He inhaled, the last breath he would take before breaking the trance.
Odyssey's surface sloped away on either side, gleaming in the twinned sunlight. Visually, the city's shell was just reflective enough to merit the term “opalescent” without being uncomfortable to look at. Aurally, it might have been pitted with millions of imperfections, but the overall effect was heavily reflective as well. Panatakis used that sound to map out the curve far beyond what human eyes could have perceived.
Eantio, to his left spread out in low-lying villas originally built on the verdant banks of Iason's River. That city was never very loud, but sounds always came from discrete areas within its limits. Parks, open-air concert halls, and the like dotted Eantio's cityscape, and the straight-line roads originally built to connect the widespread villas produced crisp, even echoes. To his senses, the colors of Eantio were dark, quiet, but easy to see. Panatakis could trace out every road in that city with his mind.
Across an imaginary line laid down as the two cities spread, Tavros's towers rose in a forest of glass and steel to his right. That city was loud at all times of day and night. Panatakis wondered how those living right on the boundary of either city coped with the sudden cultural shift from one side of the road to the other.
Tavros was alive with motion and noise. Vehicles swarmed around its buildings without cease, especially during the day. The colors barely changed at night when the cool air carried sound even farther. By contrast to Eantio, he had trouble imagining Tavros from this distance. It was so noisy and the profusion of tall, reflective buildings twisted the colors of the city's sounds back upon themselves.
The sounds from Tavros produced a clear outline, unlike Eantio's slow fade into the countryside. However, unlike the well-planned villa streets to his left, the roads of Tavros wound around the buildings like a knot of yarn. Inside the city, down on the ground amid all those towers, Panatakis could focus on some of those sounds, but from that distance most of what reached his mind was a bright muddle of color with no rhyme or reason to it.
Ironically, the sheer volume of noise coming from Tavros made the Odyssey's shell easier to image on his right side. The parts of the city's exterior that reflected sound from Eantio were fuzzy by comparison.
As the burning in his lungs started to override the mental blocks he placed on the sensations of his body, Panatakis saved a mental snapshot of the landscape to his implants' memory. Allowing his heart and lungs to function at their normal rate again, he compared that image to the one he took the week before, finding the newer one ever-so-slightly clearer.
The final part of the exercise required the visual data he had prepped before holding his breath. Panatakis tuned things so that he could see the visual spectrum for a few seconds and compared that image to the one he assembled by sound. The colors, of course, were nothing like reality, but reality was drab and boring by comparison. What was important was the clarity of the image itself, and in that area both were nearly identical. In fact, his auditory map contained more detail than the limited point of view provided by his eyes could generate.
He felt a swell of pride in his chest as his accomplishments. Not bad, he told himself, for a man who was nearly blind six years ago.
Finally, he checked all of the mundane data coming in from his implants. Simple things like temperature, humidity, and barometric pressure were possible even with his first generation of implants. At this point in his training, he used those data readouts more as accuracy checks than anything else. If his implants agreed with the computer in his pocket, which they always did, then he knew he could trust them.
Panatakis stepped back into “his” Odyssean suite. First Lord Eurybia technically owned the opulently expensive apartment, but she gave it to him for his use shortly after the first successful trial of his earliest implants. Even by Odyssey's standards, the multi-room suite was expensive, the sort of place that he never would have been able to afford inside the space-starved dome without his Hexarch's aid.
The few people who came to visit often commented on his unusual taste in decoration, but those people saw with their eyes. As he moved, his footsteps and even the rustle of his robes set echoes moving through the air around him.
Those sounds reflected off his various art pieces and unusually-shaped furniture in a variety of ways. Pitches rose or fell when they encountered strange angles and curves. At times, an echo would be louder than the sounds that produced it when a noise fell into one of the strange, parabolic sculptures in just the right way.
His hard-soled shoes produced sharp blue clicks that bounced in pulses around and through everything, while the shifting of his robe around his feet played a red-orange counterpoint in smooth waves. He whistled a single, sharp note, interjecting a spear of purple into the air that spread outward, bouncing and throwing everything for a few meters into sharp relief.
With his daily practice over, he re-opened his senses the rest of the way. A flood of sound came to him, color translated into pitch and volume in the exact opposite way that his ears turned sound into light. The scales were similar; brighter light equaled louder sound, and higher-frequency color translated directly into pitch.
The room around him erupted into music as his eyes swept across things. Other art, little more than a mismatch of colors to those poor souls with human eyes, sang to him in ethereal voices. His robe today was a dark blue shot through with dozens of glittering designs. To his mind, the garment hummed a quiet soprano interrupted randomly with the sounds of crystal bells as light caught the silver threads.
Originally, the implants had been designed to restore his sight, possibly enhance it somewhat. Early on, the scientists had been fascinated by the second generation's ability to perceive visual wavelengths ever so slightly into the infrared and ultraviolet range. Panatakis had as well, if he was being fair. It had been so long since his eyes worked at all, that expanding his vision into those bands was no more difficult than restoring it in the first place.
It was not until the third generation, when Eurybia's scientists tried to enhance his other senses, that Panatakis discovered he could “rewire” his brain at will. Ever since then, he tweaked the interface between his implants and his own neural pathways, pushing further to see what was possible.
He often asked himself, with that sort of control over his own mind, why he would ever be tempted to interact with the world in a “normal” way again.
His suite's door chime sounded, bright blue amid the rapidly quieting colors around him. It rang once, the sign of someone in the corridor outside wanting his attention, not necessarily someone with the clout or personal permission to simply enter the room. It might have belonged to First Lord Eurybia, but as long as the suite was legally his, only people Panatakis permitted could enter.
Just in case, he waited a moment to see if his potential guest rang a second time. He did not wait long, however. Panatakis, for all his ability to focus when he needed to work on something, was not a patient man.
When the door chime did not sound again, he made a hand gesture that his pocket computer would interpret even without the holographic interface active. Hidden microphones around the room picked up his voice and carried it to the door. “May I help you?”
“You have a visitor, sir.” His ears interpreted words normally, passing them along to his brain exactly as anyone else would have heard them. Even through a speaker, Panatakis was still privileged to certain additional information. Emotional tones colored everyone's words, and in Panatakis's case it was literal. For whatever reason, the messenger sounded nervous.
“Enter.”
The suite's outer door slid open so quietly that the color of its motion was a dim red mist rolling across the floor like fog. Cutting through that fog were the short, sharp footsteps of his sole messenger. Each step was a brief flash of light, bright for just a moment before fading quickly against dull red glow of the wall-to-wall tapestries.
The messenger stepped into his room, allowing Panataki
s to see more clearly the noises of his passage. His heartbeat was a ripple, spreading out around him, dim against the bright noises of his feet. His robes hummed in the pleasant, warm tones of silk. Panatakis looked over his shoulder for a moment, taking in the viola hum of his yellow robes just enough enough to attempt a visual identification.
His visitor's robe rustled, stiff. Either a new garment, or the man had been recently elevated. The smooth fabric, unbroken by embroidery, told the rest of the story. “Messenger” was likely his first job since his latest Elevation, and Panatakis wondered what achievements brought him to his newest rank. It did not take very much to rise from Fifth to Fourth, but he was clearly nervous about his newly increased responsibilities.
Panatakis had never seen this man before, and so he turned, inclining his head in greeting. He did not look directly at this messenger, instead keeping him in the periphery of his vision as they spoke.
Panatakis smiled. “Are you my visitor, Fourth Lord?”
“No, sir.”
“What is your name, then?”
“Cyrus, sir.”
“How are you doing today, Fourth Lord Cyrus?”
Panatakis heard his heart speed up. “Sir?”
“How are you today, Cyrus? It seems a simple enough question.”
His heart continued to thunder, sending little ripples out from his chest. “I'm, um. I'm doing well, sir. Thank you for asking. How are you today, Second Lord, Titan, sir?”
Ah, thought Panatakis. There was the cause of his anxiety. He smiled again. “I'm well, thank you. Now, you say I have a visitor? Tell me who and where.”
Cyrus nodded, obviously put a little at ease by Panatakis's politeness. His heart slowed somewhat, but not very much. “Second Lord Helena, Titan of Dasos, arrived an hour ago and asked to meet you specifically, sir.”
“Thank you, Cyrus. Tell Helena I will meet her within the hour at,” he paused, thinking, “Three Peaks. You know where it is?”
Cyrus nodded.
“Good. Escort her there yourself, Fourth Lord.”
He nodded again. “As you say.”
Cyrus turned on his heels and strode out of Panatakis's suite. He seemed, if possible, even more nervous than he had been when entering. Panatakis knew he put the man at ease, and so wondered what suddenly set him off again.
Three Peaks, his personal favorite coffee shop, was not far from his suite and he gave Helena an hour. They might have communicated a few times over the last several days, exchanging messages that were as light on content as possible. Their identities might have been public, but few other details of the Project were, and the risk of their messages being intercepted was too high to risk.
He supposed he could look up whatever public information was available on her, but Panatakis knew nothing had changed since the last time he went looking. At that point, the only things he could find were a handful of old, poor-quality holos registered to an obscure Dasos news agency. They showed Helena from years ago, just after her implants went in and before her hair grew back out.
He could get more information by using Eurybia's personal key, but she tended to be cross when he took those kinds of liberties with her authority. More important right at that moment, going rifling through the Hexarchs' records would be boring.
Why, Panatakis asked himself, should he waste his time with that, when he would have an opportunity to talk in person? After all, he reasoned, they had a lot to talk about—counting himself and Helena, the sum total of human cyborgs was two.
***
Panatakis arrived at Three Peaks a few minutes ahead of his promised hour to find Helena already there and seated. She was easy enough to pick out from the crowd, even for human eyes. Human skin muddied sound, but the metal of her implants, like his own, reflected clearly. They stood out in his mind as though lit from within by some sort of clear blue light.
She stood when he arrived and they shook hands. In person, Panatakis found her to be strangely alluring. The bone structure of her face, and not just that but her entire body, sounded delicate. Someone relying on his eyes might have considered her petite, or any one of a dozen other cliche adjectives, but Panatakis heard the way she moved and the interplay between her human body and the implants. With no way to tell how deep her implants ran, he found it hard to gauge exactly what her physical capabilities were, but between the sound of her muscles and the strength of her grip, Panatakis knew something more than human lurked underneath Helena's skin.
Like him, Helena was a Second Lord. Her robe sang a soprano chorus of blue, pitch perfect and precise. Every fold of her clothing was exactly where it needed to be to produce a beautiful, alluring song. He wondered if she shared his ability to hear colors and designed the drape of her robe to match or if the mathematical precision was simply some other by-product of her own implants.
Above her robe and cascading down the back, her dark hair hummed a rustling bass line. Light reflected off the myriad twists of her braid, strings and deep rumbles that filled out the chorus begun by her robe. Strangely, other than the high polish on her implants, Helena wore no jewelry.
She turned pale blue eyes on him, twinned airy solos that reached heights of pitch the choir making up her robe never could. When she spoke, her lips moved with mathematical precision that lent her words a mechanical quality. “Thank you for agreeing to meet with me, Second Lord Panatakis.”
Helena indicated the two chairs of their table, and he sat before replying. “We're both Titans, there's no need for rank between us.”
She nodded. “Of course.”
“Have you been waiting long?”
“Not long. Seven hundred seconds, perhaps.”
“Seven...?” he asked, trying to do the math in his head.
“Apologies. About ten minutes.”
“I heard you were prompt,” he replied with a laugh. That was one of the few pieces of information he uncovered, from an early interview with First Lord Aegesander himself.
“I value efficiency.”
“You'd have to to work with Aegesander.”
One metal-clad eyebrow rose. “How so?”
“Have you never met any of the other Hexarchs?”
Helena shook her head.
“That explains it. Aegesander is very, how do I put this? He's very direct. He and Tritogenes have that in common.”
“Aegesander does not like Tritogenes very much.”
Panatakis laughed. “No. No, he does not. All you need there is to watch any one of the Council meetings over the last, oh, twenty years or so and that becomes clear.”
A green-robed Third Lord chose that moment to approach their table and take their order. Helena ordered a heavily-sweetened espresso drink with a single shot of locally-produced brandy added. For himself, Panatakis ordered something much simpler, but still worthy of Three Peaks's austere atmosphere.
“May I ask you something, Panatakis?”
He briefly considered falling back on an old joke and saying, “you just did,” but ultimately resisted that urge. Instead he nodded, saying, “of course.”
“Do you trust me?”
Panatakis stopped himself before saying anything. That had not been anywhere on the list of questions he expected her to ask, and it took several moments before he could truly process what it was she was asking. The tone she used was not an idle one; whatever Helena was going to ask next was clearly important.
What he needed was more information, so he asked for it. “Why?”
“We are similar, you and I, moreso than I and anyone else. I believe I may be able to add a function to your implants they have not yet possessed.”
Panatakis laughed. “If that's all it is, then sure. I tweak them all the time and it's been years since I've really minded having someone rooting around in my brain.”
“It may be uncomfortable,” she said, “if it works at all.”
Now, he began to feel a twinge of concern. “You've never done whatever it is you're about to do before?”
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Helena shook her head. Her hair scratched out a rhythm on her back that echoed around the room, rippling through the air like waves on a pond. “You are the only one with neural implants I have met. I know what I am capable of, but I can make no promises about what yours can do.”
He shrugged. “What's the worst that could happen?”
“Insanity,” she replied, deadpan.
Despite the cold chill in his stomach that her tone evoked, he shrugged again. “Let's do it anyway.”
“As you wish. Can you lean forward slightly?”
He instinctively bristled at the way she phrased her request, then relaxed. It might have been a little rude, but asking if he could do it still gave Panatakis a way out if he decided at the last second to change his mind.
Instead, he shifted slightly, leaning forward.
Helena did likewise, reaching out with both hands. He expected her to take hold of his head or for there to be some dramatic interaction between the two of them, but she simply touched the sides of his head where the largest cranial nodes resided, then sat back in her chair, watching him.
For a moment, nothing happened, then everything went black. All sight, all sound, everything vanished. He was vaguely aware of his own movement and bodily presence, but proprioception was a poor way to navigate the world. Only because the experience, his implants shutting down, was somewhat familiar to him did Panatakis remain calm.
Slowly, over a full minute, his senses returned to him. Hearing came first as the world erupted into conversation and the noise of human interaction. Sight would have followed, if he had any. Panatakis was aware of a tension in his eyes and could feel the muscles there moving, but nothing penetrated the blackness of his vision.
Moments later, he could see again, but the image was fuzzy and unclear. His implants functioned once more, but they showed him the world as everyone else saw it, flat and static. Across the table, Helen'a implants gleamed as highlights against her skin. Her lips, painted a red so dark it might as well have been black to human eyes, were quirked in a quizzical expression, part smile and part patient interest.
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