"You alright Chloe?"
"...Hmm?" I still wasn't used to that name. I'd been standing outside the door to Anett's class wondering how my life had gone so wrong, when I realised a friendly voice was calling my name. I glanced around me and spotted two of the more accepting students: Nandy and Wunno. Hall were so similar in looks and voice that I wasn't sure which had spoken.
"It sounded like Anett was yelling a few minutes ago, and I'm guessing you were the target again," Nandy said. I knew it was Nandy because he always styled he's hair to be taller than Wunno's.
"Yeah, I was working on a personal project during the lecture again. One Anett says is doomed to fail. I'm feeling he doesn't want me to succeed. And now I'm being given extra work as punishment, to make sure I don't have time to try." I held up my scryer to display a strongly worded message of disapointment from Ginnn, listing all the extra work I would need to do to make up for my infractions.
"What are ya gonna do about it?" Wunno asked, with a tone and expression that invited mischief.
As I considered the question I started walking. This was my lunch break — the midnight version of lunch, that is — and I didn't want to spend any more of it at or near the academy. "My project is for the good of all hexmages. And for all magekind, inevitably. I can't just give up on it. It's too important." But was it really? Did I care so much about helping mages? Perhaps not, but this was where I lived now and I had to do something more to earn my keep than babysit an experiment.
"Maybe leave it until you're not a student," Nandy suggested.
"I don't know if I'll have time for my own projects later, and it'll be tough to find someone to fund me if thall react like Anett."
"You don't have time for your own projects now." Without looking, I knew Wunno was rolling he's eyes.
"Only because most of our time is wasted doing work a hex could be doing for us, even better than we could do it! If I finished my project I could do all the extra work in a fraction of the time Anett and Ginnn expect."
"That's very... ambitious," Nandy said uncertainly from my right. Wunno was on my left, and we were walking side by side on a machine-paved path beside a machine-built road between rows of machine-built houses.
"Is it really? We already have hexes that respond to commands such as buttons and levers. Surely there are hexes that can... hmmm..." I tried to think of a good example and look around for inspiration. A winjeel buzzed by, carrying a package. There were usually a few of the hovering machines somewhere in sight, though they were easy to miss if you weren't looking for them. "Do winjeels find their way, or do they follow set paths? Or are they controlled directly?"
"I think it's a bit of all three," Wunno said. "There's some set paths and they find their way betwen those, but a team of drones keeps watch in case something goes wrong."
"What's that got to do with your hex project?" Nandy asked, sounding puzzled.
I realised I'd gotten ahead of my explanation. "I've developed a way of writing the exact design of a hex in a very precise way so there's no ambiguity about what it should do, from a mathematical and logical standpoint. It has enough information to indicate exactly what a hex should be. Any hexmage should be able to follow an obvious set of steps to convert that into a hex. Or even better, a hex consisting of that exact set of steps can do it for us, for any hex description. So I was thinking, the drones overseeing the winjeels surely have a way of adding and changing paths. Surely they don't ask some unfortunate hexmage to alter the winjeels' hex every time the routes need changing, right?"
Nandy shrugged. "I suppose."
"So that means, somewhere there's a written representation of the paths, which the winjeels follow. I'm doing the same thing, but for entire hexes instead of flight paths."
"Hexes are a lot more complicated than flight paths," Wunno said with a shake of he's head. "A flight path is just a list of coordinates. A hex has so many different parts with nearly uncountable possibilities. How can you account for all of that? What you're talking about is an incredibly complex hex. If you ever finished it and tested it out, there's little chance it would work right on the first try, and there's no hope you'd be able to track down the errors. And given the sheer amount of different circumstances you'd be dealing with, how would you ever know you'd confirmed every part of it? Plus on top of that, where are we going?"
"Huh?" I stopped walking. After looking around for landmarks I realised I'd walked most of the way home without paying any attention to where I was going. This was entirely the opposite direction from the stalls where students typically ate freshly cooked meals. "Oh. Where's the nearest place we can get food?"
Wunno was frowning. "Not near enough if we want to get to the next lecture in time. This part of the sector is where people who cook for themselves live, and I don't know anyone here well enough to borrow their kitchen. Not that we have time to cook anything."
"I live here, but you're right about the time. Unless you want a breakfast bar or raw vegetables, we'll need to have a winjeel deliver something prepackaged."
Nandy had already pulled out he's scryer. "There's a park with benches halfway between here and the academy. I can have three of today's special delivered in five minutes. Sounds good?"
I nodded, but all I could think was that half an hour was too short for lunch.
The special was some sort of bean soup. It tasted odd and felt mealy in my mouth. I gulped it down regardless. "Where were we?"
"What were you talking about when I realised you'd drifted off beyond the visible world while walking, you mean?" Wunno asked rhetorically. "I'd just told you your hex is too complex."
"Right, that sounds familiar. And I think I like the sound of that. Complex hex. Hex complex. Hexplex?"
"Uh, what are you doing?" Nandy asked around a mouthful of soup.
"Trying to think up a name for my... hexplexer."
Nandy shook he's head very slowly, almost keeping he's spike of violet hair stationary. "You're getting ahead of yourself."
"Yeah, I'm still not convinced this has a hope of working within your lifetime. I doubt the Think Tank could make it work. All your winjeel route analogy proved is how big a problem it is by comparison."
"There's got to be something better to compare it to." I looked around frantically. There was not much in the park besides rocks, trees and benches. It was well lit from above by a pair of aether powered magelights. The lights were the unusual type that added extra glow to our robes and my companions' personal ink. Additional colours of light were sporadically provided by the variable signboard that was directly in our sightline while seated. "Of course, the signboard! It's made up of thousands of separate red, green and blue magelights. There's no way a hexmage makes a new hex controlling all the individual lights every time someone wants a new thing shown on the sign. There must be some way of telling it what words and patterns it should display, and the colour and size and typeface of the text, plus how it should move or resize and so on. Please tell me that's not all written by hand every time!"
"I think there's one hex that does signs boards," Nandy said.
"That's right, I've heard tales about that," Wunno said, leaning in as if he was telling a scary story. "It was a reward the Over Seer gave to one of the original hexmages. A few new features have been slowly added since then, but I don't think any one hexmage is sure of how it all works."
"Oh." I said, disappointed. I looked back at the signboard.
TITAN OPEN WEEK AND WINTERFEST
Want to discern the transmundane or rise above the limits of mortal flesh?
Come see our lineup of self-augmentations and learn what humanity can become!
5% off all new models and up to 20% off older stock, WINTERFEST WEEK ONLY!
Celebrate Winter in the Highest of Titan High Society Vision-Plus Events!
See or set the new fashions and shake assorted limbs with the Titanic elite!
"Come on, Chloe, we've got to get to our classes! What's got you so... Eww, the Titaniacs are advertising their trashy Winterfest event again. Only the weirdest mages ever go to those, and even thall don't want to admit to having attended," Nandy jeered.
"What are self-augmentations?"
"What, you don't kno... Right, of course you don't. And you're better off not knowing. Frightful stuff," Nandy said. "Come on, we have to run."
Wunno let Nandy go ahead of us. "You were probably told stories of magic 'corrupting' people and making them part machine, like the demons. Well those stories aren't exactly true, but the Titans do that sort of thing, intentionally. And not just to replace damaged parts like your arm or your eye. They'll replace working parts, saying it makes them stronger. They found a special metal the body doesn't reject and... Well, we mages certainly use a lot of magic but we understand how dangerous it can be and we definitely don't connect aether to our brains." He whispered that last part. It must have been a sore point for Nandy. I was curious but knew better than to ask why. We weren't really friends yet.
"That's... horrible. Um, when you said 'replaced damaged parts', does that mean fully functional replacement?" I tried and failed to hide my sudden interest.
"You couldn't afford their price."
That wasn't a 'no'. "Winter's still a few months out."
"Forget about it. You don't want to get mixed up with the Titans."
But I already was. According to the messenger Skögul, I was now living with one. No one else in the hive knew about that. Not even Skids.
"All my life I was told not to 'get mixed up with' mages. But here I am."
"And I can see how difficult it is for you. If you think this is different and strange, the Titans are a thousand times worse. You're the last person here who should ever have to face the Titans."
"I faced demons that were on a path to eat my home."
"Those are monstrous machine animals. Titans are monstrous machine people. If you can still call them people. You should put all that aside and figure out what you're going to do with that project of yours."
"Right, the project. I think my biggest problem is that no one really takes me seriously."
Wunno nodded. "We're students; that's normal. The solution to that is to gradu—"
"Of course! It's that simple!"
"You're gonna wait until your training is over?"
"I'm gonna become a chroma star!" It was the perfect opportunity to show off what I could do. Skids had been practically begging me to join.
Skids... from whom I'd been keeping a critical, personal secret.
So that was doomed to fail before I even started.