The first voice Dakota heard was her Synth.
This was no terrible surprise to her—she’d been hearing his digital voice since she was a kid, back in the days when Synths had spoken only through the last generation of smart devices. But she couldn’t even move yet—couldn’t even see, couldn’t even feel her body, and already he was there.
“Dakota, are you awake? This thing is huge. I could fit your whole library in here. All the music you own, plus most of the movies.”
She tried to move, tried to remember how she’d got there—but Dakota found the past coming only hazily. There was a narrow alley, and something approaching rapidly from the other side. An explosion of glass and metal, then…
Then she was here, unable to even feel her own body in a void without dimensions or borders.
At least until Cinnabar appeared. His face seemed to fuzz into focus in front of her, hovering in the air with a fidelity she found a little frightening at first. She couldn’t feel her mouth to speak, but that didn’t seem to matter. Cinnabar heard anyway.
What kind of interface am I wearing?
Cinnabar settled onto the invisible ground, an earth pony that would’ve come up to her waist if she was standing. His coat was reddish-brown, and his eyes were bright blue, always watching her. His cutie mark—a set of twisted wire ending in a knot, was clear enough that she could almost touch it. She could’ve counted the individual hairs in his mane.
“You’re not wearing an interface anymore, Dakota.” He lifted a hoof, tapping the side of his head. “You’ve gone Integrated—I’m living up near your spinal cord now. And let me tell you, this hardware is buckin’ incredible.”
Dakota fought against his words, as though she were pushing against something invisible. But there was nothing to move, and no body to move it with. Apparently he could sense her displeasure, because Cinnabar hopped a little closer to her field of view. Whatever that means if I don’t have eyes.
“It was that Crossblue/Omnistem policy you signed up for,” Cinnabar said, almost apologetic. With a gesture of his hoof, a huge stack of papers appeared in the air beside him—not strictly something earth ponies could do, but in her own space the rules were more suggestive than binding anyway. “From the feel of this tech, it looks like you really milked ‘em too. I think the Chicago Consensus Node might’ve had latencies like this, but… no other system I’ve ever used. Good thing you’re still living in the meat, or I might want a little more of it for myself.” He laughed, and somehow Dakota knew she should’ve laughed too. It was a joke, they had a history together of imaginary rivalries and cutting humor.
But she couldn’t remember much of that—it was only a fact on a spreadsheet for her, not something she felt. It felt like Cinnabar was threatening her.
Where’s my body? she thought. Wake me up.
“They’re working on it,” he said. And apparently he could sense her discomfort, because he plopped down on his haunches right there and banished the contract. “But you have to be conscious for the process, so… here we are.”
The crash got my spine?
Cinnabar nodded glumly, and for once there was no humor at all in his expression. “I, uh… didn’t know if I’d see you again. Clinically… well, you didn’t have a heartbeat when they brought you in. Hadn’t been breathing for almost five minutes. That’s… long. Information-age doctors would’ve had a hard time. But Omnistem really gave you your money’s worth.”
What… would’ve happened to you? she found herself asking. Maybe somewhere far away, where she had senses and a body again, some part of her old self was reasserting. It felt like the right thing to ask. What happens to Synths when their humans die?
Cinnabar shook his head, expression bleak. “Back to Equestria,” he said. “Never to walk the green shores of Earth again, or swim its digital highways. No more kidnappings to solve, no more missing funds to bring in—”
No more cheating spouses to spy on?
Cinnabar grinned. “None of those either. But I won’t miss those cases.” He looked up suddenly, as though he could hear something she couldn’t. And apparently he could, because he rose to his feet, pointing at nothing. “They’re almost done reconnecting audiovisual. Those senses were in your head, and… well, let’s just say there’s almost as much plastic as skin now. You do not want to see how you looked when they rolled you in here. In fact, I’ve already deleted the images. If you dig them out of Mercy’s security subnet you won’t sleep for a week, so don’t.”
Audiovisual, she repeated, ignoring that last bit. She did not want to think of herself as a half-rotten human pancake. So I’d be watching the doctors?
“Yep. Well, specifically you’d be watching the underside of your surgical tray while you listen to the robot the doctor is controlling.”
Do I have to?
“Oh, uh… I guess not. I could tell them you want to wait until the surgery is finished. Just, sorta… drift in here.”
Yeah, that sounds great. She hesitated. Where is here, anyway? I think I should know, but I can’t remember. Looks like Zion mainframe or something.
Cinnabar laughed. “Smaller than that. And I don’t think you’d know what this place was, it didn’t exist until they finished sewing it into your head. Think of it, like… a private sublayer. Fully isolated from meatspace.”
She really should’ve known this stuff, but since she didn’t remember she’d just ask anyway. One thing she did remember was that Cinnabar never got bored of her, never gave up or lost interest. The implants are how we’re talking, she thought. Something connected directly to my brain.
“Yep!” He grinned again, and something appeared in front of her. A little titanium canister, with thin snakes of wires emerging from it. And a single, thicker cable, running to a data/power port. “This thing. Integrated human slave processor, copyright Omnistem 2042, revision 1.0.3. We’ve got two petabytes of local storage, high spectrum Wi-Fi, and thirty six hours of battery life.”
Battery life. For my… brain? What happens if I don’t charge it?
“Well…” The illusory object vanished, and suddenly Cinnabar was looking away. His ears flattened, tail tucked between his legs, and he moved off a little. “You’ll kinda-sorta go into a coma and die. But it’s not their fault! Your brain was… you weren’t in good shape, Dakota. You aren’t in good shape now. That’s the only reason Omni sprung for the whole package, because you’d be dead otherwise and that’s what the contract promised. Now you’ve got another processor helping… pick up the slack. It’s not a big deal. Tons of people have implants nowadays.”
I’m not sure how many of them depend on their implants. It’s identity cards and vision enhancement.
“Well… maybe. But that’s a cost and generational thing.” Cinnabar seemed relieved, because he turned to face her again. “Give it a few decades, and you’ll be in the majority instead of the minority. You won’t believe what we can get up to with a kit like this. No more goggles, no more overlays, no more… any of it. Just one word and you’re in a sublayer. Another and you’re walking through Equestria.”
Which word gives me my body back?
“Uh… I’m still reading the manual,” Cinnabar admitted. “Let me see here… yeah, here we go. I can… connect us to Omni’s character creator. And there’s your account, uh… perfect! I’m not sure what this is gonna feel like, so…”
It hurt. Dakota was suddenly crushed, an incredible weight on her chest making it impossible to breathe. There were tubes down her throat, needles in her arms in a dozen places, and on her back an array of tiny knives cutting in and around her shattered spine. White hot agony washed over her, and it gave her the voice to scream.
It all vanished in an instant, though like stepping out into the sun or tasting something incredibly hot, there were echoes that remained, reminders of the horror she had just felt.
“Don’t do that again,” she said, and found she had a voice. Or… maybe it was just a change of perspective? She was only thinking to begin with. “I didn’t think Synths made mistakes like that.”
“I’m not much smarter than you, Dakota. It didn’t tell me what was gonna happen when it connected you. Apparently… it has to go through your real body. I was going to put us down somewhere in Equestria, somewhere a little more interesting than this… nothing. Apparently that isn’t how it works. We can’t go anywhere. If we want to visit Equestria, it’s gonna be the same way we always do. By visiting Equestria.”
And she existed. Skin pale, wearing a paper hospital gown and sitting on the edge of a too-high hospital bench. She reached back, feeling her neck for the nightmare of knives and blood that she’d briefly sensed there—and there was only one change. An open data port, surrounded with plastic to separate it from her skin. That’s what it will be like when they finish with me. “Does your manual say why?” She didn’t exactly want to go to Equestria. Her memory was still a little fuzzy, but she knew it wasn’t a place she’d ever enjoyed visiting. There were plenty of interesting sublayers a few steps away, but Equestria itself… that was for VR junkies and escapists. She lived in the real world, despite her job.
“Something about bandwidth,” he answered. “Infrastructure isn’t there yet. But I bet if we could get a slot in Chicago Consensus…”
“No,” she cut him off. “I don’t want to go anywhere. Except home.” She wiggled her toes, and found her fears of paralysis were in vain. They still moved. Dakota wasn’t tall, and her blonde hair wasn’t long. With a good pair of boots, she’d be five three. In a hospital gown, she looked like a Synth could take her down. “How long have I been here, anyway? My family must be…”
Cinnabar winced, avoiding eye contact with her. But at least he seemed able to see her. “Eight days,” he said. “Six of that was brain surgery. And… everything surgery, really. Your mom is sitting in a Mercy waiting room right now. She’ll be there when we wake up. I could… probably send a message to Feather Dance, if you want.”
Feather Dance, her mom’s synth. Unlike Cinnabar, Feather Dance and her mom spent a fair amount of time in Equestria proper. She didn’t get along terribly well with Cinnabar. Dakota’s expectation that her own Synth would act like a child of her mom’s had never once been confirmed.
“You can tell her I’m okay,” Dakota said. “That’s it. I don’t know how much longer… but I bet she knows. No surgeon could keep Mom away.”
“Alright, sent,” Cinnabar said. “And now it’s just us. Until they’re done putting you back together again. But… you could look on the bright side. Time you spend in here with me is time you’re not spending in rehab or aching on a bed somewhere.”
“Guess so.” Dakota winced, lying back on the hospital bed she’d conjured. She didn’t really feel like she had the energy to fight anymore. She drifted for a while, leaving Cinnabar to his own devices.
Then she woke up.
Dakota was so surrounded by pain that she could no longer identify any individual source. In a way that was a relief, since it made everything fade into the background. She tried to sit up, but only succeeded in twitching a bit.
Her hospital room in Mercy looked the way she might’ve expected, at least what she could see from her back. Mostly plain, clean space, with her hookups vanishing into the wall. There were a few chairs, and a sink with a few medical supplies. Her monitor hovered beside her in the air, with the slight transparency born not because she was using glasses or some other overlay system, but as a signal that it wasn’t physical. The room had configured its virtual space for her preferences, which for Mercy meant a window out at a perpetually rainy, overcast version of Chicago with old-fashioned cars driving and honking as they went by.
There was only one other person in the room with her—a lengthy doctor with wispy beard covered in a paper mask and gloves. He smiled from behind overlay contacts, and she could see the little glimmers of color that suggested whatever virtual overlay he was using. But “reverse reading” wasn’t one of Dakota’s skills, so she couldn’t guess. “Don’t try to move, Miss Tyler. The nerve reconstruction can be a… lingering process, and I’m certain it isn’t finished yet.”
“Can I…” She’d been thinking of asking “Can I talk?” but the answer was obviously yes. She tried to sit up anyway, even though she’d just been told not to. Her arms moved, twitching and flailing unpredictably.
“He said not to, Dakota. Maybe you should listen to the guy in the white coat with the expensive degree, huh?”
Cinnabar was suddenly sitting beside her, his head just barely coming up to bed level. Curiously he wasn’t transparent like the overlay elements, but had become fully opaque—as apparently real as the window. I wonder if I can touch him. But right now she couldn’t even sit up, so the answer was no regardless.
“Your Synth gives good advice,” the doctor declared. The more Dakota watched him, the more she caught an occasional glimpse of a white synth behind him, another earth pony, though his was female and with a medical symbol for a cutie mark. It looked like she was carrying his records. “We already have you referred to physical therapy, so don’t think you’ll be helpless for long. But you’re the first implant case I’ve ever seen at Mercy, so I can’t honestly tell you how long the recovery will take.”
“How long did it take the others?” she croaked. “And… can you send in a nurse? With a mirror, and…” and a damp sponge, but she wasn’t going to mention that to a male doctor.
“Of course, you’ll meet your assigned practitioner in a few moments. My name’s Dr. Norton. I’m just here to go over your symptoms one last time, perform a final wellness check.” He gestured, and the pony beside him offered a clipboard from her mouth. He took it, though she noticed his fingers didn’t exactly close around it. There were no pages, and he flicked through its digital representation with simple professionalism.
“There are… less than a dozen cases like yours in the whole world, Miss Tyler. They took between one and six months to recover, depending on how invested they were in their recovery. Now, I’m going to remove your blanket for a moment. Please don’t try to get up… good.”
They went through his checklist for the next few minutes. He asked her to wiggle things, or move in specific ways, and made notes about everything. Eventually he seemed satisfied, and a handful of nurses arrived to take his place. “Once they’re confident you’re stable, you’ll be open to visitation. Says here there’s already someone waiting to see you. Probably won’t be long now.”
There was nothing dignified about the changeover to nurses, helping feed her and clean her and get Dakota sitting up straight again. Cinnabar paced nervously in a corner of the room, looking self-consciously away during the less polite bits. Synths and the Equestrian culture they’d been made to represent didn’t share any human modesty taboos—but Cinnabar cared about her, so respected her wishes. Even if he’d probably tease her about it after she recovered.
Her use of a mirror had done a little to reassure her—she still recognized the small face, though her hair had shaved completely on the side of her head where the robotic surgeon’s knife had cut.
She felt a bit better when it was all over, and she was sitting up in a hospital bed with a virtual television streaming all the videos and interesting memes Cinnabar had saved for her during her time unconscious. “I hope I’m on the short end,” Dakota muttered, feeling the bed rock slightly as Cinnabar climbed in beside her. Synths weren’t terribly large things, so there was no question of enough space in the adult bed. But what had made it move like that?
She learned the answer to that a moment later, when Cinnabar casually stretched out on the empty side of the bed, laying belly-down like ponies often did. She could feel his weight there, depressing the fabric. His warmth even, through the paper thin sterile sheet.
“You will be,” Cinnabar declared, without looking at her. “I just know it. You might not have asked for the implants, but you were born for it. Smart, adaptable… you’re the one they’ll all be imitating. You’ll have pub credits coming in for years just from that.”
Dakota laughed—it wasn’t just that her memory felt a little less completely out of reach, though that helped. Those first few minutes after waking up, drifting through an abyss without an attachment to her past or her future…
But now that was over, and she wouldn’t have to go back.
Her mother emerged from the open door, shoving her way past a few security people and their frustrated Synths with all the tenacity of an invading army. “Dakota!” she called, hurrying over to the bed. She leaned forward in a hug that Dakota couldn’t return.
But any embarrassment at all these others seeing faded into the background. Dakota hadn’t lived at home for several years now—but knowing that there was someone in the world who still cared enough to come see her when she was hurt… that was something special.
“You actually came,” Dakota muttered, helpless to do anything else. “No telepresence, no overlay. You’re here.”
“Obviously,” she said. “I watched part of the procedure virtually, but…” She looked away, face pale. “I couldn’t keep going. Seeing you on the table, cut open like that… I think I know why they don’t do surgeries public, like in the old days.”
“I couldn’t watch either,” Dakota said. “Sorry I worried you, Mom.”
The woman only made a dismissive sound, hugging her one last time. It hurt, even through the cocktail of drugs they were pumping into her. But everything hurt. She wasn’t about to ask her to stop.
“It wasn’t you,” she eventually said, settling down into the comfortable chair beside the bed. Her Synth—a pegasus pony with a pale yellow coat, followed her quietly and hadn’t said anything. Dakota thought about banishing her completely—but even the hand controls for that were beyond her, and she didn’t feel like asking Cinnabar to do it. “The bastard in the truck was driving manual. That’s why he didn’t know you were there. That’s why he didn’t stop.”
“I didn’t know anyone still did that,” Dakota lied. She didn’t remember much about that accident, but she knew her hands were on the wheel. That wouldn’t have been the case, unless she too were operating her own car.
But why? Why had she been tucked away into Chicago’s seediest alleys in the middle of the night? She couldn’t remember. You will. It’s all coming back, just give it time. If worse came to worse, she could always have Cinnabar go over her notes with her. That should jog things loose.
“And now we know why,” her mom said, folding her arms. “But you lived, so it looks like he won’t be getting a manslaughter charge. Still… hope he loses his operator’s license. Employment credit is too good for someone who—”
“You’re getting worked up again, Mom,” she said. “It’s okay. I made it. I know I… don’t look too good. But Doctor Norton says I’m going to make a complete recovery. It’s all fixed.”
“I know, I know.” Her mom got up, paced around a bit, settled down beside her Synth.
“Miss, you really need to let her rest,” said one of the security people—wait, no. Not a person, a Synth. A burly earth pony, wearing a hospital uniform and a stern expression. Like Cinnabar, his body looked completely real, or as real as any synth could. They still didn’t seem like the proportions of true living things. “Visiting hours are over. Come back tomorrow.”
“Alright, alright.” She turned. “Feather Dance, stay here. Keep an eye on my daughter until I get back tomorrow.”
The pony looked a little sick, splaying her wings like she wanted to fly away. But she nodded obediently. “O-of course, Sophia. I’ll stay here.”
“See, nice and sensible,” the pony guard said, pushing the door open. Well, he seemed to—Dakota knew it was automatic, and he was really just using its CC-control circuit. It was the same trick Synths played with coffee machines, fast food kiosks, and automatic cars. But with his body apparently solid, it sure looked convincing. The kind of thing Dakota expected from those total-immersion parks. “Go on then, miss. We’ll take good care of your daughter here at Mercy Hospital & Medical Center.”
It wasn’t a pleasant night, having Feather Dance around to supervise. The pegasus kept mostly to herself, perched on the armchair and reading some Equestrian books she’d brought along. Dakota and Cinnabar spoke in hushed voices from the bed, counting the seconds until she left.
Or more precisely, counting the seconds until a nurse arrived with her evening medication, and something in the IV sent her into a complete and dreamless sleep. But that was fine too.
But despite Dr. Norton’s promises of a swift recovery, there was nothing magical about the process for Dakota. As it was she could move her head, chew her food, and breathe. But there was more to worry about, and she wasn’t going to start doing it again by magic.
So began eight weeks of living death.