Parts of my face are missing. I don’t have a mirror, but when you see a faceted mandible lying on the ground in flesh and tar-colored goop, you get an idea. A feel little niggles of pain but the panic of seeing walls and ground and plants melting under the relentless black is overwhelming.

RE-ABSORB YOUR AETHER.

What? What does my aether have to do with any of this madness?!

PENNY, PLEASE!

I look over to Tessa and find black splotches eating through her exo-skeleton at the speed of inevitability. Just like that, some of the panic turns into resolve and forces me to move.

Instinctively, I keep my hands off Tessa as I release all aether whisps connected to me and begin to pull. I worry briefly that my capacity will overflow, but I find my energy reserves nearly depleted. So I keep pulling, all of the aether from lingering spells and from the environment as a whole and after a few minutes of surging mana toward my body, the black blemishes on Tessa begin to crumble into obsidian sparkles and blow away.

I collapse to my knees and pull Tessa close to me and begin crying the rest of my panic out on my best friend. “I can’t lose you too.”

“This is just a shell, Penny. I was worried about you.” I notice the flick of her eyes to my body, and without thinking I look down.

I see a half-eaten upper torso of some alien creature from a sci-fi movie. Bluish skin, melting off semi-transparent fibers connecting similar-colored muscles to iridescent, crystalline bones. The bones are the only part of the torso that has not been torn by the blackness that continues to drift away as it is disturbed. It’s somehow beautiful with the colors and form that the destruction has brought to light.

I take the barest of moments to appreciate the wonders of life before I realize this half eaten alien thing is me. With that, my pain pierces through my wall of adrenalin, shocks me into rigidity. I lose touch with consciousness through the overwhelming light of white-hot agony.

***

I wake up to a feeling of being suspended in liquid with my head anchored to something.

“You owe me another dinner date.” The voice is tinted with anger. “I’m frolicking through your garden castle, when suddenly a gout of some devouring napalm erupts from the top of the building. My concern for the plants has me calling you and Tessa, no response, and climbing walls to stop the madness. Come to find, the madness was you.” She’s breathing heavy now from the exertion of swinging a bottle of wine around before she drinks from it.

“Do you know how scared I was!?” she takes another swig, “For the plants?”

I cough chuckle, “Are my plants okay?” My voice is raspy and barely there, which makes total sense considering what my chest looked like earlier.

“Most of them, yeah. But you nearly obliterated a very rare, very expensive berry bush. Thank Andromeda you’d turned away from that priceless fruited tree. In fact, almost all the plants on 48 are impossibly hard to come by. How did you do it? How did you get them?”

Wow, that went from fear to greed, and perhaps a little lust, in record time. I point at Tessa.

Hey, Tessa, is there a way to connect my directed thoughts to the speakers?

I’ll connect your text-processor to the PA, lest we have another incident of internal thoughts breaking free.

Yeah, good idea.

“Tessa designed and built this place. Ask her about the plants. I mostly just enjoyed the lazy river.”

Tessa laughs at that, “It’s true, she slept on it last night. I’ll have to put in a new filter for aether-enhanced drool, but . . .”

“Hey! It can’t have been that much drool.” I pout defensively.

“And about the plants,” Tessa turns to Francesca, ignoring my protest, “Everything below the 48th floor was available through trade partners or the exchange. Penny’s private terrace was sourced from the Collective. The tree itself was an apology for the accusations they levied against us last year.”

“No way. Really?” I try to get up and turn to face Tessa, but my head is still anchored, and apparently so are my hips.

“Stay put Penny, I’ll not have you mess up your healing just to make ridiculous faces at me. To answer your question, this came from that very tree.” She somehow snuck a bite of something cold and wet to my lips.

I pull it quickly into my mouth and a comfortable explosion of flavor and aether fills my senses and urges a shudder from my neck to my toes. “Galaxy fruit really is the best.”

“I begged for some earlier. Tessa gave me a sliver, and wow. That might be the tastiest fruit in existence. Also developed my mutation, but helpful so I shouldn’t complain. Tessa wouldn’t let me take a clipping or give me a fruit to plant, though.” Francesca pouts.

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“Makes sense. They aren’t seed grown, and I doubt the Collective would condone me producing more as it is their primary source of income.”

“But Penny, they’re 600 credits per fruit!”

“But Frannie, even a slice can level-up a young symbiote user.”

“Wait, really? That’s a huge resource then. Holy crap. Can I use this to further develop my mutation?” I can see her running calculations with here eyes.

“I mean, yeah, but taking a slice at a time is dangerous, but also, you likely won’t get any ‘fun’ abilities unless you stress your system. Just remember that even tier 3 medicine can’t fix everything.”

“Tier 3? Are you kidding me right now?” A tired sigh escapes her, not mad like I expected.

“Um, no? I made some weird leaps early, but I’m nowhere near a tier advancement for at least a handful of years.”

“Penny. Stop. I have been trudging though advancements in tier two all year. I don’t need to hear the rest of this. Let’s talk about your magnificent garden instead.”

“I mean, if you have some apprentices that need a side gig . . .”

“Excellent! Then I have all these ideas!” The sparkle in her eyes is getting out of control.

“Try to keep your shenanigans below level 30? The half-floor apartments are intended to have private gardens. You know, once I have guests that is.”

“That would make floors 1-10 and rooftops to 30 as public?” the over-excited botanist asks me.

Thankfully Tessa has answers, “Yes. Though the rooftops on each side from 30-39 are intended for community recreation. The terraces on 11-29 are intended for community gardening.”

“So, you’re saying I can play with all of them until you get residents?”

The childlike joy and excitement on her face drags a laugh from me. “Sure, and please, if you could help that berry bush recover, I’d be very grateful.”

“If I’m not mistaken, that’s the same berry that makes the juice you like.”

“If you could make a hedge maze from that bush, I would be very grateful.” We both laugh at that, but Tessa ruins my fruit pie in the sky dreams.

“Penny, every plant on that level was made available for private use only, I’m afraid. On the plus side, I was given instructions on how to keep them happy and healthy. Unless you decide to void vomit all over them again.”

Flashes of imagery and pain cycle through my brain for a second, lingering on the image of Tessa with sludge eating into her chassis. “Tessa, I’m so sorry.”

“No! Augh,” She groans with of flap of her arms to her sides. Then she starts pulling off her shirt?

“See? Repaired. I bought a device that’s like a repair Roomba so that you wouldn’t keep freaking out.” Seeing her sports brah, I remember wondering briefly why a personal assistant robot would have synth flesh anywhere but the face.

“This isn’t where I thought the evening was headed.” She giggles before taking another drag of her wine.

“Francesca!” I snap my arm out and swat her leg. Sweet! I can move my arms.

“What, would you rather I just lay about and get drunk while I resist the urge to make all of the Lady Garden jokes?”

“Have you made Aether infused hooch yet?” She nods at me and un-screws a flask and looks at our arrangement and the tilt of my head, trying to figure out the best way to feed it to me.

I waggle a finger at her and motion for her to hand it to me. She does, and I summon a ridiculous loopy, bendy straw from some party store that still has a shop on Earth. I slip it in the flask and take a hard drag. I mean, there has to be half of the flask in this straw before any reaches my lips.

It’s warm, in both alcohol and aether, the fruit is kind of bitter, and it tastes like she hopped it also. She made me a fruit-beer tasting liquor. “This is freaking delicious. Mmm delicious brain fruits.”

Francesca smirks at that, summoning her own loopy—far less complicated than mine—straw and starts sipping her wine from it. “This is much closer to what I imagined.”

We talk like that for a while, she updates me about some of her innovations with bio-engineering some Earth plants to survive in the sulfurous atmosphere, and similarly mineral rich water. She’s also been using the Murder Chickens to selectively breed meat birds and egg birds, with a bit of gene and behavior modification to my favorite river tortoise species to make them more prolific egg layers.

To my surprise, the Botanist and rancher agrees with my idea to seed Elysium with lower leveled wildlife. The catch was that I had to wait until she designed a predation ecosystem for the valley.

The end of the evening comes with Tessa taking off my head and hip restraints and checking me over while the sleazy doctor checks me out. When I ask Tessa why I had no top covering, she replied that I didn’t have any skin to cover in the mentioned area. She then told me that if I was well enough to speak on my own, I was well enough to walk and dumped me on the floor before walking off.

I’m sorry Tessa, I didn’t mean to sound ungrateful. I do appreciate that you healed me and took care of me, and were thoughtful enough to install a healing tank, for Andromeda’s sake. It was just supposed to be a stupid joke to stave off the embarrassment of Francesca staring at me.

I know you didn’t mean it like that, but even though I’ve seen you recover from having your brain melted, I was watching you kill yourself with rage. Melting OUR body from the inside and out. Don’t forget that I live there too. I’m particularly fond of both entities that call that casing home, so I’d appreciate you damaging it less. And joke about your safety less.

Oh. I do forget that sometimes. You’ve been your own person for some time now that when you’re around in that chassis, I forget that part of you is a symbiote that lives inside me.

You came very close to damaging my Hive today. But before you try to dive in and figure out why everything happened, promise me you won’t check your messages until you’re completely healed?

Yeah, okay. We were thinking this would be a big transition anyway, and if my suspicions are correct, I don’t have to go on that Affinity Quest thing anymore. If you spew magic out of your soul, it ought to be your affinity right? But what does it say about my soul that a black devouring mass came out?

Blarg. If I think about this anymore, I’m going to be more tempted to check things.

“Tessa, what did you do when I slept before you had a body?”

“I would study the Matrix, deep dive into your codices so I can answer questions and whatnot. I also spent a lot of time reviewing your interactions so that I may interact with you on a more natural basis. Now that I can work on things that interest me, I usually do that. For an hour or so a week I like to defrag, cache and temporary fragment dump, and recompile my core processes. Why the sudden interest?”

I fidget with the edge of a t-shirt Tessa had ready for me. “I don’t know, I guess I just don’t want to be alone right now?” I look over to where Francesca is passed out in my bed. “And I don’t want the implications that might come along with snuggling with her?”

Tessa snickers at that. “Don’t want new relationship drama to replace the mass that you just waded through?”

“Well, no I do not.”

“How about you can put your head in my lap, and we’ll talk until you fall asleep?”

“That sounds perfect.” I walk over to her expectantly and she pulls me down to the “launch” area of the lazy river and sits on the steps with her feet in the water.

I skip over to the tubes and climb on it next to Tessa’s legs, bracing myself on her so I don’t fall all the way in. I plant a quick kiss and as I slide my butt lower and lie down into the donut, my head resting on her knees.

“You’re a pretty amazing person, Tessa. Thanks for being you.” Her metal legs aren’t my favorite pillow, and I must have commented out loud because she’s laughing at me now, but the discomfort fades away as soon as she runs her fingers through my hair and lulls me to sleep.