Ætherglow #19

Thinking this plan the most sensible anyone has come up with, you agree to the injection. But never having done this before, you have no idea what to expect.

“Alright, let’s see…” Synth climbs around the corridor, opening panels and looking for something. They stop at a small compartment, where they pull out a number of cables. “We’ll use a hardwired connection, to make this simple for the first years.”

They hand you one of the cable ends, and one to Vik.

“You two.” They look at you and Vik. “Plug this æthernet cable into port on the back of your interface collar.” Of course Synth has no such device, being a third year, they would have a fully internal neural interface by now.

You find the port and connect yourself to the shuttle’s computer.

“Now, normally you’d have had a few months to build up to this, but with the æthernet cable this is really very simple, okay? Just let the dissociation take hold and the interface will take over. There will only be one path to follow, so don’t try to resist it. We’ll all meet up inside. Then we all stay together. And if any of you should try anything, remember I am much more dangerous in the æther.”

They sign to Eva to begin the injections. It starts with K and moves around the circle. When it gets to you, you pull your arm out of your coat sleeve. The hypospray forces liquid through your skin, deep into your arm muscle. Right away, you feel relaxed, and in a minute’s time you are struggling to keep your focus. You hold it together long enough to see Synth take the hypospray to administer Ana’s injection. Then you are gone.

You’re floating, but not as if you’re falling. You have no vestibular sense at all. You’re in space, with a billion stars around, but their pattern is anything but normal. The more you look out into the void, the more the constellations take the shape of circuit pathways, glowing with a pale, shimmering light. The stars are closing in around you and forming a corridor, a tunnel of pale starlight leading deeper into the abyss.

It’s just like you’ve read about, the æther, the realm of technopaths, a state of meta-consciousness allowing a deeper level of interaction with a computer system than the conscious mind is capable of. It’s mesmerizing and at the same time you can't focus on anything for long before it changes. The image is as real as true light, but nothing about yourself feels quite real.

You realize why you feel so strange. Normally technopaths would use a full-body interface, but you only have the interface collar. You have little sensory impression from most of your body, no proprioceptive sense whatsoever. Your body itself is not quite right either. Your avatar here can take any form you can make of it, but it is said that its default state will reflect your own subconscious self-perception.