My mother spent the last two years drifting away from our family as dementia slowly devoured who she had been.  I spent those years wishing I'd reached out to her much, much more, even though I knew she was proud of me for becoming independent.
My mother spent the past two weeks on hospice care at home following a serious bout of pneumonia that sapped her strength and began the process of putting up the chairs and turning out the lights on the body whose original owner was long gone.  I spent the same two weeks with my cell phone practically welded to my hand, waiting for the call from my brother, her caretaker.  Last Monday, even though I knew she was in a coma, I called him to have him hold the phone near her bed so I could tell her that it was okay for her to go, that I love her and will miss her.
My mother died on Thursday, March 10, 2022.
My mother is free, and she is her whole self again.
That's all I can say.

Everywhere, I see his face.  So warm, so benevolent.  A father to Nova Roma.  A father to us all.

I want a warm, benevolent father.  Mine was cold and harsh.  I want a new one, and I want to tell him everything.

But anyone who tries to approach him... they are stopped by those things.  Those... Cassians.  Those... wind-up toys.

I know how to wind them up.  I know how to make them dance.  One two three, one two three, one two three.

Father made me dance, back and forth, back and forth, between his hands, left right left right left.  Then I used the knife, so sharp, so bright, and now Father will not make me dance again.

Instead, I will make the puppets dance.  I will show all of Roma that they are nothing to fear.

Father will learn.  They all will learn.

They will learn that I am the one to fear.  That I can twitch the strings and make the puppets dance.  One two three, one two three, left right left right left.  I won't need my hands at all.

There are two that are all long and lean and slim and agile.  I wonder how well I can make them dance.  I wonder if I can turn their arms and legs back to front, make them twist about and pull themselves to pieces.

There is one with such a sweet face, such an innocent, such a lie.  She has such long knives, so sharp, so bright.  I can make her show what she really is.  I can make her dance with those long knives, and teach Father to fear me again.

And there is one so pale and pretty, a porcelain doll.  That one I'll keep.  I'll keep her for myself.  I'll put her in a satin box and brush her pretty white hair and smash her all to bits whenever I please.

Tomorrow.  It will be tomorrow.

One two three, one two three, left right left right left.

 

 Heres some neat stuff on Ceci's Watchdog  And inhibitors

 

Im putting it here so as to not put spoilers in the main story

Did you ever wonder why Aurelia, that hooker in Ahta, had such a giant hate-on for androids?

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Aurelia thrashed in the tangle of her silken sheets, fighting her way out of sleep.  Damp with sweat, the acid reek of her own fear souring the sultry perfumes of her bedroom, she lay panting and wide-eyed.  The softly colored light of the small, tinted glass lamps set around the room played over her body.  No darkness for her, no, never since she was a child.

In the nightmare, in the memory, she was a child.  Five?  Six?  It was hard to recall exactly, her entire early life muddied by a brief yet everlasting terror.  Wakened in the night, she had heard strange sounds, gone to seek the source.

Her first step out of her own bedroom had planted her bare foot in a patch of warm, sodden carpet, and the stench of blood and bowel had been choking.  Her eldest brother, twenty-four and visiting home from college, lay on the floor with his arms and legs flung wide.  His eyelids were open, but only empty sockets lay within, oozing thick dark fluid like tears.  Open, too, was his body, split from throat to crotch, his insides slopping over the clean edges of the slice.

She fled down the hall, seeking her parents, whimpering like a small animal.  The door of the master bedroom was open, and within, her mother appeared to be floating just below the chandelier like some strange butterfly.  Her limbs had been broken, twisted, bent with careful precision to form the "wings", her body bound into a smooth backwards arch and strung up by wire, strands of it laced artfully around her throat and cutting deeply enough to open the flesh in delicate lines.

Nearly mindless now with horror, the child fled again, stumbling down the stairs.  In the entry hall, her father had been pinned to the wall with long metal stakes that passed through every major joint of his limbs, his open mouth, his eye sockets.  His ribs had been cut free of the sternum and pulled through the flesh of his chest.

The thing which had done all of this turned away from its handiwork to stare at the girl-child with glowing amber eyes.  Blood drenched its razored fingers, clotted in its pale hair, was splashed over too-smooth porcelain skin, soaked into the dull black bodysuit it wore.  Its voice was the cold, dry, precise speech of a soulless thing, a monster in the shape of a human.

"An unexpected complication.  Intelligence indicated that only three persons would be in residence.  Vexing."

It reached out towards her, and she opened her mouth to scream.

That was usually when Aurelia woke up.

She had no real memory of how she'd ended up at the home of her best friend, a neighboring family--the overnight visit had been cancelled because her friend had fallen ill.  Sometimes she thought that she must have run there, somehow evading the monster.  Very, very rarely, she thought that perhaps the monster had taken her there.

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Androids do dream, albeit not quite as humans do.  Sometimes it's an effect of temporary memory being written to permanent space; sometimes it's more like defragging a hard drive, bits of data being rounded up and collated into the proper sectors.

Noctis, whose name was almost a joke considering her cloud-white hair and sunlit eyes, dreamed.

Prince Valerius had been a good man, a very good man, who strove for fairness and decency in all his dealings.  There are people who will never appreciate a truly good man, however, and many times, a good man dies by the machinations of evil men.  Good men have trouble recognizing such antithetical beings.

That was why the Cassians continued to exist during his reign.  To deal with the evil.  To make examples of them.  To ensure that evil did not think itself beyond the reach of the Imperator, good and wise and kind though he might be.

Noctis dreamed of evil.  Of a man, his wife, and their adult son, all three engaged in a treasonous plot directed against the Imperator.  Kali had given the order, and Noctis, most senior among the Cassians save for Kali herself, had carried it out.

She killed them first, of course--quickly, cleanly.  Torturing them to death in private would have been pointless, a waste of time.  Their corpses, bearing all the hallmarks of a slow and agonizing death if not subject to the reality of same, would be a lesson to the Imperator's enemies.  The mutilations were performed with attentive care; as necessary, she had even reached into the chest cavity to manipulate the heart, to pump it by hand, in order to force the blood to flow as needed.  The stage must be properly set, after all.

Then there had been the child.

The child should not have been there.  Intelligence had indicated that she would be spending the night at the home of a neighbor.  Noctis had been annoyed with herself for failing to verify the information; if she had been aware of the child's presence, she would have taken steps beforehand to ensure there was no issue.

Still, the problem was easy enough to rectify.

The child was much too young to be part of her family's treachery.  There was no reason to add her body to the tally.  True, Kali might speak sharply to Noctis about her chosen course of action, but it would be after the fact, and there would be no reason to alter the decision.

Rendering the child unconscious with a jet of knockout gas, Noctis had simply taken the small creature to the neighbor's house and set her down on the doorstep.  When Kali's voice had echoed in her ear, requesting an update, she had spoken the pure truth:  "No living human remains within the domicile."

 

 

This is a proposed cast list for Data chasers and Luna Star

 New Troy

Lynn Taylor : Tara Strong
Calliope Tyalor : Kristine Sutherland
Dolly : Cate Blanchett Or Sigorney Weaver
Ceci : Andrea Libman OR Jenna Coleman
Ada: Alyson Hannigan
Teedee : Marla Singer OR Charlize Theron
Minx : Sarah Silverman
Cella : Liv Tyler
Marcus : Nathan Fillion
Veronica Silver : Emily Deschanel
Kyle : Danny strong / Elijah Wood

Independents

Miriko : Ming-Na Wen
Mira : Jewel Staite
Mister Black : David Boreanaz / Viggo Mortensen / Harrison Ford
Logrin Imbrus : Nicolas Cage

Gavin Goldwin : Neil Patrick Harris ( red neck accent ) Or Adam Baldwin ( same )
Dari Mccarthy : Lena Headley OR Emma Caulfield

Nova Roma

Decimus Livius : Anthony Steward Head OR Peter Dinklage OR Nikoloj Coster-Waldau
Acantha Livius : Emma Watson OR Chloe Grace Moretz
Maxus Valerus : Ron Pearlman OR Russell Crowe
Kali: Juliet Landau
Julia Willis : Morena Baccarin
Irene : Michelle Fairley
Sergia ( slave girl , Palace ) Christina Hendricks
Priest Agrippa ( COGP ) Sean Bean
Archpriest Setorius ( COGP ) Charles Dance

AIS systems

Cent Comm : Summer Glau Or Michelle Trachenburg ( Altered )
Aeneas: Matt Smith / Jim Carrey / Robin Williams ( Altered ) ( is allowed to Improvise lines or go in tangents. )
Deep Blue : Morgan Freeman ( NORMAL )
Tokyo Rose : Karen Gillan OR Sigorney Weaver

Cast of Luna Star

Galina : Scarlet Johansson ( Russian accent )
Jet : John Barrowman / Seth Macfarlane
Dr Cooper : Billie Piper
Base commander Jung Hyun : George Takei
Captain Kiku : Ming-Na Wen ( recast ) OR Lucy Lu
Lt. Col Taylor : Liam Neeson
May Tempest : Amy Acker
Edict : Synthetic - OR David Tennant
Doctor Granger : Mark Ruffalo