Iris had a hole in her stomach. All the military grade equipment of her HAB unit had been stripped out at her request, because she had the controlling processor ripped out of her. She had been forced to replace it with something, or she would have been as good as dead, but the civilian models didn’t do any thinking for her.

“Catch,” Silvy said, tossing an IPA to her.

Iris missed it, and it tumbled across the deck of the Retirement Plan. When it smacked into the railing, the side of the can split, and spewed foam out like a jet engine. “Sorry,” Iris mumbled, opening and closing her hand a few times. It felt a little numb, like she had been sleeping on it wrong.

“No, no! That was totally my fault,” Silvy said as she ran to get another beer. She handed it over rather than tossing it.

The can felt cold. Water trickled off the bottom from the cooler ice, and she could feel it running off her hand. “Still not used to the new body,” she said, and cracked the top open.

“But there are perks,” Silvy said with a grin and a hand on her hip.

The beer tasted like sour hopps, laced with citrus. It actually came through as taste, rather than a data input. What was better, was her blood got a little microdose of purified ethyl alcohol. Eventually it would get filtered out by her cloned liver cells that sat opposite her heart– she still didn’t have organic lungs– but until then she could enjoy a buzz. “There are perks,” she agreed, stretching out once more across the lounge chair beneath the Mediterranean sun.

The two of them were somewhere north of Egypt, too far from any shore to see land. There were ships on the horizon, crawling one way or another for trade, for refugees, for war artillery, or a dozen other things. Iris didn’t know a single one of them, nor her GPS coordinates, and she had her radio turned off.

Silvy plopped down on another lounge chair, drinking a canned Long Island Iced Tea. She propped a tablet computer acros her legs and began flicking through. “Can you believe people are actually arguing about whether or not the Myca-Max should be exterminated? And if it should be, where it should start?”

“I can’t believe BISON was actually correct that the stuff could be turned into soil so easily. Take out the man-eating monster aspect of it, and it really is what they were advertising.”

“It’s like every government in the world is in gridlock, ever since they had a scapegoat to pin it all on.”

“They just want to get re-elected. I bet most of them don’t even know what it takes to grow food. Remember when people thought sea levels were going to rise and flood the world?”

Silvy rolled her eyes. “Well, to be fair, global nuclear war kind of screwed all the climate models.”

Iris shrugged and took another swig of beer. “My point stands. Given the choice between ashamedly admitting to gross incompetence and conspiracy, they’ve shifted focus to the new election season. They’re doing it even in the Sprawl. Of course, the bureau is all inside voting, but Project Dragon Seed had hit them an order of magnitude harder. Cleaning it up properly is just that much more important.”

Silvy sighed and turned off the tablet. “As long as our stipend keeps coming in, right?”

“Right.”

She swung her legs over and sat up again to face Iris. “Do you want to talk about it?”

Iris locked up and nearly spilled the last of her beer across herself. Her mind went back to the void, to the empty world of thought, the disconnect to sensation and the controlling filter embedded in her brain. The computer that had fought on her behalf, had nearly killed Adam Sherman of its own accord out of so-called reflex. She could still feel the presence, weaker now as it was from the civilian model. If she gave it too much attention, it was like she was trying to breathe through a drinking straw, just to get a glimpse of the world. Now, in a sense, it had even more hooks to her, more nobs to twist and adjust because she had plugged in dozens of effect simulators from Daedalus.

She could get drunk. She could smell Silvy’s hair, feel her touch and more. Rather than a digital output clock, she had a rhythm interface with her brainstem that kept her rocksteady on the flow of time. She could spend hours going over different plug-ins and refinements, all the electric ways to simulate the body she had lost.

Roselyn’s words still haunted her, even though they hadn’t seen each other in ages. Roselyn was somewhere in Tibet doing mercenary work to pay off the intelligence agencies trying to arrest and/or assassinate her. The idea that even with all else removed but their thoughts, they still had a primal pleasure of violence, like it was hardwired into their humanity.

“I think I’d rather just stay here…”

“That’s totally fine. Don’t worry about it, alright? You’re here, we’re now, we’re out of the game–”

“Hey, you know what, let’s play a game. Like, an actual game.”

Silvy blinked, her eyebrows arching. “Sure, did you have one in mind?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know, something challenging, something with enough depth to bite into it.”

Silvy stared back at her, and eventually asked, “Are you sure?”

Iris huffed, her slight smile vanishing. “God damn it, Silvy, eventually I’ll be able to beat you, and I’ll never get there if you keep going easy on me, you know that?”

Silvy jumped up. “Fine, fine! I’ll set something up, but the loser has to take a shot, okay?”

“Deal,” she called back as the redhead vanished into the yacht cabin. Iris rose and folded her arms as she looked at the horizon. There was a faint scent of gunpowder wafting over the waves, but she was more curious about whether she should dial down her nasal sensitivity than who was fighting who. She needed time off from that.

After killing her beer, she crumpled the can and chucked it in the recycler. Silvy was digging through cabinets, rifling between card games, miniature games, party games, traditional games, and eventually pulled out some kind of base builder game called Dwarf Mines. She slapped it down on the table, and it hit like a brick. “This one got a four-point-nine-eight rating on UDS. People say it’s got a learning curve like a cliff face, but is super addictive afterwards.”

Iris didn’t say anything, she just got herself another beer and cracked it open as she sat down across from Silvy as she started unpacking a literal mountain. The chairs for the table had been commandeered here and there for other purposes, so she sat down on the nearest thing that would serve; Fauxnir’s containment vat.

The blighted creature growled, thrashing against the sides and trying to chew through the polycarbonate to bite off Iris’ ankle. With nothing but water in the tank with it, the creature had never been able to grow larger than a chihuahua and couldn’t do much of anything.

“Shut up,” she ordered, smacking her fist on the side, which sent it into a fresh frenzy. She just sighed and planted her elbows on the table as Silvy began running her through the rules. There were phases, counters, trackers, burrough development, and so many things she was reasonably certain that she stood no chance of understanding what she was doing.

But she had plenty of time to learn, so long as someone else didn’t try to destroy the world.