Anastasya was in-game. The neural correlates of consciousness ached more than any exertions she’d ever had in the real, although the burning in her muscles was receding with each passing minute she and her cronies rested, having completed their quest.

We need to perform final preparations.

She fired me back an affirmative Thynk,told her cronies that duty called.

Then she closed her eyes - Anastasya didn’t like glitchy fade-outs.

“Now, Sybelle”.

Eyes shut until her olfactory senses gave her the go-ahead: gone the earthy smell of millennia-old mould, instead the vanilla-musk fragrance of the candles spread around her apartment’s library.

Blinking in the natural dim light, she squirmed her lacquered toes into the deep shag.

“Do I need the tank?”

Yes.

Pushing out of her chair - a creaking Chesterfield Bordeaux red leather wingback – the recently-promoted Principal made her way out into the main sitting room, through the adjacent dining room and down the custom-built carpeted corridor to her bedroom. Open, this aimed at a bedside table; a drawer unlocked and rolled out.

She picked out a single pill and managed to gulp it without water.

Turtleneck crop top pulled off and shrugged out of her jeans, she donned the full-body length sensory deprivation suit. The burka-like hood flapped loosely, unstrapped for now.

Anastasya wasn’t hungry but made her way to the kitchen and forced herself to start downing crackers and cheese, as well as one of the green shakes, custom-prepped earlier by a bot and refrigerated for her.

She leaned back against the counter as she did, and checked her feeds.

Outdoor temperature was mid-teens. The CROW continued its steady recent climb, a quarter point up in the past twenty-four hours. The two highlighted Polls grabbed her attention. She opened each quickly, feeling a ding of endorphins as her Credyt ticked up ever-so-slightly for doing so. She’d get even more once she voted on them.

Anastasya grinned blackly at the first, picturing Mya benefiting from a drop in the age limit of hypno. The grin died quickly though upon seeing the second. In summary: should Sybelle’s threshold for incapacitating a male citizen’s nervous system be further reduced, should he be predicted to be a threat to a female citizen? It was estimated it’d reduce male violence on female citizens by a further 80%. The reason for the Poll was the possibility that some males would be mis-classified with such a further reduction in the threshold of detection: in summary, some innocent males would be incapacitated.

“Clearly a case of the greater good”, Anastasya thought angrily.

To compound her agitation, she noticed the result of the polling so far showed 94% of citizens agreed. Who are these lunatics? she flashed in a Thynk to Tanya, before remembering her friend was still in-game and probably wouldn’t see it. A worrying thought formulated, and this one she kept to herself: what if the man she picked for her birth license (she’d only recently accumulated enough Credyt to qualify for it) was one of the 6%? 

You will be ready in approximately two minutes.

Now wasn’t time to be concerned though, so she swallowed the rest of the shake and strode out of her apartment’s main door and down the ex-hotel’s main corridor. She had a room further along the hall which housed the sens-dep tank for work with me.

Pulling her hood tight around her head, she climbed in and lay back. The lid snuck shut, the silence suddenly total, not even a hint of the storm lashing the apartment’s windows. Her visuals were in utter darkness, feeds all deactivated…it was just her and me. And the darkness.

“Ready”, she either spoke or thought, the distinction unimportant.

I had timed things with precise precision, the spark and crackle of accelerated information flow kicking off in earnest as the active ingredient of her pill did its job of lubricating her dendrites and axons. I watched her synapses sparkle and fire, new highways bursting to life in a Gordian tangle.

Her numeric synesthesia exploded in front of her numbed yet frantic eyes: numbers, colors, tastes, shapes and contours entwining in an internecine dance to the tune of the algorithms I was pumping into Anastasya’s brain via her nimp. Neural implant. Mathematical topologies alien to a handful of human minds throughout history became living landscapes, she the traverser.

It was a classification problem, theoretically unsolvable by any known mathematics, nor by any Turing machine - unsolvable even for me.

The first data points came at her.

“What’s the context, Sybelle?”

I cannot share that information.

“What? So I’m meant to classify without knowing who or what?”

 Your synesthesia and intuition will accomplish the task with total accuracy.

A hard “no” then, Anastasya noted…but why? The pill she’d taken made it impossible for her to feel too strong an emotion about it, but it was odd, especially as for the past months on Abundance, she had been privy to all metadata and context. She pushed the feeling aside, helped by the cotics strengthening their grasp.

Flexing mentally, she transformed a non-computable set problem into a topological problem where she could taste and smell the manifolds. The solution then became purely a “follow the sensory trail” task, with each data point ultimately arriving in a binary bucket: in, or out.

Classified: in, or out.

Time became irrelevant for her.

“Last one - this one’s out, Sybelle.” What - or who - had she just classified? And in what context?

A quick eye-flick to her Credyt, which just then updated, assuaged her mind - whatever or whoever, she’d done her part.