“I’m here.”

  The electronic locks to the complex opened and I stepped inside. Her place was a complete mess, strange fluids ran down broken nano replicators, small drones and robots lied half-assembled while thick shielding covered long wires that ran across the floors and walls.

  I used to think it was only her that was like this, but after getting to meet several other hackers I was starting to believe this was just par for the course.

  Heading upstairs I stood right before the door to her room. I hesitated for a moment, every time I got involved in her schemes I’d always end up in some strange situation or another. It wasn’t too late to turn around and leave.

  Kshhhk!

  Now it was.

  As the sliding doors opened, a warm voice greeted me. “Well. What are you waiting for?”

  “Come in.”

  She was staring right at me, her violet eyes almost glowed behind a pair of visors that looked like reading glasses.

  “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t invade my privacy the moment I stepped in.”

  She stopped her intense stare then gave me a sardonic smile. “Sorry for being a little paranoid, you might not be fleet military but you’re still a security officer. I can’t ever be too safe.”

  “Right.” I grumbled as I stepped inside the wide room, compared to the rest of the house it was a lot more organized. Stacks of neural chips filled the shelves; a workstation computer hooked up to several monitors could be seen next to a decked-out dive pod.

  Looking back at her again, she was a lot more disheveled than usual. With messy long purple hair that reached all the way down to her back, if she had a lab coat on she’d look like a mad scientist.

  “Do you know what this is?” She raised a card-sized object with faint markings on it. It gave me the impression that it was a neural chip but nothing else about it looked recognizable.

  “Is it a brain scan?” It was a safe guess; I knew she had recently become obsessed with them so if she was showing me something, then it had to be related to that.

  “Correct, but it’s not just any brain scan. It comes from a time when man had yet to reach the stars.” She smirked as she pushed her glasses back up and walked right up to me, tilting her head up to meet mine. “You’re rather interesting as a person you know? There are quite a few people who hate AI, but their hatred is usually blanket. Class I, II, III, doesn’t matter, it’s all the same.”

  “But yours is different. It’s focused. You draw the line at AIs spec’d to have humanity, you hate them, and you hate anyone who gets close to them.”

  “Did you bring me here just so you could give me a sermon?”

  “Sermon?” She stepped back and gave me a strange look, “Oh no! Not at all, not at all. I just want to challenge your sensibilities, really it’s about the two things you hate the most. Lonely people and robots. Yes, this is all about treating your discrimination against lonely people!” She accusingly pointed a finger at me while speaking out in joyful admonition, almost like a joke, but her voice was too earnest for it to be one.

  Out of everyone in the galaxy she was the one woman I could never get a read on. She was a lot like the chief in that way; the two had an overwhelming presence. Where the chief was stern and intimidating, Estelle was spirited and impenetrable.

  “And how are you going to do that?” I looked at her then the pod, “Wait. You aren’t seriously thinking of making me dive into some sketchy scans are you?”

  “Sketchy?!” Her face contorted into a frown before she shook her head, “Listen, I’m not just some dumbass kid playing around with toys I don’t understand, if I were, I would’ve fried my brain ages ago.” She waved the chip in her hand, “The fact that this scan is still intact makes it a priceless artifact. It’s one of a handful of neural chips from that era, and more importantly, it’s something special to me, and I want you to dive into it.”

  I always turned a blind eye to her illegal hobbies but making me take part in them was going too far. “Why should I?”

  “Because I’m asking you for a favor.”

  I stared her down and she stared just as hard back

  “…Alright.”

  I didn’t put up with shit from anyone, but I owed Estelle, and as bizarre as she was, out of all the people in the galaxy, she was one of the few I trusted the most.

  ***

  “Hmmm~ hahumm~ hmmmm!”

  Estelle hummed along as she checked the various measurements taken from my body. “Well, everything looks good. Physically and mentally you’re in tip top shape! But that’s no surprise given your job.” She gave me a pat on the back and started leading me towards the dive pod.

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  “You should be fine… though some weird issues might pop up because we’re doing some conversions from our modern neural tech to this practically ancient piece of technology.”

  That definitely wasn’t the thing you wanted to hear right before a dive.

  “Issues? What kind of issues? This thing IS safe right?”

  “Safe? Of course, it’s safe! I promise you it’s safe… probably.”

  I glared at her, and she looked away to the side. It wasn’t reassuring but I was confident she wouldn’t put me in a situation where I’d be killed in some freak accident. Probably.

  Shaaaaaa…

  Misty vapor flew up from the pod enclosure as it opened, I turned around and slowly fell back, letting my body sink into the cool nanite-infused water. I laid my head on the headrest and took a few deep breaths as I felt the nanites interact with my skintight dive suit.

  “You have some weird hobbies ‘Stelle.”

  “Of course I do! If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be me. Now, before we begin…” She started mouthing off the neural-dive equivalent of a surgical safety checklist. “That wraps up the safety check, time to talk about why I’m even throwing you in this thing in the first place.”

  “I’ve been obsessed with brain scans for a while, even before I met you I was already a pretty big b-scan enthusiast, I tracked down as many as I could and the number of scans I’ve gotten a hold of and gone through is nothing to laugh at. I was an addict, a junkie.”

  “Not a particularly surprising result for anyone serious about the hobby.”

  It was hard to see from the pod, but she walked around the shelves, taking out chip after chip showing off what I presumed were the favorites in her collection.

  “But then I started to get bored with modern b-scans, they all started to blend together, look the same. I started wanting something different.”

  “That’s when I had the brilliant idea to hunt down some antiques! I kicked things off by going through scans from one human generation ago. Even within a minute timespan of 30 years, it was amazing just how differently humans led their lives from one generation to the next.”

  “When I had my fill, I went through scans two generations back, then three, then four and I kept going and going!”

  “Oh! I’m certain ancient historians would have looked at me with pure contempt and envy. They had to imagine the past, put together a crude mosaic built from millions of different disjointed puzzle pieces, flailing around in vain, always falling short, always being one step out of reach.” She clutched her shoulders dramatically, as if playing the role of a tragic heroine spurned by envious eyes.

  Her eyes met mine.

  “Not me. I didn’t have to imagine the past; I could live in it.”

  “At that point, I wasn’t an enthusiast anymore. I was a full-blown fanatic. As I went centuries into the past it became harder and harder to find older chips. The ones that were around, were now considered precious artifacts and those damn federation admirals always kept a tight lid on them.”

  “But I had my ways.”

  She took off her glasses and put on a specialized visor with a deep dark tint. A sigh escaped her lips, as she pulled out a pair of synaptic gloves. Her hands and arms started moving, typing and swiping away at the air. “I kept searching and searching until I finally found it.”

  The pod began to hum, and I could feel my heart rate climb; I felt a bubbling sensation spread all over my body, as if my nerves were radiating white hot flares outwards from my stomach. This wasn’t my first dive, but this overwhelming, almost explosive like sensation was something I’d never felt before. I could tell, feel, she was using some insane equipment.

  “You’re at the first stage of the dive, time for some suggestive therapy.”

  “He is,” slim fingers tapped away affectionately on the chips front plate, “in every sense of the word a truly unremarkable man. Maybe you could call him interesting, but I can’t say that he’s special in any way.”

  My eyelids started getting heavy. The hot flashes were fading, giving way to a soothing warm feeling that spread throughout my body. It made it hard to focus on the words of my self-proclaimed b-scan fanatic, but her statement did catch my attention. For her to be particularly interested in any, one, person was a rarity especially to a degree that bordered on obsession.

  “If he’s so unremarkable… then, to quote some girl’s poor parents,”

  “What do you see in him?”

  “Fufun~ You’ll see. This is the part where I’d tell you his name but there’s a strange corruption with the data, I’ve tried everything, but I just can’t seem to recover it.”

  Even though my mind was falling deeper and deeper, I couldn’t stop myself from retorting. “You don’t even know his name? Scandalous.”

  She put her fingers to her lips and said, “Don’t tell mom.”

  Taking off her visor, she stepped up to the dive pod and looked down at me.

  “You know, it’s always hard to say anything about anyone’s life. We’re all so different that it’s hard to make any generalizations. But you can usually tell when someone’s lived a good life.”

  “You’ve lived a good life, haven’t you?”

  What a strange question.

  I tried moving my lips to answer, but no words came out.

  “I know all about your background; you’ve lived a life just like everyone else. A life full of ups and downs, full of things you don’t regret, full of things you do.”

  “Everyone’s life is different, no, one life, is ever the same. Yet we’re all the same because nobody’s life is ever really perfect, because no one can ever be perfect.”

  “But.”

  “Calling us all the same is also a lie isn’t it?”

  “A convenient lie to make people think that we all have something in common, when there are people out there so different from one another so alien and foreign to the other that even if they traded places with each other for a day they would never come close to understanding one another.”

  Click!

  I heard the sound of a chip being slotted into place.

  “This chip, this man’s memories… mean something to me, something very special…” She gave me one last smile, before starting the pod’s dive sequence.

  “Don’t be scared. Deep diving into someone else’s memories won’t destroy your sense of self, nor will it dramatically change who you are. By the same principle, it also won’t make you magically comprehend the mind of the person whose life you’ll be experiencing even if you can feel each of their emotions.”

  “That’s why most people can dive but can’t deep dive, some minds are so different that it becomes physically impossible to immerse yourself into them. But you’re right on the very edge of compatibility, it’s ironic in a way, AI immersion candidates tend to make fantastic human deep dive candidates as well.”

  The last remaining gap between me and the outside world finally shut close and I was submerged into darkness. It felt like I was falling, not the endless jump-fall that jolts people awake when they’re dreaming, but the slow sinking that precludes a deep and heavy dream.

  When I had finally sunk into the realm of the subconscious, a distant voice from far away whispered into my head.

  “Have you ever been truly alone?”