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"Mutant powers are weird," opines Aegis.

...birdbirdbird
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He pushes Yeah?

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Testing. I can turn it on and off on purpose. You're going to graduate before me, I wonder if we'll be able to talk without the teachers reading all our messages if we do it like so? If you don't know your range?

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Maybe I can work on it, like I did on my link limit, he says optimistically.

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I think I can hear you knocking by default and the birdbirdbird thing is only necessary for actually letting any talking happen, says Aegis. So yeah, that won't necessarily involve complicated suspicious-looking syncing up.

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"You have free time now or what?" he asks, as though he got distracted. That happens.

What's suspicious-looking? he pushes, teasingly cheerful.
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"Battleroom practice I'm not supposed to be at while I rest up," she says. "Could go on the fantasy game but you're not gonna be in it and I left off at the castle, it'll take a few minutes to get anywhere with my critters in."

Pfft, I sit and think in the middle of conversations all the time, I call it 'processing', they know how to explain it. Usually I do it with my desk on me and type but not always.
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"You know when they're gonna let me out?" he asks idly, pushing wordless affection.

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"No idea. It wasn't on the public data."

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"Guess I'll wait, then," he shrugs.

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"I'll wait with you for a bit," she says.

I've been thinking about doing some more hacking. Lots of kids start messing with the censoring protocols and stuff right in launch but it's never interested me that much, but I know some theory, I could see what they do have on us. I know they're taking psych data. They used to read my journals, before I stopped writing in language. I think the fantasy game might usually be a psych data collector but they don't know what to do with ours so I've been writing reports. I don't mind them knowing what I do in the game, but I want to know what they think of it.
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He smiles fondly at her and pushes, Sounds like fun.

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The game is really, really smart. They must pour a hell of a lot of server resources into it - there's never lag, there's never glitchy graphics, I've never heard of an exploitable bug except for the existence of a tunnel that only I'm fast enough to reach. And it's creative, too. I wonder who wrote it.

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Good question, he muses. Lemme know if you find out.

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Will do. Pause. A hundred years ago there used to be all kinds of science fiction - it's so dated now, but I like old books - all kinds of science fiction with computers who were people. And we kept making smarter and smarter programs, and they keep not being - people. As far as we can tell. The fantasy game is smart, it can make me villages full of critters that act like people, but you couldn't push it if you tried.

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A smile flickers across his face; he pushes fond/derisive amusement. Do you want me to?

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Sure, why not? Can't hurt.

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Neither agreeing nor disagreeing with this, he closes his eyes and sits on the floor, leaning back on his hands.

There are a lot of minds in the Battle School. Is he going to have to tap every one of them to find out if any of them is really a computer program? But no—different minds look different, that's how he recognizes them, or part of how. Surely the game, if it's there, would be the most different.

And sure enough, when he's been looking for a few minutes, there's... something. It doesn't have a place, that's what's throwing him off. It has a thousand different locations and none of them is really it. Decentralized. Like a complex program running on a bunch of servers, connected to even more terminals.

There's nothing there to touch, though. He can see the network of mind, but when he tries to nudge it with his power, it's like pushing air. No contact, no resistance.

He delivers his findings to Aegis.
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No shit!

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It's so - big. Are you location-dependent? Can you - I dunno - push with a bigger 'hand', get more of it in one go instead of reaching for a small point? It does seem to all be on the station.

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I don't think location and size are really... things, to the part of my power that does linking, he muses. I can link people I've linked before without even looking for them. Huh, maybe range won't be a problem with us after all, unless you get so far away I can't see you birding at me.

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Even if you can't see me "birding", I think I default to being able to tell that you're knocking unless I'm - scared or something. It seems to matter what I'm thinking about you at that moment and I can slide it by birding.

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Why 'bird', anyway?

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To remind myself that you're not some random telepath, or some kid I've talked to half a dozen times, you're the bird in the game, and I know you and I like you.

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