No more being locked in a VR pod!
I logged in to the chief’s training environment, and it fed me a viewpoint of the virtual ready room where I could inspect the bots and study while I waited for him to log in. But I was still in my body, too, and I wasn’t locked in that cramped little pod with its armor blocking my view. I grinned, and sat up to stretch.
“You look happy,” Emla said.
I looked down at her, and realized she was naked under the covers. Naked, and not worried at all about covering herself.
I felt my face heat, and looked away hurriedly. Don’t think about the fact that she was holding me for half the night, with nothing between us but my flimsy nightgown. Distraction, I needed a distraction.
“My VR support grew in,” I told her. “No more spending all day in a pod for me! Come on, let’s get cleaned up so we can get down to the mess hall. The techs are doing breakfast today.”
“We wouldn’t want to miss that,” she agreed. “But doesn’t your training start at 07:00? That’s only thirty minutes from now.”
“So? I’ll have to keep most of my attention on the training, I guess. But I can still eat and stuff.”
“That’s my mistress,” she said, a note of pride in her voice. She swept the sheets off, and rolled out of bed.
“In that case, that sounds like a great plan,” she went on. “I still can’t believe I get to eat fancy human food now. I’m never going to get enough.”
She offered her hand, and I let her help me up even though I didn’t need it. I still felt a little shy, but she wasn’t staring. I tried to focus on her cheerful chatter, and not look too much. Even if she was just casually showing off everything as she led me to the bathroom, my hand still in hers.
Her humanoid form was exactly the same height as me, and looked about the same age. If the last few days were typical she ate like me, too. Was that all on purpose? I guess it did make me a little more comfortable with her, but why would she want to look so young? She’d been fabbed as an adult, and then worked in that reactor for years.
I was broken out of my musing when she kissed the tip of my nose.
“Huh?”
She giggled. “There you are. What are you worrying about, Alice?”
“I, um, well.” My face was turning red again. What was I going to say? I took a deep breath, and tried to push through the embarrassment. “I know you’re… and most people would, um… but I’m not…”
She put her finger over my lips, and smiled at me. “Silly Alice. Haven’t you realized yet that I’m synced with you? I know what a human usually does with her companion androids, but it’s all theory to me. I’m not going to want any of that until you do.”
I frowned. “What? But, you weren’t a kid before.”
She shrugged. “I’ve never had a body that was fully functional before. At the reactor I barely had a sense of touch anywhere but my hands and feet. So it’s not like I gave up anything. I…”
She looked away, and for the first time I realized that her fearless lack of embarrassment might be partly an act.
“I was hoping maybe we could learn together?” She said hesitantly. “About hugs, and cuddling, and then someday about… other things.”
My heart went out to her. I pulled her into a hug.
“I’d like that,” I admitted. “I’m not sure about… things. But hugs are pretty awesome. We can start there, and work our way up.”
She hugged me back. Her body was lean and firm, her skin smooth as silk against mine. I found myself wondering what it would feel like to run my hands over it. To hold her against me, and kiss her.
But this wasn’t the time to deal with all the confusing feelings I got when I thought about things like that. I let her go, and turned to the shower.
“Wash my back?” I asked.
“You bet!” She eagerly agreed.
We made it to the mess hall just as the techs were serving up the first helpings of another exotic ethnic breakfast. I’d never heard of Nuevo Hidalgo before, let alone eaten their food. But it smelled delicious. Breadstick things with sausage and cheese baked into them. Fresh tortillas, and bowls full of egg, cheese, grilled vegetables and crumbled sausage to fill them with. Thick slabs of bacon with a sweet sauce drizzled over them. My taste buds were in heaven.
Chief West looked amused when he logged in to the training environment. “I see someone has figured out a new trick.”
“Good morning, Chief,” I said cheerfully. “I’m getting much better fidelity like this. Can you believe the VR pod was rendering actual pixels, instead of just feeding image data into my visual cortex? Talk about a waste of processing power.”
“That is how normal VR systems work,” he replied. “Are you running two instances of yourself now, or what?”
I hesitated. Part of me wanted to keep hiding everything. But I had a good feeling about him. Besides, it’s not like an infomorph had any room to freak out about my little quirks.
“I think I’m actually like those AIs that can run a whole ship by themselves,” I admitted. “I can give at least five or six different things my full attention at the same time, without having to make copies of myself.”
“Really? I thought you had a normal brain in there, not one of those electronic replacements.”
“I, um, I think that’s actually some kind of camouflage, Chief. Or maybe the organic me keeps the electronic side calibrated? The interface is so smooth it all feels like there’s only one of me, but I can see things that happen a lot faster than neurons can fire. Only I can’t get too carried away with that, because if I overclock myself too much my cooling can’t keep up with the waste heat.”
I added that last part because I figured admitting a weakness would make me seem less threatening. But he didn’t seem bothered at all. He just nodded, and took it in stride.
“I figured you had something like that. Sometimes you’re a little slow getting your bots moving the way you want, but your personal reaction time is always too fast for the system to measure. We’ll have to see what we can do to take advantage of that. But don’t get cocky, because today we’re taking you out of easy mode.”
Yesterday was easy mode? Oh, discord.
This time he gave me twice as many bots, and had me try to board a wrecked pirate ship. I gave it a good try, but I lost a good third of my force just boarding the ship and establishing a decent beachhead. Then the enemy decided it was hopeless, and the pirates abandoned ship and set off a suicide charge. I ‘died’ with the ship, which was pretty embarrassing.