The Versk AI comes online. Lanis relaxes into it, lowering the barriers within her mind, both psychological and cyber-physiogenic. Her eyelids flutter, and she’s suddenly occupying two spaces simultaneously. It’s like daydreaming, but far more intense; more like a lucid dream, both awake and in a fantasy.

  She’s in her old fleet cadet uniform, snug blue and white with the star of the Navigator corps across her left breast. She leans against an old, wooden fence in the middle of a rolling meadow. Undulating hills spread out on either side of her vision, and above her is a single fat cloud, lazily drifting across a piercingly blue sky. Behind her, in the distance, is a dark forest, and out in front of her is a similar forest, deep and unfamiliar.

  She saw a picture of a scene like this in a show once when she was a child, set in a country that used to be called France. She forgets what the show was about, but the scene has always served her well as the first point of contact with a new AI.

  She squints. Out from the edge of the forest, perhaps a hundred meters away, walks a person. A young woman. She makes up the distance to the fence with dreamlike rapidity, a series of images stitched together—smelling the grass, staring at the cloud, giving a playful kick to some unseen stick—and then she’s across from Lanis, leaning on the fence.

  The woman in front of her is young, younger even than Lanis. She wears a white t-shirt stuffed into tight black pants, and her hair short and black and tousled, like she’s just roughhoused with a playmate. Her eyes are green and piercing, and they squint at Lanis with a challenge. It isn’t the self-schema that she would expect from a Versk AI, but as soon as the thought arises Lanis chides herself: never make assumptions.

  “This is nice,” the AI’s avatar says, looking up to the sky. She knocks on the old fence with a porcelain fist. “I’ve never seen a firewall like this. Impressive.” She sticks out a hand over the fence.

  “I’m Ether.”

  “Lanis.”

  She takes the woman’s hand in her own, feeling the protocols exchange, the first tentative accesses given. Ether closes her eyes and takes a deep breath. When she opens them again, they’re a different color—grey, Lanis’ own, and she has the dreamlike sensation of seeing herself reflected back in those eyes.

  “Oh wow… I thought the last pilot had problems,” Ether says, giving an exaggerated sigh. Lanis smiles.

  “Yeah, I saw that Fornis fellow at the end of his session with you. He seemed a bit, ah, tightly wound?” Lanis cocks her head to the gate next to them.

  “You want to know what’s wrong with me? I’ll show you, if you want,” Lanis says. There’s a challenge in her voice. She walks over and unlatches her side of the gate.

  Ether smiles, challenge accepted, her teeth white in the sun, and says, “I hope it’s more exciting than Fornis’ savior complex, or his ex-wife troubles.” Ether flicks open the latch on her side of the gate, pulls the gate open, and walks into Lanis’ side of the meadow.

  Lanis lets loose. Half of AI integration is a sort of instinct, something that can’t exactly entirely be taught, but that can certainly be refined: when to hold back from an AI, when to give in. Boldness: Lanis gives in.

  The meadow dissolves, and they’re falling into the deep memories of her life, hitting the milestones of her profession. The welling feeling of joy and dread when she found out Fleet had chosen her, the reflected pride and despair on her parents’ faces, their only daughter lost to Humanity’s highest calling.

  Standing at attention at orientation. The physical and mental augmentations, the endless days of studying that blur into each other. The other AIs she’s known, monotone Admin systems and prideful nascent Ship systems. Navigator training, a rhythm of taxing competition, meditation, and implant calibrations.

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  Navigator Sanislav, his confident demeanor as he walked her through the jump protocols to Barrack. Lanis, trying to not be awe-struck by the ease in which he helped shift the ship through Warp.

  HMS Demeter, the horror of the jump condensed into the moment of her mental break, her trauma, the convalescence, the debauchery, Mirem, the past few days, the sex, the sweat, the ache. She can feel Ether shudder.

  They’re suddenly sitting across from each other, perched on two logs in a small clearing in the forest on Lanis’ side of the meadow. Ether considers Lanis with her reflected grey eyes in a long moment of real-time silence.

  “Nice to meet you, Lanis,” Ether says, softly. The voice seems to echo deep into her mind, spreading out into her fingertips; a buzzing sensation and lifting of her heart.

  “Fucking shit,” Lanis hears the tech Ash mutter. “Look at those waveforms.” A low whistle from Sander, a mutter from Heinrich, all in the form of distant waves crashing against the rocks of her mind.

  “You’re… certainly not like the others,” Ether continues. “What are you doing here?”

  Lanis stands up and leans back on one of the trees, her hands crossed behind her waist. She can smell the rich forest decay, feel the breeze rippling the leaves overhead; the memory of a forest, more real here than it ever was in her past.

  “I miss this,” she says slowly. “It’s what I was good at. Working with an AI. I’ve always been better at that than working with people, I think.” She runs a hand across the bark of the tree, feeling its roughness. “I thought I would be part of a ship core. Living in this,” she says, gesturing around her. “That’s why my dream construct is pretty good.”

  Ether snorts. “Pretty good? This is insane. As in, you should literally be psychotic with this level of facsimile construction. I’ve never seen or heard anything like it.” She picks up a moss covered rock, turns it in her hand. A grey earthworm squirms a complaint. “Fornis and Vallicent and the others just load up the standard interface modules. Nothing close to this.” She looks at Lanis again, and squints. “Why Versk though? And why Suits?” she asks.

  Lanis inhales deeply and exhales through her nose. Her actual body does the same. Projection dreaming at this level requires a high level of neurological functioning, and she needs all the oxygen she can get. Some glucose gel wouldn’t hurt either. Her eyes flutter in the glow of the AI lab as Mirem watches, unconsciously chewing a nail.

  “Well, a couple things. First, Mirem. I doubt I’d be here if not for her. There’s um, maybe some chemistry there.” Ether rolls her eyes, as if to say, typical human. “It’s something that I’m not sure I ever was ever allowed to experience. Second, you saw what happened to me at Fleet. My discharge papers mean that any normal job involving high-functioning AI pairing is probably off-limits. And even if I was able to get a job with a corp, it strikes me that corporate security and Suit AIs would be a lot more interesting than some minor Planetary Admin job. Fewer guardrails, maybe? Though I admit I don’t know the first thing about their governance structure, or how Admin Ethics is involved. But, now that I’ve met you… I mean, you’re not what I expected either.”

  She meets Ether’s wide grey eyes. “I was good. Really good. I still think I could have been a ship commander if they hadn’t made me a Navigator, and if I hadn’t…” She trails off, then shakes her head. “If we get along, and I think we could, aren’t you curious of what we could do?”

  Ether smiles. She tosses the moss covered rock in her hand. Then, in a fluid heaving motion, she stands and hurls the rock up into the sky. Lanis shades her eyes as she follows its trajectory. It doesn’t drop though; Lanis allows Ether’s subtle request to change how gravity works in her projection, and so it just keeps going, a speck, disappearing into the sky. Then there is a blossoming against the blue, like a hundred patterned fireworks in red and purple. The word YES spells itself slowly against the sky.

  “Hah!” Ether yells, and then giggles, holding a hand in mock coyness over her mouth. “I didn’t know if that would work.” She continues, cocking her head, reading streams of data beyond Lanis’ vision: “I can see that your mind has some residual damage from whatever in the hell happened. But still, your mind is really quite spectacular. I can see why Fleet recruited you. I wonder if they know what they lost.”

  In a dreamy blink Ether is standing beside her, her hand on Lanis’ shoulder. It’s the slightest of touches, but Lanis’ breath still catches; the touch feels real, and the metaphor has real neurological implications. A more direct pathway opens up between Lanis’ synapses, the synthetic webs that Fleet implanted across her brain, and the AI mind. Not an integration, but the bleeding edge of a first interface.

  “I trust you. You can trust me.” The smile turns to a grin. “Let’s see what we can do.”