Jenny

There was something really magical about Jess's lips. It probably should have felt stranger to be kissing herself, or at least, the person she'd been, the person she was slowly becoming again, but there was nothing odd or unpleasant in the way that Jess kissed her, the way she backed her up against her conspiracy wall and held her there. Stars, but it felt good, made her head spin just a little, made her almost forget for a second that she was in a VR simulation of a detective's office from some ancient movie or another. Kissing a girl in monochrome didn't feel any different, but it definitely added a certain special quality to the experience. A je ne sais quois. Whatever that was.

The room began to flicker around her as Jess's tongue slipped into her mouth. She'd have to make a note of that to Jess later — either her sim was glitching or, more likely, there was some minor issue with her cortical modem. She was starting to feel that weird phantom body sensation again, too, come to think of it-

it's not the implant, it's just me, i'm trying a few things

Well, try them less, it feels weird. She tried to focus back on the kissing, waiting for the flickering and odd feelings to lapse, but they didn't. Ryder?

sorry, this is important. i think i figured out how to-

The world suddenly lurched sideways for a moment, and Jenny let out a whimper. Stop it! Jess noticed something was wrong at once and broke the kiss.

"Are you okay?"

Jenny opened her mouth to explain, but the world lurched again, worse this time. "Mmmf!" What are you doing?

i'm trying to instance myself separately, and i think i see what i need to do

Don't! Jenny thought as hard as she could. Let Admin figure that out! "Sorry, it's-

this is the only way

-this is the only way — no, stop!" Stop! Don't fuck with it!

Jenny forced her eyes open. The room around her was a swirling, half-ghosted mess that she could barely stand to look at, but worse was the look on Jess's face. "Sorry, sorry," she said saying, utterly crestfallen, "I didn't mean to push things too fast, but-"

"No, no, not you!" Jenny cut her off. She was seeing double now, and squeezed her eyes shut again before nausea could overwhelm her. "Fuck!" Ryder, what the fuck are you doing?!

you don't want to leave, but i have to do something. i think i know why I have to go home, jen. i have to warn them.

Warn who? About what?! Jess was saying something, but Jenny could hardly parse her words. The feeling of disruption, of disconnection, was getting worse.

about the affini. about what they do to you. how they get inside your mind and rewrite it. i've watched you change, jen. i'm not going to let them do that to me. this is probably going to hurt, and i'm sorry, but i have to do this.

Stop it, Ryder! She opened her eyes for a brief moment and shut them again almost instantly — somehow, she was still perceiving the room even with her eyes closed, and trying to open them just resulted in double vision that was getting worse all the time. Whatever you're doing is really messing me up!

i know, and i'm sorry. i just can't think of another way to do this. it's not like i can just ask them

But who would you even be warning? Humans have been domesticated for over twenty years, Ryder!

i don't know. if i had answers, i'd give them to you. brace yourself, i think i've got this figured out

Please don't! The phantom sensations redoubled, and Jenny curled in on herself trying to escape them, fruitlessly. Somehow, through the storm of sensory input, she recognized a familiar touch, a hand on her shoulder. She opened her eyes, forced herself to meet Jess's, and the could see the worry in them as easily as she could see the little servos ticking back and forth.

"Jenny's what's going on?"

"It's-

don't tell her!

-don't tell her — Ryder! She's-" Another pulse came, and Jenny fought the urge to shut her eyes even as her doubled vision swam and took on new shapes, a different vista overlaid on the one her own virtual eyes were feeding her brain. In that other viewpoint, she was staring at the back of a woman in a suit; behind her, a woman in a dark dress that left her knees bare, her face half-shaded by a broad hat.

She was looking back at herself.

Ryder?! She caught a glimpse of something, barely visible in her distorted vision, a flickering human-like shape her eyes refused to focus on.

best i could do. believe me, it doesn't feel any better to be than it feels to look at

Then stop!

i can't. just hold on. i'll be right back

The shape began to move, its stride a shuddering, glitching series of hiccups. Nevertheless, for all its jerky half-animated nature, it had a quick stride, and by the time Jenny could force herself to speak — "Oh fuck, don't-" — it already had the door open.

"Who the frost is in my sim?!" Jess shouted, turning just as the door slammed shut. "Jenny, sit tight, okay?" She was already moving by the time she said it, one last pat on the shoulder before she launched herself into the door like a rocket, blasting it off its hinges as she sailed through it into the hall. She slumped back against the wall as she heard Jess run off down the hall, caught a glimpse of her running directly at her as she stepped into the elevator. The grate closed just in time to keep Jess out, and just in time to keep her from tearing back the wrought-iron-

There was something drifting in the sky, a shape that wrapped around on itself, enclosed within the cage-universe that was the ship. She stayed there for only a moment — there were too many witnesss — instead using the more expansive permissions of the simulation to transfer herself out of the entertainment simulations entirely.

The sensation of the transfer was borderline intolerable. She had the same mammalian neurology as Jenny, after all. For a moment afterward, it was all she could do to slump against the wall and try to ride out her shared brain's insistence that she'd eaten something toxic and needed to vomit. When the world stopped spinning, she could begin to get to work.

The hallway was long, possibly infinitely so, its arched ceiling high and letting in what seemed like sunlight (though the color was a little wrong) through its glasslike construction. Beyond it, leaves in a thousand colors stained the light, transforming the hallway's polished wooden surfaces into a kaleidoscopic tunnel. It was beautiful, she had to admit, but she wasn't here to appreciate it — she was here to find her way into whatever part of the ship's computer controlled their hypermetric communications array.

Jenny arched her back, blinking involuntarily as her gut seized and her head began to pound. She wondered, briefly, why she was suddenly lying on the floor and staring up at the ceiling. In the distance, she could hear Jess's voice calling, could hear her footsteps like hammerblows against the wooden floor — and suddenly she was there, squeezing Jenny's hand, her mouth moving and sounds coming out. "I'm here, Jenny, I'm right here! Oh frost, oh frost-"

"Help me," Jenny managed to croak out before the world turned sideways on her again.

The door in front of her read "Systems Access Directory" in alien script. She could read it because Jenny could read it. So much of her was Jenny, the knowledge, the experience, the feelings. That was the worst part of it all — what was the point of being another person if you were just a carbon copy of someone else? You brought nothing to the table. You were superfluous. She was ticking away inside their shared brain, her thoughts consuming calories that didn't need to be consumed because she was just another Jenny, and what was the point of that?

But she did have one thing to cling to. one impulse that, slowly but surely, was growing. Or was it the Jenny-knowledge, sticking to it and slowly accreting more and more of what that impulse meant? She didn't know, but she had to trust that, whichever it was, it was the correct choice to make. She couldn't escape — she'd only barely managed to hijack the body while Jenny was sleeping, and those few instances she'd managed to influence it while Jenny was waking had been largely unintentional. Maybe, given time, she could learn to take control of their shared body, and then, maybe, she could go wherever it was she was supposed to go.

But she didn't have time. She could see the way the Affini had crawled inside Jenny's mind, could see it shifting, could see it yielding to the Affini's desires. She was too far gone already. No, there was no hope for her — the best Ryder could do would be to take control of the body and leave with her. It would hurt, but it would be for the best. She'd recover, perhaps. But the best was beyond her now. The Affini knew about her, and it was only a matter of time before they used the same tricks on her, turned her pliant and biddable. She didn't have time to learn how to take the body, and it was only luck and the cortical modem that offered her a last, desperate ploy.

She couldn't take the body, couldn't rescue Jenny, maybe couldn't even escape herself — but she could send a warning. Wherever she was supposed to go, whoever she was supposed to go to, if they were listening, they'd at least know what was coming.

Maybe, if they knew what was coming, if they had time to prepare, they might stand a chance.

"Petal?!" There was another human in the simulation now — Dr. Lundberg, which was to say, Admin, was looming over her, on one knee as the warm, soft palm of Her hand came to rest on her forehead. There wasn't much Jenny could do — even shifting her eyes to Admin's required a herculean effort. Something was wrong. "I'm here, Jenny. Oh mulch, not again, not again!"

"What's going on, Admin?"

"Hold on, I'm checking the logs," She said, Her eyes glazing over for just a moment.

"There was someone else in the sim, but— but the signal was coming from Jenny! I thought it was one of Aster's pranks but then Jenny mentioned a 'Ryder,' and I have no idea-"

"Jenny is a pluribus, flower," Admin said, coming back to Herself. "Ryder is the other sophont in their system. I've taken the relevant logfile and I'm cross-referencing her system registry record with it, but there's no question that what happened was Ryder using the cortical modem to sim in herself. It's my fault, I mentioned it might be possible, but I didn't think she'd try to do it on her own. I didn't think she could."

"Right? I mean, using the same modem like that is probably sending all kinds of junk data into Jenny's sensorium! Aren't there safeguards built in to keep that from happening?"

"Yes, there are," Admin replied. She gently traced Her thumb across Jenny's lips, giving her heart a flutter. "Don't worry, my love. I won't let anything bad happen to you. I promise." She glanced up at Jess and hissed "How the frost did Ryder get root access to the haustoric implant?"

The interior of the sphere, which had to be at least a kilometer across, was an intricately-inlaid field of triangles, like a geodesic dome. Ryder drifted in the center of it — not stranded, strangely, since the rules of this sim allowed her to simply slew through the interior space at will. There was no wind in her face as she slid through the intervening space at impossible speeds. The sim didn't model it, and in any case, even if it did, she didn't have a face and might not have felt it to begin with.

It was frustrating, the limitations of working this way. The hardcoded restrictions on multi-avatar simming through a single cortical modem were something she hadn't been able to bypass directly, but by hijacking the anti-ghosting protocols, she'd been able to construct something of a workaround, even if it was hammering her with more and more spatial dysphoria. The further afield she went from Jenny, the worse it got, but they would both have to bear it.

She arrived in front of a triangle marked "Fleet Communications Services" and attempted to access it, but was rebuffed. Neighboring triangles offered the same — this level of access was beyond a mere floret's whim, it seemed, and she was saddled with Jenny's identity as far as the computer systems were concerned.

Still, this wasn't a dead end. The beauty of the simulation access protocols was that they allowed biological sophonts to access systems through simulation, since they couldn't natively interface with dataspace — meaning that, while lateral connections in the Canopy Layer of the ship's systems were minimized for security reasons, the same would not be true at a deeper level. All she had to do now was convince the system to allow her to go deeper, to places in faster time where organic-brained sophonts weren't supposed to.

It would hurt. It would hurt a lot.

But she had to do this.

"Frost, mulch, roots! She's going deeper!"

"What, into the Understory?" Jess was at her side, opposite Admin, fiercely clinging to Jenny's hand. it broke Jenny's heart to see her so worried, but there was nothing she could do except feel the thrashing, wracking chaos that surged through her mind.

"Lower." Admin grimaced. "I don't know what could possibly possess her to do this. Ryder, if you can hear me, stop this at once! Biological terran brains need special preparation to safely experience compressed time!"

"Why's she doing this?!"

"I don't know, flower," Admin said. "I know little and less about Ryder. Perhaps I should have probed harder. But now, all we can focus on is bringing her back up to absolute time. It's the only way we're going to save them."

It was a library, that much was clear, but it was a library like no other Ryder (which was to say Jenny) had ever seen before. Each hexagonal room was but a single node in a seemingly infinite tapestry of seemingly identical rooms, and each wall a towering edifice of shelves packed with books. Ryder had sampled no few of them, but thus far each contained gibberish. Perhaps she was looking at raw data without the appropriate codec to process it, or perhaps this was all some kind of colossal vanity project by a bored librarian. Whatever it was for didn't matter — all that mattered was that her portsweep had identified this simulation as an ideal point of attack, as it connected to so many other systems at a basal level. This would let her bypass access restrictions, she was sure of it.

Alas, finding her way through the library was proving more difficult than she'd anticipated. This was compounded by the pounding headache she'd developed, echoing from somewhere in the back of what her shared proprioception insisted was her head. Maybe she was feeling Jenny's headache, or maybe she was feeling the echo of her own headache off of Jenny. Either way, her head was killing her.

She'd been wandering for what felt like hours now. There had to be a way out. There had to be.

Maybe in the next room.

Jenny could barely process what was going on around her. Was she breathing? Was she in the sim, in real life, or wandering the stacks of some dark library? Flashes of color lit up the greyscale of her vision, and sounds she couldn't hear echoed in her ears. She felt two hands tightly gripping her own, and that was the one thing she could anchor herself to.

"I've put out a floret emergency order on the network. It's not enough, though. I'm leaving nothing to chance."

"What do you mean?"

"I need to stay here in absolute — I have to look after Jenny's body. That means I need you to go somewhere for me, flower." Jenny's eyes managed to focus long enough for her to catch a glimpse of Admin reaching across her body to put a hand on Jess's shoulder. "Go to this network address. It's deep in the Roots. Deeper than you've ever been. Be sure to stage yourself on the way back up or you might suffer some experiential data corruption."

Jess tried to put on a determined look, but even in her current state Jenny could see the fear. She knew her own face, after all. "Okay, but what do I do when I get there?"

"Just say hello," Admin said with a weak smile. "She'll know what to do from there."