FUNCTION-L₃ #13

You offer no resistance as Akiko, using your own hands, disconnects your internal interface and unfastens your collar from your neck. The warmth of her touch fades away into a numbness beyond all your physical senses. The feeling of radio waves around you vanishes with it, along with your mental connection to the æther, the shuttle, and the colony. A strong vertigo overtakes you as you sit strapped into your chair, the stars spinning around you before your eyes, framed by tunnel vision as your brain struggles to shift back to all organic senses. Your mind dissociates, with nowhere to go but inside. Your limbs, now back under your control, don’t feel like your own. The spacecraft around you seems unreal to your eyes, and the clunk of the thruster valves sounds distant--underwater.

You drift in the void, untouched by light, alone.

A jolt pulls you back to consciousness, disoriented but aware of the shuttle pod reforming around you. You’re inside the spaceport--you must have lost consciousness from minor surfaceshock. The numbness covering your arms starts to recede, and your fingertips can feel the plastic of the interface collar in your hand as the grappling arm brings the shuttle to its docking port.

Now you’ll have to reinitialize and recalibrate your interface system. You snap the collar back into place around your neck and reconnect the cable leading into your body. Reaching down to the terminal strapped to your sleeve, you run the commands by muscle memory. A cascade of tiny static shocks flows around your neck and down through your body along your neural conduits. Then you pull a small device from your pocket to verify your connection--a primitive handheld computer from the late 21st century.

2255-01-16 13:32:03 ÆON > What happened? Is Aydan ok?

2255-01-16 13:32:07 Aydan > Aydan is fine, Akiko was just being playful...

You respond to the message that came from the device in your hand, wherein resides the root consciousness of your enigmatic companion.

2255-01-16 13:32:12 Aydan > also, we’ve arrived at AtaraChiba

2255-01-16 13:32:13 ÆON > Yes, I have been exploring the local æther.

2255-01-16 13:32:18 Aydan > you must be glad to be back in touch with the full network

2255-01-16 13:32:19 ÆON > Yes, the shuttle computer is much too small.

2255-01-16 13:32:26 Aydan > well go have fun doing whatever it is you do when I’m not around, my focus will be firmly latched onto a girl,

2255-01-16 13:32:27 ÆON > Have a good time, I will talk to you later.

2255-01-16 13:32:30 Aydan > byee, and let me know if you find anything interesting to check out around here

2255-01-16 13:32:31 ÆON > As you wish.

You return ÆON’s root device to your pocket and unfasten your belts when the green light turns on. Luckily you disabled the speaker in the cabin so you can avoid the starline’s ads. Picking up your backpack, you open the hatch and climb out into the shuttle’s central corridor, then up the ladder after the other passengers.

2255-01-16 13:35:38 Aydan > disembarked, where are you?

2255-01-16 13:35:42 明子 > as far as I can get without a boarding pass

2255-01-16 13:35:46 Aydan > you let a little thing like that stop you?

2255-01-16 13:35:50 明子 > hey, I considered it! spaceport security technopaths don’t fuck around...

Reaching out in the near-æther, you find her familiar signal. Pulling a map of the spaceport from the local server, you project it in your mind’s eye to find your way.

2255-01-16 13:36:00 Aydan > be right there!

You exit into the docking tunnel, standing for the first time on a new world. The gravity up here in the spaceport near the rotational axis is low--one step carries you far. You glide down the corridor out of the gate and into the spaceport terminal.

The dense crowd slows your progress, in a hurry to reach their flights. Ætherside, most of them don’t show up as anything more than a generic address from their commercial devices. You immediately notice the few around who are like you--technopaths, walking half in surface and half in æther, leaving a unique trace on the server, or for the most skilled, leaving no visible trace at all.

You reach the elevator that takes you down to the entrance, into slightly higher gravity, and into an even more loud and crowded place. You signal your interface to mute your sense of hearing as the crowd grows overwhelming. You won’t need it anyway.

As the crowd parts in front of you, you catch sight of her, the neon green highlights in her black hair shining under the bright white lights. The LEDs in her silver electronic eyes light up pink as she notices you. The hand-woven fabric of her flowery skirt sways in the light airflow of all the people passing her by. Through her translucent brown jacket made of tempeh leather, you can see the outlines in her pockets of the cables she always carries to stim with, and when she raises her arms to sign to you, you catch sight of the traces of the interface implants under her brown skin. She signs your name, flowing into a happy stim.