FUNCTION-L₃ #18

“Sure,” you sign, and she drapes the translucent yellow-brown coat of a somewhat soft, somewhat rigid material over your shoulders, wrapping it around you, shielding you from the stale, cold air.

“This is made of mycelium?” you sign.

“No, not at all, it’s a symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast, though it can be easy to mistake for mycelium. Professor Reina taught me to work with it. You can also make tea with the culture.”

“You can drink this?” You feel your new temporary layer of skin.

“I have some, I’ll show you later!” she signs.

“Thank you, you sign, watching as she reattaches her terminal and its strap around her wrist, wearing a black crop top knitted from black wool above her grey wool skirt. In between the two, you can see the faint red glow of the LEDs on the synthovaries inside her, matching yours.

“But will you be okay without it?” you sign.

“I think the cold is nice,” she signs.

“On the Moon, cold is death. Heat too, though,” you sign.

“No part of the colony’s habitation space should reach dangerous temperatures,” she signs, and slaps her hand against a metal support beam in between buildings, sending a ringing echo through the quiet neighborhood. “This life support system’s lasted over a thousand months, after all.”

Wrapped in Akiko’s creation, you lose yourself in the feedback loop, in every motion of her signs and stims and the color shifts of her eyes--a circle around their irises’ edges shows when she switches on her IR or UV perception as she studies every detail of the fauna growing all around you. She turns her gaze at you and the larger solid circles inside shift back to pink. The silver metal around the LEDs reflects a warped image of you.

She takes your hand, feeling the texture of your skin and the wool yarn of the arm warmers she made you--grown from modified sheep cells, structural color filaments that shift their hue slightly as they stretch and retract.

Without her coat, you can better see the web of conduits under her skin. You slide her fingers across the little ridges they form. This close, your own interface picks up interference from her system, a sensation of soft static in your proprioceptive sense. She slips her fingers between the wool, the symbiotic leather, and you. She slides her other hand down your arm and you grasp it in listening position and close your eyes.

You feel the shapes of her signs. “You are a symphony of textures, Aydan.”

Moving closer, you kiss her, pressing her back toward the wall, but she stops you and freezes a centimeter from the flaky turquoise lichen.

“No, the lichen is fragile, you’ll hurt it,” she signs. Instead, she pulls you around the corner, into a narrow alley, and leans you against the soft, dark green moss. “That’s a much better place,” she tells you in tactile signs, gently pressing your hands against the moss as she kisses you.

Letting go of your sense of time, you let yourself get lost in the moment, entrusting yourself to her care. But your focus breaks when a sharp ping of danger flashes in your empathic sense. You open your eyes as Akiko takes a step away, focusing on her mental shield.

Once your senses reconnect to the local æther, you see them too--a cluster of strong, clear signals in the near-æther. You didn’t see or hear them approach, but you recognize a sensory echo over them all. Realizing this, you adjust your visual sense until your perception slips out of the narrow envelope their program is optimized for.

Three of them on one side, and three on the other, with little space in between in the narrow alleyway--AtaraChibans wrapped in green cloaks--on closer examination, cloaks of green moss.

Akiko’s eyes flash bright green. “Living moss fabric? That’s so cool!” she signs.

“Heh,” the one nearest her says, then pulls her arms out of her cloak of moss to sign in decent JSL, “You have an eye for biohacking,”

Each of them has a similar cloak, but underneath, their skin is lined with external cables--interwoven with green vines--connected to implants in their bodies, augments worn on their wrists and around their necks, not unlike your interface collar, but much older models.

“You’re technopaths!” Akiko signs, looking over their crude augment networks, patched cables and panels held together with tape in places. “But I’m guessing you’re not certified.”

“So what!” The enby nearest you signs. You feel aggression in the æther near her and raise your shield. “Look, the certs are scared of us.”

“They’re not certs, look,” the girl near Akiko says, reaching into her cloak for a short wooden rod, wrapped in a cable, with a block of sensors at its tip. She reaches past Akiko and taps on the plastic collar around your neck, and touches the terminal on your arm, before Akiko pushes her staff away, standing in front of you protectively.

“You’re just academy kids,” the enby signs. “Wandering out into our garden. Why is it always something like this?”

“Lost children,” a girl behind her says.

“Disturbing the balance of the air,” the enby behind her says.

Akiko touches the moss on the wall. “It’s all doing so well, I was wondering if someone was cultivating it.”

“DIY technopaths,” you sign. “What’s your story?”

“If you ever met a DIY before, you’d know that’s a question with an answer much longer than you’re prepared for,” another girl on your side of the alley says.

The girl with the staff of wood and wire pulls aside her cloak to reveal a tattoo on her upper arm, its ink glowing faintly in the dim light--毬藻の徒人, the characters forming a circle around a green orb.

“We’re the Marimo no Kachibito, and Level 2 sector 29 is our territory,” she signs. “I’m Marimo Noriko, don't you forget it,” she signs, spelling out her name kanji.

“I’m Akiko of DeepSpaceOps.”

“I don’t care in the slightest what corpo owns you,” Noriko signs. “You pro-types are painful to interact with. What do you want? Come here to make out in the bushes? Or are you scavengers?”

“A good technopath can do both!” Akiko signs. “Look, I admire your work, I wish no harm to the plants, the lichens, the slimes, the mushrooms, the bugs, or the rats. I’m the apprentice of Reina of Luna, legendary biohacker and colony ecosystem architect, you know of her?”

“I don’t care,” Noriko signs, stimming with the staff in her hand and projecting a feeling of harsh disinterest.

“Fine. We’re happy to leave your sector alone. How about you direct us to a passage down to Level 1?” Akiko signs.

“I knew it. Such a grand display of harmony with the plantlife, but you really just want to pick apart old circuits, plunder what little we have left down here, no care for what you might break,” Noriko signs.

“I...” Akiko grasps for signs.

“Everytime one of you topside punks walks off with a century-old relic, we lose something forever. Maybe it’s something meaningless, or maybe it’s something indescribably precious--you wouldn't even know.”

“We won’t take anything, we just want to look around,” Akiko signs. You can’t detect the smallest sign of either truth or falsehood in her.

“Many have said that before stuffing their pockets,” Noriko signs. “The remaining entrances to the Old City are guarded. If you want to enter, you better give us something in return, pay the toll.”

“How much?” Akiko signs.

“1 EarthCoin. Each.”

“That’s outrageous! And...EarthCoin? What are you, traddies?” Akiko signs.

“People who didn’t leave the lower levels behind like trash still remember that we’re all ultimately children of Earth,” Noriko signs. “The EarthCoin chain’s value is tied to the success of the restoration of Earth. That’s something far beyond petty spatiopolitical squabbles.”

“You’re nothing like Lunar traddies,” you sign. “I don’t have EarthCoin but we can convert, I guess. It’s about 0.6 SpaceCoin right now...”

“And what if we don’t want to pay?” Akiko signs.

Noriko raises her staff and falls back into a defensive stance, with her sisters and siblings following suit. “Then your only option is to leave!”

“Or take the information the old fashioned way!” Akiko signs, raising her mental barrier. You feel commands forming in her buffer. The near-æther resonates in anticipation.

“If you think some shiny augments and a few years of offworld training make you better than us, you’re welcome to try!” Noriko raises her own shield, readying an attack you can’t quite trace.