"Metric? Yes, it's used for a lot of scientific and medical purposes and most of the rest of the world but America's rather stubborn. There's whole textbooks on the SI units, probably I should find you some textbooks and let you have at it, honestly. Buckle up, please."

"Yes, please do, if that wouldn't be a hardship.  I have quite the love of the written word."

She's buckled!

"Not something you can get at Green Dragon but it shouldn't be too hard to turn something up."

Off they drive.

"...Don't trust Roland. Even if he is not actively malicious we have, eh... Significantly different gestalt risk models, let's say. Street players are paranoid in a different way than I am, more plainly."

She nods.  "I rather figured, after he offered to forge me a border pass when I had just met him."

"...The border is a farce, honestly. The guards will let you through for a bribe, Roland's service is to avoid getting put in the system as a 'new face' and therefore someone to monitor. And for people already on Tower's shit-list."

She nods, again, her tone more serious.  "I wasn't planning to chance it.  Tower's engagement policy reminds me too much of Kyros, and goodness knows what else awaits."

"Most of the other factions have a similar one in the end. I hear back in the 21st century it was different, but violence is close to the surface now. You know, we have all sorts of advanced robotics and computers? We could automate most of whatever industry is left around here, no doubt. Even automated construction, I've seen it. But it's cheaper to use sweat and blood."

He takes a turn a tad sharply. "I don't think we can fix thet by burning the system down, but I understand the temptation some have on that front."

"You don't fix a broken system by letting it thrash around wildly as it dies, no.  You need to supplant it with a better one.  I - tried to do my own small part in that, before, and while I expect that the methods here are different...The goal here is to marshal the resources we command to help the people who need them the most.  That will never change."

"...Remind me to look up the Velvet Revolution for you. 20th century I think? Some times when the people protested a dictator and he actually stepped down and held elections, without any open violence."

"I'll have to look into it.  Though, I rather doubt the corporate overlords will give up a single copper of their own free will - let alone a city."

"The- I think it's both more and less monolithic than you're imagining. There's all sorts of small players, just subsisting, interacting with the rest of it. You can pry a city free. You can pry a country free even, Russia went back to Communism this time with Skynet, and that has its own problems but it's definitely not corporate. But broadly you're right."

She nods.  "I'm reminded of a city I once helped conquer, when I look at this one.  It is, indeed, possible.

"What is 'Communism'?"

"An ideology that doesn't hold with individual people accumulating too much wealth and property, and believes that all property should be owned by groups, or by the state, and assigned to each according to their need. The principle criticisms you hear are 'well who's deciding how much I 'need', huh?' and 'well, that removes any incentive to work hard and be clever if you won't see any benefit from it, huh?' ...And you might be able to guess but Skynet is an old name for pervasive surveillance and neural net systems- Much more pervasive than Tower's. It remembers every moment of your life, knows your habits, knows your health. It monitors your heartbeat and temperature and what you eat and what you say to your friends and everything else, and generates guesses based on all that ostensibly to maximize human fulfillment where the corporate version of the same tries to maximize dollars extracted from you. I think Russia's is actually called Spargol or something."

"To be honest, I hadn't dared guess what a 'Skynet' was, besides a portmanteau and a cultural touchstone of some sort.  I am - strangely accountably reminded of my previous employment by it, though.  Interesting.

"Kyros's Empire was - surprisingly communist in design intent, I think.  I don't believe it succeeded at that goal, but perhaps if it had the advanced techne of this world it would turn the tangled mass of precedent the Court has laid out into a coherent set of guidelines.

"...And proper guidance on appropriate enforcement actions; I am still imperially pissed off that Kyros wreaked havoc upon an entire territory by my hand rather than just fucking executing Cairn with the force of the Edict of Stone.  It's auroch-dung.  Edicts can kill people, for fuck's sake, I felt the Edict of Execution take hold - so why not kill the rogue Archon outright?  What could you hope to gain from wrecking a breadbasket in potentia, solely because someone who isn't even from there, decided to desert therein?"

"...Excuse me.  I was the Governor of that province and I am still direly furious that my last official order was to wreak havoc upon it, but that's not your problem."

"P'raps Kyros did not control the Edicts, either. Or p'raps knew more or less than you. Or p'raps it is as you see it. I certainly don't know."

"Indeed, the question is quite often one of knowledge.  I'm not sure anyone knows from whence Edicts arise save for Kyros, let alone how they do.  But Kyros's words shape the Edict to a significant degree; he includes termination conditions, and they do actually work.  So it is either the Spire that anchors them, which is in and of itself an unanswered question, a guess of mine - or...some other characteristic...that determines the sort of words that are viable.  If I had to guess.

"The question is, what the absolute bloody fuck left that the only valid option.

"...Or it would have been, if the whole question wasn't summarily moot with my involuntary displacement.  The spires here...they are not Spires.  They're merely - towers of inordinate size."

"Well, we've caged stars and bent lightning to our will in massive webs spanning the planet, so make of that what you wish. Though the past century has been one of... Fragmentation."

"Oh, trust me, I'm impressed.  Caged a star?  That's...I don't even know where to begin.  It's just that I can tell that your high towers don't do...

"The Spires were the work of some unknown people, who came long before Kyros did.  We don't know their secrets in the slightest.  But they are responsible for upwellings of magic that Archons are a pale imitation of.  And you would have noticed if yours did that."

"Or re-created the conditions that exist at the heart of a star here on Earth, at least. There's at least eleven fusion reactors in Cinci- One in each of the Projects, five at Serisse Municipal Power in the north side, one under the airport somewhere, and at least one for the Ohio Army. Common parlance has long accepted the more poetic form."

"...How do you know that?"

There is an irrepressible expression of genuine wonderment upon her face.

"...I mean, it's not exactly secret? The airport has one because of some disaster preparedness thing, and to generate hydrogen for the zeps, that takes industrial amounts of electricity. Serisse ads mention the power plant sometimes, 'providing Cincinnati with plentiful clean energy,' pah. The Projects are famous for how they're a failure of the self-contained arcology concept, and part of that self-containedness was their own fusion power. And of course the Army needs their own, reliable power sources, and soldiers gossip, and it's not like 'they have a power plant somewhere' is a key secret like the exact location of said power plant."

"No, no, not how do you know where these 'fusion reactors' are - how do you know what's inside a star?"

"Oh. I don't actually know how it was originally found out? I think they built particle accelerators and did experiments to understand the smallest pieces. Rocks fall, water's wet, hydrogen atoms fuse into helium and release energy under hot and dense enough conditions."

"Atoms are real?", she says with a breathless curiosity and surprisingly evident lack of guile.  "That's - I want to know all about it.  I know there were some theories, the Forge-Bound talked about it a lot, how you needed traces of certain essential things to make the best iron and you could get them from different sources but they'd still be the same thing - oh how I want to tell them everything, they'd be ecstatic to know so much more..."

...and then, suddenly, her eyes are watering with tears and she's tightly gripping anywhere that might be remotely convenient for a hand to clench, because she won't see them for years she thinks, not if she has to research teleportation all on her own and she will, there's so few people she can trust, and who knows how many of the people she cares about (Verse Barik Lantry Welby Calio Tunon Sirin Sniggler Dagos General Ashe Marshal Erenyos the Forge-Bound the people of Lethian's and Plainsgate -) will end up dead by hands that care not what they hurt so long as they obey - or by Kyros' dreadful orders -

"...There is a whole world that will only ever exist in my head, I think, and I find I cannot help but miss it."

"I won't say I Understand, but I think I empathize with missing friends. Too bad for you I'm not actually a great teacher. Textbooks, I'll be getting you though."