Mirem and Lanis arrive at the Versk Suit complex early on the day of Lanis’ trial integration run.

  Lanis wonders if it’s her imagination, or if the deep bows that greet them at the gate and at reception do in fact linger a half-moment longer.

  They’re met at reception by Heinrich. The last time Lanis saw him he had seemed almost stupefied, but today he is brisk, freshly shaven and well rested, and his eyes are sharp behind his small rectangular glasses.

  “I know this is a bit irregular, to have a trial integration and simulation so quickly,” he says as he leads them down a branching hallway, away from the massive Suit hangar. “But my superiors felt it was important to get an immediate base reading of your piloting ability. Mirem informed us that you are rather new to Suit piloting, so we won’t expect you to move mountains, but your performance the other day certainly raised some interesting possibilities.” He pauses, as if hoping that Lanis will clarify this point. He clears his throat when she does not, and continues, striding briskly through the tastefully-lit Versk corridors.

  “Of course, we’ll give you a few minutes to integrate and get familiar with the sim-Suit’s modules. A very standard array, you’ll find. A quick system check, and then we’ll run a sim. Ah, here we are.” He leads them through a final hissing door, and gestures to Lanis and Mirem to precede him.

  Whereas the AI lab had banks of research terminals and two integration couches, the simulation lab has a single, clear focus of attention: in the center of the room, surrounded by a cluster of terminals, is what looks like a large, metal ball.

  The simulation pod is suspended within a framework of hydraulic scaffolding to simulate the physical effects of a Suit. Heavy cables run from its base to the monitoring terminals that surround it, like worshippers at an altar. It reminds Lanis, for a shuddering moment, of the navigation pod onboard the Demeter.

  “We’ve also added some redundancies to better monitor any power spikes like the one we saw on your last visit,” Heinrich continues, walking up slowly behind them. “And we have a full team here, and medical staff.”

  Lanis had been so fixated on the simulation pod that she had barely noticed the people, all of whom are now standing at attention as Heinrich slowly circles the pod. Lanis counts eleven tech attendants, along with two medi-techs, their eyes all boring into her, some with curiosity, others with a hint of trepidation.

  “Can I help get you settled in?” Ash says quietly, suddenly standing beside them. Lanis stupidly stares at her for a moment, blinking. The girl from the integration run, she remembers. Whereas Heinrich looks fresh, Lanis can see dark circles under Ash’s eyes. The woman looks dead tired, though her Versk tech uniform is still as neat and clean as any Fleet cadet’s under review.

  “Did you help set this up?” Lanis asks as she approaches the sim pod’s entrance. She peers inside: the interior is cramped, with a dizzying array of switches and blinking lights. From the back of the pod’s polished seat hangs a set of mesh-like nets and a coiled, silver neural shunt.

  “Yep. Heinrich had us analyze your waveforms and provide some more redundancies in case of another neural overload,” Ash says, gesturing at the heaps of cables spooling out from the pod. “It’ll provide much better feedback, and prevent an overload like the one we saw on the trial integration.”

  “So, how are you feeling?” Ash asks, trying to keep the tinge of concern from her voice. She fails.

  Lanis unzips her jacket and hands it to Mirem.

  “Great,” Lanis lies.

  Climbing into the sim pod feels eerily like entering into the Demeter’s navigation pod. But it isn’t, Lanis reminds herself again, focusing on Ash’s curly hair as the young tech straps her in. She feels a cool, silky click as the pod’s neural shunt slides into her skull, and she thinks back to Lieutenant Tran’s warning.

  She checks the flickering stream of data as the neural bridge connection is tested and verified; then her internal readings, generated by deeply-bored Fleet implants that Versk’s collection of terminals still won’t have access to.

  Sure, her implants aren’t tuned to perfection like they were six months ago—but she also isn’t about to Warp jump with a Jupiter-class AI ego, she reminds herself. The implants don’t feel damaged, and she wonders, not for the first time, how much she can really trust the Fleet diagnosticians.

  She also realizes that, ultimately, a part of her simply doesn’t care. It’s not like she wants to stroke out, but what does Fleet expect her to do? I’m not their broken toy, she thinks. They can own my past, but my mind is my own. Or at least most of it is.

  “Ok, should be all good,” Ash says, pulling one last harness cinch tight. “Don’t worry too much about all these.” She nods to the rows of tactile switches and buttons, a rainbow of blinking color that surrounds Lanis. “They’re mostly for manual override training. The AI—I mean, Ether—should fill you in on what you need to know. All good? Good. I’m closing the hatch now. Closing the hatch!” She barks loudly behind her to the assembled tech team.

  “Hatch closure!” they echo back.

  Ash turns back to Lanis one final time before she hefts the pod door shut, gently patting her knee. “Good luck,” she whispers. Lanis nods back, avoiding eye contact, afraid they’ll betray how she’s really feeling.

  For a few seconds after the pod door hisses shut Lanis’ only light is the dim cast of the pod’s hardwire arrays of switches. Slowly though, a soft light fills the pod. A HUD sparkles to life in front of her, a readout of the simulation Suit’s systems powering on with green checkmarks. If it was the Demeter it would all be orange, Lanis thinks, biting the inside of her cheek against another small surge of claustrophobia. She mouths the words silently: No flashbacks this time, ok? Right. Easy.

  Heinrich’s voice buzzes in her ear. “You reading me, Lanis?”

  “All clear,” Lanis replies, nodding to herself.

  “Ash here,” the woman says, her voice no longer tired, but firm. “Readings all look good on our end. Still feeling ok, Lanis? When you give the ok I’ll integrate you with Ether and load you into a training sim.

  Lanis takes a few deep, meditative breaths. Then: “I’m ready.”

  “Allright then. All teams are ready. All systems are go. Integration in 3, 2, 1—”`

  Lanis feels herself curl up slightly, and then she’s falling back, muttering a prayer from her Navigator training days. This time, with a proper neural shunt, she can choose to be far less aware of her physical body in the sim pod.

  She blinks, and then opens her dream eyes to a new scene.

  She’s not in the simulation room, surrounded by concerned technicians, but in a field of packed earth under a blue sky, and the pod is a proper pilot couch, nestled within the armored core of a Versk Armored Suit. The pod’s heads-up display blossoms around her, overlaying the tactile switches, revealing the full configuration of the Suit, as well as her imagined surroundings.

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  The more natural view is within her mind though. With a shift of focus, her eyes become the Suit’s eyes, two retinal clusters that give a 360 view sharper than any HUD or holo-cast.

  She feels Ether there too, hovering, like a friend who’s just walked into her peripheral vision.

  “Clear—readings good—clear—clear—” Lanis hears the muttering of Ash and several other technicians in her ear, like background music thumping away inside a club while she smokes on the sidewalk.

  “Well, hello again Ether. I guess they thought we had enough of an introduction last time?” Lanis asks, smiling slightly in the pod.

  I feel more than introduced! It’s nice to see you again Lanis! Ether says, or rather beams, the AI’s neurological data forming thoughts alongside Lanis’ own.

  Lanis’ eyes scan the hyper-realistic horizon inside the simulation. Nothing there… yet. “Have they filled you in on what we’re doing here?”

  No, they kept me in the dark. But, judging from your new presence in the sim pod, as well the amount of integration feedback monitoring, I can safely assume that we’re undergoing combat simulations to determine if you’re worth admitting in the Versk pilot program. I do hope you pass!

  Lanis smirks. “I think that depends on you as much as me. I assume you know how to work this thing?”

  Ether’s tone is a chipper staccato, accompanied by brief mind’s-eye projection of each item: You mean a Versk Biped, specifically a Mark II running an Insertion Shield, Coil Gun, dual shoulder micro-launchers, Mag-saber, and a drone decoy system?

  There’s a pause.

  Obviously, Ether says, with the dead-pan equivalent of an eye roll. All they have me do is train on these things!

  “Ok, sorry, I guess that was kind of a stupid question. The real question is, can you show me how to work this in the short amount of time that Versk is going to give us?”.

  Another micro-pause, and Ether’s inhuman intellect digests this problem.

  That all depends on how much access you want to give me. As per Arena protocol, your body has piloting control. I can only assist in decision making and subsystem control, such as targeting, energy routing, and decoy nav. Ether says.

  Lanis briefly shifts her attention to a readout of the systems monitoring her integration pathways. All green still. She whispers a subvocal mantra.

  “Ok, it looks like my diagnostics agree with the Versk techs. Everything looks good.” Lanis focuses her breathing, and reimagines the handshake that she and Ether exchanged back in the dream clearing the day before.

  “Hey, Ether? Don’t freak out. My brain was designed for this,” Lanis says, trying to project confidence.

  I’ve been designed to explicitly not ‘freak out,’ Lanis, Ether says. But what exactly are you planning—

  Except now, instead of an interface handshake, Lanis prepares an embrace…

  Suddenly, Ether is more than a friend peeking over her shoulder, whispering thoughts into her ear. Lanis can feel her respiratory rate quickening outside of the sim.

  Ether is a part of Lanis.

  Certain fundamentals were hammered into Lanis and her fellow cadets at Fleet Academy from their first integration seminars: never let an AI come fully into your mind. There are too many risks; the risk of losing your own ego, the risk of neural transmitter overload, the risk of catatonia and insanity when an artificial intellect becomes too superimposed on the biologic.

  But, as her training progressed, and as the other cadets washed out to different positions requiring less mental fortitude, and as her own neural implants were refined and articulated for the peculiar type of ego-death that Warp navigation demanded, the lessons changed. The old rules? Those were for Admin controllers, ship helmsmen, and Heavy Insertion Unit pilots. It turned out that letting go was precisely what was needed for Navigators and Commanders to achieve the necessary results with the egos of the Ship AIs, both in Warp jumping and in the maddeningly complex management of ship systems in battles against humanity’s enemies amongst the stars.

  Lanis can hear the quickening of chatter in her ear from the techs outside the sim pod, voices raised in alarm. God, if they could only see what I’m actually doing, she thinks. Simultaneous to integrating with Ether, Lanis has taken over the monitoring data that the sim pod is feeding to the assembled techs. The readings are still spiking; she has to give them something, after her last performance. But if they saw what was really happening, they’d probably manually disengage the simulation. Which would be a waste of everyone’s time, and potentially dangerous.

  She pings a quick message to the tech team—I’m fine. I’m in control. Do NOT abort sim. The chatter doesn’t abate, but it does come down a notch.

  Next, Lanis turns her attention to Ether, to the AIs own strange memories—if one can call them that—integrating them into her own.

  She feels the birth-like awakening of the AI in the Versk training lab; the tests by Admin Ethics to ensure it’s working within its protocols and sentient-level guardrails. Then the endless training on Suit systems and tactics, pilot dynamics and Versk corporate loyalty, all the while silently criticizing the methodology of this training. Ether is a product of Versk, methodical and diligently plugging away, but in the deepest strata of her mind she really just wishes that she was left alone twenty kilometers beneath the planet’s crust, or better yet working alongside Fleet within some asteroid a million miles from anything else, just barely on the legal side of sentient autonomy.

  Lanis can feel Ether give the equivalent of a startled freeze as she pulls the memories into herself. If the AI was still projecting as a young woman in a dreamscape, her face would be white.

  “We’ll be fine,” Lanis reassures her. Letting Ether digest the situation, Lanis turns her attention to the Suit, which she now knows as well as her own reflection.

  In her left hand, curling around two hundred kilograms of composite metal sinew, is a white, four meter shield, Versk proudly stamped along its equator. It’s like Sander said, back in the hangar—what Versk knows best is advanced metallurgy, second only to energy, and the thing is near Fleet equivalent, able to withstand up to seven direct hits from a KR mass driver.

  She flexes her right arm next. Not so much an arm, really, but a large gun: specifically, a magnetic-accelerator coil gun, powered by the Versk micro fission reactor that nestles between the Suit’s shoulders. There are only forty rounds, but a hit in the right spot will cripple a Suit.

  Interesting, Lanis thinks, moving to the next weapon. The Suit’s Mag-saber, a deployable sort of blade, is actually nestled as part of the coil gun. Deploying it means giving up the gun, but in exchange she’d get a three meter, close-range weapon that can slice through anything except the Suit’s Adamite shielded core like a steel gauntlet through wet paper.

  The rest of the armament is more standard issue stuff, second hand from Murkata-Heisen designs. The micro missiles are meant to be a distracting thorn against the opposing mech’s defenses, while the drone system is standard to run interference, usually guided almost entirely by the Suit’s AI.

  How did you do that? Ether asks, finally recovering. It’s not really a formed question anymore though, but rather an coinciding internal thought, one that Lanis answers almost instantaneously, similar to how she communicated with the Demeter.

  “The tricks of Fleet,” Lanis says, “as well as training and implants that were reserved for integration-track cadets. They couldn’t remove them when I was decommissioned, so now we get to use them.”

  I can almost… feel you. This is incredible!

  “I know,” Lanis responds. And to think I’m using it here, instead of out in the stars, a part of Lanis quietly thinks. Not quite quietly enough for Ether though.

  Hey, you could be stuck in a Versk training lab; count yourself lucky, Ether responds.

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean that. I’m a bit out of practice with keeping thoughts to myself in this situation,” Lanis mutters, shaking her head. “Anyway… now you can see that I was being quite literal when I said I was designed for this. In a way, without this, I’m not even sure who I even am.”

  Ether digests this, and Lanis can feel her accessing an archive of the DSM8 catalog of mental health disorders, subheadings: depression, dysphoria. She pretends that she doesn’t notice.

  Right… well, let’s keep you alive during this sim, and then focus on the future after that, Ether says.

  An alert pops up on the HUD inside the sim pod, as well as in Lanis’ shared mind.

  And look here. I guess they’ve decided to give us some company.