"Nah, not immediately, there's a lot of things it's impractical to hardcode, so we had a while in the lab learning the advanced stuff."  She glances at Fernando and her smile takes on the tiniest bit of an edge.  "My line's intended for specialist manufacturing, mostly medical/biological, but about half of us got the personal assistant course on top of that so they could advertise 'if you only own one synth, let it be a CN-7 series.'"

Well. That's terrifying. 

"I am sorry. How... things turn out after that?"

"Me personally?  Small-batch vaccines at Alphagen Enterprises, that's another little Cheiron subsidiary out in Sector One.  Then after, mm, seven, eight years the plant shut down and I fell through the cracks.  In an entirely legal and above-board manner, I assure you."

"Oh, the legality of your situation is totally what we care about here. Thank you for letting us know."

"Thomas!"

"The job is specialized enough you couldn't pursue a career in a similar field or you are just tired of labs?"

"Mm- not specialized exactly, but a lot of places that'll hire a free synth when they'd budgeted for a human have other problems, y'know?  I got tired of finding out what.  Then I figured out I like working with people better, my sweetheart got transferred here, and I thought hey, I'll give small business a try."

"They pay synth less than a human?"

"If they can get away with it, sure.  But budgeted isn't quite the word I mean, it's more- what sort of job you plan on it being?  If you're hiring for, say, algae tank maintenance, no offense Peg, you'll take whoever shows up and probably pay about the same.  Anything that's writing the procedures instead of following them, anything that needs more decision-making than 'find the problem, fix it or bump it to the corresponding specialist', when you post that ad you assume the people walking through your door are gonna be human, maybe some of the quieter supers if you're the open-minded type."

"How fun."

"I am so sorry about your situation."

"I would assume that... there would be data on how capable a given synth is. Even more than for humans."

"Thanks."  Felix gets a soft if somewhat sideways smile, and Doors looks like she's about to say something else before spotting a young redheaded man on his way over.  He hesitates when he notices she has company, but she waves him over.  He hands her a dozen or so metal skewers and signs something with his other hand that translates to Hey, good to see you, how's the kid?

Getting taller!  Come visit sometime.  The usual?

No, two glazed tonight, visiting a friend.  He lingers on 'friend' with a shy smile.

Aww, have fun!  Doors picks up two sticks of meat with the tongs and hands them over.  The man signs a quick thank-you and heads down the street at a not-quite-run.

Doors glances back at Fernando once he's gone.  "Not trying to avoid the question, I just... how far away are you from, this isn't something I normally think about how to explain."

"Imagine a plausible distance. More than that."

"Also. I don't think that exchange was very private, but we actually understood that."

She blinks.  "And... you know those don't normally fit together at all.  Uh.  Red wing rod-shaped leaf eat think?"  she tries, in what is presumably Space Latin.

"We... understood the individual words?"

"Uh.  Yeah, that wasn't a sentence, that was- bits of bio jargon.  Right, uh, I presume the language deal is a you guys thing."  She glances at Peg with a slight frown.  "And it sounds like you didn't have a starnet link, or not one you can easily access?"

"You could say that." Felix is starting to feel a tiny bit bad over all this misdirection and confusion they are causing.

Doors runs a hand through her hair and settles back against the wall.  "Right, so.  First thing to understand is that Starnet is fast, but it's not instant.  Maybe you've got the advertising copy for the currently running models stored locally, maybe not if there isn't much of a market, but to get the full specs on an older version you'd need to send out the request, wait for it to make it through half a dozen gates, however long it takes Cheiron to read it and answer it, and then for the answer to gate back to you.

Second thing is, I'm a limited run, there's only so many of us unaccounted for.  I don't necessarily want to give out my whole serial number to someone I don't know really well."  She taps the shark tattoo on her cheek.

"Third thing...."  She trails off with a sigh and glances at Peg.

"Third thing is, people are stupid.  Or lazy, or whatever, and only on average, but if someone doesn't wanna work with synths, they're not gonna research and do the math to figure out if this particular synth is a better return on investment than that particular human, they're gonna say 'get the fuck out of my shop'."

"I guess that is to be expected."

"Yeah.  It sucks, but- you learn how to find the people you can be around.  Speaking of which, this is all depressing everyone, want to hear how I met my wife?"

"Go ahead!"