###Chapter 13
She didn't touch the panel again right away.
Instead, she sat on the edge of the bed and let the room exist around her without engaging it. Hands braced on the mattress. Feet planted. Spine straight. The posture of someone deliberately choosing not to reach.
This was the part that mattered.
Not the technology. Not the awe. Not even the fear.
The *pause*.
Because if she treated this like a toy, or worse, like a gift, she would miss the shape of the thing she was actually standing inside.
Observation wasn't neutral here. Interaction wasn't innocent. Every choice she made would be read - by systems, by beings, by a culture that already had rules she couldn't see yet.
She leaned forward, elbows on her knees.
"What am I," she asked the empty room, "to you?"
The room did not answer.
Good.
If it had, she would've trusted it less.
She closed her eyes and mapped backward instead - through herself. Through habit. Through instinct.
She was not cargo. That much was clear. She was not restrained, not isolated, not stripped of agency. But she wasn't free in the way the word usually meant, either. She existed in a corridor of attention - observed, accommodated, listened to.
A consultant, maybe.
A variable.
A test case.
That possibility settled differently in her chest. Heavier. More responsible.
If that was true - if her role here was interpretive rather than passive - then staying still wasn't caution.
It was avoidance.
She opened her eyes.
The panel waited in the center of the room, patient and unlit, like it knew it wasn't going anywhere.
She stood.
This time, when she approached, she didn't circle. Didn't test. Didn't hover her hand above it like it might bite.
She stepped into place and let herself be seen.
The panel rose smoothly, light tracing familiar paths, symbols resolving into their quiet, alien order.
She didn't look at them all at once.
She chose one.
Gravity.
The sensation returned immediately - the remembered lightness of bodies that weren't meant to stay heavy. The slow, joyful awkwardness of humans learning how to move when the rules softened instead of tightened.
She swallowed.
"This isn't about fun," she told herself automatically.
And then, because she was honest, if nothing else, she added:
"It's also a little about fun."
A huff of breath escaped her - almost a laugh.
Humans had crossed oceans and continents and atmospheres chasing that feeling. The thrill of weightlessness. The brief rebellion against the constant insistence of down.
She focused more carefully this time.
Not on the symbol.
On herself.
On where her balance lived. On how much pressure her feet exerted against the floor. On the steady negotiation between muscle and gravity she usually never noticed because it never changed.
Not zero.
Just less.
The room responded before she finished the thought.
The pressure on her feet eased - not vanished, but softened, like gravity had taken a breath and decided to be generous. Her stomach fluttered, a quick involuntary swoop, and her knees bent reflexively as her body scrambled to recalibrate.
"Oh-" she said, startled.
She laughed then, sharp and surprised, because the floor hadn't disappeared. She hadn't floated away. She just… weighed less.
She tested it.
Carefully, she lifted one foot.
It rose too easily.
Her center of mass shifted upward, her body buoyed in a way that made her arms instinctively spread for balance. The movement carried her farther than intended, toes barely brushing the surface when she tried to step.
She froze.
Her heart thudded - not fear, exactly, but exhilaration threaded with responsibility. She stood there, half-hovering, suspended between delight and alarm.
"This is not a playground," she reminded herself firmly.
But the room didn't contradict her.
It held her.
She tried again, this time more deliberately. A tiny adjustment inward, a mental tightening around the idea of slightly more than before, but not much.
Her heels touched down.
Still light. Still strange.
But controlled.
She let out a breath she'd been holding.
"So it listens," she murmured. "To intention. Not input."
That was… significant.
She pushed off the floor gently, experimentally.
Her body lifted.
Not fast. Not high. Just enough that her feet cleared the surface and stayed there, her hair drifting upward, her stomach flipping in quiet, delighted disbelief.
She laughed again - this one softer, reverent.
For a few seconds, she forgot everything else.
Forgot context. Forgot consequence. Forgot the weight of being watched and interpreted and mapped.
She was just a human, floating.
Then she forced herself to stop.
She drew her feet back down, imagined normal, imagined weight and pressure and familiarity.
The room complied.
Gravity reasserted itself with the politeness of a system that knew it had been invited to relax and now understood it was time to work again.
Her shoes met the floor solidly. Her knees steadied. Her breath slowed.
She stood there, palms open, grounding herself again in friction and mass and certainty.
She looked at the panel.
She hadn't pressed anything.
She hadn't issued a command.
She had decided.
That realization settled in slowly, sobering the delight without extinguishing it.
"This isn't a control interface," she said quietly. "It's a conversation."
She stepped back from the panel, giving it space - giving herself space.
She needed to think.
Not about what she could do.
But about what she was being invited to -
The sense of weight in the room shifted, not in her body, but in the air itself.
Just slightly.
Just enough to trip her pattern recognition before her conscious mind caught up.
Then -
A sharp, irregular clicking cut through the calm.
Click-click-click-click -
Not mechanical. Not rhythmic.
Organic.
Too fast.
Too uneven.
She spun.
The doorway had opened without sound, and one of the Keshin stood there—not the warm reddish-brown she'd cataloged. This one was mottled, layered in damp greens and earthen tones, like moss clinging to stone after rain.
Except -
It was dry.
No condensation. No sheen. No organic moisture response at all.
The movements of its tendrils were clipped, erratic, the sound of its clicks dry and deliberate, like someone reciting a memorized sequence too quickly.
A distress pattern.
It wasn't looking at her.
It was looking past her.
The translation interface flickered to life behind her shoulder -
Its tentacles moved in sharp, stuttering patterns, clicks spilling out in rapid succession, too precise to be conversational. Repetitive. Metered. Like a sequence being replayed under stress.
Like someone reciting an emergency number so they wouldn't forget it.
Her chest tightened.
Every instinct she had leaned forward at once.
Something was wrong.
Very wrong.
And then the translation layer began to engage...