Version Control - part 2 (Patreon)

We eat dinner at home, something Sera throws together from what's in the refrigerator — pasta with whatever was left from Sunday, a heel of parmesan she finds in the back of the cheese drawer and grates over everything while still hot. She does this without measuring anything. I sit at the kitchen table and watch her.

I should say: I watch her and I am also doing something else, something new enough that I'm still not sure what to call it. The AI is present. Not loudly — not some internal voice offering commentary or surfacing links — but as a kind of readiness. Like peripheral vision for thought. Like how you're aware of someone just behind you in a room without turning around.

I haven't lost my train of thought once since I left the clinic. This sounds like nothing. For me it isn't nothing. I have a problem with working memory — my advisor calls it the grasshopper, diplomatically — where mid-sentence, mid-paragraph, mid-thought, the thread slips and I'm somewhere else entirely. Getting back eats time and something harder to name. The grasshopper is quiet. I'm not ready to trust this yet.

A Didion sentence I've been reaching for three weeks just lands — whole, right punctuation and everything — while Sera's grating the cheese. I reach for my phone to write it down and stop.

I don't need to write it down. It'll be there in an hour. Next week.

This is what Sera has been living with for fourteen months, which I understood as a fact but not as experience, and the difference between those two things is apparently everything. I'm sitting here holding a Joan Didion sentence in my head with a completeness I've never had for anything, watching pasta steam, and it's strange. Not wonderful. Strange.

"You're doing the thing," Sera says without turning around.

"What thing."

"You get a line between your eyebrows when you're running inventory."

"Is that what it looks like."

"Mm." She shakes the colander over the sink. "Give it a few days. You won't keep catching yourself."

We eat. She asks about Brin, whether it hurt. I say no, anticlimactic. She nods like this confirms something she already thought.

"Does it bother you," I say. "That it's — always there."

She sets her fork down. Not like she needs to think about it but like she wants to give the answer its proper weight, and her hand rests flat on the table before she answers. "The first couple weeks it did. Like someone reading over your shoulder." A pause. She turns her wine glass slowly on the table. "And then it doesn't. And then you can't really remember what thinking felt like before it." She looks at the table. "That's its own thing."

"That's what I'm worried about."

"I know," she says. And she looks at me when she says it, not at the table — holds my eyes for a second, and there's something in that look I can't read, something that isn't quite concern and isn't quite anticipation, and then she picks up her fork again.

We clear the dishes. She washes, I dry. We've done this so many times it's almost a language — who moves where in the kitchen, which drawer the plates go back in, the way she hands me something without looking when her hands are wet. I'm thinking, while I dry a bowl, about what it means that I can now hold three things in my head at once without losing any of them, and whether that will change how I write or whether I'll still be the same writer operating with better tools, and whether there's a meaningful difference between those two things.

Sera is watching me dry the bowl. When I look up she turns back to the sink, but not before I catch something in her face I can't place — not concern exactly, and not satisfaction either, but the look of someone who has already decided to let something happen.

Later, in bed, she explains the sync — how the channel opens, what to expect. I have a misunderstanding about the directionality and she corrects it before I finish asking.

"Most people think it's one person transmitting to the other. It's not like that." She rolls to face me. "More like two instruments in the same room — the sound of one changes what the other sounds like. You're not sending anything. Both of you are just there and the channel works with what it finds."

"And I'll actually feel what you feel."

"A version. There's a processing delay, less than a second, so what you get from me is always very slightly behind real time. Most people don't notice."

She looks at me.

"You might," she says.

"Because I notice things."

"Because you notice things."

Three years together. She says this without editorializing, just flat delivery of a fact — and I find it, as I often find her plain accounting of me, briefly undoing.

"There's something else," she says. She's been holding back a second thing, I can tell; she's been deciding whether to say it. "When we sync — what you receive from me isn't just sensation. It's also context. What my body is doing in relation to you. So if I'm — if something I'm feeling is in response to you, you'll feel that too. The response itself, and the fact that it's a response."

I think about this. "So I'll feel you feeling me."

"Yes."

"Doesn't that just run in a loop."

The corner of her mouth moves. Not quite a smile. "Yes," she says. "That's exactly what it does."

"Okay," I say. "Let's try."

"It starts as soon as I open it," she says. "It doesn't wait."

The channel opens and immediately there is more.

I'm touching her — her shoulder, her arm, the curve of her waist — and what comes back through the channel is the sensation of being touched there, her skin reporting back to me from inside her skin, and the difference is total. From outside I know the geography: the softness of her waist, the flesh there warmer than her arms, what it feels like under my palm. From inside — through the channel, half a second behind — I feel my own palm on her waist from the other side. The weight of a hand. The warmth of it. The slight drag moving across skin. I'm on both sides of the touch at once. I lose track of which is primary.

I move my hand to her breast and the channel delivers something I'm not ready for.

The weight of it, from the inside. The sensitivity of the tissue itself — not just the nipple but the whole breast, a density of nerve endings distributed across the surface that has no equivalent in my own chest. My chest is skin over muscle, mostly inert until you press hard enough to find the ribcage. What she has is different. The breast responds to my hand the way a piano key responds to a finger: the whole thing vibrates. I feel my own hand cupping it and the breast filling my hand and simultaneously, from her side, the warmth of a palm, the slight pressure, the way even this much — just holding, barely moving — sends something radiating out from the center toward the nipple and from the nipple outward, a warmth that fans rather than concentrates.

I brush my thumb across the nipple and she makes a sound and through the channel: a bright electric flare, immediate and total, nothing like I expected. The sudden presence of sensation so concentrated it's almost too much to be called pleasure, the body's response to it somewhere between want and flinch. I feel her feel it. I go back to it, carefully, and feel her feel me do that, and the signal through the channel deepens.

Her arousal is building and it's nothing like mine. Mine is localized, directional — I know where it's coming from and where it's going. Hers is ambient. A warmth that's been rising since before we started, low in her belly and spreading, the tissue between her legs growing warm and full in a way I can feel through the channel as a kind of weight, a presence, an awareness of that part of her body that keeps deepening without concentrating. I feel her becoming wet. Not as something I discover with my hand but as something she feels before my hand gets there — a warmth gathering, a slickness that is the body preparing itself, and I feel it happening inside the tissue, from inside, which is information I have never had and which lands in me with a force I can't account for.

I bring her close with my hand. And then the channel, and it isn't the same act.

I can feel what's working — not from reading her sounds or watching her face, but from direct signal, from inside the sensation as it's happening. The places that make the warmth deepen, the rhythm that makes it rise, the pressure that's too much and the pressure that's exactly right. Three years of guessing and the channel makes it not a guess. I feel her climbing and I feel the point where the climbing tips into something she can't slow down, and I keep going, and what comes through the channel isn't a peak. It's pressure finding everywhere at once — pelvis first, then somewhere under the ribs, then the backs of her thighs, overlapping, not in sequence. And it keeps going after I'd expect it to stop. There's a moment in there when I feel her brain catch up to her body and register that it's happening, and for half a second the registering itself is part of the sensation.

I feel it.

And because I feel it — because the channel is running and what's flooding through her is flooding through the channel and arriving in me — I go with her. Not intentionally. The sensation coming through from her side, the warmth and release of it, and my own body treats it as real, as its own, and responds. I say something. I don't know what.

We lie still for a while. She reaches up and puts a hand on my chest.

"I felt you — " she starts.

"Yeah."

A moment. Then, quietly: "I didn't know that could happen."

She sounds, I realize, less surprised than I'd expect. Not unsurprised — just like someone who had a theory and has now had it confirmed.

After a minute she takes my hand and puts it back on her.

I start to say something about needing a few minutes and she says "you won't." The way she corrects misunderstandings before they finish.

She's right. Through the channel I feel her still warm, still present, the arousal not gone so much as resting, and my own body follows — faster than makes any biological sense, her body pulling mine along. The grasshopper is completely gone.

She moves over me. What I feel as she takes me into her is nothing like what I've felt before — the sensation from outside, the warmth, the pressure. Through the channel, simultaneously, I feel it from inside her body. The filling. The internal pressure of being entered, the adjustment her body makes, a sensation that goes deep and still and then begins to move with me. I have both at once. I can't sort them into before and after; they arrive together, separated only by the channel's half-second delay, and for a moment I genuinely cannot tell you from the inside which body I'm in.

She moves and I feel her move from both sides. From mine: friction, warmth, the grip of her. From hers, through the channel: the sensation of me inside her, the fullness and movement and a pressure against something deep inside her that makes her breath change, and I feel her breath change because I feel the thing that's changing it. I feel her feeling me. The loop closes.

And then — because the loop runs in both directions, because she warned me it would — something comes through the channel from her side that stops me for a half-second. Not sensation. Something underneath sensation: the way she is receiving me. Through her perception of what I am to her right now — my weight, my hands, the physical fact of me — I feel myself from outside my own body. Not abstractly. Physically. The mass and solidity of me, a maleness that arrives through her perception as something almost startling. For a moment I'm both the person I am and the object of her experience and I can't quite locate myself inside either. The weight I'm carrying on her, the breadth of my shoulders, the roughness of my jaw that she's reaching up to touch — I feel her feel these things and for that half-second they don't feel like mine. They feel foreign, familiar and wrong at the same time, like hearing your voice played back on a recording and not recognizing the register of it.

It passes. I find myself again. She doesn't seem to notice I was gone.

Her arousal climbs faster this time — the channel tells me everything, the tightening of her thighs, the sensation concentrating now in a way it wasn't before, the heat building deep and low in her pelvis, her body moving to find the angle that gets her there. I let her find it. I hold still and let her work and through the channel I feel what she's working toward and it's pulling me toward it too — her rising is my rising, the feedback running in both directions, and when she comes this time it's the same flooding wave but faster and harder and she says my name and I'm already there.

After, she lies with her head on my chest. The channel tapers — not off like a switch but down like a volume, present and then less present and then gone. I lie awake.

What I keep returning to is that half-second of looking at myself through her. The way my own body came through the channel as something almost unrecognizable. Not bad. Just — other. I'd been outside without leaving. And I couldn't tell which of the two of me was the real one.

I reach for the glass of water on the nightstand. My hand arrives wrong — not short exactly, more like the reach itself felt borrowed, the arm's length like Sera's for a half-second, the distance to the glass calculated from a different body. I find it. Drink. Set it back.

The channel taking longer to close than expected, perhaps.

Sera's breathing has slowed. One hand still on my chest, fingers loose. I watch the ceiling for a while. The AI is quiet — not absent, just not pressing — and eventually I stop looking for things to think about and close my eyes.

The Premium version of this post includes images of Declan and Sera in bed, before, during and after the sync.