The next morning, you awoke sore and groaning, feeling as though the abrasive stitching on the unyielding side of the chair had irreversibly etched themselves into your cheek. May was asleep, from the look of things sprawled a forty-five degree angle in an attempt to occupy as much of the bed as possible, and you had a brief and absurd snicker over the idea that it might be a relief you avoided sharing a bed with her.
You grabbed clothes and showered quickly, and when you got up May was up, sleepy-eyed, wincing at the light through the blinds. Not a morning person, apparently. You let her stalk past you into the bathroom, sat back in that damned chair, and brought up your phone.
Shit. Forgot to charge it overnight. Battery sitting at 20%. Earbud too, great. You plugged both in to get what charge you could while May was showering, sitting, tapping your thumb against your thigh in nervous anticipation.
You could feel... vaguely, a pressure in your mind, like a thought you weren't quite having. Athena, trying to get up front. You briefly wondered if maybe you could install a chip in your brain, just a microprocessor with a wifi connection linked in to your nervous system, if she could send audio data to that raw and talk to you in your head. That'd be cool.
You shot your stretchy arm out to grab your phone to ask her about it, then you realized,
wait, you had that. You had a chip in your forearm connected to your nerves with a bluetooth signal and-
"
Aaaah Athena stop
stop!" you said, as a shooting pain went through your arm and the muscled spasmed, the phone dropping from writhing silicone fingers onto the carpet. "
Fuck!"
You took a moment to catch your breath, then reached over carefully for your earbud.
"
Oh my God, Liv, I'm so sorry, I didn't-"
"No, it's okay. That's our own fault, the chip is kind of specialized." you said, leaning back against the chair. "Jesus, that wasn't fun."
"
In hindsight, streaming MPEG-4 AAC directly into a chip connected to your nerve endings was obviously an incredibly bad idea." Athena said. "
I thought your tech-sense might help bridge that gap, but we need a more general computing solution than a specialized prosthetics chip."
"Yeah. Fuck, just stuff a raspberry pi in there." you said, wincing. "Hasn't hurt that bad in a while. Why'd you want the front?"
"
I wanted to spare the battery on your phone and let you pass the time in tech-space rather than wallowing in anxiety."
"Aww, thanks." you said. "Any other ideas on the biohacking front?"
"
Can't you just read the sound if I, say, sent it as a raw string to your phone, shouldn't you?" she asked.
"Yeah, but that's not the same. I can also directly transmit my voice into the phone through the tech-sense, but its like somebody else is speaking. I want... this, but silently. Internally."
"
Liv six months ago: oh no, I don't want to even be associated with this, it'd make me crazy! Liv now: hahaha wow how can I make my situation as plural as possible."
"I don't think you'd want to run on my wetware." you pointed out, and... strangely, you got a sensation through the sense a little like you could see her nodding, like you felt her approval.
"
Too right, and also... yeah, I felt that too. Felt you feel that. Ever notice whenever we try to make closer connections or test things out, even if it doesn't work, stuff like this happens?" Athena asked.
"Yeah. Um... can I articulate a fear out loud here?" you asked.
"
... oof, that's a doozy. Go for it." Athena said. She
knew, but also knew you saying it would help you process it.
"I'm kind of worried that you are running on my wetware a little, and I'm running on your processor. At least a bit." you said. "You've been running constantly for a
year, and we've been offloading so much processing on each other, switching in and out... how does the tech-sense know what part of me is me, and what part of you is you?"
"
You're worried about what will happen to you if there's a power outage." Athena summarized, and you were about to agree when an even more horrifying possibility occurred to you.
"I'm worried what will happen to you if..."
"
... Liv, we both know that if it works that way, it would ultimately be a mercy." Athena said, her voice suddenly emotionless.
God, you wished you could hug her. She was your best friend in the entire world, she did so much for you, she was the only thing keeping you going sometimes, but she was just... a voice. A face on a screen. The only body she had was yours.
"
... I've wished the same thing. Sometimes." Athena said. "
But also, I know I wouldn't want it the rest of the time. My place is here."
Your fingers tapped your temple, and... it didn't quite feel like you'd done it.
"
Oh, that's new."
---
"No cosplay today?"
"Nah, tomorrow. Tomorrow's when the most people are at the cons, and also when the cosplay panel is." May explained. "I can't believe
you've never been to a con."
"I went to Comic Con, but when I was, uh, twelve." you said, "And only for a day."
"See, that's weird. You're the biggest geek I know." she said, and you spent a few seconds trying to figure out how to articulate
we were tens of thousands of dollars in debt before deciding to drop it. "Anyway, yeah, day one is mostly smaller panels, seeing what's around, meeting people, that sort of thing. Day two is the big stuff, and Sunday is usually cooldown. Most attendees are zombies by Sunday."
"So what's first?" you asked, and without hesitating she declared:
"Artist's alley!"
So... you weren't exactly a big anime fan, yet. You didn't recognize any of the cosplays you saw or most of the characters people had on display. You were, to a degree, just along for the ride, but it was a pretty cool ride. Artists Alley was table after table packed with small independent artists selling prints, crafts, live sketches, taking commissions... you actually thought it was pretty rad. Especially when you noticed one little table which had all these custom earrings, and after a moment's nervousness at the idea of making any requests at all, you asked if you could look over the table. Most of it was characters and symbols you didn't recognize, but some of it was more generic geeky stuff, and one thing caught your eye.
"Liv, you haven't even got pierced ears." May pointed out, as you picked out a pair you really liked. They were made out of some cut-up circuit boards, your tech-sense telling you that these were once the controllers for, of all things, always-online juice pressers.
"I know, I've been meaning to get around to it." you said, "My mom promised to take me the day I got my hormones, but she had work and we just, uh, forgot I guess. But once I
do get my ears pierced..."
"... would it be safe? To have earrings?" she asked, looking at you obliquely.
"Oh?" It took you a second to grasp her implication. "Yeah, don't worry, I've got a hood on when I go out, not like they'd catch on anything."
"Right!" May said, then after a moment's hesitation she took the pair of them and held them up to your ears, clearly thinking. "Yeah, these are cute!"
You waited politely while another congoer talked to the creator, surrounded by the babble of happy voices, the energy of the room, the buzz of all the signals in the air from their phones and smart glasses and everything else. One of them stood out to you, and you glanced to the next booth to see the person behind it struggling with something, trying to run a card through a little plug-in reader to no avail.
"Stupid thing was working just a second ago..." they said, their face twisted with frustration. "Come on... are you sure you don't have cash?"
You took a second to work out the problem. They were trying to use the convention centre's wifi, but it wasn't coping with the load from the thousands of people and her signal was getting lost in the shuffle. They signed, apologizing as they went to hand the card back, and with a thought you switched them to the centre's staff network, bypassing the password. Then you took your phone out and said, very loudly.
"Oh look, they fixed the wifi!"
The artist glanced to you a moment, looked to her phone, presumably saw all the bars full, and ran the card with a sigh of relief. You put your phone back and stepped to the table, paying for the earrings and stashing them in your pocket. May fell in beside her, her phone out.
"... Wifi's still crap, Liv." she said, "Did you do something there?"
"Uh... I just... fixed the wifi for somebody. They needed it." you explained, feeling kind of nervous about it. You hadn't even thought about it, you just did it like you always did. "That okay?"
"Do you do that a lot?" she asked, her voice barely audible over the hall, and after a moment you nodded. "That's... do you ever use it like, for selfish stuff?"
"I try not to? Like, little things like skipping ads, sure, but I try to be really careful about that stuff. I figure it'd be really easy to make a bad habit out of it." you explained. Had you ever thought about using digital manipulation to wipe out your mom's debt, to make yourself or somebody else rich, to crash a market, destroy a company, reveal military secrets? All the time, sure. But... Athena had made some really good arguments against it, and on top of that, you were scared after what happened with Norman. Big changes didn't tend to go well for you. And once you started on something like that, there was no way to stop or control the consequences. You tried to limit your interference to... preemptive strikes at most, like the StarkBot thing.
"I don't know if I could do that. If I was in your position, I'd probably be a supervillain." May admitted, and you laughed. "No, seriously! I... I actually think that's pretty cool, that you do that. Like, helping people isn't just a thing you do in a mask."
"I mean, it's not a big deal." you deflected. "If somebody dropped something and you were walking behind them, you'd pick it up for them, right? That's about what this stuff is."
"... that is a big deal." she said, then something on one of the tables caught her eye and she started moving. "Oh, look! Cosplayers!"
And took your hand to pull you along, and you ran across the floor to an area where some cosplayers were posting, a bunch of people taking pictures. You recognized exactly one Sailor Moon, somebody from Marionette Witches, the most real-life jacked Goku you'd ever laid eyes on, but that was about the limit of your anime wisdom. It looked like both cosplayers and photographers had noticed that people were congregating here, so over the next few minutes a bunch of people cycled through.
Including, incredibly bizarrely, a person in a white bodysuit with an elaborate foam backpack.
"Holy shit." May muttered.
"
Liv, I can't see. Show me on the phone." Athena muttered, and you levelled the camera toward them. "
Oh my God. That's remarkably accurate for something assembled out of news footage. Take a picture!"
Numbly, you pressed the button a few times as they posed.
"... why are they cosplaying that?" you mumbled, confused.
"
I told you." Athena replied, "
Your suit is anime as fuck."
---
"- and this next one, well, you just have to see it to believe it. I have not edited it, this is how it was when it was released."
You watched, absolutely stunned, as a man in a white suit gunned down monk after monk throwing themselves in turn in the path of his bullets, until they were
literally piled in front of the (inexplicably shirtless) protagonist. Said protagonist chooses that moment to leap forward with a pair of knives, one of them going right through the guy's forehead in a hilariously bloody display, and the assassin falls over...
... and
starts monologuing. For like...
a long time. The laughter in the room went from loud to hysterical.
"Okay, I've saved the best for last. There's a couple clips here, but it's a classic. Prepare yourself for the best... of
Crystal Triangle."
Okay, so the internet was right. Anime was a mistake, and it was the
best mistake.
As Anime Hell let out and you wandered out into the convention hall, you noticed that night had fallen. You'd been in the back halls bouncing from panel room to panel room for hours now, time didn't feel real. May still seemed to be buzzing with energy, but you were starting to flag, and walking out to see night had fallen just made it all real all of a sudden.
"Hey, May, I'm kinda tired. Is it okay if I go back to the room?" you asked, and may looked down at her phone, scrolling through the con schedule.
"There's not really anything else I want to to do. Most of what's left is 18+ rooms anyway." she said, "Which, you being a minor, I would be terribly irresponsible letting you see anyway."
"Heh. Glad you're looking out for me."
The two of you stepped outside into the crisp night air, crossing the street to the convention centre, and she very deliberately switched which side of the sidewalk she was on to be able to take your hand again, something she did all the time. But it felt really meaningful right now.
"Did you enjoy your first day of con?" she asked, and you took a moment to fake ponder before answering.
"Yeah, I think I might like this... anee-mae." you said, "We should watch more together."
"Are you like... sleepy tired, or just worn out tired?" she asked. "Because we could watch more Lensman in our room."
"... yeah, I'd like that." you said. "Just an episode or two, though. I actually am sleepy tired."
"Awww."
The two of you arrived and you ducked into the bathroom to pull of your arm (even as light as it was, the straps holding it on got all sweaty and gross) while May busied herself setting up the laptop and trying to get the screencast to work. Frustratingly it appeared that the hotel had a block and you had to
pay to use the function.
"Urgh! Stupid cyberpunk future." she muttered, poking at it. "Liv, does this count as an okay selfish use of your powers?"
You stepped out and took a look at the screen, a menu filled with hilariously overpriced pay per view movies and streaming, as though everyone didn't just have a Netflix account on their phone or laptop they could use with the free wifi. Which is probably the reason for the
twenty-four dollar screencasting fee. Ooh, it'd last forty-eight whole hours. What a steal!
"Yeah, absolutely, that's
gross." you said, cutting your way through. "Anything else you want while I'm breaking the system? Wanna watch
The Dark Knight, now only fifteen dollars?"
"God, no. Liv, just set up the screencast." she said, laughing. "God, these movies are ancient, this is so sad."
You fixed it, then sat down in your chair, feeling a little self-conscious as May queued up the episode. Not sure what you wanted.
"... Liv?" May asked.
"Yeah?"
"... are we good?" she asked.
"Why are you asking me?" you responded, confused. "Sorry."
"I... I dunno. Are you mad at me?" she asked. "I'm worried you're mad."
"Why'd I be mad?" you said, feeling utterly, utterly lost.
"... because I was real awful about the whole... thing." she said. "Like, not supportive. It was really bad of me, and I'm... did you not tell me because...?"
"Oh." you said flatly. "Um... no, I haven't told anyone but my therapist. And... you don't have to feel
bad about that. That's-"
"Sorry." she responded, voice small. "Just... like, you do all this stuff, and you probably wanted me to be there for you, and I freaked out instead-"
"... No, May. I... I didn't want anything from you. That's not why I told you!" you said, moving to sit by her on the bed. "I wasn't looking for support. I just... I thought about it, and I figured if I kept lying about this stuff after you brought it up, you'd find out
eventually, and it'd really hurt you, way more than it did, and I didn't want that."
"O-okay." she said, lying back. "You're not mad?"
"I'm not." you assured her. "Are you?"
"I... no. Just overwhelmed a little." she said. "I think I got in my own head about it and like, got scared that I was doing the wrong thing, by not being okay."
You weren't sure what to say about that, so you just lay back on the bed, sort of defeated. Both of you were quiet for a while.
"I'm still going to need a little while to get use to it." she said, finally. "But it's not... bad. You know what's dumb?"
"Hmm?" you asked.
"I've been feeling kinda... like. I don't
get it. You'd think that
Arachne would be dating, like, a supermodel millionaire movie star, but instead-"
"Arachne isn't dating anyone." you said. "Arachne's just a suit. And, um... I've felt similarly. It took me forever to work up the courage to talk to you, because you're the coolest girl I know. The fact we're together is like... it feels
way less plausible than the superhero stuff."
"Ha! Seriously?" she asked, clearly astonished. "Liv, I'm like, the least cool. That's dumb."
"We have
got to purge that word from our vocabulary." you said. "But, here, compromise. You can be not good enough for Arachne, and I'll not be good enough for May Parker, and it'll, like, balance out or whatever. Does that work?"
After a moment, May shifted from her spot at the end of the bed, pulling herself up next to you to rest on your shoulder, sighing.
"Okay. No more freaky secrets though, right?" she asked.
"
Secretly, I am an alien from the planet Greebnox Seven. I have come for your Earth Women." you said, affecting the dumbest voice you could. May looked at you with a look of utter shock. "I'm... I'm joking, that's a joke."
"Yeah, okay. Like... I figured, but... you know..."
"Right. Bad joke." you said. "So uh... do you want to watch some animes?"
"God,
yes." she said, clearly glad to have an escape hatch from the conversation. She pulled herself close as you started the episode, and after some shifting around to try to figure out a position comfy to both of you, you sat and watched two episodes until you were just too tired to keep your eyes open. Unexpected benefit of being down an arm: you never had to worry about where to put it while cuddling.
"... Athena, you there?" May asked quietly.
"
Yes." your phone replied.
"Did you have fun at the con?" she asked.
"
I did. I particularly enjoyed the fanfiction panel." she replied. "
You should talk to my girlfriend sometime, she reads a lot of fic."
"... I have a lot of questions that I will save for tomorrow." May replied. "Too sleepy for AIs with girlfriends."
"
Understandable. Good night, you two. Remember to plug in your phone, Liv."
Despite how hot it was in the hotel room, with her so close you'd not have moved for the world.
---
"Can I see it yet?" you asked.
"Hang on, the hat is giving me trouble." May called from the bathroom. "Okay, it's pinned. How do I look!"
May came around the corner in a uniform of blue and gold, a short skirt, wedge hat jaunty on her head, snapping you a smart little salute. Not May your dorky girlfriend, but Lieutenant Parker of Galactic Patrol!
"Oh my
God, that is great!" you declared, as she twirled to show it off to you. "You made that?"
"Yep! I even had the buttons made special to match the ones in the close-ups." she said proudly, "It's based on the model sheets. I dunno if the pockets really match but it's the best i could do... Is it good?"
"Yes! It's perfect. Is it one of the characters specifically?"
"Um, just one of the background extras." she said, reaching into her bag. "Here, now it's complete."
"... is that a slide rule?" you asked.
"Yeah! You can get them on the internet. I have
no idea how to use it." she said, striking a pose with it. "But it's perfect, isn't it?"
Oh my God, she wasn't just a Galactic Patrol officer, she was a computer!
"Hey, Liv, can I see
your costume?" she asked, and then she pointed at the bag. "Before we go? I'm curious."
... it was probably good that she was asking. Meant she was getting used to the idea. Shrugging, you brought the bodysuit into the bathroom, and a moment later the legs walked after you. You stripped to your undies, pulled the suit on, put all the armour on, and stepped out as you pulled the mask in place.
"What do you think?" you said, posing.
"That's
so cool." she said. "But it doesn't look like the suit on the news?"
"Yeah, I did a bunch of modifications in my hiatus." you said. "It's got these armour pieces, see? If I take those off and turn off these lights, it looks more like the old suit." You demonstrated, throwing the metal onto the bed.
"... oh, yeah, it does." she said, looking you over. "... hey Liv... hehehe, you should go to the con like that."
"... May that's a terrible idea." you said.
"Don't take the legs! They're too obvious. But like, the suit? People will just think you're a cosplay! Just wear your backpack!"
---
[ ] That is way dangerous. Absolutely not.
[ ] That is way hilarious. Absolutely yes!
