The Spaces In Between

[Mina Ward]

He wasn't at all like what she figured. Every feed she had seen of the presentation had portrayed a man that was comfortable, confident, self-assure. This...Well, it wasn't what she figured.

Mina hadn't figured out if that was a good thing or not.

She raised a hand and wiggled her fingers in response, finding the unexpected having smashed all planed conversation in her mind to pieces. It was floating about in tiny little lime green and orange bits, she was just sure of it.

[Emma Temple]

"This is Mina," Emma explained, offering the young girl her most reassuring smile.

She spoke carefully, not saying too much in one go, hoping to prompt Mina into speaking up for herself: but she couldn't completely stop herself from leaping to her rescue. Emma was much older - well, okay, not much older - and even she had found her first visit to Treadstone a daunting experience. She couldn't even begin to imagine how that might be for such a young girl: especially one who had come so far, and had such a big secret resting on her shoulders.

"She's a technopath," she added, making herself sound as enthusiastic as it was possible to sound in three words.

[Tom Harriman]

Tom's face split into a grin. "Technopath, huh?"

While most mutant abilities were the stuff of science fiction, technopathy was straight out of the cool parts of scifi. People capable of plugging in and interacting psychically with machines? Such was the foundation of neural interfaces, memory transfers, and holographic replicas of Lexa Doig.

These were precisely the kind of scientific breakthroughs that Tom was hoping for: abilities that, if successfully reverse-engineered, could lead to whole new fields of science and industry.

He was getting ahead of himself though, same as always. He focused instead on the little girl in front of him: of the scientific challenge that the cosmos had presented.

"Do you think you could tell me a little bit more about what you can do, Mina?"

[Mina Ward]

"Telling doesn't work..." She felt exposed and looked the part perfectly.

It wasn't supposed to be this way, but Mina was beginning to understand just what the trips into the digital space did to her in the long run. They were good for her. The problem was the real world. It was too bright, too loud, too nonsense. "Autism" had been her cover story for so long it seemed to pop into her head as soon as she had to explain why everything was so difficult out here when in there was fluid, beautiful, crafted with elegance.

The spinning in the chair came to a stop as she grabbed on to the edge of a desk and took a deep breath. The girl's eyes shut tight as she brought a hand up and roughly rubbed at her forehead, no not exactly rubbed, more... dug the palm of her hand as hard as she could at the space just above her left eye. Another breath was taken and she dropped her hands to her sides and looked at the Doctor, trying to focus as best she could.

"Ok... so... Here goes. I used to have to wrap my wrists in bare wires connected to a port so that I could directly interface. It's like a computer is a more..." She struggled to find the word. "Primative version of my brain?"

Yes, that was right. She nodded in response to her own question. "And my body is just the housing. I leave it behind... mostly... when I network."

Another deep breath and she felt herself slipping. "But ever since the whole... wifi..thing... started... It's everywhere. I don't need the wires anymore and it never stops. I can talk to it, control it, become...part of it."

She fidgeted in the chair uncontrollably, her eyes darting from Doctor Harriman, to Emma, to her hands, to the computer, back to Harriman. "I'm sorry. I don't know how to word it."

[Tom Harriman]

It was like listening to someone try to work out what tense to use when talking about time travel or predestiny. The English language wasn't written to describe such things, and Mina earned Tom's heartfelt sympathy.

While Emma scurried away to retrieve what Mina had requested, Tom dropped himself into a crouch, bringing himself to eye level with the young girl. "My power is hard to explain, too," he admitted; talking to her not like a child who needed handling carefully, but like a kindred spirit in whom he was confiding. "When they cooked up the English language back home -" He jerked his head in an arbetrary direction, referencing - if Mina's accent was anything to go by - their mutual country of origin. "- they didn't think about things like this. They didn't think about people like us."

He flashed her a smile. "That's one of the cool things about being a scientist. You come upon the undescribable all the time: and then you get to make up the fancy technical terms, and the whole world has to start using them."

Emma returned swiftly, an assortment of USB cables and other periferal wiring bundled in her arms. Clutched between her fingers however was a small wifi device: one of those things that Tom couldn't call a dongle out loud while keeping a straight face.

"I didn't know if -" Emma started, her voice sounded a little hesitant and uncomfortable. It wasn't like her at all; Tom made a mental note to ask later if everything was okay.

Tom glanced at Mina, and gestured with his eyebrows towards the USB device. "Is that the kind of thing you need to connect up wirelessly?"

[Mina Ward]

She shook her head slowly, eying the wifi device as if it was a piece of rotten fruit. Oh, it would work. It'd made the signal all jumbled though, like listening to a recording of someone who was translating English from Swahili from a book that had been translated to Swahili from English.

But how to make that apparent...

"It works best with the wires if I'm hard connected directly. There's no gateway, no..." she fought for the word momentarily "...interference."

Her eyes crossed the device in his hand and she made the same face again. "With the advances in wireless... I just need.. me."

Mina frowned, still not sure if what she was saying what making sense. But really, it all fell back on what she knew had to be done.

"I'll show you." Defeatism laced the simple words. Not in that she was unable to get her point across without demonstration, just the knowledge of what was going to happen after.

Minda honestly hated the whole wireless thing. It was like being constantly connected in a half-state. Neither in one world or the next...it wasn't right... and it made the real world seem all the less solid every day.

The small girl took a deep breath and closed her eyes, letting in the sounds that only she could hear. The noises and blips and digits that were as plain as if she was walking in a park speaking with an old friend. Only...thanks to the lack of wires...it was all oily and grainy around the edges.

Her eyes snapped open as the computer she was sitting in front of sprung to life, exiting sleep mode and requesting a password. Several asterisks appeared, the submit button briefly highlighted... and the desktop displayed. A simple text program popped up and the following slowly appeared, one letter at a time...

It is really just easier to show sometimes than explain. Also... you should look into changing this computer's password to something a bit more encrypted than ChocolateCake.