What does it stand for?
RHO sits at the cafe. His sister is smiling at him. Finally he breaks down. “What? What is it?”
She grins. “It’s your new look. You used to be such a bookworm. What happened?”
RHO shrugs. He reaches into his deck, pulls out a card, presents it. His sister flips it over in her hand, staring at it. ”’Rho’’? What’s it mean?”
The warrior chuckles. “Red Herring Only,” he explains. Meanwhile, his sister is tugging at the card. It stretches itself out, showing RHO’s home page in higher resolution. She starts clicking through some of his videos. “So you did a lot of crazy stuff, huh?”
RHO nods. “Learned sword-fighting, evasion, combat programming, lots of things. Did a stint in the Magistracy. They put me through some pretty elite stuff after they found what Mom and Dad had put into my genes. Well, that lasted until the Free Zone stopped being a nation. Their political servers crashed. There was an insider who destroyed the backups. It was pretty chaotic after that.”
His sister reaches out and takes one of his hands in hers. “You should have told me,” she says, a hint of reproach and a world of warmth in her voice. “So that’s where those blueprints came from, huh?”
RHO nods. “The Free Zone evolved some pretty advanced neuroprogramming techniques. They were talking about things like rewriting enemy mecha pilots with modulated laser beams aimed at their sensors. Really scary stuff. I think that’s why they got attacked. Even if they weren’t going to do something like that, just the idea that they might would send people off.”