🌘

You find yourself in uncharted emotional territory. Although you’re nervous, and currently lack the ability to forcibly suppress it, your adventurous spirit wins out.

“Interface layer is so tight,” you sign. “Can you help me?”

Not hesitating, she takes your hand and pulls herself up to your level. With her hands hovering just above the skin of your waist, she looks into your eyes and her LEDs flash red, yellow, green. You sign back, “Yes,” and her fingertips slide up the sides of your body and just underneath the edges of the smart fabric that tries to maintain its grip on you. You feel the cold dead metal points lift off of your skin. She pulls it up in a smooth motion, over your head, pulling your arms up and taking the sleeves with it. As soon as your eyes are uncovered again, she leans forward and kisses you while her hands struggle with the bracelets around your wrists. Having succeeded, Akiko throws your interface shirt across the room, and the colony’s spin settles it onto the floor.

Her hands come back to her, but her pale purple eyes are on you. Reflexively, you try to send a command to your terminal to monitor your heart rate and neurotransmitter levels, but the thought goes nowhere without your collar to detect it. Instead, like a good technopath you devote your focus to the task at hand and press onward.

“Now you?” you sign.

“Yes,” she quickly signs back, but her eyes flash dark blue.

“Oh, you’re nervous?” you sign, halfway covering your chest as you do.

She looks away from you and flaps her hands rapidly in front of her face. “Shut up and take my clothes off!” she signs.

Moving closer, you pull open the magnetic strip on her dress just below the neck. But something stops you from pulling it apart--a wire running from a pocket on one side to the other.

“Oh, sorry, can you...” she signs, pointing to the pockets.

You reach into one, tracing the wire to the little metal device inside. You pull the little cable from its port, allowing you to open the left half of her dress, but another wire still stops you on the other side. It runs inside of the left half, wrapping around her body.

“Sorry, that’s the power cable for the other one, you can unplug them all,” she tries to sign in the narrow space between you. You reach into the opposite pocket and disconnect that wire, and all the other ones you can reach in that pocket for good measure. Now you can open it at last--except that you forgot to release the belt’s magnet. Once you do, another power cable beneath the belt still traps it in place.

“Sorry! Just...” She gives up on trying to instruct you and reaches behind her back, pulling out a cluster of wires from the personal battery in her dress. “Okay, we’re--” She reaches into another pocket to disconnect one more. “We’re good now.”

You open it--it works this time--it slides off of the smooth fabric still covering her arms, and she lets it drop to the floor. Underneath, the shirt and leggings the second years wear seem to be the same self-adjusting grey fabric as your interface layer, without the neural conduits woven into it. Checking for any additional obstacles or traps, it seems all clear. You pull up on the edges of the fabric. With the ease of opening a gateway in the æther, you pull it over her head, also having trouble with the arms like she did.

She instead drops her arms onto your shoulders, wrists bound together by her shirt behind your head, and pulls you close to kiss you while she frees herself the rest of the way. Her hands slide down the back of your arms, but now her blue eyes are on herself.

“Aydan, what Anko said, back in headspace...” she signs.

The electrochromic ceiling adjusts to a higher transparency level as the sun passes out of view. She looks æthereal in the light of the stars and the crescent Moon. As your hands feel the soft texture of her arms, your fingers are drawn to the pattern of neural conduits running underneath her skin, making stimmy linear ridges along her body. But crossing them perpendicularly are older, fainter scars--on her arms, around her ribcage and her waist.

“I haven’t been very good to this body...” she signs.

“Akiko...look closer.” You turn your arm over to the inside, marked with a number of old scars of little cuts, burns, shocks. Her fingertips trace the patterns on your skin.