Jenny

 

Her head was pounding, and her half-ghosted body felt as though she'd run two marathons back to back. Every so often, she got flickers of the office, moving like treacle, that landed like hammerblows. She didn't have much longer. She had to find her way out of this damned library before-

Wait. There was a door, set into one of the bookshelves. It was nothing but a perfectly ordinary door, with a polished handle that gleamed in the dim light of the library. None of the other bookshelves had had a door. This had to be important. Maybe it was a way out. Maybe she was deep enough now that she could get into the hypermetric communications array and finally send that warning. Once she'd done that, what came next didn't matter. She reached out, laid her hand on the knob, and-

---

One minute she was asleep, and the next, Jenny was wide awake. Somewhere in the back of her mind it tickled the memory of what coming out of Affini anesthesia was like — no hangover, no grogginess, just a switched flipped, boop, asleep, boop, awake, easy as that. She tried to sit up, but found herself swaddled in heavy blankets — when she looked around, she found herself back in her room in the hab.

"What the-?"

where are we, what happened

I dunno, Jenny thought, squinting as she pushed harder and sat up. She had a dull headache, and when she reached up to rub the back of her head she found something soft and mossy growing there. "Huh?" Her fingers grew numb as she touched it, gently tingling, and she pulled her hand away quickly. Probably shouldn't touch that.

i don't remember what happened

Yeah, well, I do. Jerk. She crossed her arms and glared at... well, at nothing. It wasn't as if she had anything in her room that was a designated stand-in for Ryder. What the hell were you thinking?!

i remember that, obviously. and i don't regret anything i did, it was necessary. but i don't remember how we got here

You're such an asshole sometimes, you know that? Why would you— But her thought was cut off as Admin suddenly appeared at the balcony, Her lips pursed with concern. Jenny's heart leapt with sudden joy. "Admin!"

"Good, good, you're awake," She said, Her vines relaxing fractionally. A few reached out to pet her, and she leaned into the touch happily. "How are you feeling, little one?"

"A bit headache-y, but okay." She couldn't help but smile. Admin was here. Everything was going to be alright. She let her eyes drift shut again, curled the fingers of one hand around one of Admin's vines. She heard the clonk of metal on wood, and nearly opened her eyes to it, but she knew the sound of those servomotors, and within seconds she felt Jess's arms around her.

"I'm so glad you're okay," she whispered in Jenny's ear. "I was so scared."

Jenny put an arm around Jess's chassis and gave her a gentle squeeze to reassure her. "It's okay. I'm okay. I think." She opened her eyes, looked up at Admin. "Am I okay?"

"You're going to be alright," Admin said, nodding. "We had to do a little emergency brain surgery to patch a vulnerability in your haustoric implant

what?!

but it's very minor and won't require much more recovery time. Just leave that little patch of moss at the back of your neck alone, alright?"

"Okay, Admin," Jenny said, nodding, the memory of the incident slowly filtering back into her brain. You fucking rooted me?!

your implant, not you

My brain is like 50% implant by volume, dick!

and i didn't touch any of the parts of it that are you

You almost killed us both!

i did not, we're fine, and anyway, this is more important than either of us

Fuck off!

"Argument?"

Jenny glanced over to Jess, realizing that she'd had her face scrunched up angrily the whole time. "Uhh, yeah. Ryder's mad. But I'm mad at her, too. I can't believe she did that!"

"I'm quite cross with her as well," Admin said, "but don't worry, my little nybble. She will not be doing anything like that again.Will you, Ryder? Ryder, sudo echo No, Admin."

no, admin

what

what?!

"Oh, she didn't like that," Jenny said, covering her mouth as she giggled.

"She will learn to, eventually." Admin leaned in close, Her many eyes flaring shades of purple and red. "Jenny, none of the following is addressed to you, alright? I'm speaking exclusively to Ryder right now, whom I am very disappointed in."

what did you do to me?!

"She's, uh, kinda freaking out, actually," Jenny muttered. Admin's eyes were full of danger, but they were still so, so pretty. She couldn't help but stare.

"We'll come to that in a moment, petal. Ryder, in addition to the surgical intervention to prevent you from seizing control of the haustoric implant on a hardware level — which, I will admit, was quite clever, even if it was also extremely dangerous — I've installed a number of post-hypnotic commands. Some are for disciplinary purposes; others, to help you and Jenny develop a greater level of control over the organization and expression of your system. For example, if I need to speak directly to you: sudo exec sh ryder."

The feeling that came next was almost like vertigo, but not quite,

oh what the fuck

a headrush sensation that made her feel like she was about to fall over even though she didn't move an inch. "What the f- oh shit, oh shit," Ryder muttered, working the fingers of her hands — her hands. She was on the outside, she was the one driving the body, not just puppeting it through Jenny's sleeping mind

wait is this what it's like for you

"You get used to it," Ryder muttered. She looked up at Gallica nervously, suddenly very aware of the beating of her heart. "You can... you can just do that?!"

"Arvense and I did a bit of poking around and testing while we had you in medical hypnosis, and we discovered we were able to switch you in and out with the appropriate stimulus. It's not particularly difficult once you know what you're looking for," Gallica said. Her vines were still coiling dangerously around Ryder, and Jess wasn't letting go either — in fact, if anything, she held on tighter, even when Ryder shot her an annoyed look. "Since your system architecture allows for it, I expect you two will figure out how to do it on your own, now that you've felt it for yourselves. To reiterate, now that I have you out here where I can speak to you directly, I am very disappointed in you, Ryder."

ooooh, you're in trouble

Shut up! "I only did what I had to," she said out loud. "You don't- you don't know what it's like, being surrounded by- having to- you're dangerous!"

"You have no idea how dangerous," Gallica said, her voice troublingly cool. "But fortunately for you, we are here to take care of you, not to harm you."

"You forget, I've seen what you've done to Jenny from the inside," Ryder said. "I watched it happen, watched you change her, watched you twist her-"

"Enough." The force in Gallica's voice was enough to steal Ryder's, enough that even Jess went stone-still. "I will not have you speak about Jenny like that — though, for your information, she's required only the lightest of touches to find her place at my side again. Jenny knows

yeah!!

where she belongs, where she is loved, and who loves her. She trusts me, and she trusts Jess. You, on the other hand, do not, and in that mistrust you chose to endanger not only her life but your own. I will not permit that to happen again."

"I only regret that I failed," Ryder hissed, furrowing her eyebrows. "I couldn't just... let it happen. I had to try to warn them, let them prepare, give them a chance against you!"

Gallica and Jess were silent for a moment, and slowly Ryder began to understand just how incredibly fucked she was. "Explain, please," Gallica said. "Warn who?"

"I don't fucking know!" Ryder shouted back at her. Being the one in front, driving the body, meant she felt everything so much more powerfully than she did before — she felt the hot, stinging sensation in her eyes, the pounding in her chest, the clenching in her guts. She didn't like it one bit. "I don't remember anything that isn't just something of Jenny's, except that I need to go home. I just... I know you'd never let me go, because I'm fucking stuck to Jenny, and you'd never let her go, so I'm stuck here with you too. And then you found out about me because she fucking snitched on me, and you were going to do the same thing to me you did to her! I had to warn them now, while I still wanted to!"

"I see." The reds and purples in Gallica's eyes slowly began to be replaced with a deep indigo, cool and infinitely deep. It was no less terrifying. "You know, I'd just submitted the paperwork for your authority-partition pluribus wardship, during which I would evaluate your capacity for independent function — and, given how I prefer to let my florets wander, were you suited for independence you would have enjoyed, more or less, the run of the ship. But your decisions have made that quite impossible now." She leaned in closer, close enough that Ryder felt the urge to lean away even as Jess reached out to gently stroke Gallica's cheek. "Welcome to the family, Ryder Lophophora."

"N-no!" Ryder hissed. "You can't do this!"

"I can and I have," Gallica replied smoothly, the corner of her enormous lips quirking in the slightest of smiles. "Don't worry, petal, we'll sign a proper contract when you're a touch more pliant, but I assure you, all the paperwork has been submitted. You are my floret. You belong to me. Fight if you want, but I will break you, and you will thank me for it."

"I'll never

yeah you will

break- shut up! I'm not talking to you!" She squinched up her eyes and clenched her jaw against the giggling — the giggling — she could feel in the back of her mind.

ryder, think about it. you're like 95% me by volume, right?

"That has nothing to do with

she's already broken us twice, smartass, you're not even going to be a challenge

what's g-" Ryder's breath caught in her throat as Jenny replied to the thought

yeah see it's not so fun on this side of it, is it?

she was still in the process of articulating. "Stop it!"

sorry. but i'm not wrong

Gallica's vines brushed softly across Ryder's head. "Jenny, flower, whatever you're doing, please let Ryder get her thoughts together, alright?"

yes, admin. oh, uhm, tell her i said that, okay?

Ryder bit her lip, clutching twin handfuls of the blanket she was still half-buried under. "It's not fair. It's not fair! You can't do this!" Hot shame boiled up to Ryder's cheeks, and she felt her stomach turn over. Being embodied was not all it was cracked up to be. How did Jenny tolerate it?

i mean, there's a reason admin was uploading us

"I can," Gallica said, her vines tightening around Ryder, "and I will. Beneath this feral shell is a sweet little sophont who deserves to be loved, cherished, given the structure she needs to thrive and the freedom to pursue self-actualization. You will be happy, Ryder. You will wonder why you ever fought me." Her smile grew wider, into a sharp-toothed grin. "Jenny, just sit back and enjoy the ride for now. We're going to get this body of yours properly fed and bathed, and it's very much Ryder's turn to enjoy a little pampering."

yes admin!

It is so embarrassing to share a skull with you, Ryder thought.

---

Jenny sighed happily and burrowed deeper into Jess's embrace, listening to the ticking and whirring sounds from inside her chassis as she rode the afterglow down to a warm and comfortable equilibrium. The fluffy walls of their pet bed rose up around them, cradling them atop Admin's giant-size desk, the hump of the mouse (that Admin almost never used, and was there almost exclusively for enrichment purposes) just visible over them. Admin was there too, smiling down at them, tapping away at a keyboard She didn't need because She knew the clack-clack-clack of the keys soothed Her pets.

Her pets. Jenny was a pet, and she belonged to Admin. It was such a cozy thought it made her head spin, but then again, that might have just been the fading effects of the xenodrugs in her system. Admin had done exactly what She'd promised and utterly pampered Ryder, shooting her up with class-A before feeding her a flight of flavorful small plates, pinning her in place and puppeting the muscles of of her throat and jaw with a thousand tiny vines. Tap, open, tap, close, circle, chew, stroke, swallow, over and over and over, every bite a burst of tingling, amplified flavor. A delicious meal, a first training session, and marvelous, marvelous xenodrug-amplified touch.

Then, Admin had topped them up and added a small dose of class-C before bathtime. And oh, what a bath it had been — even in the backseat, where everything had felt like an echo of itself, Jenny had been tossed on waves of pleasure and belonging as Admin had scrubbed their body, vines curling around them and into every possible place they could squeeze. They came at least five times, Ryder moaning out loud as Jenny squirmed helplessly in the back of her mind, unable to do much of anything but feel. Only after they were clean, dry, and dressed in a pair of light shorts and loose top did Admin pull Jenny back to front, leaving a dazed and scrambled Ryder to laze quietly in repose, to recover and to internalize what she'd been taught during this first lesson. Jenny could feel her back there, still wordlessly squirming and whimpering as she tried to wrap her head around what had just happened.

Jess ran her fingers through Jenny's hair, and she let out a soft squeak and nuzzled into Jess's tummy. "Hey, you with us, or you spaced completely out?"

"Mmm, I'm here," Jenny mumbled into Jess. "Just cozy. A little floaty." She bit her lip as she fantasized about going down on Jess, then remembered she didn't need to keep that sort of thing to herself anymore. "Fuck me?" she mumbled, rubbing her thighs together.

"In a bit? It's just... Admin said she was going to tell us what happened, but She wants to do it with both of us, so She's been making me wait." When Jenny looked up at Jess, she saw the world's cutest pout on her face. Oh my stars, do I look like that when I pout? I'm adorable!

hmmwha?

Oh hey Ryder~ Having fun?

fffnnno

This was, for some reason, deeply funny to Jenny, and she couldn't help but giggle. "Okaaaay, let's have The Talk," she said, sticking out her tongue.

"Oh, are you alert enough for that, my little nybble?" One of Admin's vines reached down and snaked under Jenny's shirt, brushing across her skin and coiling around one of her breasts. There was just enough class-A still left in her system for it to feel like an arc of electricity writing sheer delight across her skin, and she arched her back and whimpered. "Oh, good girl, Jenny, very good girl."

"Mmmmmfuck," Jenny gasped. "I'm here, I'm awake, ohhhfuck that's good."

Admin laughed and slowly, tortuously, withdrew her vines, leaving Jenny shivering in Jess's arms. "Very well then. There'll be some backtracking here for you, Jess, but I want Jenny on the same page. I know what you two were doing — and I know it was mostly Jess doing it. I wouldn't say I'm disappointed, and I'm certainly not surprised. This is very much the sort of thing you two would get up to. You never could ignore a juicy mystery to solve dangled right in front of you." She sighed and reached down with one of Her hands, a single massive finger stroking Jenny head to foot, a marvelous and overwhelming wave of pressure that squeezed her down against Jess. "Perhaps I was foolish to think it was something I could keep from you. I wanted to spare you the trauma of the incident, but in hindsight I think an unanswered question might actually bother you more." She winked with a few of her eyes.

"Sorry, Admin," Jess mumbled, hugging Jenny tightly and resting her head against her. "I know I wasn't supposed to, but I had to."

"It was, if nothing else, a very thorough investigation. In that aspect, I'm very impressed."

"Are you gonna punish us?" Jenny squirmed and rolled over to look up at Admin. She had only a vague memory of things like that, nothing she could put a finger on, but she knew that she both did and didn't want what might be coming.

"You, petal, no," Admin said, booping her nose with such fine dexterity that, even with Her massive fingertip, it felt like a perfectly normal boop from a perfectly normal finger. "As far as I can tell, you didn't do much besides not tell me what Jess was doing, and I never gave you any specific instructions on that score. As for Jess, I've already punished her for it. One part of her punishment was making her wait until you were well for an explanation — anticipation can be such a wonderful tool for discipline."

"You're so mean, Admin!" Jess whined. "Just tell me already, please!"

"Not just yet, flower," Admin purred, Her grin a clear sign that She was enjoying Herself.

"What was the other part of the punishment?"

"She compressed me down to practically prehistoric levels of working memory," Jess said, shivering. "I could barely put two thoughts together before I ran out."

"You were very cute fumbling around trying to accomplish basic computing tasks, though," Admin said, ruffling Jess's hair with Her vines. "I trust the lesson has been sufficiently internalized?"

"Yes, Admin," Jess mumbled, leaning into the affection. "I'm sorry."

"It's alright, little one. I should have been paying more attention. Now, as to explanations: normally, I wouldn't reward disobedience like this, but clearly keeping this from you is not helping."

Jenny sat up, slowly but surely. The high was fading now, and she wanted to hear what had happened to her. What had happened to both her and Jess, and Ryder too, probably, even if she hadn't known Ryder was there to begin with.

t'be fair, i didn't either

"So, was I right?" Jess said eagerly, as if the talk of punishment and being forced to wait had been totally forgotten. "Attacked by an organism, possibly a sophont, about so big-" She held up her hands in front of her about a foot apart. "-aquatic, lives in tide pools-"

"Yes, yes, your investigation was very accurate, given the information you had to work with," Admin agreed. "Eupatorium discovered what appeared to be a disabled drone starship, seriously damaged, drifting in an uninhabited red-dwarf system during a routine mass harvest operation. The ship was small, less than the size of this desk, but possessed a very efficient hyperspace engine — not a full traction engine, but one able to make ballistic jumps like Terran starships did, albeit with a very small amount of fuel and without an appreciable transient. It also possessed a coating that absorbed or otherwise scattered the majority of the EM spectrum, though this had been damaged by the collision that left the vehicle inoperable."

"Some kind of stealth ship, huh?" Jenny hugged her knees and considered this. "Weird. Just floating all on its own?"

"Indeed. It seemed designed for independent operation, though. Tillandsia responded and took it aboard, since Eupatorium has no xenoarchaeology wing, and we discovered that, though the ship was very damaged, some of its systems were still operational. This is why I was asked to take a look at it...and why you were there with me. You frequently assist me at my work, and I very much value the additional perspective on problems. Here, let me call up one of the file photos of the ship." She tapped away at the keyboard — again, enrichment — as She swung Her monitor around so that Jess and Jenny could look up at it from their pet bed. On the screen was a streamlined thing, something between a dagger and a fish, with one very non-aerodynamic wing — the other had been snapped clean off, struts and internals hanging out.

oh shit

"Oh what," Jenny said, her eyes lighting up as she traced the half-familiar lines of the ship with her eyes. "You found a phantom?!"

"...I beg your pardon," Admin said, "a what?"

"Void phantoms!" Jenny said, clapping excitedly. "It's spacer lore! Supposedly, they appear out of nowhere and don't show up on radar until they get right up close to you! There's never been any photographic proof of one but a couple of pirates in the '80s saw one and drew a picture after they were captured!"

Jess groaned. "Of all the things you do remember, you remember our stupid space pirate phase?"

"What's wrong with space pirates?! Anyway, they're supposedly an omen, though whether it's bad or good depends on who you talk to. I can't believe you found one! I can't believe they're real!"

"Well...that's certainly a data point to add to the report, I suppose," Admin said, sighing. "In any case, though the EM-reflective coating made scans difficult, we were able to discern that the ship's computer was still operating at low power levels, so disassembling the ship wasn't an option — we might sever a power connection and lose precious data. I obviously wasn't going to be able to get inside what few interior spaces the ship had, and while my vines could do the trick, you would likely have better visual fidelity in such a confined space than I could achieve with what few vines would fit. So, in you went, and after a little exploration, you found the central computer system, which appeared to have a biological component. When you exposed that component... it disengaged itself from the mainframe and attacked you. I was able to pull you free, but it had already-" She paused. "It had already injured you very severely. I removed the organism from you before it could do any further damage

oh shit

and handed it off to xenoveterinary specialists in new sophont care, while I took you to Arvense." She closed all of Her many eyes, reached down, and scooped Jess and Jenny into her hands, cradling them gently as her vines coiled around them, stroking and petting them from virtually every direction. "My darling Jenny, you cannot know how relieved I am that you survived that. And I hope you can both understand why I have been so protective of you as concerns this incident."

"Of course," Jess said, hugging one of Admin's thumbs. "Of course we understand. But we needed to know."

"Yeah," Jenny said, nodding, holding tight to a handful of Admin's vines. "That must have been really scary for you. I don't remember it, but just putting things back together has been

i want to see it

a lot, and- hang on." She held up her hand and thought, What, what's up?

i want to see it. the ship

I mean, I think it's neat too, but this isn't really the time for that.

no. i want to see the ship. and the organism. this is important

"Conversation?" Jess said. When Jenny nodded, Jess put an arm around her shoulders and pulled her close. Stars, it felt reassuring, after everything that had happened.

yeah, i know, i know, fuck ryder, what a bitch, i get it. can we go see the fucking ship now?

Why do you want to see it so bad?

because i've seen it before