Marcus looked startled for a moment and then said, “You know…, a female, a woman, two X chromosomes...that kind of,” he paused awkwardly searching for a word, “...stuff.”

Lilijoy was shaking her head through Marcus’ explanation. He took a moment to give her a bit more water, and then said, “Well okay, I can see we have a bit of a communication barrier. Let’s not worry about that right now. Can you tell me your name?”

“Lilijoy,” said Lilijoy

Marcus smiled, “What a lovely name for a lovely...” Marcus’ words petered out awkwardly again, “...person,” he finished. “Anyway, Lilijoy, we have a bit of a mystery to solve together here. I am wondering if you have seen anything strange in the last day or two. Or if you’ve found something unusual, like a little box, or a crystal?”

Lilijoy was shaking her head again, her eyes welling up with tears. “Lilijoy has the fog. Only sees scratches.”

“Scratches...” Marcus pursed his lips. “Can you tell me what the scratches look like to you?”

“Lines that glow, with some shapes and some blinks.”

An expression of pleased understanding came over Marcus’ face.

“Now we’re getting somewhere! Lilijoy, I want you to try saying a few things. You can repeat them when I say them, and you have to think them too. Think them as loudly as you can. Then you let me know if the scratches change, okay?”

Lilijoy nodded.

“Okay. Here we go,” he said. “Status.”

“Staytuss,” Lilijoy repeated. She wasn’t sure why she was doing this, but as another strangeness on top of her recent experiences, she had very little energy left to wonder.

“Did you think it? Any changes?” Marcus asked eagerly.

Lilijoy nodded, and then shook her head.

Marcus hummed under his breath. “Here’s another one,” he said. “Cancel.”

“Cancel.”

Lilijoy thought the word really strongly, imagining her voice was loud and deep. Instantly the scratches changed. Now there were far less of them, and the delighted look on her face let Marcus know that something had happened.

“Something changed?” he confirmed. “That's more like it!” He began to mutter under his breath. “Don’t want to make any changes before we even know what we’re doing here. What about...yes, that could work.”

In the meantime, Lilijoy was ecstatic. She could see again! The room was uncomfortably bright, much worse than before when the scratches were blocking most of it. She squinted her eyes shut and turned her head to try to get a glimpse of Marcus. An enormous person with abundant white hair was leaning over a table, his back to her. He was looking for something and muttering to himself. He opened the side of the table and closed it, then opened another place and made a pleased sound, pulling forth a rectangular shiny object.

When he turned back to her, she could see that he was smiling. His face looked very young to Lilijoy, with hardly any wrinkles or growths on his light brown skin. No face hair either, more like Grabby than Mooster. His eyes met hers, small and brown in his large face, and his smile widened.

“That’s better now, eh? I want to show you something. This is a tablet,” he gestured with the device he was holding. “In a second, it will be up and running. I want you to look at the screen and tell me if it looks like the ‘scratches’ in your eyes. I think that what has been blocking your vision is called a ‘display screen’ or an ‘optic interface’ and what you thought were scratches are what we call ‘letters’. When you have several letters together, they can form words, like we use to talk to one another.”

After a moment, the tablet began to glow, and sure enough, there were the letter scratches! There were lots and lots of them on the screen at first, but after a moment, the screen changed again and then there were just five of the ‘letters’, much larger than before. Marcus pointed to them, saying,

“For example, the words ‘yes’ and ‘no’. It will be really important for you to know what these look like. These two letters up here mean ‘no’, and these three down here mean ‘yes’. Can you look for those letters in your interface?’

Lilijoy looked carefully through all the letters in front of her eyes.

“Yes,” she said “They are both there, at the bottom of my eye!”

“Okay. Now can you tell me how many other letters there are above those? I’m going to make my tablet show many different letters, and you can start at the top part of your interface and point to the letters you see on my screen. Then I will be able know what the interface is telling you.”

Marcus then changed the tablet screen again, and now it was back to showing many more different letters. After a lot of back and forth about which letters were on her interface, and how they were grouped, Marcus said, “Okay then, I think I’ve got it. It is asking if you want to ‘cancel the stage two integration authorization procedure.’ I don’t know exactly what that is, so lets try something different instead of doing that.”

He then asked Lilijoy to look really hard at the ‘No’ and to say and think “Select.” She did, and flinched as the letters filled her sight again, back to obscuring nearly all of her vision. She opened her mouth to complain, but Marcus quickly assured her it was only temporary.

“Now that we’ve got that out of the way my dear, lets see if we can make this easier for both of us,” he said. “Try a new command for me. This one will be a little longer. Ready?”

“Uh huh”

“Interface mode.”

Lilijoy repeated his words and the screen changed to a stack of what she now knew were words.

He showed her five new words to look for, ‘Auditory’, ’Verbal’, ‘Vocal’, ’Input’, and ‘Output’. This was harder than ‘Yes’ and ‘No’, but not too bad, and after some more back and forth refining what she was seeing, he settled on a new command for her to try.

“Output auditory only!”

Immediately, her vision cleared completely. She heard a series of tones, buzzes and odd humming sounds, followed by a gentle voice, neither low nor high, but with some of the drawn out qualities of the voices she had heard while unable to see. The voice sounded very bored to Lilijoy, like it couldn’t be bothered to speak with any feeling.

Audio parameters configured. Stage one integration at 8%. Stage two pending authorization. Secondary and support systems undetected. Communications in stealth mode. Emergency beacon canceled due to acknowledgment. If the emergency has not been resolved, please think the word ‘Help” three times. Pain signals above the override threshold detected. Emergency nerve suppression in left brachial extremity currently in place. All motor nerves and sensory systems to the affected area have been blocked. Vasal constriction implemented in all extremities. Nucleus acccumbens stimulation at low. Please indicate if pain and discomfort levels are unacceptable by thinking ‘Ouch’ three times.”

There was a pause, and then the voice continued.

Nanobody count below critical threshold at 14,031. Permissions required to initiate guided cultivation. To repeat this message, think ‘priority log’ three times.Nanobodies’ current energy incapable of sustaining auditory output. Minimal icon interface implemented. Check icon for energy level necessary to resume.

With that last message, Lilijoy saw a tiny picture appear at the top right side of her vision. Before she had the time to look closely, she was distracted by Marcus’ face looking closely into her own. He was in the process of saying something.

“...with me? How’s it going in there?”

Before she could reply, a wave of fatigue rolled her head back, and sleep took her.