Page 39 of Leviathan

"I'm already strapped down like the birds," I said. "You have me totally immersed in your filaments, right next to your core. The only difference is you've put up a bunch of your holoprojectors around me so I can see what is going on. If I'm not controlling anything, why give me controls I'm used to? Won't I just distract you?"

"I'm not certain, as I haven't done this before," he said. "But I've heard about it from members of my kind who have taken on crew from species who have evolved to have heightened reactions in times of danger. In giving you a direct line of sight and sense as to what is going on around us, you might react to a threat before I do."

"I'm not sure how that would work for a space battle," I said. "Don't you have to account for missiles crossing large distances and things like that? Don't large ships require more effort to move because of the resistance to the change in motion? The more mass an object has, the harder it is to change what it is doing."

"I am quite agile, and the projections on the sensors take distances into account," he said. "And if this doesn't help, it won't hurt anything. You won't distract me or harm our efforts. The only harm would be from you being scared at viewing what is going on, which again, if you don't want to do this, you really don't have to."

He was so sweet, giving me an out. I knew it was because he wanted to make sure I felt like I had a choice, not because he didn't want me to help.

"No, keep me involved," I said, gripping the wheel. "If you want me to backseat drive and ghost brake, I'm all for it. I'll be your twitchy passenger that grabs for the wheel."

I floated up in the air.

"To get synced up, I'd like it if you made the motions as if you were driving," he said. "I'll follow what you do."

I pressed down on the gas pedal, and we began to float forward.

"Cars don't have an up or down," I said, as we lifted upward to avoid a large protrusion of ice.

"We don't need that," he said. "I just need you to feel enough like you're driving a car that you react the way you would to avoid a crash."

"Let's practice braking and accelerating then," I said. "If I push the gas pedal all the way flat, that means go as fast as possible as quickly as possible. I'm not going to do that in here because of the jagged ice, but let's feel it out. Every car has a different feel to it, a different tightness in the turn or the sensitivity of the brakes. If you can stay consistent in how you react to the press of my foot, then I'll feel like I'm driving a particular type of car."

When we got to a corner in the chasm that he had slipped through to fit into this ice-riddled asteroid, I turned the wheel to try to aim towards it.

Instead of turning, the whole hamster ball rolled, and the asteroid spun around me.

"Woah," I said, letting go of the wheel. "That's different. Cars normally just turn; they don't roll over."

"It's a more effective mode of movement for a reaction-based connection," he said. "I will take care of the direction we go. I just need you to instinctively move to get out of danger."

"Okay. Let's practice that one a bit before continuing to move forward," I said. "The whole room spinning around me might make me sick."

The next time I turned the wheel, I stayed upright, and the outside world remained aligned with me. Instead of turning, I slide sideways, the hamster ball spinning around me.

"I've stabilized your view so it won't spin," he said. "You will still feel some of the forces on your body, but I've already set up minor gravity adjustors so that any extreme changes in direction won't harm you."

Warmth flooded my chest. He thought of everything. He took care of me so well.

I gave a few experimental turns, then I pressed down on the 'gas' again. Instead of just relying on him turning, I spun the wheel, and the end result felt like I was drifting the hamster ball around a corner.

I let out a giggle.

"You're enjoying this," he said, his tone warm.

"This is fun," I said. "I know we don't know what is waiting out there for us, and it could be someone lying in wait to attack us, but... this is fun."

We drifted around another corner, and I let out another giggle. The view changed, angling to keep the crack level with my horizon even as it jigged and jagged in ways that weren't stuck on a linear plane. I went with it, pressing on the gas pedal, and occasionally the brakes as I got more and more used to the sensation of maneuvering a filament-built hamster ball through the uneven pathway of the insides of a giant asteroid.

"We're almost to the entrance," he said, tension evident in his voice. "As soon as we have a clear view of the stars, we will be detectable."

"Pedal to the metal time," I said. Then I quickly added in case that idiom didn't make sense. "Once we see the stars, we should go as fast as possible out of here, right?"

"Not quite," he said. "We want to clear the asteroid first. Just because we are detectable doesn't mean a hunter would pick us up right away, but they certainly will notice if we crack open this asteroid by firing up the main thrusters while still inside it."

"You say when and I'll gun it," I said, loving the illusion that I was in the driver's seat, even when in reality I was encased in the grip of a gargantuan space-faring alien whale that had created a pretend environment to take advantage of the fact that my species was good at flinching.

I could think of a lot of scenarios we could pretend to do, once we were safe.