Inhabited - chapter 2 (free preview) (Patreon)

The bra is on the nightstand where she dropped it. The t-shirt has ridden up in the night and part of it is bunched under her breasts. Underwear still against her, the cotton dry now where it had been wet and a little stiff along one edge. She shifts her hips and the fabric moves against her and the whole area answers, confirming it’s been awake this whole time, a low warm readiness she went to sleep on and that apparently does not go anywhere.

The sheets have come loose from one corner of the mattress. Her hair is across her face and across her mouth and in one armpit. She breathes in and the smell arrives. Not bad, not clean either. Her own sweat, a warm salted skin-smell with something floral at the back of it from whatever body wash is in the shower. Under that: sleep-breath, soft and sour. Under that, closer, the smell that rises from between her legs when she turns over — not rank, just her, warm, a quiet musk that was there yesterday too, a little stronger this morning for having been slept on.

It smells like Cara. She has been here less than twenty-four hours and she already knows that, the way you know a roommate’s perfume before you know her full name. It’s what Cara smells like when she wakes up. It’s what Cara’s sheets smell like. It’s the body she is in now and she cannot step out of it to get a breath of anything else.

She lies there a minute longer. The arm she slept on has gone numb under the weight of the breast resting across it and she moves, carefully, and feels the pins and needles come in as the blood comes back.

The shower is not optional.

She reads the bottles. Shampoo, then conditioner.

The water is hot and the pressure is good and for a moment it’s almost okay. Just a shower, warm water, the relief of it. Then her hair gets wet.

She’s showered every day of her adult life and the hair on her head has never been a factor, a quick lather and done. This hair is long enough that when it’s saturated it hangs past her shoulder blades, and the weight pulls on her neck where she can feel it in her trapezius. She works the shampoo through it with both hands and the lather goes thick and the process takes longer than she budgets for. So much hair that she’s still working it through to the ends when she’d normally already be rinsing.

She rinses. Then the conditioner, which apparently requires leaving in for a minute. She stands in the warm water waiting for this, nothing to do.

She washes everything else and everything else is its own education. She is aware, in a way she never was before she was in it, of how much there is. Soap slides off the hipbone instead of over it. Water collects at the underside of the breast, where the skin is sticky from the night’s sweat, and she has to lift the breast to wash there. Between her legs the labia are two separate surfaces, and the washcloth has to go between them, and the tissue answers — alive and present under even this routine contact, registering the pressure with a warmth that is not possible to be entirely neutral about. She keeps moving.

She gets out.

Drying takes longer. She has to be careful with the towel. Learning, in real time, which parts need to be patted and which can be rubbed, the underside of the breasts again, the folds between her legs. She wraps the towel around herself and it sits differently than it would on her own body: lower at the waist, the fabric anchored on wider hips, the whole thing requiring a different tuck to stay up. She fights the hair dryer for ten minutes. One side comes out better than the other. She calls it done.

She has to go to work.

The email from Marcus sits in Cara’s inbox — subject line Re: yesterday — and the tone of it has a floor she can feel. A second day gone and she’d be done and she knows it. She reads through the Henderson project notes, Ryan’s summary from the Tuesday call she missed, the client email threads, enough to have the shape of it. Then she stands in the closet and reads the work clothes from the other clothes.

Dark trousers, a silk blouse, a blazer. Low block-heeled shoes.

The trousers negotiate the hips like the jeans did yesterday. That moment of working the waistband past the widest point. When they button, the fit across the seat makes her aware of the same shape she keeps forgetting is there until she moves. The blouse is thin and the bra shows through it in silhouette, the outline of the cups visible against the silk. She puts the blazer on and that’s better.

She looks at the makeup on the bathroom counter. Opens it, considers the small array of things, a foundation, a mascara, a lip color, and closes it. Doing it badly would be more visible than doing nothing.

The F train is ten minutes. She walks to the station in the block heels, which require attention at every curb, and takes the stairs down to the platform.

The train is crowded. She holds the overhead bar. At the next stop more people board and a man positions himself behind her — too close, like people position themselves on crowded trains when there isn’t anywhere else. Her shoulders pull in before she decides to let them, her eyes going to the middle distance and staying there. She holds the adjusted posture for the rest of the ride. She's been that guy. Nowhere else to stand. She has adjusted her posture anyway.

The architecture firm is on the fourth floor of a building in Dumbo, original brick, salvaged industrial windows, a reception desk mostly for show. She signs in with the key card and walks into the open office.

Several people look up. A woman near the door — Jess, a colleague, something closer to a friend — comes over with reading glasses pushed up on her head, the expression of someone who has been genuinely worried and is now switching out of it.

“’Morning, Jess. How’s your week going?”

“You’re back.” Jess says it quietly. “Marcus is in early. You should go before he comes to you.”

She finds Cara’s desk and reads. Henderson. The presentation deck. Ryan’s notes from the Tuesday call. She reads until she has enough and then goes to Marcus’s office and knocks.

He looks up.

“Close the door,” he says.

She closes it and sits down.

“Yesterday,” he says.

“I know. I should have called.”

“You should have called.” He leans back. “Ryan covered the client call, which wasn’t Ryan’s call to cover. And the Henderson presentation is today.”

“I’m ready for it.”

He looks at her. She holds eye contact. She's used to being on the other side of a conversation like this — the side that decides if the explanation lands. The waiting from this side is its own thing.

“Don’t do it again,” he says. “If something’s wrong, call.”

“It won’t happen again.”

He picks up his pen. She gets up and walks back through the open office.

Jess catches her eye from across the room. A small look — how bad? — and she gives a slight shake of her head. Fine. Jess nods once and goes back to her screen.

She’s reading a structural drawing when Ryan stops at her desk.

Mid-twenties, good-looking like someone who hasn’t fully registered it yet. He has a folder and the manner of someone who found a reason to stop by.

“Hey. Good to have you back — you okay?”

“Getting there. Thanks for covering Tuesday.”

“Of course.” He leans against the desk, easy with it, taking up space without appearing to decide to. “So they want to push the rooftop terrace further west. I told them we’d talk about it today.”

“What do you think about that?”

He has thoughts. He walks her through the wind load implications, the drainage, what it does to the mechanical runs on the floor below. He’s done his homework, she can tell. She asks follow-up questions because she needs to know where the project stands. He answers them. When he’s done she has a clearer picture than she had twenty minutes ago.

“Really helpful. Thanks.” She turns back to her screen. “See you at three.”

“See you at three,” he says, and goes.

Just before lunch she goes through the wrong door.

Men’s. A urinal on the wall. A man at the sink who glances over in the mirror.

She backs out. The door swings shut. She stays in the hallway for a second and then goes through the door on the left.

The women’s bathroom has a short row of stalls, a sink counter, a mirror. She locks herself in a stall and stands there. There’s no reason anyone would look at her twice. She’s a woman in the women’s bathroom. But she keeps her movements small. She doesn’t want to flush yet. She doesn’t want anyone to hear her in the stall and start the involuntary mental work of placing her by sound. She does what she came to do and wipes and flushes.

At the sink another woman is washing her hands. They make brief eye contact in the mirror and the woman gives the small smile of two people sharing a space and goes back to drying her hands. Nothing. Just two women in a bathroom. She dries her hands and leaves.

She and Jess eat lunch together. It’s a deli counter, small tables, nobody lingering. Jess orders a turkey sandwich. She orders the same because it’s the first thing she sees on the board.

“Marcus really wasn’t bad?” Jess says.

“Not bad. He had a point.”

“He had multiple points.” Jess peels back the paper on her sandwich. “Some of the others he’d have —” She stops. “Anyway. I was worried.”

“I know. I’m sorry I didn’t text.”

Jess looks at her for a second. Something not quite adding up in her face. She takes a bite of her sandwich and chews and looks at the table and then back up.

“Are you okay, actually? You seem —” She gestures vaguely. “Different.”

“Different how.”

“I don’t know. More —” She does the gesture again. “You asked me how I was this morning. Which you don’t usually do.”

“I don’t?”

“Not really. Not like that.” She says it without heat. “It’s not a criticism. It’s just different.”

She doesn’t know what to say to this, so she eats her sandwich. Jess lets it go.

The presentation is at three.

Four people from the client on the video call. She pulls up the deck and talks through it — direct, clear, moving through the material with the authority of someone who built it. The clients are engaged. Then they reach the rooftop section and Daniel, the project architect, is already pulling up his own screen and already talking.

“Before we get into the design intent —” He doesn’t look at her before he starts. “I’ve been running some updated numbers. There are a few variables I think we should flag.” He’s explaining to the clients that the analysis is still in progress, that the team has been revisiting assumptions. All of it accurate. None of it wrong. None of it something he thought to share with her before the call.

She sits beside him and waits. The clients nod at Daniel.

When he finishes she picks it back up. The variance. The end-of-week commitment. The client's ask from Ryan's Tuesday notes. The call ends fine.

After, Daniel says, “Good presentation.”

“Thanks.”

“The end-of-week timeline — good thinking.”

"Thanks," she says again, and he picks up his laptop and steps across her on his way past. She gathers her things. Ryan, still at the conference table, catches her eye. A small nod.

Jess comes by her desk around four. Two coffees, the expression of someone who has been holding something since lunch.

“So,” Jess says, settling on the edge of the desk. “Ryan.”

“What about Ryan.”

“I’m just wondering how things are going with Ryan.”

“Fine. I needed to catch up on Henderson. He covered Tuesday.”

“You asked him about Henderson,” Jess says, in the tone of someone tasting something. “And then he walked past your desk three times this afternoon to get to the printer.” She pauses. “The printer is in the other direction.”

She traces back. She’d asked what he thought. She’d listened. Asked follow-ups. Said really helpful, thanks. Just a normal check-in. Today it had been received as something else. She’d been doing nothing different. The signal had moved without her.

“I was just asking about the project,” she says.

“I know.” Jess sets the second coffee down. “That’s sort of what makes it funny. He’s harmless, I’m not worried about you. I just think it’s interesting. You’re gone for a day, you come back, you’re this completely different version of yourself, and Ryan is walking in the wrong direction to use a printer.” She tilts her head. “You were warmer at lunch too. With me. Another week you would’ve gone straight back.”

She looks at her coffee.

“What happened with the guy?” Jess says, gentler. “The one you were seeing.”

Something surfaces in her memory. The shape of it, three months ago, a breakup that hasn’t finished landing. Not enough detail to speak to it, only the fact of it, and for half a second a shape in her own forgotten past answers it and goes quiet again. She shakes her head a little.

“Didn’t work out,” she says.

Jess nods. Doesn’t push. She picks up her own coffee and goes back to her desk, and that’s it. No speech, no gesture. But when Marcus comes out of his office later and his face is already set toward Cara’s desk, Jess intercepts him at the printer. Thursday timeline, delivery schedule — something. He nods and goes back in. By the time Cara looks up again, Jess is already back on her screen.

She takes the F train home at six and stands in the adjusted posture for twenty minutes and gets off at her stop and climbs the stairs to the street and straightens. Her shoulders ache from holding them that way.

She goes home, changes into whatever she finds that isn’t the work clothes, and sits at the desk and opens the laptop. She reads through the cached forum thread again, more carefully this time, looking for anything she skipped. She finds nothing new. The name on the notepad is the only thread she has and she doesn’t know yet where to pull it.

She closes the laptop. The VR rig is in the corner.

She puts on Cara’s headset.

The array activates against her temples first. A low pulse, almost nothing, then a warmth. The room folds. Not a blackout and not a flash. More like the apartment decides to stop being present for a moment and something else decides to take its place. The white expanding ring, standard boot, and then she’s standing in a lobby.

High-ceilinged, warmly lit, the kind of virtual architecture designed to make you feel you’re in a well-funded reception area. The floor is polished concrete that someone spent time on. Around her, avatars moving in small clusters, the environment realistic, as if she’s really there. The system is very good.

Without surprise, she registers that the body she’s in is familiar, female. It’s Cara, as herself in the virtual environment, though perhaps a bit enhanced. She moves through the lobby, still getting her footing. She keeps to the edges. Listens.

Cara’s social spaces are architecture-adjacent. A professional mixer in here, a design review club through a branching corridor to the left. She tries the mixer first. The avatars are polished, faces subtly idealized, the bodies tuned a few notches past what any of these people actually looked like. The conversations are professional-social, work as currency: a developer talking about a hospitality project, someone asking about structural tolerances in VR-adjacent construction, the half-professional half-personal blurring that happens when colleagues spend time in spaces with no commute and no end-of-day. She moves through it carefully, listening for register, not speaking. After a while she logs out and navigates to the design club.

The club is smaller and rougher. Someone’s project images tiled on the walls, a few people in a corner arguing about building setback ratios with the animation of people who genuinely care about building setback ratios. She finds a seat at the edge and listens. Nobody acknowledges her, which tells her Cara is not a frequent enough presence here that her silence is unusual.

Toward the end of the session, in the gap between two public environments, she opens the avatar editor.

Cara’s avatar: a composed version of Cara, the hair a shade more controlled than it is in the physical world, the posture exact. Professional. She looks at it for a moment.

She navigates to the gender configuration settings. Not through the standard menu — through the back of the settings architecture, two levels below where most users stop. The option is there. She finds it without looking.

The avatar shifts when she moves the selector. Shoulders broadening. Face changing shape. Proportions reorganizing toward male. She applies the full-depth sync override, suppresses the calibration degradation limiter.

For approximately three seconds it holds.

Then a flicker in the visual field, like the kind that precedes a display driver failure. Something wrong in the sync layer. Not nausea exactly. Deeper than nausea, the neural handshake stuttering against a mismatch it’s been forced to ignore. The avatar fragments. Hair reverting first, then the face, then the bone structure, everything snapping back to female with a hard visual jolt.

Sync instability detected. Reverting to registered calibration profile.

She tries again. Same result. She goes deeper into the configuration and finds a hardcoded lock three levels below the user-accessible settings, the kind of flag that assumes you know what you’re looking for. She reaches it. She could remove it. She knows how.

She removes it and tries once more. Same result.

She sits in the reassembled female avatar and waits for the sync layer to settle. The network will not hold her in a male form — it should, but it won’t. She closes the editor and navigates back to the public environments.

Finding the other space takes her longer.

She follows a link embedded in someone’s user profile to an unlisted community board — a sparse text interface, nothing visual, a list of threads and usernames. Most of the threads are locked or members-only. One has an open join prompt. No branding, no NovaSphere skin. Just a text field and the instruction: Describe a session anomaly you’ve witnessed or experienced. Include any platform details you have.

She describes the cached forum thread. Its contents, its removal. The third-party index where she found the cached version and what it contained.

The request takes longer than she expected. She watches the cursor blink for almost a minute. Then it clears.

The environment that loads is nothing like anything NovaSphere ships, a self-hosted environment accessible through the network. Someone built it from scratch on community infrastructure — rough-textured walls in a dark gray-green, the light sourceless and diffuse, a space that feels more like a basement than a lounge. The seating is shapes that approximate chairs without committing to them. Thirty people, maybe, in clusters of three and four. No ambient sound design. No music. Just voices.

She finds a position in the corner and stays in it.

A woman is describing a session anomaly. She’s exact about it: the timestamp, the session environment, what happened to her awareness in the thirty seconds before the anomaly resolved. Two users are asking follow-up questions. One of them asks everything twice — once plain, once in the jargon — and waits to see which version gets a real answer. The second one is usually what he actually wants to know.

The moderator, apparently named Philippa from her nametag, doesn’t speak for most of it. When she does the room reorganizes.

“Wren, what was the sync state at the time of the anomaly,” Philippa says. It isn’t quite a question. It’s the shape of one.

The woman gives the state. Philippa is quiet for a moment and then says: “That’s the third one in that state in two months.”

Nobody argues with her. The conversation shifts to build on what she’s said.

She stays in the corner. She listens. She doesn’t speak. She doesn’t know whether Cara has been here before, whether Cara is known in this room as someone who can be trusted or someone who hasn’t been tested yet. She maps the people the room flows around. Philippa. Wren.

She comes out of the rig close to one in the morning. The apartment is quiet and the street outside is quiet for Brooklyn. She sits on the edge of the couch for a while before she goes to bed, thinking about Philippa.

The Premium version of this chapter includes images of Cara in the shower, on the train, at the office and in the VR environment.

Read ahead to chapter 3 here.