Two dozen different cameras feed signals through optical fibers in the walls, floors, and ceilings of the ship, splitting and merging. All of these signals converge into Louise’s tank, where a cable feeds the information to the port connected to her occipital lobe. She can see nearly every square inch of the interior of the Dominion simultaneously, with the limitations imposed by her optical nerves removed. Everything is as in-focus as everything else. The sensation that this initially caused made her vomit the contents of her stomach into her liquid respirator, but over the past few hours, she’s grown surprisingly used to the intense optical stimuli.

The woman who had called herself ‘Denilah’ had set her the task of trying to figure out how all of the rooms connected to each other on her own, rather than providing her a three-dimensional schematic. To that end, she’d given her access to an application that she could use to try to map the rooms, controlling it with her thoughts. Louise presumes that this is an exercise meant to train her ability to think three-dimensionally. She should feel much more insulted by that than she is, but she’s become nearly certain that they’re dampening her emotional responses. Fine by her. As long as this gives her time to think. She uses the mapping program to construct her own internal model of the ship while she appraises the choices that brought her to this point.

Was renting out her nervous system to the military for the next ten years of her life really the only way out? It felt like it was at the time. At a certain point, when you don’t have anything else left, selling your body is all you can do to keep going on. A significant part of Louise, though, is beginning to question the inherent value of ‘going on’ that everyone but her has always seemed to feel. She let her atavistic impulse to keep living get the best of her, though, and it’s too late to back out, now. Unfortunately, she doesn’t have long to ruminate.

“Hi, Louise. Just checking in. How do you think you’re coming along?”

Denilah is just insufferably chipper for Louise’s taste. Her nearly sing-song tone is enough to set every nerve in her body on edge. Or, at least, all the ones that aren’t already on edge from processing all of this visual input. She mentally commands the mapping application to slot the airlock in beside the ‘mud room’, as she has come to refer to it in her head, before she responds.

“Do they pay you to pretend to be my friend, or are you just doing that because you enjoy watching my blood pressure reading go up?”

There is silence for a long moment, and Louise smirks in satisfaction.

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“They pay me to make you comfortable. Would you be more comfortable if I were less friendly?”

“Frankly, yes.”

With no hesitation and no forewarning, Denilah’s cheery tone dissipates like so much smoke, and becomes the perfect model of Empyreal professionalism. “Okay. Status report, Specialist?”

That, she can work with.

“I’m no longer experiencing nausea or migraines from simultaneous video feed exposure, Lieutenant. I’m about three-quarters done with my map of the ship. Is this exercise supposed to be training my ability to think in three-dimensions, or is it just to help the controls mesh with my motor control centers?”

There is another pause, a much longer one. Louise constructs the arrangement of the lower storage rooms on her lower map, in silence.

“You’re taking to all of this remarkably well. We should be having you move to simulated missions within the next few days. We’ll need to splice you with the Oracle you’ll be working with, first, of course.”

Louise imagines the Lieutenant smiling with sick, perverse glee from behind whatever terminal she works at. She knows from an old coworker that Oracle splicing can’t be done under anesthesia.

“Cool. When do I get to start on my multi-channel audio processing?”

-

Louise stares at the notification on her unit’s central terminal. She’s been doing that for the last ten minutes, hoping that she could change the characters on the screen (or their very clear meaning) by sheer force of will alone. They’re lowering her stipend on short notice. She’s not going to be able to afford the subscription on her living unit this quarter. All of the fields that she has experience in require, among other things that she doesn’t have, depth perception. She’s out of things to sell, and out of options.

Or, well, she’s nearly out of options.

She runs her hand idly across the cool, solid metal of the spinal implant at the base of her neck, as she considers. The terminal goes idle, and the screen darkens, reflecting her own face back at her. Her cybernetic eye stares at her, unseeing, from within her own skull. Just beneath her left collarbone, she sees the port used to charge her cardiovascular implants. Her hair sticks to her head in matted clumps, and her lips are red and raw, missing skin. Her eyes look bruised and black from exhaustion. Glitter clings to her cheekbones and jawline from makeup that she couldn’t get to wash off fully.

With a sigh, she presses her finger to the screen of the terminal, navigating to the instant messaging function. She taps out a message to someone that she was very much hoping that she wouldn’t need to talk to ever again.

> Declan, If you’re still looking to buy, I’m selling.