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My floret stands in the middle of my hab, patient as usual. She has no schedule any longer, no structure beyond that which I impose to keep her healthy and which she adopts on the whims of her own fleeting desires. She begins projects and abandons them with equal blithe disinterest. I consider this a great victory.
I stand in front of her, and brush fingers through her hair. She enjoys it, as she always does.
I hold up an object. "Do you know what this is, petal?"
She shakes her head. Her long, twin braids flow back and forth with the force put on them an entire second earlier by the movement above.
"It's a very special device. It creates light and warmth."
I strike it against a rough portion of my bark. Friction creates heat. Heat ignites the crude compounds on its head. At once she is fascinated, and her eyes watch the soft dancing of the light, its motion back and forth in otherwise invisible breezes reflected in her widened eyes.
"It's pretty," she says.
Her voice is dreamy. It's always dreamy. I made sure everything felt like a dream, spent months carefully testing the catalogues of xenodrugs available for the purpose, calibrated the implant's dose schedule. She's frequently unsure whether she's awake or not, because every waking moment feels as comfortable as the hypnopompia just as she wakes. I also consider this a great victory. Neither her waking nor her dreaming are painful for her any longer.
"Would you like to see more of it?" I ask her. She nods, not because she has a great passion for it, but because it's caught her interest and she may as well see where it goes.
I kneel in front of her, give her a kind smile, and swallow it.
It catches in the dry tinder of my body. A soft orange glow begins to emit from me, and rapidly, bright light, as I go up in flames. This is as meditative for me as it is for her. The primal fear is still there, the kind of ancestral terror that can only exist when you are made of flammable material. It is enjoyable, now that it means nothing.
I begin to walk around the room, and my floret is captivated by my immolation. She cannot look away as I brush my fingers across a table and leave streaks of light that begin to spread. She turns to follow me as I do the same for a couch, a shelf, a chair. Soon, she is surrounded by light.
I become indistinguishable from the light, and soon I am indistinguishable from the hab. She just keeps turning, having already forgotten my presence. Now, there is only the fire, as it encroaches upon her position in the middle of the floor. Great billows of black curl up the walls and across the ceiling.
She is calm, and curious. She is not afraid even in a recreational sense like I am. She waits for the flames to reach her, and then crawl up her body like a blanket pulled up to her chin at night. It climbs her braids and engulfs her loose, papery dress.
Soon, her face is the only thing in the hab that isn't on fire, and she is utterly enchanted by it. She begins to walk around, looking at the dancing of the flames, bobbing her head idly to the crackles and snaps of everything in the room burning to the ground.
Not that it is, of course. The hab has been outfitted with enough holoprojectors to send everything up in a facsimile of fire real enough to terrify terran and Affini alike, in all respects but one: It can no longer hurt her. My biorhythms are suffused in the algorithm rendering the flames and emulating the sounds. It is fire, but it is music, and she dances to it, even if she doesn't recognize what she is dancing to, or even that she is dancing.
I was a part of an advance group pacifying a power facility offering what the Terrans very cutely referred to as 'resistance'. The fighting caused a fire to break out, worse than most fires. Chemical, and the chemicals involved burned particularly hot. Not even personal flame suppressants helped, after a point.
She was in the middle of it. This tiny, helpless sophont, about to become a cinder.
I saved her. Of course I did. I saved suppressant for her and covered her in it when I reached her, even as my foliage turned to ash. I carried her out, leaves gone, some of my vines glowing, three of my eyes already incinerated, and got her to safety. Barely.
The recovery process was long for her. She had burns within a rounding error of her entire body. Her weapon, which she had clutched and still tried to use even while she was burning, had partially fused to her hand. She was, of course, immediately domesticated; she had the kinds of injuries that only a haustoric implant could fully recover her from.
I didn't fare much better. There was simply too much damage to sustain the bloom. So I had a choice to make.
I gave power of attorney to a trusted friend, asked mim to fill out the paperwork for me, and…
I don't entirely know why I did it. Perhaps I also wanted to escape the flames. Perhaps I felt like I needed to become something greater than myself to save her. But either way, I chose to digitize myself rather than rebloom. I became her owner, and her hab. She never saw the material version of me that wasn't on fire.
It was slow, at first. She was so afraid. Of my avatar, of her new life. But she was especially afraid of any warmth, because of how badly she had been damaged by it. She couldn't eat foods or take baths that were warm or especially cold, because of the strange quirk of terran neurology that renders the sensations the same at the extremes. The hab lights could never flicker or fade in certain ways, and she required cold light and projections of mists and cool, open air. The humidity in the hab was kept as near 100% as was healthy for a long time. She was calm in darkness, but only when awake. Searing brightness awaited her when she dreamt.
I remember so clearly the memory literally burned into my core that day. I saw her surrounded by flames, and made a promise to her. She could not hear and would never truly know it, and by the time she was ready to hear it, it would have been exactly as interesting and important as everything else:
One day, I would put out the part of her that carried the ghost of the fire that nearly killed her.
She giggles, as the flames lick her arms and under her chin.
It took years to get to this point. Careful hypnotic reinforcement, judicious use of the right xenodrugs in the right doses at the right times. Every step had to be perfect, for her. I removed her fear, yes, but that was only the first step. There would be a hole burned in the center of her by its absence. It had defined her. No, I had to make her capable of enjoying the fire. To make her transmute her fear into love.
This is the promise of the Compact as I see it. We will turn you into a version of yourself that can stare the worst thing you've ever experienced in the face and smile like greeting a friend. We will domesticate the trauma itself and make it eat out of your hand.
The digital rain of my relieved catharsis puts the fire out. She just lays down on the floor of the now-revealed intact hab, arms spread wide, feeling it land just as harmlessly on her cheeks, and just as passingly interested in it as the inferno.