Steel Beneath the Skin by Niall Teasdale

Author:Niall Teasdale [Teasdale, Niall]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: cyborg, Aneka Jansen, science fiction, adventure, archaeology, artificial intelligence
Amazon: B00D4MN40O
Published: 2013-05-31T04:00:00+00:00

Part Five: Plus ça Change

Yorkbridge Mid-town, 6.6.524 FSC.

‘I’m really not sure I’m ready for this,’ Aneka said as she ran a comb through her hair. The hair did not protest, but it was never tangled and did not need combing.

‘Of course you are,’ Ella replied, not looking around. She was trying to decide what to wear. ‘You’ve got the Dean’s dinner in four days. If you can’t handle an evening with Kate and Dillon, how are you going to manage a formal dinner?’

‘What if I do something stupid? Like… use the wrong fork.’ Now Ella did turn, favouring Aneka with a look. ‘All right, but I could say something wrong. I could offend one of them…’

‘Your face has been all over the news. Everyone knows you’re from Old Earth. Even if you did make some social faux pas we can gloss over it with your lack of knowledge of everything now.’

Aneka grunted an acknowledgement. ‘Well… what should I wear?’

‘Your swarm dress, minimal density. We’ll be having sex after dinner and you might as well let them glimpse the dessert during the main course.’

Aneka started for the bedroom door. ‘I’ve just got over my fear of threesomes, and you’re suggesting an oncoming foursome?’

‘If three is okay, four is easy. Dillon’s the one who’ll have to keep three women satisfied.’

‘Poor man. I feel for him. I really do.’

~~~

‘So,’ Katelyn said, ‘what was it like back then? I mean, we had to ask, right?’

Aneka smiled at her; yes, someone had to. She took a drink of the wine the couple had served, not a bad tasting drink, if nothing much like wine, and considered her answer. They had eaten a fairly simple meal which had tasted quite good. Perhaps that was because it was the first real food Aneka had consumed since waking up, but Aneka suspected that Katelyn was a good cook. They were chatting around the table while their dinner digested. In Aneka’s case, digestion involved nanobots disassembling the food and converting it into materials usable for repairs, while the water content was largely processed into fuel for her reactor. Al had decided to give her detailed readouts of the process, which she considered far too much information.

‘It was different from now in a lot of ways, but there are still a lot of similarities. I mean, I’m still learning. I haven’t even spent a month here and all the sleep learning simulations in the world don’t quite prepare you for the real thing.’

‘After a thousand years you’d think we were pretty different,’ Dillon commented. For a man with the muscles of a Greek god he had a surprisingly good brain. Then again, the average IQ of the human race was now about twenty per cent higher than it had been in Aneka’s day.

‘We didn’t have spaceflight back then. Well, there was a space station, we’d been to the moon, and there were a lot of satellites in orbit, but we hadn’t been to Mars yet. I think routine flight between the stars has made people a little more… cosmopolitan.

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