclass that is, actually, inherently superior to those they rule, and from that there had to be a next logical step--
It started with genetically modified pets. Cats that glow in the dark and rainbow coloured finches. But after a while everyone had those, the symbol of being able to lavish so much money on a functionless creature growing stale, and then there had to be more. It had to be even more daring.
Genetically modifying human beings was already permissible. At some point, someone pointed out that in order to be considered human underneath a bill passed years ago a person had to be demonstrably genetically human, within a certain degree of variance. The bill had been passed in an effort to resist literally superhuman children being created by the upper class, but there was no reason not to extend it a little. Stretch it.
So they started to make the Pets.
You add a dash of this, a dash of that. Mess with key markers and rearrange a helix. Make them look visibly different from human, but not so far they aren't recognizable. The first few efforts created misshapen, ugly things, but eventually the method was perfected, and the first Pets rolled out of the laboratory and into the loving arms of their owners. You could have anything you wanted: a lovely singing voice, blue swirls on the skin, eyes like a shark's, intelligence dimmed or enhanced, docility bred right into them.
There was outrage, understandably. People railed about a new form of slavery, about playing God, but they weren't people anyone listened to, and at the end of the day all that had to be done was throw a few concessions at them. Compromise a little bit. The Pets were almost all sterile anyway, that was easy enough to promise. The margin of genetic error was expanded slightly. But the people making and purchasing Pets argued fairly successfully, trotting out gentle, idiot examples, ones with obvious and shape changing alterations, that they weren't really like people. They were living dolls. The perfect companion, even better than traditional domestic animals, because they could talk back a little and offer comfort no cat or dog could. They talked about end of life care, about lonely children being tutored at home provided with a playmate, about the proven scientific benefits of a Pet on stress according to several studies.
So this went over, and that was that. Pets were there to stay.
History:
Severe trigger warnings for child sexual abuse:
Wren was the second iteration of a custom Pet. The man who had her commissioned, Edward Anderson, had been one of the first people in the world to acquire a Pet, well before there were generic lines being developed. He wouldn't have settled for that, anyway, because he had very specific and detailed requirements. He ended up more than satisfied: he said he always wanted something like a daughter, only less work, and it was a running joke around the household.
She was grown from one of the embryos he'd had preserved when he first had her predecessor designed, alongside six others, and her test tube was chosen when she showed the best development of all of them. Two were kept around, just in case, and the others were culled right away. Wren developed--well, it seemed like it was normal, going by the one who came before her, and after seven months of gestation she was delivered on May 7, 2068, a vigorous and lovely baby girl with bright blue eyes, blonde hair, and soft white down feathers running down her arms and back. The excess young were culled as well, after a last inspection to determine if Wren really was the best bet, and shortly after that she was shipped to Anderson's Hawaii mansion. It had been an inland property, once, but now it was beachfront--just one of those things that happens when the water levels rose.
There, she was introduced to her genetic twin, Larkspur. Larkspur was twelve and absolutely doted on Wren on the spot, which made Anderson happy--he'd been worried about jealousy.
The first few years of Wren's childhood were pretty idyllic, all things told. Anderson was affectionate, if often absent, enjoying playing with Wren and leaving her actual care to a nanny while Larkspur accompanied him on business trips. Larkspur and her nanny, Yvette, were much more involved with Wren's upbringing. Larkspur always stressed (and maybe a little too pale, too tense, too quiet, but what does a three-year-old know about that?) that Wren had to be very, very grateful to Anderson, because they owed him everything. He was their everything, and Wren could never forget that. Wren readily accepted this, since there was no reason not to.
That lasted until Larkspur started to have tremors in her hands. Wren was four, and one night she went to sleep still having a sister and then in the morning--not. Larkspur had expired. Not died, but expired, because she wasn't really human or anything natural, she was a sophisticated expression of the miracles of modern science, and now she was gone. Anderson had engineered a time limit into both of them. He wasn't a young man, and he didn't like the idea of his Pets outliving him for very long. Larkspur would have succumbed eventually to the neurodenegerative disease that was embedded in her DNA, but since Anderson couldn't stand to have imperfection around him he had her disposed of. It was perfectly legal. They were his property, to do what he wanted with.
When she was four Wren didn't understand that. She just knew that she was lonely, Larkspur was gone, and for the next two years she withdrew a little. She always made herself perk up for Anderson, but when it was just her, Yvette, and a squadron of household help Wren was a quieter, shyer little girl. This probably saved her life, because it meant that certain important markers of a flaw in her design were missed. Anderson never intended Wren to be educated. He'd never had Larkspur taught to read, for example, because it wasn't the point of having them around. But Wren got older, and her early curiosity and insight began to blossom into a wide-eyed brilliance.
If she were human, Wren would have been one of those rare flukes of intellect that qualify people as geniuses. She was a clone, so she shouldn't have been smarter than Larkspur, but mutation and change did happen even within the same batch of embryos. A minor exposure to extra radiation in the lab, an imbalance of chemicals, anything, really. It happens even between identical twins born naturally, and Wren had been exposed to vastly more difference since she was budded off of strands of engineered DNA. Normally, this kind of mutation would just have made her sick--lupus, autism, heart defects. But not here.
And maybe Larkspur hadn't been stupid anyway. It was still a new science, when they made her. Intelligence isn't a single gene flipping on or off.
Wren will never really know. What she did know at the time is that she wanted--needed more stimulation, more to learn and to do. She was allowed to watch as much television as she liked, since she had no school to occupy her time and no playmates to interact with. She turned on close captioning, pulled her knees to her chest, and then one day she could read. After that, stealing books was easy. Anderson hung onto a collection of large, old paper books, but only as a symbol of money, not to read for himself. Wren could play in the library all she liked, and she soaked up her only meaningful form of learning like a hungry little sponge. There wasn't a reason to know things, except just--to know them. For herself. It was the one thing that was really hers, with Larkspur gone.
She was smart enough to know vaguely that this wasn't allowed, so she kept it to herself. It helped that keeping a secret was another thing that was just hers. Secrets and words: these were the things that Wren could have.
Shortly after she turned seven Anderson started taking her on trips with him, and on the first of these trips she met a boy--a boy Pet, whose name she doesn't remember. She does remember that when she told him who she belonged to he winced, pulled her into his lap, and fed her candy the rest of the time they were waiting for their owners to be finished a meeting. He had tiny quills in his hair, like a hedgehog, and bright purple eyes. Wren found out what he was sorry about later that night.
It turned out, Anderson drank when he was away from home. It turned out, there was a reason he wanted pretty young things that looked like girls that had nothing to do with false daughters. It turned out, Wren could breathe very fast, very shallow, and not move. After, he held her and cried until he went to sleep, and Wren crawled out of bed to the hotel washroom to grimly assess the damage in the mirror.
She learned then that even if she had soft white feathers barely dappled with iridescent streaks, even if she was tiny and defenceless and hurting, underneath that she could make herself be tough. She knew about things a little like this from some of the books she'd read. (Years later, she'd realize Larkspur, who couldn't read and never had friends, would have had no idea what was happening to her. Another thing to tuck away and remember.) There was no point in crying, even if she did cry a little, braced inside the bathtub. She went back to bed and curled up with Anderson again, and that was that.
Between trips Wren was left alone to do what she liked, mostly. She kept reading and learning, still for no real reason, but she added learning about what Anderson actually did to afford this place. To afford her. He left her unattended in hotel rooms often, not bothering to hide his papers or lock his computer, and Wren learned about computer technology. It fascinated her, and not just because it was a distraction from anticipation of--later on. It felt right in her head in a way she couldn't express, the crisp logic of programming and the engineering challenges of miniature hardware.
Wren disassembled her first computer, a simple touch based interface meant for her to play simple games on, when she was nine. Then she put it back together.
Two weeks later, there was a short news clip about discarded Pets being a problem in the cities. The reporter had pleaded with owners to be responsible, please, and commit to caring for their Pets one way or another.
These two things clicked together in Wren's mind like wire slipping into place to carry a current: one, that she had a skill, and in this world of information and cybernetics it was a skill with value, and two, there were things like her that lived free. It might sound stupid that the idea of escape had literally never occurred to Wren before, but it was really just naivety. She disliked her life, but it was all she'd ever been allowed to know, having been deliberately cloistered so long. Her life was unpleasant, but it was hers. It was only then she wondered if this is what it had to be.
She couldn't do it right away. She needed to be smarter, better prepared. She'd only ever been driven through the kind of place she'd need to go, in order to hide, and she had no idea what it was really like. She was dependent on other people to care for her; she didn't know how to feed herself, or how to use money, how to find a place to live or--she was frustrated to realize that she didn't really know anything. But she could change that.
It took five years, five years in which she studied and practised. By the time she was fourteen Wren could build a computer out of spare parts. She knew how to make and program implants to do all kinds of useful things. Wren had to steal all the bits and pieces of her knowledge, watching and trying not to get caught noticing so much. On the surface, she was dutiful and polite, a delightful little toy. But inside, she calculated. How far it was from the mansion door to the gate. How much she could easily carry on her back without looking like it was anything worth stealing. A path from Hawaii to the mainland she could take if she managed to bribe enough people, if she could figure out who she needed to bribe. She wasn't ready, not really, but one day Anderson casually mentioned that he was thinking of getting another bird, and she couldn't wait anymore.
She didn't have to kill him. She'd never killed anything before, not even an insect, and she had been worried it'd be hard. It wasn't, though. If anything it was--easy, so easy, slitting his throat and covering him with a pillow so he couldn't scream. Stabbing him twenty-three times in the face after that was maybe a little excessive, but. No more Larkspurs. No more Wrens. They'd be coming for her as soon as they found him, so Wren showered quickly and made for the door. She knew all the door codes she needed by rote, and as for the thumbprints it wasn't like Anderson needed those for himself anymore regardless. She didn't bother trying to hide evidence linking her to this, because it was going to be pretty obvious who was responsible when she turned up missing. All she had to do after opening the doors was cutting the tracker chip in her forearm out, and then--there.
Outside of the gates Wren took her first breath of air that didn't belong to anyone else, and then she ran.
New Honolulu was overwhelmingly large, and as Wren huddled in a doorway and stared at all of the lights, all of the people, she was amazed, overwhelmed, and recklessly let herself be hopeful for the first time since she was little.
The first night, Wren was rolled for every valuable she had on her body, assaulted, and ditched behind a garbage disposal unit.
She hadn't been ready for this, not at all. Every tentative plan she'd made imploded on contact with reality, where Wren was a tiny fourteen-year-old girl who practically smelled like helplessness, with her shiny soft hair and unhardened hands. She spat up blood and--reassessed. She didn't know what she was doing and her face was everywhere, now, the police searching for her on every corner. Even keeping her hood up and hiding from cameras wouldn't protect her in this place, and that wasn't even remembering the way the boys had spit on her after they saw her feathers. No. The original plan wasn't going to work, and Wren gave herself five minutes to cry, call herself on idiot, and rock back and forth. And then she got up. She got up, because Wren wasn't ready to quit. Not when this--this was still better, than what she'd had before.
Hiking to the next city over took a long time, since she stayed off the roads and scavenged for food in the Dumpsters of gas stations. She fucked a trucker who was too drunk to recognize her for a fistful of money, unsure of what she should ask for and bitterly reflecting on the fact that she had never asked Anderson what she cost. Then maybe she'd know how much she was worth now, fallen from grace. It turned out she'd been paid badly, but it got her a pair of sunglasses and some salve for the blisters on her feet. She decided to play it safe and skipped over to Maui by hiding herself in the belly of a small fishing boat. There, she made for Kahului.
She met Jo there, when they took shelter under the same bridge. Wren was weary, understandably, but Jo was one of those people who could not take a hint, and before long they were talking and sharing a flask. Wren had never been drinking before, and it felt good. Soothing and warming. Maybe that was why instead of trying to lie smoothly when Jo asked her name, Wren hesitated.
"I need...a new one," she admitted.
"Libby," Jo pronounced, after a second of evaluation. "You look like a Libby."
So Libby left Wren behind under the bridge and followed Jo around for a few weeks like a shadow, observant and learning. Jo was an easygoing kind of mentor, possibly because she was either drunk or high every minute of the day, and she took Libby under her wing out of a wild burst of generosity. That, and Libby was pretty, still, while Jo's looks had been eroded severely by the elements and addiction. Libby knew she was being taken advantage of when she thought about how much of the money she earned ended up in Jo's hands, but then again, maybe not. What Jo was giving her was far more valuable than money. Jo was showing her how to survive. They ended up parting ways after a while, since that kind of alliance was always fragile, and Libby hopped another island.
She was still wanted, still flinching and hiding from cops, but she felt like she had her feet more under her. Being small and being pretty, with no one to turn to, meant Libby still got the shit kicked out of her and worse semi-regularly, but she refused to do what most girls did and hook up with a guy for protection. She was done being owned, even if it meant she died. And that meant her money was hers, too, to hide and spend in little bursts at junk shops. There were still shreds of her original plan, somewhere in her, and bartering with something besides sex had its perks. Before long Libby had a semi-regular batch of the criminal element hitting her up for tech support; Libby could reprogram an ankle bracelet and pile false money onto a credit card, even with the crude tools she had at hand.
Eventually, she had enough to give herself her first implant. She almost bled out, nicking a vein in clumsily sawing open her arm, but once she staunched it and stitched it back up she had her very own hidden electronic lockpick. She added a few others, over the years, the most recent being a shunt she had to use a mirror to place in the back of her neck where it'd be hidden by her dirty, blue-streaked hair.
The thing was, Libby was sixteen now. The first time she saw her hands shake she didn't waste time with denial. She'd been expecting it for a while, and she knew there was this one drug cocktail that would at least slow down the deterioration of her nervous system. That's what the shunt was for. The problem was affording it. She could get it, sometimes, but mostly even going without food and crashing on other people's couches without paying rent she just didn't have enough. Enough money, enough time, enough ingenuity to think her way out of it.
It's been two months since her fingers started to tremble when she left them at rest, and underneath spitting defiance and reckless thrill-seeking Libby is just scared.
Personality:
At first brush, Libby is one of those hard-eyed, smart-mouthed little girls that desperate situations and self-destructiveness breed sometimes, old enough to be angry at the world but not old enough to do something constructive with that anger. That anger in turn is mostly the patching over of old wounds and fear, so you could say and be forgiven for doing so that Libby is just One Of Those Girls, the kind who's either dead, pregnant, or in jail by twenty-one. In a lot of ways Libby is that girl, and of the three options she at least knows which one it's going to be.
It's never easy to face death with grace, and it's impossibly harder when you're sixteen. Even worse when you've only really felt alive, even if it was awful, in the last two of those years. Libby knows she'll probably be dead before her next birthday, and she doesn't even really know who she is yet. What weighs on her is time: time she doesn't have, time she wouldn't know what to do with if she did, time to figure all of this out. Time to be able to ask what it all was for and having an answer that at least satisfies her, even if it helps no one else. Even in a best case scenario with ample medical attention her prognosis is two years, maybe three, and the last third of her time will be spent with a body shutting down around her.
So that's why Libby is desperate and angry, because she's trying to cram an entire lifetime into maybe eight or nine months, and unlike all the cramming of information she's done before there's not really a substitute for life experience she can glean out of a book. Libby, brilliant and talented, hates thinking of all of her potential and desire to be something that matters extinguished. She's never had a chance to really shine, to play with computers like she's always wanted to and make them sing. But she knows she could, if she had a chance. She thinks less about what she's going to miss when it comes to people, but that's something else.
Libby has never had much use for people. The closest bond she's ever had with someone died when she was four, and after that it's all being people using her somehow. For a job, for a fetish, for ten minutes of sweating and then out of the car you go, for fixing a computer, for stealing cable. As a Pet and then a homeless non-human, legally accorded the same rights as a dog and socially seen as a freak of nature or a curiosity, Libby has never existed in a setting where she's an equal. It would be bad enough being a homeless teenaged girl with no one to protect her. Add in feathers and smelling like strawberries, and Libby has nothing to protect her except her intelligence, which is pretty useless against fists. She's never had a friend, mostly because she lacks the skills required to make them and the trust necessary to embrace something that (to her) tenuous and frail. She never found the other Pets she was looking for: that news story she hung onto was exaggerated, a grab for ratings. People don't throw away something that valuable to be used by someone else, and most Pets lack the intelligence to even think of escape, let alone pull it off.
So Libby has pretty much always been on her own, and if she has ached for companionship (she has) she's ruthlessly suppressed it. Ironically, she can fake being charming and innocent extremely well, when she wants to. The ragged little hooker-cum-hacker has impeccable manners and a lifetime spent learning to please underneath her smudged eye make-up. She cleans up well, looking like a little angel, but Libby is rarely moved to make the effort. In her new life being polished and sweet is like painting a target on her forehead, and even besides that Libby stubbornly refuses to be nice for the sake of other people. She's done being that doll of a thing she used to be, when she only did it because there was no other choice, since it reminds her of everything Before.
That's not to say she's totally lacking in a certain kind of acidic charm, if a person goes in for sarcasm and swearing. Being clever, in her case, came with being witty, and all that time spent biting her tongue has left her with apparently endless reserves of snapping, eye-rolling dark humour. She can be really funny, which gets her attention, and in spite of her refusal to admit it Libby does crave attention. If acting out and running her mouth gets her that, then that's what she does, even when it'd be better for her to just sit down and shut up. But she won't sit down and she won't shut up, because time is short and she's not wasting a goddamn minute of it.
Her wit is one of those tells that says Libby isn't as stupid as a lot of people would assume her to be. Reckless and foolish, yes, but wisdom and intelligence are not synonymous. If anything, the fact that Libby knows she's so smart makes her even more of a hellion, because to her most people seem unbearably dense. She often feels like a bright crackle of electricity in a room full of dead bulbs, and the frustration of so often being misunderstood or met with blank looks leads her to lash out more. She's smarter than other people are. She's better than they are, at least at what she cares about, and no one has ever told her how smart she is. They've called her a smartass, but it's not the same thing, and once again her motivations spin back to wanting to be seen and understood. She wants at least one person to recognize that she's more than her body or the circumstances of her manufacture. That she could have been something, if things had been different for her. In the middle of that, nestled where she'll never admit it even to herself, is the fear that maybe she isn't so smart after all. That if she was smart, someone would notice. If she was smart, she could figure out a way to survive. If she was smart, she wouldn't be doing the things she does. A smart person would have found a way out, wouldn't they?
It hasn't changed since she was five. Being smart and keeping her private thoughts her own are the only things that really belong to Libby, and it's dangerous to hinge already fragile self-esteem on just two things. If and when those things are questioned or taken away from her Libby has nothing to fall back on. It breaks her a little every time, and part of what scares her about the future is that dementia is almost certainly in her cards. She'll lose her mind before her life, and of the two it's the former that means the most. Dying wouldn't be so bad if she just had the chance to still be her when she goes.
Of course, Libby doesn't really know who 'her' is. She has the emotional understanding of a rock, complicated by the highs and lows of teenaged brain chemistry, further complicated by the incredible stress that her lifestyle puts on her. When every meal is a hard earned victory and someone breaking even two of her fingers could end up killing her, well--every day is a rollercoaster. It's part of why Libby is unable to settle down: she doesn't actually know how to be settled. A calm situation feels like a disaster waiting to happen, and she'll half-consciously fuck things up on purpose because that's what feels normal to her. She does things that are harmful to only herself and doesn't understand why she seems so bound and determined to always wreck her own opportunities. On the other hand, if she ruins everything before someone else has a chance to then maybe it won't hurt so much when things, inevitably, do go wrong. It's easier to expect the betrayal and the disaster, when every experience of her life so far tells her that's what always happens anyway. It's better not to let herself get attached to anything. Especially considering the obvious.
So there's all of this almost pathological avoidance of attachment and stability built up in Libby, because it terrifies her. It's one of those fears she won't admit to, of course, but Libby is afraid that she will end up caring about someone or something outside of herself and that it'll tear her apart. Losing Larkspur left deep scars in her, ones she barely remembers but still feels. Loving anything means she'll lose it, and Libby doesn't think she could lose anything else and survive. And Libby is a consummate survivor. If that means being alone, not letting herself even start to need something that she can't keep, so be it.
She has a deep capacity to care, is the part that's even worse--or that's how she sees it. Being so damaged herself makes Libby open to understanding the damage of others, and even if her empathy is hamstrung and limping it's still there, still trying to claw out of her chest and kill her. She feels everything else so strongly she's actually half-convinced in this illogical way that letting people in would literally physically choke her, because she wouldn't know how to shut the door. It's hard enough bearing up under the weight of her own history, let alone anyone else's. Libby's almost painfully keen sensitivity to her environment works against her, here, because she has to struggle to not notice, not learn, not get invested. She has to work to blind herself to these things, which is yet another reason not to spend more time around people than she has to. It's dangerous.
Also dangerous is being cared for. Libby interprets expressions of affection towards her as hostile unless strongly convinced otherwise. As a pretty, small girl she's received her fair share of overtures, and a few of them weren't even motivated by a desire to capitalize on her earning value as a part-time prostitute. There's a certain kind of person who's attracted to people like Libby as lovers or friends, and Libby recognizes that these people are as broken as she is. She also has trouble telling them apart from the people who want to trade with her for sexual favours, because in her muddled understanding of the world it's all about what you owe and are owed. Libby doesn't want to owe anyone anything, so on principle these people all fall in a category she should avoid unless the transaction can be put to her in terms that make sense. Usually, this means trading her body or her skills for something she can use.
Sex, for Libby, has never been about her. She knows other people have it for fun, that some people need it so bad it makes them crazy, but Libby finds sex unpleasant at best. She's a dead fish, which usually doesn't bother the kind of person who picks up an obviously underaged girl to nail in a seedy motel room or the type who trades shelter for head. As unpleasant as she finds it, though, it's something that's easy to understand and to trade in. Her body has always been a commodity, and at least in hooking she has more say over what happens and gets to profit it off it herself. This idea of her body as a tool or a good extends to how she treats it otherwise, with all of her experiments in self-modification with cybernetics. Her scars aren't about self-harm; she doesn't enjoy the pain of self-surgery or feel any relief from doing it, but she likes her scars anyway, and the ugliness of her implants. It makes her feel more like she owns herself, since she's free to do whatever she wants with her property--her skin, her muscle, her bone. Every scar is a sign of what she's claimed for herself. So it goes the same way for the job that earns most of her income: this is hers, to rent out temporarily, but never to sell for good.
It's nowhere near that simple, even if she wants it to be. She hates her job and usually works intoxicated, whereas her self-modification is an interesting and personal experiment that she does sober. She just doesn't know a way to feed herself otherwise, since her preferred work barely pays for itself. If she had an opportunity to quit she'd take it in a heartbeat, but unfortunately the idea of trade will never fully leave her mind--it'll always be easy to fall back on. She does, at least, lack shame about what she does, and would react viciously to being demeaned for doing what she has to. Shame is something that happens to other people, but she can't afford shame. That or guilt.
Libby's entire moral compass is skewed. She's not a psychopath, despite murdering Anderson when she was fourteen, but questions of right and wrong just rarely occur to her. There's what she has to do to survive, and everything else. She doesn't enjoy the instances she's had to be violent or cruel to get by, but she doesn't dwell on them either. Her moral system is more about what she can get away with without punishment than anything else, still grounded in a child's reaction to being praised and scolded for slightly incomprehensible reasons. This is one of those ways that Libby is childish, responding as someone much younger than she actually is. When caught and penalized she's more likely to feel resentment than anything else, and reflecting on her past actions is rare. They're in the past, over and done, so who cares? Why linger on the bad things? Libby has never heard an answer that satisfies her, so she doesn't bother with it.
In short, Libby is more complicated than she looks, but every girl like that is. She's an outsider who isn't even knocking on the door since she's so sure she won't get again, telling herself that she prefers being outside anyway. Outside, Libby is as free as a bird. Inside, she remembers quite clearly, is where they keep cages.
Abilities, Weaknesses and Power Limitations:
+ ability | genius
What it says on the tin. Libby is a genius, a broadly (self-)educated, always learning, and immensely innovative thinker. The only thing in her life that brings her joy is the ability to make connects and solve problems; give her a challenging intellectual task and she thrives, seemingly only getting more refreshed the longer she works. Her special aptitude and gift lies in computers, software and hardware, wherein she loves taking things apart to see how they're made and putting them back together better. A natural offshoot of this, at least in her world, is the creation and insertion of cybernetic implants.
+ ability | cybernetics
More part of her body than equipment, Libby has four implants she built and inserted herself, along with a self-sealing shunt in the back of her neck she uses to administer her medication:
* Electronic lockpick. When this device is working and able to scan and tune into a compatible frequency, Libby can push a button embedded under the skin of her left wrist and force an automatic door or lock open. It doesn't always work, is the problem, and it surely won't work on any doors on the ship that really want to stay shut.
* Vitals monitor. Libby built and inserted this implant a year ago, in preparation for the inevitable. A spider-like splay of wire on the outside of her left rib cage but mostly embedded underneath the skin, this device tracks her heartbeat, respiration, and blood chemicals. All Libby has to do is find a computer with compatible blue tooth and set it up to receive from her implant, and she gets a reading of her vitals at the moment, over the last 24 hours, and over the last day. Compiled, she can build graphs to track over weeks, and she does.
* Memory card. Libby houses this one in her shoulder, just over her heart. It's a slim, flexible silver bit of material, about the size and shape of a playing card. It was highly expensive to assemble the components, but worth it. On her memory card she can store up to a terabyte of information through a wireless port that juts slightly out of her skin. She uses it to secure information that's especially sensitive or personal, since it's essentially impossible to hack without physically removing it from her body, and if that happens Libby figures she'll have bigger goddamn problems.
Speaking of problems: while her implants run on bioelectricity, they're still electric devices embedded in her tissue, and while on their own they lack power enough to hurt her even if they short out (well, they wouldn't hurt much) it would be very bad if Libby got herself electrocuted. Since they are assembled out of bits and pieces of scrap and already flawed, there's a decent chance one or more of them would explode, doing serious damage and leaching toxic chemicals into her bloodstream as well.
+ ability | hydrophilic intangibility
Received from Jesse Pinkman.
+ ability | inhuman
Only a certain percentage of Libby's DNA is unaltered human raw material. She's had wide swatches deleted, cleaned up, and augmented. She's also been added to, with a mixture of doves, hummingbirds, and larks providing the basis for the feathers on her arms and back, along with her unusually light bones. There's even a sampling of wild strawberry spliced into her that leaves her always smelling faintly of the ripe fruit in question. Besides the cosmetic alterations, she has a strong immune system, 20/20 vision, no allergies, an excellent metabolism, favourable muscle composition--if she took care of herself, she'd be as healthy and fit as any sixteen-year-old girl could be. Except for one thing.
- weakness | degenerating
The Aves Protocol is the timed development of a vicious neurodegenerative disease that Libby's former owner had placed in his little birds to ensure that a) they wouldn't outlive him long and b) they'd never grow old and unappealing. The course of the disease largely resembles amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig's Disease, with the addition of a high likelihood of dementia in the late stages. Libby is already experiencing the first symptoms, which are weakness in her arms, fatigue, and trembling fingers. Unchecked, the disease will cause increasing weakness, muscle atrophy, difficulty speaking or swallowing, emotional lability, difficulty breathing, and dementia. By the last stages Libby will need assistance breathing, but will still eventually succumb to respiratory failure.
With a blend of medication available in her time to stave off the symptoms and offer protection to her motor neurons, Libby could live up to three years. Without this medication she'll be dead well within a year. In the short term, while on medication, eating properly, and gently exercising, Libby can be mostly symptom free. Off medication and caring poorly for herself can leave her incapable of managing fine motor control with her hands, exhausted, and mildly disoriented.
- weakness | technical inexperience
While Libby is brilliant and adaptive, she's also never had direct, unfettered, and risk free access to computers of any degree of sophistication--at least in her time, although a modern computer would strike her as both adorably slow and frustratingly crude. She's certainly never had access to something like the Tranquility, and even if she had genius only takes a person so far. She's still sixteen, without any formal training, and she'll have to study the hell out of the new systems available to her (with instruction from more experienced people) to get up to a decent level of proficiency. As is, Libby is hamstrung by her lack of knowledge. When it comes to her cybernetic implants, Libby has been used to jury-rigging them together out of less than ideal components and performing crude surgery on herself to implant them, which has resulted in a mess of scarring on her body and numerous instances of infection and rejection. The implants she did implant successfully tend to be buggy at best, and she's not really in a hurry to hack herself open and replace them.
- weakness | broken wings
Libby has immense trust issues and psychological baggage. She dislikes normal humans, especially men, and reacts to overtures of kindness with hostility and suspicion. Libby herself never gives anything away for free if she can help it, so she's always looking for the strings attached to any soft word or gesture. It's all a trick, she's sure, and she's ironically more comforted by people who are blatantly out to get her. That, at least, means they can negotiate straightforwardly. It makes her fall in with bad crowds on a regular basis.
Beyond smaller social concerns, Libby in a situation where she feels cornered in any way is a Libby who panics. It doesn't always manifest as coming out swinging, but none of her responses are ever anything good. She does not handle the sense of being threatened well and always overreacts, unthinkingly just trying to make the situation stop. On a ship like the Tranquility, that could be easily fatal, for her or for someone else.
- weakness | inhuman
Both a strength and a weakness. The flipside of Libby's modification is that there is only one of her, and while she's built in such a way that medicine that works for unaltered humans usually works for her this isn't always the case--although luckily for her, her neural protection cocktail works exactly as it's supposed to. The serious problems are that Libby is susceptible to diseases that can't usually jump species lines, she can't receive blood transfusions from anyone, and any work up of her blood or other tissues will find them unutterably weird. Her bones are easier to break than a normal girl's would be. Animals react to her with anything from distaste to aggression, unless acclimated to her scent. Her treatment would require both a doctor and a veterinarian willing to communicate thoroughly with each other. She's sterile, which isn't a concern for her at the moment but something to note anyway, and even if her neurodegeneration magically disappeared her lifespan is still going to top out around fifty at best, due to the health problems clones usually face. Libby was not designed with a future in mind.
- weakness | half-deaf
Libby can no longer hear out of her right ear.
= power limitations | baseline
Despite her claims to the contrary, Libby isn't physically or mentally any better than what lies within the normal variances of human beings. She may veer to the far end of the Bell curve, but she's still on it. Specifically, she's on the curve for 5'3" sixteen-year-old girls who are underfed and slowly dying. Physical confrontations aren't her forte, social ones usually end in her losing, and in mental ones she can be outmoved by any adult with experience and intelligence. She's not superhuman, even if she's not human either. She's one of a kind.
Inventory:
- a handheld tablet computer comparable to an iPad and the size of a modern iPhone; interfaced with her implants
- her facial piercings, earrings, and belly button ring
- a black eyeliner pencil
- a three week supply of her medicinal cocktail
- a modified syringe
Appearance:
PB is Britt Robertson.
Libby is a slender 5'3" sixteen-year-old girl with a slightly heart-shaped face. Her features are soft, small, and delicate, her full mouth and blue-grey eyes commanding the most attention by default. When not abused with a straightener and streaked with dye, her honey light blonde hair tends to fall in loose waves. She has the kind of looks people associate with innocence and purity, with all the cultural baggage that entails. The light down of iridescent white feathers that run along the outside of her arms and down her back to taper at the small of it cement the picture for what it is: angelic.
So Libby does everything in her power to erase her fourteen-year-old face. She straightens her hair but often lets it go unwashed, and has streaked it with electric blue. She tends to wear it in weirdly twisted ways, or tucked under a hat. Her eyebrow, nose, ears, and belly button are all pierced by herself or by enlisted buddies, because that's sanitary. She has lumpy, ugly scars along both arms, dotting her sides, and on her thighs, from implants being inserted and removed. The implants that stay in are sometimes visible as unsettling regular shape under her skin, especially the ones with external ports or visible wire. She masks the faint smell of strawberries that clings to her with boys' cologne that smells more like rubbing alcohol than anything else and uses heavy smudged eyeliner to darken her blue eyes. Her clothes match her image too: ragged long sleeve t-shirts with vests thrown over them, jeans that are more holes than denim, abused military surplus jackets, short shorts that hang off her hips, and always enormous stomping boots. She accessorizes like a magpie, loading on more necklaces than can suit her tiny frame, and wears rings like makeshift brass knuckles. She always covers her arms and back when in public, just in case; she's thinking of getting a tattoo, but hasn't decided what she wants yet.
Sometimes she still looks like a little girl playing dress up. But usually she wears it all with confidence, strutting around as if she's much taller and more sure of herself than she actually is. Her voice, irritatingly--or at least it irritates her--is equally as tiny and lovely as the rest of her, and to compensate she's developed the habit of making it falsely, awfully bright, so at least it seems like mockery and not an accident. Occasionally, her fingers and arms have tremors, but when she notices then she bunches her hands into fists and pretends nothing is happening.
Age: 16
AU Clarification: N/A
SAMPLES
Log Sample:
So this is her life:
Retro from the 2050's is coming in, so everyone else is wearing clashing neon and showing off as much skin as they can get away with, in her circles. Everyone is wearing tans and misusing old slang. Everyone is rolling on designer feel-good drugs that make you just want to fuck everyone and touch everything.
Libby keeps smearing on black eyeliner in her long-sleeved jackets and drinking. Smoking a little hybrid potpoppy every so often. Because Libby hates changing for anything but her own reasons, and she's not going to fucking dress up like she's not going to smile when people say she's too pretty to look so serious. She's not going to give one inch even if it's on wicked petty little things like that, because--fuck them. Fuck all of them and their birth certificates.
She has a proof of sale. Everyone can go to an ice hell.
*
Liam used to dance ballet, like her. Both of them have quit for about the same time. When he first told her he used to dance she evaluated his dark curly hair, his coffee clean skin where it's not mottled with track marks, his hazel eyes--yeah, she said, she could see it. He'd laughed, quietly. Not that kind of dancing, Libs.
He's more of a downer than an upper person, like she is, which makes crashing at his place less fucking manic, at least. She could actually sleep when him and his heroin buddies nodded off, and her only worry was them jacking her stuff to pawn. Fortunately, people soaked out of their heads aren't very good at problem solving, and if she throws a blanket on them and a plastic tarp underneath, puts on some kid's channel--they're too distracted to even really start looking. She hides it, hilariously, under the floorboards.
Liam, she doesn't worry about. He knows she'd kick his skinny brown ass if he tried anything. So she sleeps, curled up on the end of a mattress, and feels slightly okay for a while. At least she's out of it.
She even goes so far as to trust him with the tricky operation installing her spinal shunt was. If she fucked it up she was very aware she was going to be crippled as well as doomed--there are plenty of medical advances that might get her some feeling back, but all of then are vastly more expensive than she could ever afford. Her half-assed solution is, practically speaking, more than she can afford. But if she didn't do it--fuck it. She's always been a ride or die girl. And it worked out, didn't it? So far, at least.
Libby sees it as hacking. A body is just a complex piece of machinery, animated by a sophisticated (but delicate, so delicate, prone to so many errors and structural flaws--if she were in charge of putting it together it'd be nothing like this) computing system. It runs on chemical reactions. It operates optimally in certain environments. If she's not squeamish about tinkering with her other machines there's no reason to be squeamish about tinkering with this one. So she isn't. She just understands that breaking this one has bigger consequences than usual.
*
It was something she would have done alone, if possible, but someone needed to hold the mirror and mop up blood. Libby sterilized everything as much as she could, shot up with what hopefully were actually the immune system suppressant it was labelled as, and had Liam pinned and secure her hair under plastic. He swabbed down the incision site and Libby took a breath.
"Libs, are you sure you don't want painkillers--"
"I'm cutting into my motherfuck spine, Liam," she snapped, "I'm not going fuzzy on this. Neither are you, so stop twitching at the needle. There's no way you've got the WDs this fast."
"That's not why I'm twitching." He paused. She could see the seriousness of his expression, and didn't like it. Sober Liam was too fucking contemplative. Too bright. And far too fucking perceptive, the bastard. As soon as this was over she was getting him higher than the skyline.
"Good," she said, tersely. "Have the towel ready."
"Siddhartha," he breathed, after, "Siddhartha, Libby, you didn't--that looks fucking awful."
Libby, in more pain than she could recall in a while, the back of her shirt soaked in her blood and her hands shaking--but not from nerve damage, from exhaustion, adrenaline, the rush of success as long as she didn't get infected--she flashed her teeth at him in the mirror. "Like a fucking monster."
Daddy's little bird is a fucking monster. Try putting a leash on a monster, try killing one. See what fucking happens. Oh, they die. But you suffer.
"Don't ever make me hurt you again," Liam had said, and Libby had been about to tell him off when he pulled her into an embrace and breathed into her hair, shakily. Since Libby didn't want to find a new place to sleep today she didn't elbow him in the stomach or bite his arms.
(He hadn't hurt her. What the fuck was he talking about?)
*
After, because Liam really wasn't so bad, weird hugs or not, they shared pho together. They got it even cheaper than instant noodles from the store by going to the little Vietnamese guy downstairs. Libby played on her handheld while Liam blew the guy, they got their green tea and noodles, and they balanced both carefully as they ascended the stairs. The great thing about pho was that it was basically impossible to throw anything in it that would fuck it up, so it was different every time besides the noodles and the broth. That day the old guy had wound up with meat from somewhere--not even cat or dog--and some vegetables that weren't even wilted. It was astounding the things you could find to eat where other people saw weeds. Libby didn't know how it was done, but she appreciated it.
"He's actually nice," Liam opined, dreamily--he was high again, that she took care off immediately, "Sometimes when you're not around we play checkers."
"I don't--" fuck, no, Liam had done her a favour. Two favours, with feeding her. She owed him, and before she could pay that back--plus it was like beating on a little kid. It amazed her how she always felt like the older one when she was sixteen and he was eighteen, nineteen. It wasn't like he hadn't been through a lot. But that was probably the benefit of being a junkie. You never had to feel anything for long, just between hits. Still, she swallowed snapping at him (even if he'd instantly forgive her) and sniffed a bit of the white meat in her noodles, popped it into her mouth.
"Mm. You know what this tastes like?" He shook his head. Her teeth shone bright. "Me."
He choked lightly and tipped sideways on the couch, laughing, and Libby actually smiled for real. It hadn't been that funny, but Liam was pretty easy to make laugh.
He was a pretty decent guy.
*
This is what a girl (who isn't even a girl) figures out about pretty decent guys: they will try to crawl into your heart, even if they don't mean to. Even if they swear they do know better than to get inside of you--not even fucking you, just getting too close, in past where you can throw them out anymore. It goes for some girls, too, but guys are more likely not to realize what they're doing. They're better at keeping a distance. Libby has to wonder where the bullshit idea came from that women are the emotionally frail ones, because in her experience it's men who cling. Who are too stupid to read keep out signs.
(Pretty decent guys make you want them there. The fucking bastards.)
Liam drapes a blanket over her while she's sleeping. She knows it's him because he's sleeping on the floor, a heavy drum of water resting in front of the door. She kicks him to find out what the fuck (it's been a week since her surgery, and so far, so good, but she's still wobbly) and he groggily comes to, smiles at her.
"'M sorry," he says, "One of those guys said you were cute. Worried."
"I don't need your fucking help." Libby almost spits that down on him, enraged and scared at the same time--this is three things she owes him, that's just not fair.
"I know. He said I was pretty too. This is the only room with a door. Stop kicking me?"
What a fucking liar.
Libby can't move the water barrel by herself, so she stomps back to the mattress and seethes. If she didn't seethe, she'd have to be grateful, and she's not. (This isn't in her plans. She's going to be dead before she's seventeen, probably, she doesn't--he doesn't know that, nobody knows that. This isn't part of the fucking plan, but it's tempting enough that it scares her. Liam is a pretty decent guy. He could probably take care of her at the end. At least put her out of her misery. Libby could give up that last little fragment of freedom for security, and the thing is, Liam isn't like the guys who convinced her to avoid men. He wouldn't pimp her out; at least she's never seen him do it with past girlfriends. He wouldn't hit her. He knows about her feathers and just thinks they're pretty.)
(But she can't. She can't hold anyone else up. She can't even hold herself up.)
She sends him an email before she climbs out of the window, all of her possessions not even half filling a backpack. It's the least she can do.
*
It's one of those things that feels like it should have a conclusion. Like if this were a made for TV movie or a comic, Libby would answer his email back and realize she did care.
Instead, she deletes them until they stop coming. Automatically. There are plenty of easy filters for that. She forgets about him as completely and thoroughly as possible; deletes photos, deletes video, deletes text. She'd delete memory if she could. Instead she can only do so much, but it should be enough: with nothing to look at, he'll fade from her. If she lived long enough she'd forget his name.
But she's not going to have time. So he's Liam, pretty and slender, who muddled out of heroin high to appear to actually care. And it's not fair. It's not fair she doesn't get time to waste seeing if she could handle a connection. It's not fair she had to run away to save him the trouble of her death. It's not fair that they will always be a what-if and it's not fair that she is always going to be a what-if and it is just not fucking fair, at all, none of this is fair and--
Libby curls up underneath an overpass. Breathes very fast, very shallow, and doesn't move.
Comms Sample:
[visual]
[Libby is nestled on the floor in the midst of machine components, tinkering with one particularly complicated looking bauble of wires. Her uniform sleeves are rolled down to her wrists, there are a few smudges of grease on her face, her hair is a bird's nest, and she looks extraordinarily excited. Screw alien abduction or whatever the hell this is, screw the freaks and monsters, screw everything--she's in a playground, the best one ever, and she honestly doesn't give a rat's fuck about it all.]
[Hence the video communication, because she has to talk about this radicalness with someone.]
Have any of you--Buddha fuck me sideways, people, this is just--[Whatever she's messing with sparks suddenly, and Libby laughs breathlessly as she drops it and brings her fingers to her mouth to suck on them.]
I thought alien abduction was supposed to be some motherfuck bullshit, not wicked rad.
[She leans forward and picks up her comms device, grinning like a lunatic.]
'Kay. Open invite: anybody who wants to come play with wicked sharpness, I'm in my place. 'M Libby, and this is just--[she looks at the scattered components around her (where did she get all of th--oh, right, she snuck off and filched it from around the ship, because she is a terrible delinquent thief) with unfiltered joy, which is maybe the first time she's ever honestly worn an expression like that. And she doesn't even care that people will see, because she has toys. She has toys, she doesn't have to hustle, and she's been in a lot scarier places than this. Alien abduction can suck her left one; give her this over somewhere like Kahului any day of the week.]
Aloha, best kidnapping in history.
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