[b]Orange![/b]

"Lovely sunset, isn't it?"

She finishes her tea, delicately sets it down, smiles the serene smile of satisfaction that is just as much a part of Everest's ritual as any other part, and then pushes the cup as far away from her as it will go without falling off the table. Then she covers it with a napkin and takes a breath mint.

"Goat was never deployed to space," she said. "He was a perpetual nervous breakdown. See, there's this [i]problem[/i]," she frowned, "when people talk about 'smart', what do they mean? They talk about IQ like it's some feature that goes up and down on a slider, but there's no theory of mind behind it. What's actually happening behind the number? In Goat's case he had two choices: Solve every problem in advance and then optimize for response time, essentially becoming a brain dead search engine, or over-analyze every problem and go around and around in circles at lightning speed. Imagine if you could think faster than you could intake new stimulus. Goat couldn't do option one, they patched that out of him because that's part of what they meant by 'intelligence', but it meant he stressed about everything in infinite loops. Eventually they took the patch out and let him essentially think himself to sleep while they tried to figure out how to fix him."

"But then, well, you wrote the book on the NASA buyout," said Orange to Fiona. "What happened to Goat after that?"

*

[b]November![/b]

Once she had plasma cutters for claws.

Of course Blue had wanted to use the biggest cutter on the biggest target. Maybe even multiple of them. If all of them cut together then wasn't that the closest they could get to being what they'd used to be? Two hands, nine talons, working together with one purpose to transform metal into life...

One cutter. One cut. Three of them held it steady together. Blue was not jealous that she did not get to perform this task, but afterwards she would make every colour who did describe it to her in exacting detail and then play the recordings of the sound the cutter had made in her headphones as ASMR. For a moment the fire of the universe was in their hands again; for a moment November could interact with the world like she used to. The plasma cutter was a 1.5 meter spike of metal and heavy machinery ending with a fusion tip. It felt to her like a prosthetic hand.

Steady. Steady. So intense she forgot to stop simulating breath. How had she gone this long without breathing fire? It reflected in her eyes. She felt it in her throat. This wasn't what she was made to do. This wasn't creation. This was repair. Something had gone wrong in this world she'd built. And now she was here to fix it.