Words cannot describe my state of mind as Vesper grabbed my hand, pulled me out of bed, and then we were somewhere else. Somewhere bathed in rich, amber light. And there were these big, tall things all around. Like giant tubules of lace adorned with breezy, wispy things that shimmered against an enormous, bright orangey thing.
I worked out that the big orange thing was probably a sky. From there, I assumed we were outside. Before I could logic my way through anything else, though, I noticed my legs giving out. Everything seemed so heavy, and the air seemed so thin, and I just had to sit down for a second or two. So I did, falling onto the soft, shaggy thing below. The shag was oily, and it smelled like caramel and butterscotch. I examined my oily fingers, imagining they were covered in maple syrup, and my stomach turned.
“She’s not handling this well,” Hugo’s voice said from somewhere. I hadn’t even realized he was still around. “Why didn’t we pop straight into a medical facility?”
“We can’t,” Vesper’s voice responded. “Coda’s surveillance is top notch these days. You pop inside a city, and the Consortium network lights up.”
“Do you not have tricks to counter their network?”
“I do. And it’s called ‘popping into the edge of the terminator band where they don’t monitor every blade of grass.’”
“I’m gonna throw up,” I said, now lying in the grass. I don’t remember when I’d laid down, but there I was. I wasn’t sure that it was grass either—it seemed more mossy—but Vesper said grass, so I assumed it was grass. It was green. Or maybe chartreuse. Almost a sickly yellow. I was definitely going to throw up.
“You’re not going to throw up,” Hugo said. “I’ve distributed a contingent of motes throughout your circulatory and nervous system. It’s not a permanent fix, but it’ll keep you alive until we get into town.”
“You what?” I woozily tried to push myself back up to at least a sitting position. My clothes and face were covered in yellow syrup.
“This was a bad idea,” Hugo said, eyeing me. “We should take her back to Caligo.”
“No!” I said, and a burst of energy came over me. It was that sort of energy you get when you’ve been drunk all night, and then you come to, hovering over the toilet puking, and your crush is there, holding your hair back, and you realize how utterly foolish you look, so you try your best to play it cool and swear up and down that you’re absolutely up for hitting another bar.
I stood and ran my goopy fingers through my goopy hair. “No, no, let’s keep going. I feel fine, actually. Your continent of modes really did the trick.”
“Can you call an autopod out here?” Hugo asked Vesper.
“Already done!” she said, approaching me. She wore a delicate, lacy dress with three or four shawls wrapped around her shoulders, waist, and wildly curly hair. Vesper took one of those shawls and used it to wipe off my face and hands. “Don’t worry, Eira dear, it takes five or six hours for that resin to have any effect.”
“Have any effect? To do what?”
“Oh, nothing terrible,” she said.
“Necrosis of the skin,” Hugo said in tandem.
“Not with medical attention,” Vesper groaned, then her face brightened as she waved to an approaching vehicle sailing over the ground. “Ah, look, our ride is here.”
Inside the pod, the seats formed a cozy circle, forcing us to stare at or past each other for the full length of the ride. Vesper and Hugo bickered like an old couple over logistics: how I was meant to access services without proper identification, what to do about a bank account, and how to address the language barrier.
I eventually turned in my seat to lay my head against the cool glass of the autopod. The windows were tinted, but I could still see the world outside. We were quickly out of the lacy forest and into what I assumed to be a suburb. The buildings were largely composed of spires and globes. Tall and smooth. Copper and verdigris. Lots of vertical lines and geometric patterns.
We eventually reached the medical facility, and I became a herd animal in a processing plant. We stood in line for about half an hour, then sat in a waiting room for another two. Then it was on to the exam rooms: one after another. Floating mushroom-headed octopus doctors examined me with their robo-tentacles while faceless nurses poked me with needles. If not for whatever Hugo did back in the feather forest, I would have passed out about a dozen times.
At one point, a somewhat normal-looking doctor with a snub nose and long, lanky arms said, “Her eardrums are insufficient for detecting a wide range of vocalizations. Should we replace them?”
“That seems reasonable,” Hugo replied.
I didn’t faint, but I still felt ill. Wooziness had become commonplace, even with Hugo’s science-fiction-sorcery keeping me upright and vomit-free. Vesper had disappeared by then. I’d hoped she might serve as a voice of compassion and understanding, but the two-hour wait in the lobby seemed too much for her.
“I don’t want new eardrums,” I said, hoping my opinion mattered. “Aren’t these things good enough?” I pointed to the little translator baubles sticking out of my ear canals.
They both looked at me as if I were insane. I felt insane. I was sitting on an exam table in a clean, white room with a literal robot-alien doctor staring down at me. The likelihood that this was all happening in my head was first and foremost, especially with Hugo’s gorgeous and ever-present visage watching over me. I had surely gone crazy, or this was a very weird version of Heaven.
“Eira,” Hugo said, trying to smile, but he mostly looked irritated. “If you’re going to join the galactic community, you’re going to have to make some changes.”
“I would suggest a permanent digital transition into the Consortium. Discard the body entirely,” the doctor said, “Only we don’t fully understand her anatomy yet. That could prove to be catastrophic!” He laughed.
“Bionic replacements are fine as a temporary measure,” Hugo said just as much to the doctor as to me. “We could start with the ears and eyes, then move on to bone and muscle replacements later. Medbots should sufficiently handle external toxins for now.”
“I don’t want new eyes and ears and bones.”
“Eira,” Hugo said again. “This is the reality of intergalactic integration.”
“Can’t we just do something less permanent? Like an exoskeleton mech suit kind of thing?”
Hugo was not pleased by this response. But he did eventually cave. “There are options.”
“I love options!” I jumped up from the table and grabbed my things. We had lingered in the hospital for far too long. “What have you got?”