The Versk AI comes online. Lanis relaxes into it, lowering the barrier within her mind, both psychological and cyber-physiogenic. Her eyelids flutter, and she’s suddenly occupying two spaces simultaneously. It’s like daydreaming, but far more intense, more like a lucid dream, both awake and in a fantasy.

She’s in her old fleet cadet uniform, snug blue and white with the star of the Navigator corps across her left breast. She leans against an old, wooden fence in the middle of a rolling meadow. Undulating hills spread out on either side of her vision, and above her is a single fat cloud, lazily drifting across a piercingly blue sky. Behind her, in the distance, is a dark forest, and out in front of her is a similar forest, deep and unfamiliar. She saw a picture of a scene like this in a show once when she was a child, set in a country that used to be called France. She forgets what the show was about, but the scene has always served her well as the first point of contact with a new AI.

She squints. Out from the edge of the forest, perhaps a hundred meters away, walks a person. A young woman. She makes up the distance to the fence with dreamlike rapidity, a series of images stitched together— smelling the grass, staring at the cloud, giving a playful kick to some unseen stick— and then is leaning on the fence across from Lanis.

The woman across from her is young, younger even than Lanis. She wears a white t-shirt stuffed into tight black pants, and her hair short and black and tousled, like she’s just roughhoused with a playmate. Her eyes are green and piercing, and they squint at Lanis with a challenge. It isn’t the self-schema that she would expect from a Versk AI, but as soon as the thought arises Lanis chides herself. No assumptions.

“This is nice,” the AI’s avatar says, looking up to the sky. She knocks on the old fence with her porcelain fist. “I’ve never seen a firewall like this. Impressive.” She sticks out a hand over the fence.

“I’m Ether.”

“Lanis.”

She takes the woman’s hand in her own, feeling the protocols exchange, the first tentative accesses given. Ether closes her eyes and takes a deep breath. When she opens them again, they’re a different color— grey, Lanis’ own, and she has the dreamlike sensation of seeing herself reflected back in those eyes.

“Oh god, I thought the last pilot had problems,” Ether says, giving an exaggerated sigh. Lanis smiles.

“Yeah, I saw that Fornis fellow at the end of the session. He seemed a bit, ah, tightly wound.” Lanis cocks her head to the gate next to them.

“You want to know what’s wrong with me? I’ll show you, if you want,” Lanis says. There’s a challenge in her voice. She walks over and unlatches her side of the gate.

Ether smiles, challenge accepted, her teeth white in the sun, and says “I hope it’s more exciting than Fornis’ savior complex.” Lanis flicks open the latch on her side of the gate, pulls the gate open, and walks into Lanis’ side of the meadow.

Lanis lets loose. Half of AI integration is a sort of instinct; when to hold back, and when to give in. Boldness: she gives in.

The meadow dissolves, and they’re falling into the deep memories of her life, hitting the milestones of her profession. The welling feeling of joy and dread when she found out Fleet had chosen her. Standing at attention at orientation. The days of studying, blurring into each other. The other AIs she’s known, training together. Navigator training, a rhythm of taxing competition, meditation, and implant calibrations. Navigator Sanislov, his confident demeanor as he walked through the jump to Barrack, Lanis nervously watching, impressed by the ease of which he helped shift the ship through Warp. HMS Demeter, the horror of the jump condensed into the moment of her mental break, her trauma, the convalescence, the debauchery, Mirem, the past few days, the sex, the sweat, the ache. She can feel Ether shudder.

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They sit across from each other on two logs in a small clearing in the forest on Lanis’ side of the meadow. Ether considers Lanis with her reflected grey eyes in a long moment of real-time silence.

“Nice to meet you, Lanis,” the Ether says, softly. The voice seems to echo deep into her mind, spreading out into her fingertips; a buzzing sensation and lifting of her heart.

“Fucking hell,” Lanis hears the tech Ash mutter. “Look at those waveforms.” A low whistle from Sander, all in the form of distant waves crashing against the rocks of her mind.

“You’re… certainly not like the others. What are you doing here?”

Lanis leans back on one the trees, her hands crossed behind her waist. She can smell the rich forest decay, feel the breeze rippling the leaves overhead; the memory of a forest, more real here than it perhaps ever was in her past.

“I miss this,” she says slowly. “It’s what I was good at. Working with an AI. I’ve always been better at that than working with people, I think.” She runs a hand across the bark of the tree, feeling its roughness.

“I thought I would be part of a ship core. Living in this,” she says, gesturing around her. “That’s why my dream construct is pretty good.”

Ether snorts. “Pretty good? This is insane. As in, you should literally be psychotic with this level of facsimile construction. I’ve never seen or heard anything like it.” She picks up a moss covered rock, turns it in her hand. A grey earthworm squirms a complaint. “Fornis and Vallicent and the others just load up the standard pairing modules. Nothing close to this.” She looks at Lanis again, and squints. “Why Versk though? And why Suits?” She asks.

Lanis inhales deeply and exhales through her nose. Her actual body does the same. Projection dreaming at this level requires quite a level of neurological functioning, and she needs all the oxygen she can get. Her eyes flutter in the glow of the AI lab as Mirem watches, unconsciously chewing a nail.

“Well, a couple things. First, Mirem. I ah, doubt I’d be here if not for her. There’s uh, maybe some chemistry there.” Ether rolls her eyes, as if to say, typical human. “Second, and no offense, it strikes me that Corporate Security and Suit AIs would be a lot more interesting than planetary Admin. Fewer guardrails, though, I admit I don’t know the next thing about their governance structure, or how Ethics is involved. But, now that I’ve met you… I mean, you’re not what I expected either.” she meets Ether’s wide grey eyes. “I was good. Really good. I still think I could have been a ship commander if they hadn’t made me a navigator and if I hadn’t…” she trails off, then shakes her head. “If we get along, and I think we could, aren’t you curious how far we could go?”

Ether smiles. She tosses the moss covered rock in her hand. Then, in a fluid heaving motion, she stands and hurls the rock up into the sky. Lanis shades her eyes as she follows its trajectory. It doesn’t drop though; it just keeps going, a speck, disappearing into the sky. Suddenly there is a blossoming against the blue, like a hundred patterned fireworks in red and purple. The word YES spells itself slowly against the sky.

“Hah!” Ether yells, and then giggles, holding a hand in mock coyness over her mouth. “I didn’t know if that would work.” She continues, “I can see that your mind has some residual damage from whatever happened. But still, your mind is really quite spectacular. I can see why Fleet recruited you. I wonder if they know what they lost.”

In a dreamy blink Ether is standing beside her, her hand on Lanis’ shoulder. It’s the slightest of touches, but Lanis’ breath still catches; the touch feels real, and the metaphor has real neurological implications. A more direct pathway opens up between Lanis’ synapses, the synthetic webs that Fleet implanted across her brain, and the AI mind.

“I trust you. You can trust me.” The smile turns to a grin. “Let’s see what we can do.”

Then, blackness.