"Luck with that."

"Thanks. Good luck with your information on gay people not being horribly misleading."

She shrugs. "I'm not actually even sure if I'm gay yet. Sue seems to be. He used to flirt with me before he cottoned on I didn't like it but he didn't mean it."

"Is Sue a boy's name in the future? I think historically the trend has been for boys' names to become girls' names more than the opposite."

"Pff. No, it's a girl's name, that's how I conned the Tactical School people into letting me room with him. He hates his paperwork name like it stabbed him in the face. Like it stabbed me in the face, more like, Sue'd care more if it were that way around. Wouldn't tell me what it was back when we met, and then I watched him play that psych data game I mentioned and he kept going to a part that killed his avatar in interesting ways, over and over and over, and I nicknamed him Suicide Watch. Got shortened."

"Aww, that's cute. In a sort of superficially disturbing way."

"Disturbing and cute is very Sue."

"And this was before the incident which I am not supposed to comment on extensively."

"I mean, you can comment, but if you start calling for the dissolution of the IF or something I have to fall back on 'but the buggers would destroy the entire Earth and that is strictly worse'."

"Oh, no, I'm far more rational than that. If I can put up with encouraging the American government's trigger-happy tendencies I can put up with not futilely trying to overthrow an organization that massively fucked up."

"Mkay."

"I mean, if there was some convenient alternative that would predictably do at least as good a job, that would be one thing, but that would be massively implausible even aside from the part where I expect you would have mentioned it."

"It would've come up."

"I had guessed. I really hope the Buggers aren't a thing in my universe."

"Me too."

"I expect China agrees with us."

"Oh yeah. There's still a China, but they took an enormous loss."

"Oh, I hadn't thought to ask. That's good, I think China represents the oldest continuous civilization in human history. It would be a terrible shame to lose that, even on top of the loss of human life."

"It sort of depends on how you count 'continuous civilization', I think."

"It's got some pretty damn important culture regardless, but I suppose so."

"Some culture was lost. A lot of landmarks are unrecognizable. Some of the more regionally concentrated ethnic groups were all but wiped out."

"Yep. I mean, I know some things that aren't military history. It's not that expensive to maintain a decent library for other things. I read fiction sometimes, or stuff about economics or philosophy or whatever strikes my fancy. Especially since Tactical School has basically no games around, while Battle School was brimful."

"Reading's nice. I probably wouldn't have done very well at your games, I have problems caring positively about things that look like they should have minds behind them but don't."

"Well, then you wouldn't have liked the fantasy game, but some of the ones in the room you could play against the other kids if you didn't like the automatic."