The pilot floats with neutral buoyancy in the slurry of oxygen-infused muonic perfluorocarbons that fill her tank. Sealed ports made of body-safe platinum have been set in strategic places across her head and body to allow access to her major organs, blood vessels, and nerve clusters, with cables leading off her body and toward their relevant systems. A black mask covering her nose and mouth serves as her ventilator. Her eyes are closed, and they’ll stay that way as long as the tranquilizers do their job.

At the very edges of her awareness, a deal is struck. Money changes hands. Tests are conducted with samples of every kind of tissue that a human body contains, and the results are notarized and signed in triplicate. She dreams that the papers are signed in her blood. They aren’t, of course. The Empyrean military has a legal monopoly on her genome, now, and they aren’t likely to give any of it away for free. She can dream, though, that the men and women in suits have horns and forked tongues, that they speak backwards like the demons in old movies.

With nothing to anchor or guide her mind, she’s free to enjoy her last few minutes of dreamless sleep.

-

Consciousness comes slowly to the pilot. There's a dim but rising awareness of discomfort, of distant sounds distorted by the viscosity of the fluid that surrounds her. Her eyelids feel far too heavy to open, and her limbs don't respond at all. She can’t even seem to get her fingers to twitch. Just as she becomes aware enough for her trepidation to turn to panic, she becomes aware of a different noise–a voice. She tries to pinpoint where it’s coming from, but realizes that the sound seems to be coming from inside her own skull.

“Hi, Louise. My name is Denilah. Can you understand me? How are you feeling?”

When she tries to speak, she finds that she can't move her mouth at all, and not for lack of mandibular control. It feels like her jaw has been wired shut. Even still, she hears her own voice, slow, slurred, and barely coherent, but screaming at the top of her voice, nonetheless. "What did you do to me?"

There's a long pause before she gets any kind of response. Between the drugs and the sensory deprivation, she can't tell if it's a few seconds or a few minutes before the woman that had been speaking moments ago responds. The terror stirring in her belly seems like it's beginning to rise up through her throat to collect behind her teeth, a scream that she can't let out. She tries, but she doesn't hear her voice as she did a moment ago.

"Louise, please try to relax," the voice says. It's soft and sweet, soothing, but obviously rehearsed, which only aggravates her more. "The next few steps of the process are too sensitive to be done with you under anesthesia, so I'm going to be walking you through it. There's clearly some disorientation, so I'm going to start from the beginning. I'm giving you access to a camera, now."

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

She tries to curse and spit and lash out, but nothing happens. Another moment passes before her senses are flooded. Suddenly, she's able to see a room. It's really quite small, and somewhat oddly shaped--long and narrow, with bare metal for the walls, floor, and ceiling. One wall is covered with shelves that are stacked high with tools and computer equipment that she doesn't recognize, all firmly strapped down. The other wall is plastered with what appears to be worker's safety posters. At the opposite end of the room from her is a desk with about a dozen monitors spread out in a partial sphere such that it would take up the entire range of vision of anyone who is looking at it. The monitors are open to a variety of applications, all of which look absurdly complicated to Louise's mind. They seem to mostly be readouts for many different kinds of data, none of which she knows how to interpret properly.

"That's where you are, right now. You're aboard the E.S.S. Dominion, and this is the pilot's room. Now, your vitals to be stabilizing somewhat, so I'm going to give you back audio input access. Please do not yell at me."

Louise feels herself slowly gaining more complete awareness, memories piling back into her mind from wherever it was that they fled. A slow, creeping guilt forms in her for yelling at a woman who seems to be genuinely trying to help her through this.

"I'm sorry," she says. Her voice comes out much more clearly, this time, though it still sounds all wrong. The resonance is completely off. "I remember. Sorry."

-

Light pours in through the window of Louise's unit from the dayglow lamps outside. She does as much of her work as possible while the free light is around. She's in her tiny bathroom, barely big enough for one person to stand, and huge pile of black hair is tied up behind her head, to keep it out of the way. With a screwdriver in one hand and a pick in the other, she is delicately attempting to remove the lens of her artificial eye. It was required equipment for her last job as security personnel for a weapons dealer, and though the company paid for the subscription to the necessary software packages while she was employed there, when they terminated her due to downsizing measures the eye became a useless hunk of metal embedded in her eye socket. She could afford to pay for the software package herself, of course, if she didn't need to pay for rent. Since she does, though, she's trying a trick that she heard about.

With careful hands and a feather-light touch, she removes each of the six minuscule flush-screws from their positions around the false green iris of the artificial eye and places them in a tiny cup that she had laid out on the edge of her sink for the purpose. When she removes the last one, she carefully positions the pick to catch the ring of metal and sapphire glass that makes up the lens, and gently lowers it into the same cup. This exposes the circuity underneath, all of it far too complicated for her to understand. All she knows is what she heard some of the other poor schmucks in her position who have a little more knowledge have done. From the edge of the sink opposite the cup, she carefully lifts a thin, sharp blade. She raises it to the artificial eye, and carefully cuts two solder-bridges equidistant from each other, near the top and bottom of the eye. If the rumors are to be believed, this severs the connections to the internal security chip, and should give her access to the entire software library. It's not like she actually needs all of that stuff, she just wants to have depth perception again.

Once she has put the iris-lens back onto the eye, and her arms ache from the effort of having them lifted for so long, she puts all of her tools down and leaves her bathroom. She lays down on her bed, just barely large enough to hold her, and stares up at the white, sterile ceiling of her government-assigned housing unit. Worst case scenario, she supposes, is that this thing shorts and her optical nerve gets electrocuted. Nothing risked, nothing gained. She reaches a hand up to her temple and places two fingers into the metal divots, there. The implant reads her biometrics, and attempts to activate the eye.

Nothing.