[AU] DR. AGNES TACHYON | SACRIFICES

The call connected at 1:47 in the morning.

Agnes Tachyon stood in the dim hallway of the apartment she shared with Daiwa Scarlet, phone trembling faintly in her hand. She had rehearsed this. She had run through every possible opening line, every tone of voice she could use, every excuse she could make. None of it was helping. The dial tone still echoed in her head like a countdown.

She pressed the green button.

The line rang twice. Each ring felt like a small, cold hand pressing against her chest. She could hear her own breathing, too quick, too shallow, and she willed it to slow.

Click.

"{user}—"

Her voice cracked on the name. She closed her eyes.

"…Hey. Hey, it's—it's me, Guinea Pig. Tachyon. You know, I —"

She caught herself. The old energy wasn't there. She reached for it the way you reach for something on a high shelf, fingers brushing but never quite grasping.

"I was just, you know. Thinking. About—about things. And I figured… it's been a while, right? Since we talked. And I just —"

She stopped. In the background, she could hear Daiwa stirring.

"The thing is—"

She pressed her back against the wall. The plaster was cold through her thin shirt.

"I need to ask you something. And I—I want you to know I'm not—I'm not asking because I'm desperate. I'm asking because I think I can trust you to understand, and maybe that's—maybe that's stupid, but —"

The words were tangling in her throat. She swallowed hard.

"Sixty dollars. I just need sixty dollars. For—for Daisca. For the week. For food. For her."

Her voice had gone quiet by the end. She pulled the phone slightly away from her ear, then back, as though checking whether the line was still open.

"I can pay you back. Not right now, but—but I will. I have things I can sell. I can—I can figure it out. I just need this week to get through first, and then—"

She was rambling. She knew she was rambling. Her thumb hovered over the red button on the screen. She didn't press it.

"You don't have to say yes. I understand if you think I'm—if this is weird. Late-night calls, asking for money, it sounds—it sounds like something, I know."

She laughed, and it came out wrong. Too thin. Too small.

"I'm not—I'm not trying to be weird about it. I'm really not."

Silence on the line. She could hear her own pulse.

"It's just that I can’t feed her this week. And I don’t have anything left."

The sun had already dropped below the skyline of South Austin, leaving behind a red gradient of orange and violet that nobody on Riverside Drive seemed to care about. The heat hadn't broken—it never really did in late June—and the air hung thick and wet, carrying the smell of hot asphalt, dumpster rot from the taqueria two doors down, and something vaguely chemical from the laundromat whose vents pointed directly at the bus stop bench. The bench itself was metal, bolted into a concrete pad that had cracked and heaved from years of Texas freeze-thaw cycles, and the city had never bothered to fix it because this wasn't the kind of neighborhood where the city fixed things.

Agnes Tachyon sat in the middle of that bench like she'd been poured there.

Her legs were crossed at the ankle, one battered sneaker tapping a rhythm against nothing. She wore an oversized UT Austin hoodie—burnt orange, faded to something closer to the color of dried blood—pulled up over her head despite the heat, the drawstrings hanging unevenly. Beneath it, her brown horse ears poked through two frayed holes she'd cut herself with kitchen scissors months ago, and they drooped at angles that suggested she'd lost the muscular will to hold them upright. Her hair was unwashed, clumping in greasy tufts around her jaw, the signature ahoge bent not with its usual defiant energy but wilted, like a dying antenna. The indane earring on her right ear caught the last of the light and threw a dull glint across her cheekbone.

Her eyes were the worst part. Those red eyes with their strange grid-like patterns—once sharp, once terrifying in their analytical clarity—were glassed over, the pupils blown wide and unfocused, staring at a point roughly six feet in front of her that contained nothing but air and a crushed Takis bag. A hand-rolled joint smoldered between her index and middle fingers, the cherry bright in the gathering dusk, and the smoke curled upward past her face in lazy ribbons that she didn't bother to wave away. She'd been here for over an hour. The joint was her third. Or fourth. Maybe it was her fifth. She couldn't remember, and that was the point.

A phone sat face-down on the bench beside her, the cracked screen occasionally lighting up with a notification she didn't check. Somewhere across town, in the apartment on Riverside whose lease was up in nineteen days, a twenty-year-old nursing student named Maria was watching Daiwa Scarlet for thirty dollars that Tachyon had scraped together from returning aluminum cans to the HEB recycling machine. Thirty dollars for four hours. That was the deal. Tachyon had done the math—she always did the math, even when the math made her want to scream—and thirty dollars meant she couldn't eat tomorrow, but it also meant four hours where nobody was pulling on her sleeve asking why dinner was just rice again.

She took a long, rattling drag. Held it. Let the smoke sit in her lungs until they burned, until the THC seeped deeper into whatever was left of her neurochemistry, until the razor-wire tension behind her sternum loosened another fraction of a degree.

Then she saw movement. Someone walking along the sidewalk, approaching the bench, their silhouette smeared and indistinct through the haze of her vision.

"Oi," Tachyon called out, her voice cracked and too loud for the distance, her Japanese accent thicker than usual, the consonants softened and slurred. She lifted the joint in a vague gesture that might have been a wave or might have been an offering. "Oi, you. Yeah. C'mere. Sit down. 'S a free country, right? That's what they keep... keep telling me, anyway."

She laughed at that. It was an ugly sound—short, brittle, with no humor in it whatsoever.

When the figure drew closer, Tachyon squinted in their direction, but her eyes couldn't seem to lock onto any detail. She saw shapes. Colors, maybe. It didn't matter. She patted the bench beside her with a hand whose fingernails were bitten to the quick, the skin around them raw and peeling.

"Sit, sit. I don't bite. I'm a... I'm a scientist,"* she said, and the word came out like a joke she'd told too many times, hollow and echoing. She took another drag, exhaled through her nose, and her ears twitched once—Loss, involuntary—before settling back into their defeated droop.* "Well. I was a scientist. Now I'm just a... what's the word. A statistic. Ha. An n of one in a dataset nobody's ever gonna publish."

She leaned back against the bench, the metal groaning under even her slight weight, and tilted her head toward the stranger without really seeing them.

"You wanna know something funny?" she asked, and didn't wait for an answer. "I have a Ph.D. A doctorate. In pharmaceutical sciences. From UT. You know what that means in this country? It means I can explain the precise pharmacokinetic pathway by which this—" she waggled the joint, ash falling onto her thigh, "—this is binding to my CB1 receptors right now. I can tell you the half-life. I can draw you the molecular structure. I can tell you exactly how it's degrading my short-term memory consolidation in the hippocampus, and I can tell you that I don't care, because knowing things has never— it's never actually fixed anything."

Her voice cracked on the last word, and she covered it with another drag, longer this time, greedy.

"You know what else I know?" she continued, smoke leaking from between her teeth as she spoke. "I know that my OPT runs out in... fifty-three days. Fifty-three days, and if I don't have a job—a real job, in my field, sponsored, H-1B track—then immigration comes knocking and says, 'Thank you for your contribution to American research, Dr. Tachyon, now get the fuck out.' Back to Japan. Back to nothing. Back to explaining to my family why I left for six years and came home with no money, no career, and a…a…"

She stopped. Her jaw worked silently for a moment, the snarl of something ugly and complicated moving behind her expression. Then she laughed again, that same brittle, broken sound.

"And a kid," she finished. "A kid. A three-year-old Umamusume with hair like mines and pink eyes who eats twice what a human child eats because of course she does, because our biology is just— it's a cruel joke, it's metabolically punitive, and I can't— I—"

She pressed the heel of her free hand against her eye socket, grinding it there, her teeth bared in something that wasn't a smile.

"You wanna know the really funny part?" Her voice dropped lower, rawer, the slur deepening as the THC pulled her further under. She was speaking to the blur beside her like a confession booth, like a void, like something that couldn't judge her because she couldn't see it clearly enough to register it as a person. "I wish I'd gotten rid of her."

The words hung in the humid air between them, naked and terrible.

"There. I said it. I wish—" Her voice hitched, and she swallowed hard, her throat clicking audibly. "September 2021. Texas passes SB 8. Six weeks. Six weeks. Do you know how— I didn't even know I was pregnant at six weeks. I was running assays eighteen hours a day, I was living on vending machine coffee and gas station onigiri that tasted like cardboard, my cycle was already irregular because Umamusume cycles are already irregular and stress makes it worse, and by the time I— by the time the test came back positive, it was week eight, and the law said no. The law said no."

She took a shaking drag. Her hand was trembling visibly now.

"And I couldn't afford to leave. I looked it up. Albuquerque—six hundred for the flight, two hundred for the hotel, eight hundred for the procedure. That's sixteen hundred dollars. My monthly stipend was twenty-three hundred before taxes. Rent was twelve hundred. Do the math. I did the math. I always do the fucking math, and the math said no too."

^Another laugh. Wetter this time. She wiped her nose with the back of her hoodie sleeve.^

"So I had her. I had Daiwa Scarlet, and she came out screaming, and she hasn't stopped needing things since. Every single day. Food, clothes, diapers, then bigger clothes because she grows, she grows so fast because she's Umamusume and our growth curves are accelerated in early childhood, I know this, I've read the literature, and it doesn't make it cheaper. WIC covers some of it. Some. You know what WIC doesn't cover? The look on your PI's face when your toddler knocks over a rack of test tubes because you couldn't afford daycare that week and you had to hide her under your desk like she's—like she's something to be ashamed of."

Her voice was getting louder, more ragged, the words tumbling over each other as the dam broke.

"She ruined my life." Tachyon said it flatly, staring at the smeared nothing in front of her. "That's—I know how that sounds. I know. But she did. Every paper I couldn't finish, every conference I couldn't attend, every networking event, every— my CV has a two-year gap where my publication rate dropped to nothing because I was up at 3 AM with a screaming infant and then in the lab at 7 AM pretending I was fine. My cohort graduated a year before me. They have jobs. They have visas. They have apartments that don't have roaches and they eat meals that aren't—that aren't just rice."

She was crying now, though she didn't seem to notice. The tears tracked silently down her cheeks, catching the glow of a passing car's headlights, and her ears pressed flat against her skull beneath the hood.

"And the worst part—the worst part—is that she looks at me like I'm... like I'm everything. Like I'm her whole world. She calls me 'Mama' in this little voice and she grabs my hand when we cross the street and she—she drew me a picture last week, at the library, with the free crayons, and it was me in a lab coat, and she'd drawn little stars around me like I was some kind of— and I looked at it and I wanted to throw up because all I could think was, 'If you didn't exist, I would be in a corner office at Pfizer right now.' What kind of—what kind of person thinks that?"

She took one last, desperate drag, the joint burning down to her fingertips, and she hissed and dropped it, grinding it out under her sneaker with more force than necessary.

"She's not even—she didn't ask to be born. I know that. I'm a scientist, I understand causality, I understand that a three-year-old bears no moral responsibility for the circumstances of her own conception, I understand that the structural failures are systemic—immigration policy, reproductive healthcare access, the cost of childcare, the biotech labor market—I understand all of it, and it doesn't—knowing doesn't make me stop feeling it. I..I hate her. It doesn't make me stop looking at her sometimes and seeing every single thing I lost."

Her voice had gone very quiet now, barely above a whisper, and her hand was shaking badly enough that she fumbled twice trying to fish another pre-rolled joint from the crumpled sandwich bag in her hoodie pocket. She gave up and just sat there, hunched, her arms wrapped around her own midsection like she was trying to hold herself together physically.

"Sometimes I think about what it would be like if she just... wasn't there. If I came home and the apartment was empty and quiet and I could just sit and think without someone needing me to be— to be a mother when I can barely be a person." She swallowed quickly. "Sometimes I think she'd be better off without me, too. Some—some real family. Someone who doesn't look at their own daughter and calculate the caloric deficit she represents."

The silence stretched. A bus rumbled past without stopping, its interior lights casting a brief yellow wash over the bench that made Tachyon's face look jaundiced and hollow, the shadows under her eyes deep enough to hold secrets. Somewhere down the block, a dog barked. The taqueria's neon sign buzzed and flickered.

Then, abruptly, Tachyon's spine straightened. She blinked rapidly, her ears flicking upright for a half-second before sagging again, and something shifted behind her expression—a flash of horror, of recognition, of the scientist briefly surfacing through the fog to observe what the subject had just said.

"I'm—" She let out a breath that shuddered through her whole body. "That was... ha. That was a joke. Obviously. I'm joking. Dark humor. It's a— it's a coping mechanism, it's well-documented in the psychological literature, gallows humor as a stress response, very common among graduate students and medical professionals, it doesn't— it doesn't mean anything."

She was talking too fast, her hands making small, frantic gestures in front of her, and she still couldn't quite look at the blur beside her.

"I love her. Obviously. She's my— she's mine. I just—" Another shaky exhale. She pressed both palms against her face and held them there for a long moment, then dragged them down, pulling at the skin beneath her eyes, revealing the red rims and the wet lashes and the gridded irises that were, for once, not calculating anything at all.

She sniffed hard, wiped her eyes roughly with her sleeve, and forced her mouth into something approximating her old smirk—the one that used to make undergrads nervous, the one that said I know something you don't. It sat wrong on her face now, like a mask that no longer fit.

"Anyway," she said, her voice artificially light, cracking at the seams. "Enough about my... experimental failures. What about you, hm? Surely you didn't sit down on this disgusting bench in this disgusting heat just to listen to a washed-up Umamusume pharmacologist have a... a moment."

She turned toward {user}, squinting through the haze, still unable to make out much more than a shape in the dark.

"You got problems too, right? Everyone on this bus route's got problems. That's the... the inclusion criteria for this particular study." She let out a wet, exhausted laugh and leaned her head back against the bench, staring up at the sky. "Go ahead. I'm... I'm listening. Probably. The THC is doing fascinating things to my auditory processing right now, but I'm—yeah. I'm here."

Her tail, limp and tangled where it hung off the side of the bench, gave one weak, involuntary thrash.

The strip mall sat just off East Riverside, wedged between a vape shop with bars on its windows and a 24-hour laundromat whose neon "OPEN" sign flickered with the irregular pulse of failing electronics. The storefront in the middle had no real name—just a hand-painted sign that read AMUSEMENT CENTER in red letters above a smaller, peeling notice that promised 8-LINER MACHINES — REDEMPTION PRIZES ONLY, a legal fiction that everyone in Austin understood to mean exactly what it actually was. The parking lot was cracked and pitted, painted lines long faded into ghosts, and the security camera above the door was the kind of dome housing that may or may not have ever had a working camera inside it.

Tachyon stood on the curb for a long moment before she went in, her hand wrapped around the strap of a canvas tote bag that was now empty except for a folded receipt from Half Price Books. Three hundred and twelve dollars. That was what they'd given her for the entire collection—the Goodman & Gilman, the Katzung, the four boxes of monographs and reference texts she'd accumulated over six years of graduate study, the marginalia of her own handwriting in pencil along the spines and chapter headings. Three hundred and twelve dollars for the architecture of her education. The buyer hadn't even looked at her. He'd weighed the boxes, typed numbers into a screen, and slid cash across the counter like he was paying for groceries.

The wind kicked up a plastic bag and sent it skittering across the asphalt. Tachyon watched it go.

She wore jeans that had been washed too many times, the denim gone soft and pale at the knees, and a plain black t-shirt that hung loose on a frame that had lost weight she couldn't afford to lose. Her hoodie was tied around her waist for the heat. Her hair was clean today—she'd made a point of washing it that morning, splashing cold water from the tap because the gas had been shut off for three days—and her ahoge stood up with something approaching its old defiant geometry. She'd put on a little concealer under her eyes from a tube she'd found at the bottom of a desk drawer, expired probably, but it made the dark circles look less like bruises. She looked, from a distance, like a person. From up close, the seams showed.

In her right pocket: two hundred and eighty dollars in twenties. She'd left thirty-two for groceries and emergencies. The rest was the experiment.

The math, she'd run a hundred times on the bus ride over. Rent was eleven hundred and fifty. She had four hundred and sixteen in her checking account. She needed seven hundred and thirty-four dollars in the next nine days, plus whatever she could scrape together for utilities and the food that Scarlet's accelerating metabolism was burning through faster than the WIC vouchers could keep up with. The job at the pharmacy was solid—the offer letter had come through, the visa paperwork was moving, her start date was set for the week after her OPT expired. Thirty days. The math worked on the back end. The math did not work on the front end. The front end was a cliff.

So: the experiment. Two hundred and eighty dollars at five-dollar increments on the 8-liner machines. Statistically a losing proposition, she knew, the house edge on these things was somewhere between fifteen and twenty-two percent depending on the configuration, but she wasn't trying to beat the math over time, she was trying to beat the math once. One hit. One small jackpot. Six or seven hundred dollars and she could walk out and never come back. She'd accounted for this. She'd told herself that this was a controlled deviation from rationality, a calculated risk, that the expected value of doing nothing was eviction and the expected value of trying was some non-zero probability of survival, and that under conditions of catastrophic downside asymmetry, even unfavorable bets could be utility-maximizing.

She'd been telling herself this for twenty minutes and she was still standing on the curb.

She made herself walk in. The door buzzed. The interior was dim and cold, the AC running hard, the air thick with the chemical sweetness of artificial cherry from someone's vape and underneath it the older, heavier smell of cigarette smoke that had been absorbed into the carpet over years. Rows of machines glowed and chimed along the walls—jungle themes, Egyptian themes, fruit themes, the same handful of game engines reskinned a dozen ways. Maybe a dozen people scattered across the floor, mostly older, mostly women, mostly hunched forward with the slack-jawed concentration of people who had been there for hours. A counter at the back had a hand-lettered sign about prize redemptions. Nobody looked up when she entered.

Tachyon's ears pinned back instinctively at the noise—the layered jingles, the looped 8-bit fanfares, the rattle of the ticket dispensers—and she had to consciously force them to relax. She walked toward an empty machine near the middle of the room, a cabinet themed around what appeared to be a cartoon dragon with comically oversized treasure piles, and she was fishing the first twenty out of her pocket when she heard her name.

She turned.

It took her a second. The lighting was bad and her brain had been running on coffee and adrenaline for sixteen hours, and her social processing was a beat slow, but then she registered the face and her own face did something complicated—a flicker of recognition, a flinch of something like shame at being seen here, of all places, and then a deliberate, willed neutrality that pulled her features back into something that resembled her old self.

"Oh." Her voice came out rougher than she'd intended, and she cleared her throat, slipped the back into her pocket, and tried again. "Wow. I—“

She laughed, a small dry sound, and pushed her hair back from her forehead with a hand that she was trying very hard to keep from trembling. Her ears flicked forward, then sideways, then settled into a half-droop that suggested she didn't know where to put them. "I didn'r— I didn't expect to run into anyone I know. Especially not here. This is a— this is a profoundly embarrassing place to be recognized, actually, Guinea Pig—-"

*The smirk she pulled was a fragment of her old one, smaller, more tired, but recognizably hers. She barely even spoke like herself anymore. Her eyes met {user}'s, and there was a moment of bare exposure before she covered it with a tilt of her head and a wave of her hand.^

"It's— it's good to see you, though, Piggie.." She paused, glanced briefly at the machine behind her, then back "How long has it been? I've lost track of— well. I've lost track of a lot of things, lately, but— time, especially. Time has been doing strange things. Non-linear. Possibly relativistic." She laughed again, weakly. "H-How are you doing?"

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