FUNCTION-L₃ #14

You push yourself forward and glide in the low G into her arms. For a moment you rest there in her warm embrace, holding her tight. Then inspiration strikes you--before you can compromise your intentions with a stray emotion, you reach up for the back of her interface collar to give her a taste of surfaceshock in return.

But your fingers can’t find the cable--even the collar feels wrong. On a closer examination, what your eyes perceived to be an interface collar like yours is actually just a choker with no electronics inside at all.

Akiko pats you on the head and separates from you.

“A sensory echo?!” you sign to her in JSL.

“Can’t believe that worked. Someday you’ll learn not to trust your eyes. I’m fully internal now, except my terminal,” she signs and taps the back of her head.

“Right, I forgot for a moment...” you sign.

She reaches to touch the skin of your arms, tracing the path of your conduits. “You’re getting there! Next year you’ll lose the collar too.”

“I love the internal interface, it feels so much smoother,” you sign.

“Skin is a troublesome barrier.” Her fingertips graze the side of your cheek as her bright pink eyes stare into yours. With her other hand she pulls you closer, then kisses you, opening an emotional feedback loop as she does. When she lets you go, it takes a second to stabilize yourself on the surface and not slip away.

“I missed you so much,” you sign.

“Come on, I have so much to show you!”

“I want to get rid of my bag first.”

“Yeah, we’ll go home first, let’s go!” she signs, then takes your hand to pull you along to the exit elevator.

A long, curved platform stretches across the front end of the spaceport. You see the elevator cars sliding up the shaft, magnetically propelled. As the doors slide open, the masses exit, and Akiko leads you in. It looks like a train car, connected in a chain to the others sitting at an angle as the chain stretches around the curved shaft.

Through the windows on the opposite side, you look out into the cylinder--so vast you can’t even see the far end, the sky turns a shade of blue, the air itself obscuring the furthest buildings you can see. You can’t help but look on in awe. Below you, a dense grid of skyscrapers--grey concrete, metal, shining glass--train lines running between the blocks, green parks and forests lining a ring across the center of the cylinder wall.

As you hold onto a support bar with one hand and your girlfriend with the other, the elevator moves, carrying you down toward the wall. The illusion of gravity grows stronger as you descend, as you rotate faster and faster. It quickly passes up the 0.16G of your homeworld, and the 0.3 of Translunar Academy, into uncharted territory for your Lunatic body. You had your neuromuscular stimulant injection before the flight, preparing you to adapt to the new environment faster, but by the time the elevator stops you feel almost twice as heavy as you ever have in your life.

When you let go of the handle, you realize how much you were supporting yourself with it. You can walk, but each step is short and difficult.

“Let me carry your bag,” Akiko signs. You happily comply. Without that load, it’s somewhat more manageable. “We’ll take it slow until you adjust,” she signs.

“Thank you...” you sign with one hand, supporting yourself by her arm with the other. “I haven’t felt so heavy since my first day at TLA.”

“We don’t have to walk much, just to the train,” she signs.

As you walk, you look up to try to see the other side of the city above you, but the air paints them a deep indigo in the sunlight shining through the giant glass panels forming a circle of light around the front end, facing the Sun. Even a thin layer of cloud lingers along the central axis, further obscuring the far wall.

“Never been in a colony this big, have you?” she signs.

“Only the second one I’ve been in. This city must be even bigger than Korolev.” You think of the scale of your home city on the Lunar surface, sprawling across most of the Mare Moscoviense.

“This is just the top layer,” Akiko signs.

“How many are there?!”

“Seven, sort of, though there is wide overlap between them in places and some say it’s only three. We run out of space to build things and we build another shell over the last. Some of these buildings go all the way down to the old city.”

“Wow, interesting!” you sign, still looking around in awe of the scale of it all.

“We can go down and explore the ruins of the lower levels sometime if you want, I’ve always wanted to,” Akiko signs. “The old city is over a hundred years old. They say it’s dangerous down there, but we’re technopaths.”