My implants must be malfunctioning again. The ones that control subtlety of hearing and touch. I usually get them calibrated before each cycle, but immediately following the end of the last one, I ran into a clone of my old friend Acy from back in pre-school and primaries for the eighth colony in-vitros. Turns out this version of him is over on Nereid. Or in Nereid to be more specific. We got shitfaced on ostensible White Russians on the temp base. I dare not think too hard about what passes for “Kahlúa” in these parts.
Back to the implants, though. The whole of the greenhouse and its extensions oscillate in a way that transforms something I don’t quite understand into living matter. The machines crawling through brain dampen the effects of sonic attack emanating from below. The sinewy undulations of the structure plugged into what we call “the guttering orifice” are helices of melodies that ever repeat, stumbling drunkenly across the circle of minor thirds and major seconds. Fortunately, I have drugs that knock me out during off shifts. At times I even dream and am always taken by a cascade of diaphanous arpeggios that eject me far, far into and then beyond the Kuiper Belt.
