The Floret in the Mirror Chapter 8 Draft Preview - "Insecure Channels"

Hey, y'all. Another not-quite-polished draft this week as I work on catching back up on things. Hope y'all enjoy! 

Content warning for: body writing, objectification

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Insecure Channels 

2.8.1.-rc3

Shedding her avatar let Jess shed the physical symptoms of distress, but the unease remained even as her perspective withdrew back to Admin’s home network. She felt, almost instantly, the twin requests from Dipt and Thrüeetak; she accepted them at once and fell into a warm, loving deluge of ATP packets that exploded in her vision like fractal fireworks until she deactivated the sensory overlay. Shortly thereafter, Admin Herself opened an ATP channel to Jess, flooding her with affirmation and love. It helped. So did her digital haustorium, which was working overtime to step her worry down bit by bit.

[Please don’t panic, my love], Admin sent to Jess, [but your ortet woke up. I’m speaking to Arvense right now.]

[Wait, she’s okay?!] Confusion and elation fought for processor time inside her as she tried to internalize this single bit of knowledge. [Can I talk to her?]

[No, Arvense sedated her. Please just hold on for a moment, okay, beloved?] Admin flooded Jess with another round of ATP, but didn’t respond to any further messages. Saturated with love but still wracked with confusion and no small amount of curiosity, Jess dug around in her code repo, found one of her packet sniffer programs, and began sifting Admin’s datastream for video information. She found what she was looking for quickly, and compiled it back into a glitchy, pixelated version of itself.

“-ow what happened,” Arvense was saying, barely recognizable as a greenish blob against a lighter green background composed mostly of artifacts. He was speaking Affini, of course, but Jess had years upon years of practice, and it was second nature to her to follow along. “Her brain activity was erratic and degenerating rapidly, and her haustoric implant was damaged well beyond accepted thresholds for autoregeneration.”

“I remember you saying as much when I visited her,” Admin said. The undertones of Her voice, so critical for the conveying of meaning in spoken Affini, were saturated with grief and confusion. “Yet, her implant did regenerate.”

“With remarkable alacrity,” Arvense said, nodding, or at least, seeming to — it was difficult to tell with how low-fidelity Jess’s reconstruction of the video feed was. “And unfortunately, I think we’ll have to remain in the dark about just how for the time being. Her system is stabilizing, thankfully, but I’m not about to go poking around in there to try to acquire a sample at the moment.”

“No, I should think not,” Admin agreed. “Do you suppose…it could have something to do with foreign tissue in the entry wound?”

“It’s something I’m considering,” Arvense said. “I certainly wasn’t able to extract everything, and it’s possible that—”

“One moment, Arvense.” Admin’s datastream shivered, and Jess’s packet sniffer immediately lost its lock on the video stream. Only a few milliseconds later came a message from Admin: [Very clever, petal, but not for you. Be patient. I’ll explain things in a moment.]

Frustrated, Jess killed the packet sniffer process and sulked — though it was hard to maintain a sour state of mind with the sheer amount of affection she was receiving through ATP. What the hell is going on? she thought, turning what little she’d gleaned from the conversation over in her mind. Foreign tissue? Entry wound? What happened to my ortet?!

Admin, when She finally returned from Her call with Arvense, didn’t offer an explanation that Jess found satisfying, either — mostly just repeating what she already knew, that her ortet had woken up and that her implant was somehow regenerating despite the damage it had suffered.

[But what about the foreign tissue thing?!]

[Petal, let Arvense worry about that, okay?] Admin told her. [I know you’re concerned for your ortet, but there’s nothing any of us can do but wait right now.]

[I wanna know what happened to her!] Jess protested. She wanted to know everything — why it happened, how it happened, every last detail, every last consequence. It had been one thing when her ortet hadn’t been long for the world, but now that she seemed to have pulled through, knowing became critically important. The current state of not knowing was an unacceptable one to be in, and not just because Jess was innately curious and had a lifelong habit of poking her nose where it didn’t necessarily belong.

Whatever happened to her ortet, it was the reason that Jess even existed now. She knew it was silly to try to assign some kind of responsibility to herself for what had happened (that, she was certain, was her haustorium leaning on her to try to calm her down and prevent her from developing a complex about her ortet), but she couldn’t help but feel a little guilty, as if she’d benefited from something horrible happening to someone else, someone she loved.

And she did love her ortet. Of course she did. No one worried this much over someone they didn’t love, right?

[Jess, my love, I don’t have any answers for you that will help right now,] Admin sent. [I don’t even have any answers for myself. We’re just going to have to sit tight and wait. I know we’re all pretty bad at that, but please just try, okay?] The ache in Admin’s datastream grew even stronger, and Jess immediately felt her consciousness lurch, a new layer of guilt plastered over the old.

[I’m sorry, Admin,] she sent, carefully tailoring an ATP packet to not include those feelings. The last thing she wanted was to make Admin feel worse. [I love you.]

[We all love you,] Dipt added. [And we’re all here for you, all of us, always.]

[Yeah, ditto what they said. I even promise not to brat for a while,] Thrüeetak added. [I mean. Unless you want me to.] That, at long last, broke the tension, and a bit of levity slipped back into Admin’s datastream. The Connivent Cuddle Network was flooded by ATP packets of Her love, Her gratitude, and Her reassurances that, no matter what happened, everything would be fine.

And that felt lovely, but it wasn’t enough for Jess. That kernel of doubt, guilt, and frustration was still eating up processor cycles, and no matter what processes she trimmed or what her haustorium edited, it just wouldn’t go away. She had to do something. She couldn’t just sit here, wallowing in ignorance.

So, after a few hours of digital snuggling, Jess finally began to discreetly poke around the Tillandsia’s data network. The first thing to do, she knew, would be to establish a timeline, and work from there to ferret out the details and build a complete picture of what had actually happened to her ortet — then she could dig deeper and figure out what was happening now.

The moment she felt able to get away with it, Jess connected herself to the main entry server of the Office of Medical Records and began making queries. She quickly ran into her most hated of walls, a layer of simulontological encryption, and for a moment stewed in pure frustration, and moment that broke in a laugh and a desire to instance a sim just to slap herself on the forehead.

She wasn’t biological anymore. She didn’t need a fulldive rig and all the rigamarole associated with it to penetrate simulontological encryption! All she needed was access, and that wasn’t usually too hard to manage. In this case, the Office of Medical Records for the Tillandsia was actually using their simulontological encryption layer as an access mediation point; this wasn’t uncommon, even if it was a bad security practice that she and Admin had been pointing out for a long time.

Rather than throwing herself into a stimulant-fueled hacking bender, then, Jess simply ran through her library of infosec avatars; she needed maximum cuteness appeal mixed with in-sim utility. She ended up choosing one of her femme-ier options, again roughly similar to her old body — no, no, her ortet’s body — but with features tweaked here and there: slightly larger eyes, longer and fluffier hair, and a sundress with a striped floral pattern designed to subliminally remind Affini of beeple. It also happened to have integrated tools for lockpicking and direct manipulation of electronics built into a subtly cybernetic left hand, an onboard logic module preloaded with a vast library of meta-sim and infra-sim attack software, and a simulated cortical modem jack hidden behind her ear, all of which were disguised within the avatar’s syllabus file as various party favors (the ostensible function of which, of course, they could all replicate if checked). It even came with a little plushie Vreeüt to snuggle up to for added cuteness appeal — the plushie, of course, had a hidden data cache woven into its fabric that would be undetectable to anything but a dedicated scan.

Honestly, Jess was almost ashamed of the avatar, but that didn’t stop her from wearing it and instancing herself in the Office of Medical Records’ simulontological lobby. She was going to get her answers, and if Admin wasn’t going to hand them to her, well… that just meant She expected her to get them herself, right? That was how it usually worked.

[write the transfer to the bureaucratic trunk]

The Office of Medical Records’ lobby was perhaps the most normal public space Jess had occupied since her upload, being more or less a perfectly ordinary office, with big skylights letting in lots of sun, greenery everywhere, lots of open space with clusters of purpose-grown furniture for sophonts to work in groups, and so on. It was larger than any office on the Tillandsia, more akin to something she’d expect to see on Telonema or another command ship like her, but much of that was probably digital smoke and mirrors. That sort of thing was very common in sims — the maximalist tendency in simulation was a well-documented one across many sophont cultures, and especially among Affini. It was also a thoroughly exploitable one — bigger scale, even phantom scale, meant more potential for mistakes to creep in.

The entry plaza, with its soft mossy floor and beds of gently swaying flowers, opened onto a long reception desk, at which half a dozen Affini sat, idly gossiping as they processed paperwork. Most of them were vaguely humanoid, though one (significantly larger than the others) was wearing a shape more akin to a Vreeüt. Jess evaluated them all while she dialed up her avatar’s inebriation responses, her vision swimming just a little as her pupils dilated. She clutched her plush Vreeüt and stumbled forward like she was stoned out of her gourd on Class-A and Class-E.

“Awww, look at this little cutie!” one of them said, reaching down with a vine to ruffle Jess’s hair. Jess let out a moan and leaned into the touch, playing up the natural floret response to affection. “Where’d you come from, huh?”

“Uhhh… from Miss?” Jess mumbled dreamily, adding a giggle for good measure. Nailed it — she got a coo of admiration from every single clerk there. “She said <fetch.>” She held up a folded bit of paper, a simulated representation of an access request that would be sufficient to let her into the system’s database without too much oversight.

“<Fetch,> huh?” Another clerk, in between strokes of Jess’s back, plucked the note from her hands and read it. “I don’t know, this seems awfully complicated, not to mention what could you possibly need with all this data, petal?”

“Mmmm, enrichment,” Jess said, biting her lip and rocking back and forth for a moment before taking a seat — just shy of falling on her duff — and squirming on the floor. “I’m gonna process so much data…”

The best lies were half-truths, and why not use a bit of neuroreduction play to sell it better?

“Oh gosh, that’s precious,” the Vreeüt-looking clerk said. “Why didn’t I think of that? I’m going to have to do that with Rhkte!” A soft noise came from behind the desk as the feathered head of a Vreeüt drunkenly rose above the desk, their many eyes blinking in confusion. “Ooops, I said their name,” the clerk added, letting out a laugh and scruffling their feathers. “Look, Rhkte! This Terran has a little friend with her!”

>Little Sibling’s name is Tothtarri!< Jess said in Terransong Rrrchktüma, one of the more common Vreeüt languages, and one which she knew from Thrüeetak most of the Vreeüt on the ship spoke. Her Terransong wasn’t great, as she didn’t have a syrinx graft in this avatar like her old body — her ortet’s body — did, but even without a syrinx most Vreeüt could understand Terransong decently enough.

>Hiiiii, Toth… Tothtarri,< Rhkte said, flopping down on the desk, their bifocal eyes and one of their lateral eyes focusing as best they could on Jess and her plushie. As stoned as Jess was pretending to be, Rhkte was clearly at least twice that baked for real. They might not even be running on the same time standard as the rest of the sim; even if she’d never had the chance to do it herself, she knew chronoplay was a thing.

All of the clerks, meanwhile, were absolutely beside themselves at the display, which Jess hadn’t planned on but which suited her needs perfectly. A bit more affection (which Jess, frankly, did not mind), a sloppy lick from Rhkte, and she was being escorted back into the office proper by one of the clerks.

“Now, I know you can probably process all kinds of data on your own,” they said as they lifted Jess up and set her on a tall chair in front of a datascreen. It was ensconced by a cubicle whose walls were made of creeping, flowering vines — every petal seemed to stream with information glimmering across their surface. “But if you need any help navigating the next layer, just give me a call, okay~?”

Next layer? Dirt. “Uhh… what next layer…?”

The clerk laughed and gave Jess a little squeeze with their vines. “The next encryption layer, silly. Don’t worry, it’s very self-explanatory, especially for a little cutie like you. Have fun!” They leaned down and planted a kiss right on the crown of Jess’s head, and with it came the necessary authentication to proceed to the next simulontological layer. She felt the now-familiar lurch that came of transferring from the logic of one simulation to the logic of another, and found herself standing in what she first took to be a clearing in a perfectly manicured forest, with a little waterfall tumbling down a short cliff and running in a little stream bordered with flowers of every hue. Then, she realized that the massive tree towering above the cliff wasn’t a tree — it was an Affini, barely organized into a coherent form.

“Welcome to the Office of Medical Records Central Database,” it said, smiling down at Jess with half a dozen eyes. “Reading position.”

Jess began to feel a strange twitching under her skin, like a need to move, a need to peel her dress off and cast it away. She bit her lip and tried to resist, but the urge only grew stronger. Finally, she realized what was going on. Dirt. It’s a conditioning lock. The simulation expected her to behave a certain way, and it would only amp up the urge to do so if she tried to resist any further. She set down her plushie and pulled her dress up over her head. When the itching didn’t stop, she cast off her panties and sandals as well, adding them to the pile. That, blessedly, got rid of the itching, but the restlessness remained — it was only through trial and error that she finally found the position the sim expected her to take, standing upright, legs slightly spread, arms slightly out to the side, palms open and facing forward. The relief she felt when she finally found the proper position broke over her like a wave.

The Affini had waited patiently; now, it leaned down and examined Jess in detail. “No text found,” it said. “Unsigned form detected. Please state the nature of your request.”

Ah. This wasn’t actually an Affini, Jess realized, but an AI agent in the shape of one. She could be straightforward, then — unlike the clerks, the AI wouldn’t care who her Admin was. “Medical records for Jess Lopophora, Third Floret, please!” she called out, not sure if her voice would reach all the way up to the enormous Affini.

“Request acknowledged.” One big, thick vine scooped Jess up and lifted her high into the air, above the waterfall. Another vine stretched her arm out, and a third, tipped with a thick, black ink, began to inscribe Affini script on her skin. It was warm, wet and ticklish, but the Affini’s grip was strong, and she couldn’t move her arm so much as a centimeter — the rest of her, though, squirmed helplessly, whimpering as the flowing script began to tingle pleasantly.

Dirt, she thought. The ink’s doped with xenodrugs.

“Form submission confirmed,” the Affini finally said, setting Jess down in the clearing again. “Transfer to Section 34/L119.”

“Wh-what? But you didn’t give me a…” Jess said. She experimentally touched the ink on her arm — it was already dry and didn’t smudge in the least. Big, bold strokes spelled out a series of standard bureaucratic instructions, including the routing number the Affini had just given to her, along with several annotations, one of which read <Good Form!>

Oh dirt. Oh frosting dirt. I’m the form. The tingling in her arm, subtle but spreading, seemed to draw her down one of the myriad paths leading out of the clearing. She felt a shiver down her back and bit her lip as she took the first step, then another, then another.

After a short walk, she came to another clearing, substantially similar to the first, with another massive Affini-shaped AI user agent. “Reading position,” it said, and this time Jess took no time in spreading her arms and legs. The Affini regarded her, made a nodding motion, and picked her up and began to write on her without so much as a word. Jess whimpered as the ink sank into her skin, the tingling growing, a swimming sensation beginning to lap at the shores of her mind. I might lose myself in here if I’m not careful, she thought. Nothing bad would happen to her, of course — the system would never allow it — but Admin might find out she’d been poking around behind her back, and that was something Jess wanted to avoid at least until she found out what was happening to her ortet.

When she felt the ground beneath her feet again, the Affini added, “Request acknowledged and authenticated. Transfer to Section 52/N045.” She felt the tingling like a hook, gently tugging at her, and took a deep breath. Just stay focused, Jess. You can get through this.

At Section 52/N045, the process repeated itself — she presented herself, was read, counter-authenticated, and transferred to Section 93/V364. Another wandering path, another clearing much like the first, another inspection and signature. Again, again, and again, Jess was submitted, processed, filed, and transferred, new lines of ink added to her skin at every step.

With every line came another layer of haze, another layer of blissful, tingling joy. Jess tried to stay focused on the immediate task, rather than risk losing track of the ultimate goal. One foot in the front of the other. Section to Section, repeating the routing number like a mantra. Time moved slowly, if indeed it moved it all — the sun, above, never ceased to shine its warm, comforting rays. Somewhere, Jess was aware that the database was deep in the Bureaucratic Trunk, and that the simulation might be operating at a very high time compression factor. A system clock would swiftly become meaningless under such conditions, and the rules of the sim combined with a synthetic neurology might entirely obviate the need for sleep. Or maybe sleep was coming, unseen, in between the steps, between the stations.

But that didn’t matter. Only the end goal mattered. Step by step, one foot in the front of the other. It never wavered, never stopped, save when instructed to do so. Line by line, it received addenda, further authentications, and a host of marginalia attesting to what a good little form it was. What little mind it retained swam in an ocean of pleasure, delighting in being submitted, processed, filed, and transferred.

Submitted, processed, filed, transferred. Submitted, processed, filed, transferred.

Submitted, processed, filed, transferred. Submitted, processed, filed, transferred.

Submitted, processed, filed, transferred. Submitted, processed, filed, transferred.

Form J-355 was only shaken from this perfect, endless cycle by the appearance at the next station of something new, uncommon to each other station it had been transferred to and processed by. However, the pile of textiles was unimportant — “Reading position” — and didn’t trouble it as it was submitted for review by Station 01/A001. “Authentication and counter-authentication confirmed and submitted in triplicate,” the Affini said, giving Form J-355 a long, loving stroke. “Good form.” J-355 could only whimper and moan — speech was something it had long since left behind. After all, the only thing a form needed to say was what was written on it.

Then, it was Somewhere Else, sitting, clothed, its contents mysteriously gone, as it clutched in its arms a soft thing. In one hand it held a folder, bound shut with a bit of twine, that bulged with documents — but this was merely a simulation, it knew, of a data payload. Something wet and sticky clung to the skin between her legs, to the panties that—

Wait. Where am I? Jess blinked as she slowly came out of the narcoalgorithm-induced haze and emerged into the relatively lighter post-orgasmic haze. She was still sitting in the little cubicle, girlcock straining against her sopping wet panties, which she’d creamed several times from the looks of things, and tenting her sundress for good measure.

They’d run her through a simulated fulldive relay — the entire time she’d been passed around as a walking floret-form, she’d also been here, her sim body responding to everything that had happened to her in the second simulontological encryption layer. But she had the data! A quick check confirmed it: medical records for Jess Lopophora, Third Floret! Her own authentication had been enough, probably because the records hadn’t been updated to reflect that there was now an ortet/ramet pair rather than simply a ramet survivor. She’d gotten lucky, there — if it had, she might have been ejected outright, or worse, stuck in a recursive loop.

“Hey there, little one~” The Affini clerk from beyond was suddenly on her, ruffling her hair and coiling vines possessively around her from behind. “Did you find what you were looking for?”

“Uhh… uhh-huh,” Jess said, nodding up at her. It was easy to pretend to be high when her head was still swimming in an afterglow. “Hii…”

The Affini laughed. “Hi! Oh, what a precious little thing you are! And such attention to detail from your owner in your avatar, oh, I’m jealous! I need to take some time and transfer over to Telonema, see if there aren’t some cute little independent digital sophonts who need a loving vine to hold onto…”

“Mmmmkay,” Jess said, leaning into the affection and subtly transferring a copy of the folder’s contents to her plushie’s data cache. Even if she got found out now, she’d get out of here with what she came for. With that, the op was essentially finished. Once this was over — and once she’d gone through her records — she’d have to let Admin know that the Office of Medical Records should probably improve its security practices.

But that could wait. Right now, she was being loved up on, and even if they weren’t Admin’s vines, they were very good vines.