🌘

“I know, it’s scary, I feel it too. But I meant what I said before we synced. I want to know all of you, and I want you to know all of me,” you sign.

She pulls you close, kisses you, and hugs you tight.

[Akiko liked that]

“Aydan,” she signs, letting you go to communicate, “I want that too.” Her metallic eyes glow bright pink, distorted by tears clinging to their glass surface. “We’re contract technopaths and our futures are written and signed. Redshift and DeepSpaceOps are often on opposite sides, we might even be sent into battle against each other. I knew this, so I didn’t let myself get close to anyone. And they were happy to ignore me too. But you were different...”

You wipe the tears from her face with the wool of the arm warmers she made you. “The future is many months away. You once told me that only the present matters, and I’d like to keep living that way as long as I can.”

“Then we just have to make the most of every moment we have!” she signs. “I want to experience everything I can with you in the thirteen months we have left together.”

“Sounds good to me. Where do we start?” you sign.

“Aydan, have you ever had...” She signs a sign you’ve never seen, wriggling her fingers of one hand underneath the other in the shape of a ball. Feeling your confusion, she spells out “Takoyaki.”

You understand. You make the sign yourself, “Octopus.”

She pats you on the head and you repeat the tentacles motion with both your hands in a happy stim. “No, I don’t think any autokitchen in Korolev could grow octopus meat. I’ve never even seen one,” you sign.

“There’s one autokitchen on TLA that has it, and it happens to be in the second years’ dorm,” she signs. “It makes pretty good takoyaki, not as good as what you could get on AtaraChiba, but, let’s get some!” She stands up, taking your hand again. “You’re hungry too, right? It was an exhausting ætherwalk.”

“Yeah, I am!” You follow, interlocking your fingers and staying close to her.

“You’re going to come visit my colony, right?” she signs awkwardly with your hands still locked together.

“I’m contractually bound to, plus my mom owes me a shuttle ticket, and for all her faults, she doesn’t back out on an agreement.”

“I’ll show you everything on my world, the scent of the gardens, the stimmy oscillations of the trains, we can go to the shrine for the new years festival, I’ll show you the school I grew up in, I’ll show you everything!” She happy-stims with her fingers.

“I can’t wait!” you sign.

“We just have to pass our exams first,” she signs. “You ready?”

“After all I’ve been through recently, as ready as I’ll ever be,” you sign.

Night falls and dawn rises as you cross the colony under the vibrant green trees. You reach the residential block, passing by the twin towers of the first year dorm to the dome-shaped building next to it. Akiko leads you inside, scanning the key in her hand to open the door for you both.

Inside, it’s not so different from your building, just more circular in layout. You see the doors leading to the lounge rooms, the elevators going up to the dorms. She leads you to one of the rooms with autokitchens.

She submits her commands to the system, and two little bowls slide out. After a few minutes, it dispenses its finished product, a number of little balls of fried bread. You take yours and follow her to a couch where you can sit together.

“This looks really good,” you sign, and stab into one with the little plastic stick it printed you. You taste it--an incredible symphony of flavors, mixed with a secondhand empathic sense of nostalgia radiating from Akiko. “Wow, this is good.”

“I told you!” she signs. The emotional sensory feedback loop between you is even better than the snack. And after you’re both finished, and return your bowls to the machine, you turn toward each other.

“Post-sync attachment is really something else when you already love the technopath in question...” Akiko signs.

“Yeah...even without that autistic euphoria drug we had last time,” you sign.

“Aydan...I don’t really want to be alone tonight, do you? Why not...spend the night with me?” she signs.