#answer.me.this

[inkedcinders]

Coming Out

Coming Out

           It was a fairly normal day, slightly overcast but hot, not that it mattered when you spent all of your time indoors as answer was want to do. How else was he supposed to keep his pasty complexion? Plus, he’d finally gotten air conditioning, courtesy of a friendly donation of the woman sitting next to him.

           Not that he had a choice in the matter, so it was more of a hostile donation.

           Sitting next to him on the couch was his assuredly not-a-girlfriend, sigma, known to the rest of the world as Natalie Abela, daughter to the CEO of AbelaTech. She was insanely wealthy by extension of her father, and so incredibly smart she finished high school two years early and went straight into university. Despite this, she was still so under stimulated intellectually that she’d taken on part-time hacking gigs.

           She hadn’t been terribly well-known at the time, keeping herself to small jobs that she could do from home or a library, trying to keep a low, anonymous profile. It wasn’t like she needed the money, after all, or the fame. It was just a way to pass the time. It most likely would have continued that way if he hadn’t tried to access AbelaTech’s servers through a backdoor route that turned out to be her personal files, and she’d counter-hacked him in response.

           His roommate Buster still bore the mental scars of what she’d uploaded to answers’ ‘ware.

           Answer wasn’t entirely certain how they’d gone from antagonists to occasionally working together, but it was how she started doing the bigger jobs, going on-site and sometimes even shooting things.

           And she was still getting perfect A’s in school.

           From there they’d become friends, with her foisting a cat on him that he’d named Tubby-tubb-tubbs to her annoyance, but conceded was better than “Cat”. The orange fuzzball was a useless mouser but loved to cuddle, and she paid for her upkeep, and he was still a little afraid of sigma through proxy of her father, so he’d just let it slide.

           He was even less certain how they’d become lovers. It just sort of... happened. And then they’d said it was a bad idea, and should never do it again. And then it happened again not long after. A few more rounds of this and they’d given up and just accepted it was happening.

           She was quite insistent that they were not going out, which hurt a little bit for reasons he didn’t want to think about.

           21 now, she’d completed her bachelors and moved on to a masters degree, still being annoyingly vague about what she was majoring in, despite a noncommittal hand wave and “just computer stuff”. She kept him weirdly distant from her life.

           It kind of made him feel like a secret mistress or something.

           She was working on schoolwork, he was doing the boring part of shadow running: sorting through his messages and paperwork. Sometimes sigma did it for him for fun because she was insane, but today it was his burden to bear.

           Sorting through a few messages on a job call, he made a derisive noise at the contents of one, emphatic enough to get the tiny hacker to look up at him.

           “What is it?” She asked.

           “Ah, just some dumb fuck who’s pitching a fit because there’s a known technomancer in a job call,” he muttered, rolling his eyes.

           Her head tilted slightly, assessing. “You’re okay with technomancers?”

           He gave her a look. “Why wouldn’t I be? They’re just people, right? You have to be stupid to get your panties in a twist over a dude who can hack with his brain. Or people with magic. Or the metahuman variants. Lotta stupid people.”

           “There are a few,” she remarked dryly. “I thought a lot of hackers didn’t like them because they were gonna put them out of a job, or whatever.”

           He gave a short laugh. “There aren’t that many technomancers, and not all of them want to be hackers, either,” he said. “And just because they’re technomancers doesn’t mean they’re gonna be good at it. Not many technomancers are better than me.”

           “I’m better than you,” she said mildly, turning back to her work.

           “Well, yeah, you’re better than me, but...” he trailed off as his brain caught up with what she said. He shot her a look, but she was studiously working on her school assignment, not looking at him, and it was difficult to determine what she was thinking. Did she just..?

           That wasn’t necessarily an admission to being a technomancer. It was a pretty ambiguous statement. She might just have been throwing shade by saying the girl six years his junior was better at him than hacking and so didn’t believe his claim that most technomancers weren’t at his level.

           Then again, sigma was a master at being coy. She was naturally rather shy, despite all appearances, and she lived under such scrutiny that she had gotten very good at ambiguous statements that could be taken multiple ways and spun in the way that caused the least amount of fuss. She could be testing the waters, see how he recreated to the idea.

           Because despite everything, technomancers were still under threat, even if things were better than at emergence.

           Answer decided it was best not to say anything. It was a touchy subject for a lot of people, especially technomancers, and if she wasn’t feeling safe enough to just out and say it, he didn’t want to press the issue. If the situation blew up, he’d deal with it then.

           Maybe not the best policy, but these weren’t the decisions he was really made for.

           Sigma did some hand gestures to deal with whatever she was doing in AR, then said, “To the question you’re dying to ask, the answer is yes, I am.”

           Well, that was refreshingly direct. Looking closer, he noticed that her tan skin had gone pale, body tense, hands slightly trembling. Not as unaffected as she was pretending to be.

           “You should really keep quiet about that,” he said finally. “Technomancers just... disappear sometimes, and I don’t think even your father’s money and influence will help with that.”

           She shot him an annoyed look. “Answer, I have been a technomancer for the last five years, I know a thing or two about “keeping quiet”!”

           “Five years?” He repeated, incredulous, and then suddenly so many strange things that had happened over the years clicked into place.

           Then he couldn’t help grinning. “Wait, if you’re saying this now, it means you trust me, don’t you?” He couldn’t help but feel a little bit excited by it; she was actually allowing him a little closer.

           She didn’t quite look at him, mumbling, “Maybe a little... I have been letting you have sex with me for the last three years...”

           He made a derisive noise. “Sex has nothing to do with trust.”

           “That explains so much about you.”