Jacob Voz met Moire when he delivered another iteration of a superconductive boat motor to the Marine Science Institute. He opened the door into the lab and saw a woman in a fluorescent orange bikini sitting at a workbench full of electronics equipment. She looked to be about 25 years old. She had a giant, ancient VR rig on her head. Her hands were weaving intricate patterns in the air.

     “Excuse me, I’m looking for Steve Desmond, I’ve got his new motor,” Jacob said, but the woman showed no response. He set the motor down onto a bench–-it was heavy despite its small size because of the density of all the superconductors packed into it. “Excuse me,” he said again, but she didn’t even twitch. Her head-mounted display was very old-fashioned–heavy and cumbersome. It included a fabric cap that clung to her skull but left her ears exposed. Now  her hands were twitching like a dreaming cat’s paws– she had joint tats on her fingers, red hematite, it looked like, just like his own joint tattoos.

     In the old days you needed gloves to control your computer screen with hand gestures, but now you could have coded magnetite tattooed in the skin around each joint, plus a dot at each fingertip, and the computer could electromagnetically sense their positions and make your on-screen hands operate with faithful precision.

     “Hello, I’m looking for Steve Desmond,” he said again, much louder this time, but she still did not respond. Was she deaf?

     He heard a noise outside the door and stepped back out and saw Steve carrying a big squirming octopus. “Hi, Jacob, just a minute.” He dumped the octopus into a tank of salt water and grabbed a towel and wiped his hands and arms while walking into the lab. “You got that new version of the motor for me?”

     “Yes,” Jacob said. “Who’s that girl? Is she deaf?”

     “Oh, you haven’t met Moire yet, have you. No, she’s not deaf, she’s just immersed. She just got here from Woods Hole–-she solved that latest brain parasite plague among East Coast whales. Let me introduce you.” Steve tapped her on the shoulder and she started, then turned away from the bench to face him.

     “Sorry to interrupt you, Moire, but I’d like you to meet Jacob Voz of Acme Nanotemplates. They’re helping me turn this fancy new motor idea into a practical device. Jacob, meet Moire Herault.”

     Jacob was expecting her to take off the VR rig, but she didn’t. It was big, clumsy, ancient-model headset with a flat black visor two inches high and six inches wide.

     She turned the face-plate toward Jacob. “Pleased to meet you, Jacob,” she said. “What kind of motor is it?”

     “Howdy, Moire,” Jacob said. “It’s a superconducting induction motor– it’s an old idea that Steve is trying to make work.”

     Steve said, “It generates a strong magnetic field from a superconducting coil to eject water at high speed to propel the boat forward. It’ll be like an underwater jet engine.”

     “If we get it to work right, it could go over 100 miles per hour!” Jacob said.

     “Well, we want it because it’s efficient and quiet,” Steve said. “With this motor in a drone, we could pace along with sharks and whales without spooking them. It’s noiseless.”

     “Why isn’t it working?” said Moire.

     “The Buckytube coils keep expanding and heating up, which destroys the superconducting properties,” Steve said. “Salt water is really corrosive, too.”

     “Yeah, Sandy told me to remind you not to go out of sight of shore,” Jacob said. “He’s still not sure the shielding is going to be good enough.”

     Steve said, “How’s it going with the trilobite DNA, Moire? Are you getting the hang of the equipment a little better?”

     “Oh, yeah, it was just a little different from our equipment at Woods Hole. It’s going okay, but it’s tedious. Slow.”

     “What are you doing?” Jacob said.

     “I’m analyzing the DNA of these trilobites Steve found at a seafloor volcanic vent,” she said.

     “I thought trilobites were extinct.”

     “So did everybody else. But it’s a big ocean out there.”

     “What kind of equipment is this that you’re using with your virtual reality gear?”

     Moire hesitated, then said, “It’s a magnetic resonance 3D imaging microscope. First I scan a rough area, then I select one cell and scan it at a higher resolution, then I locate a mitochondria and scan it at ultra-hi-res.”

     “Could I take a look at it?”

     “Um, this is a custom headset, you can’t use it. Made just for me.”

     “Could I jack in with my own headset? I have an infra-red link like you’re using.” Her headset was old and cumbersome, but Jacob had access to Acme’s 50-element nanotank and all the templates in the world, and he upgraded his rig whenever possible. Today he was wearing his new ultralight headset– nothing but a plastic band that curled around the back of his head and across the top of his ears, with a pair of unobtrusive side projections that extended forward far enough to spray photons directly into his eyeball to create the impression of full vision.  

     Moire looked at Steve, who nodded assent. She shrugged. “Okay, come on along. Just a second.” She climbed onto the workbench with a cat-quick athletic move and reached high to throw a switch, then dropped back onto her stool. “Go ahead,” she said. Jacob activated his headset and suddenly he seemed to be floating inside a gray sphere filled with smaller spheres and rods and blobs.

     “Are you with me?” Moire said. “We’re inside the cell, now– I’ll take you down to my work-point. That’s the nucleus up there– ” Jacob saw a glowing array of her hand-tats gesturing toward a blob in the middle of the cell– “these rods are centrioles, those bubbles are vacuoles, and so on. Now I’m heading for this mitochondrion down here.” They floated closer to the mitochondrion and it enlarged and enlarged and then they floated through the mitochondrial membrane and were inside. “Mitochondria have their own DNA, and that’s what we’re analyzing to calculate this trilobite’s relationship to other species and other members of its own species,” she said.

     The blobs and structures grew bigger and bigger as Moire increased the magnification, and Jacob was overwhelmed by sensory overload. “We’re not seeing by light now– the colors are all computer simulations,” Moire said. They floated now next to a twisted strand of DNA. “I left a marker here somewhere–there.” Jacob saw a flashing ligh t and they approached it. “This is the molecule of cytosine where I stopped,” she said, touching a yellow clump of balls on the double helix. When she touched it, a note sounded. She moved to the next clump of balls along the chain, which were blue, and a different note sounded when she touched it. “Guanine,” she said. “The red ones are adenosine, the green ones thymine.” She moved along the strand faster and faster until the notes formed a continuous stream of music and Jacob felt as though he were on a supercharged rollercoaster, swooping and soaring and rushing through a chaotic tumble of colors and shapes.

     “I’ve never seen anything like this before,” Jacob said.

     “It’s a technique I developed,” she said. “It’s simple and boring, really. The computer does most of the work. The DNA is all twisted and packed together, and when the strands are too close together for the computer to track, I have to tell it what to do.”

     “It’s not as boring as the project my friend Al caught,” Jacob said. “He’s an astronomy student– he’s measuring and dating all the craters on one of the moons of Mars.”

     “I’ve heard about that,” Moire said. “Once every crater in the solar system is dated, we’ll have a chronology of the major events of solar system history. That doesn’t sound boring to me.” They sped along the strand of DNA faster and faster, then stopped abruptly while Moire reconnoitered, then resumed. Jacob was totally confused by the sensory overload.

     “Al thought it was boring,” Jacob said. “Maybe when it’s your own job, it’s boring.”

     “Maybe. Well, Jacob, it’s been nice meeting you, but I have to keep at this, so…”

     Jacob clicked off his VR and looked around; Steve Desmond was gone. “Okay, Moire… um, have you had a chance to look around downtown in Santa Barbara yet? Why don’t you meet me at Stearn’s Wharf tonight at 6 and we can pedal around and I’ll show you the sights.”

     Moire turned her headset toward Jacob and looked him up and down. Jacob was a wiry athlete with 8% body fat. “You know, that sounds like fun. Stearn’s Wharf, huh? I suppose that’s easy to find?”

     “Yep, at the beach where State Street hits the sea.”

     He bicycled away through the deserted campus, threading his way among the palm trees. It was a brutally hot day in August. Swirling dust added grit to the sweat dripping into his eyes. The bicycle path was trash-laden; the school itself was just about out of business except for its research wings: the Marine Science Institute, the Theoretical Physics Institute and the Robotics Lab. Fewer than 300 students would arrive on campus next month to begin the fall trimester; on-line schools had all the students these days.

    Jacob pedaled away from the campus to the asphalt bicycle path that led south toward Santa Barbara, a ten mile ride. So he had plenty of time to think about Moire. Jacob didn’t meet many girls like Moire.

     He looked her up in a database while he was pedaling. She was 24 years old, a little younger than he’d thought, and had gotten her PhD two months ago at Woods Hole. He scrolled down through a long list of titles of articles and papers she’d written for technical journals, but there was nothing else except school transcripts. He poked at the database for more information, but most of Moire Herault’s information was locked, inaccessible.

     He hoped she didn’t look up his record.

    His ear buzzed and it was Cal, the Acme dispatcher– “Jacob, you got a pickup at Wax Apple on Hollister in Goleta, you know where that is?”

     “Sure, I been there before.”

     At Wax Apple, Maxie handed him a pair of deformed toothbrushes. “Here you are, Jacob, customers who bought our new template are getting these kind of bad printouts. We’ve been unable to duplicate the error using our own 3D printers.”     Wax Apple’s gimmick was that they sent you a wax apple, you bite into it deeply and send it back, and the company sends back a template for a toothbrush to all your specifications and it’s made specifically for your mouth.

     “Customers are snail-mailing their failed printouts, like these tufts of brush erupting in inappropriate places.”

     “That looks like something we can fix in a hurry,” Jacob said. He put the toothbrushes in the bike’s carrier and pedaled toward Santa Barbara.

      Jacob was simply a courier. Acme Nanotemplates made prototypes for manufacturers, and Santa Barbara had quite a development community. The prototypes were of two kinds: some developers wrote their own code and used Acme’s industrial-strength 3D printers, and Jacob delivered the results and the company would test out the prototype. The other way was when a company developed a prototype and gave it to Acme for scanning and duplication.

     So he got plenty of exercise and had plenty of free time. Jacob believed it was better to do things in your actual body than to use the web to plug into somebody else’s recorded experience. But he wasn’t getting anywhere, even if he was in the most beautiful town in the world.    

        At 4:30pm he arrived back at Acme’s office in the Granada Building, the tallest building in the city. He went into the prototype shop and accessed the template of his headset. He sent the template to one of the 3D printers to make a duplicate of his headset for Moire.

     He pedaled home for a quick shower and a change of clothes, and the new headset was ready by the time he got back.

     He pedaled down State Street to the ocean; Moire, on a rental bicycle, was already at the dolphin statue at Stearns Wharf. She was still wearing the orange bikini–-well it sure was bikini weather–-but she also still had on the bulky old VR headset.

     He’d heard about such VR addicts who can never bear to leave their private worlds, but he’d never met one. He decided to be diplomatic about it. “Hi,” he said. “Welcome to beautiful downtown Santa Barbara.” He gestured toward the buildings and trees rising into the foothills, with the yellow rock face of La Cumbre Peak looming high behind the foothills.

     “It really is beautiful,” she said. “I should have done this earlier. I’ve been too locked up in my work.”

     They began pedaling west along the bicycle path on top of the berm. “This used to be a beach,” Jacob said. “Now from Butterfly Beach to Ledbetter Beach this twenty-foot berm holds back the Pacific.” Santa Barbara had been lucky so far since the sealevel rose. Further south, the cities of Carpinteria and Oxnard were no more, and Ventura had moved back a quarter mile from its former beachfront.

     “At Woods Hole they had to move everything a mile inland,” Moire said. “Martha’s Vineyard has really been hit hard, all the littler islands, too.”

     It was one of the electric blue days in Santa Barbara, days when there’s not a particle of dust in the sky, not a whisper of water vapor, and the sky is a deep, deep blue and there’s a feeling of electromagnetic tension in the air, and the humidity is extremely low, and the temperature is high, and the air is so clear that the mountains seem to loom extra large in the sky and the islands are near enough to touch, and the Santa Ana winds whirl up at sunset as high pressure systems behind the mountains push masses of air over the edge, and the air falls, compressing hotter and hotter and racing toward the shore.

     They pedaled through the harbor under a vivid indigo-blue sky. “Usually you can’t see the Channel Islands this good,” Jacob told her, gesturing toward the ocean. “It’s really clear today.”

     Moire rode slowly and uncertainly, stopping often to put a foot down. At the harbor she was looking at the boats and collided with a pedestrian. The little boy wasn’t hurt, and Moire said, “Why don’t we walk the bikes for a minute,” and they strolled through palm trees along the bike path by Ledbetter beach watching the surf pound into the berm.

     “This is so terrific,” Moire said. “I want to stand here in the breeze for a few minutes. In fact, let’s sit down.” She parked her bicycle next to a picnic table and sat down. “This was really a good idea, Jacob. I can’t remember the last time I’ve been out like this.”

     “Is the lab having trouble with their equipment budget?” Jacob said.

     “Not that I know of,” she said. “Why?”

     “I was wondering why you were stuck with that ancient headset.” He reached for his shirt pocket and pulled out the duplicate of his own headset. “Anyway, here’s one for you that’s just like mine. It has all the latest technology and it has to be a lot less heavy than the one you’re wearing.”

     She stared at his outstretched hand but didn’t move. “Um, thanks, Jacob, but this one is custom made for me. It’s not just a VR rig, it’s a prosthetic eye. I’m blind.”

     “Oh,” said Jacob. He didn’t know what else to say. He sat down next to her and stared out to sea, then looked back at her. He could see the clean lines of her cheeks, her straight nose, her chiseled chin, her lips, but not her eyes, not her whole face.

     “So I never take it off,” she said. “I guess I’m not used to discussing it–-back at Woods Hole, everybody knew about me, everybody knew about it. I haven’t been away from home very much at all.”

     “How good can you see?” Jacob said. He pointed toward a pelican soaring above the ocean. “Can you see that bird?”

     “Oh, sure. I know my headset looks ancient, but it has a complete micro-adaptive-optics system. The front may look flat and featureless, but actually it is a billion point-receptors. I can zoom in on things– I can see fishing line tangled on that pelican’s left foot, for instance.

     “It’s one of the reasons I’m able to do my DNA mapping. I have a split consciousness, sort of. I can separate into a right brain and a left brain with different pictures for each brain. Focus on two things at once. I’m not so hot at real-world 3D actions, though… I’m really sorry about running into that little boy.”

     Jacob said, “But if you’re a marine biologist–-how do you–-is your headset waterproof?”

     “No,” she said sadly. “I can’t go into the ocean. Not and see anything, I mean.”

     They bicycled back to the wharf in silence. Moire said, “Look, I didn’t mean to freak you out. It’s my problem, not yours. I thought you said you were going to show me the town–-why don’t we go somewhere and get something to eat?”

     They returned Moire’s bicycle to the rental stand on State Street and hiked into downtown Santa Barbara, passing under the deserted US 101 freeway. There was hardly any traffic; with manufacturing completely replaced by nanotech replication, people no longer commuted, commodities were no longer trucked. The cities were thinned out now. People were moving into the wilderness, able to survive without civilization as long as they had a 3D printer and Web access.

     “Do they make a good martini here?” Moire said as they were sitting down at their table at Joe’s Cafe.

     “I don’t know, I’m not a martini kind of guy.” Jacob ordered a bourbon and 7-Up. Joe’s was packed with people and loud with talk and clanking glasses and dishes, but they were in a bubble of privacy amid the noise.

     Their drinks arrived. “So how long have you been in Santa Barbara, Jacob Voz?” Moire said, sipping her martini.

     “I came here to go to college, and after I graduated a couple years ago I haven’t been able to leave the place. I keep trying to figure out some way to be able to stay here.”

     “What’s your degree in?”

     “Oh, it’s just Bachelor of Science in Information Access. It doesn’t matter what you know; what matters is being able to find what you need to know.

     “I wanted to be a dentist. But then molecular repair technology came along in my junior year and ‘dentist’ went the way of ‘buggy whip maker’ and ‘VCR repairman.’ I don’t really know what I want to do any more. That’s one of the reasons I like my job–-it lets me move around and see a lot of different lines of work.

     Moire stirred her martini and said, “I thought your job was–-aren’t you a scientist at Acme Nanotemplates?”

     Jacob stared at her. “No, I’m their bicycle delivery guy and nano-printer attendant.”

     “Oh. Oh dear. I’m sorry, I just assumed…could we order now?”

     Jacob signaled the waiter. “I’m going to have the abalone,” he said.

     “Ick,” Moire said. “I guess it sounds funny, but I can’t stand sea food.” When the waiter arrived, she ordered a hamburger and another martini.

     “You’ll love the burger,” Jacob said. “They use real natural meat here, in fact everything is real. Local farmers still bring traditional produce to market, and nanoprinter stuff just can’t compete.”

     “You seem to know a lot about Santa Barbara. Did you grow up here?” Moire asked.

     “No, I’m from Waterloo, Iowa,” Jacob said.

     “How’d you pick Santa Barbara?”

     “I don’t know. I guess it was when they were building the berm to keep the ocean out. It was in the news, and the other cities were just pulling back from the coast, giving in to the ocean, and Santa Barbara was fighting back. I wanted to fight back.” When he was 15 he’d joined a Web community of kids who were going to attend UC Santa Barbara, but now his group had graduated and dispersed and he was floating untethered with no idea what to do or where to go. So for now he was hunkered down in the most rich and beautiful little coastal town in the world.

     Their food arrived, and Jacob took a bite of abalone.

     Moire exclaimed about her salad. Farmers market stuff. “My god, this is good.”

     “You’ve been eating that college cafeteria stuff, that’s all. Nanosludge. I remember.”

     “What do your parents back in Waterloo do?”

     “Nothing,” Jacob said. “My parents are just in a different world. They’re total house potatoes. They just sit home and watch the screen all day.”

     “Maybe you’re like abalone,” Moire said. “An abalone larva is a free-swimming ocean creature until a chemical signal–gamma-aminobutryic acid, GABA–tells it to drop to the bottom. It loses its swimming cilia, and in forty hours, a heart forms and the larva attaches to a rock and starts growing a shell. Its wandering days are over.”

     Jacob took another bite of his abalone. “But I’m still a wandering boy for now. What do your parents do?”

     “Mom’s a musician, she plays violin in the Boston Orchestra. She says she’s lucky– there’s been no technological advancement in her field for over 400 years. Her Stradivarius is still state-of-the-art.”

     “And your father?”

     “My father is a neurobiologist.” She took another sip of martini. “He is the world’s foremost authority on the visual system of the squid.”

     “Squid, eh? You followed him into marine biology?”

     “Not exactly… squids have large nerves, they’re easier to study. But yeah, we were there at Woods Hole, we knew a lot of marine biologists.” She took a final bite of her hamburger, washed it down with the last of her martini. “ I haven’t talked to my father in eight years. I need another drink, okay?”

     “Are you sure?” Jacob said.

     “Oh, I’m quite able to handle my martinis,” she said. “Liquor doesn’t affect me much.”

     “I just don’t want you getting blind drunk on me. I mean… .” Jacob blushed.

     “I’m sorry, Jacob, I don’t usually go around blabbing about my deformity. I hope it doesn’t make you uncomfortable.”

     The waiter cleared their dishes away, brought Moire her fourth martini and a second bourbon and 7up for Jacob.

     “Well, I’m kind of interested in the technology,” Jacob said. “I never heard of prosthetic eyes before. How do you control it?”

     “I don’t know of anybody else using this technology, so it’s not surprising,” she said. She rubbed her hand across the fabric cap on her head. “The skullcap has hundreds of metal contact points touching my scalp. It’s nothing but an encephalograph, but the feedback system lets me to communicate with the vision-control computer with subtle variations in my brain waves.” She took the olive out of her martini and ate it. “Also, I control it by flexing my scalp in certain ways. Look, I can wiggle my ears.” She wiggled her ears. “I don’t know exactly how I control it, to tell the truth. I grew up with it and slowly learned. I mean, do you remember how you learned to see?”

     “No, but then I wasn’t born blind. How does your headset connect to the visual cortex? I never heard of anything like that.”

     She took another big gulp of martini. “I’m half-computer,” she finally said.

     “What do you mean? I’m on the computer half the time, myself.”

     “Did you ever hear of B.F. Skinner? A psychologist? A pre-Millenium guy?” she said.

     “Huh? No.”

     “He developed a way to train animals using what he called a ‘Skinner Box.’ You could read about it on the Web. Anyway, what he did was raise his own daughter in a Skinner Box, just the way he raised pigeons. God only knows what he thought he was doing. It ruined her life. Well, my father decided to do Skinner one better. He gave me the best eyes in the world, along with a computer/brain interface implant.”

     When Moire was two days old, her father clamped a headset and earplugs onto her, radio linked to a computer that could play back anything in its storage at the child’s command.

     “I had to learn to see all by myself–-just like you.” Somehow she did it. As she grew, Dr. Herault had to replace her headset several times, and each time the hardware was more sophisticated. When she was 8, Moire asked her father for a hundred petabytes of 20-picosecond random access memory for her birthday present.

     A significant proportion of Moire’s “self” was in the computer. Her organic brain was not able to process language without the help of the computer. She had a true photographic memory. She used the stupendous storage capacity of the human brain combined with the computer’s ability to tag and file each memory and find it again when needed. “I can remember everything everybody has said to me since I was 4 or 5. It took me that long to learn language and learn how to store memories coded in language, just like a normal child.”

     “I don’t get it,” Jacob said. “If you’re blind, how do you get the visual information?”

     “The headset has two video screens, one for each eye.”

     “You can see the screens? So you’re not really blind.”

     “Well, first of all, I never developed variable-distance vision. I’m permanently nearsighted. Daddy didn’t anticipate that. They discovered a cure when I was 4 or so. But it’s more than that. They could have cured me by taking off the headset permanently, but without it I’m only 6 months old, mentally. My eyeballs defaulted to the perfection of the vidscreen; likewise my brain took advantage of the perfection of the video storage system.

     “Today I have no idea which things are stored in meat and which are stored in computer. Without the headset I can’t track objects, I can’t focus, I can’t do anything. I’m effectively blind.” Also, she didn’t really understand English without the headset. Sure, the girl/computer pair used English to communicate with the rest of the world, but that was a construct of the computer; the communication between the girl and the computer was in a creole that Moire developed all by herself, understood only by her and her private neural network.

     So it wasn’t that she was physiologically blind without the headset, it’s just that nothing could enter her long-term memory. If you can’t remember seeing it, then you didn’t see it, is the bottom line.

     “But that’s terrible,” Jacob said. “How could your father do that to you?”

 Not about Daddy.” She finished her martini and swirled the glass. “Can I have another drink?”

     “Well,” Jacob said.

     Their waiter appeared at their table. “Give me another martini,” Moire said.

     “I’m sorry,” the waiter said, “I don’t think we should serve you any more drinks. Would you like a cup of coffee?”

     “No, no… Jacob, can we get out of here?”

     Jacob put the meal on his card and thumbprinted it. They stood outside Joe’s Cafe. Moire looked up at the starry sky.

     “How am I going to get home?” she said. “I’ve got to get back to the campus. Do you have a car?”

     “No, I’ll call you an Uber,” Jacob said.

     “No, wait, I’m not done yet. I hope I’m not offending you. It’s like… I’ve never been able to talk about this stuff with anybody. Could we go to your place?”

     Jacob was embarrassed. “My place is a crummy little studio. I’m sorry.”

     “I don’t care, let’s go. I don’t do this all the time,” she said defensively. In the Uber car she said, “I don’t go out and pick up guys. This isn’t like me. But I need to talk about it to somebody.”

     “You’re drunk,” he said.

     “No, well, maybe my body is a little drunk but my computer isn’t. And I’m half-computer.” She patted her fanny pack. “Everything about me is stored in my computer.”

     As soon as they entered his apartment she started kissing him, and then they were taking their clothes off, and then they were in bed.

     But gradually Jacob noticed that Moire seemed detached, not really participating, and then it was over. He rolled off her and lay back on the bed.

     “Oh well,” she said. “I was hoping it would be different this time.” She sighed. “I’ve never–-always before I’ve done it with three guys in my life. I didn’t tell them about me, about my Dad, about the headset. About everything. Tried to make them think it was just my own kinky way. But the computer interface doesn’t have any hormonal feedback, I guess. It’s like my own body is nothing but a video game that I’m playing remotely.”

     “Maybe there’s an upgrade path for your hardware,” Jacob said. “You know, all the latest stuff comes through Acme Nanotemplates, and I could do a literature search and find something to help you at least get out from under the cumbersome VR rig and get a lightweight eyepiece like mine.”

     “Oh,” she shouted, “like my Dad’s stuff is no good, huh?”

     “No, no, obviously your Dad’s technology was impressive in its time, but there’s been a lot of advancement, how do you know that something can’t be done now to improve things?”

     She slumped back down. “I suppose you’re right.”

     “Let me try out your headset just for a second, let me see what you’re up against.”

     “Nobody else can comprehend it,” she said.

     “No, but I can hook it up to my diagnostics and find out how to update it.”

     After a minute she said, “Oh, all right.” She pulled the headset and cap off and handed them to Jacob. His home electronics were connected to the Acme Nanotemplates equipment–he did a lot of the work remotely. It took him a few minutes to interface her headset’s inputs and outputs to his equipment.

     “Okay,” he said, “it will take a few minutes for it to run a full diagnosis.”

     She was rubbing his shoulder. “You are so strong,” she said. She was staring at him with her real eyes, her vivid blue eyes that he’d never seen before, and she had an animal electricity and they fell into the most highly charged sex that Jacob had ever experienced. With her glasses off she was a superb empath, able to use her sharp intelligence to interpret gestures and tonal variations and aromas even in the absence of all language ability.

     It was a magical mystical experience for him, easily the best sex of his life. They did it for an hour, and then they were done, breathing hard and sweating and Jacob fell into a profoundly satisfied sleep.

     In the morning when he woke she was gone. There was a note on the table:

“Without my headset, I wasn’t there.”

     Her headset was gone and the one Jacob had made for her was still here.

     Oh well.

     He called her but she didn’t pick up. He uploaded the data about her headset to his cloud account and went to work.

     When he got to the office there was a message from her: “You fucked me after I took off my headset, didn’t you,” she said, matter-of-factly, with a touch of chill. She included a video capture from her headset cam as she put it back on: random views of Jacob’s ceiling and walls, and then there was Jacob in bed in a profound slumber. She dressed and summoned an Uber and the video ended as she went out Jacob’s door. No other text or voice message.

     Jacob turned on his office computer and downloaded the specs of her headset from his cloud account. Some of it was stuff he hadn’t seen before and he asked the boss for advice. He showed Jacob where to download the info for the parts Jacob was ignorant of.”

     “How’d it go on your date with that university girl?” the boss said.

     Jacob explained a few things. “Oh, daddy issues,” the boss said.

     Jacob assembled a new set of modules adapted to the constraints of the antique technologies of her headset’s interface and storage and printed it at the office and it was ready by noon. It did everything her cumbersome rig did, but looked like the normal streamlined headset all the smart young folks were wearing these days. Like Jacob’s headset.

     He thought about biking out to the University to hand deliver it, but she was not returning his calls. He chickened out and had UPS deliver it the next day.

     He called her back three times and got no answers.

     Then he was home and there was a knock at the door, and it was her. She was wearing the new headset he’d made. Her beauty was now more evident. More of her face was available to be seen.

     “I had no memory of what happened with the headset off, as usual,” she said. “But this time I focused on what I’d heard, and the sense memories of my animal body–muscle memory, instead of the computer-enhanced vision and language.

     “I’m not really blind,” she said. “I mean, I am blind but it’s because of this damned technology my father inflicted on me. My eyes work fine but they’ve been short-circuited for connection to the visual centers in my brain. Having half your consciousness in a tech box is a perplexing existence.”

     And then she took off the headset and began kissing Jacob.