At 0500 station time, I was awakened by an emergency message sent to my implant from the station’s AI. We called her Blu.

Report to the lower assembly room at once for an emergency meeting.

  Nothing else, no briefing or other information was attached, which could only mean the meeting was about some sensitive topic. The message was weighted with standard privacy encryption. I wasted no time crossing the distance of my small trisect quarters to the door. With hardly perceptible efforts of will, I suppressed my implant’s automatic interactions with my quarters that were part of my daily routine. I searched the Fleet’s network for signs that something had gone wrong while I slept. I didn’t expect to find the answer outright; I was hoping to find some hint as to what I was walking into. I didn’t have clearance to view the station’s system reports at will, so instead I searched the Fleet’s social media. I found nothing that would bode an emergency. I broadened my search, feeling the media’s trends, and found nothing out of the ordinary. I only searched back a week. Anything more, and I would have to slow down and concentrate.

  I only walked twenty-five meters before I exhausted my media searches. I targeted my inquiries to the assembly room itself. I could feel multiple presences outside the assembly room making searches of their own, or communicating with other implants. The assembly room had been secured, no signals in or out. As far as I could tell from the buzz of activity I was getting, everyone was just as clueless as I was. Every implant that hadn’t cloaked themselves with the general privacy settings belonged to one of the team leaders of the scientific division stationed on the Blu’era, including social sciences. I could only assume the rest were as well. We were middle management. We oversaw and participated in the work of the hands-on teams. We reported to the administrators of our division, who reported to the governing-level Executives. What emergency could possibly call for the convening of all mid-level scientists onboard the station? Unless the higher-ups had some news we had to break to our crews?

The scientific community is an expansive and diverse culture. Exploring, quantifying, and discovering every facet of the known and theoretical world. What crisis could possibly unite every single one of us under one roof?

  I had walked another seventy-five meters, exiting the living quarters via the elevator that would take me to the common areas. As I stepped into the elevator, it occurred to me that this might be happening on other stations and ships in the Fleet as well. I went back into the interfleet media. I couldn’t tell who was scouring the media in search for answers, but I could gather how many people were searching the same places I had. The number was significant enough for me to conclude that the entire scientific body of the 436th was being gathered in the light of some pressing emergency.

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  I checked the other assembly rooms and found a much smaller number of people outside the waiting rooms of the main assembly auditorium. Each one had activated their privacy settings, so I couldn’t identify them. I guessed they were our administrators. To verify that guess, I messaged my boss, Dr. Jekaebin. I sent it with a high priority alert so it would wake him up if he was asleep, and no matter where he was in the fleet, he would know to answer me right away. I waited for a full second and got no answer. Which meant the only place he could be was in the shade of the assembly room, or another secure room elsewhere in the fleet. Less than two minutes had passed, and I had already gotten all the information I could possibly obtain. I stepped out of the elevator and decided not to think about it for the rest of the one hundred twenty meters to the assembly room.

  I hesitated in the waiting room. Going into a bunker like this is difficult for someone like me. To most people, an implant is simply a device that allows you to interface with the digital world without a physical medium. For them, severing ties with the digital world is refreshing, even necessary at times. I’ve heard it described as a constant static in the back of your head, finally ceasing. For people like me, who’ve had theirs since birth, interacting with signals and networks is no different from using any of our other senses or bodily functions. Imagine suddenly being cut off from your sense of smell or sense of touch, sense of balance. You can prepare for it all you want, but it still creates a gaping hole in your perception of the world.

  The longer someone goes without an implant, the harder it is to adapt to the additional realm of awareness it brings. You have to ease into it. Your brain has to train itself to use the implant like its any other integral part of the brain. And eventually, you either reject it or get used to it. And when you spend your whole life with his added awareness, you have to train your mind to go without it to avoid panic attacks or other adverse effects. But that only takes you so far. You can always feel the fear, the absence, the same way some people say they can always feel the presence of the nets. Like a constant, and in some cases overwhelming, buzzing in your head. All you can do is train yourself not to be controlled by it.

  I took a deep breath and felt the door’s sensor probe for a passcode hidden within the encryption of the message that summoned me here. I walked in quickly and felt all my connections with the outside world sever as the door closed behind me.