FUNCTION-L₃ #16

You send back a feeling of warmth and adoration--her eyes light up pink again before settling on purple.

“You’ll have to teach me that trick,” you sign.

“It’s easy. Just find a suitable mark, any corpo-type wearing an interface they can barely use just to feel superior to the poorer normies, preferably one who’s thinking weird thoughts about us like that guy was. Half the time their password is their mom’s birthday or something trivial to find like that. You can do anything to them. The memory of it will be like a bad dream, and he won’t remember what we looked like, that part’s important I guess.”

You glance over at her target--visibly shaken, pushing others away from him.

“I wonder why normies don’t like technopaths,” you sign.

“They are cowards who can imagine nothing outside the narrow, fragile boundary they call nature,” Akiko signs. “I should have given him dysphoria too.”

“You’ll definitely have to teach me how to do that,” you sign.

A sequence of stimmy ascending tones plays from the speaker above. “The next station is...Level 5, Atarougakkou.” You halfway understand the automated voice.

Akiko reaches for your hand, you accept, and she pulls you up, stabilizing you as the train slows. Together you exit through the dense sea of normies onto the platform, and the train rushes onward to its next stop.

“Wow, this is so much nicer than the trains we have on Korolev, no subscription required, smooth maglev,” you sign, looking around the station, much smaller than the spaceport’s. All around, screens flash their advertisements in your eyes, forcing you to adjust the brightness of your visual processing. “Some things are familiar, though.”

“It’s a fascinating transit network,” Akiko signs. “On the Moon you don’t have to worry about the trains’ motion affecting your world’s rotation. Here we have to maintain a delicate balance--a train over here moves spinward, another of equivalent mass on the opposite wall has to be moving antispinward. If one gets delayed, its counter-train has to be delayed too. The margins are tight, and even with the number of lines we have it’s inadequate to serve the population level we have now.”

You follow her out of the station. On the street outside, a bright light hits your eyes, and you shield them instinctively--the Sun reaches this area from the glass panels on the end of the colony. The trees along the edge of the street cast long shadows, sliding across the pavement as the cylinder rotates. The way Sunlight enters and scatters and moves here feels surreal, compared to the wide glass ceiling of Translunar Academy.

“Do you like it on AtaraChiba?” you sign.

“I don’t know, it’s home,” she signs. “But who knows where the company will take me when I’m certified. Could be here in Moon-Earth, could be in the middle of nowhere on a battleship in the belt. It’d be nice if it was somewhere interesting like Jupiter. Yeah, I guess being trapped here all my life definitely isn’t what I want, but it’s a good place for right now.”

She leads you along the fence of parallel iron bars, with a row of vibrant green shrubs behind them blocking the interior from view, and up to the gate, with a sign above spelling out kanji and kana in neon tubes--新ろう学校.

“Welcome to my home,” she signs, and scans her hand over the sensor to open the gate.

Inside, the hidden complex unfolds before your eyes--green trees, moss, and clovers intersperse the stone walkways of the courtyard--long buildings of white stone blocks surround the edges on three sides, with rows of large windows on each floor. As the centerpiece of the courtyard, a huge sculpture of Earth made from a grid of circular metal bars, cast iron plates of continents and islands bolted on them. A long bar reaches up from the islands of Old Japan up to a model of AtaraChiba.

“So this is where you grew up,” you sign. “Beautiful place.”

“I guess,” she signs. You look over to see her metallic eyes are turned off as she leads you down the walk path, stepping on every stone in their irregular pattern.

“And they let you stay here even though you’re not a student here anymore?” you sign.

“It’s in the training contract. Since Atarougakkou was my contractual guardian before DeepSpaceOps, they have to shelter me during semester breaks, so I can live somewhere when I come back home for my surgeries. Meanwhile the school can use me as a propaganda tool to demonstrate they’re a source of quality technopaths.”

“Wait, how are you even understanding my signs with your vision off?” you sign.

“We still have a sensory link open, silly, I’ve got your proprioception data.”

“Wow you really are good at communication.”

“They don’t call us CommSpecs for nothing.” She veers off of the path and takes you up to a tree, about four or five meters tall, thriving with dense green leaf cover. “Here’s my tree!” She grasps the lower branches and climbs up to the top in no time, like she knows the position of every single twig and leaf.

Remembering the sensory link goes two ways, you focus on parsing the data and find her tactile input--you can feel the texture of the rough bark, the smooth leaves, as if your own fingers were touching them.

Up above you, she signs, “It seemed a lot bigger when I was little.” She jumps down, drifting antispinward under the coriolis force, to land right in front of you, her eyes still blank silver spheres with no indicator lights active. She pats your head, and your hands respond with a happy stim, which she mirrors--you feel both.

With the empathic feedback loop still flowing in the near-æther, a smooth circle like the colony’s rotation, you find yourself lost in the sense of attachment between you. She takes both your hands and pulls you closer to her, kissing you as the long shadow of her tree drifts over you both.

Shifting her fingers to put your hand in listening position, she signs in ProTactile JSL, “I always wanted to take you here.”

You switch roles and sign back, “Show me every part of your world.”

She lets go and signs visually, “I will, I will. Follow me, let’s go to my room.”

She leads you to the building lining the spinward side of the campus. Through the door, you arrive at an open foyer, with the walls on either side halfway built of glass blocks, showing you a view into the adjacent rooms where a number of kids around you and Akiko’s age congregate--in one, you see autokitchens and tables with plates of food, in another, monitors showing games in play--competitive space combat simulations or immersive roleplaying games--and tables arranged with mahjong tiles or cards.

“It’s all so transparent,” you sign.

“Deaf architecture, Aydan, we’re a very visual people, normally,” she signs. “Me, I didn’t have vision until two years ago, I know my way around a lot better without such distracting noise.”

An elevator takes you up to the second floor--here the walls are opaque. She leads you down the long hallway, stopping at a room near the end. The door opens when she scans the key in her hand. She touches a panel outside the doorway to activate the lights inside, for your sake.

“Outside light switch, interesting,” you sign.

“How else would you get the attention of someone inside?” she signs.

“So how do they alert you?”

“They give up and go bother someone else.”

The door slides shut behind you. Akiko’s room is about the size of the dorms on TLA--a bed, a desk, a closet and some cabinets and drawers.

“Here we are!” She sets your heavy backpack down. “What’s in this thing, M-type meteoroids?”

“Just my clothes, and accessories and stuff! I didn’t know what the climate would be like, or the styles...”

“Femboys really can’t travel light can they?”

“Only the bare essentials!”

“How are you feeling, anyway?” she signs.

“It’s nowhere near as bad as the shift from 0.16 to 0.3. The stims are pulling weight too. I’m adjusting okay...” you sign.