This is the toughest chapter I’ve ever written. Don’t even know what to call the smut in this chapter, but it’s kinda there.  

Martin paced back and forth across the floor of the sauna chamber, Tenebris still lying unconscious against the wall. Beads of sweat were beginning to form across the visible parts of her body, and the parts that were covered by clothing were turning dark with saturation. 

He noticed an idle pain in his eyes and ears. Pressure sickness. The station had had lower pressure than the decommissioned missile (he still couldn’t believe he’d flown in it), likely to make the event of violent depressurization less violent. This was common practice among stations and ships alike, since the lower the pressure differential between the interior and hard vacuum, the lower the strain on the structure. Most stations kept it around thirty kilopascals of pure oxygen, as did the missile (still crazy). However, he had felt a pressure drop upon boarding the station, so it must have been different. He reckoned it had been around twenty-five Kpa, approaching the minimum that could be tolerated before it became dangerous. However, he felt no pressure change upon making landfall, which meant the interior of the buildings were close or equal to that value. 

All of this was to say, he was sitting around at twenty-five kilopascals. If he wasn’t, he would have noticed when he exited the egg ship. Twenty-five Kpa was a mere ten percent of the atmosphere of the planet, which sat at two-hundred fifty Kpa. Meaning, those membrane windows were holding back a pressure differential of an entire magnitude, in addition to the already mind-numbing temperature difference of around two-hundred eighty degrees Celsius. 

He'd think the technology was incredible if it weren’t so gross. 

Taking his mind off the oncoming pressure sickness, he tried to return to casual matters, such as trying to destroy a nigh-omniscient superintelligence.  

Pulling out his tablet once again, he routed his connection back through the signal pin he had left in Tenebris’ chip. The coords are way out of town, hmm. He plotted. How would he get there? The hostile environs would make it border on impossibility. There. He pulled up a document. 

Land vehicle. Parked in the garage, all those hundreds of stories below. Unused, likely remaining there after someone arrived and didn’t take their bike back with them after they left. If they had left at all. Specs: hydrogen cell power, long range, autopilot capacity, gyro stabilised, high tolerance to temperature and pressure. However, it was unpressurized, and was bookmarked by the system to be around two-hundred Edo-1 orbits old. He ran some quick math to convert it to hours.  

An Edo year was two-hundred forty-five days. Multiply that by two-hundred years, then multiply by twenty-seven hours a day, and it comes out to one point three million hours. 

That was quite a while. Still, H-cells didn’t deteriorate, at least not on those timescales, so it should still work. Next problem: unpressurized, meaning there was no interior. He and Tenebris would be out in the harsh Edoan atmosphere, with the bike providing no protection. 

He thought back. Tennie had that vacuum suit, still in her bag. Problem: it wasn’t designed for high pressure; it was designed for zero pressure. The same went for temperature. Regardless, it was designed to handle large pressure and temperature differentials, so it should still work, even in the other direction. 

What the hell are you doing? A small voice in his mind hissed, its tone fuzzy and drowned out by oppressive amygdaline coating. 

I’m planning how I’ll kill the Cabinet, Martin replied confidently, not letting it draw his attention. 

You? You think you can just waltz in there and destroy a superintelligence? It sneered.  

I’ve got the passcodes. Nothing will stop us from getting in. He straightened his posture. 

‘Us’? You really think Tenebris will go with you? The only reason she even cares if you live or die, is if you’re dead, she doesn’t get her money.  

That’s not true.  

Look at her. She’s selfish, and she knows only an idiot wouldn’t be. You should be like her.  

He let the tablet hang at his waist. She’s coming around to it.  

In fact, you have access to her chip. You can save yourself. Go in, short circuit her brain. Better yet, dangle it over her head that you could. Seize control, it pontificated. 

I’m better than that. Martin held. 

You’re not some saviour. The dissenting voice grew louder, the amygdaline dripping away like ice melting and falling from a frozen branch. You’re property that refuses to accept the new ways of the galaxy. 

Martin paused. Drawing in a deep breath, he continued his internal argument. Someone has to try. I should stand for something. 

Do you, Martin? Do you have to stand for something? No one is rooting for you. There is no greater force cheering you on, just your own delusions of karmic justice that you’ve constructed for yourself.  

He furrowed his brow. Fuck you. I’d rather die trying to fix this shit, than just live in it.  

You’re hiding from the truth. It rasped.  

He chose not to dignify the voice with a response.  

Fine. You should probably wake up your friend, though. Sauna’ll kill her, soon. 

Martin shot his head up, looking at the unconscious woman. Her chest was rising and falling slowly. She had gone from moderately sweaty to completely drenched, soaking what little clothes she was wearing and making her skin paler than it already was. He quickly grabbed at his tablet, pulling up Tenebris’ metrics.  

Heart rate below average. Blood CO2 increasing, O2 decreasing. Abysmal salt levels. However, it was highly recoverable. 

He cursed under his breath. How would he wake her up? The chip wasn’t designed with other users in mind, it didn’t have a function for that. He desperately tapped into menus and options, searching for something.  

Nerve control.  

That might work. Interaction was complex, but he only needed to activate her pain receptors, jolt her awake. While there wasn’t a direct way of doing this, there was a roundabout method that’d do the trick.  

There was a display of her body’s nerve pathways with mountains of data he could never hope to parse. However; he didn’t need to. He zoomed in on her hand. There was a small space in her palm that had a smaller concentration of nerve pathways than the other regions. Her implant.  

He activated the surrounding muscular nerves, nerves that once controlled a muscle that had long since become vestigial and was now repurposed to activate her EMP.  

An audible fizzle from across the room, followed by a groan.  

Tenebris was getting up. Martin breathed a sigh of relief. She clutched her head in her hands. 

He quickly ordered an electrolyte bag to be delivered to the nearest dispenser. She’d need it.  

“Hey!” She shot up. “What the hell did you just do? I saw that!” 

“I can explain later, just get out of the sauna!” He demanded. 

Clearly confused, she stood, and drowsily walked out of the room, leaving behind slick footsteps of sweat. Martin felt the thud of her sitting down on one of the benches outside. 

He skittered across the floor and crawled under the doorway, careful to avoid being struck by its swinging. 

“What is this.” Tenebris grumbled, sitting on a bench in the centre of the room, glaring into the non-space of her neural display. “Did you fucking pin me?” 

“I-I had to do it,” he stuttered, “I had to find a way out of this-” 

“A message?” She interrupted. Her eyes flicked side-to-side as she parsed it. “This is a scam.” She said in disbelief. 

“That’s what I thought, but check the encryption. It’s some of the tightest ice I’ve ever seen; trillion-dimensional vector encryption, built off neuron architecture. Coordinates and passcodes seem legit, metadata checks out, too.” 

“Shit...” 

“All of Edo’s wealth. I could take less than halfsies and still have enough to buy entire systems with shit to spare.” 

She held still for a while. “I... I’ve gotta think about this.” 

“Yeah, that’s fine!” Martin exclaimed quickly, his anxiety present in his tone. “Let’s go get you something to drink, and then you can take a while to think about it.” She would actually consider it. He internally celebrated. “I can order us a room for the night, too, if you like-” 

“No!” She interrupted. “No, that... that felt too weird.”  

“Sure thing!” He held up his hands, trying not to upset her. Thinking about it for a moment, it should have been obvious she wouldn’t respond to something like that well. He imagined it would feel like having someone else imagining things in your own mind. Needless to say, it would be uncomfortable.  

Tenebris stood back up, slowly, and grabbed a towel from a rack on the wall. She wiped it across her skin, shiny with sweat. It took her a while, since she moved slowly and seemed to struggle in summoning deliberation. She threw the towel over the bench, and went to retrieve her stuff from the round cubby.  

Taking a good while, she began putting on her clothes. Martin took that time to clamber up the bench, using the grooves and imperfections in the wood to reach the top and pull himself over.  

She drew the loose-fitting garment, a ‘t-shirt’ he remembered it being called, over her head, letting it fall down and hang just above her legs, allowing the cup of her simple black panties to peer out from beneath the hem of the shirt. The leggings proved a bit more difficult, as the tight material had to be pulled rather tight to contort around her shapely figure, concealing her pale skin. Finally, she sat back on the bench and slipped on the shoes and socks. 

“Electrolyte bag’s ready.” She remarked at the same time as the notification appeared on Martin’s tablet.  

“Wanna go get it?” He said. 

“I probably should.” She gently rubbed her forehead with the back of her hand. She tiredly extended a hand for the Parvian to step into. After he climbed on, she stood up and slipped her bag over her shoulder.  

... 

This was the place. A small room, designed to emulate a hotel not made from biotech. Of course, a nagging at the back of Martin’s mind told him that it was almost definitely still biotech. The pillows that sat on the bed could easily be spider silk, or something of the sort. Making it a little less obvious was still nice, though. 

Tenebris, holding the lip of her electrolyte balloon between her teeth, set him down on the bed, which sat at the centre of the room. The covers were thick, heavy, and soft. They were thinner on the sides, tapering off into a sheet that wrapped all the way around, going under the bed where the cinching mechanism lay. When a person sat beneath the covers, the mechanism would activate, pulling the cover taught and allowing for a comfortable sleeping experience. He recognized it, since such a mechanism was also common on ring stations, or even gravless stations, as the cinching mechanism prevented sleepers from drifting away in zero-gee.  

She tossed her bag next to him and left to the bathroom.  

Alone, Martin absorbed his surroundings. Never had he been more grateful to see standard steel and those cold blue lights that were inset within every surface. The room was rectangular, which came as a relief to him, as he worried the entire galaxy had been transformed into strange, winding corridors with inconsistent shapes and blotchy bone-like hues. Not bone-like, he had to remind himself. The buildings, as he had come to realize, bore concerning similarity to a human spine, with each vertebra comprising three floors. He shivered at the thought. 

He heard running water, muffled through the bathroom door but apparent. She’d been in there a while.  

She was probably weighing her options. As deeply as he could, he hoped that the little glimmer of reason that he’d seen earlier was making a good case for him. 

His tablet lit up at his side. Picking it up, there was a notification. He opened it. 

A text document, this time live. It read only one word. 

‘BUGGED’ 

Of course the rooms would be bugged. That’s what you do, especially when you’re in the business of dealing in things that one might not be comfortable with selling. You listen to them, in the place which they see as most private, and you collect data. Find what disgusts them. Find what calms them. Compile it and create a profile. Use that profile to build a situation where you gain leverage and make them comfortable enough to sell.  

As all listening in does, it gives you secrets. But the pair had a secret that directly threatened the entire system; leaking it would be suicide by all accounts.  

Martin shielded the screen in case there was a camera (or, more likely, an eyeball) somewhere, and further inspected the live document. It was stored locally, directly on Tenebris’ drive, and only through his direct link was he able to access it. 

She was communicating with him, in the most secure way available to them. The document updated; more text being added. 

‘COMING OUTSIDE. PRETEND TO RUN AWAY, AND THEN GET CAUGHT.’ 

He didn’t know why she would want that, but seeing as he likely wouldn’t get the chance to act, he had to go on blind faith. 

He turned off the screen of the tablet and let it fall to his hip. Forcing breaths in and out, he mentally prepared for his role.  

Martin ran. He sprinted, slid right down the covers that ran to the ground. Right on cue, Tenebris walked out the door, her stature strong and domineering as it had ever been. He continued running, ‘trying’ to make it to the door – he may not have understood why he was acting, but he’d be damned if he wasn’t going to give an award-winning performance.  

“Where the hell do you think you’re going?!” She thundered from above. The steel groaned as she leaned over to grab the Parvian off the ground.  

He thought about making a dive, but was snatched in her fist and brought up to her face before he could go for it. 

There she was. Looking into his eyes with her own. They shone blue, exacerbated by the cool lighting of the room, but there were also small blood vessels visible in her pupils, giving them a slight purple tinge, like a lightning storm whirling in her lens. 

“Running away?” She teased, a sly grin creeping across her face. “You know, I actually found the perfect thing for that...” From behind her back, she drew a large bottle. It was unclear what it was at first, but it quickly became apparent to him: lube. Because what makes a stay more comfortable for the squeamish type? Sex. The comfort of another. That elusive compound that defined what it was to love; oxytocin. 

It clicked, why she’d be doing this. While the Edoans were doubtlessly building a profile, he and Tenebris could feed them a different narrative. Acting for the silver screens at Edo HQ. Feed them inaccurate data, and then whatever profile they build will be ineffective. No leverage. No stolen secrets. Not too shabby, he thought. 

Martin began to thrash in her hand in a half-acting, half-serious attempt to escape. Sure, it was probably part of her plan, but could he really be bothered to go inside her again? She licked her lips. Really laying it on thick, huh? He thought. She continued. “How I’ll miss punishing you, corporal.” He swallowed the urge to roll his eyes. At least he got that promotion he’d asked for.  

With her thumb, Tenebris popped the lid of the lubricant, flipping it upside-down and dousing the Parvian in it. He shut his eyes to prevent the liquid from entering them. The sound was muffled, but he heard a loud thud, what he assumed to be the lube bottle clattering to the ground so that his co-star could free up a hand. He sputtered a bit, uncovering his mouth and allowing him to breathe. 

Her index finger repositioned, freeing his arm. Using it to uncover one of his eyes, he was immediately greeted by a different kind of eye.  

Tenebris was at the foot of the bed, bent over, using one hand to support herself and the other to hold him. Her pants were completely at her ankles, her shirt drawn up to her chest. It was a completely clear shot, a stare down between Martin’s own eye and her brown eye. Or rather, her blue eye, due to the lack of pigmentation. 

She planted her previously unoccupied finger on the back of his head, supporting him for entry into her. The world moved around him as he was brought towards her anus once again, head-first, just as before. It was possible she had a preference.  

There was a small scar on her left glute. Nothing particularly noticeable or interesting, but it still stuck out to him.  

He shut his eyes and braced for impact. Her idle body heat could be felt even through the thick lubricant coating, growing increasingly potent as he assumedly drew closer.  

His head slipped into her. It was easier to enter than it had been last time, either from the support of her finger, the lube, or that she had loosened it prior to bursting out the bathroom. He hoped it was the latter.  

Feeling his shoulders pop in, entering the hot, dark interior of Tenebris’ ass, he was met with that all-too familiar smell that pervaded every square inch of her rectum. Somehow, it was all still better than the elevator. He continued writhing, both to act and to just get the whole damn thing over with.  

The lubricant that covered his torso was wiped off gradually throughout, and his ability to hear soon returned, not that there was much to listen to beside the occasional wet noise or heartbeat. A heartbeat, he noticed, which was going a good bit faster.  

Tenebris’ finger retracted from its position against Martin’s spine, sliding against his body as it left to wrap around his leg and assist in pushing him deeper into her.  

He pulled his hands free, having been pinned against his sides in her tight sphincter. He wiped what little lubricant still residing on his face away and blinked a few times. Not that there was any point to seeing – it was pitch black inside the woman, aside from the occasional ray, which only illuminated the slick walls of her intestine, something he already knew fully well was there.  

His knees entered, and his feet followed. Soon, he was fully submerged inside her, the organic opening behind him sealing now that the obstruction had been cleared. Tenebris began to move, shifting around. Walking a bit, her steps reverberating through her body and into him. The world spun ninety degrees, the Martian having likely crawled into the bed.  

It was warm, at least there was that to enjoy. And dark. He didn’t have to look at any more weird biotech, at least today. It was strange, that he preferred the inside of a colon to biotech, but something about the unnatural flesh and eery flawlessness ticked him the wrong way. Perhaps that was why his brain took particular notice in her scar tissue.  

Martin’s tablet illuminated, casting blue ghoulish light onto the pink tissue surrounding him. He pulled it towards him. It was the text document again.  

‘USING DIRECT MIND TECH, it read. ‘NOT USED TO IT. MAY SAY WEIRD THINGS.’ 

‘THATS FINE’ he typed out. ‘THANKS FOR THE PROMOTION’ 

‘DON’T MENTION IT.’ There was a pause. ‘TELL ME YOUR PLAN.’ 

‘WAIT IT OUT A BIT. TELL THEM YOU NEED MORE TIME TO THINK. THEN, WE SNEAK OFF. THERE’S A BIKE. BOTTOM FLOOR. WE STEAL IT, GO TO THE COORDINATES. USE THE PASSCODES, SNEAK IN, KILL THE BRAIN.’ He explained, hoping it sounded plausible enough. ‘DEAD CABINET. RICH TENEBRIS.’ He concluded. At one point, he’d briefly considered obtaining a neurotoxin to do the job, but on a biotech-reliant system like Edo, it would be akin to them handing a stranger nuclear launch codes.  

‘I’M NOT SURE ABOUT THIS.’ Tenebris responded after a while. 

Martin tried to butter her up as best he could. ‘THINK ABOUT IT. WHAT WOULD THEY OFFER YOU? ENOUGH TO LIVE FOR A DECADE, MAYBE 2. THEN WHAT? BACK WHERE YOU STARTED. BUT ALL OF THE WEALTH ON EDO? YOU COULD MAKE IT TO HEAT DEATH WHILE STILL LIVING LAVISHLY.’ He laid back. Debating killing a superintelligence from within a rectum was certainly not a circumstance he’d imagined himself getting into at any point.  

Something flickered on the screen. A sentence appearing and rapidly disappearing in about a half second. It was too short-lived for him to fully read it, but he saw the words ‘sell’ and ‘bad idea’ in a way that made him concerned.  

‘WHAT WAS THAT?’ He asked. 

‘NOTHING. I MESSED UP THE INPUT.’ 

He sat in silence, staring at the screen. He was decidedly not in the clear. The prospect of losing such an opportunity right there and then was one that weighed on him heavily. A lump formed in his throat – some more amygdaline would have helped a lot.  

Another message appeared on the display. ‘I CAN’T MAKE A DECISION RIGHT NOW. IT’LL HAVE TO WAIT UNTIL TOMORROW.’ 

Martin’s shoulders slumped at his sides. With every fibre of his being, he wanted to argue his point, make Tenebris see it his way. Make her unable to deny that it was the best of all options. He knew full well that it was risky, dangerous, and possibly just stupid, but he stood by it anyway. Tenebris, however, wouldn’t, couldn’t hinge it on blind faith. His anxiety screamed to make her understand, yet another part screamed not to say anything, lest he risk pushing her away. He was sitting at the unstable apex of a rollercoaster, with which a simple gust of wind could send him careening backward into the worst possibilities. And to add on that she hadn’t even made a full decision yet? 

He’d never sleep in such a condition.  

So he simply sat, silently, in the dimly illuminated corridor at the tail-end of Tenebris’ digestive track, that same overbearing, crushing dread that had met him on the landfall vehicle returning to him again. The hands of fate were wrapping their cold fingers around his throat, depriving him of air, and all he could do was breathe what little capacity hadn’t been cut off. 

... 

Martin peeled open his eyes, having been woken up by a sudden bout of movement. So, he had at some point fallen asleep. That was comforting.  

He had gone vertical, that was apparent. Tenebris had stood up. He checked his tablet, the immediate bright light contrasting so harshly with his surroundings that he had to hold up a hand to protect his yet-to-adjust eyes. When it became comfortable, he inspected the screen. ‘08:17’ it read, the data coming from the neural chip, which in turn came from wherever the data was stored on Edo-1. Planetary time. Assuming that Edoans abided by standard time practice, with days beginning when the region was facing opposite to the system’s star, it was early morning. He wasn’t sure what time it had been before, but it couldn’t have been nightfall by that point. That meant at least Tenebris had slept a very long while. Either her body was simply recovering from the heat sickness she had likely incurred in the sauna, or the amygdaline influenced her ability to sleep. The latter thought conjured a myriad of questions he both did and didn’t want answers to. 

He opened the document. Treading as carefully as he could, he greeted her. ‘GOOD MORNING’ 

‘MORNING’ she replied after a while. Accompanying it, a gingerly contraction of the surrounding muscle, putting a bit of pressure on the Parvian. 

It was a bit strange, greeting in such a manner. It occurred to Martin that he had never actually set foot on a planet, so time-related phrases like ‘good morning’, while familiar to him, he had never actually said. In fact, he couldn’t think of a time he’d even used the word ‘morning’. 

There was something above the good morning message that he hadn’t noticed before. He inspected it. ‘YOU MIGHT BE IN THERE A WHILE. I’VE GIVEN YOU ACCESS TO MY EYES.’  

Short, flat, emotionless. He scoffed. How considerate of her – now if he was to die of anything, it would now be sulphur poisoning rather than boredom. Or some sort of gut-biome related disease, but he heavily doubted that she even had a gut biome – due to the prevalence of high-purity foods, most people could live without it. Brushing away whatever possible ailment might arise from an extended foray in Tenebris’ colon, he tapped away at the tablet. He enabled sonic reproduction, a setting that took the raw data from Tenebris’ brain, and instead of translating it into text as it had in the document, translated it into a simulated set of vocal cords, making it audible. It wasn’t flawless, however, and while it was able to mimic the speed and intonation of the woman, it couldn’t quite copy her exact voice. Additionally, since humans don’t breathe in their thoughts, neither did the artificial reproduction, making its vocalizations tip into the uncanny valley at times. 

Continuing on the tablet, he brought up menus until he found the one he was looking for. He patched into her visual feed. 

It was a funny thing to look at. What he was seeing was the fully processed image from her visual cortex.  

Due to the immense visual data at any given moment, the visual cortex tends to only record ‘snapshots’ of what the eyes see, filtering out motionless and unremarkable things, leaving only the important bits. Factoring in natural blind spots and lens focus, the overall resultant image, to an outside viewer, would be incredibly spotty, and details would be generally indiscernible unless the owner of the visual cortex deliberately looked at them. 

In Martin’s case, he was looking at a sky. A blue-green sky that shone so bright it made the twisting spinal towers in front of it almost appear as silhouettes. Apparently, Tenebris was staring out the window.  

“You patched in.” The emulated voice of Tenebris said from the speakers of the tablet. 

He turned on his own microphone, careful to enable noise filtering – it was unlikely that she wanted to hear the idle noises of her own insides. Checking it was enabled, he answered “yes.” 

“Ugh, that’s a weird feeling.” The not-quite Tenebris voice complained. She glanced around at the various buildings and took a sip from a liquid-containing bulb presumably containing coffee, or at least something of the like. “Quite a blue sky, huh?” She took his silence as indication he was listening. “It’s the methane that makes it do that. Ammonia gives it the green.” 

“Never seen a sky before.” Martin said. 

“Neither have I.” She said. “Not as nice as I expected.” She slid a finger down the membrane window, making it transition back into a metal wall. So even the metal wasn’t real, just a convincing imitation from chromatophores. 

After a while of watching her go through her morning routine, brushing her hair, getting dressed, the like, he hesitantly asked “have you made a decision yet?”  

She stopped. She looked into the bathroom mirror, into her own eyes, and by extension at Martin who was looking through them. “You’re putting me in a really tough spot here, you know that?” Not-Tenebris spoke, the real Tenebris’ lips not moving. 

“What about yesterday, the sauna?”  

“That was nothing. Bad reaction to the amygdaline.” She dismissed, leaning over the counter. 

“You want to do this, and you know it.” Martin argued. 

“It’s stupid and psychotic.” She rebutted, pointing into the mirror at him. 

He was about to respond when Tenebris jolted in surprise, looking to her side at the door. “What the hell was that?” He assumed she had heard something by the way she swivelled, but having no access to senses other than seeing, he had no idea what it was. 

“We’ll finish this later.” The emulation concluded the conversation. 

He decided to at least wait to see what she had heard before he protested. He brought the tablet closer, watching Tenebris approach the front door from which the sound likely originated. 

Opening it, the area surrounding the Martian’s vision grew dim and fuzzy, her attention fully captured by Dee, the looming ambassador standing in the doorway, her face darkened with her back to the light. She spoke something, her overly articulated lips forming out the words with that same eery efficiency as they had the day before. Martin’s hairs stood on edge, anxiety mounting with the knowledge that just past the walls of woman surrounding him was the ambassador whose qualities seemed to fall just outside of what a normal person would possess. 

She continued speaking unabated, taking pauses where Martin assumed Tenebris was responding. Unable to parse what they were saying, he could only watch through the eyes of his compatriot, glaring into Dee’s insectoid eyes, gleaming a dull grey at the pupil.  

Eventually, she spun on her heel and began walking away. He was about to release a sigh of relief when Tenebris began to follow. He scrambled, bringing the tablet to his mouth. “What’s going on? Why are you following her? Why is she here?” He asked into the microphone. 

“She’s taking us early for the appointment.” Not-Tenebris answered, a slight quiver of fear in her tone.  

“Why would she do that? Do you think she knows?” Martin resisted the urge to bite his fingernails.  

“I don’t know, it doesn’t feel like it...” 

“I don’t like this. Can you give me auditory permissions?” 

A short pause. “Done.”  

He hurriedly tapped into her ear feed. Footsteps, stomping against the brittle bone floors. It was working. No dialogue for now, though. 

They were led to an elevator. He had to hear and see the awful lips peel open, the fleshy chamber lying in wait for them. Dee clambered into her own, while Tenebris slid into another, the organic tissues parting to make room. The lips shut behind them, the increasingly familiar green bioluminescent veins taking over for lighting the interior. Tenebris clenched as she entered, her discomfort flowing into Martin, who was in a similar predicament in her rectum. Yet, somehow, he found it less uncomfortable than what he saw and heard from the tablet. It was something about the way it felt; while her colon was undoubtedly worse in most ways, the unnatural surface of the elevator made his skin crawl and his fear centres shriek.  

“I fucking hate this.” The emulation whimpered. He silently agreed. 

Acceleration. Going down. 

Idle pulsating of the surrounding flesh, both inside and outside. Only one was green, though. 

Deceleration.  

By the wait, Martin assumed they had travelled more than a few floors. The lips parted once again, allowing his co-conspirator (at least he hoped she was) to exit back onto one of the floors. She glanced about, laying her eyes on one of the membranous windows. The outside view was drowned in a sea of orange dust, making only the nearest of the towering spinal buildings visible. However, she didn’t pause long enough to get a good look and continued following Dee. 

Tenebris looked at the ambassador’s clothes. Only then did Martin notice she was wrapped in a translucent dress, one which looked like it should have hung below her feet but seemed to constantly miss the ground, never quite reaching it. The see-through outfit was membranous and interspersed with opaque veins like the wings of a dragonfly. It was wound multiple times around her body, cloudy layers making her form below invisible, but when the light struck it illuminated her gangly silhouette. 

“So, ambassadors.” Tenebris spoke aloud, making conversation. “Can you explain that to me?” 

“Ah, a common one.” Dee grinned. “In some places, you might call us ‘Dits. We’re the ones who bridge the gap between Edoans and galactic humans. Ambassadors.” 

‘Dits. Conduits. Martin had heard of them, once or twice, back on his home station. They were the ‘translators’ from more advanced systems. The ones who through various methods fundamentally altered their thought processes so much that they were no longer comprehensible to the ‘lesser’ galactic civilizations. Thus, conduits evolved independently throughout the galaxy; a space-age Moses who could take down the word of God from the mountain and allow everyone else to get a good look at it. 

“I’m familiar.” Tenebris tilted her head to the side. “Why take us planetside, then? Couldn’t you just make the purchase yourself, up on the station?” 

“We like our meetings.” Dee said. “Speaking of the purchase,” she continued, “where is the Parvian?” 

“Oh, he’s just getting punished. Gotta keep ‘em in line, you know?” She tapped her hip. Martin elbowed her insides, making her jump. 

The ambassador’s expression shifted to something else for a half second but was quickly submerged beneath a returning smile. “He will need to be removed to be inspected.” She informed. 

“Yes, of course-” 

“There is a bathroom here if it makes you comfortable.” She interrupted, gesturing off to her side where a membrane door lie. It peeled open, as if aware it had been addressed. Awkwardly, Tenebris entered the room. 

The interior was circular, with white surfaces of bumpy material that called to mind eczemic skin. There were only two objects in the room; a ceramic toilet and sink. After a few moments, the bumpy, skin-like surfaces began to undulate and shift, their textures changing and shapes beginning to protrude. Soon, the interior was made of comfortable subdued tiles, hints of colour only barely present. Just like their room, the space was artificial, made of contracting chromatophores and muscular hydrostats to give the illusion of a normal bathroom.  

“You heard her?” Not-Tenebris asked. 

“Something isn’t right here.” 

“Agreed.” She began to shimmy down her pants on the screen of the tablet. Martin’s stomach lurched as she bent over to drop them to her legs. 

“Why the ass again?” Martin complained, trying to make his way to her ‘exit’. 

“I’m going in, get ready.” She ignored him.  

He patched out of her sensory feed and clicked off the tablet. A light entered Tenebris’ insides, followed by a pair of fingers grabbing at his legs. He made sure to pull his shirt up to cover his face and was soon pulled out from the Martian.  

Tightly clenching his yet-to-adapt eyes, he began feeling running water over his body. It was warm, thankfully. Tenebris’ thumbs scrubbed down his body.  

“Deja-vu, huh?” She joked from above – her real voice, without the emulation or the slight compression or artifacts of her audio feed.  

“Yeah.” Martin rubbed his hands on his face. Feeling his eyes had been given enough time to get acquainted with normal light again, he opened them to a slit, blinking a few times.  

“Ready to get this over with?”  

He sighed. After a little while, he finally answered, “yup.”