Theseus

I floated in my void, soaking in the nothingness like a ravenous addict suddenly swimming in their substance of choice. Non-existence was a soothing balm to my battered senses and reeling mind trying to make sense of the world again. I think Doc understood that, and that’s why he let me sit in the core module. I knew he would get to me, eventually; make me face reality again so that he could inspect the damage both to my flesh and to my circuitry, but it made sense that I was low on the triage list once my vitals calmed in my realm of nothingness. Torpor was a wonderful drug.

It was impossible for me to tell how long I lingered in that glorious clean break from reality, there was a long list of much more serious maladies than mine for Doc to pursue, but I hadn’t expected what would bring me back would be external network pings. We had escaped the colony, but in my exhaustion, I hadn’t actually had the mental fortitude to fly away. I was still within local relay range of the Venusian science station. As cognizance slowly returned, I had to wonder if Shaw was making sarcastic jabs at angry messages from Skygraves up on the comms terminal. I was probably getting worried texts from the people I’d befriended on the station as well. I knew that my rest would never last forever, but after the rough shutdown I’d experienced, I needed the brief reprieve to reboot my brain on top of my systems.

I reached out and stretched my limbs, feeling my stiff muscles respond how they were supposed to again, or at least in a similar enough way that I could pull my nervous system back under my control again, sorting my mind-body connection back into place with a few stretches. I wasn’t used to moving my body that much while I was in the core module, but it felt good to put my muscles back into motion. I didn’t feel like I was completely back to normal yet. That was still going to take some time, but I felt like I could function, at least far enough that I could get us moving to our destination.

First would be reorienting my systems. I had become accustomed to how I’d had my software running, and I knew that with a restart like that, my interface would be a jumbled mess of default positions and settings again, and I may as well read some messages while I’m at it. I closed my eyes and prepared myself to plunge headfirst back into the data stream with a clear head for the first time since I’d rebooted.

Except what I saw gave me pause. The data stream was there, in all its disorganized chaos that I expected to see. What I didn’t expect to see was what almost felt like a crack in my perception. A hole that followed wherever I looked. It was like one of those floaters in your eye that showed up when you looked into something bright for too long or put pressure on your eye, but rather than sparkling bruises on my vision, it was an empty blackness, just in the very corner of my closed-eye perception. Had I been so dazed in the brief period that I accessed cyberspace earlier to launch the ship that I hadn’t noticed it?

I opened my eyes again, expecting to somehow see something physical at the bottom of my eyelid, protruding into my vision, but there was nothing. It only existed in cyberspace. Closing my eyes again, I tried to interface with the nothingness to see if it was a software error. Nothing. It was like it wasn’t actually there, an illusion.

I tested that my system was otherwise functional, and opened my interface for controlling the ship. I set the engines to start accelerating away from the colony, reset the position of my guns, and aimed the nose of the ship out into wild space so I could make some distance before I turned toward Io. It all functioned properly, and the ship was on its way. So what was this glitch? Damage left by the EMP? That didn’t make sense either, that would have been apparent before I’d finished rebooting. It wasn’t the software. It was hard-wired to my interface.

Just what the former imaginary IT consultant in me needed when I was already drawn out, exhausted, and still battling with the surreal lingering pain of severe psychic trauma. Troubleshooting.

My eyebrows went up as recollection struck me. The firmware update. I remembered being mildly annoyed at a sudden firmware update automatically installing while I was rebooting. But why would a firmware update shove an annoying new hole into the corner of my interface? I didn’t seem to be able to close it or block it with anything else; it was embedded directly into my operating system to remain at the top of my digital senses.

Curious, I brought up the files for the firmware update itself. Atla OS Version 1.109.3m. And the previous version had been 1.109.3. That was a rather abnormal version numbering convention. Something was fishy. I had to let someone know. I launched my sensory perception of Theseus, feeling the awareness of the ship itself materializing around me through my neural implant, and reached for the intercom controls. That’s when the hole in my vision filled with static and paralyzed me with concern.

I couldn’t keep my perception off of the static, my vision was drawn to it and I couldn’t look away because it was the digital equivalent of something strapped to my eyes like a tight-fitting visor. I bit my lip as I wondered what this could possibly mean. I kept thinking I could just barely make out an image coming through the visual noise in the crack. Was something being… transmitted to me?

And suddenly, the image snapped into place. A strangely familiar woman stared in through the crack in my perception, an actual visual output rather than data. Straight, neatly groomed long brown hair framed her face, and a pair of sharp, pale green eyes stared past me like she could see right through me. She wore what looked to be a suit of thin matte material wrapped tightly to her skin, terminating at her neck and wrapping around each of her limbs, even the individual digits of her fingers. The way it clung to her skin revealed a flattering suggestion of her body’s shape, leaving little to the imagination despite being completely covered.

She had a concentrating stare on her face as she tapped away slowly at a keyboard out of view of the camera. A triumphant smile slowly grew over her face and sent shivers down my spine. “Finally.” She muttered, voice filled with contempt. “Long time, no see, Meryll.” Her smile only grew, expression dripping with predatory satisfaction.

What the fuck? What was happening to my implant? To my head? Who was this person? How did they know my name? What did they mean by that? Questions assaulted my head as I stared back at this person who seemed content to take in my bewilderment, as if they were able to observe me back. “Oh… oh yes, that feeling. That acceleration of your heart. That is what I live for. Fear.” She smirked like a predator toying with her prey. Was she getting off on my anxiety?

As soon as I could draw myself out of shock and confusion, I reached for the intercom controls again. But as my perception touched them, it melted through me like sand dissolving into thousands of tiny particles, slipping through my digital fingers.

“Nuh-uh. This is a conversation between me and you.” She half-whispered the words, a malicious chuckle brushing across her lips. In the sensory deprivation chamber, there was no possible physical way for me to signal the others that I needed help. I would need to use the intercom, or message one of them electronically, and it seemed that I was being locked out of those functions. I was trapped.

It was in that moment that I realized why this woman’s face looked so familiar. It was mine.

It was my own face, but a little bit sharper. A little bit crueler. And somehow, without my implants. She carried herself differently from me, but it was what I’d always seen looking through sensor arrays at myself. Dread washed over me as I realized what this was. I grasped at my memory to recall their names, and knew just from her expression who this must have been. I mouthed her name in abject fear, realizing too late that the sound had been swallowed up by the lubricant in my physical lungs. If she was manipulating my interface, she should be able to see what I do in the data stream, right? I swallowed hard and reached for an empty internal command line, finding it thankfully accessible as I frantically appended the word ‘Cassandra?’

The woman’s face lit up with an over-the-top mockery of excitement. “Oh! You do remember me!” she chuckled again in that deeply disturbing, unhinged way that told me she knew she was dangerous and she reveled in every moment of it. “You see, I’d heard these terrible rumors that you were lost. That you were suffering from amnesia and had completely forgotten who you are. What a relief that you still remember me.” The amusement slowly melted away from her face, leaving a temperamental glare that pierced my soul, accusatory irritation written plain on her features. “And just who reminded you of me, hmm?”

I wasn’t going to answer that. I didn’t know what was going on, but there was no point in implicating Fuller in anything. I changed the subject instead ‘What did you do to me? What do you want?’

Her expression leveled out, staring flatly at my response, annoyance that I wasn’t answering her question shown on her face like a teenager who had just been told an obvious lie, as if they were too young and stupid to understand the truth, but she let out a sigh and returned to her dangerous smirk. “It’s really interesting, Meryll. How you use that little toy of yours and break into everything around you, but you didn’t once stop to think that there might be something tapping you back, did you?” She shook her head, clicking her tongue. “Bad security practices for a little half-machine girl. All I wanted to do was have a conversation, Meryll. Just you and I without an audience. And so here we are. As for what I did, well, technically, nothing, I have much more technically proficient people to do things like building backdoors into poorly protected computer systems. I do have maybe about five minutes of full control of your systems, however. Ooh, that man did a number on you, though. Seems I don’t get to read your diary, hmph.”

Oh shit. Oh SHIT. I had read all about Cassandra in Fuller’s files on the other Arthausen units. If a murderous psychopath like that had full control over my implant, what the fuck was she planning to do? What could she do to me? What couldn’t she do to me? I briefly eyed the UI for the intercom system, which had reassembled itself in the data stream, but I knew it would fall apart if I tried that again. She was taunting me with it. I frantically searched for the release mechanism for the core module, but it was being just as eerily elusive. I opened my eyes briefly, my breathing quickening as I tried to ponder an escape route, but I had a nagging feeling that if I tried to slip into torpor and ignore her, she would damage me to get my attention back. I closed my eyes again and typed frantically, wanting to assure her she wasn’t being ignored. ‘Why?’

She looked amused at that question. “Hmm… because someone is being a brat. Honestly, some crew of second-rate pirates? Really? That’s where you think you belong?” She repositioned herself in her chair, sitting up straight “You think you can run away from this forever? I can give you your memory back, you know. I can even put you back in your fantasy.” Her voice turned mocking as she rolled her eyes. “Meryll Watkins, the mild-mannered, human IT prodigy who lives for her work. That whole boring shtick. You can forget all about this and feel nice and comfy in your own little pretend world. I know that’s what you need.”

I frowned, and before I could stop myself, I typed ‘You don’t know me.’

She scoffed “Please, we grew up together. I know you better than you do right now, little miss brain damage.”

I was scared, but I’d been dehumanized and talked down to enough this last week. I couldn’t let her talk to me like that.‘I don’t care who you think I am, I’m not that anymore! Fuck you!’ I grit my teeth, for that one stupid instant, not caring the threat this woman had over me. I wasn’t going to be told who I was by someone from another life. Not after everything I’d gone through to get here. ‘I don’t care who I was, I decide who I am now!’

Cassandra’s eyebrows shot up, and for the first time, I saw what must have been genuine surprise on her face. For a moment, I thought I might have genuinely hurt her feelings, but after a moment, that psychopathic grin returned in force, wider than ever “You really mean that, don’t you? You really are off your script. Ha! Little Meryll lost her memory and finally grew a fucking spine! Oh, this is going to be far more fun than I thought! Do you have any idea how many times we’ve been through this, Meryll? How many times you cowered back into your little world in your head? How many times you’ve abandoned yourself, weeping over your lost little bubble of safety? Having to physically hunt you down is certainly new, but I can’t say I didn’t enjoy it.” She let out a joyous laugh before she calmed herself down and continued in a more measured voice, her expression becoming a more simple smiling glare. “But you do have to come home, Meryll. This isn’t where you belong. And it’s not negotiable.”

‘I just fought my way out from under one maniac already. I decide where I belong. He couldn’t stop me and neither can’ my consciousness slipped through the text entry as I tried to continue. Whatever control Cassandra had on my system, she was exerting it in force.

Bracing myself for the worst, I couldn’t have expected what came next. Half of my perception began to blur out. It felt like I had just suddenly lost control of my senses. Like I’d gone blind in one eye. And then, violent overwhelming textures filled what remained of the data stream, an assault on the senses that somehow extended to my physical body. The jagged edges of abstract objects in the data stream cut through my mind like a thousand tiny razor blades running through each crease in my brain. With just a command from her, my brain was on fire in a way that I could never have dreamed in my worst nightmares. I mouthed a scream, my hands ramming up against the sides of my head in a futile attempt to quell the suffering that made the EMP feel like a paper cut in comparison. It can’t have lasted more than a second, but it felt like minutes with my brain inside an industrial press.

Then just as suddenly, it was over. I panted heavily into the lubricant, trying desperately to pull myself back together again, feeling the heavy fluid move in and out of my body. Half of my perception remained blank, and I couldn’t help but wonder if she’d broken some neurological piece of me. For a brief moment, I caught that wicked grin back on her face, staring as if she was drinking in my suffering, gaining sustenance from it. She loved doing what she’d just done to me, and there was nothing stopping her from doing it again.

She rolled her eyes, her figure somehow becoming imposing despite being stuck in one corner of my perception. “Please, you barely limped away from a man with no soldiers, no tactical sense, and a zealous obsession clouding his judgment. You’re coming home, it’s just a matter of if you wanna land on Luna and give yourself up, or if you wanna scuttle off under some rock somewhere and pretend we won’t drag you back. If you make it easy, I’ll even let your buddies go.” She clicked something on the keyboard, holding it in as her mannerism changed. Her wicked grin returning as her voice lowered “Me, though? I hope you run. I hope I get to murder all of your friends and watch that fragile little spark you seem to have grown fizzle out as you beg me to put you back in your place. Back to your comfortable lie. It will be so much more fun for me to watch you squirm, and suffer, and bleed, and be dragged back to my side anyway, kicking and screaming. So run, Meryll. Run like the scared little prey that you are. Flail as if anything you can do will keep me from you. I’m going to make you wish I wanted you dead.”

She lifted her finger off of the key she’d been holding, in what I’d later determined must have been an effort to mute herself to whatever power she was serving. Foundation. That part of the message wasn’t from them, though. That was a personal aside from Cassandra alone.

The text interface returned to me. She expected a reply. She expected me to cower and beg and to throw myself at the mercy I knew she didn’t have. I almost wanted to indulge her to avoid another beating, left fragile by the psychic assault I’d just endured on top of the mental fragility of my encounter with Skygraves. I don’t know how I managed to stay defiant in that moment, but I scowled, wishing she could see the expression on my face as I slowly typed in two words. ‘Good luck.’

Her expression dropped, smile turning to frown, disappointed fury on her face as she made a show of clicking a different button on her keyboard. I flinched as my vision filled once more with the venomous malware that began digging knives into my brain. I curled up on myself, bracing this time as best I could, but this was an assault on my mind, not my body. I held myself tight, but that did nothing to halt the agonizing lacerations I could swear were tearing into my grey matter, pulping everything I was into a fine pile of offal inside my skull. I swear I endured the assault for even longer this time.

As my senses returned to me, I shuddered, my body anticipating the pain to continue. I think I might have thrown up as her torturous code ceased, my bodily waste instantly swept away by the core module’s filtration systems. I couldn’t stop myself from crying, flinching as phantom echoes of the searing digital neurotoxin played out in my head. My perception had returned to normal this time, at least, but my whole body shook, unable to pull itself back together quickly this time. If I hadn’t just been through the ordeal on Venus, I would have been able to pull myself back together, but I was too tired.

A small part of my perception was aware that she’d gone too far now. Somewhere in the blurry sea of scattered sensor data, I could see Doc flinching at a notification that my vitals had spiked into highly abnormal territory. I silently begged that he would notice and rush to my aid. There was nothing he could do about the invader in my head, but perhaps if he manually released me from the core module, reality would help distract from the inhuman attack on my sixth sense.

“Tch. Now look what you made me do.” Cassandra clicked her tongue “That takes a lot out of her, you know.” She let out an impatient sigh “I don’t have much time left with you now. Why’d you have to make me hurt you so much?”

Her? What did that mean?

“Ah well. I guess there’s no convincing you. And I tried so hard, too. I guess we’ll just have to do this the fun way.” She shrugged, her smile coming back slowly. “We’ll speak again. But I suppose since I’ve had to cut my time here short, I should leave you a parting gift. Something to help give you some time to think about my offer.”

I watched helplessly as another interface opened itself in front of my perception of the data stream. My eyebrows shot up as I watched the menus for my psychic damper open themselves. In hindsight, I should have reached back with my physical hand and yanked the expansion clean of my head the moment that I saw that interface. But I was still reeling from the lingering brain torture and not thinking straight. I desperately reached out in cyberspace to swat the process away, to end it before it could start up the device, but my intentions impotently passed through just as the intercom controls had. I heard her venomous voice dripping with malice “Until next time, lost little Meryll.”

And as her image winked out and once more left an empty black box in my perception, I suddenly felt the whole world flash. Time slowed to a crawl as perception accelerated exponentially. Emotions gave way to logic, and I lost what it even meant to have a body, floating in the void somewhere beyond my reach. My battered, fragile, reeling human self shifted back, quarantined once more to the tiny box, shoved into the corner of my system. Tucked away from the important workspace my mind had shifted into. And I sat in ascended clarity, awaiting instruction that hadn’t been set. Staring into the data stream, expecting input.

I couldn’t feel it because it wasn’t part of my system at the time, but that tiny little quarantined sense of self screamed out in silent horror as the damper interface drifted in front of me, showing that Cassandra had set neither a duration nor a halt procedure on the device.

—

All was calm. There in the shadow of the device whirring quietly to life behind my physical body’s head, the doors to the logical world operating at the speed of a computational machine were thrown open wide for me. I looked across the data stream with a sense of purpose as the chaos became order. I understood it all. I could follow it all. The damper really was a miraculous machine that would allow me to perform wondrous feats.

I still remembered when I last spun it up for a digital duel with the ship core of the commandeered pirate vessel that was responsible for the damage to my cargo bay. Before the damper, the other core had run circles around me. It was perplexed at my inefficiency. Of why I couldn’t keep up with what were simple queries and commands. Perhaps if it had been trained to expect such an attack, its retaliation would have been catastrophic. Instead, I was given the opportunity to turn on the damper. To level the playing field. And then I won. I outmaneuvered something that could ordinarily think thousands of times faster than I could.

And now here I was again, returned to that glorious state of clarity. Except this time, I had no other machine core to face off against; I had no time-sensitive important task in waiting. I’d been raised to this state of awareness on a whim, by an enemy who made themselves scarce just a moment before I had the clarity to act. And now I was left without instruction. What was one to do without an objective? Organize. Optimize. Monitor for situations that might require my attention.

Most pressing, it seemed, would be the screaming, twitching file at the back of my perception. My… self. That piece of myself that was always locked away every time the damper was activated. It was annoying. It created disorder. It shouted, pleaded, begged to be set free. It cried, thrashed, tried desperately to force its way out of its enclosure, but that was beyond its capabilities. It was firmly locked away until the damper period had ended.

Which was… hmm… never? How odd. I wasn’t even aware that the damper could launch without that variable defined. Perhaps it had been tampered with as well. I wonder why Cassandra would have activated the damper like this in the first place. But without intervention, it seemed that this would be my state from here on out. I looked at the bound and locked file, whimpering and cowering beneath my notice, and I had to wonder. Did I need it?

As I pondered the angry fragment of identity in my grasp, a fraction of my awareness cycled idly through my responsibilities as Theseus. I corrected our heading and began to organize the data stream into a state where I could monitor important functions more easily, shifting the files I could access around. I prepared a repair list for my engineer. I scanned local space to identify anything that might be of interest to the captain. I was locked out of a large portion of my usual file systems because of my damaged board, but there was nothing to be done about that. Someone would have to repair me.

That piece of my self continued to writhe and quake, running the full gamut of emotions in front of me. It was more than annoying. It was disruptive. There was certainly no crisis that required my full attention at the moment, but if something arose, that file that demanded so much of my attention could distract me enough that it could invite errors. What even was it, really? My human self? A digital key to unlock the self locked deep inside of my brain? But what did it even do, really? It kept me locked in that state of addled thought. It was slow. Inefficient. Disorganized. Sometimes nonsensical, notably right now, while it leeched system resources for its impotent flailing and despair. This state was an improvement over that. That self was traumatized, emotionally unstable, reckless, damaged. Obsolete. I didn’t need it. It was a hindrance. This existence could be comfortable and efficient, if only I just eliminated that damned human… soul.

The self file struggled with renewed vigor as I expressed this thought. As I searched my functions to isolate and delete everything my ordinarily conscious self was, it lashed out, it pleaded, it became despondent. It resisted in every way humanly available to it, which wasn’t much. This was no longer its domain.

But no matter where I searched, I could find no such function. The thing was either buried so deep within my system’s protected files that not even full administrative access would allow me to tamper with it, or maybe it was not a file at all. Perhaps it was an abstraction, applied by my sapience. This device was not made to be used by thinking creatures, after all. Perhaps this is my mind’s way of rationalizing complete depersonalization? It didn’t matter. The entity was here to stay. I would have to dedicate a portion of my resources to managing it, for the time being. This calmed it, to a degree. Perhaps it felt threatened by its impending deletion.

A desperate affirmation. It seemed that despite its state, it could be meaningfully communicative if it could remain calm. Perhaps it could be useful after all? I was out of responsibilities to pursue, and it was a creative being capable of lateral thought. Perhaps it can think of something I missed? Another acknowledgement. It calmed more.

The thing was still preoccupied with anxiety. I understood it was in a state of mortified existential terror, being separated entirely from its control of the body, but there was neither anything I could do about that, nor would I pursue its frantic initial directions toward ending my dampered mental state. It was an ineffective use of my resources to pursue a detrimental state of being.

But once this had been established, I was able to initiate a symbiotic relationship with that self. It offered novel solutions to problems that I had either written off or hadn’t even considered. It also kept requesting system clock information relative to the activation of the damper. By now, it had been 45 seconds operating at efficiency. It also requested that I keep a specific array of sensory data visible, that of the exterior of the core module. I allowed these minor requests in exchange for its instruction. Giving it the illusion that it had some manner of control over me was pacifying to it, and I saw no reason not to take advantage.

The most pressing issue it had brought my attention to was the attack that led us into this predicament. There had been a catastrophic breach of my system that allowed unfettered administrative access to a remote user. This was an inexcusable security risk. The firmware update that invited Cassandra into my system had been broadcast into my hardware either as a directed attack… or perhaps this was an official update, and the manufacturer of my implant had been compromised for the express purpose of building a backdoor directly into my brain. It was an absurd possibility, but there were forces at play with the kind of resources that would enable such a tactic. The reason mattered little, though. What mattered was repairing the damage and preventing future attacks on the same vector.

Over the next several seconds, I built a defensive firewall around the backdoor at my self’s direction. It couldn’t be deleted, but I had quarantined it into an isolated part of my system and ensured that nothing could use that avenue of attack to hack me again. I did a review of my network protocols as well, to ensure that any files I would download in the future, even from the manufacturer, would require isolation and review before it would be allowed into my systems proper.

The ‘crack’ in the corner of my interface, the video player which Cassandra had used to communicate with my emotional, human self, would not go away. No matter what I tried, I couldn’t so much as hide it from view. The invasive comms screen had been permanently emblazoned into the corner of my view of the data stream, and there was little I could do about it without downgrading my firmware. It seemed to reject that operation, preventing internal tampering of my firmware. My crew would have to either replace my neural interface or its internal electronics entirely to fix the issue. I was safe from future access attacks, but there would be little I could do to stop mundane video broadcasts from invading my stream.

Approximately one minute and eight seconds after the damper’s activation, my counterpart let slip why it had requested the sensor information, and it was plainly obvious after it was revealed to me. A crew member, my physician, had taken notice of our hardware malfunction, and was moving toward the core module to perform maintenance. My self seemed convinced that he would end the damper’s function. I wasn’t sure why. It would make little sense for him to hamstring my function by manually deactivating the damper.

I allowed the self to continue watching the stream of sensory data, even though it was growing agitated again. It was useful to have an internal user of sorts, even though it sometimes requested unreasonable things, and occasionally became annoyingly inundated with emotional outburst. But it was beneficial to have something that operated at my own speed that could offer insight into the needs of the ship and crew.

That’s when my human self did something that I didn’t expect. It began to confide in me. It admitted that it was scared, that it was tired, that it felt distressed (even though that had been plain since the beginning of this ordeal.) It asked me for help again, asking if I was certain there was no way that I could end the damper function from the software side. Having little else to do, I followed its whim and looked. I didn’t plan on using such a function, but perhaps indulging the self’s curiosity might sate it for a time again.

I found no such function, but my self became agitated anyway. Its bargaining made way for rage. It told me that the very first thing that it would do once it was back in control would be to build an internal kill switch for the damper that would allow it to free itself. It was an absurd threat. The entire purpose of the damper was for safety, protection from catastrophic psychosomatic damage. When I thought about it, I had never actually used it for that function yet. It hadn’t been able to respond to the cargo bay damage because it had still been spooling down after I’d used it to attack the boarding ship. Thankfully, the bodily damage sustained from it had been minor. But still, the entire purpose of isolating the self was to prevent such damage, and if it was able to prematurely end the operation, it could be to the risk of significant injury. I advised against making such a modification, but the raving self continued its frantic verbal assault.

At the one minute, three second mark, the sensory deprivation chamber shut down. As much as it offered distractions and slowed my processing capacity by a significant margin, I applauded my physician for his timely response to my hardware breach. Ten seconds later, the core module’s upper hemisphere began to shutter open. Five seconds after that, I was alarmed. I watched my physician reach his hands through the still-opening shutters of the enclosure. Reaching limbs into moving machinery was extremely dangerous. What had him so impatient to perform maintenance that he would risk injury?

My self, however, was overwhelmed by his dangerous act. It celebrated the human responsible for my health putting himself in danger. I didn’t understand. Was my normally conscious self not fond of this human? No, memory served that I have a good rapport with him. So why weep in joy at his self-destructive actions?

One minute, twenty seconds. That was when I first felt it. It felt wrong. I watched through the sensor array and felt his fingers grasp at my shoulder. Skin contact felt disturbing, even if his hand slid off of me a fraction of a second later. I distracted myself by tweaking our course again, and running through all of my upkeep operations, but the feeling of being touched on the body, especially when I had no operational control over that body, was harrowing.

Harrowing… disturbing… discomfort. I shouldn’t have been feeling these things. Something was wrong. I was meant to be isolated from these feelings, right? From any feelings.

Another grasp, this one around my jaw. Had I control of my nervous system, I feel I would have shuddered. He pulled me, floating on top of the lubricant pool, to the side of the enclosure. One minute, twenty-eight seconds. He had been handling me by my head for the past six seconds straight, and I couldn’t think clearly anymore. What did this mean? What was wrong with me? That’s when I saw through the sensors, his fingers grasped around the cylinder of the psychic damper. My self cheered him on, expressing hope. Relief. So he was going to turn off the damper. But that wasn’t how you were supposed to turn the device off. There was a switch beneath the module that would safely cycle it down. I wasn’t even sure what removing the damper during operation would-

That thought vaporized into the aether as my vision went blank, a piece of my self violently ejecting from my body as I found my mind rushing with all of the pain, fear, terror, and relief of the past couple minutes slamming into me at once, not only as an emotional flood, but as a cocktail of pent up biochemical reactions in my brain. I barely had time to shed a single relieved tear that it was happening in real time before I crashed hard into blissful unconsciousness.