Surface Detail

She looked at herself in the reverser. The tattoo was a frozen storm of swirling black lines scrolled across her body. She had spent a lot of the time over the days since they’d left the GSV learning how to use the tat’s own controls to influence its display. She could thicken and thin the lines, alter their number, their colours and reflectivity, make them straight, wiggly, curled or spiralled, turn them into circles or squares or any other simple geometric form, or choose from any one of thousands of tweakable patterns.

She frowned at the silvery ring on her left hand. “What about the terminal ring?” she called.

“Don’t worry; the suit will adjust.”

She shrugged. Oh well, she thought. She stepped onto the foot parts of the suit. There didn’t seem to be any holes to put her feet into.

Just when she thought nothing was going to happen and that maybe she ought to reach down and see if she could pull it up somehow, the thing suddenly rippled and rose, clumping round her feet then flowing upwards, climbing up her shins and thighs, enveloping her torso and flowing down her arms as it gathered in a sort of ruff round her neck. It moved faster than the tattoo had performing its roughly similar trick. It felt like it was at blood heat; like the tat, she could hardly tell it was there.

“Stopped at my neck,” she called out.

“That’s standard,” Demeisen shouted back. “It’ll go complete if there’s any threat or if you tell it to.”

“How do I tell it to?”

“Saying ‘Helmet up,’ or just ‘Eek!’ usually works, I’m told.”

“It’s… intelligent?” she said. It came out closer to a screech than she’d intended.

“Dumber than a knife missile,” the avatar told her, sounding amused. “But it recognises speech and it can hold a conversation. Thing’s supposed to react to perceived threat even when you’re asleep, Led. Can’t be totally stupid.”

Her eyes went wide and she sucked in a breath. She felt herself rise on her tiptoes. “It’s also just given me what feels like a buttplug and a pessary,” she said, aware that her voice had risen a couple of tones. “That had better be entirely fucking standard.”

“Yup. You can adjust that too. For all that stuff you can talk to it or use the controls on either forearm, or the finger pads; just like the tattoo. Got colouring and camo functions; you can use them to give it modesty panels if you’re shy.”

She looked at herself in the reverser. The gel suit didn’t even reflect the way she’d have expected it to. She could still see the tat; it was almost like the gel suit wasn’t there at all except at the edges of her body as they appeared in the image, where it looked like she had a thin grey line drawn right round her.

“So it can talk?” she shouted.

“Mm-hmm,” the avatar replied.

“You going to introduce us then?” she asked. “Seems only right,” she muttered.

“It was being polite, waiting to be spoken to,” Demeisen said. “Say hello, suit.”

“Hello,” the suit said, making her jump. The smooth, cool, androgynous voice came from just under each of her ears.

“Well, hello,” she said, and realised she was smiling like an idiot.

“Ms. Y’breq, I understand?” the suit said.

“Hello there!” she said, probably louder and more heartily than was strictly necessary.

“May I suggest I introduce minor filaments into your ears to allow me to speak to you directly?”

“That necessary?” she said. She found she was whispering for some reason.

“It is preferable,” the suit said. “The collar components are already able to comprehend sub-vocalisations. This means we may converse without appearing to.”

“Right,” she said. “Okay then.” There was a pause. She didn’t feel anything happening, then felt a brief, tiny tickling feeling inside both ears. “That it?” she asked.

“Yes,” the suit voice said, sounding slightly different. “Testing: left, right,” it said, the source of its voice shifting appropriately before centring in her head again. “Does that sound correct to you?”

“I suppose,” she said. Another pause.

“No, couldn’t hear a thing, suit,” Demeisen said.

Lededje took a breath. “Suit, put the helmet up, please.”

The helmet component flipped up over her head almost before the last syllable had been uttered, unrolling from the neck ruff with a whoosh of air.

She was aware there was something around her head but she could still see perfectly well, and she could blink. She put her fingers tentatively up to her eyes and found what felt like invisible bulges over each eye. She flexed her jaw, stuck out her tongue; a shallow bulge had opened over her mouth and extended outwards when she stuck her tongue out. Her nose had tiny bulges under each nostril. “What am I breathing?” she asked quietly.

“Air, I imagine,” the avatar shouted.

“Ambient air,” the suit told her. “I am charging back-unit components with pressurised ambient air as a precaution; however, for long-term use I can continually reconstitute oxygen from carbon dioxide with my reactor.”

“Reactor?” Lededje said, slightly alarmed.

“Chemical processing reactor,” the suit told her.

“Ah.”