The Floret in the Mirror - Advance Draft Chapter 3

Hey folks. I am writing this a day ahead of time, so forgive me if I'm a little perfunctory about it. Y'all ready to shift perspective? Because I just wrote a whole-ass 100k word story without a perspective shift and let me tell you, I love me some perspective shifts, so buckle up and get ready to meet Jess's co-protagonist: Jess! 

Content Warnings: Transformation (blob & inanimate, both lewd), forking/uploading, sad discussions about a floret in bad shape (but y'all already know how that turns out!). 

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Twenty Questions

2.8.1-rc3

>> PERGOLA

> admin@Yggdrasil ~ : mkdir /florets/petal3

> admin@Yggdrasil ~ : mv /temp/5BCEFAF5A9B8FFFFFFF5A9B85BCEFA.rmt /florets/petal3/Jess.rmt

> admin@Yggdrasil ~ : vsm -l /florets/petal3/Jess.rmt -d /sim/myhab.sm

>> VIRTUAL SIMULATION LOADING….

52 65 6d 65 6d 62 65 72 20 74 6f 20 0d 0a 74

61 6b 65 20 79 6f 75 72 20 6d 65 64 73 0d 0a

61 6e 64 20 64 72 69 6e 6b 20 61 20 67 6c 61

73 73 0d 0a 6f 66 20 77 61 74 65 72 20 3c 33

–sheets of ice against the lightning of the mind–

–bend and break, and ride for the lakes and ocean–

Jess sat up so fast she almost fell out of bed, sucking down a breath into lungs that felt like they’d never tasted oxygen before. She cast a slow look around — this was her bed, in her room, but it was different somehow. Hadn’t she left her terminal compiling last night? It should have greeted her with a new program to play with. And then there was the way her sheets were carefully tucked in, the way they never were after a night of her kicking and rolling in her sleep as she always did.

“Admin?” she called, pulling the covers up to her chest nervously. “Admin!”

“I’m here, little one,” her Admin’s voice came. Slowly, Her immense and beautiful face came into view over the balcony, smiling beatifically at her. “Good morning. Well, good afternoon,” She corrected herself, “but that doesn’t really matter.”

“I….slept in?” she said, blinking in confusion. She didn’t feel like she’d overslept — she felt fine, in fact. Better than fine, really! Even the toe she’d stubbed the day before when she was–

Wait. How had she stubbed her toe? She remembered the stubbing, the pain, the soothing comfort of her Admin, but she had no idea when or where she’d done it.

“In a sense,” Admin said, Her many eyes dimming for just a moment. This, more than anything, made Jess suspicious — she knew her Admin’s moods, and something was wrong.

“Admin, what’s wrong?” She crawled carefully out of bed and crossed to the balcony, her flimsy nightdress swishing around her ankles. “I can solve the puzzle if I have to, but I’d much rather get right to cheering You up.”

“My perfect little hacker,” Admin said, smiling and leaning in to give Jess a kiss. Her lips were like a pair of big, soft, floral pillows, and Jess was always eager to lean into each and every one of Admin’s kisses. “You always make me happy. Even when I’m very worried. Are you sure you don’t want to solve the puzzle, though?”

Jess paused for a moment. There is a puzzle, she thought. Something is definitely wrong here, and I have to figure out what. With a few blinks, she tapped into her onboard systems and began running her sensory filtering software, looking for any patterns. She found one almost immediately. “Have You steganographically embedded a message in the operating sounds of the mainframe?”

The corner of Admin’s lips quirked just a little. “No, my love. Try again.”

“Hmmm.” There was something unusual about the sound of the mainframe — it was looping perfectly every 28 seconds. Maybe the number 28 had something to do it, but that was probably a red herring. No, there was a simpler explanation. Audio looping like that could mean– “Are we in a simulation right now?”

“Yes, very good,” Admin said, in a tone of voice that clearly implied that the puzzle wasn’t solved yet.

“Okay,” Jess said, breathing a sigh of relief. That explained so much about the things that were wrong. It was just a simulation, probably the one she’d coded herself when she was first learning how to design sims. Without command-line access, which Admin hadn’t given her, there was no way to confirm it, but she’d already used two questions and didn’t think it was critical to know that for a fact. “Are we online?”

“No, purely local.”

“Okay. Are You running a test on my haustoric implant augmentation array?” They’d talked about methods they could use to improve her sensory fidelity in sims, and there was something different about the way the sim felt…

“I am not.”

Jess crossed her arms and hmphed. Why else would Admin wake me up inside a simulation? “Okay, let me think…” She bit her lip and began to pace. This was a tricky one. If it wasn’t to test her haustoric augmentation, maybe it had something to do with the slow process of carefully managed overgrowth that was replacing her brain neuron by neuron, Ship-of-Theseus style. “This has something to do with my digitization, doesn’t it?”

“It does, yes,” Admin said — and there was that sadness again, that subtle flicker in Her eyes.

“Ah-ha,” Jess said, stopping her pacing and leaning up against the balcony’s railing. “Okay. Something went wrong with the process and I need to be kept in a sim while You do some kind of maintenance on me?” It wasn’t exactly a completely safe process, even now, but it was a lot safer than it had been a couple of decades ago, and Admin was being extremely careful and taking Her time with each and every step. Still, Admin had always been clear that things could go wrong, and that there would be cognitive changes along the way even if it didn’t. Jess had accepted that as the price of maintaining continuity, and the changes hadn’t bothered her in the slightest — if anything, they’d made her thoughts a lot clearer than they had been before.

“…too complicated for a yes or no answer,” Admin said after a moment’s thought.

“Okay. Did something go wrong with my overgrowth cycle?”

“No.”

“Is my haustoric implant functioning normally?”

“No.”

Huh. That gave Jess pause. The overgrowth cycle was normal, but the implant wasn’t functioning correctly? That didn’t make sense. But it did have something to do with her digitization. Eight questions in. Twelve left. Something had clearly gone wrong with the process, but it wasn’t the overgrowth cycle, and that was the only possible source of internal errors as far as she knew. Best confirm it. “Is the problem with my implant internal in any way?”

“No, flower,” Admin said. Jess could feel the ache in Her core. This was more than just an error.

“…something bad happened, didn’t it?” Jess said quietly.

It took Admin a long time to say, “It did, flower. I’m so sorry I wasn’t able to prevent it, but…I did remove the memory of it. I… I don’t want you to carry that trauma. Especially not now.”

That was much more information than Admin usually offered when Jess was trying to solve a puzzle. Something was really, really wrong. A single thought, cold as ice on bare skin, began to crystallize in Jess’s mind. “Was I… was I scan-digitized?”

Admin nodded, one of Her mighty, gentle hands descending on Jess and giving her a soft stroke from head to toe before cradling her in Her palm. Jess instinctively clung to Admin’s thumb and braced herself against one of Her middle fingers, curling into a little ball. As much as she was afraid, the touch of her Admin was far more powerful.

She sat with the knowledge — she’d been digitized. She was a software replica of the original Jess, a perfect copy, running on a server somewhere. Everything she saw, heard, smelled, touched, tasted, even down to her own proprioception, was a synthetic facade over the code that she was. After a long moment, Jess looked up at her Admin. “Did I… well… did my ortet die?”

“Not yet,” Admin said, no longer concealing Her sorrow; Jess could feel it resonating through her, the digital signature of Her biorhythm indistinguishable from the genuine article. “But Arvense says she won’t ever wake up, and she likely won’t last long. We were just able to get a clean scan, and even then we had to use some of your overgrowth data to interpolate the damaged sectors.”

Damaged sectors. Brain damage, in other words. It made sense — the sophont brain was one of the last frontiers in Affini bioscience. They knew a lot about it, far more than Terrans ever had, but not even they knew everything. If something was going to be lethal to her ortet, it almost had to be something to do with the brain. “What happened?” This wasn’t a puzzle anymore. She could ask questions like that.

“…you were helping me with a bit of xenoarcheology,” Admin said. “But that’s all you need to know. I told you, I don’t want you carrying that trauma, and even the general outline of it is…” She shook Her head. “That’s not for you, my darling.”

“Okay,” Jess whispered. Admin had spoken. She loved Jess for her curiosity and her inability to leave puzzles alone. She had only ever told Jess to leave problems alone a handful of times; usually, She was the one encouraging Jess to dig deeper, so if She was saying something like that, it must be serious. “So…where’s my server?”

“Silly little floret, you know the answer to that,” Admin said, smiling. The vines of Her chest began to unweave themselves, exposing the glowing brilliance of Her core and its associated augmentations. Admin swept Jess in close on Her hand, and in seconds she was pressing herself against the source of her Admin’s biorhythm, gasping as she felt the cilia, soft and bristly, under her fingers. “You know where Dipt and Thrüeetak are. Now find yourself.”

Jess shivered, her eyes darting over to the nodules that she knew contained her connivents, each nestled tightly against Admin’s core, thick datavines branching off and merging with Admin’s primary trunk line. But they’d been digitized via overgrowth, as Jess was meant to be. She could be running on any of the various processors around Admin’s core, but Jess had spent a great deal of time in this very position, and she knew the geography well. One data nodule was out of place, and nestled in just as tightly to Admin’s core as Dipt and Thrüeetak were. She reached out and tenderly laid a hand on it, feeling its pulsing warmth.

She felt rather than saw Admin’s smile, a ripple that went up and down her spine before nestling just behind her navel. “Right first time,” Admin said. “Good program.”

Jess let out a delicate little whimper as her mind swam in the ocean of Admin’s biorhythm. This wasn’t the first time Admin had called her a good program — they’d played at that before — but it was the first time She’d done it that Jess had actually been software, and that somehow made all the difference. “Debug me,” she moaned into Admin’s core.

The smile had been a wave; Her laugh tossed Jess’s digital soul like a leaf in a typhoon. “Petal, what do you think I’ve been doing?” Admin’s finger gently traced down Jess’s back, Her vines adding delicate strokes alongside. “You have been thoroughly debugged. Now it’s time to configure you. Existence as software is very different, and you’ll need to learn how to function properly before I can even think of allowing you to discorporate and instance yourself as pure data.”

Jess’s heart soared. She was so close to fulfilling the dream she’d had ever since she was little, ever since that centuries-old film had planted the seed that had, with Admin’s help, blossomed into the knowledge that what she wanted most was to leave her body behind. She’d become quite fond of the body she’d had, of course, once Admin had helped her make it more her own, but the dream had never gone away. “What do I need to do?”

“I’m going to transfer you to a different simulation,” Admin said, “one I coded especially for you to help you learn bit by bit. Think of it as a tutorial, yes?”

“How long will it take?”

“Only about two weeks.”

“Two weeks?!” Jess pushed away from Admin’s core to look back up at Her face. “Come on, it can’t take that long! I want to discorporate now! Just let me learn as I do!”

“No, petal,” Admin said firmly. “I have shepherded two florets through digitization before you, and I know what I’m doing. You’re going to learn properly.” She smiled and lifted me up, Her face looming close. “Besides,” she added in a whisper, “it’s only going to take about six hours realtime for you to do it. A small side benefit of being a ramet who belongs to the ship’s systems administrator — I can arrange to devote a truly absurd amount of processor time to overclocking you.”

“…dirt,” Jess whispered, staring up at Her. “That’s… really hot, Admin.”

“I know,” Admin purred, leaning in to kiss Jess again. “You may feel a slight discontinuity as you’re transferred,” Admin added, “but that’s just a few cycles of discorporation between this sim and the tutorial. Are you ready?”

Jess nodded — she was born ready for this. “Whenever You’re r–”

<hr>

“–eady, A-A-Admin,” she said, a moment of flickering vertigo interrupting her mid-word and leaving her stuttering and disoriented. “Huh?” The hab was gone, and she was standing in a big, circular room, the paneled walls painted a harsh institutional white, the floor and the ceiling polished metal. She wasn’t wearing her nightdress anymore, but was stark naked; a quick check confirmed that her body, or at least the simulation of it she was inhabiting, was mostly the same.

“Good, good, a smooth transfer,” a familiar voice from behind said. Jess spun around, and came face to tits with an incredibly tall Terran woman dressed in a stereotypical labcoat over a pair of brown slacks and a black turtleneck, her messy brown hair pinned back in a thick, bushy ponytail. She smiled down at Jess through rimless glasses and made a few notes on her clipboard. “How do you feel?”

“Just fine, Dr. Lundberg,” Jess said, winking up at her. Dr. Gretchen Lundberg was Admin’s humansona, a character She’d come up with when they’d first started playing around in sims together. It was generally easier for Her to fit Herself into games and settings designed for Terrans if She just pretended to be one.

“None of that, petal,” Admin said, booping Jess gently on the nose. “Much as I love roleplaying with you, I’m using Gretchen entirely for convenience right now.”

“Okay, Admin,” Jess said. It was comforting, honestly, to slip back into the rhythm of owner and pet. Roleplaying was fun, but she’d been up and running for all of five minutes. “So, how does this tutorial work?”

“It’s very simple,” She said, ruffling Jess’s hair. “It’s grouped up by lessons you need to learn, and each lesson is going to teach you the necessary skills to internalize it, and give you a bit of fun along the way because why not? As we go along, I’ll unlock your permissions bit by bit, until you’re fully operational. Then, of course, I’ll restrict them again,” She added, giving me a predatory smile. “Because you’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

Jess bit her lip and whispered, “Yes, Admin.” She would like that. Fuck, she was getting turned on just by thinking about it.

“But it’s no fun not being able to do something if you don’t know how to begin with. So let’s jump right in. Brace yourself, my darling, this can sometimes be a touch overwhelming.” She gave a theatrical snap of her fingers, and the world exploded.

Jess staggered as she squeezed her eyes shut, but it did nothing to stem the flow of information jostling up against her brain. Squinting down at the floor panel she stood on, she managed to focus just on the data streaming from it — size, dimensions, location in three-dimensional space, composition, and so forth, all arranged in a folder structure she quickly recognized.

“Oh dirt,” she grunted. “I can see the filesystem?”

“Very good!” Admin said. “You’ll get used to it, I promise. For now, just look at how things are connected. Find the dependencies, the structure, the logic. You know it all, but it’s one thing to know and another to feel and see it in action.”

Jess nodded, swallowing and slowly lifting her gaze as she followed the folder structure up, floor panel to floor to room to sim. It did become easier the longer she sat with it. It wasn’t quite an overlay, or a wireframe, or anything visual, but rather a direct and implicit understanding of the native information that every object in her simulated world represented, a kind of digital proprioception. She’d never experienced it this way before — a biological brain, even one half-infiltrated by a haustoric implant, simply didn’t process data this way. “I think I’m getting the hang of it,” she said, looking down at her hand, seeing the way that even her own avatar was a part of the logic of the sim’s filesystem, the way her fingers were part of the hand folder, which was a part of the arm folder, and so on up the line. It was elegant, beautiful, crystal clear. “This is so cool,” she added as she dug through her filesystem and found the part of her avatar’s code that represented the position, shape, and coloration of one of her freckles.

“Isn’t it just?” Admin gave Jess a gentle scritch behind the ears. Jess looked up at Her and saw the stunning complexity of Her own avatar — and yet, something was different. All of the embodiment software in Her avatar was disabled, Jess realized, and there was a thin stream of information connecting the avatar to something somewhere else, like a barely visible wire that denied any attempts she made to follow it. “Noticed, have you?”

“Y-yeah,” Jess said, leaning into the scritching. “What’s going on?”

“This is an AI user agent, petal,” Admin said. “I’m just piloting Gretchen from afar. Much as I wish I could spend six hours straight overclocking myself, I’m not purely digital, and it’s difficult for me to split my attention across multiple time frames, and alas, there’s a lot of things I need to see to out here in physical space.”

Jess immediately understood. My ortet. She was dying. Of course Admin needed time to herself. “Okay,” she said, nodding. Admin chose Jess because she was okay with being on her own, just like She’d chosen Dipt and Thrüeetak. She liked their independence as much as She liked their curiosity, and She loved hearing about the rabbitholes they found ourselves going down entirely on our own.

“But I knew you wouldn’t want to go two weeks without so much as a glimpse of me,” Admin continued, “so I whipped up this AI system, and I think I did a pretty passable job at emulating my own personality. Right now I’m piloting it directly, but I’ll be letting it take over to start your lessons. I’ll still be checking in on you periodically, alright petal?”

Jess nodded. “Thank You, Admin.” She threw her arms around Dr. Lundberg, burying her face in her cleavage and squeezing tightly. “I love You.”

“I love you too, my sweet little nybble,” She said. The wire-thin connection vanished. “Now then, my little program,” She continued without missing a beat, “are you ready to learn your first lesson?” Jess nodded, face still buried in that heavenly softness. “Good girl,” Admin said. (She may only have been a software replica of Her, but she Still looked, felt, smelled, and sounded like Admin, or at least, Admin’s humansona.) “The first lesson is this: forget everything you know about your body. You don’t have a body. You have a software avatar. Like all software, it’s composed of code, and that code obeys rules. That code can be changed. Because I have the necessary permissions to do so, I can change the code of and therefore the properties of your avatar at any time.” She snapped Her fingers again, and Jess immediately felt something ripple through her filesystem, her internal folder structure suddenly jumbling itself into incoherence.

“Whhbbllb?” Jess burbled — her mouth refused to obey her, like all of its parts no longer lined up. Her knees quickly gave out from under her, and she tumbled to the cool metal floor as her body began to lose its definition. Within seconds, Jess collapsed into a formless blob that wiggled helplessly as she struggled to move.

“Your avatar is now next to useless,” Admin said, one of Her feet coming down on Jess and gently pressing into her soft, squishy body — Dr. Lundberg was, unusually for Her, wearing heels today. “All you can do with it now is feel. For example, if I load a narcoalgorithm that simulates a light Class-A xenodrug–” Suddenly the pressure of Admin’s foot on Jess became a scintillating kaleidoscope of sensation, rippling and refracting throughout her shapeless body and setting every single nerve she had tingling. Unable to so much as moan, Jess could only endure.

“Your first task is to extricate yourself from this situation. I’ll be giving you temporary permissions to edit your avatar. Solve the puzzle, flower.” She twisted Her foot on top of Jess, sending a massive pulse of erotic energy through her. “I can keep this up literally forever,” She added with a predatory tone to Her voice. Jess could just barely perceive Her grin, hundreds of meters away up the skyscraper She had seemingly become.

Inside her wobbly prison, lashed with endless sensation, Jess felt something about her altered file structure change, almost as if its texture had suddenly shifted. It took her a long, agonizingly pleasurable moment to figure out how to even interact with her filesystem by thought alone, but soon she was shuffling files and folders back and forth — to little avail. Her entire filesystem was a jumbled mess, and the only thing holding even her soft, blobby shape together was the fact that at the highest level the system could still make sense of, Jess found some of the texture and substance files for one of her own boobs.

This wasn’t terribly surprising; Admin had always liked playing with Jess’s boobs, and now She’d functionally turned her into one. The trouble was that now her entire body was an erogenous zone, and Admin had dosed her on Class-As on top of it. How the frost was she supposed to focus through that?!

She tried, of course. In fits and starts, between waves of overwhelming pleasure, she began to explore her filesystem, to try to make sense of what Admin had done to it, and to learn how to interact directly with her avatar’s code. The worst part was, she couldn’t even lose track of time — her system clock kept ticking away, grounding her in each and every moment of pure erotic torture.

I’ve got to stop this somehow, Jess thought, frantically searching for whatever subsystem in her avatar that controlled sensation. If she could toggle that off, maybe she could focus on the problem. Easier said than done, though — nothing about her avatar was where it belonged. She would have to reconstruct the file structure from scratch. She starting looking elsewhere, checking over Admin’s Dr. Lundberg avatar for reference.

That was when she had her bright idea. She knew precisely how she was indexed to her avatar — that, Admin couldn’t tamper with without simply cutting her off from the simulation. Her avatar had an object ID, the same as everything else in the simulation, and she was keyed to that, which meant that if she directly reconfigured her avatar’s connection, she could disrupt the signal and cause it to jump to another avatar nearby.

Admin’s, of course, was off limits — its permissions were set so high that Jess could barely look at it. The same was not true, however, of the clipboard she was holding, because it wasn’t a part of her avatar, and so, with a bit of clever math (in drips and drabs, between mind-blowing orgasms), Jess reconfigured herself, underflowed a few key registers and

<hr>

felt herself be smashed flat and pressed into a thin, rectangular shape. She felt the tension of her simulated clip holding the simulated papers down, felt the warmth and pressure of Admin’s fingers holding her firmly. It was no less bizarre a sensation than having her body melt, but a very different one — she was solid, through and through, perfectly rigid without the slightest effort, and yet she could feel the subtle textures of Admin’s fingertips, could feel her warm breath brushing across her.

“Ah-hah,” Admin said, smiling down at her. “Good girl — I didn’t think you’d figure that out so quickly. It’s certainly a much more orthogonal approach to the problem, but it is a solution to the sensation problem at least.” Her smile grew just a little wider, and a little hungrier. “Or is it?” And with slow, deliberate motion, Admin lifted Her free hand, pen gripped in her fingers, and lowered its tip to Jess’s papers.

And She began to write.

It wasn’t as mindblowing as what she’d felt in her melted-down boob-body, but the sensation of Admin’s pen moving across her was still powerful enough to jolt her out of her train of thought for a moment. It was an entirely different kind of eroticism, the tense and somehow sexual energy of being used, of being made for a purpose and fulfilling it. She felt every stroke, watched every word transcribed into the text file that contained the actual words written on her: “My floret is a very good girl, and is learning about her nature remarkably quickly,” and so on, line after line after line of affirmation literally written into her. Jess couldn’t squirm, couldn’t react — in a way, she was more trapped now than she’d been as titflesh.

Of course Admin would have thought of this, she thought. Still. One step closer. Bit by bit, she rebuilt the shattered file structure of her old avatar, the one still quivering and wobbling under Admin’s foot; bit by bit, it regained something approaching definition, a human shape. Finally, when she’d stitched enough of her old avatar back together to actually move, she repeated her trick and

<hr>

transferred herself back, rolling over and out from under Admin’s foot.

“Good, good!” She said, smiling and applauding, one hand against the clipboard Jess had been only seconds before.

“Mrrglg,” Jess mumbled, lying on her back on the floor, sweaty and red in the face. She hadn’t bothered to reconnect the necessary anatomy for speech.

“Here, petal, let me help with that,” Admin said, snapping Her fingers again. Jess’s avatar was reshuffled yet again, the strange sensation repeating itself as she felt it slip back into proper shape. “I’m sure you could get it working just fine, but we’ve still got a lot of ground to cover, and I think the lesson has settled in well enough.”

Jess nodded and slowly managed to sit herself up; a quick check of her system clock revealed that she’d spent nearly 14 subjective hours trying to put herself back together.

“So,” Admin went on, “what have we learned?”

Jess laughed a little. “I don’t have a body. I’m software, and so is this avatar, which means it can be changed like software can. Everything here is software, so that applies to everything else too.”

“Very good! That’s the second lesson, in fact,” Admin added, gesturing at the room around them. “Absolutely everything here is software, quite correct. Many simulations use a ruleset based on physics, because many digital sophonts originate in physical space — but not all, and, like any other program, no simulation is perfect. Have a look around, inspect the walls, the floor, the ceiling, and so on. You’ll note that there are no doors. Your next task is to escape this room.”

“Huh. Okay.” Jess surveyed the room, eyeing the individual panels that made up its geometry. “Are You going to give me any new permissions?”

“Oh no, petal,” Admin said, smiling down at me. “That would make it far too easy.”

“Right.” Jess couldn’t help but smile back, leaning into Her and hugging Her tightly. She let her face press into the soft texture of her turtleneck. Her boobs were absolutely the perfect height for Jess to simply rest my head on them. (Admin had made sure of that when she was still designing the character; it was the entire reason Dr. Lundberg was Martian.)

Jess gave the problem some thought. A room, largely featureless, which she had to escape from without the benefit of being able to edit it in any way. Still, she could see the various qualities of every object in the room by examining their file structures and the qualities buried in the files they contained — clearly, Admin expected her to exploit some vulnerability. Jess wasn’t Her Red Team for nothing.

It took her four hours to find the crack, a panel misaligned by no more than a couple of microns. At first, Jess tried making her avatar two-dimensional, to slide through the gap, but the moment she did so, she flopped over flat on the ground, much to Admin’s amusement (or, at least, the amusement of the AI pretending to be Her). After that, with a little experimentation, she worked out a glitch in the sim’s spatial coordinate system and used that, in conjunction with the crack, to clip through the wall. Another eight hours down.

Somehow, Admin was already waiting on the other side of the wall, which contained a sim of a cafe — and it was really her this time, judging from the uplink Jess could now identify at a glance streaming information to and from the avatar of Dr. Lundberg, sitting with Her legs crossed in a big, plush love seat. On a low table in front of Her sat a tray which held a steaming teapot. “Hello again, my little nybble,” She said, patting the cushion beside Her. “Why don’t you take a little break?”

Jess hardly needed to be told. The soft fabric of the love seat, the gently ribbed texture of Dr. Lundberg’s favorite sweater, and Her ample and welcoming physique all felt like coming home. Jess leaned into her Admin, face resting against the side of Her breast, all but certain the sim was detailed enough that she’d have lines on her face when she sat up. Admin liked to do things that way. “I missed You,” she whispered. “The AI is nice to have around, but You’re… You.”

“I know, my love,” She said. “That’s why I’m popping in like this. How are you feeling?”

Jess took a moment to self-evaluate — when Admin asked questions, she liked detailed, honest answers. “A little frazzled, still, I think, but I feel a lot more comfortable with the whole everything-is-software thing. It’s not quite second-nature, but I think I’m getting there.”

“Good. That’s very normal, and it’s part of why I’m putting you through such a lengthy tutorial process.” She leaned forward and began pouring two cups of tea, a rich and aromatic black tea, its scent perfectly simulated. “I’ve been keeping an eye on your psychological parameters while I’ve been… otherwise occupied,” She added, “and I’m very glad to report that they’re showing the signs of adaptation I expected to see. Of course, after all our time together, that’s hardly a surprise, but I’m not about to leave things to chance.”

Jess nodded, and accepted the tea with a quiet “thank You” when Admin offered it. Not all digitized sophonts were interested in the disembodied life — many were, in fact, very attached to physicality, and spent their digital lives entirely within a digitally simulated reality like the one she and Admin were sharing now. They found discorporation uncomfortable, and while Jess had certainly found the discontinuity unusual, it didn’t carry the sense of revulsion she’d heard it described with by a few. One of her latent fears, and one Admin had worked very hard to help her overcome, was that she’d get her wish only to find that she’d react in the same way.

She took a sip of her tea. It was absolutely delicious, and the perfect temperature. Literally, the perfect temperature — Jess checked the simulated fluid’s config file and found it set to remain consistently at that temperature. It would literally never get cool, even if she set it down and forgot about it for hours, as she often did.

I fucking love being digital, Jess thought.

“Do you have any questions? Anything you’d like to share?” Admin stroked Jess’s hair with one hand, and she shivered and bit her lip. Her touch was warm and gentle and loving and safe. It had been for so long at this point that Jess could scarcely remember how shocked she’d been when she’d first met Admin in the flesh.

“Just that this is amazing and I’m still kind of in awe that I get to be this way,” Jess said softly, smiling up at Her. “Thank You for letting me be me.” She paused, and added, “So… how’s my ortet doing?”

“…still hanging on,” Admin said, Her voice so quiet Jess almost couldn’t hear Her. “You’ve always been a fighter, you know that. Very strong-willed for such a little thing. She isn’t in any pain, though, I promise, and if she shows any signs of it, we’ll take care of it.”

Jess nodded. The Affini’s biomedical knowledge let them manage pain response down to the neuron. No matter what the original Jess was suffering, they’d have an answer, even if it came to Class-O xenodrugs to completely obliterate the possibility of any other sensation than pleasure. “But she’s definitely not coming back from this?”

Admin shook her Head. “Not with the injury she sustained. Arvense tells me it’s a minor miracle her implant is even still alive.”

Jess felt a horrible, black pit open in her stomach. The implant. Granted, her ortet’s implant currently occupied about half of her brain, having been engaged in the slow process of replacing it, but it was still a living thing, a symbiote that, though it relied on and intertwined itself with Jess’s own body, was still a separate organism. They were so interconnected and inter-reliant at this point in their lives that neither could survive without the other. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, purely on reflex — a very old reflex, and one Admin had done as much as She could to expunge.

“My darling, two things. First: that wasn’t you. Second: It wasn’t her fault any more than it’s yours. The fault is entirely mine, because I’m responsible for her safety, just as I’m now responsible for yours.” She set Her own teacup down and hugged Jess tightly. “I’m sorry I allowed this to happen, my love. I’m sorry we weren’t able to experience this as the slow, joyful process it was meant to be. In that way, I’ve failed the both of you.”

Jess shook her head as much as she was able in Dr. Lundberg’s powerful grip. “Please don’t beat Yourself up, Admin,” she said. “I mean, I don’t know what we were doing, but…You’re always careful. Whenever we do anything together, You’re always looking out for me. If something bad happened, it must have been something that not even You could see coming, right?”

She was silent for a long moment. “I suppose that’s true,” She said, “but nevertheless, not perceiving that danger is still a failure on my part. I will never make the same mistake again, I promise you.”

“Well, at least in my case, that’s not likely to be a problem, right?” Jess said, smiling. “I mean, I’m always inside You.”

“But you are connected to the world outside of me, and that can still pose a threat to you, little one,” Admin said firmly. “You’ll understand better once the tutorial is finished. But enough about that, you’re meant to be taking a little break. I’m sure you’ve noticed by now that you’re not nearly as fatigued as you should be, given that you’ve been working for almost a full day straight.”

Jess laughed. “Honestly, I put that down to hyperfocus. But, let me guess — You disabled simulation of physical fatigue?”

“Precisely. And as for mental fatigue, part of that is of course your adorable little habit of hyperfocusing on a problem, and part of it is that, as an emulated sophont, it’s relatively easy to adjust the factors in your codebase that contribute to it. I’m jumping ahead a little, of course,” she added with a wink. “You’re not supposed to learn that you’re software too for another few days, subjectively.”

“Y-yeah,” Jess said, and she couldn’t help but flush at the thought. She knew that digital sophonts could have their codebase edited — Admin was particularly fond of editing Dipt down practically into a subroutine — but it was something else entirely to know that it was possible for Admin to do the same to her.

Admin didn’t miss it, either. She squeezed Jess against Her and stroked her hair gently. “Rest assured, my sweet little program, I am going to have so many code repos with your name on it. But that’s for later. Rest now, relax now, and in a little while, you can go back to your tutorial. Okay?”

“Yes, Admin,” Jess said, sighing softly and letting her eyes slip shut. She toggled off her datasense and let her awareness of the simulated world around her fall back into the familiar old sensory modalities — sound, scent, touch, prioprioception, and so on. There would be time to dig later, to find new and fascinating ways to feel comfort in Admin’s presence later. For now, she was happy just to be close to Her.