The Floret in the Mirror Chapter 9 Draft Preview - "System Partition"

Hey all! Still on the content treadmill here, plus finishing up some freelance work on the side — hopefully that won't interfere with my uploading things on time, but if it comes to that, I'll let y'all know. I doubt it'd result in more than a single-week hiatus, but obviously I'd like to avoid that if at all possible. 

Content Warning: Plural system with a backseat member the front isn't really aware of

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System Partition

1.0.0-a1

The first thing Jess noticed was the scent — fresh bread, pungent cheeses, meat, real meat, and beneath it all a floral backing that was strangely familiar. Then textures crept in, and temperatures, warm and soft and comforting, a gentle rocking sensation. Finally, voices began to emerge from the susurrus of sounds around her, and by the time her eyes blinked open–

–I’m just saying, maybe we didn’t need to just pile into the truck and — hey, why are we stopping?–

–she was beginning to realize she wasn’t in Layla’s weird forest-hab anymore, but in a public place, ten feet off the ground, wrapped up in strong vines. “Uhhh?”

“Oh, good, right on time!” Polyphylla smiled down at her from entirely too close, and Jess’s brain, still wobbly, just about did a backflip inside her skull. “How are you feeling, little one?”

“Uhh, okay, I

still terrible, thanks for asking

think?” She blinked her eyes again and tried to reach up to rub them, but her arms were pinned in place. Polyphylla’s vines soon loosened, though, and she was able to follow through. “Where are we?”

“Cliff’s!” Leah’s voice, from below; when Jess craned her neck to see, Layla was there too, beside her, both of them leashed to one of Polyphylla’s vines. “It’s lunchtime!”

“And there was no earthly way we were going to eat all this baklava ourselves, anyway,” Layla added, holding up the covered tray she was carrying in her hands with a smile.

As her eyes relearned how to focus, she took in her surroundings — some kind of a restaurant or cafe, open and airy, with lots of space between tables and booths that were all much too large, with the seating at variable heights around them. She didn’t quite understand why until Polyphylla stopped at a booth and lifted Layla and Leah up into the taller end of the bench that ran all around the table. “Why don’t you sit here too, since you seem to be a bit more alert this time?” she added, gently plunking Jess down between them.

“This time…?”

“You came around a bit earlier,” Layla said, setting the tray down on the tabletop, “but you weren’t really coherent, and you went back under pretty quickly.”

“I’m afraid I may have overestimated your neurocognitive stability just a tad,” Polyphylla said, her undertones apologetic — though Jess wasn’t entirely sure how she knew that. “But I talked to Gallica and Arvense, and he says it’s probably nothing to worry about from a physiological standpoint. Are you retaining any of the memories that we reviewed?”

“Uhhh… I think, maybe?” Layla put an arm around Jess’s shoulders, and she reflexively leaned into the older woman; Leah, meanwhile, leaned into her. Part of her was still a little weirded out by all the casual affection, but she had to admit it felt really nice. “I think I remember being in court, and uh… being in the back of a truck? I don’t know. It’s all really jumbled.”

“Well, we can try again once you’re a little more settled,” Polyphylla said. “I wasn’t expecting any great strides to be made on your first day back, but it was certainly… informative, let’s say!”

“Informative?” But before Jess could press any further, another Terran — a floret, too, given the collar and the wobbly way she walked, not to mention the brightly colored uniform and apron combo she was wearing — came up to the table, climbing up on a little stool so she was level with the tabletop.

“Denise!” Leah waved excitedly. “Hi!”

“Hey, y’all~!” Denise said, waving back with one hand and brushing a lock of slightly-tousled brown hair back behind her ear with the other. “Good to see you! The usual?”

“It would be wrong to get anything but a Revolutionary,” Layla said, smiling and pushing the tray to the edge of the table. “And these are for you, fresh from the oven.”

“Ooo, baklava?” She clapped excitedly. “Everyone always loves your baklava! Thank you!” She finally noticed Jess, and her eyes went wide enough that even from the booth Jess could see her enormous pupils. “Oh wow, Jess! I didn’t know you were up and about!”

“Uh, yeah, hi?” Jess said, waving awkwardly. “I’m definitely Jess, alright.”

“She’s having some minor memory issues,” Polyphylla explained, reaching down to gently pet Denise, immediately knocking the lock of hair loose again. “We’re working on it.”

“Oooooh,” Denise said. “I’m sorry to hear that, Jess! Should I just get you your favorite, then? Class-A, Help Me Mistress?”

“S-sure, I guess?” Jess shrugged and looked away. If there was a feeling worse than running into someone who clearly knew you and not remembering the first thing about them, Jess had no clue what it was. “Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it! And let me guess, the Cuddle Puddle?”

“Mmm, yeah!” Leah said. “Extra messy!”

“Extra messy it is,” Denise said, giggling as she hoisted the tray of baklava and carefully stepped back down from the stool. “Shouldn’t be too long, y’all!”

Jess watched Denise walk away with the baklava, brain working overtime to try to catch up to what was going on around her. “So…that’s how we pay, yeah? Like, you make the baklava, they make the sandwiches?”

“No?” Leah said, looking confused.

“It’s not barter,” Layla added, “we just had extra baklava, so why not share it?”

“But…this is a restaurant,” Jess said, squinting in confusion. “You don’t bring food to a restaurant.”

“Why not? It certainly made Denise happy,” Polyphylla said, “and given how good my girls have gotten at baking I dare say it’ll make a lot of other sophonts happy as well! What’s wrong with that?”

“Yeah, well…” Jess pouted. Everything they were saying made sense, at least in terms of its own logic, but… nothing had ever worked that way. Sure, capitalism was gone, she’d remembered that much, but that didn’t mean any of how things were actually working made sense to her. She rubbed her eyes again and looked out over the cafe. Maybe if she

what’s that what’s that what’s that?!

checked out how others were doing it, she’d — “Oh shit,” she whispered, clinging to Layla as her eyes focused on a large, toothy maw attached to a massive feathery creature, “is that a fucking dinosaur?!”

“What?” Layla followed Jess’s gaze, and laughed. “No, that’s a Vreeüt. Tekshtmaret, I think.” She leaned around Jess and squinted. “Yeah, that’s Tekshtmaret. Haven’t seen her in a while!” She cupped her hands around her mouth and made a series of hooting and clicking sounds. >Hey! Tekshtmaret! Hii! How’s your work coming?< The not-a-dinosaur — which, now that Jess looked closer, had way too many eyes to be anything from her native biosphere — hooted something in response, but Jess was too busy being stunned that she understood what Layla’s noises meant to listen.

“But…what

that is a predator that is not safe run run run

are they doing here?” She felt a chill on her skin and a tingle on the back of her neck, and her heartbeat quickened.

“Uhhh, getting a sandwich, probably,” Leah said, shrugging. “Cliff makes great sandwiches. Are you– hey, Jess, are you okay?”

“H-huh?” Jess felt like she had a rock caught in her throat when she tried to swallow. “Y-yeah, just… I guess I thought, I dunno, maybe someone cloned a dinosaur, or something? I saw a documentary about that once when I was a kid.”

“The Vreeüt are from a star in what Terrans call the Scutum-Centaurus Arm, I believe,” Polyphylla said. “We domesticated them a few centuries before we discovered you cuties. I was just a youngbloom back then, I wasn’t ready for the responsibility of a floret, but I did put together a very attractive Vreeüt-like form, if I do say so myself.”

“Okay,” Jess mumbled. “And… they like sandwiches?”

“Everyone likes Cliff’s sandwiches,” Leah said, giggling and nuzzling into Jess’s shoulder, prompting a shiver from deep inside her and

oh. huh. that’s nice

a clamping down as Jess tried to will her body not to get turned on. “You’ll see when ours get here. A Help Me Mistress Class-A is a bit much for me, but I know you love it.”

“I’m glad someone knows something about me.” Jess tried to settle back into the cushy bench of the booth, tried to get her heart to calm down. She focused, instead of on the not-a-dinosaur, on the grain of the polished wooden tabletop in front of her. “What, uhm…what work?”

“Pardon?” Polyphylla said, leaning in just a little.

“Layla asked what, uhm, how the work was coming, just now. I don’t know why I know that, but…”

“Well, she’s a mathematician,” Layla said, “so I can’t say I particularly understand what’s going on when she talks about it, but we have talked about it a bit before. It’s nice to hear others talk about things that interest them.”

“Yeah, get Layla started about literature, we’ll have fun for hours!” Leah reached across to tickle Layla, who squirmed and tried to put Jess between her and Leah’s hand.

“Well, your language processing seems to be working well, at least.” Polyphylla reached in with a vine and directed

not this again no no look away

Jess’s gaze up towards her. <Can you understand me?>

“Y-yeah.” Again, Jess tried to swallow around the phantom blockage in her throat. “What is that?”

“The Affini dialect developed for Rinan-Terran space. It’s still the french language for most of the florets on the ship, since we have such a large Terran population.”

“Lingua franca, Miss,” Layla said, snickering.

“…did I do that again?” Polyphylla released Jess and laughed along with Layla. Stars, it was a beautiful laugh, too — Jess could practically feel it filling her lungs as if she were taking a deep breath. “Ah well, I’ll get it eventually.”

“So… she’s not a floret, then?”

“Of course she’s a floret,” Layla said. “I don’t think we even have any independents on board, do we Miss?”

“Not that I’m aware of,” Polyphylla said, “though it’s possible one might visit for some reason or another. Most of the independents in the fleet live on Telonema — that’s our command ship,” she added, glancing back down at Jess. “Much larger, and much less of a domesticate-first-ask-questions-later mentality.”

“…there’s bigger ships?” The bottom droped out of Jess’s stomach. How do they get bigger than this?!

“Oh my, yes. Tillandsia is actually fairly small for the role she plays in the fleet, you know. Telonema is nearly a hundred and eighty kilometers long.”

“A hundred and…

no

…eighty?” Jess felt her head start to swim. That was impossible.

“Anyway, being a floret doesn’t mean you can’t do stuff,” Leah said, taking Jess’s hand and squeezing it. “Like, yeah, getting blitzed on xenodrugs is fun and I like it a lot, but there’s more to life than that. Why do you think Cliff has the cafe, y’know?”

Jess hadn’t considered that. Cliff was a pretty human-sounding name, and if everyone on the ship was a floret, that implied certain things about Cliff. “Like… baking?”

“Yeah, I love baking, but I mean, I’m not a baker, I don’t run a bakery or something. I think that’d be too much, like, I’d get overwhelmed if I was doing it all day every day. Also, I’d have to wake up early! Ick!”

“I cannot ever imagine you waking up early,” Layla said, smiling across Jess at Leah.

“Well I’m sorry, Miss Morning Person.” Leah stuck out her tongue. “We can’t all get up at the crack of dawn and start writing! You know she’s written like twenty books?!”

“I have not. And anyway, half of them are more like pamphlets.”

“Sweetie, pamphlets are little things you unfold that are like, five pages total. You write books.”

Jess bit her lip and let the two argue around her for a moment, her hand still tightly held in Leah’s. While it was true that the sheer scale of how much everything had changed around her in just a few years was a bit terrifying, at the same time she felt more comforted than she could ever remember. Gallica had been able to push her deeper, down to a place where even thought was overwhelmed, but this — cuddling between a pair of maybe-not-perfectly-normal Terrans? — was a kind of comforting that she could understand, had even longed for when she’d been living on her own. Maybe this isn’t so bad, she thought,

this may feel nice but we still need to get away

even if I don’t really understand what’s going on half the time. “So, uhm, what about me?” she said, slipping into a conversational lull. “What do I do? Do I… do anything?”

“I know you’re not kidding,” Layla said, taking Jess’s other hand and squeezing it just like Leah had done, “but are you kidding? You do a lot.”

“As I understand it, you mainly help your owner find security holes in the ship’s systems by trying to break into them,” Polyphylla said. “Which I’m told involves quite a lot of work, and Gallica is rightly very proud of you.”

“…I’m her Red Team?” Jess said, blinking. “Holy shit.” She couldn’t quite bring herself to believe it — she was on an alien starship, a starship full of hyper-advanced technology made by a species that had utterly steamrolled the Accord and had made literal pets out of humanity, and she was in charge of breaking their stuff on purpose to find exploits in its systems. It was the coolest thing she’d ever heard.

Then reality caught up with her. “…shit.” Infosec work relied on knowledge of how systems operated, and that was often unique to particular languages, hardware, and so forth. The basic principles might be universal (and that was a big might considering the Affini’s level of advancement), but she didn’t know the first thing about how any of it worked — or rather, she used to, but had forgotten it all. “There’s no way I can do that anymore, is there?” she whispered to herself.

The table was silent for a moment. Then, Leah spoke, her voice gentle: “I know how you feel, actually. I used to have really bad memory problems, too. They were on purpose, it was part of how Mistress fixed me, but… I still couldn’t really retain anything she didn’t stick in my brain on purpose. She actually made it so that if I started stressing out, I’d just forget everything that happened for like, five minutes beforehand. And I used to get stressed out at a lot of things, so my brain was pretty much swiss cheese.”

“…seriously?” Jess couldn’t help but stare — the contrast between what she was saying and the way she was saying it, the horrifying content and the kindly tone, was like fingers tickling at the back of her mind.

“Mmhmm. And I know what you’re thinking: that’s scary, right? But if she didn’t do that, I’d have these awful spiraling self-hatred anxiety meltdowns that would mess me up so bad she’d have to go in and put me back together again from scratch. But I got better over time. I remember lots of stuff now, even some stuff from before Mistress. Some of it’s pretty hard to think about, too, but I haven’t had a meltdown in…wow, five years?”

“A little longer, I think,” Layla said, smiling.

“Five years, two months, eleven days.” Only now did Jess notice Polyphylla’s vines creeping up from under the table and coiling around Leah, and by extension around her as well. Leah, naturally, let out a sigh of relief and relaxed against Jess. “And that was scarcely a meltdown at all by the standards of where we started from.” The pride in her voice was palpable.

“My point is, Miss Gallica isn’t going to give up on you just because you can’t remember how to do something,” Leah continued. Her hand was growing ever warmer against Jess’s, the bakery-scent of her fighting through all the delicious smells of the cafe. The weight of her body was a kind of relief that Jess had never expected. “That’s not how Affini are. It’s okay to be a little scared, sure. I know not remembering things can be super scary! But just like Mistress took care of me and gave me the help I needed to be exactly who I really wanted to be, Miss Gallica will do the same for you. You’re her floret, and that means you’re a part of each other.” She gave Jess’s hand a little squeeze for emphasis. “Everything else is just details, and Affini are super good at details.”

Blinking at the sudden burning in her eyes, Jess let her head rest gently against Leah’s on her shoulder. “You’re… really good at this, you know?” Her voice was hoarse with the tears she was fighting back. “Making it seems like not such a big problem, I mean.

“I should hope so.” Leah let out a little giggle. “I’d make a pretty cruddy therapist if I couldn’t even help others with a little perspective!”

“And you really think I can come back from this?”

“We know you can,” Layla said.

“And all of us will be very happy to help however we can,” Polyphylla added. “Though, we should definitely wait before we try another memory-charting session. I know that probably isn’t what you want to hear, but it’s best to take these things one step at a time.”

“Yeah, I mean… if it scrambled me

it didn’t ‘scramble’ anything

that bad, we should

we should get out of here

take it slow,” Jess said, squeezing her eyes shut and trying to clear her head. “I still feel pretty weird, not gonna lie.”

“Do we need to go? We can take the sandwiches back to our hab if the cafe is overstimulating you.” Polyphylla’s vines slid across Leah to coil gently around Jess’s own legs, warm and cozy, setting her skin tingling.

“I’m fine,” Jess said, “let’s just

i’m not fine

eat here.” She buried the weird upset feelings as deeply as she could — she couldn’t just give in and run all the time if she was going to get anywhere in her recovery, she figured. She was with friends,

you barely know them

and they were safe. They felt safe. Jess felt safe — or at least, she told herself she did — with them. And she was getting hungry again, and while she didn’t know what a Help Me Mistress Class-A was, she was pretty sure it was going to be better fresh from the kitchen

okay you have a point i guess, but we go home right after

than it would be having been wrapped and carried and probably squished a little on the way back. Maybe once she ate something she’d stop feeling so mixed up inside. “So…what kind of books?” She glanced over at Layla. “Like, romance, mystery, sci-fi, what?”

“Nonfiction,” she replied, over the sound of Leah’s snickering. “Mostly just politics, reconciling human philosophy with Affini ethics, that sort of thing. Also a bit of literary criticism, comparing Affini storytelling culture to how humans and some other xenos like to structure narrative–”

“I wanna read a romance novel you wrote,” Leah said, sticking out her tongue again and poking Layla in the shoulder. “Write a romance novel!”

“I would be a terrible romance author and you know it.”

“Oh, don’t put yourself down like that!” Polyphylla’s vines were now all over all three of them. “You’d make a wonderful romance author, Layla! You’re so romantic!”

“Don’t encourage her, Miss!”

“Too late, I’m encouraged! Write write write!” Leah was still poking Layla when Denise returned, climbing up onto the stool with a tray loaded down with plates. “Oooh, yay!”

“A Cuddle Puddle, a Revolutionary, a Help Me Mistress Class-A, and mineralized water with a tea selection for the Miss~” she said, setting the plates out one by one. All of the sandwiches looked incredible — the water for Polyphylla came in a floral-print ceramic teapot, gently steaming. The one in front of Jess looked like fried chicken on toasted bread, with shredded carrots, cucumber, and red onions. There were little flecks of red peeking out of the chicken, and a spicy smell tickled her nose. “Oop! Can’t forget the milk!” She set down a tall glass in front of Jess as well.

“Mmm, yummy!” Leah immediately picked up her sandwich and dipped the corner in the little ceramic bowl it had come with, soaking up some of the – soup? – inside. “Thanks, Denise!”

“My pleasure, y’all!” she said, grinning as Polyphylla ruffled her hair into an absolute mess again. “Just shout if you need anything else, kay?”

“Will do,” Layla said. She, too, picked up her sandwich — some kind of a reddish hash of meat and other things between two slices of golden-tosted bread — and began to attack it with gusto. Jess eyed her own, her stomach grumbling

just eat so we can leave

as she lifted it and took a bite. It crunched marveously, all the way through — the bread, the chicken, the onions, the carrots, the cucumber. Her eyes began to water, and something

ow ow ow ow ow ow

hot began to tingle at the roof of her mouth. It was only after her nose, too, began to burn that she realized her tongue was on fire, that the heat was only building the more she chewed. A whine escaped her throat as she swallowed, and it was all she could do to squeak out “Oh wow, that’s hot” as she fanned her flushed face with one hand. “Oh shit that’s really hot!”

“Here, petal, have some milk.” One of Polyphylla’s vines lifted the glass and handed it off to her, and the cold, creamy liquid helped smother the flames a bit.

“Thanks.” She coughed and set the glass down. “I think… now I know what’s coming, I’ll be able to handle it a little better. But wow, that’s hot.” A wide grin was slowly splitting her face. “And really good, no

wait you liked that? i mean yes the flavor is nice but that actually hurt a little!

wonder that’s my favorite!” She took another bite, bigger this time, crunching away and leaning back as the heat set in again. “Mmmmmmf!” Wiggling happily, she took another bite, then another, before quenching the heat with another mouthful of milk to reset her palate. The more she ate, the better she felt — she was between two people who clearly really cared about her (and who were both soft and warm to an absurdly cozy degree), she had one of the most delicious sandwiches she’d ever tasted in her hands, and when this was all over, when she finally went home, she was going home to–

Okay. Gallica was kinda scary, both in terms of her size and when it came to how easily she could just shut Jess’s brain down, but she’d never once given Jess any indication that her love was anything less than totally genuine. She’d lost…however many years of memory, probably more than five, but she was definitely in a better situation than she remembered herself being in before. Yeah, she was a pet — that was still weird — but if this was what being a pet was like? Eating delicious sandwiches with friends, living on a gigantic spaceship that was apparently small by Affini standards? Being the ship’s sysadmin’s private Red Team?

Yeah, this was the kind of being-a-pet that Jess could tolerate. It sure the hell beat codecrunching.

…

ow. ow. ow. how can a sandwich hurt?!