PI-00 B3 :: TEST #4 —「pi youngbae.」

What did the machines dream of when they sleep?

Datum, chrome, programming. Sequences, like dominoes cascading in a line, all by meticulous design. Functions, fractions. Numbers. Each and every part of their dreams was born from numbers, plotted out with them.

And in the dark, binomial dreamscape of her meta-suit that Ping found herself within, her own dreaming self laid in fetal position, curled in on itself like a flowerhead. How long had she been here? How long had it been since they severed the connection? It usually took less than a minute for her and the machine to become separate entities again, but this felt new. The machine had taken ahold of her, and kept her in its dream. She was caught within the subliminal space between subliminal spaces.

She couldn’t move. Or, perhaps the right way to describe it would be that there was no concept of movement, not yet at least. Machines moved when given stimulus, and maybe that applied even in a dream. She reached out to her arms, to her legs, and willed them to move.

They laid still, inert.

Then, as she kept her focus on that thought, slowly but surely, her limbs unfurled, piece by long piece, taking up the space around her. They were longer, shorter, stronger, weaker. Length and strength were only factors here, ones she innately knew she could control on her own whims. Pi made herself stronger, like she had done before, like she would do again. She stood up in this dreamscape, ran her fingers across its borders.

She looked ahead.

She saw Elliot.

That was her name, right?

The girl in the tank, the girl dreaming of machines. When she first saw her, Ping thought she looked like a lovely insect encased by amber: beautiful and tragic all at once. But she appeared different now. It wasn’t how Ping remembered her, but how the machines did: her skin was aluminum, her eyes beads of kerosene light. Hair ran down her back in metallic tubes, veins glowed across her skin like a mass of a thousand wires all connecting together at the center: her heart. Her metal heart, jagged and shiny, crackling softly with electricity.

Pi marveled. As a scientist, she couldn’t help it — the make of her was so strange in its planning, so alien and uniform, that it made her brain jumbled and her eyes stung. “Elliot?” She spoke to her, to the machines, to the dream.

No answer came.

Her foot took a step forward, then stopped, wavered. Was this a good idea? If all logistics and data were summed up, it wasn’t. The meta-suit interacted with her brainwaves, but also imbued them with its own power. The purpose was for them to control them as effortlessly as their own body, not to have dreams fueled by a strange neurological phenomenon. She should be waking up, while there was a chance to.

Pi lacked the luxury to indulge in her own curiosities. It was important she didn’t lose sight of the mission, of the promise she made to herself. Her dream self tilted its head skyward, looked up ahead. This was someone—or rather, something else’s dream, but now it had become hers.

And in all her dreams, she had the strongest wings to fly with. Pi closed her eyes, but felt the ice-cold caress of metallic feathers around herself.

Time to wake up.

When she opened them next, the fluid began to drain from the tank, drawing away with it the yellowed tint it drenched the world in. Her throat felt prickly-dry, her eyes blinking away the sudden glow of the halogens.

“Connection successfully severed,” an automated voice stated.

She looked up to the other side of the glass, at Baines and Abraham, and blinked slow. “How much longer was I dreaming for this time?”