Jane has a moment to get a bad feeling when two blocks of air under the bridge waver with something too geometrical to be heat, and she realizes she's fucked when they break apart into chromatic aberration and resolve into a SpecOps gorilla with prosthetic eyes and a chick whose entire body screams state-licensed razorgirl.
"Jane Lane?" asks the gorilla. "We're here to talk about back-alley face work."
And she had just stepped out for jasmine rice and a brick of nutrient suspension.
"Relax," says the razorgirl, and it's not remotely effective. "Your friend Aoi says you do good work, which means you're probably not the one we're looking for."
Jane connects the dots. "You're Section 9," she says. "Aoi said that you'd all be terrorists if your boss hadn't conned you paychecks to go up against people worse than cops." Dead-eye SpecOps doesn't seem impressed by this description, but pain in purple hair might be a fraction amused. "I guess that earns you a conversation."
She can tell they want a private chat, but she doesn't want them in her home. For starters, there's no room. What isn't the bio-printing studio is the mat where they sleep. Second, the ambiguously-cops bit. Third, her better half has even more to lose than she does.
It's Tokyo after World War III and Non-Kaiju World War IV, or however the mantra goes. The garden is mostly weeds, but if the building hasn't fallen down yet, there's a chance it won't this year.
"Sorry," she tells them at the gate, "the koi are all at the cleaners."
And Daria is out in the garden today. Dammit.
* * *
"Artificially induced cyberbrain sclerosis?" Jane is incredulous.
"That's what it looks like," says Kusanagi, the one with better taste in hairstyle.
"That's..." Jane begins.
Daria finishes. "Ghoulish. Like deliberately infecting someone with AIDS." At this angle, sitting as she is in the shadow with the sun on her spectacles just so, her eyes are as featureless as Cyber Van Der Huge's.
"We think it was caused by isomeric protein granules introduced into black-market prosthetics. Maybe random product tampering for stochastic violence, maybe targeted."
"Contaminate the body," says Van Der Huge, "with a bastardized version of a genomic drug designed to pass into the brain, and the brain falls down."
"Sick fucks," Jane says.
Daria rises. "Excuse me a moment." She turns and heads back into the apartment.
"You say..." Jane's throat is dry. "You don't know whether it's random or not?"
Kusanagi replies, "No obvious commonality among the victims, apart from having recently had a prosthetic repair or replacement outside the blanket."
"Which includes more of society than you'd want to admit," Jane mutters.
"It could be randomness on top of the goal, to obscure the intended target." This sounds like something Kusanagi finds plausible, whatever reason she has, whatever pattern she sees.
Daria returns with a cold can of iced coffee.
"Thanks, babe," says Jane. "And you come to me because I know that world?"
"You're an artist," Kusanagi says. "You do faces that are better than their owners could afford otherwise, and you do them for people who—"
"Whose doors you'd be kicking down in another life," Jane suggests.
"Hey now," says Van Der Huge, but he sounds more irked than angry. He might be fun in a meathead kind of way when he's not on the job.
Jane locks eyes with Kusanagi. "Your body looks like it's come off the shelf at a department store," Jane says, "but it's special-purpose underneath, isn't it? I bet your skin receptor density is double the market standard. Better zoom factor and low-light mode on those peepers. Augmented actuators in your legs. I know some clubs where you'd be a huge hit."
"I expect I know them too," Kusanagi says. She looks from Jane to Daria. "Algorithmic gait. But irregular micro-motions consistent with the presence of a ghost when adjusting your glasses and handing her a coffee. I'd say your body is new, or newly overhauled, and the somatic disconnect is still strong enough that you depend upon pre-programmed movements for many tasks."
Daria deadpans back: "Like she said, you've got good eyes."
Cyber Beefside comments, "You came here from the American Empire. They're not exactly forthcoming with their records, but it looks like you did so in a hurry."
"Work's better here," Jane says, flatly. "Living space is more expensive, but parts are cheaper. Net win."
"Particularly," suggests Kusanagi, "if one of you is a brain case in a fully prosthetic body."
Daria monotones, "Funny how I've been called a brain since I was a teenager."
"Look," Jane interposes herself. "What about motive? You're looking for someone who does sick-fuck work. Have you asked what would drive a person to hurt people like that?"
"Out of all the ways," Daria adds, "that one could hurt a person, most of them much cheaper."
"Eschatological religious belief seeking to sow chaos," Kusanagi suggests. She doesn't sound like she believes it. "Or an ideological animus against a population segment that depends upon prosthetics." She looks to Daria again.
This is it. This is her real theory, her guess as to why they're living in the ruins of Tokyo, her reason for thinking that Jane knows the relevant corner of the black market better than any other face artist.
Daria is watching Jane. Jane shrugs her hands in her lap, a tell them if you want gesture.
Daria taps her glasses. "These," she confirms dispassionately, "are all I carried along with my ghost. I left America in the body of a sex doll that, let us say, fell off the back of a truck. Even after everything she's overhauled in me, I wake in the dead of night from dreams in which my body carries memories of everything it endured before, and I have to wash myself in water so hot it would scald off any skin that is not prosthetic. And it's still better than the life we left behind."
Jane holds Daria's wrist, feels the even and steady servo-pulse. "They didn't think she was a she when she was born. Typical Americans." She meets Kusanagi's gaze again. "If you think that's the 'ideological animus' driving your killer, I'm all ears."
Jane is shaken all anew when she enters their home and sees Daria kneeling on their sleeping mat, slowly curling and uncurling her fingers. Kusanagi had been right. She was still relying on pre-programmed movement patterns, and far too much. Dammit, the latest repairs should have settled in by now.
"Doing all right?" asks Jane.
"Just this terrible pain in all the diodes down my left side."
"Hey," Jane says. "You should eat something."
"By something, you mean the one thing, right?"
Cyborg food comes in different textures, but not different tastes. And because unlike vision and hearing and touch and proprioception, smell is a damnably individual thing, sensorium recordings from one person don't often play well in the pathways of another. It's a long process involving a lot of feedback to get Alice's taste perception of any given dish to be remotely acceptable to Bob. Together, Daria and Jane had managed to transfer the experiences of mala numbing spice and shiitake bouillon, so she could have that much variety when nibbling on a nutrient block, but they'd never say it was a gourmand's life.
Jane sits cross-legged beside her. "Have you been able to walk without the subroutines? At all?"
"Some. Not much," Daria admits. "I'm not that fond of having to get about by using code for a maid bot."
"I'm pretty sure that code is the same for, like, secretary gynoids and all the rest."
Jane tears the wax paper off the nutrient block and hands it to Daria. She manages a bite. "Sorry. Bad day."
"You're fucking telling me."
"You think we're done with Section 9?" Daria sounds doubtful.
"Not yet." Jane speaks with a certainty that Daria had not expected. "I'm going to have to make some calls," Jane says. "Maybe a few train rides. There are people I need to speak with myself. I can pass along what I hear, if it's anything, but I have to protect their identities."
Daria breaks off a piece of the nutrient suspension. "I understand." Meaning, Jane knows, that this is for all their sakes. Daria puts the morsel in her mouth and sets about chewing.
Fuck, the idea that this is incontrovertibly an improvement on where they began, it breaks the heart sometimes.
Daria had hated everything that came with testosterone puberty. It was an imposition from inside, meeting the rules from outside, burdening a mind that had already found richness without it, and only getting worse from there, worse each day. Jane falling for her in part because of how she had looked then, smelled then, been built then, was a new kind of torture, poison in the wound that threatened to make Daria's one and only true friendship its own circle of Hell. And then, a wild plan for deliverance. Jane could go both ways, which was bad enough in the American Empire, and she was nothing if not an artist... Pygmalion was a fucking amateur. Jane did cosmetic work for back-alley prosthetic docs, shaping and contouring for doll brothels... The only way out of the irony was through. Daria needed a new body, and a central nervous sawbones to put her into it. And then fake papers to get out of the country tout de suite.
They didn't know if desire would come with the transfer. Absence of its opposite, freedom from revulsion, that was one thing. The other, well, that hasn't happened yet. Daria's body had been built from the skeleton out to be a pleasure gynoid, and she doesn't want sex. Perhaps this stems from something so neurally deep that it contributed to testosterone puberty being torture in the first place. Swapping out subroutines and internal parts hasn't shaken the conviction in her ghost, her enduring awareness of her body's original function. Perhaps this is a sign that her situation is fundamental: If she were capable of not being repulsed, couldn't she come to terms with that origin?
"I could doll myself," Daria says very quietly. "I could reactivate the original firmware in my spinal subprocessors, and switch off my senses during a sleep cycle. You could make love to my body while I am absent. You'd have an experience that men would have paid a lot of money for."
"My love, my love, we talked about this. I'm not going to do that to you. Do you think I could handle a doll looking at me through your eyes? Do you think I don't know how much knowing what happened would hurt you when you woke up?"
"If it's something you need in order to stay..."
"Daria, my love, please, no. Don't do this to yourself. The point of all this was to make your pain stop. And we did that, right, OK? We're here now, I'm here with you, and I'm going to stay."
"I'm sorry I've made you cry," Daria says.
Jane tries to sweep the tears out of her eyes, but her hands are shaking enough to make that difficult. "Please, Daria, just eat something for me, OK? Let's just both eat something and get some rest."
* * *
After that horror show, Jane doesn't want to leave town. Shit, she doesn't want to leave their apartment. She does what she can in the private chatrooms, but the thing about people deep into the black market for reasons that would make them not just criminals but social and religious pariahs in at least one world superpower is that they're not very trusting.
"I have to go to Dejima," she tells Aoi on their next call. "Maybe Etorofu, even, but God I hope not. She's been in a bad way."
"I'll pull on my own threads," Aoi says. "If I can find something that will get you out of a trip, I'll inform you post haste."
"Thanks. You're a mensch. And, like, call her too, while I'm gone? Maybe do a little more simultaneous bookbinding? I think that was good for her dexterity."
* * *
"How's Dejima?" Daria floats in a circle of sharp white light before the shuttered grocery vendor across the narrow lane from the wall Jane is leaning against.
"Everything the brochures promised. So, a hell-hole, but not without a certain charm. Same as a lot of places where as many desperate people as possible are trying to make the best of it in close company. We should really consider it for our second honeymoon."
"Did we ever have a first?"
"Depends," Jane says, "on whether you count the hold of that cargo ship."
"You have a safe place for the night?"
"I'm crashing in a room above a tea shop that's the center of social life on this block. I'll be fine. I'm supposed to have a cuppa there with that guy I subcontracted for, repairing those vets from the Nemuro landing. He's running late. God, I miss your face, babe."
"I suppose every artist has a work of juvenalia of which they are inordinately fond."
"Hush, you. I did brilliant work, and you know it." Jane remembers carrying over the details of an organic face, softening where her intuition led her, watching it become more than a mask. She had gone above and beyond with the hair, then, finding an option that had struck Daria dumb with wonder. Jane running her fingers through that had been one of the first ways of touching they'd found which calmed Daria instead of panicking her.
"... You did, my love."
"These kids down the street found a box of old theatre masks. I think they've been playing Spartacus. And maybe the Martians are involved too."
"Some stories belong to the world, and become new again in each corner of it."
"Starting to sound like Aoi, there, babe. You're lucky we found someone who reads as much as you do. Shit, I see the guy."
"Time for cucumber sandwiches."
"I'll call again as soon as I can, babe."
* * *
Jane is on her seventh purveyor of dubious medical services in her second refugee district when she gets a break. The face-job equivalent of a bent-car-aerial abortionist remembers a man who had transiently worked as a med tech in their specialized and unregulated field, a man with abnormally much experience above ground, even a stint at Serano Genomics. Between jobs he'd been outright scornful of their clinic patients, more and more as time went on, including those who everyone else saw as folks muddling along same as anybody.
She calls Aoi. Then she calls Section 9.
"He worked on Serano's protein micromachines," Aoi tells her.
"The treatments for cyberbrain sclerosis that don't actually work," she says to confirm.
"But they do enter the brain."
"Friend, you've just lit up the skies over the port city."
Her next call back is from Major Kusanagi. "He's changed names at least twice since the job you discovered. We've linked him to three other different shady clinics. And before Serano Genomics, he spent time in the American Empire."
"Home sweet shitting home," Jane says. Then she decides: "You take it from here. I'm going back to Tokyo."
* * *
She sleeps on the train. In fact, she's sufficiently dead tired that she nearly misses a connection, and then on the next leg, she forgets to set her alarm for her regular call to Daria.
* * *
She wakes to Aoi's voice coming out of a madly grinning pop-art icon with "I THOUGHT WHAT I'D DO WAS, I'D PUT EVERYTHING IN ITS RIGHT PLACE" spinning about it, floating to her upper-right. "Jane?"
"Fuck, man, before coffee?"
"It's Daria. She's not answering."
* * *
Jane is maybe half an hour out by Shinkansen and taxi. Kusanagi is farther away, but damn her, she gets there a few minutes faster. Whatever past she and Aoi have shared, she takes it seriously when he says there's a problem. Jane returns home to find a tilt-wing aircraft making a downdraft that scatters the weeds, Kusanagi in their apartment outfitted like she's ready to storm a hostage situation, and the body of Daria being gripped, arms behind it, held in place by Kusanagi while it swivels its head to face Jane, face flushed and lips parted, and Daria's voice is pumped with sultry and saying, "She's rough. I hope you'll be gentle, but I think I could handle both of you if you make it worth my while."
"Shit fuck baby no no no."
She runs to her love, tries to take Daria's face in her hands, and there is nothing behind Daria's eyes, and she is trying to take Jane's fingers into her mouth, and baby no this cannot be happening—
Kusanagi says, "I got here five minutes ago. She tried to climb on top of me. This is a very elaborate doll program. Do you know who did this to her?"
The utter dread in Jane's visage is answer enough.
"Don't you want a girl with no limits?" asks the thing that has taken Daria's place. "It's all there, and it's all built for you."
"Aoi," Jane calls out. "I need a barrier breaker."
She knows where the connector cable is. Nothing is far from anything else in their apartment. She pushes her own hair to the side and jams the connector into her AUX jack. A tiny part of her is grateful that only Kusanagi and Aoi are seeing this.
"Baby, I need you to wake up," she says, and finds the jacks under Daria's river of auburn hair.
The room goes white.
* * *
The light shrinks to a point above her as Jane falls. The doll program is hitting her own pathways. She feels her own hallucinated body twist through poses of allure and invitation without movements to transition between them, like film splices of pornographic sense data. She wonders if some neural feedback could set her off towards arousal, realizes that that would separate her from Daria's ghost forever—
And then she crosses Daria's ghost line.
The memories are as jumbled as in a dream, but the geography is constant, not flickering oneirically.
There are the quiet shelves of the National Library, the labyrinth where Aoi makes his home. There is the garden outside their apartment, but verdant rather than weedy. There is the floor of Jane's room long ago in America, the room where Daria had been called by her name for the first time.
And Daria is sitting on that ratty carpet from the other side of the world. She looks up at Jane.
"I miscalculated," Daria says.
"My love... why?"
"Why did I do it wrong, or why did I do it in the first place?" Daria shrugs. "I'm still afraid that you'll leave me. Isn't that answer enough?"
"I guess it has to be true," Jane says. "But it's not right. I... I love you. Isn't that answer enough?"
"I'll never be able to be all that you need," Daria tells her. "That's pretty obvious in here."
"Daria, my love, I think you've proven yourself a terrible judge of what I need."
"Or what you deserve?"
"How does slaving your body to a doll program give me anything that I deserve, then? Is what I deserve to beat off with the aid of a thing shaped like a woman?"
Daria looks away. "It was the best I could do. And then I did it wrong. It was supposed to be what I had offered before you left. I tried to tie it to my sleep cycle, like I said. I was practicing while you were away, practicing being absent and coming back to my body after it had been running... this. I thought if I could get used to that much, then you could have... more than you'd had before." She adds, "I wasn't getting used to it. Not at all. I kept trying, though."
"Thank you," Jane says at last. "I mean, it was a terminally misguided and staggeringly self-destructive thing to do. But maybe people in love are entitled to a couple mistakes like that. You think?"
"You're not going to leave me?"
"I'm in your brain right now," Jane points out.
"I don't know how to wake up," Daria says. "I tried. I promise. But the doll program is just... running now."
"How about you just try following me?" Jane asks.
* * *
Daria is looking up at Major Kusanagi. "Don't you have crimes to solve?" Daria inquires.
She stands, unsteadily, and Jane realizes that she herself has ended up on the floor somehow too.
Daria shuffles to a table where Jane has been preparing face masks for circuit inlay and leans backward against it. "Huh," she says.
Those had not been subroutine steps.
"Please don't do that to me again," Aoi says, heartfelt.
Jane realizes that he is not speaking over the net. He's standing in the doorway.
"Hello again," says Kusanagi.
"Hello, Major. Daria and I were supposed to work through a bookbinding lesson today."
"Hmm," she says, in that incrementally-amused way of hers. "Until next time, then."
And then the three of them are alone.
"I think," Aoi says, "we should find some replacement spinal subprocessors that just don't have that firmware in them."
Daria responds, "Oh, God, don't you have an assassination trend to provoke somewhere?" A beat. "Sorry. Just trying to come to terms with the fact that the number of people who saw me as a sex doll is more than zero."
"We're all good at keeping secrets," Jane reminds her.
Daria's look is very tired, but very fond. "You think you're up to working on my spine?"
"I'm the artist and you're my canvas, my love."
"Well." Daria takes a deep breath and stands up fully. "Well," she repeats. "You know what? I could eat. Anyone else hungry?"
They go to Niihama for the sights.
Batou meets them at the train station. His first words are, "We got the sick fuck."
Jane acknowledges with a nod. She can think of several things she could say, all of which feel like they'd land with one tone or another that she might not intend.
"He had friends," Batou says, falling in step beside them. "We don't yet know how many are still at large."
"So," Daria says, "someone out there might hear about the gaikokujin girl who was asking too many questions."
"We'll watch our backs," Jane says.
"And may the street protect its own," Daria adds.
Batou seems satisfied at this, maybe a little resigned. He lets out a deep hrmmm that might be a "some things never change" or a recollection of a battlefield he'd fought upon long ago.
"Come what may," he says, fishing a foil pouch out of his coat pocket. Cyborg food. "Here. It's a texture I've only been able to find at a little place way out in the Ryukyu."
"Thanks," Daria says, reading the shop's handwritten label. "Maybe it'll taste good as mushrooms."
Batou stares off for a moment. "If you're here to install the replacement parts that the Major thinks you are, well." He glances to Jane. "That's nadsy. Respect." And then he leaves.
* * *
The book carts at the National Library are sturdier than they look. Jane looks up from her notes and brushes aside a data-ringed HUD circle to see Daria riding past on one. "It's strange," she says, "I seem to have been printed without an appendix."
Aoi rubs his eyebrow and makes a halfway grin, caught between a laugh and a groan.
Daria rides around the corner of a shelf. Jane hops into motion to catch her coming up the other way. "Is my volume too loud?" Daria asks, the slightest variation in her habitual deadpan. She sends the cart into reverse, but Jane is fast enough to glomp onto her before she gets very far. It's an embrace at an awkward angle, what with her being perched sidesaddle on a shelf, but it's a comfortable one.
Daria whispers, "Never doubt to whom I am dedicated."
* * *
Aoi's backroom is Faraday-caged to the standard that hospitals use for the operating rooms where they do prosthetic body swaps.
Daria sits on the table, wearing an oversize blue coat backwards like a smock. Her back is open all the way from her cervical through her thoracic vertebrae. Her hair is tied off to the side and pulled forward to fall in front of her shoulder.
"You still OK with your motor functions off?" Jane double-checks.
"I'm fine with enforced laziness," Daria reassures her. "Keep going."
"They always make you need one more weird shape of tool," Jane mutters among the whirring and snapping and clicking.
"I hope there aren't any unexplained bolts or washers left over when you're done."
"Babe, you've always had a few screws loose." Jane gets quiet for a minute as she focuses. "OK. Data lines in, power lines in, heat sinks check out, new subprocessors are seated and good to go. Reactivating power bus in three... two... one." Jane leans around to watch Daria from the front and sees her blinking rapidly.
"Definitely different firmware," Daria reports. Relief and gratitude warm her countenance.
Jane can't help but smile back. "Let's get you closed up so we can do the rest, then?"
Skin resealed, Daria twists back and forth a few times to test her reactivated voluntary motor control, holds her neck in her hands and rolls her head... "Good," she says at last. "Nothing feels like it's a new shape in there." She unties her hair and lets it cascade down loosely again.
"All right." Jane draws a deep breath. This next part was the one she figured would feel a liitle spooky. "Lie back, OK?"
Jane slides off Daria's glasses and carefully folds them. She puts them into Daria's right hand.
"Wait," Daria says, her breath catching just a little.
And so a moment later, Jane is leaning her head out the door and beckoning Aoi to come in. "She wants you to hold her hand," Jane says.
Spectacles in one set of fingers, Aoi gently pressing the others, Daria breathes deeply and informs them, "Ocular functions disengaged. Visual input zeroed. Conscious point control zeroed. Focus adjustment zeroed. Saccades zeroed."
Releasing each of Daria's eyes from the orbital socket requires finding one catch-hole, the diameter of a straightened paperclip, in her artificial sphenoid bone, and another in her zygomatic. And then the forceps. Jane doesn't feel too good as the left eyeball comes out, and Aoi doesn't look too good, but Jane has the replacement ready.
"Halfway there," Jane says to reassure everyone in the room.
Her hands are steady with the second set of wire probes, and almost before she knows it, the second swap is complete.
"Boot your systems for me, darling?"
Daria blinks. She focuses on Jane. Wordlessly, she slips her glasses back on—the optically neutral "lenses" and the thick black frames. "Good job," she says, not bothering to hide her amazement.
Jane says, "Her model and mods. Your color."
Daria sits up, and then hops to the floor, never pointing her new eyes away from Jane. They embrace, and through the contact Jane can feel the new lightness in her love.
Aoi has been tactfully looking away and is too polite to clear his throat or otherwise re-alert them to his presence.
"It's fine, friend," Jane says, and he looks back.
Daria says. "I'm still not going to do anything you'd be scandalized to watch." There is a subtle bliss in her smile. "She's just... harmonized my ghost. Or buried my old ghosts at last, if you want a different metaphor. My body and skin were built for 'love'," the scare quotes plain in her tone, "and my eyes were built for war, and I finally feel that all's fair."
History mostly passes them by for a while.
They do find themselves on a job in Fukuoka when the whole city has to evacuate because of the terrorist nuke threat, but for some people, that's Tuesday. And the conversations with strangers on the bus out of town are remarkably charming. By popular request, Jane draws portraits of a boy and a girl and their parents and their stuffed animals. Daria talks the difficulties of translation with a literature student.
They are among the fraction of the population, when the American missile explodes harmlessly over Dejima, who hear singing.
And not so long after that, Jane comes home from an invigorating jog, only to find—
"Daria, why is Major Kusanagi dead in our bed, where we sleep?"
Daria is kneeling beside the body, staring into eyes of the same model as her own. "She left Section 9," Daria tells Jane. "And she left us her prosthetic body for spare parts." She bends Kusanagi's old arm at the elbow to show off the wrist. "See? No watch. That, she took along with her ghost. It keeps the same time she does, just like my glasses see what I do."
"Well." Jane finds that she has less to say about this than she feels she ought.
"It seems like we should write a thank-you note," Daria muses, "but I'd also bet that if we meet again, it'll mean trouble for all concerned."
"I'm going to clean up and change, and then we'll... find a place for the body, I guess."
"Hat rack?" Daria suggests.
"We don't wear hats."
"We could if we had a rack to store them on."
* * *
That night, Jane curls around Daria on their sleeping mat. She likes seeing Daria's face if they manage to grab a little cuddle and/or doze time during the day, but feeling Daria's hair in the dark has benefits all its own.
"I need to tell you something," Jane says.
"I'm listening."
"I understand why you were afraid. When we met, I was a hormonal teenage girl. Fresh off a chain of bad decisions due to bad horny."
"I'll agree that you made quite the first impression."
"It took me a while to learn... I'd never fallen in love before. Turns out that can change a woman's priorities. I can live with just getting myself off when I need to. As long as the woman I love is in my life with me. I didn't imagine that desire could be... wide but shallow. I'm doing a rotten job explaining this, I know. I wouldn't have believed me either if I'd heard this at 17."
"I wondered if transition would give me the kind of heat that you had. I didn't want that. I was willing to take the risk, because the alternative was death by inches."
"Centimeters, love," says Jane.
"We were in America then." Daria stays quiet, and then she adjusts herself to settle more closely into Jane. "Your heat could sweep up men and women alike. It seemed unfair to stop a thing like that with a person like me."
"Even less fair to let you miss out on life because of a... gender glitch. Or to let you miss out on love because I'm vulnerable to horny mistakes."
"Hmmmmm. Not many people could find a life with me to be complete."
"Not many women are works of art like you."
Daria sits up, turns over to face Jane, and props herself up on her elbow. Jane can just make out her putting on her glasses. Daria says, "I can see you better in the darkness now." She brushes the edge of her free hand lightly across Jane's hair. "One thing I can give you now, my love."
The stream from Daria's visual feed opens in Jane's field of view.
"What am I looking at?" Jane inquires.
"The woman I never want to lose."
"Well then." Jane's fingers meet Daria's, and Jane begins transmitting visuals of her own.
"Blueprints," Daria says. "But elusive, impressionistic, in flux..."
"An artist's eye on the woman I will never give up."