Surface Detail

Now he – it – was offering her a present: a tattoo, allegedly. She was sat in one of the three flight-deck seats; she’d been watching news reports out of Sichult on the module’s screen when Demeisen had popped into existence behind her. She leant forward. The thing lay in his palm; a looped, tangled assortment of thin grey-blue filaments looking a lot how she knew a fully grown neural lace looked.

“What makes you think I might want a tattoo?”

“You said you missed having one.”

“I did?”

“Eleven days ago. Then again yesterday. The first time, you said that sometimes you felt too naked when you woke up. You also mentioned that since you were revented you’d had dreams of walking down a city street thinking you were fully clothed but everybody looking at you weirdly and then you looking down at yourself and realising you were naked.”

“Apparently normal people have that dream.”

“I know.”

“Did I also say I was glad to be rid of the tattoo?”

“No. Maybe you just think you say that to people.”

She frowned, looked at the thing in his palm again. Now it looked like thin strands of oily mercury. “Anyway, that does not look like a tattoo,” she told him.

“Not like this. Watch.”

The assemblage of loops and lines started to move slowly, stirring itself. It began to flow out across Demeisen’s palm as though forming a sort of chain-mail glove. He turned his hand over for a moment to show it wrapping itself round his fingers, then turned it back as the lines moved like tiny waves up his wrist and arm, disappearing under his shirt. He rolled the sleeve back to show the filaments coursing along his upper arm, thinning fractionally and spreading out.

He undid his shirt a little to show the silver-blue lines tracking smoothly across his upper chest – it was smooth, hairless, like a child’s – then put his head back as the tattoo rose up his neck and over his face and then right round his head, a few tiny thin lines decorating his ears while others swept fabulously, precisely over his face, moving to within millimetres of his nostrils, mouth and eyes but stopping there. He raised his other hand to show the lines flowing down there too, then held both hands and forearms up to show that they were identically, symmetrically decorated in millimetrically spaced curls and swirls, curves and parabolas.

“I’m getting it to display just the upper-body section,” he explained. “It does the torso, legs and feet too; same spacing.” He admired his hands. “Or you can go for a more angular look…”

The mobile tattoo shifted everywhere, the curves becoming straight lines, the tight curls becoming right angles, zigzags. “Colour’s commandable too,” Demeisen muttered. The tattoo changed to soot black. Then to perfectly reflective silver, as though the whole tattoo was made of mercury teased impossibly fine. “Or sort of random.” Within seconds the tattoo had become a dark, random scribble across what she could see of his body. “Motifs, obviously,” Demeisen added. The tattoo became a series of nested, concentric silver circles on his skin, the largest a hand’s-breadth in diameter across his upper chest.

She reached out and took one of his hands, peering at the circles on the back of his hand. Looking extremely closely – she still thought her eyesight was significantly better than any normal Sichultian’s had ever been; more zoomable, for a start – she could just make out tiny silver lines running from one circle to another. Hair fine, she thought. No; down fine.

She gazed at all the silvery circles, spread across his skin like too-symmetrical ripples in a pond someone had thrown a few dozen pebbles into. The circles spread, merged, became a criss-cross pattern of thick lines that looked braided, and much finer lines which wove in between the braids. Changing from silver to gold, they made it look as though he was wrapped in a glittering wire cage.

“Of course, I’m able to alter it by just thinking,” he told her. “You’d need to control it through an interface; maybe have some sort of control section always manifest in the pattern, if you wanted to make it change appearance. One wrist with a sort of stylised key- or glyph-board on it would work, or even just coded fingertip sequences anywhere. Though a terminal would work too. Something to decide later.”

She was barely listening, still staring. “It’s astonishing,” she breathed.

“Like it? It’s yours,” he told her.

She kept hold of his hand. She looked up at him. “It doesn’t hurt, does it?”

He laughed. “Of course not.”

“Are there any catches?”

“Catches?” He looked confused for a moment. “Oh,” he said, “you mean any downside?”

“Anything I might wish I’d known, looking back on this moment from some point in the future?”