She sighs, tilting her head back against the train window. “The risk of me inventing the world’s first accidental orgasmatron?”
I don't respond. I’m not amused. I’m notsupposedto be amused.
In reality, I’m counting off symptoms in my head—delayed seizure response, synaptic misfire, memory corruption, potential degradation of cortical tissue. The translator doesn’tjustreadsignals. It writes back. If she left it on even a second too long, it could’ve begun overwriting other pain-processing pathways entirely.
“You may have burned out part of your anterior cingulate cortex,” I say, watching the city lights flicker past. “Or your insula. Possibly both.”
“You’re catastrophizing,” she replies. “If there were real damage to the insula, I’d be having sensory disassociation. If it hit the cingulate, I’d be in full-on emotional dysregulation or catatonia, not cracking jokes about my vibrator hat.”
I glare at her. “As your supervisor, it’s my job to catastrophize. I probably should have been doing more of that before you volunteered yourself as a test subject.”
“I promise it wasn’t all that bad,” she says, a smile ghosting over her lips.
I don’t return the look.
She sobers fast.
“Look…at least we know it isn’t as broken as we originally thought—it’s just translating wrong, like if you wanted to get Skoll out of Merati and instead you got…I don’t know, Portuguese? But they’re all languages?—”
“Translators killed too, before the technology was refined,” I tell her. “Biotech isn’t a toy, Walker. It can cause permanent brain damage.”
And you have a beautiful mind, I almost add but think better of it.
She falls silent, her knee still bouncing, but slower now—like the weight of what I said is finally starting to press down. I don’t like scaring her. But I’d rather see her humbled than hurt.
The train jerks slightly as it pulls into my district. She glances up at the station marker and then back at me.
“So,” she says, “what happens if Ididstart to rewire something? What would it feel like?”
I hesitate. “You might notice pleasure from things that used to hurt. Or…pain from things that didn’t used to hurt. Your threshold could change. You might start misclassifying inputs—heat, pressure, even emotional responses. Worst case, your reward system could start treating pain stimuli as positive reinforcement. That kind of loop is…difficult to undo.”
She exhales slowly. “But I’m not showing signs of any of that yet.”
“Not yet,” I say. “But neural misfiring doesn’t always show immediately. We’re not dealing with a bruise or a sprain. We’re talking about live software in an organic processor. And yours is overclocked even on a normal day.”
That earns me a sideways look. “Was that a compliment?”
“A warning,” I mutter, standing as the doors slide open. “Come on.”
She follows, not saying anything more until we’re out on the street and walking the short distance to my building. The night air is crisp—rare for this late in the season—but she doesn’t shiver. Just keeps pace with me, a little too close, like she’s trying to read me sideways while pretending not to.
“I’m not sorry,” she says finally, as we near my steps. “About trying it. I wouldn’t have gotten this far without pushing the edge.”
I pause, hand on the codeplate for the door. “I’m not asking you to be sorry.”
The door opens before she can ask more questions, then we’re moving into the elevator. It carries us upward, Lyn looking around.
“This…seems nice,” she says. “Big faculty salary, huh?”
“The Nyeri’i Authority pays for my housing,” I murmur.
“So you’re kind of a big deal.”
I glance at her sidelong. “Not at all. I worked in Systems Containment before I began my career—it’s dangerous, so my people pay for our education and housing.”
“Systems Containment?”
“First responders,” I explain. “We go into ships on the verge of catastrophic collapse, save as many people as possible. Before the Trinity was destroyed, we were the ones who got people off our homeworlds.”
