Post #1181553

2026-04-16 04:12 UTC

D freaks Leon out by saying the fish are asking about Merrow, and that Merrow witnessed the shooting. Leon has a moment of "even if you *can* understand them, it's not like fish testimony will hold up in court!" D's reply: TP: But you know I'm right, don't you? That's why you brought them to me, wasn't it? You knew the fish would be able to provide you with a clue. SS: *You* could understand them too. I'm quite certain you could also hear what Merrow has to say. Both versions have broadly the same vibe -- they're ominous for similar reasons. But SS nails the specific balance of "the reader can assume it's a callback to the way Leon heard the pets' voices earlier, then it turns out Merrow is a chatbot who interacts in English, and Leon can assume D was just referring to that." Leon wonders if *this* is admissible in court...and D points out how much humans trust computers. Oof. Because this is PSOH, *we* know Merrow-the-bot is as much of a conscious/thinking being as the non-digital pets are! But yeah, plenty of humans in-universe would trust a non-conscious chatbot, even 30 years before Replika came on the scene. Purely on the grounds of The Computer Said So, It Must Be True. (Our species really is living down to D's expectations, huh.)

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@ErinPtah@universeodon.com 2026-04-16 04:37

One last reveal: the woman walking around and introducing herself as "Merrow" wasn't the digital pet in humanoid form, she was Geordie in femme mode. What tipped D off was, all of Geordie's tropical fish were the kind that can change sex: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequential_hermaphroditism The specific thing D says: TP: They're all what you would call...transsexuals. SS: They're all hermaphroditic. So, okay, D would certainly *know* the scientifically-accurate term. Fish that can switch from one sex to the other are "sequential hermaphrodites." At the same time, it's true that Leon would definitely just *call* them "transsexual fish"! (Or y'know, something ruder. But if he was trying to use a non-offensive term, this would've been the standard in the '90s.) On the one hand, I get the value of being precise, here. On the other, I like D making the explicit connection to the human trans community. Geordie/Merrow identified with these fish because ze was trans (possibly bigender), not because ze was a hermaphrodite (which is not a thing in *human* biology, and D would know that, too).

Open ##1181552