Breaking Through Limits (Larry Stylinson)

Chapter 20

Being in the Needle was nothing at all like Harry had imagined. For one thing, he'd somehow thought they would be sitting but they weren't -they were standing with nothing to sit on in the entire cockpit. Other than that, he had always pictured being naked in a small, dark space with Tomlinson plastered against his back in the claustrophobically tight cockpit. And at first that expectation was met. Then the smart metal of the Needle enclosed them both and the neural net took over, binding their two brains into one unit, and everything changed.

"Ready for launch," he heard his partner say in his ear. But he also felt the words in his own mouth and thought them in his brain at the same time. It wasn't a repetition of what Tomlinson had just said either -he literally thought and mouthed the words at the exact same time Tomlinson was saying them.

"What the hell?" he murmured and knew that Tomlinson was thinking and saying the same thing at the same time.

"What did you expect?" Tomlinson asked as he piloted the Needle down the narrow launch tube that led to the airlock. Again Harry thought and said the same words at the same time.

"I don't know. Not this. It's weird -I can't stop saying and thinking what you're saying when you say it."

"It's the neural echo effect," Tomlinson explained as they waited for the airlock to cycle open. As promised, there was three-hundred-and-sixty-degree visibility now that they were inside the Needle, which gave Harry the strange impression of having eyes in the back of his head. Through the visual scope that had molded to his eyes the moment he got into the cockpit, he could see to the sides and the back of the outside of the Needle as well as he could see to the front. But since his new view was just of the sterile white launch tube in all directions, he could still concentrate on what his partner was saying.

"The what?" he asked, wishing he could see Tomlinson. But despite his visibility outside the Needle, his partner was invisible. Only the press of his naked body against Harry's back and the murmur of his low voice in Harry's ear remained.

Tomlinson sighed, his breath warm on the back of Harry's neck. "You know when you call someone and you have a bad connection, sometimes you get that annoying echo of your own voice a split second after you talk?"

Harry nodded and then, realizing Tomlinson couldn't see him, said, "Yeah, I've had that before."

"Well, that's the aural equivalent of what's happening here only instead of you hearing your voice and me hearing mine, we hear each other's echoing inside our heads. The neural echo is what you get when you don't have enough contact to make the neural linking complete."

"Don't have enough contact?" Harry asked incredulously. "We're bare-assed naked and plastered all over each other."

"And how do you feel about that?" Tomlinson murmured in his ear. "Does it bother you, Harry?"

Harry didn't even have to think about it. He knew that a month ago he would have been freaking out in this situation and he certainly would have be too upset to fly. Now it seemed natural and right to have the older cadet so close to him, invading his space. Because there was no personal space in the Needle, he realized. There was no space that he and Tomlinson didn't share.