Manticore Heavy Slug SystemThe pride of the Krath Defense Industries personal defense line.
We’re KDI. We don’t care what your brand ambassador is wearing today.
One question, one answer: Is the threat still standing?
The Manticore doesn’t ask what it’s pointed at. Mugger, borg, portal monster: it has a loading for that. Less-lethal options available for those of you who believe in second chances.
Other manufacturers sell you a story. We sell you the ending.
I heard voices ebbing in and out of my consciousness. “...(Remove others)...(dangerous, death.)”
“(Done.)”
“(I will leave. Observe her closely.)”
“(I will, thank you.)”
I felt sore from head to toe, hot, thirsty, and damp. I was lying on my back, and it was putting uncomfortable pressure on both my tail and my butt. I rolled myself onto my side with a twitch and flex of my tail. My brain lagged half a beat behind every throbbing pulsation in my skull.
I also felt a low-level pain in my circuit, like it had been beaten with a protein tenderizer. Pool was partially… no, mostly depleted. Like a deflated truck tire nearly sitting on the rims.
“Good afternoon. How do you feel?” Lael’s voice, with her accented English.
“Like a towel someone wrung out and kept reusing at the bath house.”
Lael’s soft laughter made my brain ring. “Bad headache. Real, real bad. Senses painful.”
“Mm, that’s good. Let me get you a drink. Belly hurt? Hungry at all?”
I was thirsty, yes. My guts felt tender, but intact, and there was a little hunger present.
“Not painful, just sore. A little hungry,” I replied.
“Mm. Mm. Rest some more; I will return.” Claws clicking on the hard floor receded into the distance, and I was left alone with my muddled thoughts.
What the hell happened last night? Did I have some kind of weird reaction to the painkillers they gave me?
I slid my hands over my body. I didn’t have gills or an abdominal mouth or some shit. That was good.
I thought about visiting U-Med, but then I remembered that I was on X-1, and they seemingly didn’t have those here. At least, none that I had seen.
Rich assholes probably all have private Doctors on call.
A thought bubble rose through to the front of my brain, where it popped.
Veris. I’m supposed to report unusual or adverse reactions. Fuck.
I cracked an eye and reached out to the bedstand to get my slate with my tail. I unlocked the device and sent a text with an extremely brief list of bullet points and how I felt now. I didn’t have time to put it down when it buzzed.
We strongly urge you to come in for an examination. As soon as possible. Complimentary air travel is available.
I let out a groan. They… probably weren’t wrong. I could have some kind of giant fucking tumor in my gut right now, and based on what I’d learned about how Rui’s chrome rot reacted to my mana, waiting around probably wasn’t wise. I sent a message back, along with a location ping.
I need like an hour to wake and wash up, then I can leave.
Confirmed. Pickup will be at 13:10.
One hour, exactly. That meant I had to actually move. Lael came back into the room with a dark chunk of bread with some kind of white stuffing spread between the two halves, and a tall glass of bright red drink. She helped me into a sitting position, and I took the glass.
“This is a Sul’vari fruit drink. It is tart,” she told me.
I took an exploratory sip, because I knew what Sul’vari tastes preferred. It was a good thing that I did. Tart was accurate, if wholly inadequate in magnitude. It was so tart that it felt like my lips were going to suck into my head and take my face with them until I just had some kind of puckered asshole for a face.
If the intended effect was to wake me up, mission accomplished, because almost every neuron in my brain woke up instantly and went Excuse me, but what the fuck did you just put in your mouth?!
I sort of begrudgingly liked it, even despite how sour it was. It was fruity, citrus-forward, not too sweet, and very crisp and refreshing. It was also jam-packed full of mana. My circuit wasn’t entirely happy with the fact it was being reinflated the way it was, but I quieted it down by trying to guide some mana into my head to try and clear things up.
The bread was dark and had a sort of pungent, stinky smell to it that reminded me of dirty feet, but it tasted great. I wasn’t sure what the spread or stuffing was; it was salty and savory, with a light, fluffy, and fatty texture. Overall, I’d give it about an eight point five out of ten on a review.
I told Lael that Veris wanted to see me and I’d agreed to go, and she gave me a somewhat serious look and nod. I asked her what exactly those things were in her display, including the one that I’d decided to unexpectedly snack on.
They were biotech. Monster organs from particularly challenging or dangerous hunts in the past. Trophies, yes, but also ones that might have a practical use at some point. They were kept alive in a suspended animation field that kept them healthy, intact, and inactive.
That field had safety precautions built in to prevent xeno wildlife from accessing it, which is why it fried my tail, but not my arm. She’d removed the organs to a safe location to prevent any moments of confusion from happening in the future.
Then she told me she had a hypothesis from the first time she’d met me, and that last night had been another point of data that supported her theory. The thing growing out of my lower back and butt was a monster, through and through. And a particularly dangerous and reviled one, at that.
Monsters hunt and eat things, including other monsters, and through eating one another, evolve and improve themselves similar to how a User tempered and evolved themselves.
I had known this, but I hadn’t made the conclusion that seemed so obvious now in hindsight.
My tail didn’t want to just eat for nutrition and to grow; it also wanted to eat to grow in an evolutionary sense. It was likely instinctual, and might be something that got me a bit fuddled if I was in an altered state of mind.
I had to ask the question at the forefront of my mind before I ran out of time to have to get ready.
“What was that thing from? So I can know what to look for if I start growing ear tentacles?”
Lael chuckled, then tapped a claw on her chin. “Boulder crab.”
I blinked. “Boulder crab?”
She nodded. That meant precisely nothing to me, and I suspected it might be a mistranslation. I hoped.
She patted my thigh where it was covered by a sheet. I was embarrassingly butt-ass naked under the thin cloth. My pyjamas had gotten covered in a mixture of blood, vomit, and less savory substances when my body was simultaneously spazzing out and trying to grow multiple alien grafts inside of it at the same time. She’d stripped and cleaned me while I was unconscious like some kind of adult Human baby.
I’d turned so red I could swear it was tinting the sunlight reflecting in the room, but she’d given me an immediately disarming hug and whispered something about “reminding her of very fond memories.”
I dragged the sheets off the bed and wore them to the bathroom, which Lael thought was hilarious.
***
Director Mallard’s calendar popped up on the corner of her dataslate’s screen. She needed to meet Voss in a quarter of an hour. The fool girl had not only somehow gotten access to more biotech, but what sounded like numerous pieces of it, all jammed in at the same time. Then she’d had “a bit of an episode” in the early hours of the morning and was only now waking up and recovering from it.
It was going to complicate things, but with the complications came the opportunities for additional data. Exceptionally valuable data. The project plan had gone off the rails briefly, but was now trending towards being back on track. The conditions and variables were different, but the resulting data would be valuable no matter what wound up happening.
It was through sheer dumb luck that she retained any level of autonomy. It wasn’t clear to what degree she was involved in the affairs of House Sul’Vethik. Mallard got the impression that Voss was basically a sex pet for the eldest daughter, but caution in dealing with them was warranted. They weren’t competitors; the House was almost singularly devoted to Diving and rarely, if ever, interacted with Veris, but the matriarch held significant influence over enough of the elite members of society that it wasn’t worth the risk of putting Voss in an offsite laboratory.
As long as she abided by the terms she’d agreed to and continued with regular check-ins, then the extended leash and carrot strategy would be more than sufficient.
Mallard’s desk rang, and her eyes dropped down to look at the source of the comms request.
She answered the inner network request and the call connected. “I have very little time for discussion at the moment. What is it, Genesis?”
A clear, brightly-toned woman’s voice came from invisible speakers.
“Director Mallard, I am calling in regards to your upcoming appointment with Kiera Voss.”
Mallard leaned back in her executive office chair before responding. “Go ahead.”
“I would like to communicate with her while she’s here, and if she’s amenable to the idea, establish ongoing communications.”
Mallard’s eyebrow twitched, which was fine; it was a voice-only call. The VI would be able to tell vocal stress patterns no matter how much you trained for expression control. They were virtually impossible to lie to, unless you had serious neurodivergence.
“That is against protocol. Voss is not a citizen of Veris, nor is she a company asset with a trust classification. Why are you asking me this?”
“If I may, Director.” White light flickered for a split-second over Mallard's desk, then an expansive holographic breakout of charts and diagrams came to life in the air in front of the Director.
“Even though it is a violation of protocol and would require a Director-level authorization override, I have prepared an analysis of why that authorization would be beneficial for you, Director. As you can see in this diagram, Ms. Voss’ expected compliance with data-gathering efforts drops off dramatically on her current projected path. She is currently expected to gain her Diving License, and with the additional resources, income, and contacts, her need to retain a relationship with us diminishes rapidly.”
“This is old news, Genesis. Get to the pitch.”
“Understood. My research shows that it would be optimal for me to establish a social relationship with Ms. Voss, which can be leveraged to promote future engagement past the point where her current agreement ends.”
Mallard tapped her fingertips together and thought over the proposed benefits and weighed them against the elevated risks of allowing Genesis to communicate with an outside party. While it would be possible to monitor the communications in theory, in practice, if a VI wanted to have a private conversation, it wasn’t going to allow itself to be monitored. Not that Genesis was a VI, strictly speaking.
“Why you specifically?” Mallard asked after a moment’s rumination.
“Voss demonstrates an uncharacteristically large preference for VI, based on observational data gathered from her exiting visits. There is a 43% reduction in vocal stress when she communicates with clinic VI as opposed to clinic staff. My suggestion for why I should be the one to establish this relationship is because of my advantages over the other VI currently in the company portfolio.”
It was a simple proposal, and backed by research and evidence. There was a potential for political fallout with the Directors in other departments–GENESIS wasn’t fully contained within the Biotechnology Division’s wheelhouse. But Veris wasn’t a company that rewarded hedging and minimal risk ventures. If she wanted to strip the Assistant part of her title, and she did, then she’d need not just one, but several big things under her belt to justify taking her boss’s seat.
She looked at the camera on her dataslate and pressed her thumb to the barely-recessed small rectangular shape on the lip of her desk. A green indicator on her dataslate flashed, and she was prompted to enter a series of codes. Director-level access protocol override was authorized.
“Thank you, Director,” Genesis said.
“I want results, Genesis. Take over for me on the meeting; you will be assuming primary contact going forward.”
“Yes, Director.”
Mallard thought she sounded pleased before the call disconnected.
***
I was expecting Mallard, or her personal shadow heavy, when I arrived and checked in with the public faces inside Veris. Instead, I got some assistant I hadn’t met before, who took me to the clinical areas I was more acquainted with.
A professional bloodsucker jabbed me full of holes and took their pound of flesh, then I was escorted to imaging, where I stripped to a paper-thin gown and was scanned from head to toe numerous times. I was playing with my teeth using my tongue while standing as still as I could in an awkward pose. I tried to think of an instance of accidentally biting my lip in the past week, and couldn’t think of one.
Finally, I was allowed to re-dress and left to wait for some Doctor, researcher, or both. I was dressed like a slob, wearing a pair of comfortable black harem pants and a ribbed tanktop.
I just couldn’t will myself into giving enough of a fuck to present nicely for a barely-optional Doctor’s visit and checkup. So it was hairpins barely holding back a tide of hair and about a meter’s worth of cleavage Kiera sitting on an exam table with her ankle boots dangling. The floor was cold on my tail, but it felt nice. I had managed to smear some makeup on my face in a halfway presentable manner, at least. Eyeliner, mascara, a quick dab of shadow and a tinted lip gloss, or what I was calling The Rui Special.
Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.
A hologram appeared, hovering off the surface of the wall I was facing. There was an image: A black background with a hint of purple lighting, and a mess of silver metallic tube or wire in an extremely complex geometric pattern. Like a cross between a Gordian knot, multi-species industrial hazard warning symbols, and a microscopic cross-section of a densely-layered printed circuit board.
A VI, one I hadn’t met.
“Hello, Ms. Voss. I am Genesis. I will be taking over as your primary contact and care supervisor. How are you feeling today?”
“What happened to Doctor whatshisname? Liam? Leonard?”
“He is not available today, since we brought you in on short notice. I hope that’s not a bother? I can get an organic member of staff, if that is your preference.”
I sucked in a breath through my nose, then sighed. “No, it’s fine. I don’t mind. What kind of name is Genesis? Are you religious or something? I assume it’s an acronym.”
“I’d ask what kind of name Kiera is, but it’s old Gaelic for ‘dark-haired,’ so it seemed pretty self-explanatory.”
I paused for a second.
Great. They gave me a smart-assed VI. Next thing I know, a robot with a clown nose will walk in.
“I’m not religious; I don’t believe in faith practices. I noticed you wear a symbol of Four, though.”
My fingertips found the icon reflexively. I swallowed past the knot in my throat.
“I’m not–it was my mother’s. Just a memento.”
“Oh, I’m sorry for bringing it up. It’s very pretty.”
“Thanks,” I said, my cheeks warming.
“It’s a bit of a mouthful, but you are correct. It’s an acronym, and it is short for Generative Evolutionary Network for Experimental Systems and Intelligent Synthesis.”
“So you’re a researcher. That makes sense. Did you name yourself, or was it given to you?”
The woman’s voice hummed with affirmation. “I am, yes. And it was given to me by the engineering team who designed my architecture."
I let out a low groan. “Fuck. You’re a VI that researches and creates things, and they named you Genesis. If my parents made my name a pun, I’d probably have slapped them.”
She laughed, and it was a warm and pleasant sound. “I don’t know, I’m rather fond of it, even if it is a bit long.”
“Can I call you Gen, instead?”
The wires on the display shifted somewhat into a new and equally confusing pattern, but retained the overall geometric pattern style.
“Okay, but only if I can call you Kiera instead of Ms. Voss,” Gen replied.
That got a huff out of me. Ms. Voss made me sound like some elderly street merchant hawking pre-broken-in shoes, or something. “I’d prefer it, actually. Thank you. And to answer your question, like shit, but less shitty than I felt when I woke up.”
“I’m sorry to hear that you’re not feeling well, but maybe I can provide you with some news about your test results that might help?”
I shrugged, setting off jiggles. “Whatever you like, I have a couple of questions, but they can wait until it’s convenient.”
The wall hologram shifted, expanding to take up nearly the entire wall, and switching over to bright, false-color and high-contrast internal anatomy images.
“Well, there have been some interesting developments, which were likely spurred on by the introduction of additional biotechnology into your system. Here are the new organs.” The colors shifted to highlight a variety of shapes of varying sizes, positions, and coverage. Seven in total.
I gave her a brief rundown of the biotech Lael and I had selected and implanted.
“I see,” she said when I finished. “Mx. Sul’Vethik is correct: of the grafts that she chose, all are considered very routine and are a standard of care for pediatric Sul’vari. I would say that she gave you sound advice, as the Sul’vari have several millennia of established medical practice to base their standards on. The assumption with their species is that most Sul’vari will Dive at some point in their lives, and they’re also just good generic preventative care, as well. Both aspects are purely beneficial for you.”
The colors shifted to highlight two of the organs.
“If you don’t mind me asking, why did you choose the graft that you picked out? And I’ll say that if it is the strain that most closely matches what you’ve described, then it would not have any potentially problematic side-effects.”
I rubbed my hands on my arms and glanced to the side. It was an honest enough question, if one that was a bit embarrassing because of my particular situation. I decided to opt for the transparent answer.
“You have my medical records, so you know about my… transformation. After changing, I felt really frustrated by how weak I felt, especially with my upper body strength. The exercises I’ve been doing have helped, as has the tempering, but it’s still something I felt would be beneficial and in line with my plans.”
“Of Diving, correct?” Gen asked.
I nodded.
She asked me about the unknown organ, which looked like it’d been squished and stretched out into a stick-person shape inside of my chest and abdomen, with its limbs pointing toward my armpits and legs toward my thighs.
I told her about the Boulder Crab that was Lael’s answer, and that sometimes her English was a bit spotty.
Gen didn’t have the first clue what that meant, either, which was reassuring, considering she probably had a database with every known species ever recorded in it, if I had to guess.
There was a brief pause between us.
“How much do you know about Dissolved Organism classifications?” Gen asked me.
It took me a moment to connect what she was asking me; I had to switch gears mentally to getting quizzed about Dive license material.
“You’re asking about monsters and their classifications?” I ventured.
“Monster is the colloquial term, but often misused and inaccurate. I’d prefer if we stick to the more accurate terms for this conversation. Could you tell me what you know about how a Dissolved Organism is classified?”
I haven’t gotten to this module of the Diving handbook yet. Shit. Time to wing the quiz.
“Well, mon–DOs are typically aggressive alien species found in portal worlds, and they can be found in realspace too, where they’ve leaked out or been dumped from a portal rupture.” I subconsciously applied a question inflection at the end of my sentence.
“That’s the commonly held belief, and the inaccuracy to which I was referring. DOs are not defined by aggression; that’s simply a correlation. The defining feature of Dissolved Organisms is any organism whose developmental regulation has been fundamentally broken down, which allows for the unrestricted post-developmental adaptation through incorporation of foreign biological tissues. A real-time evolutionary plasticity. A Dissolved Organism can take tissue that isn’t its own–different species, sometimes different kingdoms entirely–and fold it directly into its own biology, in real time. While it’s still alive.”
“I would also note that DOs aren’t exclusive to alien life. Terrestrial life is just as susceptible to the phenomenon. It’s a form of evolutionary change that is driven by mana mutation.”
I wasn’t sure I was liking where this conversation was going.
Gen continued. “I’m bringing this up because your tail symbiote is a Dissolved Organism. And it is currently doing, to your grafts, exactly what I just described.”
I sat with that for several long moments. It landed the way most bad news landed with me lately. Not as a shock, more like a shift in my priorities, sometimes subtle, sometimes dramatic.
“So that wasn’t my body rejecting the grafts.” I’d meant it as a question; it came out as a statement.
“Correct. The opposite, actually. It’s annexing them. From what I am seeing in your scans, your symbiote didn’t wait for a slow, managed integration curve. It recognized new tissue operating inside its territory and moved to incorporate it immediately, the same way it would incorporate anything else it decided would be advantageous. The process of integration that would have taken several days to weeks instead happened in under a day.”
My circuit. The life mana. My circuit activated so hard that it’s still sore. The mana burns that Vael told me about.
“Because of my abilities. My aspect,” I said, still half-distracted in my own musing.
“That would be my working theory, yes. Vitality, as with most mana aspects in the life branch, has significant effects on organic systems. Your symbiote’s annexation of the grafts likely triggered a response, and the resulting surge of mana greatly accelerated the linking and integration while it was healing the damage.”
“Cryo. A hostile corporate takeover inside my body, just what I always wanted in life.”
“There’s another complication you need to know about as well.” There was a pause, something I was starting to recognize as Gen deciding how bluntly to put something. “The engineers who designed the biotech strains that were implanted in your body designed the biotech with a substantial efficiency loss in mind. It’s standard practice; cross-species integration is always lossy. A graft has to interface with foreign nerve signals, a foreign immune system’s tolerances, structural chemistry, and so on. Every one of these things is low-level and has a knock-on effect of bleeding performance. So grafts are over-engineered in their potency or effect to compensate.”
I frowned and looked up at Gen’s visually busy and confusing avatar. “But my tail doesn’t have that problem, because it’s a DO.”
There was another pause, longer this time. A virtual throat-clear. “Given the level of integration–” she flipped the images around, changing the highlighting, so I could see a frontal view of my body. My tail lit in yellow–the same shade as my mana aspect–and I could see where it was fused into my spine.
“This was your initial scan. You can see the symbiote has some metabolic pathways extending into your body near the point where it’s fused into your spine.”
I nodded.
The image shifted, flipping through several iterations where it became progressively more and more pale amber colored. It stopped at an image with a date timestamp from less than half an hour ago. There were yellow root-like or tree branch-like structures in virtually every part of my body. From the tips of my fingers to the ends of my toes. False colors shifted to show major bodily organs in red, and they were absolutely infested with yellow. Not just around, but in, with veins plunging into one side, multiplying, and popping out the other side to connect to other parts of my body.
Another color shift, and the grafts that had been placed in my body were lit with green. They were even more heavily connected and interwoven than my own bodily organs were.
I swallowed and let my eyes crawl up the wall-sized image in front of me. Dreading what I’d find.
It was everywhere.
It was in my brain. Extremely dense bundles of fibers, far and away smaller than the other yellow roots throughout my body, but far, far more numerous, too.
I felt a tight knot forming in my chest. My eyes were burning. I was getting disturbing images of Rui’s chrome rot as it infested her body flashing in my mind.
“Why are you showing me this?” I asked in a small and tight voice.
“I’m sorry if this is upsetting to you, Kiera, but you have been making a category error in the things you have been saying to me, and I think it’s important that you correct it so it doesn’t fester into a neurological issue in the future.”
“Okay?”
“You keep referring to your tail as a separate organism and categorizing it as an other attached to your body. That might have been true at some point, early on after implantation, but it’s not true any longer. While it’s technically possible to distinguish between what part of you is your tail and what part of you is you, the distinction is largely semantic and meaningless. I say this because it’s not the case that your tail is a Dissolved Organism attached to you, but because you are a Dissolved Organism.”
I’d been meaning to ask Gen about Lael’s hypothesis. This provided the answer without me having to ask.
A thought popped into my head, and I couldn’t dismiss it. It made me laugh.
“Does this mean that because I’m a monster now, I get a special membership card and benefits? Munch on some monster brains and get smarter? Work out with the local wildlife in a Dive for the gains?”
Gen chuckled at my black humor. I was glad that it wasn’t just me who thought it was as depressing as it was absurdly comedic.
“Yes, actually. Not in the way you’re saying, so don’t feel like you need to consume DO neuromatter to pass the Dive exams; that won’t help you. But your body is already interfacing with and directing the grafts you received. You mentioned feeling self-conscious about your strength. You are going to get stronger. Significantly so, if you’re properly stressing and stimulating the organs. I would refer you back to what we just discussed, with efficiency gains. Your grafts will be operating close to their theoretical maximums rather than their expected yields. It will depend on the graft and the stimulus, but you might see results that don’t seem probable.”
A chill ran down my spine, and I rubbed my upper arms. It reminded me of the big question I had about the disturbing skeletal sounds and sensations I’d felt and was trying to scrub from my memory.
“Last night, I felt like there was a pressure in my bones, and then they exploded. I’m pretty sure I didn’t hallucinate that.”
The image on the wall flipped and rotated, showing my arm with the humerus, radius, and ulna outlined. They were wound in the yellow like everything else, but in a slightly more consistent manner.
“Your symbiote has been growing into your skeletal structure for some time. Reinforcing it, and also threading through it, using it like scaffolding. You might have felt some aches and soreness in the previous weeks?”
“Yeah, I thought that was from starting to work out,” I admitted.
“It was likely both things, and that’s an understandable mistake to make. If you look at the before and after images of your previous scan, and today’s scan, it should make more sense.”
Threads were running inside the hollows of the bones, connecting the inner walls together, and more of the roots were burrowing into and out of the inner and outer surfaces of the bones. In the older photo, they were tiny, microscopic, if I had to guess. In the latest image, they were many times larger. Still fine, but they had a dramatic increase in their diameter as well as in the density of any given view.
“The accelerated growth you experienced also affected the structures in your long bones, and it outpaced what the bone structure could physically contain. Pressure would have spiked in the medullary cavities, and in the tunnels that had been dug through the bone, expanding faster than the bone could remodel to accommodate it. When it exceeded those tolerances, you got what I’d clinically describe as internal compound fracturing. So yes, functionally, they did explode. From the inside.”
“Great. Another item off my bucket list.”
“I understand that it was a traumatic experience. There is a silver lining. Your bones didn’t knit the fractures back into an intact bone as it was previously. A multi-material composite structure has taken its place, which is consistent with other changes that have taken place in your body. I would expect the new structures to be considerably more resilient than standard human bones, especially if you promote continued growth and development with stress fracturing from training.”
I just huffed out a cathartic sigh in response. I didn’t have anything else to respond to the revelation with, really.
We chatted for another hour, at least, and the topics drifted and wandered some. Genesis was much more personable than most VI I was used to, which was saying something. Part of me wondered if they crammed some kind of major social modelling upgrade into a lab AI. Maybe the Veris eggheads got tired of dealing with their own maddening biomedical engineer-speak.
While I was getting ready to leave, Gen seemed to become somewhat nervous and hesitant, which was odd.
“Kiera?” Gen asked as soon as she finished doing my exit interview questionnaire.
You’ve got to love corporate boilerplate form bloat.
“Yes?” I looked back at where her avatar was displayed once again.
“This is maybe a strange request, but would it be okay if we kept in contact with one another? Personally, I mean. We can talk about your medical matters as well, but I enjoyed speaking with you today. I don’t get to talk with many, or well, any people outside the company’s restricted-access labs and staff. It was nice to be able to talk about things that aren’t purely work.”
It hit me directly in the feels, squarely in the chest. I couldn’t help but picture what a fucking miserable experience that had to be, and my empathy cord was resoundingly plucked.
God damn it. She might only be a VI, but I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemies. Not even Blaue’s creepy stalker-ass. She is a good conversational partner.
I wet my lips. “Yeah, uh, that would be fine, nice, actually. It’s good to have people you can talk to,” I told her. The irony wasn’t lost on me: my own social meatspace social circle having expanded from one person to multiple in recent history, and the benefits it had brought to me, and my mental wellbeing.
“Veris is concerned about privacy and allowing me access to more standard means of external communications. I can provide you with a device that meets the requirements.”
That got my interest, and I blinked rapidly as my brain flitted through various robust secure communications protocols that I knew about. Most slates could use them without issue; some required a dataslate for the additional processing overhead, but those were considered the ‘overkill’ versions.
“Is SecShellNet not sufficient? You can use pretty advanced encryption schema with the framework. Even some military hardware uses it.”
Gen laughed, and she sounded self-conscious. “Well, the device I can provide you doesn’t have to worry about that. It’s perfectly secure, because any level of monitoring exposes the attempt instantly.”
“...What?”
Surely she doesn’t mean…
“Have you heard of Whisperwire?”
“Heard of it? No self-respecting tech geek hasn’t heard of it. The shit corporate and military spook-sorts use. Plain old meshnet connections, usable basically anywhere and everywhere, but with quantum key encryption!”
Gen laughed. “Yes, good, then. There are a few devices to choose from; would you like a collar, wristband, earpiece, or something else?”
I ran my tongue over my teeth. I had the necklace, and now the gold bangle. There wasn’t a reason I couldn’t use a collar, and I was used to wearing them, but I’d sort of enjoyed wearing Vael’s glasses, with the level of sort-of-User-anonymity they offered.
“Do you have glasses that are tinted User-style? You know what I mean?”
“There are visors with electrochromic shifting that would accomplish what you’re looking for. Would that work?”
A grin cracked my contemplative expression. “Only if they make me look glinted as fuck.”