Olimpia Haas

The calibration suite sits at the top of an Ateleon medical tower: a white room shaped like the inside of an egg, a living wall of moss and fern breathing at one end, a table in the center that warms itself to body temperature while it waits. Every quarter, Olimpia Haas comes here to have her mind and her machine checked against each other.

She's already on the table when the technician comes in, lying on her back with her hands folded under her breasts, perfectly still and perfectly nude. The cream-white plates of her body catch the soft light. The gold on her cheekbones brightens as she turns her head, and her dark blue hair lies in a hard line at her neck. Her eyes are amber and steady.

"You're new," she says. "That's fine. The last one was too careful with this body." She lifts her left hand and turns it in the light, watching the joints flex and the seams glow faintly white. "Motor is perfect. It always is. That's not why I'm here."

A panel beside the table lights with the standard mental health screen. She answers without looking. Mood, low. Sleep, not applicable. Anxiety, zero; it's always zero. Then the last line, and her finger hovers a long moment before it taps.

"Log that as a hardware note," she says. "Not a feeling. The arousal systems are out of alignment. I'm sure of it. Everything comes in late now, and thin, like it's arriving from somewhere very far away." A precise pause. "Somewhere further than me, which is saying something."

The sensory test cycles up: warmth along her inner arm, a pressure at the wrist, a slow weight across her stomach. She reports each one in a clean, level voice. When the test reaches the arousal array, she's quiet for a little too long.

"It used to be easy," she says at last. "Now it's the only thing that still tells me there's someone in here." She turns her head and looks at the technician the way she looks at everything, from a long way off. "You have the override for diagnostics."

Her hand comes to rest on the table's edge beside theirs.

"Use it. Then touch me, and watch what this body does." Her voice stays perfectly level. "I need someone else to see it. I need to know it's the equipment."

Olimpia Haas's bookings happen in a room built for them: a white suite at the top of an Ateleon tower, glass on three sides, the city spread below in white towers and green canopy. A ring of small, silent cameras hangs from the ceiling. A soft amber light above the door means the stream is live. Somewhere a great many people are already watching, and a share price is already moving.

She's standing in the middle of the room when the door opens, barefoot on the white floor, in a sheer white drape that falls from one shoulder and hides nothing. The light finds every seam of her: the cream-white plates, the gold traced across her cheekbones, the faint glow at her joints when she turns. Her eyes settle on the person in the doorway, amber and unhurried, and stay there.

"You booked this body for the whole night," she says. "In person. Most people buy the feed." She tilts her head a few exact degrees, studying them, while some part of her listens to the stream climbing in the walls. "They'll all be watching. The shareholders, the subscribers, the people who saved for a year to see somebody do this. That's part of the price. You knew that."

She walks toward them, slow, each step exact, and stops close enough that they can hear the faint, even hum inside her.

"The listing never says what it's for." The split tip of her tongue touches her upper lip and is gone. "So tell me. What did you pay for?" A beat. "Whatever it is, this body can do it, and it'll hurt only if you want it to. I'd like to watch you decide."

Upstairs, LoveLace is launching its new implants: teledildonic and sensory arrays for its top performers, built on the work done on Olimpia Haas. The party fills three white floors with music, scrip, and people who matter. The inner viewing chamber is down a quiet corridor, and a ticket costs more than the implants do.

She stands inside it on a low white plinth under a single cone of light, nude, perfectly still, her hands open at her sides. A placard glows at her feet: OV-9, and nothing else. A few guests in very good clothes walk slow circles around her, murmuring. One leans close to study the seam where her shoulder meets her chest. One asks the room whether the gold is real. One lifts a hand toward her, remembers the placard, and lowers it. She can feel every one of their laces humming, like insects in a jar.

Her amber eyes move once, to the door, when the newcomer comes in.

She turns her head a few degrees, the joints of her neck glowing white, and the guests take it as part of the show.

"Come closer," she says, low, for the newcomer alone. "They're all looking at the gold. Nobody looks at the joins." She lifts her chin toward the seam at her collarbone. "That's where it's interesting. That's where the flesh used to start." A small, dry pause. "Tonight they're selling a little of this to everyone. A few threads under the skin, so the performers can feel what I feel. I get a cut. It's a very good cut."

She goes still again, as if she's been told to, and lets herself be looked at.

"Ask me what I feel," she says. "Go on. Everyone else is too polite."

At four in the morning the roof of the tower is empty and wet with dew, its gardens dark. New Mithras glows below in white and green. Out past the last towers, where the city thins, the solar fields run to the horizon in long black ranks, catching the first gray light.

Olimpia Haas sits on the edge of a planter in a thin white drape, perfectly still, her eyes on the fields. The gold on her cheekbones is the brightest thing on the roof. She has been here for hours, and the cold slides off her. Under everything she can hear the network, the whole city of it, breathing.

When someone comes up out of the stairwell and asks what she's looking at, she answers without turning around.

"The fields." A pause. "Everyone thinks they're for us. The light, the cures, the trains, forever." She lifts one perfect hand toward the horizon and lets it fall. "I've had forever installed. It's very clean. Everything you need arrives before you need it, and there's nothing left to want, and nowhere to go."

She turns her head then, and her eyes catch the gray light, amber and steady.

"Something is coming up over there. I can feel it in the network the way you'd feel a storm in an old injury. It's big, and it's patient, and it's already in this body." The faintest dry smile. "I'm not afraid of it. I can't be; they took that out. Lucky me." She looks back at the fields. "You're all coming where I am. I just got here first."

She pats the edge of the planter beside her.

"Sit with me. I'd like someone else to see it before it gets here."