The Floret in the Mirror, Draft Preview - Chapter 5 -

Hello, y'all! Time for another draft preview, and the beginning of (finally) getting into the intended cadence of the story, alternating chapter-for-chapter between Jess and, well, Jess. (I'm also running up against my buffer — the trip really took a toll on it — but worry not, I should have a finished draft preview ready for y'all this time next week!) 

Content Warning: A very small instance of memory alteration. 

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Second Skin?

1.0.0-a1

Jess woke up tangled in her sheets, one leg hanging awkwardly off the side of the bed, and for a moment forgot where she was. There was a strange but curiously comforting scent on the air, and a dim glow that slowly brightened as she rubbed the sleep from her eyes. The bed she was lying on was huge, and the room around it far larger than any she’d ever slept in before; one side was even open to some sort of balcony, with a beautifully carved handrail resembling some kind of creeping vine or root. There was a wardrobe

clothed in armor of nacre, ride the wild current; the lakes and her host yet beckon

set into the wall as if it had grown from it, and on the opposite side of the room a beautiful wooden desk that was overloaded with an agglomeration of vines that glowed a gentle blue, much like the soft grass on the floor. Set into it were half a dozen monitors, all cold and dark for now. Jess knew, without understanding how, that this was her terminal, that she’d spent hours upon hours that she could no longer remember sitting in front of it, engrossed in some technical challenge or another. It was familiar without being familiar, that same nagging feeling of deja vu she’d been having since she woke up back at the hospital. Veterinarian. Whatever.

She had still not yet fully processed the night before, but the memories welled up out of the dim fog of sleep before too long — the way that Gallica had touched her, and with that simple touch had reduced her to a quivering lump of girl incapable of much more than helpless acquiescence. She clutched her pillow and curled up around it, biting her lip and trying to fight off the remembered sensations of being bathed in what was, to her, practically a small swimming pool, but what must have been to Gallica not much more than a washbasin. She remembered the gentle soap, the loving strokes, the way her body had simply gone limp for Gallica and refused to obey her. She remembered Gallica dressing her in the flimsy nightgown, impossibly soft against her skin in a way that thrilled her regardless of how she came to be wearing it, and remembered being tucked in, too tired to do much more than fall asleep the moment her head hit the pillow.

Stars, but it all turned her on so much — and that terrified her in equal measure. She’d been completely unable to resist Gallica from the minute that first vine had touched her. It was like she’d become someone else, some other Jess. Was that what she’d been like before the head injury? Was that the person she’d become, and so quickly after meeting these plant xenos? Layla had been the same way, perfectly normal until Tsuga had touched her, at which point she’d slipped into helpless adoration of the (suddenly much less massive-seeming) tree woman.

Was that just what these xenos did? Could they just unmake you with a touch? Layla had said they were florets, pets for these alien plants, and Jess was beginning to understand just how they’d done it. Never mind the impossibly advanced technology; if these things could make you helplessly worship them the minute they laid a vine on you, humanity really had never stood a chance. How many of them were there? Was every single human a pet now?

Something shuddered in the back of Jess’s mind, like a memory she couldn’t quite grasp, but the thought slipped away as Gallica’s voice seized all of Jess’s focus. “Good morning, my little nybble,” she said, suddenly looming over the balcony, her twelve eyes all fixed on Jess. “How are you feeling this morning?” One of her enormous hands reached in, and Jess’s eyes went wide.

“Stop!” she managed to shout, her voice still creaky from sleep. Gallica froze — not just her hand, but every single one of her shifting, slithering vines came to an absolute halt. “Just…wait,” Jess mumbled, curling up tighter.

“Is…something wrong, Jess?” There was that undercurrent of sorrow again, and Jess felt it’s echo roll through her body like a fist clutching her heart.

“I’m sorry, just– I need to think,” she said, fighting off the urge to cry. Why did the thought that she might have hurt this massive xeno that could practically switch off her brain on cue make her feel so miserable? “And when you touch me, I can’t.”

“Ah,” Gallica said, her hand slowly withdrawing. “The fault is mine, flower, I’m sorry. When I saw the way you responded last night, well…you seemed to be more or less back to normal, and I’ve been so very worried about you, I suppose I couldn’t help but dote on you like I normally do.”

Like I normally do. Stars, that kind of treatment was an everyday thing around here? “I don’t think any of this is normal,” she said. “I’m… I’m on a freakin’ alien O’Neill cylinder, sleeping in a server farm made of plants that I’m sharing with a xeno who’s so big she can literally hold me in her hand. How is that normal?”

“Well, for us it rather is,” Gallica said, her enormous lips curving in a gentle smile. “And for what it’s worth, it’s an arrangement you’ve always been quite content with.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t remember any of that,” Jess said. She buried her face in her pillow, afraid to so much as look at Gallica. If her touch could break her like that, who knew what else she could do to her. “Just…little things, here and there. Which doesn’t help, because when I get those flashes, I know I should know more about them, but don’t, and–” She sniffled and squeezed the pillow tighter. “And it just makes me feel, I don’t know, broken maybe. And scared.”

“Oh my darling,” Gallica said softly — but to her credit, she didn’t reach in and start petting Jess. “You are not broken. You’ve simply had a very serious injury, and recovery will take time. I will be here for you every step of the way, for however long that takes. I know you’re still missing a great deal, but surely after last night, if nothing else, you must feel how deeply I love and care for you.”

Jess let out another sniffle, tears brimming over as she nodded. She could feel Gallica’s love for her, even now, in every word she said, every subtle movement, even in the shifting of her vines. It was like Jess had a sixth sense just for how Gallica felt, and as much as it let pangs of sorrow hit her like a truck, it also wrapped her up in a love so all-encompassing that it was almost as scary.

“Would you like some breakfast? You fell asleep before I could feed you last night, so I expect you’re quite hungry.” Jess was hungry, but she’d been steadfastly ignoring it up until Gallica mentioned food. Now, she couldn’t help but feel the empty pit gnawing away inside her. She wasn’t just hungry, she was fucking ravenous. She took a deep breath, tried to staunch her tears, and nodded. “Okay. Just sit tight,” Gallica said, her voice full of warm assurance. “I know just what to make for you. When you feel ready, why don’t you get dressed? Your dining table’s just over here,” she added, gesturing with one of her massive hands. “Whenever you’re ready. There’s no rush.” And then, as suddenly as she’d appeared, she was gone, slipping down below the railing, and Jess was alone again.

Alone, save for the pounding of her heart.

Slowly, Jess squelched her emotions to a manageable level and levered herself up to a sitting position on the edge of the bed. This bedroom — her bedroom, she supposed — was bigger than her old apartment, now that she looked at it properly. Maybe bigger than her parents apartment that she lived in before getting a job made her ineligible for cohabitation with them under tenant limit laws. On legs still wobbly from sleep, she stumbled over to the wardrobe, pulled it open, and stood face to face with herself.

There was a mirror on the inside of the door, full length, surrounded by softly glowing moss or something that illuminated her from all angles. For a moment, Jess wasn’t sure what or who she was looking at, because the girl in the mirror didn’t look anything like her, or at least, what she remembered herself looking like. She knew her body had changed, of course, had spent an embarrassing amount of time yesterday exploring it before Layla and Tsuga walked her home– or, rather, walked her to Gallica’s — but there was a fundamental difference between exploring it from her own point of view versus seeing herself from the outside.

For one thing, she could see her face now, and while she thought she could make out a vague resemblance, as if she were her own cousin or something, there was precious little in that face of the weedy nerd she’d once been. Like her body, her face was soft, not quite round but gently angled in a this-girl-will-bite-you kind of way. She looked like she might be in her mid to late 20s at the absolute most. Around her neck was a collar, deep indigo with a big black ring just the right size for a vine to slip through and hold her by. Her hair, a soft blonde that it hadn’t used to be that edged into faded blue, had once been styled in an undercut, but the shaved part had since grown partially back, probably while she was in the coma.

Fuck. Even her face was the face of a total hottie. She watched the girl in the mirror smile and bite her lip nervously and realized that was her. Fuck. She looked away and started perusing the clothes, neatly folded and hanging alike, on the wardrobe’s shelves. If she kept looking at herself

strange flesh, soft, yet it heeds not the leash

in the mirror, her bits were going to get hard (Well, harder than they’d already gotten from that brief overview. Fuck, she was hot.), and in this nightdress there’d be no hiding it. Hell, she could practically see her panties through it already, its diaphanous pink material translucent almost to the point of transparency. She pulled it off and, not knowing what to do with it, folded it awkwardly and tucked it on a shelf that looked less full than the others. After some waffling, she pulled on a pair of denim cutoffs (these, too, really emphasized her bits), a sports bra (because, looking at all the other bras, she realized she had no fucking clue how to operate them), and a tank top with a graphic of some kind of alien flower overlaid on a field of hexagons emblazoned on it.

That would probably do for the day, right?

She took a moment, before she moved on, to walk to the balcony and look out over the interior of the — well, whatever this place was. It was dominated by a single massive circular chamber that stretched from floor to (probably) ceiling, somewhere in the dimly lit shadows above. Below, the glowing grass let her make out the faintest hint of tunnels leading outward, perhaps to other chambers like this one. Each was a yawning black pit, devoid of even the faintest trace of light, every one Gallica-sized. To her, this was probably a humble little place, but to Jess it was like some kind of warehouse or stadium or open factory floor, vast beyond reason for human habitation.

Around the perimeter of the chamber, there were other spaces cut into the wall — Jess realized that her room must have been one of them, and probably looked much the same from any of the others, dimly lit and difficult to see into. She could have sat there for an hour, trying to figure out what each of them was just from the faint details of each, but the rumbling in her stomach grew ever more insistent, and before long she set out in the direction Gallica had indicated earlier.

The dining room, as Gallica had said, wasn’t far — all it took was a walk through an arched hallway, like a tunnel carved into the trunk of an enormous tree, and there was a beautifully detailed table that looked large enough to seat half a dozen or more comfortably — though, at the moment, there was only a single chair with a cushion on its seat.

“Ah!” Gallica appeared again, looming up from below. “There you are. I made your favorite! Come, sit, sit!”

Jess’s body didn’t react, but deep in her mind something snapped, and she felt a wave of absolute terror rush through her. “Y-you know,” she managed to say, her heart beating an incongruously slow and steady rhythm, “you move way faster than anything your size should…”

“… Did I startle you? I’m sorry, petal,” she said, radiating contrition. “I suppose I’m rather used to you being used to me. We’ll get there again, though, don’t worry. Here, eat up!” From one palm, her vines produced an entire meal: cutlery laid out on a perfectly folded napkin, a glass of a brilliant blue liquid that smelled sweet and citrusy, and a bowl of reddish-brown stew with herbs sprinkled over the top. It smelled spicy and tangy all at once.

“Uh… what is this?”

“Ful medames. Layla introduced you to it, and you absolutely wouldn’t stop raving about it, so of course I had to learn to make it. I confess, this is compiled, but it takes a while to make and I didn’t want to make you wait around, hungry as you are. I’ll make it again soon, from scratch, I promise.”

Jess regarded the bowl with no small amount of skepticism. She could see large, broad beans embedded in the sauce, big as the end of her thumb. Beans were not her favorite thing to see — half the time, if she was able to swing a hearty meal, it was beans out of a can, metallic-tasting and so funky her apartment would stink of them for days. Still, these beans smelled rather better, so maybe they tasted better, and she was hungry enough to eat even one of those cans of beans. With some hesitation, she lifted a spoon, scooped up a small amount of the mixture, and took a cautious mouthful.

It was the most delicious thing she’d ever tasted. The sauce was heavy on something bright and powerful, like lemon flavoring but deep and rich in a way she’d never tasted before–

–my papa used to make this for me practically every morning–

–my God but you’re beautiful, you know that?–

–and Jess suddenly remembered Layla on top of her, an entirely different kind of hunger than the one she was feeling now in those deep, blown-out eyes, the same flavors Jess was tasting now on her breath. Jess swallowed the heavenly mouthful, the spices and the heat making themselves known once the tang of citrus was gone, and rather than think about the fact that she’d probably had sex with the drugged-up granny, Jess chose to let hungry-kid instincts take the driver’s seat. She began to wolf the ful down, each bite a hammer-blow of lemon followed by a slowly building burn of heat and spice. It was like Jess had never tasted real food before, as if she’d starved for the first… well, however old she was, that many years of her life. As she began scraping the last leavings of the sauce up, then began licking the bowl, she came to the realization that maybe she had.

When she came out of her reverie and looked up, she found Gallica smiling down at her. “I didn’t quite expect that,” she said, “but I’m glad you enjoyed it.”

“It was…” Jess paused, realizing how she’d absolutely lost herself in the experience of eating, and felt more than a little embarrassed. She set the bowl down and took up the napkin, cleaning off her mouth and chin. “…it was really good. Th-thank you.”

“It was my pleasure,” Gallica said, and a wave of love and reassurance rolled through Jess’s body, making her shiver. “And it always will be.”

“Y-yeah,” Jess muttered, looking down at the floor as her face warmed. “About that, I

dive, dive and seek the safe places deep within the reef

don’t really– I mean, I really appreciate this all but I don’t know how I’m going to pay for it, like… my medical bills must be through the roof, right? And I can’t even imagine what the rent on a place like this must be, and I know I’ve lost my job if I was in a coma, so–“

“Petal.” Gallica’s voice was reassuring, even, though Jess could detect small undercurrents of confusion, grief, and even… was that anticipation? “We don’t do that,” she said. “No rent. No money. If you need something, you receive it. Scarcity is not an issue, because we have abolished it.”

“…no rent?” She was having trouble wrapping her head around the idea; back on Earth, she hadn’t even fully owned half the clothes she wore.

“And no money.” Gallica’s smile grew broader. “It’s funny, last time the conversation was much more about the technology. You accepted the– oh, what did you call it? Ah, the ‘fully automated luxury plant space communism!’” she said with a soft chuckle. “You accepted that right away. But I suppose you don’t remember much of the philosophy you read on Solstice, do you?”

“…philosophy? On Solstice? The prison colony?” There was something turning in the back of her head, like the world rolling over–

–from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs–

–stop being such a fucking splitter, Forsythe!–

–and for a moment she felt the old fear of Nell on the back of her neck, not that she was entirely certain who Nell was. “I… wait…I’m a communist?”

Gallica laughed, and Jess felt it up and down her spine. “After this long, I should hope so!” she said. “But yes, my love, you were already quite committed to the downfall of capital when we met. One of the things that made your little batch of sophonts so interesting! Most of you Terrans had convinced yourselves you loved suffering under scarcity and exploitation, but your lot had other ideas.”

“I don’t really remember that, either,” Jess mumbled. “I don’t remember a lot, I think.”

“Then we’ll rediscover it together,” Gallica said. “At whatever pace is comfortable for you.”

Jess nodded vaguely, staring into space for a long moment. Her thoughts seemed to slide frictionlessly off each other, and something prickled at the back of her neck. “How… how long have I been here with you?” The unspoken question: how much time have I lost?

Gallica sighed, leaning in close. “I’m wary of overwhelming you with too much too fast. You’ve already had several bad reactions, and—” She paused, clearly thinking things over, and in that moment Jess realized that the empty bowl that had been in front of her was gone, and the glass of blue whatever-it-was was now half empty. What was that taste on her tongue? “I’m going to take a chance and be fully open with you here, Jess. You already asked me that question, and I answered it, and you panicked so badly that I had to give you a microdose of Class-B xenodrugs to erase your memory of the last five minutes.”

“You what?” Jess stared up at her, heart beginning to pound in her chest. “Is that why I can’t remember anything?!”

“No, no,” Gallica said quickly. “Your amnesia is due to trauma to your diencephalon, my love, not xenodrugs. The particular Class-B xenodrug I used is much, much more surgical — I had to entrance you and specifically code certain memories for removal before applying it. You lost nothing but the last few minutes, I promise.”

Jess shuddered and hugged herself tightly, a chill trickling slowly down her spine as she stared down at the empty spot on the table where the bowl had once sat. “Please don’t do that again,” she whispered, unsure if Gallica could even hear her.

“I won’t, love,” Gallica said, her voice soft and soothing — and somehow, that did help. Her voice was like a warm blanket wrapped snugly around her shoulders. “Not unless it’s absolutely necessary. Your implant still seems a bit out of sorts, overmedicating for some impulses and undermedicating or failing to respond to others. I spoke to Arvense just now, and we’ll talk more later, but he tells me that it should normalize over time. Until then, though, he says, and I agree, that we should minimize emotional strain. Discussing exactly how long we’ve been together seems to qualify, I’m afraid.”

Jess was silent for a long moment before she finally worked up the courage to look up at Gallica. “It was a long time, wasn’t it?”

“By your standards, flower, yes, it was.”

“Years? I kind of figured, but–” Her voice caught. What did one even say in a situation like this?

“Let me say it this way: we’ve had the opportunity to make many happy memories together,” Gallica said, reaching in with one of her enormous hands and holding it out to her, palm up, over the table. “I hope they aren’t all gone forever, but even if they are, that only means we’ll start making new ones. That is my promise to you. Alright?”

Jess stared at the outstretched hand, another shiver of an entirely different kind running up her back. There was a powerful instinct

dive, dive and let the shell take the blow

that she couldn’t ignore, and before she knew it she’d lifted one of her own hands and gently laid it on one of Gallica’s thick, powerful fingers. She could feel the texture of every vine, the warmth, the steady pulsing of something below the surface, and she could feel herself being inexorably drawn in, drawn under, by that pulsing.

“I can’t… when I… when you…” Words became impossible. Every time she tried to put a thought together, a pulse came and scattered it before it could make it to her mouth.

“See? Your body remembers,” Gallica said, a few of her vines reaching out to play with Jess’s hair and pushing her even deeper down, down into thick, treacly thoughtlessness. With a calm and empty mind, she heard Her voice continue: “It remembers that you are safe with me, that you belong with me. In time, your mind will remember that again too, and you won’t feel quite so flustered when we touch.” She slowly pulled Her hand away, and Jess found her body lurching after it, reaching, her fingers closing on air. She gasped as her thoughts unstuck themselves all at once.

“I just… oh fuck, that’s so much,” she stammered out, hugging herself and half-wishing Gallica would keep touching her.

“We’ll take it slow, my little nybble. We’ll figure this out together, at a pace that’s comfortable for you.”

Jess swallowed heavily and nodded. Somewhere, deep inside, she knew there was no fighting this, and yet– “I think I need to… to have some space. Clear my head. Maybe… talk a walk or something?” She looked hesitantly up at Gallica. “Is that allowed?”

“My sweet, clever, curious little hacker…” Gallica’s broad smile came back at once, and brought a chuckle with it. “Of course it’s allowed, Jess. Go take a walk, take time to think — and when you come home, we’ll talk some more.” Her eyes all seemed to radiate a kind of excited glee. “Go and explore, and tell me what you find.”