Page 47 of As You Wake, Break the Shell

“Mmm. Too busy noticing other things?”

“Oh, please,” Signy huffed. She ignored his chuckling and nodded at the screen. “And they use these to—” She skimmed as well. “—process what the rorqual is saying? Is that it?”

“Seems to be, but look, it goes both ways.” He brought up a picture of an odd spacecraft—the saddle, Signy distantly remembered from school. A small, complicated pod strapped onto the rorqual’s back. Or perhaps its head. Hard to say. “So, the pilot rides in that craft—” Otto began.

“Mhm.”

“—and they wear a special helmet—”

“Mhm.”

“And then . . .” Otto paused, processing. “Looks like the helmet talks to their implants.”

“Okay,” Signy said. “And then the helmet—”

“The helmet . . . oh, here, look, the helmet also talks to these . . . sensors, or whatever, on the underside of the saddle—”

“And what do they pick up?”

“Ah,” he said smartly. “You were right about this one. Rorquals use pheromones to talk to each other. You know, like bees, or—”

“Plants,” Signy said. She sat with that for a moment. The rest of this was so bizarre, but pheromones—pheromones she understood. She shut her eyes, fitting the pieces together. “The helmet connects the pilot’s neural nodes to the saddle. The saddle has sensors that pick up the rorqual’s pheromones.”

Otto nodded, looking at diagrams. “And the implants translate the pheromones into something the human brain can understand.”

Signy adjusted her chin on the back of her knuckles. “So how does the pilot talk to the rorqual, then?”

Skim, skim, skim. “Ah—” Otto set his mug on the desk and began to read aloud again. “‘The rorqual is outfitted with a complementary set of neural implants before reaching physical maturity. These allow the rorqual to process signals intentionally generated by the pilot via the brain-computer interface as communicative input.’” He scratched his chin. “I’m not sure I follow that.”

“It means the pilot thinks through their part of the conversation,” Signy said. “Instead of speaking or writing, they just . . . think what they want to say.” She blinked, once. “That must take a tremendous amount of discipline.”

“Mmm, that’s right here, see?” Otto was down the rabbit hole now, and his enjoyment was palpable. “‘As rorquals do not communicate in verbal or written language, pilots describe the experience of being in the saddle as akin to an intense psychoactive state, in which they must focus their stream of consciousness into guiding the rorqual to complete specific tasks and-slash-or goals, parentheses, e.g., completing a flight from one destination to another, end parentheses. Pilots must also dissuade the rorqual from locomoting at speeds that would be unsafe for both the health of the pilot and the stability of the cargo vehicle, through either positive or negative reinforcement techniques, as warranted.’ Whew.” He leaned back in his chair. “I’ve heard that it’s a lot, but that sounds like hell, for—what, how long does a trip to the Quarries take? A week? Two?”

Signy thought of Cora talking about her rorqual. The ardor in her voice, the shine in her eyes, the way she’d turned to stone when she discussed the possibility of the creature being put down. It didn’t seem, from the outside, that Cora found anything hellish about her work. Quite the opposite, in fact.

“Can you scroll down?” she asked. The header of the next section had caught her eye.

“Let’s see,” Otto said. “‘Side effects and health risks.’ Mm. Cheery. Do we have to read this?”

Signy patted his hand. “We can skim until you’ve had enough.”

Otto sighed, shaking his head. “All right, we’ve got headaches, we’ve got muscle spasms, we’ve got cancer risk from all that time spent out in space. And then there’s a whole big section on mindbleed, which—ugh, let’s not. That’s creepy.”

Signy kept her voice level. “Why is it creepy?”

“Why?” Otto’s face scrunched with dubious disapproval. “You think somebody’s brain trying to act like the brain of another animal isn’t creepy?” He jutted his finger at the screen as though she couldn’t read what was there. “‘Mindbleed affects approximately one out of twenty-five rorqual pilots. The risk increases with the cumulative amount of time spent in the saddle, parentheses, hence why pilots have a mandatory retirement point twenty years into their career, if they have not already acquired the condition, end parentheses. Though the exact causes of mindbleed remain unknown, it is believed that repeated exposure to the cognitive patterns of a nonhuman species eventually pushes the brain to attempt the same patterns.’ How is that not creepy?”

“It’s just an illness, like any other,” Signy said.

Otto shivered. “I prefer my fellow humans to act human, thank you very much.”

Signy sipped quietly from her mug. “I bet from the outside, you wouldn’t be able to tell at all.”

Chapter 22 Cora, Fortune

Out in the universe—which was to say, right here, right now, outside and inside and deeper still, into the places in which cardinal direction was meaningless—there were colors Cora had no words for. She had no native structures in her brain that could process them. The rods and cones in her eyes were adapted for one specific sliver of the electromagnetic spectrum; the rest was supposed to be invisible.

Her understanding of those nameless colors didn’t come to her by way of eyes at all. Colibri didn’t have eyes, not like humans did. She had patches on her skin—pocks and divots scattered all over. She didn’t have a head. She didn’t have an up or a down. She was a being born for the void, and her body reflected that. No eyes, no face, just unremarkable pits—photoreceptive cellular mats, Cora’s textbooks called them—lying in wait like cupped hands ready to be filled by an endless pour of particles and waves. Colibri did not have eyelids. She did not sleep. The concept of “turning the lights off” perplexed her, because darkness wasn’t real. Darkness was simply a limit of human perception. A presumed natural quality assumed to be ubiquitous, when in reality, there was no objectively correct observation of what the universe was. There was only what you used to measure it. And if all you’d ever measured things by were the sensory organs of one lone species, then you didn’t have an accurate picture of existence.