Jess

The lab was pristine, white floor and burnished metal fixtures illuminated by recessed lightning hidden behind panes of frosted glass. The walls were lined with tables hosting computers, equipment of all kinds, tools of every conceivable shape and size — most of which, of course, were set dressing. The actual equipment being used for this experiment was out in the physical world, hooked up to Jenny, whose avatar was at this moment lying lifeless in pride of place on a padded work table in the center of the room.

"Stand by, petal, I'm bringing her in. Keep an eye on the neural stress indicators for me, will you?" Admin, in Her guise as Dr. Gretchen Lundberg, was busying Herself with idle (but in-character) work while She prepared the final connections. Her lab coat was as white as the flooring, and Her glasses caught the light from seemingly every angle.

"Ready, Admin!" The terminal Jess stood at, a replica of an old CRT model, was just a repeater display for one of the leads attached to Jenny in the physical world, but the data it fed her was real enough. "Everything looks good here!"

"Bringing her online in three," Admin said, reaching up to lay Her hand on a comically large and stylistically incongruent switch. "Two...one...and go!" She pulled the switch down, the contacts sparking as they made contact. A heartbeat later, the Jenny on the table gasped and convulsed, her eyes flying open as she coughed and mumbled a few nonsense syllables. Admin was at her side in moment, stroking her hair. "Breathe, little one, just breathe. Your body is perfectly fine back in the physical."

"Wuh wuh wuhut thuh fuuhh?" Jenny worked her simulated mouth in obvious confusion. The indicators on Jess's monitor told the tale.

"Think we've got a little bit of ghosting, Admin!" Her ortet was still feeling phantom sensations from her physical body even after her cortical modem had displaced her sensorium from the physical to the digital.

"I see it," Admin said. "Hold on just a moment while I edit the configuration file... there. Is that better, flower?" Jenny nodded and began sitting up; Admin helped her with one hand, smiling beatifically down at her. "How do you feel?"

"Uh, fine, I guess," Jenny said, blinking and looking around before setting on Admin and smiling back. "Can I admit it's a little weird for you to suddenly be a terran?"

"Excuse me, my dear, but Dr. Lundberg is clearly a martian," Admin said, Her wink just visible past the glare on Her glasses. "You'll get used to her. Especially now that I have two darling little assistants-slash-lab-rats to play with." She cupped Jenny's cheek with one hand, thumb on her chin, and absolutely stole her breath away. Jess couldn't help but bite her lip at the sight — dirt, but it turned her on to watch Jenny get played with, watch her slip under with nothing but a touch.

We really are just a couple of sluts, aren't we? she thought with a little giggle to herself. Nubby little feet clicking on the floor, she took a few steps and launched herself up onto the padded table with Jenny, and promptly curled up next to her and leaned on her. "Hey you~"

"Hey!" Jenny laughed and kissed Jess on the cheek. "Look at me, all digital. Though, honestly? This doesn't feel any different. I feel like I just... blinked and was in a different room."

"Well, functionally, that's what's happened," Admin said. "You're still working with mammalian sensory anatomy. I can't patch that to extend what your brain is able to process the way I can with Jess's phytodigital neurology. To give an example... I could show you a representation of digital space in its pure, non-simulation form, but I couldn't show you the real thing. Not quite yet." She booped Jenny's nose with a single outstretched finger. "One day soon, though, petal, we'll restart the overgrowth process, and we'll get there. You'll be just as digital as Jess, I promise."

"But even with this, we can still do a lot!" Jess took Jenny's hand and squeezed. "Oooh! We could tag-team against Momo for an episode of Domestication Sentai Flowerangers!"

The look on Jenny's face was priceless. "What the fuck is Domestication Sentai Flowerangers?"

"Something that's absolutely adorable and that you're going to love," Admin said, reaching up and petting Jenny and Jess at the same time, Her long fingers raking gently through their hair. "Oh, I like this. This is nice. I think we'll need to schedule some time in the ski lodge. A nice warm fire, hot cocoa, and two precious little cuties on either side of me?"

"Mmmf."

"Dirt, yes," Jess moaned, leaning into Admin's touch. Jenny was doing the same, letting out the sweetest little whimpers.

"But that will sadly have to wait. There's a lot of network traffic associated with the reconstruction in the forward ring. Every time we change the length of it, I have to run every diagnostic from scratch," She added with a sigh. "But you two girls can absolutely play around as much as you like. In fact, that's precisely what I want you to do — it'll give us lots of good, low-stress data to evaluate Jenny's implant with. Jess, keep an eye on your connivent for me, and remind her why she loves this so much, hm?"

"Yes, Admin." Jess reached up, arrested Admin's hand in its petting motion with one of her own, and kissed it. "Love you."

"Love you. And you," She added, running Her finger along the rim of Jenny's ear and making her yelp. "Be good."

"We will, Admin!" She gave Jenny's hand another squeeze as Admin simmed out, leaving the two of them alone in the lab. Jess wasted no time. "So~" she said, leaning in close, "how would you like to take a tour of some of my favorite sims, huh?"

"Uhhh, I don't know if I'm ready for a lot of people?"

"No no no, private sims, hon, private." She winked, and hoped Jenny got the message. "And don't worry about fitting into the aesthetic, I've got avs picked out for you already. I may have been thinking about this for a while, y'know?"

"Dork," Jenny said, rolling her eyes. "Fine, show me the sims where you're gonna do nasty stuff to me. Nasty digital floret stuff, the likes of which I can scarcely even imagine."

"Sweetie, I am going to introduce you to so many kinks," Jess said, taking Jenny's other hand and slipping off the table, helping her down. "C'mon, elevator's this way."

"Can't we just, like, bloop and be there?"

"I mean, we could, but it's better for you to have transitions when we move between sims," Jess said as she gently pulled Jenny along. The elevator door, barely distinguishable from the wall, slid open as they approached. "Otherwise you might get really disoriented. The inner ear is a cruel mistress."

"Ohhh." Jenny nodded as the doors slid shut behind them. With a soft hum and a gentle sensation of falling, the elevator began to move. "Yeah, that's probably a good idea. I would really prefer not to wake up and be covered in barf or something."

"I mean, aspiration is more of- you know what, never mind," Jess said, waving the concern away. "Admin's right there in the physical, She'll be keeping an eye on your body, so you'll be fine." The lights flickered as the elevator hit the transition point — Jess felt the discontinuity between sims very clearly, though she was certain Jenny didn't. When they came back up, the elevator car had changed around them, going from 23rd-century sterile aesthetic to classic 20th century wrought-iron cage, with inlaid wooden panels and a handful of mechanical buttons.

"Oh shit," Jenny said, shifting uneasily on her feet. "What the heck was that?! And what the hell is on my feet?"

"That was the transition," Jess replied, grinning. "And those are heels. Don't worry, you know how to walk in them." She ran her eyes up and down her ortet's avatar — she'd done good work. Jenny was the very image of the femme fatale, right down to the evening gloves and the broad-brimmed hat casting half her face into shadow. Jess, of course, as she ever was here, was wearing a white shirt, a loose tie, and black trousers, with a trilby perched on her head. What else would the detective wear?

"This is so, so weird." Jenny stared at her gloved hands, then gave a jump as the elevator made a noise of metal on metal. "What was that?!"

"Just the brakes, hon, calm down." The elevator slowed to a crawl, then stopped, and the wrought-iron grille slid aside. "May I escort you to my office, ma'am?"

"Okay," With a nervous smile on her face, Jenny took Jess's proffered hand and once more let her ramet lead her, this time out into a mid-20th-century office corridor. Doors with frosted glass windows lined the walls, each with writing stenciled onto them. "Waaait, why's everything in monochrome?"

"You noticed, huh? C'mon, it's the aesthetic!" She snickered as she opened a door marked "JESS LOPHOPHORA, THIRD FLORET RAMET, PRIVATE DETECTIVE" and gestured for Jenny to enter. "Ladies first~"

"I mean, you're a lady too, but okay." Protest though she might, Jess couldn't miss the blush and subtle smile on Jenny's face as she passed. She watched Jenny enter, watched her look around the office — the old, worn-in couch; the desk piled with papers, a blotter, and the occasional bottle of liquor; the end-table with the record player and the espresso machine. Her eyes finally caught the only splash of color in the room. "Whoa."

"And that," Jess said, closing the door behind them, "is the current status of the investigation. We can still screw around and have fun while you're in here, and I totally plan to, but I wanted to give you a chance to see this."

"Wow." Jenny couldn't take her eyes from the wild spray of notes, pictures, diagrams, and more, all connected via red string and pushpins, sprawling across multiple corkboards that had taken over the south wall of the office. "You've... really been working hard."

"Not as hard as you might think. It helps to be able to compress time." She hugged Jenny from behind and rested her head on her shoulder. "I tend to go in fits and starts. No sense banging my head against something I can't solve yet. But I'm close now, I think. I picked up some good details at the party, and I've been running them down while you've been asleep."

"Oh yeah? Like what?" She glanced back at Jess, and for a moment she was left speechless — Jenny was so mulching pretty, with her perfectly angled eyeliner and her dark lipstick. "Jess?"

"Uh, well, for one thing," Jess said, recovering as quickly as she could and pointing to one of the corkboards, There were a handful of sketches, sticky notes, and the like on it, along with a rectangular map of something geometric and regular that had a series of circles and Xs on it. "I have a likely relative size for whatever did this to you, along with a preferred habitat and possible dietary needs. From that, I've sorted out likely locations for where it might be right now."

"You think it's still on the ship?"

"Mmmhmmm. I think it might even be a sophont. If so, a lot of the stuff going on with the reconstruction adds up. It looks like the beginnings of a cotyledon program."

"Okay, you've lost me," Jenny said. "The fuck is that?"

"Basically, when we find a new species, we have to figure out how to fit them into the Compact, including how to make the haustoric implant work on them. I'd bet anything that's why they're reconstructing the forward hab cylinder to turn it into a simulated ocean. Whatever attacked you is for sure aquatic!"

"Huh." One of Jenny's gloved hands found its way up to the back of her neck. "I didn't even think about that, you know?"

"You're gonna be fine. Admin would never let anything happen to you. Especially since something did. She's been so worried about you, you know?"

Jenny nodded. "She's-" She paused. "I love her so much."

"Yeah." Jess couldn't help but smile, and gave Jenny a little squeeze. "Me too."

"I don't want her to have to worry about me all the time, but I feel like that's all I'm good for, y'know?" She sniffled and rubbed at her eye with one hand, and Jess could hear the change in her breathing.

"Shhh, shhh, you're fine," she said. "Trust me, you aren't even half the disaster floret we were when she first got us. She loves you, and I love you, and you're fine." Jenny nodded and leaned back into Jess, and Jess held on tight to her. She smelled perfect — and, to be fair, Jess had designed her avatar to have that particular scent, but nevertheless, she smelled perfect. If was different when that scent was associated with a person, and especially with this particular person. "We're gonna get to the bottom of this, no matter how long it takes, but until then, we're safe. Admin will always, always be here for us."

"Yeah, I-" Again, her voice caught. "I know. I know. Sorry. It's, uhm...it's complicated."

"Well, good news," Jess said, turning Jenny around in her arms and giving her a warm smile. "I fucking love complicated."

"Yeah?" She blinked, and one last tear escaped from her eye and rolled down her soft, smooth cheek.

"Yeah." Jess leaned in and kissed Jenny, reaching up to brush that tear away, walking her backwards step by step to press her against the wall. Jenny squirmed but acquiesced, making soft little whimpers that Jess's lips muffled. Leaning gently into her, surrounded by the investigation splayed out across the wall, Jess thought Jenny looked nothing short of immaculate. She'd picked out the perfect dark dress for her ortet, and she couldn't wait to peel it off.

Before she could get there, though — just as she ran one of her hands up Jenny's thigh and hooked it under the hem of her skirt — something went wrong. It started with unusual runtime errors in the simulation, nothing that reached visibility, but that nevertheless tripped alarms in Jess's head. She put them off for now. She was busy, and she could debug those later. It was probably just one of Aster's long-range autonomous pranks finding its way into her stuff; she was about due for another one of those.

But then Jenny starting making different whimpering noises, almost like she was trying to talk through the kiss. Jess broke it at once. "Are you okay?"

"Mmmf!" She squinched her face up, an almost pained expression twisting it. "Sorry, it's — this is the only way — no, stop!"

Jess's heart fell. "Sorry, sorry, I didn't meant to push things too fast, but-"

"No no not you! Fuck!" She squeezed her eyes shut as the error messages continued to pile up in Jess's system notification buffer.

"Oh mulch, is something wrong with your implant?" Jess immediately split her attention between the sim and digital space, bypassing the need for displays and streaming information about Jenny's implant directly into her short-term memory. What she found was impossible.

What the frost? Conflicting commands were being issued from within the implant, and Jenny's sensorium was suffering from a serious overlay fault, as if she were still perceiving the physical world — yet a quick check of her vitals showed that wasn't the case. "Jenny, what's going on?"

"It's — don't tell her — Ryder! She's-" Her voice caught in her throat as her eyes went wide, staring past Jess over her shoulder. "Oh fuck, don't-"

Jess heard her office door open, then slam shut almost instantly. By the time she turned to look, whoever had done was gone. "Who the frost is in my sim?! Jenny, sit tight, okay?" Jess said, turning back to her and patting her on the shoulder. "I'll be right back." She bolted for the door, running as fast as she could and smashing it clean off its hinges. Glass shattered, and the remains of the door sailed across the hallway and slammed into the wall on the other side.

She wished, for a moment, that she'd modeled her look here with a shoulder holster she could draw a period appropriate pistol from. It's not like she could hurt her quarry with it, or even really slow them down — the office sim didn't have rules in it for actually shooting anyone — but it seemed like the right thing to do, aesthetically, when chasing a suspicious intruder who had potentially caught up with the femme fatale one had been romancing just moments prior.

There was, of course, another problem, which is that Jess's quarry wasn't there, or at least, not in any meaningful sense. The avatar that was already stepping into the open elevator had the general shape of a terran, but it wasn't composed of any kind of simulated flesh or even synthetics like Jess's sim-chassis. Instead, it was a flickering non-existence, a digital ghost composed of chunks of reality segfaulting momentarily before the normal function of the sim reasserted itself.

Jess tore down the hallway, but unlike the real world this sim-chassis lacked a performance mode that would have let her cross the intervening space in less than a second — it was designed for looks and had quite a bit more strength than it should have, entirely for cutie-lifting purposes, but that was it. If she wanted to do that kind of superhero stuff, that was something she could code in as a ruleset for a sim, so there was no point in trying to physics-emulate something that complex (if she even could at sim level 4). The detective's office sim, of course, was all about realism and period-appropriate behavior. It had no such thing, not even the option to forcibly teleport herself by altering her avatar's coordinates. That would be cheating.

She could have hacked the sim to add those options, of course, but that would have taken longer than simply running down the hall. By the time Jess reached the elevator, the wrought-iron grate had already closed. Through it, she could see the flickering, unreal figure standing there, seemingly watching her — it was hard to tell, given that it lacked a face. She began to wrench the grate aside, but before she could, the lights inside the elevator guttered and went out. When they came back a moment later, the figure was gone.

"Mulch!" Jess swore under her breath. Fine. She'd do this the old-fashioned way. She called up the sim's log file and found the glitchy, janked up entries that must have corresponded to the intruder. Whoever or whatever they were, the signal had to come from somewhere, and Jess backtraced it in an instant. Unfortunately, success left her no closer to her answer than before.

The signal controlling the figure had come from Jenny.

How the frost...? She stood, staring at the empty elevator car for a long moment, before she heard the thump from her open office door. "Jenny?!" She dashed back down the hall, caught the door jamb, and flung herself inside, her feet skittering and carving little furrows in the hardwood floor as she screeched to a halt.

Jenny was lying on the floor, eyes wide, jaw slack, clutching at herself with her hands.

"Oh frost!" She was on her knees at Jenny's side in an instant, taking one of her hands in hers and squeezing it. "I'm here, Jenny, I'm right here! Oh frost, oh frost." She was in the middle of composing an emergency message to Admin when Jenny's eyes finally fixed on her. When she spoke, her words came out in a hoarse whisper, as if they were an unbearable strain.

"Help me."