Cohost writing prompt: @Making-up-Mech-Pilots — Mech Pilot who says “watch this” then turns on the strange box they bought off a tweaked out spacer
"What is that?" Mher says, looking at the box.
"Dunno. Antique," Kiri says cheerily, stroking the labyrinthine carvings on its sides. It sits in her lap, shimmering with oilslick colours. "Ran into a feller in an old mining ship on Botolph Waypoint, strung on out on combat stims. Claimed he hadn't slept for two months, said he was on the stims to suppress his ability to dream. Said it was the only way he'd ever be able to get rid of it. Said it shows illusions."
"Illusions?"
"That's what he said. Or, my Vastrian's not very fluent, I think. I figure it's some kind of pornbox, right?"
"What a charming souvenir," Mher says dryly.
"He begged me to take it away before he ran out of money for stims and never managed to escape it," Kiri says. "Traded him a medbot with detox programming, and then he — it was really sad, actually, you could tell he had a real problem. Followed me all the way to the mech like he couldn't help it, couldn't take his eyes off it."
"That doesn't sound at all good," Mher says, eyeing the box. She doesn't recognise its workmanship or iconography at all.
"Well, I hope the medbot will help him kick his addiction to stims and to twelve-foot prehensile granny cock zero-g orgy porn, or whatever this is." Kiri turns the box over. "It's got a power signature; do you suppose this is the on switch here? Hey, watch this—"
The shadowy black tentacles that burst free of the box startle Mher into falling off her chair, scrambling back across their ship's little flight deck. Her psionics were never strong enough to qualify into combat telepathy, but too pronounced for regular piloting; these things aren't physical but they're nonetheless real, not alive but telepathically active, constructs of the box's mechanisms, seeking surrounding minds—
She batters them away as they home on her brain, rippling with psionic barbs and quills and sucking mouth-ideas, trying to batten on and— something. They're flimsy enough, and she hooks in with ideated fingers and shreds, leaving the air heavy with the tang of ozone, her head pounding and achy.
"Kiri?" she says, levering herself up on the edge of the map table. "Are you—"
Kiri is looking down at the box in her lap, unseeing, the last black tentacle wrapped tight and hooked deep into her mind. She's smiling.
"Oh Kiri no," Mher says, panicky, and tries to pry it loose, then stops when Kiri's nose bleeds a little.
She's pretty sure, at this point, that she knows what it is. The Kitherians, that clade of voluntary Hive-Humans, radically adapted with gene-deltas and mindsurgery to deemphasise the value and survival of individuals over the collective, reputedly make use of devices when training their combat telepaths. This thing is designed to drill into its victims' psyches, induce them to construct their own perfect solipsitic fantasy prison, the dream they don't want to escape.
It takes either iron self-control, or teamwork, to get free.
Presumably, if it didn't kill its previous owner, it will relinquish for raw physical survival reasons. And presumably, if he resorted to such desperate measures in the end to resist its temptations, it won't for anything less.
There's no help for it; no station or other telepath for at least a week's travel in any direction. If Mher doesn't want to simply watch Kiri's physical condition deteriorate until the box fails safe, she's going to have to do something deeply invasive of her oldest friend's privacy, and hope she's forgiven.
It's a little like walking through a thick fog, and emerging into a bright clearing.
Setting up the psychodive didn't strictly require much, not even skin contact; but Mher isn't much of a telepath. The flight deck chairs are all part of the deck fittings, so she couldn't push them together; she risked moving the box out of Kiri's lap instead, sat on the deck between her feet and draped her limp hands on Mher's shoulders, reached up to cover her fingers with Mher's own, concentrated and controlled her breathing and slipped into Kiri like a sunwarmed sea.
"Kiri?" she calls, casting around for the locus of her friend's attention, skirting the humming claws of artificial focus caging her. "Kiri, where are— oh."
The bright clearing is...a memory. A farmers' county fair; the smell of fried food; a blurry crowd. Evening, music, dancing.
"Kiri?" Mher says, behind Kiri's shoulder. "This is— isn't this—"
"We were nineteen," Kiri says dreamily, slow dancing with a memory.
"I think you're remembering me a little too flatteringly," Mher says, peering at something like her own face. "Oh," as nineteen-year-old remembered Mher looks up into Kiri's face in a way that makes Mher's actual chest tighten. She remembers this, too, in a bizarre picture-in-picture way, as she stood on her tiptoes and shyly, lightly kissed her best friend, then and now, on the lips. "Oh, why this, Kiri—"
Kiri tightens her arms around an old memory, and keeps dancing, longer than the actual pause went on, face blissful, Mher's heart hurting with her own memory of how perfect it felt.
"That's when you told me you'd joined the Sparklarks," Mher says eventually.
"If I'd known it was the last thing we'd say to each other for ten years..." Kiri says, and demonstrates what she thinks she'd have done instead; says nothing, keeps slow dancing, and Mher feels like crying, because it's been good having her friend back, but she'd thought— she'd thought— they weren't nineteen any more, and the soap-bubble brilliance of first feelings weren't something you got back—
"Kiri," she says, "this isn't real, it's the old spacer's pornbox...you know that, right?"
"Sure," Kiri says agreeably, cheek resting on Mher's hair, as the wait goes on and on and she doesn't say it.
...In her perfect self-made fantasy prison, she just doesn't leave.
"You have to voluntarily let this go to get out of the box, Kiri," Mher says. "Come on," and Kiri closes her eyes and makes a little uh-uh sound. "Kiri."
"I like this," Kiri says. "I don't hurt you and I don't go off and kill people for a living and turn hard inside. I don't turn into a coward who'd never dare do this again."
"There's room on the flight deck to dance," Mher says.
"That's a different dream," Kiri says, lips curling, and Mher steps right up behind her and stands on her tiptoes to look over her shoulder at the memory-Mher, and nineteen-year-old Mher has the scar under her eye that Mher didn't actually pick up till four years later; the one she's never talked to Kiri about, the one you can only see if you look really, really closely.
She takes Kiri's arm, not even sure what she's going to do until she's ruthlessly prised it away from fantasy-Mher and wholesale crowded her out of Kiri's grasp. "Fuck your dreams," she says crisply. "We were nineteen on a dead-end planet and you needed out. I got over it. I got over you, I was nineteen, I wasn't pining all those years. You could have timed telling me better, but the Sparklarks don't count recruitment as final until you hit the boarding ramp, and I didn't get over myself and come to the spaceport to ask you not to go until a hour too late; so whose fault was that?"
Kiri stutters, then her eyes go huge: "I don't know that," she says. "I don't know you came to the field at all. How would I know that? Oh shit, you're not imaginary—"
"—Damn right I'm not," Mher says, sitting on the flight deck floor between her feet, the feel of tear tracks on her cheeks.
"Ow," Kiri says groggily. "Mher—"
Mher tries to get up, nearly falls on her face, and climbs more carefully to her feet using Kiri's knee for support. "I'm getting a medbot to check you," she says.
"Mher—"
"What."
"I wasn't..." Kiri says, flushed, gaze pointed anywhere Mher isn't. "I haven't been pining for a teenager all these years either, you know? That was— that— you grew up pretty great."
"Oh, wow," Mher says. "Wow, you got worse at saying 'I love you'. That's magical. God, you're lucky I love you back."