I instinctively brought my arm up to check the time. It was a habit that was ingrained in me from having a watch for most of my life. But of course I didn't have a watch now. The thing had been lost in the fighting and being captured by Varis. She'd talked about giving me one of those damned wristbands for navigating the tower, but I'd ultimately decided it wasn't worth it.

I had Arvie following me around everywhere I went anyway, and he seemed more than happy to help me out with stuff. Even though Varis had complained multiple times that using a Combat Intelligence for day-to-day stuff like that was like doing target practice with an atomic weapon.

I tapped my foot and then glanced over to Rachel and Jeraj.

"Did you have any idea this was going to take this long?" I asked him.

"Well, there are a lot of livisk out there, and when somebody decides they're going to swear allegiance to someone it does take some time."

"Tell me about it," I said.

Yet another livisk came up to Varis and bowed down to her. They did that thing where they did the traditional livisk salute and then they bowed down until their upper body was at a right angle to their legs.

Which was an impressive feat. Clearly all these people didn't skip ab day. I wondered if that was a thing where they worked out on the regular, or if it was a thing where livisk had to do this so often, at least the people on the lower rungs of the social ladder, that they just had natural ab strength from all the bowing and scraping.

I tried to do it once when I first saw them pulling the move, and the burning in my abs told me there wasn't a chance in hell I'd be able to pull it off.

"It's just that we're kind of on a timer here," I said.

"Oh, I'm very aware," Jeraj said, grinning at me. "This whole thing is backfiring on you just a little bit, isn't it?"

"I thought I was being clever, but I guess not," I muttered, shaking my head.

I looked at the line of livisk who were stretched out, and then I sighed and walked over and sat down on a bit of rubble. I looked down and there was a little mosaic built into some of the rubble. Like this had been part of some decorative something once upon a time.

"So what do you think this place was?" I asked, looking up at Arvie.

"It's difficult to tell," he said. "We're not low enough in the ruins to see any of the Ancient stuff, so I don't think it was attached to anything they were doing."

"Yeah, I didn't think that," I said. "Besides, it has a sparkling blue pattern on it. A telltale sign it was done by a livisk of some sort. They love their sparkling blue stuff."

"Almost as much as you humans like drawing pictures of genitalia," Arvie said.

"What? Where did that come from?"

"I thought we were talking about the various species' predilection for drawing things that are representations of themselves, and I know humanity is fond of drawing pictures of their genitalia."

"What are you on about, Arvie?"

"Well, there are the dick drawings that you found in Pompeii, and of course there was that symbol used by Christianity that everyone says is a fish, but was probably also ancient Roman graffiti for a vagina."

"Arvie, you have trouble understanding Earth pop culture stuff, but you know all about people drawing dicks and vaginas on ancient graffiti on Earth?"

"Well, your history is more interesting than your pop culture sometimes," Arvie said. "And it's easier to get ahold of some of that historical stuff on the networks at the fringe."

"If you say so, pervert," I said.

"Excuse me?" Arvie said.

"Nothing," I said. "You're right, the ancient Romans did have a lot of pretty freaky stuff they got up to. How's that other thing going?"

"Are you sure it's a good idea to talk about that out loud?" Arvie asked.

"Okay," I said, brushing up against that little knot in the back of my mind that was the connection to Arvie. "I figured you'd want to talk out loud and keep me from using this, but we can do the mental thing. It's a hell of a lot faster anyway."

"It is," Arvie said. Then he paused for a moment. Like a machine intelligence pause, not the kind of pause I would've noticed before having the chip implanted in me.

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"Have you noticed any other odd symptoms, William? I was worried you were overdoing it."

"I'm surprised that I was overdoing it at all," I said. "I used to play games where I'd have multiple windows open and alt-tab in between them so I could run multiple accounts at the same time."

"That seems like cheating," Arvie said.

"You'd think so," I said. "But a lot of people respect the game if you're able to control multiple things like that. Especially if you're doing it by switching windows rather than using hotkeys and assistive bullshit."

"I see," Arvie said. "So it's the sort of thing where you can cheat, but only if you're cheating using the mental faculties that were given to you."

"Something like that," I said.

"I'm going to try and not be insulted by that," he said.

"I bet you are," I said.

"It's not working. Anyway. I think part of the problem is that you were switching back and forth between various windows and doing the equivalent of what you talk about doing in these video games back on Earth, but you were doing it in machine space where your mind was working much faster than it's used to."

"That was really helpful when I was flying combat," I said.

"I don't doubt it was," Arvie said. "But it was also enough to overwhelm you since your mind isn't used to that sort of thing."

"Is that the sort of thing my mind will get used to with time?"

"Most likely," Arvie said. "But it's still something we need to keep an eye on. It's also something I'm very interested in learning more about, considering this is the first time I'm aware of that a human has been implanted with something like this."

"We do it all the time with gamers back on Earth," I said.

"Correction. This is the first time something like this has happened with a human who was implanted with the livisk version of the technology and someone who is in a battle pair with the reaction times that come with that."

"Right," I said. "I keep forgetting I'm your little science experiment."

"You should be honored that I consider you my science experiment," Arvie said.

"Yeah, whatever," I said. "What if we tried to slow things down? Like we didn't exactly have things running at the same pace we were running them before?"

"That's an interesting proposition, William," he said. "So you would be able to view things slowed down, but not to the point everything was basically frozen from your perspective."

"Is that how everything operates for you?" I asked. "That must be a pain in the ass."

"There are times when I have to occupy myself because I'm in the middle of a conversation and I know it's going to be an eternity, at least in terms of how I reckon things, before I get a response."

"That makes me feel a whole hell of a lot better about all those times I actually made you pause to think about things."

"I had no idea you were tracking those," Arvie said with a sniff.

"Yeah. And if you were pausing long enough that I could notice it then that means you were really pausing to think about stuff."

"Yes, well, you have a habit of doing precipitous things that make me stop and think about what you're doing."

"Glad I can keep life interesting for you."

"I'll look into adjusting things so they're going slow enough that you can handle more bandwidth when you're trying to, say, fly a bunch of fighters, but not so slow that it overwhelms your mind at your current level of integration with the system," Arvie said.

"I love to hear that, but make sure that takes a back seat to getting Selii and her people out of trouble, and getting Satomi. I really don't want her to go to the imperial palace after all the stuff I've just pulled on the empress."

"Oh, no worries on that score, William," Arvie said. "I'm getting ready to send in some troops to try and take the transport ship your human companion is on."

"Good," I said. "Remember, we're already basically in a state of open warfare with the empress. I don't want to hold back on doing anything because we're afraid of a disproportionate response from her. She's already showed that a disproportionate response is the name of the game."

"Understood, William," Arvie said.

I came out of the computer talk a moment later. Rachel elbowed me in the side.

"Did you have fun wherever you went just now?"

I blinked, and then I turned to look at her. It took me a moment to get used to being back in realtime where everything was flowing as normal.

I wondered if Arvie had slowed everything down to the point that time had frozen, or if he was regulating the time dilation to the point it wasn't going to fry my brain. Even with all that, there was a little bit of odd color popping all around the fringes of my vision.

The heads-up display had disappeared as well, and I could feel that knot in the back of my head. That was the chip connection to Arvie, but it wasn't currently active.

It was good to know there were levels to that sort of thing, for all that it sounded like I was in a video game or something. But at the very least, I knew the livisk had experience with people learning how to control this stuff.

"I was just having a conversation with Arvie," I said.

"You know your lady friend over there would probably try to kill you with her sword if she knew you were doing that."

"Oh, I don't know about that," I said. "I'd probably get chewed out, not killed."

"And you've been chewed out before," she said, grinning.

"I mean, I am a man in a relationship," I said, grinning right back at her.

We settled into a silence after that. I turned and looked at the line of livisk who were bowing to Varis. Even she looked like she was starting to get a little uncomfortable with all of this.

"So where is he?" I finally asked.

Rachel knew exactly who I was talking about.

"He's been keeping himself scarce."

"Really?" I said.

"I think he's a little ashamed of how he acted while we were down here."

I shrugged, looking down at the ground. "There's no need for him to feel ashamed."

"You should probably tell that to him in person."

"Kind of hard to have a chat with your husband if he refuses to come over and talk."

"Yeah. Well, he's been through a lot. He was sure you were the reason we were taken captive."

"I was the reason why we were taken captive, even if I didn't have an active role in it."

"I suppose," she said. "But he still felt bad about it when we heard you came down here and killed that overseer. When Olsen started gathering raiding parties to send out into the Undercity all around us and he stayed back to stew in his annoyance."

"Yeah. I probably do need to have a chat with him at some point."

"Probably," she said.

"But not right now," I said.

"You're not just putting it off, are you?"

"I'm totally just putting it off," I said, turning and grinning at her. "But we also need to get a move on. This is taking way too long."

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