As fun as teasing Amelia was, all thought of continuing to do so promptly vanished when I took my first bite of the pizza.

Listen, the sandwich we had while shopping? It was great. Some of the very best synth food I'd ever tasted.

That pizza, though? Every bit that hit my tongue made me want to melt. I couldn't even taste the usual cardboard undertones or tang of chemicals that went into making food replacements.

If there were any in the pizza to begin with. For all I knew, it could have been fully natural, because it sure tasted that way.

Literally nothing I had ever eaten tasted better than that pizza. When my eyes happened to meet Amelia's, her green orbs were no longer glaring at me disapprovingly. They were filled with a smugness that made me freeze briefly.

Only briefly, of course, because I was back to stuffing myself a moment later.

"Slow down," Amelia eventually giggled, shoving me playfully with her shoulder. "I promise I'll order from that place again. They are my favorite. Still, if this is how you're going to react to all the food I show off, maybe we should set some time aside just for tasting sessions, hmm? Figure out what you really like."

"You're making me feel like a traitor," I grumbled. "I have… I had a chef friend, and he was good, but this is making me reconsider if I ever knew what 'fresh ingredients' even means. You know, if we have to go to ground and hide in the slums or something, the food there just might kill you."

She grimaced and muttered something under her breath. I just busied myself with the pizza again to keep myself from wondering if the slums were even a thing anymore.

"I don't want to hurry you along," Amelia ventured a few minutes later. "But I was wondering when you're going to set up my new scroll?"

"I can do it any time you'd like, but I just don't understand why you don't want to keep your current one."

"Maybe because every time you talk to it, creepy eldritch eyes pop onto the screen?"

"You do realize I'll need to briefly transfer my shadow pal onto the new scroll anyway, right? I'm learning, but I'm nowhere near good enough to make sure there's no way to track us through a store-bought scroll. On your old scroll, he's already sorted out anything that could have caused trouble. Plus, you did say it's a model customized to your specification, right?"

"Yeah, it's…" Amelia had an extremely complex look on her face as she turned away from me, chewing her bottom lip. "It was the one thing my father did for me. I mean, I'm pretty sure he had it made only because I told him it would let me assist him better, but…"

"It was still a gift," I finished quietly for her, and she nodded stiffly.

"That's part of why I'm torn on keeping it." Her voice was barely above a whisper. "You know, shadow infestation notwithstanding. I love that scroll, but it also reminds me of all sorts of stuff."

"For what it's worth? I think you should keep it. Shadow Buddy can live in the new scroll, no problem."

Well. Not entirely no problem. From what little I'd glimpsed of the new scroll's specs, even with the ridiculous price Amelia paid for it, it wasn't on par with hers.

That meant Shadow Buddy would be living in slightly worse hardware. But hey, I was pretty sure he'd make it work. He had a cousin or whatever living in a shard back in my apartment, if the building was still standing and hadn't gotten ransacked. It wasn't like the lower specs would put my shadow pal's life at stake.

"Maybe. I'll… let you know in a bit? We're not in a hurry!" she added much more brightly, face lighting up at the reminder of her freedom.

It did wonderful things for her cuteness.

I coughed and looked away, scraping a bit of cheese off the bottom of the pizza box and popping it in my mouth. "Ummm, on a related subject, would you mind if we went through some of the data we stole from your father? I could do it alone I guess, but I'm not sure I could understand it properly, and I figured…"

"You want me to admire your bodily data and swoon over it?"

She kept her face blank for all of two seconds when I turned to gape at her, then broke down into giggles.

"Rude!" I protested.

She arched an eyebrow at me. "So you can tease me, but I can't tease you?"

"I wasn't teasing you! I just came out of the shower!"

"All dripping wet with clothes sticking to you, mmmhmmm, checks out. And then you cozied right up to my side. You know, if you're hitting on me, there are better ways to do it. I can make a list for you."

"Them's fighting words for a girl who immediately went all blushy on me!

"You caught me by surprise! And before you bring up the ripper thing again, I'll repeat: there is nothing sexy about seeing a person laid out unconscious on your operating table. It's different!"

"So, you think I'm sexy?"

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Maybe I deserved getting clobbered in the face by a couch cushion. Once.

The other two smacks? Totally uncalled for.

Still, we were both laughing and sprawled out on the couch together soon enough. I felt cozy and warm and just the right amount of full from all the pizza. I genuinely couldn't remember the last time I'd been that relaxed.

Definitely not since I'd stolen the eyes, and most likely not before that, either. Sure, I knew Amelia's father was out there looking for us, but that threat somehow seemed more… manageable.

It wasn't a shadowy evil figure pursuing me anymore. It was a comically short doctor with a penchant for carelessness. I even had his daughter helping me hide!

I really felt like we could make it.

It also helped that the good doctor couldn't just throw the entire district into chaos on a whim. Not the district we were currently in, anyway. The doctor could have been king of the slums if he'd cared to try. But an inner city district? Yeah. No. The corps situated here would go after his throat if he tried something funny, to say nothing of the actual law enforcement.

Because of course that's what the fancier district had: guaranteed, enforced safety.

I was just starting to feel salty about that all over again when Amelia began squirming against me, reaching for items she'd left lying on the ground next to the couch. It was a good thing she wasn't looking at me, because my cheeks went up in flames at the feeling of her pressing against me like that.

Thankfully, I managed to get my body back under control by the time she hefted two scrolls over. One was brand new, while the other was clearly older, if well looked after.

"Okay, if you want my help with the research data thing, then get to shadow transferring. I'm sorry, but I just don't feel comfortable using the scroll with a shadow stuck on it. I don't want to somehow end up turning into one of those. Uh, no offense."

"None taken. And for what it's worth, I don't think you could. Get turned into a shadow through a scroll, I mean."

"Really? Why not?"

I paused before replying to pull a connector cable from the back of my skull. That never stopped feeling trippy: the sensation of something unspooling from inside of me.

"That one time I did the whole turn-a-person-into-an-eldritch-horror thing, I had to maintain eye contact while hovering over the guy," I explained. "And then, um… the whole 'Essence' thing in my status? I used some of it up to… trigger the change, I guess. It felt like invisible tears were seeping out of my eyes and into his or something. So, yeah. You don't have to worry about it happening accidentally or anything."

I kept my hands busy as I talked, plugging in the scroll and using the connection to contact Shadow Buddy. It was a form of communication, something between shadow-speak and a pure mental transfer of ideas, but he got the point and surged down the connection, settling inside of me.

I wasn't sure if it was my flesh or my cybernetics he was possessing. Either way, I felt… heavier. More real. Straining against reality in some odd way as two 'people' took up the space meant for one.

"That's… interesting," Amelia ventured cautiously. Glancing to the side, I noted her expression was caught between thoughtful and decidedly worried. "Essence is… well, it's a whole topic."

"Why don't you get us started in on it, then?" I quipped as I plugged myself into the new scroll.

I didn't want to boot it up just yet. Not until Shadow Buddy could go through it and eliminate any trackers. So, keeping it in startup settings mode, I prompted my shadow pal to vacate the premises of my body. He did so with some reluctance.

I suppose I made a better eldritch container than a scroll.

"Essence is…" Amelia sighed. "Ugh. Let me start from the beginning, okay? You know how Terra scientists kept pushing and pushing until they broke reality, right?"

"Sure." It was kind of public knowledge, so yes. No one knew exactly how or why, but everyone knew our society had broken apart due to some major disaster on Terra that took our 'original' solar system and beyond with it.

"Well, when they did that, the scientists unleashed creatures lurking in that… space, let's call it. Eldritch creatures from the beyond. I don't think they could actually pass through. Not most of them, at least. What they could do was break off pieces of themselves and send them into our reality. That's how you get the shadows, the stalkers, the behemoths, the menders… the whole lot of them, really."

I obviously recognized some of those names, and I shuddered. Just imagining the first breakout of shadows was enough to give anyone the shivers. "Must have been a slaughter."

"It was, actually. Definitely not pretty. At all. Still, from that hole in reality, which is still open by the way, came the Essence. It's… I suppose it's energy from the other 'reality.' The 'emptiness beyond', or whatever you want to call it. No one ever crossed over to check, so…"

"Right. But, the energy?"

"Yes. Right. Turns out, it's incredibly useful. And it's spreading outwards from Terra, just empowering and… well, occasionally mutating everything it comes across. Nowadays, I'd bet a decent portion of the universe is contaminated by it, but the overall saturation is high enough to cause spontaneous mutation only around Terra and the surrounding systems."

I paused my separate chat with Shadow Buddy to stare at Amelia in mild horror. "Mutations?"

"Not the kind you're imagining. Well. Not always. Just… the ability to naturally sense and absorb the energy, mostly."

"And that's a good thing?"

"Oh, absolutely. It does wonderful things to you, apparently. Firms up your mind. Makes you smarter, more mentally stable, the whole thing. It makes it way, way easier to install cybernetics without going insane. Like, the modern cybernetics? The really heavy-duty ones, including full body conversions? They're mostly made with the assumption that the user can gather Essence, at least to an extent."

For a moment, I felt a bit of bile build up in the back of my throat.

I had wondered, of course. The net had plenty of stories about people going full-on cyberpsycho or turning into little more than machines if they chipped in too much chrome. So, how was anyone supposed to reach the level of augmentation showed off by corp troops and assassins? Or even the corpo higher-ups themselves?

Now I knew. It was all thanks to a resource that most people had never even heard of. I, at least, had never seen so much as a whisper about it on the net.

No, not quite, I reminded myself. There were those old, old forum posts I found, back when I was researching stats…

I couldn't remember exactly what they said, but I was pretty sure there was some talk of Essence there. Vague, ill-defined talk. On forums that were almost definitely monitored.

Ugh. I could only guess at the kind of non-disclosure agreements the corps demanded in order to stop the spread of the info.

Amelia was apparently oblivious to what was going through my head, because she just kept talking.

"Of course, that's not the only benefit of Essence. If you manage to grow your stores enough, it'll start to affect your body, too. Not on a crazy level or anything. Not enough to make cybernetics obsolete. But, like with the mind, Essence… enhances the body. 'Firms it up', so to speak. Improves things like reaction speed, instincts, nerve quality, etc. Makes nerve connections to cybernetics more robust. And it can make aging slow down, or stop altogether. Even reverse it, to an extent."

"Wait." I swallowed down another teensy bit of bile. "The Essence can make someone immortal?"

"Yep. Pretty neat, right?"

Sure. That's the word I'd use.

Because it was simply amazing to learn that corpos had yet another way to make themselves live forever, other than just a full body cybernetic conversion.

Really. Just amazing.

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