/siberia/ - Off-topic

Bright sunlight bathed the podium on which the three athropoids stood. A nice breeze tickled Mir's cheeks and played with Rin's hair beside her. Calming leaves rustled above the rest of the crew, 410 in total, who were arranged to watch them depart. The captain and a political delegate stood with them.

"Comrade Mir", the CC delegate said, approaching her with a medal. She took hold of one of Mir's hands, and placed the honour in the palm. Then, she looked up to meet Mir's eyes.

This CC delegate was hundreds of years old. She had lived on Earth. Like the soldiers, she was an arthropoid, but of the old type, back when they were designed with biomimicry and had thick armour made of chitinium. Mir, and Rin and Lariophel had shed most of the insect features, and only really shared size and intention with the older model.

In the symposium, they lived in purely human bodies. If they were to survive the war, they would have their cyberbrains replaced into Porth's mind arrays, and they would return to being in practice be no different than any other being, though in reality people did still treat others differently based upon past phyiscal body plan.

Olivia, on the other hand, retained her distinctly abhuman body. It was that of a bee, a mass production model that had been built in Britain during the end stages of the Red Solar War 250 years ago. She had lived the nation of England, before the Human Empire had reduced that name to royalty, control and a standardised habitat design.

Mir felt the badge be applied to the shoulder of her physcial form. It was a waste of mass, really, but the sentiment was nice. It came with a digitised letter signed by all the crew, and the Party leadership out in the Oort Cloud. She murmured, "Thank you."

Olivia shook her head. "No, comrade. We thank you, for your bravery and sacrifice. You're going to fight in one of the most daring operations that I've seen since the Earth War. We all wish we could be with you, and I promise, if this was back on Earth I would, but the rocket equation limits our ability to shift the mass of physical bodies. So, the mission lies on your shoulders. And after getting to know you all these years during the transfer, I do not think anyone could be more up to the task."

Mir smiled. She felt proud. She wasn't capeable of feeling fear, and if she could, she would have been paralyzed. But she'd discarded that emotion when she volunteered for this, having her human brain copied into an arthropoid. She was happy to die with Rin, with whom she often shared a bed.

"I feel nothing but excitmement. I am ready to take on the mantle of all you that you stood for in the past, and bring into fruition the goal of a society where no intelligence is exploited", Mir said.

"We were all like you, when I was young", Olivia said, sadness in her black eyes. "It's just… thank you, and good luck."

Mir sensed words unspoken, a habit of the old world, where lying was possible. But she did not care to ask. Olivia probably felt guilty, but the decision to fight had been her own, and she was a professional.

"I can't wait to feel real atmosphere on my skin", Mir said.

"It's not at all different to the simulation", Olivia said, before turning away.

Lariophel was spending his last minutes with his boyfriend in the crew, while Mir could not find anyone out of her friends or lovers that she would rather be with than Rin. The rest of the crew were cheering them. She took Rin's hand.

"Only a few minutes until the drop", she said. "I won't let you go, not until the end."

"Yeah!", Rin smiled. Her expression shifted as her autumn eyes looked into Mir's. "Oh, you look a little sad. Why's that?"

"I wonder what the original me is doing on Porth. Probably wishing she was here", Mir said. "I don't know. Why did I - she - why did she reject immortality on the cloud? I never disliked it."

"Someone had to", Rin said. "If we didn't have volunteers, we wouldn't be able to fight. Then we'd be stuck running away from capitalism. Also, maybe we still care about the people we were cloned from. We're fighting for the betterment of their material conditions."

"Or maybe they just made a bad decision and now we're stuck with it", Mir sighed. "I was conditioned to want to join."

"How else would they get soldiers to fight for the revolution? We don't feel the weight of the Imperial System out in the Oort cloud, but the need for soldiers is just as much as it has ever been with their stellaser set up", Rin said. "Do you think conscription, or cultivating bioforms specifically for war, are better? They are infinitely more brutal."

Mir nodded. "And, you know, I want to benifit all of humanity. Someone needed to do it. I'm proud of myself. That's worth dying for, not that it will matter when we are on the ground."

Rin squeezed her hand. "We might make it, you know. It's not like we'll self destruct once the mission is over. Maybe we'll find some way to survive."

"Maybe", Mir said. It wouldn't happen, and anyway, she was happy to die.


The symposium was gone, and she was within the vessel's cargo bay. It was a coffin, affording her no space to move, though she had tested each muscle group and hydraulic system already. Attached to her body was the heavy ballute system, on top of the nitrogen cooling loop that would take them from their landing site to the target. All three were holding hands.

Agile 1, ready. Agile 2, ready… Agile 3, ready

Vox would always be strange to Mir. She didn't have a strong intenal monologue, so she wasn't used to hearing voices in her head. Anyway, it was almost time to drop. She clenched her muscles.

Goodbye, Jaft. I like you a lot, Mir, and I love you, Rin.

It was time. The bay doors swung open, revealing the totality of Venus. Endless layers of clouds swirled beneath them like the gas giant her class had designed in school. High atmosphere cities, where the biological Humans of the Empire breathed oxygen, could be seen through the beige clouds. None of them had seen a planet with atmosphere before. Porth and Atahualpa only a tiny percent of this rocky planet's mass, and even though there had been some heat within them thanks to radioactive decay, they were much too far from Sol to host any gas.

Mir, however subsumed to the merge as she was, felt gripped by the planet, as if the goddess was clasping the arthropoid within her pretty hands, ready to bring her down to her breast. This wasn't an incorrect feeling. Gravity would soon take them down into the beautiful, deadly, atmosphere.

The ballute shuddered, and they were flung outinto space by the explosive separator. It was amazing. If Mir had been afforded a personality interface (there had not been the mass allowance for it, nor was it necessary for a short mission like this), she would have opened her mouth. The three of them spun through the air, holding on to one another tight with their backs to the gargantuan ballute.

The vessel, disquised as an Imperial Tanker, engaged it's engines and fell away from them like a rock sinking into the ocean, or a train leaving a station. It would be 20 minutes until they hit the atmosphere, at which point correct angling of the ballute would be integral to landing close to the target. It was going to be hard, like jumping into water from a height and receiving concrete. Until then, they could coast and chat. None of them had nerves. They had prepared several for this day.