"Aoi? Are you there?"
"Daria?"
"Please help. I don't have anyone else I can call."
* * *
Daria likes to take walks while Jane is at work. They're about a week away from moving out of Niihama, and Jane is busy with clearing obligations. She's building exactly the reputation she had wanted: good work, fast, affordable, and no questions if the cash is on the barrelhead. She knows enough from rebuilding Daria that she can work on anything cybernetic: If it's circuits or servos or polymers, she'll tackle it. She's a good complement to the types who work with the squishy stuff and don't ask questions they don't need answered either.
There's a block not far from their own coffin-sized space that was largely settled by immigrants from Hong Kong, in between World Wars III and IV—economically rather better off than the refugees who are The Problem on so many chattering tongues now, better off than Daria and Jane on average. The restaurant on the corner is a second-level fusion of Hong Kong Canto-Western Cha Chaan Teng with Japan's own Western fusion tradition. It makes Daria wish she could still taste food, just to experience how that combination turned out. Just down the street from that is a vendor who'll give her a discount of 100 yen or so on a black-pepper sauce that Jane likes because she brings her own glass jar.
Sometimes, Daria keeps her translator module running, to get at least a decent sense of what people are saying, and sometimes she leaves it off and appreciates what she can from tone and gesture. When she's listening to straight-up Niihama street talk, in between the words and phrases she has learned, she picks up scattered bits that sound like meaningless French or Latin, as though her mind files the speech it hears as foreign language and then does the best it can with the non-English languages she had studied when she was young.
The day it happens, she has her translator off, and what she hears is American English.
She has a jar of sauce and a few pieces of fruit for Jane and is willing to call it a good excursion when everything goes wrong.
She's walking past a parked car, a convertible, and a female figure with a head of blonde curls turns in the backseat and makes a teasing tonguetip-pass over ruby-red lips and says to Daria, "Hey darlin'. Want to help me put on a show?"
Daria knows the voice. She knows the face. She knows every dimension of the body to a centimeter or better.
Her hands spasm twice on the strap of her satchel, and then she takes a step backwards, and then she turns and runs.
* * *
"It was my body," she tells Aoi. He finds her hiding in the entryway of a bar that isn't yet open for the night. She'd been running for the better part of two kilometers. "My body," she says again.
"Hey. It's all right. You're safe now. Just tell me what you can, OK, Daria?"
"You know about us, right? About me?"
"I know what you and Jane have told me. I've never needed to know more." It's quite an admission from a wizard-class hacker, a youth whose great push on the arc of world history had been becoming the Laughing Man.
"My body," Daria says once more. "Someone... bought, or rented, an American-model sex doll. For the exotic thrill. I guess, I don't know. That same model..." She can't keep the panic sobs back any longer. "It's what Jane had to use to make me. It was my original face, Aoi. The one this body had before Jane designed this." She runs a hand disorganizedly over her own face. "It was my original voice, do you understand? The voice this body had before Jane..." Her hand rests on her throat. "And she barely had time. I could sound so much like that, Aoi. Why do you think I talk the way I do? Because I can't risk sounding like that again. And... everything I do... it wasn't enough. She recognized me, Aoi."
The door lock is electronic and easy for Aoi to defeat. He loops the bar's security feed, opens the door and ushers Daria inside. It's dark and quiet, and a quick scan of the local logfiles indicates that they have at least an hour before they might be interrupted.
"The doll was programmed to identify similar bodies," Aoi says. He guides her to a booth away from the front windows. She leans against the wall instead of sitting.
"Not just similar. It spotted me as the same make and model. It activated a subroutine to... coordinate a joint performance. Because that's what we're all built to do. We... entertain. Everything that the stuff up here," she presses the heel of her hand against her forehead, "can't do even with the woman I love, everything that I recoil from, that's what this body was built for, and even a doll in the street can see it. Can see it and try to recruit me for... please, I can't say it, don't make me say it, please understand, I just can't, Aoi, I can't, please understand..."
Gently, he asks, "Why didn't you call Jane?"
She fixes him with a sad, desperate, don't you know stare. "I can't call her. I can't let her know. She can't find out that she failed. That all the work she's done can't shake what my ghost knows about this body. That the body she found to save my life still gives me so much pain."
"She loves you," Aoi says. "Not a doll, not an entertainment product, not an exotic thrill."
She pushes herself forward from the wall and tumbles into his arms.
He's not very good at this kind of thing, as far as he knows, but he lets her compress herself onto his sweater.
"I'm sorry," Daria says, in a tone at least approaching her habitual one. "I know this isn't really what you do. Or what you expected from me."
He's retreated from trying to save the world these past few years. Helping a bookworm and an artist who are just trying to make their own way, that he can do.
"It's fine," he says, honestly. "Come on. We'll call a taxi and get you home."
* * *
Jane knows that something is wrong the moment she sees the look on Daria's face. The fact that she just stepped out of a taxi with Aoi means that it's something unusual.
"The good news," Daria says, gamely trying for a witticism, "is that I didn't drop the fruit or the black-pepper sauce." She hands her satchel over to Jane, who grabs the strap immediately. The way Daria's hands are shaking, she might risk dropping them right now.
"Black-pepper sauce?" Aoi asks.
Jane takes the jar from the satchel. She resorts to saying something about it, because whatever happened to Daria is not something Daria will talk about easily. "It's got, like, douchi in it and stuff?"
"Would you believe that I've never tried it?"
"You can't get anything exactly like it back where we come from," Daria says.
Daria lies on her right side upon their sleeping mat. Jane has Daria's left knee open and is checking the internals with a handheld magnifier. She takes the flashlight out of her mouth in order to talk. "When did you notice the pain?"
"Yesterday, after making udon."
"That was good udon... so, you think it was the foot-stompy bit?"
"Or just all the standing, I don't know. It hurt a little on the trip from Niihama, but it hasn't been consistent, or really all that bad, until now."
"So, five, six weeks, maybe?"
"See anything?"
"Nothing yet. Let me pop this internal cover thing here and look some more. So. What's happening today in the life of a wordsmithette?"
"Had I unknown phrases, sayings that are strange, novel untried words free of repetition; not transmitted sayings spoken by the ancestors! I wring out my body of what it holds, in releasing all my words; for what was said is repetition, when what was said is said." Daria lets herself smile faintly. "Khakheperre-sonb, Ankhu to his friends, about 1900 BCE. Closer to the Pyramids than to Alexander."
"The more things change, then?"
"Essays for expats on old American queer media still put tips in the jar. And another fanlore wiki crew wants to make something out of their ephemera and will pay a bit to have someone handle the editing. Anything yet?"
"Still a negatory... How's your poetry mission?" Not receiving an answer, she pauses her examination. Daria is pulling a tress of her hair over her shoulder and slowly running her fingers through the last centimeters of it. "Daria?"
"Maybe I just wasn't built for walking so much," Daria says.
"Or maybe, whomst amongst us doesn't need a weekend WD-40 soak?"
"Hmpfh."
"I am not seeing anything mechanical... Hold on, let me plug a fault-finder into this port here and we'll check if a low-level scan finds a digital problem."
"It feels strange to try and write poetry," Daria admits. "Everything I feel motivated to actually work on also sets off my finely-honed this will have no audience sense."
"How so? Can you try flexing your leg for a second?"
"The more that an image feels like it needs evoking, the more it feels that it's so particular that I'm only writing for myself."
"For us," Jane corrects matter-of-factly. "Oh, this is interesting."
"What?"
"I think my girlfriend is suffering from substandard copper. There's a damage sensor that's only operating intermittently."
"The way my buffer circuits are wired," Daria ponders, "yeah, I could be receiving that as pain."
"I'm going to try just taking the damn thing out, OK? We can scrounge a replacement later."
"OK."
"All right, let me just zero out that line in your buffer... Gonna apply my dikes to my dyke here... And done. I'll close you back up and you can try walking, OK?"
"Fine."
Jane smooths the edges of Daria's prosthetic skin back together again. It would take a close examination indeed to find the seam; she's a bit proud of her work.
Daria stands, gingerly, and walks a few steps, not eager to put weight on that leg yet. "Well, it's not hurting at the moment. I guess we'll just wait and see."
"Wait and see," Jane agrees.
"You want the last of this rice in a bowl of default spicy soup?" It's a concoction of a nutrient suspension block chopped into bite-sized pieces and soaked in two kinds of instant broth with rice and a stiff chili oil. Daria can make it by proportions alone without needing to taste it, and Jane can apparently eat boundless quantities of it.
"Sure," Jane says. It hasn't been until this apartment that they've even had a tiny space for preparing their own food, and tiny is definitely a description in full effect there. But they are making a go of it, finding recipes where Daria can work by sight and touch alone to contribute as much as possible. Jane has finally realized that her problem with okonomiyaki was the mayo that everyone seemingly drizzles all over it. Apparently, she just doesn't like mayo on either side of the Pacific.
This evening, Jane wolfs her bowl of soup while Daria goes about tidying the workshop. She isn't trusting her knee yet, but she's not showing signs of pain yet, either.
They sit on the grassy roadside slope adjacent to their building and watch the sunset. Daria leans on Jane's shoulder occasionally.
"Read to me?" Jane asks.
And so Daria brings out her latest drafts of verse. While Jane sits on their sleeping mat, propping herself against the wall, Daria reads a poem about quotidian pleasures they might have shared, all the way back in America, had Daria been living in the body she needed all along.
She stops when she sees Jane silently crying.
"Go on," Jane says, rubbing the tears away. "It's good."
After Daria concludes, Jane brings herself over to embrace her love. The way they're sitting, Jane ends up holding Daria from behind, and so she happens to see over Daria's shoulder. On her notebook page, the space after the stanza she has just read is a briar patch of cross-outs and attempted modifications. It looks ugly, just from the way the ink covers the page—overgrown by thorns.
"What's all that?"
Daria is silent for a moment. "I woke from a nightmare," she says eventually. "I don't know how it didn't wake you. I was doing all this until the dawn." She turns the pages. There are four more, five, six. It's all primally wrong, like a field of spikes intended to warn future civilizations away from a nuclear waste dump for the next ten thousand years.
"You had a dream about..." Jane can pick out some words in isolation, and she doesn't like the hint they're giving her.
"I dreamt about it," says Daria. She looks into her notebook, not at Jane. "About the thing with my body in that car. My skin sister. I dreamt that I saw myself through its eyes. That I made the invitation it made to me. That I watched myself run away. No. That I watched myself step back and try to run away, but I knew that I could not go far."
Daria is shivering.
Jane reaches around her and takes the notebook, closes it gently and sets it aside. Then she settles her arms around Daria's shoulders. "I love you," she says. It's what anything else she could attempt to say right now would mean.
Daria and Jane are walking home that first day after Supplemental Moral Instruction. Daria feels no pain in her knee. She feels none of her pain at all. This time, she's in a body that works. Jane is the taller one, the way she should be. This time, nothing stops their two sides of the conversation from flowing together like two halves of a soul. This time, when they reach Jane's room, Daria sits on the bed and writes free verse to echo what Jane paints on her easel, and Jane's fingers can comb through Daria's hair for long slow seconds before they slip out, and Daria is calm rather than terrified. She is still because she is calm instead of being frozen, and Jane holds her with acceptance in the cycle of her breath instead of lifting herself back up with the sting of confusion and rejection in her blue, forever-blue eyes.
They are diving now, into the sea of the net, past diamond interlocks and through spun-glass rings of virtual visualization programming, towards a neural rhizome the size of a thundercloud. Daria reaches out and grabs files as they pass, explaining the syapses of words she can weave among them.
And then Daria realizes that this can't be happening yet. Editing a fan lore zinethology, writing verse from the perspective of looking up at Jane walking beside her, a body in which Daria can finally breathe, no, that's all in their future.
She falls through the dream of a luminescent lace-cloud of data, and now the one diving beside her is her own make and model.
Daria knows its every dimension down to the centimeter or better. She knows the voice with which it will speak.
"Darlin', won't you put on a show to keep her?"
"What are you," Daria manages to ask, "my repressed side?"
"You're not repressed, you're repulsed, through and through, honey. Ain't nothing in your brain case that can keep her, no matter how deep you go. What, you think she'll stay with you for poetry? You think she doesn't want what I can give?" The lips of the thing with her body are stained the color that Jane had worn that first day. "You think she'll keep you when you can't do that at all? How long before she finds someone who can love her the way she wants? You can't stand the thought of her being that close to anyone else, can you? Silly little self-deluded girl. Can't do for her yourself, and holding her down from finding somebody better."
"But I love her," Daria whispers.
"Not with all she needs."
"No," Daria confesses at last.
"Oh? What was that again? What is it she needs? You're such a good writer, how about you explain it for us all?"
"Please don't make me."
The thing with her body grins with her mouth, and its eyes are dead, and now Daria is falling alone through a nightmare of the net.
"Please," Daria says again. "I can't do it. I can't say it. I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, please understand, my love, you have to understand, I just can't say it, I don't have it in me, it hurts to try and say it, you're the only one who understands, please, my love, my only love, my only and forever love, I know that who I am is hurting you, I can't be that, I'm sorry, I know what you deserve but I just can't, I know all you've done for me but I just can't, please, I'm praying to you that you understand, I can't even say it, you have to understand, I know I'm hurting you but I can't live with us apart, please my love, you're all I've ever had and I'll give you all of me and I know you deserve more than that and I know I'm keeping you from finding it and I just can't, my love, my only and forever love, please understand, please..."
Wrath of Khan right before bed had been a mistake, Jane decides. How they'd even gotten onto the subject... Ah, yes, Daria had shared one of her essays that made the tangential observation that the original Star Trek had by luck predicted the day of the week for Apollo 11, and got within five years for the start of World War III. And so they'd dug the movie out of the world data net and settled in with a box of chocolate-covered wafer sticks for Jane and nutrient-suspension jerky for Daria. Just a quiet night in, with a history that had taken a different course, one that led eventually to the stars.
Thus, in the dead of night, Jane awakening. All the emotions and imagery of her dream had piled into those last few moments. Daria, emotionless, under orders, already broken and defeated, holding a cupped hand to Jane's ear so that something can slither inside. I know I'm hurting you, she says, flatly, but I can't live with us apart.
Jane bolts awake, and somehow everything gets worse, because Daria is whispering in her sleep, words piling on top of words, mantras of desperation, and Jane realizes it's what Daria believes.
It's hard to wake her from a nightmare. Jane doesn't know whether this is a cyborg thing or a Daria thing, but shaking Daria's shoulder and calling to her isn't doing any good, so Jane reaches over her companion for the nearest connector cable and jacks into Daria's neck.
"... Jane?" she mumbles. "Is that you?"
"That's me and a virtual dawn cue," Jane whispers. She's given Daria a digital dose of an artist's impression of the golden hour. "You were having a bad dream."
"... I was."
"You gonna be OK?"
Daria pauses and closes her eyes before nodding briefly. "Yes."
"Good." Jane brushes the edge of her hand over Daria's hair. "Love you, babe."
"Love you, too."
* * *
"Mm-mmm! What's that old saying—born Shinto, die Buddhist, eat Buddhist vegetarian?" Jane gestures with her chopsticks from her array of plates to her mouth and back again. "Because this is delicious."
They're sitting at the bar of a heretical shojin ryori place, one that actually cooks with alliums for some reason they won't dare to guess at, maybe just a chef thinking "I survived World Wars III and IV so I'm eating some goddamn garlic", a hole-in-the-wall that they must have passed a dozen times without trying. Jane is tucking into daikon pickled in a way that she's never tasted before. Densetsu's big hit of the season, his collab with that jet-rock girl group that came out of nowhere, is playing from the vintage-clothing shop across the way, loudly enough to float between them, in that oddly perfect way that urban sounds sometimes combine.
"This is so good," Jane continues, "babe, that it's making me wonder if I forgot an anniversary."
"I got paid for an editing gig," Daria says. "Figured I'd spend it on a nice time." Her own meal is the full-body cyborg special, all one basic substance but with some actual variety of color and texture.
"Well, we're filing it with your good ideas," Jane declares.
* * *
Daria is diving for a chatroom session with another fanlore community to scout an editing gig when Aoi calls to check on them.
"One day at a time," Jane says. "One night, sometimes, too." She takes a moment to watch Daria, and makes a mental note to tell her when she resurfaces that her eyelids were doing that micro-flutter thing that is just adorable. "So," Jane goes on, "read any books you can recommend lately?"