Inhabited - chapter 1 (with images) (Patreon)

He’s in the middle of an orgasm when it happens.

The woman beneath him, virtual, the sensation already cresting. Then the signal drops. White, but not in his eyes — somewhere further back than his eyes. He feels nothing, no sensory input at all. When it comes back, the wrongness is everywhere.

She’s on her back on a hardwood floor.

Her hair is in her mouth. She turns her head to clear it and the hair is heavy, more of it than there should be, dragging against the floor as she moves. The hand that comes up to push the hair out of her face is smaller, lighter, a small raised scar on the index finger. She holds it in front of her face for a second. Turns it. Then she takes the headset off.

Then the chest. Two weights, front and center, shifting when she breathes. The reflex to push them off is immediate and wrong because there’s nothing to push. This is the body. This is her. She stops. She's wearing a bra, soft-cupped, hook-and-eye closure at her back, which she knows by feel before she sees it. One of the straps has slid off her shoulder and the elastic band is sitting a little high under her ribs, pressing in each time she breathes.

Between her legs, the underwear is wet. It takes a second to understand what she's looking at. Not something done to her, not an aftermath she can trace. The body's own. Warmth pressed against her in unfamiliar folds. The stain has soft edges. Nothing the body she came from would have left. Something that happened inside her, without her, and left this behind.

Brooklyn. A living room. Gray morning light coming flat through two windows. A NovaSphere rig in the corner — the mid-range one, her eyes going to the sync port before anywhere else. She gets herself upright. The weight on her chest shifts forward and settles, and hair swings across her face, a lot of it, dark and heavy, falling past her collarbone before she can stop it. She pulls it back behind her ear.

There’s a settled presence low in her pelvis, dense and constant. She makes a sound and is very glad there’s no one to hear it.

Getting to her feet takes longer than it should. The center of gravity is wrong. Lower, shifted, hips wider than they should be. She grabs the back of the couch and stands there while the hair falls forward again. She pushes it back. The underwear is an immediate practical problem and she would rather treat it that way. She goes to the bathroom.

Her name is Cara.

This arrives without looking for it, easy and complete, like a password surfacing when you’re already halfway through typing it. She’s an architect. Her best friend is Keya. She knows the silverware drawer and the code for the entrance to the building’s front door and the name of the firm where she works. She knows none of this about herself. She reaches for her own name and finds a door with no handle. She tries her address. She tries to pull up the room she was in, the green LED on the console, the late hour, and gets the console, vaguely, nothing attached to it.

She goes to the toilet and her hand moves down by reflex and stops on nothing. She changes her mind and sits down instead.

The porcelain is cold against the backs of her thighs, against her ass, sit bones wider than they should be. She lets go and nothing is where it should be. The stream doesn’t go straight down. It goes forward, close along the body, redirected by something on the way out, and some of it wets the inside edge of a fold she didn’t know was a fold. A line of warmth against skin. The sound is wrong too. Closer. No distance to travel before it meets water. She waits through the last of it and the last of it takes longer than she expects, a small after-trickle she can feel before she hears it. When she’s done, the wetness stays. Not much. A damp band along herself that the body she’s used to would have shaken off in an instant and this body is going to leave there. She reaches for paper. Front to back, her hand doing it before she thinks to. The paper drags across something alive enough that she blinks. She wipes again, gentler. Stands. Flushes.

She backs away and sits on the edge of the tub and looks at her smaller hands. Then turns to look at the mirror, the hair long enough that the weight of it shifts when she turns her head.

Late twenties. Dark circles. Her eyebrows have been shaped, but not recently. Hair wrecked from sleep. A mole near the left corner of her mouth. She looks at the face long enough to stop seeing it as strange. Then she looks at the rest of it: the soft-cupped bra, light blue, the weight real behind the cups. Her hips, wider. The flesh at her lower belly sits differently. Softer across the front, curving outward. She puts her hands on her hips briefly and takes them away.

The hands know how to make coffee. She lets them reach for the bag, twist the grinder, press the button on the machine.

She’s not going to work.

She knows she should. There’s a client presentation, it surfaces from somewhere in Cara’s calendar, a meeting she’ll be late for if she doesn’t get ready right away. She cannot get on the F train and walk into a room full of people who know Cara and hold herself together for eight hours. She sits at the desk with the coffee and she doesn’t go.

She opens the laptop instead.

She opens NovaSphere first because the rig in Cara’s corner is NovaSphere, and whatever put her here came through one. She goes to the site without quite deciding to, and the technical spec for the sync protocol is immediately legible to her, more legible than it has any business being. The session-layer handshake. How the protocol handles edge-case desynchronization. She understands how this is built. She has no explanation for how she knows that. She pushes past the consumer documentation into the developer forums.

The forums are a mess of complaints. Latency issues. Sessions not saving. Data bleed between users who shared a rig. She reads through them with half her attention until the other half catches on something: a thread from several months back, maybe twenty posts, users describing dissociation episodes during extended sessions. Coming back disoriented. Not knowing where they were. The thread stops mid-discussion, a follow-up question sitting there unanswered.

She works backward through a third-party indexer and finds a cached version, more complete. She reads the whole thing. Most of it is what she expected — disorientation, lost time, returning to the rig and not knowing how long they’d been under. One post is different, about a stasis chair, the high-end gear that runs the hydration line. Most rigs don't have one. Cara's doesn't. A woman writing about her partner. Came home, found him in the chair, rig still running, the stasis chair’s IV line in his forearm. He didn’t recognize her for forty minutes. She reads it twice.

At the bottom of the cached thread, in a post she almost skips, a username: MeshAdmin_47. Technical. Correcting someone's interpretation of the session log format. Attached to a screenshot — a directory listing, file headers, an approver flag in the corner. The name on the flag was Halston.

She writes the title and name on a notepad from the desk drawer. She reads the cached thread again, mentally sketching the sync vulnerability — where the session boundary breaks down, what would need to be true for the rig to produce a displacement like the one she's in, whether you could isolate the exact handshake failure if you had access to a modified rig and ran it against the production protocol in a controlled environment.

She searches three more angles and finds nothing new.

Keya texts. She reads the preview without opening it.

She has to go out eventually because there’s nothing to eat.

The closet: she can read the organization, hanging things, folded things, shoes along the bottom, but the logic of which pieces go together on a given day, what Cara reaches for without thinking, none of that. She pulls jeans because jeans she understands. A gray t-shirt. A canvas jacket from the hook by the door.

The jeans go over her legs fine and then she hits the hips. She works the denim up and over the flare of the pelvis, the waistband briefly stuck at the widest point. When the button closes, the fit across the seat is something she’s never worn — the denim pulled close across the roundness of her ass, a tightness with every step, a shape she’s not used to moving inside. She looks in the small mirror on the closet door at the body from the waist down. She stops looking.

The t-shirt goes on over the bra. The jacket has Cara’s smell in it — skin, a perfume worked into the canvas over months — and she goes out.

Half a block to the bodega. The sidewalk is already busy.

She makes it maybe twenty feet.

A man coming the other way, thirties, in a work jacket, eyes on his phone. His eyes come up for half a second and move across her, her face, then down, and go back to his phone. He’s already past.

Her shoulders pull in.

A small contraction, already in progress before her mind caught up. She stops on the sidewalk. The man is half a block gone. Her chest is angled slightly inward and her shoulders are drawn and she has done none of it.

She’s given that glance before. She knows exactly what it felt like from the inside — barely conscious, not predatory, the kind of look you give without deciding to. Eyes moving before you do. She is now on the receiving end of it and the body moved first.

She wonders how many times a day this happens in this body. She has been outside for only a moment.

Inside the bodega, a man behind the counter, mid-fifties, reading something on his phone. She grabs a basket from the top of the stack. Water, a protein bar, a banana. Up on her toes, her fingertips barely catch the protein bar that she wants. She gets it down.

When she comes to the counter he looks at her and his face does something small. A warming, a slight reorganization.

“Good morning.”

“Good morning.” That’s when she hears it: her voice. Cara’s voice. A little low for a woman’s, a little morning-rough, coming out of her own throat in a register entirely unfamiliar. She clears her throat. Takes the bag. Goes back upstairs.

She reads, then paces, then tries her own name once more and gets nothing. She eats the banana standing up at the sink. She works the back clasp open through the t-shirt, pinches the band together, slides one strap down off her shoulder under the cotton, and pulls the whole thing out through the sleeve. Her hands do it before she thinks about it. The bra lands on the desk. The weight redistributes. Then the t-shirt is against her nipples. She’d been wearing this shirt for an hour and not registering it. Now she’s registering it. She puts the bra back on.

She goes back to the laptop and reads for two more hours. Patent history. Third-party technical analyses. Nothing else she doesn’t already have. The name on the notepad — Halston — is still just a name. She doesn’t know yet what she’s going to do with it.

Keya texts again. The preview: Cara seriously where are you. She opens the thread this time and types: I’m okay. Bad day. I’ll call you tomorrow. She sends it before she can second-guess it. A minute later: okay. you sure? She types yes and closes the thread.

By nine she’s in pajamas and lying in the dark trying to figure out what comes next and not figuring it out. The problem is that she has no way back she can see. No idea how she got here, what put her in this body, what would pull her out of it. She lies there with the ceiling above her and outside through the window she left cracked open, Brooklyn is going on without her, a siren somewhere, someone’s music. She reaches for her own name again and gets the same nothing.

She slides her hand down instead.

Through the pajama pants, through the underwear. The warmth that meets her palm is immediate. Gathered heat. The labia responding to even this much pressure, a density of sensation she wasn’t ready for. She lifts her hand. Goes back more slowly.

The sensation spreads like no sensation she’s had spreads. Not a point but an area, the whole width of her, the lips warm and heavy and the skin above them tender, a tenderness that has nothing to do with pressure. Deeper in, further back than she expected, a warmth that isn’t quite a feeling yet but is waiting to be one. Her whole pelvis is awake. Strangely, pleasantly.

She finds the clitoris by how it answers. She goes straight for it and it’s almost too much, a bright pull she wasn’t braced for, and she comes off it again, lighter, watching for what the body wants. It wants her not quite on it. Pressure too firm blunts it. Too light and it gets restless. There’s a narrow band in between where the body wants her to stay, and she finds it.

The warmth climbs up into her lower belly and runs down the insides of her thighs. The t-shirt drags against her nipples each time she breathes and she hadn’t realized her nipples would be part of this. She is aware of skin she has never had to be aware of: the underside of the breasts where they’re resting against the ribcage, the crease where the thigh meets the body, the soft skin on the inside of her upper arm. All of it warm. All of it listening.

She slides her other hand down and finds the opening, wet, wetter than she was ready for, and works there with one finger while keeping the other hand where it was. The feeling deepens. Fuller. Arriving from two directions, the inside warmth and the outside warmth meeting somewhere in the middle of her. And still it doesn’t tip. She waits for it to tip. She tries a little more pressure. The intensity climbs and levels off. Slower. Same result. She adjusts the angle. Changes the rhythm. She tries matching her breathing to it, then lets her breathing go.

She is entirely in her head. She can feel herself being entirely in her head. Her body is humming, alert, waiting for something she does not know how to bring it. She is running checklists down the side of her own pleasure. Pressure. Rhythm. Angle. The body keeps offering a door and she keeps standing two inches to the left of it.

After a while she takes her hands away and lies there with them flat on the sheet. The t-shirt pulled up under her arms. Her underwear still pushed to one side where she left it. Her heartbeat high in her throat, her pulse thick between her legs, the body waiting for something she did not know how to bring.

She lies in the dark for a long time before the warmth goes.