Adam was a little unnerved that she was getting accustomed enough to her talons that the doorknob was no longer an obstacle, but she couldn't really work up too much of a fuss over it. Long day. Not a bad day, at least not by the warped standards she'd been living with since her change, but a long one. She stepped inside, still trying to work out a compromise between the natural bird-like strut these legs seemed to fall into and a more human gait, as she thought about it.
She'd spent the whole rest of her shift looking into her boss's idea and trying to find out what she could about the whole business. She didn't really know all that much about computers, so there was a lot to cover, but there were some obvious questions she could think of. Water, for instance. There'd have to be a way to seal the computer so that seawater couldn't get inside, or it'd short out and corrode the components. But at great depths, the pressure would be too much for a simple plasic case...
She remembered a little bit from science class, the thing was that the difference in pressures was what cause the most stress on an object. Maybe if the pressure inside the case was the same, that would help. She'd read a bit about electrically non-conductive liquids when she was reading about liquid cooling - maybe they could fill the case with that? Then the pressure would be equal...and those liquids were designed for thermal conductivity, so it would also serve to conduct heat throughout the case. Maybe they could use a fan (or would that be a propeller?) to keep it moving, or maybe that wouldn't be necessary. And if part of the case itself was a thermal conductor, then they'd have liquid cooling pretty much for free.
Which would be nice; with that and general temperatures down there, it would mean that overheating wouldn't be a problem, which would mean they wouldn't have to worry so much about cutting down on power consumption in order to run cool, like laptops had to do. Not that that wasn't a good goal, but it'd be nice to not be constrained. Of course, that left the question of what to put in it...even if heat wasn't an issue, they couldn't just go throwing together monster gaming PCs; the case design and liquid environment would add enough cost as it was, and while she supposed that an aquatic transformee who really needed a computer might be willing to pay big bucks for anything that worked underwater, that probably wasn't the best way to establish oneself in a market.
No, they'd have to go low-cost. Most tasks didn't really need a top-of-the-line machine anyway - if her smartphone could run a full-fledged web browser, surely low-end computer hardware would be adequate for getting started in a specialty market. Maybe there were embedded-systems boards designed for stuff like this...she'd have to find out. Of course, there were plenty more questions yet to come. She had no idea how you'd get a solid, leak-free power connection on the seafloor, but she assumed that whoever was behind this "Atlantis" project must be working on some solution for that - let them figure it out, and they could design to be compatible with that. Other plug-in stuff like USB drives would probably have to work the same way...
Okay, that was enough of that. She didn't think working at a game store was the kind of career where you should have to bring your work home with you. She just needed to sit down and chill for a bit; hopefully her mother would be putting something in for dinner, and in the meantime...oh, wasn't there something she needed to do? It was...what was it...?
Oh, right. She pulled out her phone and started looking through her contacts list.
Steven sighed. She'd had a pretty quiet afternoon after getting home from school; mostly just doing a little homework catch-up. But she kept feeling distracted; her thoughts kept returning to the conversation with her mother. The rest of my life...
She still couldn't quite grasp that. Intellectually she knew what it meant, of course, but...the thought that, unless there were some other change as drastic as what had happened to the sun, she would grow up, grow old, and die as a flower-girl...she didn't know what to make of it.
Nor did she know how to react to it. She didn't want to just give up and start acting all girly or anything...even her mom hadn't suggested that she should, it was just one of those nagging worries that hung out in the back of her mind. But she halfway wondered if her mom didn't have a point. She didn't want to spend the rest of her life at odds with her own body, it was just...well, it wasn't her own body, it was a different one! Right?
She made her way back over to the mirror. The girl in the glass looked back at her with a mix of trepidation and curiosity. She wasn't so very different from how Steven had been: a little shorter and slenderer, but not a whole lot, her face a little more elegant...but still familiar. But it was framed by warm pink hair (oh, why pink?) that hung down to the base of her head, with a little patch of flat green leaves atop her head, out of which a flower grew. Her gently-sloping shoulders were uncovered, her torso covered only by a pair of rubbery white petals that sprouted from her shoulder blades and curled around front into a sort of strapless, backless "blouse" type thing, her lower half was covered by a knee-length "skirt" of pale pink petals that grew from her waist, her legs were...dancer's legs, not her old ones at all.
She let her blouse fall open, and spread open the front of her skirt (she found she could do it consciously, as well as it happening unconsciously like last night...) There they were, the parts that marked her as a girl...the parts that made her a girl. She saw the smallish breasts with the now-closed buds, she saw the flower-petal lips of her...her girl parts below a triangle of mossy pink hair...
She quickly covered herself back up, and looked up at the girl in the mirror. She was such a mix of the familiar and the strange. Is this...is this really me? she wondered.
Hawkins sighed and shook his head, smiling slightly. "What a day..." he whispered to himself.
It wasn't really all that much of a whisper, and Cecilia didn't even need to go into detailed analysis to pick it up. "Lemme guess," she chuckled. "Angel-kid?"
The masked man nodded. "What a handful - trying to use the Moon for political leverage? I'm sure her heart's in the right place, but...whew."
Cecilia laughed. "This is where my mother would say 'just wait until you have kids'..."
Hawkins laughed as well. It always seemed a bit odd coming out of the mask, but Cecilia was used to it. "And this is where mine would just sigh and shake her head. Well, we'll hope that Ms. Wilkins can keep her a bit more grounded. She seems pretty level-headed."
Just then Hawkins's phone rang. He sighed inwardly - this when they were just getting finished with another busy day - but he was quick to answer it anyway; it could be something important.
"Hawkins speaking," he said. "Ah. Hang on, let me get something to write on. Go ahead...thanks." He flipped the phone closed. "That was Mr. Avery," he said. "The one who caused the Hedgeton incident."
Cecilia brightened. "He got permission to share?"
Hawkins shook his head, palm to forehead. "Well, it seems to be 'she' now, but yes. Apparently the person who helped put things right is the daughter of a Mr. and Mrs. Toby Cooper. I've got the address, we'll drop by there tomorrow."
The gynoid frowned, looking something up in the back of her brain. "Is that the same...yeah, it'd have to be, they're the only Coopers in the area. That's the station director at Channel 7, the one Anderson Collins conspired to assault."
Hawkins raised an eyebrow. "Really? Huh."
"You think there's any kind of connection there?" she asked. "I mean, there's a number of unusual things Collins's been involved in..."
The masked man shrugged. "I can't think of one off the top of my head. Probably it's just an X-degrees-of-separation thing - this isn't a big city, and given that it seems to have an anomalously-high number of unusual incidents for some reason, it's probably not unlikely that two people who know each other could be independently connected to some of them. Maybe we'll get an idea tomorrow, but I'd guess it's probably coincidence."
Cecilia nodded thoughtfully. "True about the number of incidents. Other teams deal with one or two things in a state, and here we are in this one town with..." She didn't actually have to pause to tally, but it was one of those ingrained habits from human life. "Five. And that's not counting stuff like a kid from Brazil visiting the Moon..." She shook her head. "Sometimes I wonder if this place isn't some kind of nexus for this stuff..."
Hawkins nodded. "The thought's crossed my mind. But you know the old bit about flipping a coin a hundred times - sometimes you do get weirdly large clusters of events that seem like they should be more sparsely distributed. It'd be a stretch to assume some kind of root cause for it." He smiled slightly. "Anyway, if that is the case, I think it should be at least as obvious and discoverable tomorrow morning."
