🌔

“Maybe, um, could you tell me how you did that?” you say to 7.

“Tell you?” She looks around, every direction besides yours. “Can you tell me how your eyes see, or your heart beats? I’m…not very good at instruction, sorry…”

“Oh, sorry…”

“Um, here. I’ll show you,” she says.

There’s a sudden pressure and jolt in your head. Looking at your terminal, you see that your interface collar has been forcibly connected to 7’s terminal, and therefore, to her interface, and to her brain. No sooner after realizing this do the full implications begin. Your vision becomes incomprehensible as two conflicting input streams collide. Your brain tries its best to rationalize it as a coherent image, but the best you get is a cacophony of broken fractals of blending colors. And the noise is overpowering, a double perception of everything in the room, like a loud echo.

You can barely make out 7 holding her hands against her head. “Close your eyes, it’s disorienting…”

Once you do so, the noise quiets down. Connected like this, you see your æthereal avatar faintly, floating in a blank void. In front of you is 7, in a shape like her own composed of a translucent glass skin, surrounded with a pale blue aura.

“Now feel what I do.” She speaks directly to you, in a way beyond language, through impression that you understand faster than you could have processed words.

A half-sphere of transparent light forms in between you, halfway surrounding 7’s avatar. It shines with a pale green light, rippling with waves of blue, bright white sparks jumping from its edges.

She hasn’t spoken another word to you, but you feel what she does on a deep level in your mind. You copy the geometry of her thoughts, and your own barrier forms, mirroring hers, almost touching it. Yours is patterned more to the nature of your own mind.

[Author’s Note: this was a multi-select poll on the original site. We don’t have this capability here yet, but it is a planned feature. We can’t represent vote percentages that add up to more than 100% yet either, so this poll result is even more approximated than usual, but the winning results are accurate to the original.]