🌘

“Absolutely,” you sign, emphatically.

She leads you to the elevator. The other students in the hallways seem far away. Their gaze never reaches you, only Akiko’s touch feels real. The doors to the elevator close. It’s a short ride, barely long enough to kiss her before it opens to a labyrinth of hallways. It’s nothing like the narrow tower you live in. In slightly reduced gravity, you follow her down a curved hallway of light blue carpeting. She stops you at room 116. Her key opens it.

Inside is a bit more familiar, the same model of bed and desk, the same padded nanofiber carpet. But the ceiling is all glass--a curved segment of the dome. It looks dark, with dim light shining from LED rows around its edges in the corners of the ceiling.

The door closes behind you. Akiko releases the magnets on her bootstraps and lets them slide off of her feet. You do the same, as she pulls you over to her bed. She collapses onto its soft blankets, pulling you along with her. You find yourself surrounded by friends made of soft fabric--a cat, a mushroom, an octopus, a worm as long as the bed. There’s just enough room in between for the two of you.

You sink into the soft fabric sea, feeling only the touch of Akiko’s hand and the tingling static of interference from her nerves in the sensors around your wrist. With the spark in the near-æther of an outgoing data packet from Akiko, The LEDs shut off, and with another command, the glass roof lights up with the stars far beyond the glass and water of the colony wall above.

You happy stim fast with your free hand. The crescent Moon drifts by as the sky quickly turns.

“It’s electrochromic glass, isn’t that cool?” Akiko signs. She changes its properties again, now halfway reflecting the two of you lying side by side, hand in hand, and halfway permitting the starlight to glisten on your reflections.

“That’s beautiful,” you sign.

“Like you,” she signs and happy stims as you watch her reflection in the sky. The pink glow of her eyes blends perfectly with the star clusters passing through them.

“You’re...” Your fingertips lightly caress the back of her hand, full of stimmy interference static. “So soft.”

You turn towards each other just as the Sun crosses the window and the glass automatically adjusts to dim its light. She wraps her other arm around you, pulls you closer, and kisses you. You close your eyes and lose touch with the light of the Sun, the spin of the colony, even the current of the æther. The interference from her central nervous system flows in your senses like soothing noise in your ears, snow flickering in your eyes. You lose your place in time, almost dissociating completely before she pulls away.

“No technopathy tonight.” Sitting up, she reaches to the side of her neck and unclasps her interface collar. You do the same. You switch your terminal to standby mode and pull it from its strap on your arm, setting it down with collar. Now that you spend so much of your time connected to the near-æther, separating from it feels like blinding one of your senses. Even though you lived like this most of your life, it feels unnatural to step back into this fully solid world.

Without the central interface collar, the peripheral conduits are just metal in your sleeves, cold contacts on your skin.

“You want something more comfortable to wear?” she signs, as if reading your mind.

“I should’ve thought to go to my room first and get something,” you sign.

“But that’s so far,” she signs. “Just steal something of mine.” She gestures at the clothes aimlessly strewn about the floor.

“Oh, okay.” You stand up and look around, eventually picking a soft shirt, light blue, much too big for either of you.

“I don’t even really like that one, I think it would suit you better,” she signs.

You toss it onto the bed and reach to manually open the magnetic strip running down the front of your dress. Akiko looks up at you with pale lavender eyes--you aren’t sure if you’ve seen them that color before. She scans you up and down as you let the heavy dress with all its wires and augments fall from your arms. You glance back at her eyes and look down at yourself, wearing your interface layer--leggings, half-shirt and sleeves tightly clinging to you--with your presents from Akiko on your arms, and purple striped socks that match well in the right lighting.

“You’re so cute,” she signs, repeating cute several times as she rocks side to side, keeping her eyes on you. You feel like she’s hit you with an empathic attack, but there’s no æther connecting you now. Are CommSpecs truly so powerful?