Nell closed her eyes. The ship vanished. The emptiness of space was replaced by the banging of her heart in her ears and the pulsing blue light she could see through her eyelids.
Jakob slowly unraveled his mind, performing hardware and software checks on his new body. The tension of the synthetic muscles felt strange to him.
Beads of sweat began to form on the back of Alvarez’s neck. He had been anticipating this moment for weeks, without knowing the exact day it would arrive - like a bleeding doe waiting for the inevitable wolf to appear.
A chill ran up his back and his neck hairs stood on end. He began to shake as his stomach turned, warning him to leave before he could see anything else.
Though Nell had no personal reason to hate the Andromechs, she didn’t understand them, and that worried her. Any attempt to fit this new variable into a predictive scenario only led to uncertainty.
Focusing his attention on the device, he could sense millions of electric signals passing bits of binary information under his palm - data points being updated in a mad rush as the image on the screen changed.
“One cannot change one’s own nature,” Tanis said, “so forgive me if I have no confidence in what you’ve told me. It is hard enough for a man to change himself, let alone a machine which was made by man.
It was a cause of mass anxiety for the crew - the thought of being unconscious for forty days, submerged in fluid, and stuffed into a cramped tube with no control - no way to get out.
© Simeon Neese, 2026
