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drowned-cypress · 6 days ago

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The source of the signal, when Robin found it, was at the very back of the underwater cave. The entire far side of the cave contained what looked like the outer wall of a building embedded in it. The wall was made of the same green stone that the monoliths had been made of, bearing the same lined patterning, and had a single large rectangular opening in it. She swam toward the entrance with caution and blazing curiosity. The open doorway was about three times her height, and seemed to have some kind of transparent barrier across it. Through it, Robin spied a rectangular room lit by strips of green lighting along the edges, and four cubes embedded in the walls with bright patterns in them. There was another large doorway in the far wall, blocked by glowing light.

Floating in the water next to the entrance, Robin pointed her handheld scanner at the threshold, trying to avoid touching the barrier. The readout on her PDA indicated that it wasn’t emitting any harmful energy. Cautiously, she pressed her scanner forward, through the membranous barrier, until it was inside the room itself. The tool dripped water onto the floor, and Robin realized that the interior contained an atmosphere. The scanner reported the air composition was the same as it was on the surface of the planet, but the pressure was equalized with the surrounding water. That was for the best. It wouldn’t do to give herself the bends.

Satisfied with her assessment, Robin pressed her body forward through the barrier, expecting some resistance but finding none, and yelped when gravity took hold and made her stumble the half meter toward the floor. She landed awkwardly, and her seaglide fell to the floor with a clank, but she didn’t fall. The valve on her air tank reacted to the change in environment with a hiss, refreshing her air supply. She turned to examine the barrier, and nearly tripped over her flippers, still unused to the lighter gravity of the planet after three days spent in the water. She shoved her seaglide out of the way, removed her flippers, and stowed them in her bag with her face mask before finishing her inspection of the entryway. What she had thought was a barrier from the other side looked more like the surface of a vertically rotated pool of still water from this side.

Her investigation was interrupted by a voice. “Sanctuary power critical.”

Robin whirled, turning away from the entrance just in time to see what was definitely a glowing forcefield across the doorway in the far wall blink and then disappear to reveal a natural cavern beyond. The sound had come from all around her, echoing through the room and the cave beyond. It sounded like an amalgamation of many different voices, all speaking in unison. In a warped sort of way, the overall effect was that of a machine providing a voiced notification.

“Hello?” Robin called, taking a step further into the room. “Is someone there?”

“In a manner of speaking,” a single voice responded in a phlegmatic monotone. This voice sounded distinctly male, and though the tone was flat and dispassionate, the cadence sounded far more natural. The contrast between the second voice and the first voice only increased Robin’s suspicion that the first voice had been some kind of notification rather than a sapient actor. “We are running out of time,” the second voice informed her.

Out of time because they were out of power? Robin crossed the room and went through the doorway in the far wall into the natural cavern beyond. It was large, and had a sandy floor with sparse plants growing intermittently. She made her way down the path between natural rock formations, and nearly jumped out of her skin when she spied movement to her right.

A crablike robot with four legs waved two glowing antennae-like stalks at her from atop the rock formation to her right. Robin let out a breath and raised her scanner at the creature. She had never seen anything like it before. She added it to the body of evidence that seemed to indicate that she was experiencing an alien encounter.

“What is all this?” she asked the air, waving her free hand to indicate the robot, the cavern, and the strange architecture. Her PDA pinged a notification that the scan had completed, and the screen displayed the results in a wall of text that scrolled by too fast for her to read before putting up a more manageable summary. She skimmed her new data entry: the crab was a maintenance robot of some kind, threat level practically negligible. Satisfied, she put away her PDA and scanner, determined to read the rest of the data entry later, and continued walking along the winding path through the cave. The crab turned to follow her passage with its antennae, but stayed where it was.

“Seeking emergency storage medium,” the first polyphonous voice declared in lieu of answering her question.

Robin didn’t know what an emergency storage medium was, but the reference to power made her suspect it was digital storage of some sort. And the fact that it was an emergency made it likely the speaker–or speakers, she still wasn’t sure–were asking for help. “I can help you better if you show yourself,” she called, mildly annoyed at her question being ignored.

“If we could show ourselves, we would not need storage,” the second voice replied. Thus far, only the second voice had answered her directly. Robin mentally assigned him the role of spokesperson to whatever group he was part of.

Wait, did he mean that he needed to store something, or that he, himself needed storage? Was he some kind of noncorporeal digital being? Are you an Architect? she nearly blurted, before realizing that he quite probably would have no idea what she meant by it. “Are you human?” she asked instead as she turned a corner and spotted another large rectangular doorway on the other side of the cavern.

“No, we are not. Is that a problem for you?”

“No!” Robin cried in excitement. “That’s fine with me!” It was her dream, actually, to be the first person in human history to make first contact with a technologically advanced, probably even spacefaring sapient alien species. It was one of the reasons why she had gone into the field of xenobiology. It was ironic that the alien she was conversing with was likely digital, and thus had no biology, but her enthusiasm was entirely undeterred.

“Storage medium identified,” the first voice notified. Robin was almost certain now that the first voice belonged to the alien facility’s computer system, and not an actual alien.

The path she was on passed under a broken bridge, seemingly shattered by a large fallen boulder. Robin stopped to examine the sparking wires poking out of the jagged ends of the bridge. If the Architects had run power cables through it, this was most likely the reason the facility was low on power. They must have some kind of battery backup to still be functional.

“We will be lost unless we find a new host.” the second voice–the spokesperson–said in his strangely flat tone. “Can you help?”

Lost as in stuck in a bad situation? Forced to function without vital data? Unconscious? Dead? Robin wished the alien would be more specific. The path she was walking looped back in the direction it had come, and Robin passed under another bridge, this one intact. The term host put her on guard. “Can you use my PDA for storage?” she asked warily, unclipping the device from her belt and waving it demonstratively at the ceiling.

There was a pause, and then the spokesperson asked, “You are not with the group from before? Your cybernetic components bear their signal.”

“Alterra?” Robin laughed, startled. “No!” Robin was only too eager to disavow affiliation. If he hadn’t been an extremely fascinating alien, she might almost have been insulted, but as it was, it was understandable why he might draw that conclusion. “My equipment is, uh… borrowed.” She wasn’t about to get into the details of her self-assigned mission with him unless she had to.

“It will have to do,” he replied.

Robin nodded at this acceptance, and climbed the final stretch of pathway up to the doorway in the far wall of the cave, musing about the alien’s word choices. She didn’t have cybernetic parts. She wondered if he was making some kind of translation error. She was about to ask when she reached the doorway and became absorbed with examining the interior of the next room.

The room was wide, similar to the first room she had passed through, made of green metallic stone, with walls decorated by lined patterns. The far wall split into two corridors, one on the left, and one on the right. In the room itself, three short platforms each held a glowing green cubic crystal larger than her head. Their placement seemed nearly ceremonial. When she approached the one on the left, the platform reacted to her presence by extending a short podium underneath the cubic crystal, causing it to rise to waist height. She scanned it and skimmed the summary. It was a battery of some kind.

“Hey, would these solve your power problem?” she asked, gesturing at the three green cubes.

“Not enough,” the alien spokesperson replied. “The power demands of the facility would swiftly drain them, and we would be in the same quandary we are now, potentially without your assistance.”

Robin frowned, but moved on, leaving the cubes where they were. She wasn’t about to start pilfering the aliens’ stuff. She entered the rightmost corridor. The path wrapped around to meet the leftmost path immediately, and Robin walked through an irregularly shaped doorway that was wider at the bottom than at the top. Through the doorway was a room with a tall, angular ceiling, and a low pyramid-like platform at the center so big it took up nearly the entire room, leaving only a narrow walkway around the edge. Hovering over the platform was a floating cube made of shards of metallic stone that fitted together puzzle-like. Green geometric lines on the surface glowed steadily, giving the impression of light shining out of cracks from inside the cube.

Robin wondered if any of the other facilities that had been discovered before were like this. Perhaps not. If they had held the digital consciousness of one or more aliens, Robin’s stolen Alterra brief about the planet would not have been so confident in its assertion that all the aliens had died over a thousand years ago. Abruptly, Robin wondered if the alien she was talking to had been stuck here that entire time.

“How long have you been stored here?” she asked.

“Longer than hoped,” the voice answered. Robin wondered if he was being vague because he didn’t want to tell her, or because he couldn’t figure out how to tell her in a unit that would make sense to her. How did aliens measure time?

“Warning,” the alien facility alerted in its unsettling polyphonic voice, “sanctuary power critical.”

“Our data can be downloaded from the terminal,” the alien spokesperson told her. “We may speak more once the transfer is complete.”

“Do you have enough power for the transfer?” Robin asked. “I can go get the cubes if you want.”

“We have enough power to complete the transfer so long as we begin promptly.”

“Yes, okay. Hurrying.” She rounded the platform to the back of the room, and walked up the ramp to what appeared to be a computer terminal. At the center was a glowing green holographic projection with a single alien symbol in the center, and a few smaller alien characters at the top and bottom. On either side of the hologram were two sets of black consoles, each with buttons labeled in alien script. The terminal was tall, at chest height on Robin, which would seem to indicate that the aliens were taller than humans. The presence of two separate sets of data entry pads on either side would seem to indicate that the aliens had bilateral symmetry, though perhaps that train of thought was a stretch. At the very least, the presence of buttons would seem to indicate that they had fingers to push them with. Perhaps Robin was anthropomorphising.

This was wasting time. It would be a tragedy if the facility lost power before Robin could assist. She shook herself and stepped up to the terminal, unclipping her PDA from her belt and presenting it to the slowly spinning cube at the center of the room. “What should I do?” she asked. The tablet and her hand passed through the light of the holographic projection, and the projection switched off abruptly.

“Storage medium accepted,” said the alien facility. “Brace for transfer.” The overlapping voices suddenly sounded menacing, where before they had only been unsettling.

“Brace?” Robin echoed in alarm, attempting to back away.

The cube spun faster and faster, and Robin suddenly backed into something hard. She cried out in alarm as a metal appendage closed around her and pushed her forward again. She tried to look behind her, but it held her head in place. She dropped the PDA in panic. “What’s happening?!”

“Transferring,” said the facility with horrible, alien dissonance.

The spinning cube suddenly split into pieces, splayed out in front of her face in a mandala of glowing shards, revealing a bright aperture at the center which shot green light directly in her eyes. The edges of her eyesight fuzzed strangely in green rather than black, and her vision tunneled. Her head hurt horribly, as though the light was driving a hot poker behind her eyes. Every muscle in her body contracted painfully, and her eyes rolled in terror.

Her vision reduced to a pin-prick, and she blacked out.

—

The next thing Robin knew, she was on the floor. Her head hurt with the worst migraine of her life, and the edges of her vision were distorted and filled with subtle rainbows. She moaned in pain and tried to pull herself up to her knees, grabbing the edge of the closest console when she was hit with a wave of dizziness.

“Transfer complete,” said the facility in its many voices. The sound made her head throb.

“How do you feel?” asked the alien spokesperson. His phlegmatic monotone had gained a peculiar kind of resonance that made him sound so much closer than he had been before.

“Why do you sound like you’re in my head?” she asked, distracted and disoriented. She spotted her dropped PDA at the edge of the platform and pulled it towards her.

“The facility identified hospitable capacity within your cerebral cortex,” the alien replied in an infuriatingly calm voice.

Robin couldn’t breathe. She was suddenly plagued with thoughts about everything she had ever learned about brain parasites, including not just the scientific education she had received in the course of obtaining her doctorate in xenobiology, but also the plots of several horror movies.

“You are in my head?!” she yelled when she managed to slow her breathing enough to find her voice. “I offered you my PDA! Get out!!” She slammed her fist against the edge of the console, ignoring the dull pain of impact. She was aware, in a distant way, that her voice was beginning to sound hysterical.

“Oh no–” The voice’s perpetually calm monotone was modulated by sudden dismay. “Does your kind perceive a boundary between cybernetic and organic components?”

Robin’s panic, pain, and disorientation crystallized into sudden blinding fury, not just at the alien, but also partially at herself. She shouldn’t have assumed the alien’s word choices were a translation error, she should have followed up. Of course, she wasn’t about to put all the blame on herself. He shouldn’t be so blasé about her bodily autonomy! “My mind is not a component!” she hissed, gesturing wildly with her hands.

“You sound angry,” said the voice, returning to a tone of dispassionate detachment. “We will allow you a moment to process.”

She was angry, thank you very much! “No! You need to explain yourself to me, right now!”

No response.

The anger in Robin’s belly began to curdle with anxiety once more. Could he read her mind? Could he control her? Was his presence giving her brain damage?!

“Don’t you go quiet on me!” she demanded, voice quailing in the face of these new fears.

Still no response.

“Hello?!” she called desperately.

The voice was gone.

The glowing lines on the softly floating cube in the center of the room suddenly blinked out, along with all the lights, leaving Robin in an eerie darkness. At the same time, a background hum Robin hadn’t even registered hearing also silenced. Some small and rodent-like ancestral vestige in her hindbrain gave a mental squeak of panic at the sudden darkness and quiet, and Robin gave in to the impulse to hide, huddled under one of the consoles in a miserable ball. There was the sound of rock hitting rock, and Robin cringed away from the noise until she realized that now that the facility was unpowered, the floating cube could float no more, and had crumbled into pieces.

When Robin’s eyes adjusted, she realized that there was still a little light. The room was dimly lit by the faint green strips of what Robin realized were probably emergency lights that lined the edges of the room. All that remained of the cube lay scattered in a broken heap all over the low pyramidal platform.

This couldn’t be happening.

She pulled her knees to her chest and fought the urge to cry. The aftermath of pain and fear and squandered adrenaline left her exhausted and with an increasing sense of unreality. Sitting in the dark, she could imagine herself elsewhere with ease. Maybe… maybe it wasn’t happening?

That thought was unworthy of her. She was not going to start questioning her own reality. Running from her problems was not a good solution, no matter how much she wished she wasn't in this situation.

Actually, it occurred to Robin that hallucinations were not unheard of in deep dives. The alien facility sat right at the two hundred meter depth mark, which was a very deep dive in Earth gravity, but not so much on this much smaller planet. She didn't think she was experiencing nitrogen narcosis, but she supposed it could be happening. She had never actually experienced it herself. Her initial scan of the atmosphere in the facility indicated that she was currently experiencing over six bars of pressure, which was more than enough to experience symptoms.

She groped for her PDA and pulled up the list of symptoms in her medical database: euphoria or extreme emotional response, confusion, idea fixation, delayed cognition, loss of dexterity, dizziness, sleepiness, memory problems, hallucinations, tunnel vision, and in extreme cases, loss of consciousness.

…She had lost consciousness. The level of anxiety she was currently experiencing could certainly be called extreme. She had a splitting headache, and her vision still had a mild aura, though it had gone down; she wasn't sure that was what it meant by tunnel vision, but it was possible. She had been dizzy when she first regained consciousness. She was exhausted. She supposed that the idea of an alien in her head could qualify as idea fixation in addition to hallucination. She was confused as hell.

With dawning horror, she realized that it was plausible–likely, even. A glance at the included pressure table indicated that she should be experiencing something, at the very least. She didn't fit all the symptoms, but it was enough for her to begin to question. It was possible that none of this was happening. Even if she wasn’t hallucinating, she was probably still experiencing sleepiness, delayed cognition, and increased anxiety, at a minimum. Of course, the strongest point against this being a hallucination induced by nitrogen narcosis was that she didn't feel drunk! It was called the raptures of the deep! Raptures! This wasn't rapturous!

Robin didn't know what to think. She stood up and made her way back toward the exit. The walk back through the cavern seemed shorter than it had when she had first come through here. She stopped in the entry where the water was held back by some kind of intangible forcefield. Hell, maybe the forcefield was also a hallucination, she thought hysterically. Maybe none of this was happening! But she didn’t feel like she was hallucinating! Was she dreaming?

No, her head hurt too acutely for this to be a dream.

If she was hallucinating, she was in trouble. This far underwater, she would drown if none of this was real. Deaths from nitrogen narcosis were usually caused by poor decisions resulting in drowning. She wouldn't even know if her decisions were poor if she was hallucinating this hard.

On the flip side, even if she wasn't hallucinating, she was still in trouble! She didn’t know anything about this person! These people? Was there more than one of them? Hell, she didn’t even know what their species was! Sure, she was willing to do a lot to help a person in need, but invading her body? Who knew what they could do with that kind of access! If they were the unscrupulous type, they might not even think twice before hurting her! Or maybe they were so alien they might not even realize they were hurting her! The thought made her dizzy, or perhaps she was still dizzy from whatever had just happened. Her head was still throbbing. Her anxiety had spiked, making her feel like her heart was going to beat through her chest.

“Okay, no. I need you to say something.”

No answer. Maybe she really was hallucinating. She came to a stop in front of the wall of water that was the exit to the facility, and dipped her fingers into it. She couldn’t feel the forcefield at all. The water simply stopped. There were too many things contributing to the sense of unreality she was currently experiencing, but focusing on the surreality of the situation was better than dwelling on all the ways this situation might hurt her. She slapped at the water with an open palm. It rippled, but did not splash. She was pretty sure she had had a dream where water stopped following the laws of physics like this before.

“Seriously,” she continued after the silence had stretched long enough to make her start questioning her own reality again. “I tried to help you out of good faith, but you’ve taken way more than I offered! I realize that you were desperate,”–the facility had lost power almost immediately, if she had been even an hour later–“but look at things from my perspective!”

She paused again. Still no answer. She gritted her teeth. Well, there was no harm in talking to herself. Who was going to judge her? The fish?

“I’m just… I’m freaking out here!” she exclaimed. “Either I’m having the most vivid hallucination of my life, or I’ve just been violated by aliens!”

Said out loud it sounded crazy.

“We… apologize,” the voice finally replied, sounding smaller than before. “We did not intend it to be a violation.”

Robin let out an explosive breath. The voice was back.

“If you want to fix it,” she said in as calm a tone as she could manage, “then get out of my head.”

“We cannot. We do not have a suitable vessel or storage medium for transfer.” The voice sounded at least somewhat contrite.

Robin clenched her eyes shut and took a deep breath.

Alright, questioning her own reality was going to drive her crazy. As far as she could tell, she probably wasn’t hallucinating, and she couldn't live her life second guessing herself. She had to continue under the assumption that this was really happening. This was her life now. She was going to have to live with aliens in her head until she could find a way to get them out. Priority one of surviving this situation was to find out what constituted a suitable vessel or storage medium and get them to it. Priority two was to find out as much about these aliens as possible. Either getting to know them would alleviate her anxiety, or it would give her insight into what they might try to do to her.

She shoved all her anxieties about the situation into a little box and mentally sat on the lid. She could be nice. She could be friendly. She could survive this.

There was no way in hell she was going to try to swim to the surface in her current state, though, so she might as well make herself comfortable. She sat down on the floor and rummaged through her backpack for a water bottle.

“Okay,” she said after she had drunk half the bottle and taken a few more calming breaths. “Alright. I can live with this for now.” If she said it more often, she might even start to believe it. “I'm gonna need an introduction. You keep saying ‘we.’ How many of you are there?”

“One of us and all of us. We do not think of ourselves as individual, distinct.”

That… was definitely alien, yep. One was better than many though. “And what are you called?”

“Your kind call us ‘Architects.’”

Hah! She knew it! But also, “That wasn't quite what I meant. Do you have a name?”

There was an odd hesitation before the voice said, “You may append your seed code to our–to my species designation. Please call me Al-An.”

His stutter and odd emphasis seemed to indicate that he wasn’t used to referring to himself in the first person. It also sounded like he didn't have a name and he had just made one up. That it was a familiar name was probably a coincidence, but still amusing, in a kind of hysterically disbelieving way. “My whole life, I’ve been dying to meet a sapient, spacefaring alien up close, and you’re telling me your name is Alan?”

“Is it insufficient?”

Oh no, the cultural differences were going to be a bitch to navigate, she could already tell. He didn't have the context to know why that was funny, and he sounded so confused and sincere. Explaining was definitely not a priority, though. “No, it’s fine. It’s perfect. My name is Robin. I wish we were meeting under better circumstances. Why are you down here, Alan?”

“That… is a long story.” Al-An’s voice sounded guarded. “Perhaps you will prefer to focus on the construction of a new storage medium to which w–I may transfer?”

Yes, absolutely, but also Robin was certain he was changing the subject on purpose. It might be a product of cultural differences, but she thought he was acting squirrely. “Can I do it from here?”

“No. You will need to find the necessary components. I have added the information to your databank.”

Robin’s PDA pinged. She checked it. Al-An had, in fact, added an entry to her databank.

“How did you do that?” Robin asked, incredulous.

“Your device has remote connection capability,” Al-An said, as if that answered everything.

“I thought you were in my brain, though.”

“I am.” That matter-of-fact tone was going to get annoying fast.

“I can't even access my PDA with just my brain!” Robin explained, tone rising sharply.

“Remote access is an integral part of my dataset. It was necessary to format a partition of your cerebral cortex for my use.”

“Format?!” Robin exclaimed in dismay, her carefully constructed calm disintegrating in the face of this new, alarming prospect. "What does that mean?!”

“While your cerebral cortex was identified as an acceptable storage medium, it had to be modified to prevent functionality and data loss. Maintaining remote access functionality was necessary to continue interfacing with my people's technology. The ability to access your device was an unintended benefit. You need not worry, your own data loss should be minimal.”

Robin couldn't believe what she was hearing. Not only was he in her brain, he had modified her brain structure in the process?! What else could he do from there?! She tried very hard not to hyperventilate.

“What about this is distressing to you?” asked Al-An.

“You changed my brain!” Robin cried. “Physically!”

“All data transfer involves physical encoding. The increased functionality was not more invasive.”

Oh. Her breath gave a stuttering hitch. She hadn't thought about it like that, but she understood the neuroscientific mechanism behind memory encoding, how it made physical connections between neurons. Was he saying that his data transfer, however it worked, was similar?

She wasn't sure she particularly cared at the moment. She felt unmoored and vaguely hysterical. “That’s not comforting!” She looped her arms behind the backs of her legs and buried her face in her knees.

Al-An didn't respond, so Robin began a breathing exercise to try to get her feelings under control. She refused to cry in front of the alien.

She could do this. She could prioritize and get the most crucial information from the alien now, and she would feel better.

First, the most important question. “Is this going to give me brain damage?”

“The procedure has never been tested with a human before, but I made an effort to avoid causing permanent harm or loss of functionality.”

Not quite a no, but probably the best she was going to get. Next, “Can you read my mind?”

“My partition is separate. I merely have access to your sensory input.”

That sounded like a no. Good. “Can you control me?”

“Doubtful. My partition was not designed for it. Making the attempt has the potential to induce a seizure. It would not be in my best interest to try.”

Robin made a face. That was all well and good until they found themselves in an emergency and he tried it reflexively, but she supposed there wasn't anything she could do about that.

Next priority, “Can you influence me?”

“I am unsure. Is conversation not influence?”

“Don't be pedantic, I meant by manipulating my brain. Can you affect my emotions or my senses?”

“As I said, my partition is separate. I cannot access your normal brain functions other than sensory input, and I can no more influence your sensory input than you can.”

“How is it you’re communicating with me, then?” Robin demanded.

“That is a function of my remote access capability. My species is, as your people call it, telepathic.”

“But you can’t read my mind?”

“I transmit information and receive transmissions. You can receive my transmissions, but you are not transmitting, so I receive nothing from you.”

“How are you interacting with my PDA then?”

“It has the capacity to communicate on frequencies at which I can transmit.”

Robin clenched her teeth and tried to think of other important questions to ask. She was so tired. Her head still hurt.

“You seem to be concerned that I will compromise your autonomy,” Al-An said after a long moment.

“I don't know anything about you!” Robin exclaimed. “I don't know anything about your species! You invaded my brain! What am I supposed to think?”

“Counterpoint: I know very little about you as well.”

That was… true. If he wasn’t lying, and he hadn’t taken the chance to modify her brain to give himself an advantage over her or hijack her body, he was in a worse situation than she was, and he was being remarkably composed about it. If she paused to look at things from his perspective, she found she was very sympathetic. He’d had to sacrifice his independence for her to save him. He’d nearly died, and here she was saying that the price of his rescue was too much for her. She suddenly felt ashamed, but she still couldn't help but feel threatened by his actions. The conflicting mixture of emotions made her feel vaguely queasy.

“Are you going to compromise my autonomy?” She needed to hear the assurance.

“I have no intention of doing so.” He actually sounded a bit offended.

Robin slumped. She shouldn’t, but she believed him.

She wasn’t prepared to forgive him for the invasion yet, but perhaps she was too freaked out about this whole situation to be making any judgements about him just yet either. It's not like she wanted to see him as an enemy. He wasn't even hostile, as far as she could tell. She wanted to be friends, at least in theory. She could learn so much from him! If you had told her a year ago that she had the opportunity to get to know a sapient, spacefaring alien intimately, she would have been thrilled. If she had received some kind of assurance up front that the alien would respect her boundaries, she might have even agreed to the whole brain sharing thing. Maybe. If she had realized it was that or let him die, and if he had asked.

Ugh. He had asked, though. Sort of. He had just misunderstood her answer.

Actually, why had he thought her PDA was cybernetic? “I don’t have any cybernetic components,” she complained. “Why do you think I have cybernetic components?”

Al-An remained silent for a long moment before he began to list, “Your PDA prompts you with alerts about your biological functions, you have a seaglide, and facility scans indicated you have a metal component located in your abdomen–”

“First of all, that’s none of your business!” Robin burst out. “Second of all, that’s not cybernetic! It’s a hormone pump that works on a timer; it’s not reactive! To be cybernetic, it has to respond to feedback!” Robin would know, her sister was–had been–a roboticist. “And third, those other two things aren’t components because they’re not part of my body!”

“How curious,” Al-An said, sounding bemused. “Our definitions differ.”

“Why? What’s your definition?” Robin couldn’t help but ask.

“Any part of a biological, mechanical, or energy system, or some combination, regulated through circular causality.”

“That’s incredibly broad! By that definition, a vehicle is a cybernetic component!”

“Yes.”

“But a vehicle isn’t part of your body! It’s not a component, it’s a tool!”

“Any biological vessel I inhabit and control is as much a tool to me as a vehicle, and both operate inside systems of circular causality of which I am a part.”

It occurred to Robin that as a currently noncorporeal being, Al-An might have a completely alien concept of self, unattached to the physical world. Robin tried to wrap her head around it for a moment, boggling at the strangeness.

Ugh, fine. She could accept that he hadn’t been trying to act maliciously if she put aside how threatened and defensive she felt. She didn't like being defensive. And maybe she didn't need to be. Maybe she could afford to give him the benefit of the doubt and just… reserve judgement.

The tension drained out of her, and she flopped over onto her back. A wave of exhaustion washed over her, likely a result of her emotional outburst.

“Is this normal? In your culture?” she asked plaintively. “Uploading yourself into someone else’s brain?”

“It is rare, but not unheard of. There have been a few cases in extreme situations, usually on remote planets like this one, when a vessel was damaged beyond repair, a stable network connection was unavailable for upload, and it was projected that the vessel was unable to be moved before it would expire and cause permanent data loss. It is an emergency measure, not taken lightly, and resolved as quickly as possible.”

There was so much about that statement that Robin couldn't even begin to unpack. She could only wonder at how different his frame of reference was from hers. This was more evidence that he hadn’t been acting maliciously, but hearing him speak even a few sentences about his own culture only highlighted how alien he was. Just thinking about the misunderstandings that were bound to spring up from the yawning gulf of missing context that stood between them was an exhausting prospect. She needed a nap.

“Is there going to be any side effects if I go to sleep?” she asked, abruptly deciding she was done with the situation for now.

“Unknown. There are no precedents for this situation. Do you have reason to believe there may be side effects?”

“People always say you shouldn’t sleep after a concussion. I thought it might be similar.”

Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed her PDA screen brighten and begin shuffling through menus. She rolled over on her side and looked at it. Al-An seemed to be rapidly scrolling through her database of medical information. He must have seen her access it before. She wondered how much he was actually processing the pages he was looking at. It was certainly too fast for her to read.

“The mechanism is not analogous,” he finally said.

“Then I’m taking a nap,” she declared. Spending more time at higher pressure increased her risk of getting the bends or some other condition, but Robin was pretty sure it was more dangerous for her to attempt to ascend to the surface in her current state than it was to take a short nap in the increased atmospheric pressure.

“I will not protest if you feel it is necessary,” Al-An replied, “but I believe that your time would be better spent gathering the necessary components for a new storage medium.”

“I’m not going to risk ascending right now,” Robin sighed. “I’m too tired to do it safely. There’s sharks out there.” Not to mention, her body was sluggish after the sudden release of tension. “This is a safe environment, right?”

“You will not be attacked by predators, if that is your concern.”

Right. She finished her water bottle, set an alarm on her PDA, and laid her head on her backpack. The hard floor was uncomfortable, but she was too tired to care anymore. She closed her eyes and hoped her headache would go away.

#Subnautica #Subnautica Below Zero #SBZ #Al-An #Robin Ayou #fanfiction #writing snippet #my writing #long post #yelling into the void #woe! headcanons be upon ye!#this is part of a larger wip #but this part specifically exists to address some things that bothered me about this scene #especially the “this isn't happening” bit #also worldbuilding

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