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bloodyrosemccoyIndex and Prologue!
Previous Chapter!
Oh, hi!
Yep, still writing this, just at a slower pace. Updates will probably be sporadic from now on, but I do have a Plan, so hopefully I can fill that in.
It feels a little weird to add a ✨Paypal link, ✨ but hey, writing is hard, so if you want to tip me, I wouldn't say no!
CW for that extremely frustrating feeling when your "friends" are doing something deliberately stupid and you're stuck trying to be the voice of reason. Also for autism misinterpretation.
The original draft of this study done on "atypical" autistic morality interpreted having a conscience as a neurological dysfunction. Pathologizing autism is a real pastime amongst scientists, it would seem.
---
"I'm so bored," Jod complained. "This station sucks."
We were sitting in 225 Park, Jod, Nielli, and Thoren pitching rocks into the pond. I wasn't sure if that fell under the Do Not Throw Things Into The Pond signs around the area, but just to be safe, I wasn't joining them.
"We gotta find something to do," Jod went on.
I was trying to figure out a way to excuse myself to go hang out with Giro. But Thoren had sort of swept me along with him after school. And now we were aimlessly loafing around and complaining, which wasn't on the approved list of Correct Uses of Leisure Time as outlined by Beacon Studios, and the movie file Zarla had shown me how to download was burning a metaphorical hole in my tablet.
"Why don't we go to the library?" I suggested.
To nobody's surprise, Jod blew a raspberry.
"Any good movies playing?" Thoren asked.
"Nothing," Nielli said.
Thoren, who was splayed on the grass, turned his head to face me, a questioning look on his face. I swallowed. "Not yet," I said. "Sorry."
He sat up. "How come? Come on, you gotta share the mystery with me, dude."
"I, uh, promised that I wouldn't," I said. "Or"—with a burst of inspiration—"if I reveal my source, I'll be cut off."
His eyes narrowed. I tried to look at the ripples in the pond from Nielli's skipped rock.
Thoren was about to say something when Jod said, "Fine, maybe we should go find the secret video black market." His eyes followed one of the reflective arrows on the sidewalk. "Maybe it's hidden somewhere."
He gave us a wicked smile and started to follow the arrow. We all trailed after him, curious.
When he stopped at a pod bay hatch, though, I said, "What are you doing?"
Jod gave me a smirk. "What? You worried I'll find your buried treasure?"
"You're not supposed to go into the pod bays," I pointed out.
He rolled his eyes. "Yeah? What are they hiding in there?"
"Pods," I sighed, exasperated. "You can't play with them."
"Oh, really." Jod spun the handle on the hatch. "Just watch me. Admin can't tell me what to do." He dragged the hatch open. I looked down at the path made by the soft blue emergency lights.
"I'm not going," I said. "This is against the rules."
"Ooh," Jod said, already climbing onto the steps. "I'm so scared."
"No, you're just stupid," I said, feeling helpless. Maybe I could make him see reason.
Jod scoffed. "You guys coming or not?"
"On my way," Nielli said, slinging a foot onto the steps.
Thoren glanced back at me. I shook my head stubbornly. Didn't these idiots know what the rules were?
"Come on," my brother said.
"No," I said. "I'm not messing with a pod bay. They're the station's emergency escape, and it's a safety issue."
Thoren rolled his eyes, too, and followed our friends into the sublevel.
"I'm gonna tell!" I yelled.
"No you won't!" Thoren said back.
I sighed. He was right. Telling led to too much drama.
But at least I had managed to extract myself from the group. Now I could go buy a pizza for Giro and get this movie file burned so I wouldn't have to keep evading my brother's suspicious questions.
#
"This thing is great," Giro said, plugging in one of the adapters he had stringing Dad's tablet to his disc burner. "Can I keep it?"
"No." I didn't manage to hold back the snap as territoriality surged through me. He'd already talked me through changing the display settings to optimize visibility for paquos. What more did he want?
I tried to salvage the fallout from my sharp tone. "I'm already delinquent enough using it myself."
"Huh." Something in his tone conveyed skepticism, but I wasn't sure what he was skeptical of.
"And anyway, you can't," I said, scrambling for another excuse. "It's got a bio lock."
"Can't be very good, since you got around it," he dismissed flippantly.
I bristled. "Well, I'm related to my dad, you know. We're bound to have some genes in common."
Giro snorted. "Yeah. Some."
He didn't seem to mind when I watched him over his shoulder as he worked. I mentally catalogued each step he took in copying the movie file to the blank disc Dexer had provided us. When the disc started to spin and the little progress bar popped up, we exchanged gleeful looks.
"Seriously, though, I would love to be able to stream uncensored movies," he added. "Maybe even find a file of Wackadoo Critters floating around. I read that it was totally done, and the studio just scrapped it." He flicked an ear. "Rough on the creators."
"I can look it up when it's done recording," I offered, gesturing to the tablet.
"Burning," he corrected.
"Burning," I amended. He got weirdly finicky about this terminology.
"It's too bad we can't do this with books, too," I said. I had recently discovered a Greater Galactic Library that let one download ebooks.
"It's a little harder to steal that equipment," Giro said. "We'd have to sneak into a print shop to copy books, and that would be a bad idea."
"You could fine-tune Ronf or Dexer to handwrite," I said, smiling at the idea. "Make our own scriptorium here and nobody would recognize the handwriting."
"Hey!" Ronf protested from zeir perch on Giro's workbench.
"Oh, sure," Giro said. "You steal the paper for it, then."
I snorted. "Pass."
"Then the youth of Bright Beacon will have to deal with the tepid literary selection at the Bright Beacon Public Library for now," Giro said.
He flopped back onto his nest-bed, wincing a bit as he jarred his gunshot wound. He reached for the pizza box I had brought. "Hey, next time, could you get glassfish as a topping?"
I made a face. "You like them?"
"They're nice and salty," he said.
I reached for a slice. "Nobody would believe it if I ordered glassfish on a pizza. They'd get suspicious." This station was pretty small. I was worried enough, with this pizza, that word would get back around to Vilda that I had spoiled my dinner.
"Not a fan, huh?"
"I am loudly not a fan, yeah."
He shrugged. "Oh, well. Sausage is good, too."
A shriek pierced my skull.
I dropped the pizza and brought my hands to my ears, curling over myself, as the brain-stabbing klaxon repeated again and again, and the blue station-alert light up by the ceiling began to flash.
"What the—" Giro said, or mouthed—all I could hear was the siren.
Just as I was starting to grudgingly acclimate to the rhythmic screeching, the floor shuddered with a rumble that must have shaken the entire station.
Was it another impact attack? Nobody had talked about Politics lately, but the Technocrats were always lurking. Had they decided now was a good time for an assault on the powerhouses of Feavah?
I frantically ran through what I remembered of Station Safe! and Bright Futures. If the station went into lockdown, they said, the section seals would iris closed—oh! That was what the shaking floor was!—and whatever breach might have occurred would be fixed. If your section wasn't affected, stay in place until the seals opened, then make your way home in an orderly manner and report to your Security branch.
If your section was affected, things got more complicated.
"Is our section affected?" I asked. "Have we been breached?"
Giro shrugged his ears. "Dexer, go check if we've been breached."
"You're supposed to stay in place during a lockdown," I protested.
"Dexer's an unauthorized robot," Giro reminded me. "Zey're not bound by the laws of korano or paquo."
"Freedom!" Dexer cried, zipping through the half-irised doorway.
I spent the time waiting for Dexer's return trying to run over the rules for what to do if one's section was breached. We'd had drills for this, after all. Every building had emergency shelters in case of decompression. One only had to follow the arrows on the reflective signs to them. There were also escape pods if the section was completely compromised. They were under the streets, toward the outer rim. They would allow us to escape unscathed, assuming Thoren and the others hadn't made a mess of things—
Oh. Oh, right.
Presently, Dexer returned. "We're good," zey reported. "Some punk kids were messing around and pulled a lockdown alarm."
Thoren. Thoren and Jod and Nielli. I groaned.
At least all we had to do was wait. I could do without the klaxon shrieking at me, but if I plugged my ears it was almost pleasant, waiting for the disc to burn and watching Giro bounce through some other projects.
Eventually, the all-clear tone—much more agreeable-sounding—told me I had to make my way back home to report in. And, even better, Giro pulled the disc from the burner and put it in a blank case.
"Presto! The Bulging Brain, director's cut," he informed me, presenting it to me. "Tell your friends, tell your enemies! Charge 'em money to rent it! We'll set up a whole movie black market! We shall become a lone light in the darkness that is Bright Beacon!"
I tucked the disc into my bag. "Thanks," I said, the words "black market" feeling as slimy as a dish of red courgettes. But as Zarla had said, I was definitely a pirate now. And Jod's flippant comment on it had planted a seed in me. A delinquent, criminal seed.
And when I got home, Security was already there.
#
They weren't there for me.
Thoren lurked on the porch, his face thunderous, as Dad talked to the Security officers. My brother wouldn't look at me as he sulked.
"And here's the good one," Security Officer Blieg said jovially as I approached. "Hello, Dreedo. Where were you when the station locked down? Off on a date?"
"No." People were really keen on kids' dating lives on Bright Beacon. There were a lot of awkward Follow the Beacon videos about how to handle dates correctly. Personally, I never planned to use those.
I looked around at the scene. "Did Thoren pull a breach alarm?"
Dad looked pained. "He did."
"It was Jod! And he just did it as a joke," Thoren exploded from the porch.
"I thought you were smarter than that," I told him.
"He and his little friends were messing about in a pod bay," Officer Blieg explained to Dad.
Dad leveled a look at Thoren. "Hmm."
Officer Blieg scowled, as though dissatisfied with something. "This is a serious infraction, young man," she threw to Thoren on the porch. "If you were my kid, I'd—"
"I'll talk to him," Dad said pointedly.
Officer Blieg glowered, but turned to Dad as she pulled out a notepad. "I'm writing him a citation for violation of Station Safety Code 237(a)," she said, scribbling. "You can pay the fine at Administration."
"Very well," Dad said, taking the slip once it was offered. "Good day."
She gave him a curt nod and then shot a final glare at Thoren before leaving.
Dad turned to regard Thoren.
"It was—" my brother began.
"It was a joke that inconvenienced thousands of people," Dad said, gesturing him into the house. I slunk past them. It looked like Thoren was in for a long, repetitive lecture. "It could have injured or killed someone if they were caught in the section seals. This station depends on cooperation to spin smoothly." I straightened with a tingle. That was from Station Safe! I wondered if Dad knew he was quoting it.
"This station is a dead-end spinning wheel!" Thoren burst out. "There's nothing to do here! We were just looking for some entertainment!"
"You can't entertain yourselves at the expense of the station's productivity," Dad said.
Thoren rolled his eyes. "Oh, yeah, the planet depends so much on our power supply. This place is boring, and you know it!"
"You need a hobby," I told him.
"What, like chopping up station mice?"
"A better hobby," Dad amended for me.
Thoren squared his shoulders. "Oh, you're so smug, why didn't you tell anyone where we were?" He looked at Dad. "He was there when we went into the pod bay! Mr. Perfect here didn't bother to tell anyone what we were doing!"
I had no idea how to respond to that. I thought he didn't want me to be a tattletale.
Dad blinked slowly. "He should have told an adult, yes. But that doesn't change what you did, Thoren." He looked around for a moment, as though trying to find inspiration in the empty room. "You will have to pay the fine yourself."
"Literally how—"
"Your pocket money," Dad said. "I'm sure the neighbors would be willing to pay you for odd jobs." He threw a look at me. "You boys might want to put some thought into getting jobs, too. You might appreciate a little extra money."
Black market, I thought.
"This is drombash!" Thoren exploded.
Dad threw him a look, face twitching a bit. "Where did you learn that word?"
Wait, was that a swear word? I guess I shouldn't be surprised. I had learned it from Zarla, after all, who was probably a Bad Influence.
"I'm not getting a stupid job here," Thoren added. "Don't you see? This place is just spinning its wheels."
"It is a wheel," I pointed out.
"I live on the most boring place imaginable," Thoren lamented.
"This station is an important component of our society," Dad said severely. "You can leave when you graduate, if you want to, but as long as you live here, you'll have to follow the rules."
Thoren thunked onto the couch, glaring at the floor, arms folded, clearly bracing himself for one of Dad's meandering don't-do-that lectures.
I slunk away. I already agreed with Dad, after all.
Which, it occurred to me, was rather hypocritical, as I was starting to consider the concept of a black market a little more seriously. I just really wanted to share these cool films with everyone, though. It was stupid that the Board of Civic Hygiene thought we couldn't handle cool storylines or swear words. This couldn't be the same thing as inconveniencing the whole station, or causing a safety threat, right?
I flopped onto my bed and pulled out the disc case. I'd have to show it to Thoren when Dad and Vilda weren't around. He might not be so bored if he got good stuff to watch.
And then there was the possibility of making pocket money.
I was going to have to talk to Giro again.
#
#
Next Chapter!
Previous Chapter!
Oh, hi!
Yep, still writing this, just at a slower pace. Updates will probably be sporadic from now on, but I do have a Plan, so hopefully I can fill that in.
It feels a little weird to add a ✨Paypal link, ✨ but hey, writing is hard, so if you want to tip me, I wouldn't say no!
CW for that extremely frustrating feeling when your "friends" are doing something deliberately stupid and you're stuck trying to be the voice of reason. Also for autism misinterpretation.
The original draft of this study done on "atypical" autistic morality interpreted having a conscience as a neurological dysfunction. Pathologizing autism is a real pastime amongst scientists, it would seem.
---
"I'm so bored," Jod complained. "This station sucks."
We were sitting in 225 Park, Jod, Nielli, and Thoren pitching rocks into the pond. I wasn't sure if that fell under the Do Not Throw Things Into The Pond signs around the area, but just to be safe, I wasn't joining them.
"We gotta find something to do," Jod went on.
I was trying to figure out a way to excuse myself to go hang out with Giro. But Thoren had sort of swept me along with him after school. And now we were aimlessly loafing around and complaining, which wasn't on the approved list of Correct Uses of Leisure Time as outlined by Beacon Studios, and the movie file Zarla had shown me how to download was burning a metaphorical hole in my tablet.
"Why don't we go to the library?" I suggested.
To nobody's surprise, Jod blew a raspberry.
"Any good movies playing?" Thoren asked.
"Nothing," Nielli said.
Thoren, who was splayed on the grass, turned his head to face me, a questioning look on his face. I swallowed. "Not yet," I said. "Sorry."
He sat up. "How come? Come on, you gotta share the mystery with me, dude."
"I, uh, promised that I wouldn't," I said. "Or"—with a burst of inspiration—"if I reveal my source, I'll be cut off."
His eyes narrowed. I tried to look at the ripples in the pond from Nielli's skipped rock.
Thoren was about to say something when Jod said, "Fine, maybe we should go find the secret video black market." His eyes followed one of the reflective arrows on the sidewalk. "Maybe it's hidden somewhere."
He gave us a wicked smile and started to follow the arrow. We all trailed after him, curious.
When he stopped at a pod bay hatch, though, I said, "What are you doing?"
Jod gave me a smirk. "What? You worried I'll find your buried treasure?"
"You're not supposed to go into the pod bays," I pointed out.
He rolled his eyes. "Yeah? What are they hiding in there?"
"Pods," I sighed, exasperated. "You can't play with them."
"Oh, really." Jod spun the handle on the hatch. "Just watch me. Admin can't tell me what to do." He dragged the hatch open. I looked down at the path made by the soft blue emergency lights.
"I'm not going," I said. "This is against the rules."
"Ooh," Jod said, already climbing onto the steps. "I'm so scared."
"No, you're just stupid," I said, feeling helpless. Maybe I could make him see reason.
Jod scoffed. "You guys coming or not?"
"On my way," Nielli said, slinging a foot onto the steps.
Thoren glanced back at me. I shook my head stubbornly. Didn't these idiots know what the rules were?
"Come on," my brother said.
"No," I said. "I'm not messing with a pod bay. They're the station's emergency escape, and it's a safety issue."
Thoren rolled his eyes, too, and followed our friends into the sublevel.
"I'm gonna tell!" I yelled.
"No you won't!" Thoren said back.
I sighed. He was right. Telling led to too much drama.
But at least I had managed to extract myself from the group. Now I could go buy a pizza for Giro and get this movie file burned so I wouldn't have to keep evading my brother's suspicious questions.
#
"This thing is great," Giro said, plugging in one of the adapters he had stringing Dad's tablet to his disc burner. "Can I keep it?"
"No." I didn't manage to hold back the snap as territoriality surged through me. He'd already talked me through changing the display settings to optimize visibility for paquos. What more did he want?
I tried to salvage the fallout from my sharp tone. "I'm already delinquent enough using it myself."
"Huh." Something in his tone conveyed skepticism, but I wasn't sure what he was skeptical of.
"And anyway, you can't," I said, scrambling for another excuse. "It's got a bio lock."
"Can't be very good, since you got around it," he dismissed flippantly.
I bristled. "Well, I'm related to my dad, you know. We're bound to have some genes in common."
Giro snorted. "Yeah. Some."
He didn't seem to mind when I watched him over his shoulder as he worked. I mentally catalogued each step he took in copying the movie file to the blank disc Dexer had provided us. When the disc started to spin and the little progress bar popped up, we exchanged gleeful looks.
"Seriously, though, I would love to be able to stream uncensored movies," he added. "Maybe even find a file of Wackadoo Critters floating around. I read that it was totally done, and the studio just scrapped it." He flicked an ear. "Rough on the creators."
"I can look it up when it's done recording," I offered, gesturing to the tablet.
"Burning," he corrected.
"Burning," I amended. He got weirdly finicky about this terminology.
"It's too bad we can't do this with books, too," I said. I had recently discovered a Greater Galactic Library that let one download ebooks.
"It's a little harder to steal that equipment," Giro said. "We'd have to sneak into a print shop to copy books, and that would be a bad idea."
"You could fine-tune Ronf or Dexer to handwrite," I said, smiling at the idea. "Make our own scriptorium here and nobody would recognize the handwriting."
"Hey!" Ronf protested from zeir perch on Giro's workbench.
"Oh, sure," Giro said. "You steal the paper for it, then."
I snorted. "Pass."
"Then the youth of Bright Beacon will have to deal with the tepid literary selection at the Bright Beacon Public Library for now," Giro said.
He flopped back onto his nest-bed, wincing a bit as he jarred his gunshot wound. He reached for the pizza box I had brought. "Hey, next time, could you get glassfish as a topping?"
I made a face. "You like them?"
"They're nice and salty," he said.
I reached for a slice. "Nobody would believe it if I ordered glassfish on a pizza. They'd get suspicious." This station was pretty small. I was worried enough, with this pizza, that word would get back around to Vilda that I had spoiled my dinner.
"Not a fan, huh?"
"I am loudly not a fan, yeah."
He shrugged. "Oh, well. Sausage is good, too."
A shriek pierced my skull.
I dropped the pizza and brought my hands to my ears, curling over myself, as the brain-stabbing klaxon repeated again and again, and the blue station-alert light up by the ceiling began to flash.
"What the—" Giro said, or mouthed—all I could hear was the siren.
Just as I was starting to grudgingly acclimate to the rhythmic screeching, the floor shuddered with a rumble that must have shaken the entire station.
Was it another impact attack? Nobody had talked about Politics lately, but the Technocrats were always lurking. Had they decided now was a good time for an assault on the powerhouses of Feavah?
I frantically ran through what I remembered of Station Safe! and Bright Futures. If the station went into lockdown, they said, the section seals would iris closed—oh! That was what the shaking floor was!—and whatever breach might have occurred would be fixed. If your section wasn't affected, stay in place until the seals opened, then make your way home in an orderly manner and report to your Security branch.
If your section was affected, things got more complicated.
"Is our section affected?" I asked. "Have we been breached?"
Giro shrugged his ears. "Dexer, go check if we've been breached."
"You're supposed to stay in place during a lockdown," I protested.
"Dexer's an unauthorized robot," Giro reminded me. "Zey're not bound by the laws of korano or paquo."
"Freedom!" Dexer cried, zipping through the half-irised doorway.
I spent the time waiting for Dexer's return trying to run over the rules for what to do if one's section was breached. We'd had drills for this, after all. Every building had emergency shelters in case of decompression. One only had to follow the arrows on the reflective signs to them. There were also escape pods if the section was completely compromised. They were under the streets, toward the outer rim. They would allow us to escape unscathed, assuming Thoren and the others hadn't made a mess of things—
Oh. Oh, right.
Presently, Dexer returned. "We're good," zey reported. "Some punk kids were messing around and pulled a lockdown alarm."
Thoren. Thoren and Jod and Nielli. I groaned.
At least all we had to do was wait. I could do without the klaxon shrieking at me, but if I plugged my ears it was almost pleasant, waiting for the disc to burn and watching Giro bounce through some other projects.
Eventually, the all-clear tone—much more agreeable-sounding—told me I had to make my way back home to report in. And, even better, Giro pulled the disc from the burner and put it in a blank case.
"Presto! The Bulging Brain, director's cut," he informed me, presenting it to me. "Tell your friends, tell your enemies! Charge 'em money to rent it! We'll set up a whole movie black market! We shall become a lone light in the darkness that is Bright Beacon!"
I tucked the disc into my bag. "Thanks," I said, the words "black market" feeling as slimy as a dish of red courgettes. But as Zarla had said, I was definitely a pirate now. And Jod's flippant comment on it had planted a seed in me. A delinquent, criminal seed.
And when I got home, Security was already there.
#
They weren't there for me.
Thoren lurked on the porch, his face thunderous, as Dad talked to the Security officers. My brother wouldn't look at me as he sulked.
"And here's the good one," Security Officer Blieg said jovially as I approached. "Hello, Dreedo. Where were you when the station locked down? Off on a date?"
"No." People were really keen on kids' dating lives on Bright Beacon. There were a lot of awkward Follow the Beacon videos about how to handle dates correctly. Personally, I never planned to use those.
I looked around at the scene. "Did Thoren pull a breach alarm?"
Dad looked pained. "He did."
"It was Jod! And he just did it as a joke," Thoren exploded from the porch.
"I thought you were smarter than that," I told him.
"He and his little friends were messing about in a pod bay," Officer Blieg explained to Dad.
Dad leveled a look at Thoren. "Hmm."
Officer Blieg scowled, as though dissatisfied with something. "This is a serious infraction, young man," she threw to Thoren on the porch. "If you were my kid, I'd—"
"I'll talk to him," Dad said pointedly.
Officer Blieg glowered, but turned to Dad as she pulled out a notepad. "I'm writing him a citation for violation of Station Safety Code 237(a)," she said, scribbling. "You can pay the fine at Administration."
"Very well," Dad said, taking the slip once it was offered. "Good day."
She gave him a curt nod and then shot a final glare at Thoren before leaving.
Dad turned to regard Thoren.
"It was—" my brother began.
"It was a joke that inconvenienced thousands of people," Dad said, gesturing him into the house. I slunk past them. It looked like Thoren was in for a long, repetitive lecture. "It could have injured or killed someone if they were caught in the section seals. This station depends on cooperation to spin smoothly." I straightened with a tingle. That was from Station Safe! I wondered if Dad knew he was quoting it.
"This station is a dead-end spinning wheel!" Thoren burst out. "There's nothing to do here! We were just looking for some entertainment!"
"You can't entertain yourselves at the expense of the station's productivity," Dad said.
Thoren rolled his eyes. "Oh, yeah, the planet depends so much on our power supply. This place is boring, and you know it!"
"You need a hobby," I told him.
"What, like chopping up station mice?"
"A better hobby," Dad amended for me.
Thoren squared his shoulders. "Oh, you're so smug, why didn't you tell anyone where we were?" He looked at Dad. "He was there when we went into the pod bay! Mr. Perfect here didn't bother to tell anyone what we were doing!"
I had no idea how to respond to that. I thought he didn't want me to be a tattletale.
Dad blinked slowly. "He should have told an adult, yes. But that doesn't change what you did, Thoren." He looked around for a moment, as though trying to find inspiration in the empty room. "You will have to pay the fine yourself."
"Literally how—"
"Your pocket money," Dad said. "I'm sure the neighbors would be willing to pay you for odd jobs." He threw a look at me. "You boys might want to put some thought into getting jobs, too. You might appreciate a little extra money."
Black market, I thought.
"This is drombash!" Thoren exploded.
Dad threw him a look, face twitching a bit. "Where did you learn that word?"
Wait, was that a swear word? I guess I shouldn't be surprised. I had learned it from Zarla, after all, who was probably a Bad Influence.
"I'm not getting a stupid job here," Thoren added. "Don't you see? This place is just spinning its wheels."
"It is a wheel," I pointed out.
"I live on the most boring place imaginable," Thoren lamented.
"This station is an important component of our society," Dad said severely. "You can leave when you graduate, if you want to, but as long as you live here, you'll have to follow the rules."
Thoren thunked onto the couch, glaring at the floor, arms folded, clearly bracing himself for one of Dad's meandering don't-do-that lectures.
I slunk away. I already agreed with Dad, after all.
Which, it occurred to me, was rather hypocritical, as I was starting to consider the concept of a black market a little more seriously. I just really wanted to share these cool films with everyone, though. It was stupid that the Board of Civic Hygiene thought we couldn't handle cool storylines or swear words. This couldn't be the same thing as inconveniencing the whole station, or causing a safety threat, right?
I flopped onto my bed and pulled out the disc case. I'd have to show it to Thoren when Dad and Vilda weren't around. He might not be so bored if he got good stuff to watch.
And then there was the possibility of making pocket money.
I was going to have to talk to Giro again.
#
EXP: IP262
DATE: 01.12.90
E0's social development continues. E0 is influenced by immediate social context, listening to peers for moral direction. C0, however, exhibits deficit in ability to interact with peers; even in hypothetical scenarios, C0's theory of mind appears lacking. When presented with a peer-pressure scenario, C0 continues to invoke laws and safety regulations and remains inflexible in moral decisionmaking.
#
Next Chapter!
