FUNCTION-L₃ #38

All ready for the show, you watch from the window of a train as Level 4 appears --- a corridor of light framed by darkness, bright pastel colors rush by from a hundred store signs and ad displays. The train glides to a stop on its magnetic rails and the door opens. You follow Akiko out, met with a rush of cool air.

Your Lunatic senses tell you it’s night, though you know on this world that has nothing to do with what day it is and everything to do with where you are. Here the plates of the upper and lower levels and the dense rows of buildings in between block almost all Sunlight from reaching this narrow street.

The lights glow bright on the metal wrapping you up in your new dress. With its cable plugged into your interface, you can feel the electromagnetic field around you through both the conduits under your skin and the wires of your dress. Akiko next to you went with her black dress wrapped in belts and crossed with cables, heavy black fabric, spikes adorning the shoulders, with copper wires wrapped around, preparing her for anyone who might try to touch them without permission.

From the passers-by you almost feel at home --- hair dyed in UV reflective ink or woven with extensions in structural color that changes as they walk by, LED piercings reflected in mirror visors, wire implants and terminals strapped to forearms. But with a glance below the surface, most of the crowd melts away, projecting no real presence in the near-æther, or even the shadow left on its fabric by a technopath who does not want to be perceived.

“They’re not technopaths,” you sign.

“No, they wish. Just garden-variety cyberpunks,” Akiko signs. “Allistic imitators. Notice how even when they wear our skin as decoration, they still will avoid us.”

Looking around, your hands swaying in a nervous stim, you catch glimpses of eyes scanning your every move before turning away from you, their owners keeping their distance from you.

“They know what we are,” she signs. “Even if we look superficially the same, we are as different from them as ÆON or Vix.”

“Does it bother you, being around...humans?”

“Not greatly. It’s a fact of life. I’m content to ignore them just like they do to us, and to every machine and animal and plant around them, thinking themselves the center of the universe. Mostly I am overjoyed to not have to live such an empty life. What do you think?”