Agatha and I had a good time despite the looming uncertainty of my exact relationship with the computers I immersed myself in. I lost myself in trivial strategy, overanalyzing the behavior of the ships, and occasionally making mistakes that would not have been an issue if this was real warfare. Agatha kept exploiting systems and occasionally giving me some new insight into strategy when she pulled off something I didn't expect. Maybe Aisling was onto something when she said she got me this game so I could learn tactics.

Then Agatha pulled some kind of strange strafing maneuver with a line of fighter ships that had no place in physics, and I was once again disillusioned of its worth.

I got a ping I'd been waiting for in my messenger near the end of one of our matches, and checked the system clock. We'd been at this for a few hours. I guess I had been having fun. 'Gonna have to stop after this one. My therapist is finally free.'

'You still seeing Yates? I don't imagine there's a lot of people you can talk to about stuff like that in your mysterious hideaway.'

'Yeah, it's Dr. Yates. He knows me too well, somehow.'

'That's shrinks for you.' Agatha said, right before the assault craft I'd maneuvered around her frontline landed a critical shot on her main carrier's engine at an angle I knew shouldn't have worked. I'd figured out how to use that strafing maneuver to my own advantage. 'Whaaaaaat? Where did that come from?!'

'I'm learning your tricks.' I teased, aggressively pushing through her line to form a kill box around the disabled craft's launch platforms. The match was over a minute later. 'If you can win through exploits, I can too.'

'Bah, hacker. You cheated, didn't you? The servers are gonna blow up in a few months.' I knew she wasn't serious, but the faux indignation was funny. 'Well, good luck getting psychoanalyzed or whatever. It was awesome catching up with you, and it better not be another seven months before I hear from you again. I wanna pick apart your weird biocomputer nonsense some more.'

'I'll be in touch. Promise.' I closed the game and pushed Agatha's connection aside, pulling up Dr. Yates' correspondence instead.

'Ah, yes, Meryll. It's good to hear from you. I'm sorry I didn't have time to respond earlier. Dr. Fuller said in passing that you've already spoken to her, though, so you've been apprised of the goings-on here. I hope that you're in good health.'

'I've been better.' I couldn't lie to him, but maybe it was best not to go too deep into that right at the moment. 'Sorry I can't drop in for a session or whatever, but I thought I should at least try to catch up with my contacts back there.'

'Well, given the circumstances, perhaps I could still lend an ear, if something's bothering you.' he offered. He was too nice. 'Or perhaps I shouldn't make that offer. I have been pushing myself lately. Suffice to say that the stunts pulled by your crew and our benefactor have... opened up a lot more of the population of our station to my craft. I have had quite a few more patients since then.'

'Sorry about all that. It wasn't exactly our plan, but we did know something was up beforehand, so maybe we could have handled it better. How's your son?' I had to ask. I remembered the familial receptionist cowering behind his desk when we left, caught off guard by Dr. Godin bursting in with a firearm and promptly dropping dead in front of him by Aisling's hand.

'I'd be lying if I said that what he witnessed did not have a profound effect on him. He's been a bit more reserved since then. Nervous. But he's functional. I know I can't blame your captain for what she did, given the circumstances, but here as far from the corporate and pirate colonies as we can be, I hadn't expected that he would have to be exposed to something like this. I won't say there is no crime at all in our community, but it shook a good few of us to have an outright bloody battle in our halls. Henry is... managing. Better than some, in fact.'

I nodded to myself. It was unfortunate that civilians had to be exposed to our world. I briefly pondered when I stopped considering myself a civilian, but the title didn't seem to fit anymore.

There was an awkward lull now as we were both surely attempting to pull together the right words to continue after that exchange. Yates was the first to put himself together. It made sense that he was a slow typist, though. He had told me he wasn't big on tech, so I waited patiently once I saw his typing indicator. 'Have you regained your memory?'

Relieved to be off the subject of our previous indiscretions, I replied, 'Bits and pieces. It's coming slowly. Sporadically. Usually when I sleep. I think that's helped a lot. I won't say there haven't been clear psychological effects. I apparently used to have self-destructive coping mechanisms that my body remembers more than I do.'

'Self-destructive in what sense, if I may ask?'

I supposed I would have to get more specific about it. 'Physically. Pain was preferable to facing the circumstances I lived in. They kept me in a soft room so I didn't have anything to hurt myself with. So I would rip myself open with my teeth a lot. They eventually had to keep me in a muzzle.' I felt like this would have been much harder to get out if I was saying it out loud, but in text, it was easy to say matter-of-factly. 'Ever since I started remembering, I'll occasionally bite down on my arm when I get nervous. I don't even notice I'm doing it half the time. I usually don't hurt myself like I did back then, but I'll still pierce the skin sometimes when I get especially tense.'

There was another long pause, but I figured he was just taking notes now. 'It sounds like you were in a terrible place. Severe post-traumatic stress disorder. What circumstances caused you to develop this habit?'

'It's hard to explain. I don't even fully understand it myself when I'm not recalling it directly. I'm not sure if it was just because it was in a dream or if I actually saw the world in this way, but everything felt so... abstract. People who didn't matter to me were indistinct shapes more than people. I thought of them as monsters. And the places never felt real. They blurred together and made no sense, like everywhere was the same, but not. But the worst part was the noise.'

I shuddered as I recalled the ethereal drill of the noise constantly boring into my skull, every moment of every day. It was torture. It was madness. And even though the separation of it through my amnesia made it less real, less distinct, it still made me feel sick to recall. I suffered a raw, primeval, paralyzing nausea at the very thought of it.

I would have wallowed in the memory of pain had a new ping not pulled my attention up from the depths. 'That sounds like a form of dissociation. Another coping mechanism, surely. Hallucinations layered over reality in an attempt to ease your mind where it could manage by escaping what was happening to you. Do you want to talk about this noise?'

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So I was crazy, but in an effort to keep myself calm? That felt stupid. But I supposed human bodies had all kinds of defensive mechanisms that did more harm than good, not just mental ones. 'There's not much to say about it. It was this... noise. Something only I could hear. It wasn't anything coherent like words, so there was no sense to be made from it, but it hurt me. REALLY hurt me. All the time. It dug into my brain and it felt like I was constantly suffering, like my whole... being was on fire and being torn apart and... I can't even describe it. I've literally had my brain hacked and suffered a neurological attack, I've felt what it was like to have a whole section of my hull explode, I've been shot before, hell, I'm still nursing a concussion I got the other day. But nothing I've felt post-amnesia has come even close to what the noise did to me, every second of every day back then.'

I sent the message and did my best to hold down the stomach-churning memory of the noise. I was surely crying, but my tears were being washed away into the lubricant before they could touch my face. I opened my eyes to try and calm myself, to keep myself from retching up my girlfriend's breakfast, but the pain won out. I sobbed as my stomach emptied itself into the void, a brief cloud of stomach acid and half-digested food particles thankfully quickly being swept away into the invisible sanitation system that kept the inside of the core module pristine.

Talking about it in depth was draining. Thinking about it too hard was bad for my health. After a moment of pitiful sobbing, I took in a deep, heavy breath and focused on stabilizing myself. I hadn't realized I'd been working myself up so much until my body started to rebel, and I needed to bring myself back down.

I couldn't think about... that anymore. Think about how far I've come since then instead. Think about Theseus, the crew, Lily, the friends I made on Venus, the little differences I've made on Io. That was a lifetime ago, and just because it's haunting me now doesn't mean it owns me. Not anymore. I took a few minutes focusing on my breathing and then closed my eyes again to rejoin the conversation.

'And this noise, you don't experience it now?' Yates asked.

'No. Only in my memory. I've never felt it outside of recall. I guess something I haven't remembered yet must have... I don't know, cleared it away. Can we not talk about this anymore? I just threw up.'

'Of course. Don't force yourself. Perhaps it's best that you relax, we can talk about this another time if you'd prefer.'

'I'd prefer if it never came up again.' I sighed to myself. 'But it will. I'm going to keep remembering. Hopefully slowly, but it's going to happen. I've just had enough for now.'

'That's a good mindset to have about this. Many would choose to suppress these things rather than talk them out. It's good to want to move past this rather than ignore it, and it's good to know your limits, too.'

'Thanks. I'll see if I can contact you again soon. For now, I've got to make sure none of that got caught in my hair.'

'None of what?'

'The vomit. I'm in the core module right now. Full liquid environment, so you might imagine...'

'I see. I think that's something I'd rather not think about myself.'

I smiled a little. 'Ooo, spooky computer girl spends all her time suspended in a liquid tank, swimming in her own waste.'

'Excuse me?'

I forgot Yates had no sense of humor. 'Nothing, I'm just teasing you and being weird.'

'Well, at least you seem to be back in good spirits. Have a good evening, Meryll.'

'You too.'

Maybe it ended a little awkwardly, but catching him up on my mental state, brief as it was, would probably be helpful in the long run. I could talk to him more about it once I sorted some specific topics to go over later.

For now, he was absolutely right. I just needed to relax for a bit. I thought about messaging Ray and getting out of the core module. As if she could somehow ease the burden of sensory sickness, even though realistically I knew her fur would be a nightmare texture for me. No, I still needed some time in the void. Perhaps for now I would just go into torpor and relax properly. Let a less stressed out Meryll deal with acclimating to the physical again.

Then again, there was nothing wrong with checking in on her as I was. She knew I was the ship. She probably respected it the most out of the whole crew, even if she didn't completely understand it. And it seemed like I didn't either, the more I looked into it.

I flickered through my internal sensor arrays and found her in the cargo area, a terminal in her claws. She was taking stock of our supplies.

I called out to her, "Hey sexy."

She jerked her head to the side, toward the awkwardly spaced intercom panel in the large room and then smirked at it. "Have you been watching me this whole time?"

"I might have checked in more than a few times," I admitted as she set the terminal down on a shelf and walked over to the panel. "How's your day been?"

"Not bad. We need to have supplies ready for the trip, so I've been making sure we're stocked up." She leaned up against the wall next to it, looking down at the speaker. "You know, I expected that if I ever got to be with someone, they would probably be smaller than me, but not also much, MUCH bigger at the same time."

"Yeah, I could stand to lose a few tons."

She smiled and let out a quiet snort as she gently knocked on the paneling next to her. "You're not fat, hun. I like you just the way you are."

"Aww. I like you as you are too. Let's make out, right now."

She laughed this time, stepping away from the wall to compose herself and retaliated with, "You'll have to excuse me while I learn where all the holes are."

It was my turn to lose it at that. I was rubbing off on her quickly, it seemed. We both spent a moment calming down, but she kept looking at the intercom panel with that wide, toothy smile of hers. "You know that's not where my eyes are, right?" I asked.

She shrugged. "I don't know where else to look." She lifted her head up and scanned the top of the room. The sensor arrays were pretty discreet, but after a moment, she was looking at the right place. "Ah, there you are. So what's it feel like to have your mouth and eyes so far apart, anyway?"

I shrugged to myself. "I guess I don't really think about it. The sensor arrays do kinda feel like part of my senses, so in terms of proprioception, they do feel sort of like my face? It actually really hurt that one time Skygraves blew one of them up, like someone shot my eye out or something. But the intercom just feels more just like... a device, you know? A really intimate device that's a part of me, but still just a device."

Ray pondered this for a moment. "So your face is up there... are there any other parts of you like that?"

"Yeah. Doc taught me that word, proprioception. It's like how your brain keeps track of all your limbs and organs and stuff without you having to think about it. Certain parts of the ship just kinda got added to that when I grafted it. I can feel the infirmary at my heart since that's where the core module is, and the reactor and engine area is sort of in my gut. The wings are at my arms and legs. I guess the cargo bay is my spine, since that's what got hurt most when it exploded."

"Is the helm your brain then?" She asked sincerely. "It's where all the big decisions get made, so that makes sense."

"That one doesn't map as cleanly." I shrugged, not having really thought too deeply on the subject before. "It's like how the intercom is just a machine. Sometimes a room is just a room. It's part of me, but it's not like, a big important component part of me. The mess and the crew quarters are the same way. It felt really really weird having one of the rooms taken out of me for a little while when we were traveling, but it didn't feel like getting my tits ripped off or something."

Ray just stared up at me for a little while with a loving smile on her face until she replied, "You're weird."

"I thought you liked weird!"

She chuckled, "Yeah, I do."

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