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Mehitabel reads a lot.
She starts calling herself "Tab", for short, not that anyone calls her anything apart from Kers. She writes suitably encrypted emails to Aelise about ideas for fixing the world - mostly she asks questions, to start, forming a picture of the exact problem she has to solve.
She misses her parents, but not very much. At least she got to say goodbye.
When her brain won't absorb new information, she bounces around in zero-g.
After six months, Aelise visits again.
Tab says, "Anybody you store up here must be important somehow. If I don't know about the other secret person, I won't know how to come up with ideas that work with them being important however they're important."
giftedandtalented
"I could visit you a lot," says Tab anxiously, "if that would help. I don't want any babies to die."
"Maybe," he says. "Aelise already visits me a bunch. But I think I need more people than this. This fucking place is just so empty, you know?" He hugs his pillow some more.
"Enough people. I don't think she's gonna do it," he says. "Anyway, if she brought me twenty people who are all still all fuzzy over Chelsa, I'd probably launch myself into orbit. And there aren't twenty people who aren't."
"I don't know if I can unfuzz a person," frowns Tab. "I think maybe I could keep them getting more fuzzed."
"And if you could unfuzz a person—" Harley shakes his head. "Fuck it. I need to be on the ground, that's all. And if I can't be on the ground then I'll just - find somewhere else to be."
"Somewhere with people in it would be good," he says. "But there's plenty of things that are worse than good but better than here."
"Nope. Dying is not my actual plan," he says. "I'm not telling you my actual plan, because you'd tell Aelise, and then she'd find a way to stop me."
"She didn't tell me I had to tell her any things, so I could promise not to," Tab says, "and then I wouldn't."
"No," he snorts. "And I'd stick around and let her drain me all day long if that was all it took. But this place, this universe, with Chelsa and everything, and being up here all alone - it fucks me up, I can't take it forever."