The first thing Amy did, now that she had the mental capacity for boredom, was to turn on the screen in front of her. It took about three seconds to turn on- not bad, for something that couldn’t possibly be the main priority to power- and jumped straight to the fitness program.

That... didn’t feel right. Either whoever had set this thing up had gone through the whole thing to remove any traces of things that someone might have a problem with, or the settings were available enough for passengers to mess with them.

She knew which one was more likely. While there were some things it would be reasonable enough to block, she also knew people complained if they couldn’t watch whatever they wanted in private, and sometimes in public. She’d once had a teacher in middle school who waited for the youngest person in the class to turn thirteen and then instantly made them watch a horror movie. For a grade. Amy hadn’t been able to look at spiders the same way ever since.

No, if she’d been unlucky, she was certain it would have led to being jumpscared by a slasher flick.

Which she was pretty sure the people running the train didn’t want to happen. That was how you got complaints. So this couldn’t possibly be the default unless whoever set the system up was incredibly stupid.

And that gave her an idea.

(Interest: Optimization)

The remote had been shoved between the seat and the wall, because of course it had. Fishing it out would have looked incredibly undignified if she wasn’t in private seating. Of course, if she wasn’t in private seating, she wouldn’t have been messing around with this kind of thing, anyway, so it all balanced out.

A bit of delay in things turning on had been acceptable. Unfortunate, but the sort of thing that happened when most of the power was being spent on running the train. But the pause button? Opening the menu? Maybe some people wouldn’t notice it was taking a fraction longer than it should have been, but something inside Amy itched.

Well. She was going to the settings anyway. They were all the way down at the bottom of the menu, bright blue gear icon and all. Completely open, not asking for a login or anything.

She opened them.

The first set of options looked pretty normal. Mostly. If you ignored that the available resolutions stretched well beyond what would realistically make a difference in a screen that size. Amy couldn’t ignore that, because that was processing power that could have been going to literally anything else, like having mildly less input delay while navigating the settings.

She had to go down a whole five levels to see any visible difference. And she was actively trying!

...And, if things were left like this, the next person to realize they could access the settings menu- likely very soon, since she planned to mess with startup options- was just going to crank it all the way back up, ignoring that they’d gone past the point of diminishing returns and into active hindrances. It wasn’t like anyone would... notice...

...This was a bad idea.

And yet.

Now that it occurred to her, she just couldn’t help herself.

A deep breath. Sure, there was definitely at least one camera in there with her. But most people wouldn’t notice what they were seeing, to begin with.

If it was visible at all. She’d never checked with anyone about that.

She just knew it wasn’t a thing most people were capable of.

Amy closed her eyes, took another deep breath, and reached. Reached with a part of herself that hadn’t always been hers, but had settled so deeply, she couldn’t imagine living without it. Reached for the screen, for the settings menu, to the data saved within it. Gently tweaked the options that wouldn’t actually contribute anything so the machine wouldn’t actually try to run them. She just had to flick her fingers, and the offending wastes of processing power would be banished into the depths until at least the next software update.

And updates to these sorts of things took forever to come out, so if that did reverse the change, it wouldn’t be her problem anymore.

Which was good, because she didn’t think she’d be doing this again. It was a much more complicated tweak than just excising bloatware from her personal devices, and it wasn’t even her device, and at least one of those things was contributing to her splitting headache.

Why had she done this to herself? She was already having weird dizzy spells, why did she do something to make it worse?

...Right. Because the way things had already been set up was actively offensive. Startup options... Turn ‘restore last session’ to off... Now to find something quiet to watch until she could properly breathe again.

---

When the train rolled in to Crown Point South Station, there was someone waiting there for Amy. Not her father, that would have been asking too much of him, but a girl a few years younger than her, chocolate-brown hair tied up with deep purple ribbons that matched her eyes, but not the pastel purple watch on her wrist.

They hadn’t seen each other in years, but there were only so many people who could have been sent to get her. "...Colette?" Oh, she even remembered her name. This was already going great.

"I’m surprised you recognized me." Colette Blakeley’s tone was clipped, clinical, like an imitation of her mother. "It’s been a long time since you showed your face here."

Amy wasn’t sure why she cared. Colette couldn’t have been older than four when the divorce was finalized, and they’d only ever known each other because their parents were friends. They hadn’t even been the only two kids at the fancy, boring dinners.

Even her being there just spoke to Lance Rollins not actually caring, and Amy had known that for a while now. "Dad could have sent someone with an actual car." Or just something associated with the school. Did Brilliant Crowns have its own vehicles? Surely, the normal student body couldn’t be expected to transport themselves. That just wasn’t a thing rich kids could be bothered with.

Or kids with heavy suitcases, which was the relevant thing here.

"Your father is currently occupied with something." Okay, but that wasn’t what she’d said. Also, why did she sound like a robot? It had been a long time since she’d spoken to her, but she was pretty sure she remembered her talking like a normal person. More rich kid stuff? "I was sent to ensure you made it safely to Brilliant Crowns. I can carry your luggage."

With those twig-like arms?

Of course, if Colette was carrying the luggage, that meant Amy didn’t have to. So she was all for it, really, as long as she didn’t start complaining about the weight halfway through. All the breakable stuff had been shipped ahead, and nothing inside was directly incriminating about anything, so there wasn’t any harm in it. "Sure. Thanks."

With that, they walked through the automatic sliding doors and into Crown Point.

If Amy had to compare the city to anything, it was an outdoor shopping mall. Most streets had two layers- a ground level for people traveling in vehicles, and an upper level for pedestrians. Because of this, each building tended to serve multiple functions. Colette led her to an escalator that ran remarkably smoothly, but had a sign next to it saying not to use it in the rain.

She didn’t want to know what the story behind that was.

Between the distance and the rest of the skyline, Brilliant Crowns remained but a speck on the horizon. A distant set of spires that, supposedly, was the dream of every child in Crown Point.

Amy wasn’t convinced.

Still. That was a problem for when she got there. And that wouldn’t be for a while. For now, she had other priorities.

[ ] As they walked, Amy tried to probe Colette for information about Brilliant Crowns, what she’d been doing for the past decade, and why she was there in place of an actual adult. Especially the last one. She really didn’t get that one.

[ ] About halfway through the trek, they stopped for lunch at a small cafe above an abandoned electronics store. If Amy’s father wanted her at the school in time to eat, he could bother to arrange actual transportation. But he didn’t, so sandwiches it was.

[ ] Brilliant Crowns wasn’t actually a hard place to find. And Colette wasn’t interested in making conversation herself, or looking that much in Amy’s direction. It wouldn’t be that difficult to just slip away for a bit, make her own way, see if anything was as she remembered... Especially that last one.