So the circuit lay, unused but not forgotten, in the back of a dresser drawer. The pain wasn’t real, Seb told himself, but that didn’t mean he didn’t feel it. The phantom parts of his body haunted him, those severed from each neurode stump left in his spinal cord: the absent shuttle-bay doors, the missing habitation system, the navigation array, and the ConstDrive engines. Sometimes when Seb lay in bed half asleep, or sat by the kitchen window with the too-bright sun burning holes in his eyes, he caught himself trying to deploy repair nanos to allay the damage. But there were no nanos, and there was nothing to be done.
Seb dreamed of the vast empty space between asteroids, the nothingness between worlds. He dreamed of hollow echoing compartments and the ring of boots in long hallways. Seb dreamed of life, his and others’.
Seb spent the next morning lying on the couch, staring up at the ceiling. All the time in the world to think, and nothing to think about. At least it wouldn’t be a waste to divert some of his processing power to something as frivolous as a hobby. Learning to play the clarinet wouldn’t deprive a sanitation system of his attentions, and reading a novel wouldn’t require powering down the collision sensor array. He didn’t care about books or clarinets. But he cared about maintaining his medication supply, so he would have to figure out a way to redirect some energy into a hobby. A hobby, when all he really wanted to do again was—
Fly.
He sat up. Called out to his tablet, told it to place a series of orders from various vendors. He paid extra for overnight shipping, already wanting the pieces in his hands. This wasn’t a hobby, he told himself. It was just a different sort of life-support system.
The next time he spoke to the doctor, he had his handiwork to show her. A modified drone, outfitted with articulated limbs, a camera, a microphone. Her eyes rounded with surprise as he explained its assembly. “I thought,” he said, dissembling easily now that he had a comfortable plan to decelerate into, “that it could be my eyes and ears on the city. Give me a look at what’s out there before I’m going to head out under my own lift.”
“That’s a wonderful idea.” She studied the drone from her vantage point on the far side of the screen. “Do you have any plans for what you’re going to do with it first?”
“I have a few thoughts,” he said, and a genuine smile stretched his lips. It hurt, an unfamiliar sort of strain, but the pain was real, and Seb relished that.
The thing about the neurodes was that after ten years, being constantly plugged in started to overwrite the rest of your nervous system. Resources got rerouted to the systems that were in constant use: the ConstDrive, navigation, temperature control. Your arms got sluggish, your legs forgot how to walk. Your lungs started to slack off, and a coughing fit would split your needed attention away from the bay doors or from shifting the collision shield. Instead of going pitter-patter, your heart just pittered. And then you got sent back “home.”
But only if you stayed plugged in all the time, and if you were plugged in to something as vast as a ship. So many moving pieces in play, so much to keep track of. One little drone, a few limited sensory inputs. And Seb didn’t intend to stay plugged in all the time. Just now and then. When he needed it, to take away some of that dull throb of pain that his medications couldn’t reach. Like now.
The neurode at the back of his head, just where his skull met his spine, was the easiest for him to reach, and so he worked from there to attach the working transmitter he’d built. For the first time since he’d moved in to the apartment, he wished he had a mirror.
From the parts he’d ordered, he also managed to assemble a functional neurode receiver, through which he routed the drone’s inputs and outputs. He activated the transmitter first, a mere brush of thought, and gasped at the hollow echoing sense he’d opened up. Then on to the drone, turning on one input after another. The void filled, then reverberated, with light, color, sound. His apartment seen in dizzying double. His own hoarse breathing bounced back to him.
It felt good, tamped down on the pain. Some mental circuits, long dormant, flickered to life, warning Seb again of damage he’d taken: far too little input, far too little capacity, for what his neurodes had been designed for. He took a deep breath, soothed the autonomic response, enjoyed the sensation of being more than once again.
But more than still wasn’t enough. The window was open, and a mental twitch lifted the drone off Seb’s kitchen floor and out into the afternoon. White sunlight danced across the camera lens; Seb’s eyelids clamped instinctively but couldn’t shut out the light that seared him. It took him three tries to adjust the camera’s aperture and let a manageable amount of light in. By then the drone had lost considerable altitude; he righted it and stabilized its bearing only two stories off the ground.
Seb exhaled noisily. No one on the sidewalk glanced up at the drone; they probably hadn’t noticed the drones that had brought Seb’s pieces and parts either. He nudged the drone forward, hugging close to the apartment building on its route. He circled the exterior once, then hesitated. Sending his proxy out from home shouldn’t feel like such a challenge. What he’d desired had been to soar again, to remember what it felt like to be part of something greater than one fragile body and its limited sensations. He wanted to be free of that fleshy anchor, not cling ever closer to it. He brought the drone around and across the front of the building once more, and determined to send it out into the street this time.
But on the front steps, something caught his eye. A ragged EduFriend, the rabbit model, shuddering in the corner—one of those toys engineered to provide age-appropriate interaction and comfort to young children. Under Seb’s watch, the toy tried over and over again to squeeze itself into the crack between the building’s front door and its jamb. Of course it was far too large to fit, but it kept trying anyway. Seb wondered why no one had followed its signal to find it. He considered the rabbit’s battered state, the dent in the blue fur of its back. Broken, then. He felt almost sorry for the thing.
And not just the rabbit itself. There would be a child, somewhere in the building, who had noticed too late that their friend was missing. Well.
Seb extended the lightweight telescoping arm he’d installed on the drone, and a manipulator tool grasped the rabbit by the realistically fluffy scruff at the back of its neck. The rabbit panicked at first, playing havoc with the drone’s balance, but froze up when the drone began to pick up altitude. Either a self-preservation routine had kicked in, or the thing had simply shut down entirely.
Seb brought the drone around the side of the building, to a first-story window, and extended the telescopic arm to tap at the glass. The rabbit’s blue hind legs scratched there too. After a moment, a teenager approached the window, then stopped short at the sight of the rabbit-encumbered drone. Seb watched as her face folded into a bewildered scrunch, then moved the drone clear. No one came to the window at the next apartment, nor the one after that. The fourth window was open, with a man scrubbing dishes in the kitchen sink. Seb extended the rabbit out toward him. The drone’s microphone didn’t register a sound, but Seb could clearly read the man’s lips: “What the hell—?” And the drone retreated.
Around the building following the row of first-floor windows, then up a story, then another. Seb began to wonder whether he’d have any luck on this initial circuit of the building at all or if he’d need another pass, while he scratched at a window on the fifth floor. At least it was something to do.