🌒

You approach this mysterious girl. But as you do, the birds notice you, and in a storm of their little bird squeaks they scramble to the other side of the girl.

Without looking up at you, she communicates something in some kind of sign language. This makes you stop and think. You’ve been studying languages ever since getting the neural interface. It makes the process vastly easier than it would be with your organic brain alone. But you have been remiss in not devoting time to non-spoken languages. Luckily your language learning program is quite adaptive. Maybe you can brute force your way to a passable interaction. You just have to think quick, be flexible, like a technopath.

The program picks up her signs as 日本手話, Japanese Sign Language, and finds the core verbs easily enough. You’ve been learning spoken Japanese but this language seems not even tangentially related. You reason through it. “You’re scaring them.” she said. Then, “Sit down. Calm. They will get used to you.”

You do what she asks, taking a moment to run a crash course in JSL’s grammar and basic vocabulary. After a few minutes the animals dare to look at you again.

The second-year girl points to the four birds around her. “This is Alpha a, Alpha b, and Proxima, and this one is Sagittarius A,” she spells out for you. “Sagittarius A is very protective of the other birds in the colony, be careful.”

You try to put some of your hastily acquired signs into action. “They are cute.”

You fail to process her next sign, then realize it’s just a happy stim. “I love animals,” she signs.

“Are you from a colony with many animals?” you sign.

“No,” she signs. “I’m from AtaraChiba colony at L3, it’s city, city, city, city.”

“I’m from Korolev on Spaceside.”

“Lunatic,” she signs, looking up at the pond just as the sun rises over it. At the warmth of dawn, the birds take to the sky. Seeing them fly in an environment like this is interesting. After a few strong flaps of their wings, their momentum carries them much more like they are in microgravity, with no force to pull them back to the surface. They seem to have gotten used to this and maneuver elegantly.

“I love the Moon,” she signs, “I never saw it with my own eyes until last year. It was always just this distant thing pulling on us from across the Earth, a spectre.”

“Interesting, I have never seen the Earth,” you sign.

Her eyes light up. “It’s beautiful!”

“Someday, someday,” you sign. “But, it’s unusual for an L3 colonial to come to TLA, isn’t it?”

“I chose to apply here, to get far, far away. Start over, make a new self.” She looks down and touches her lower abdomen, a gesture you recognize, as that is where your ovary implants are.

You stand up and approach further. “I’m Aydan,” you sign, just before realizing your nametag would have conveyed that anyway.

You look down at hers: 明子

“I’m Akiko,” she spells.