“The others call it a ‘gate’, but it’s really some kind of brain-machine interface,” Kay explained the device grafted into her skull, idly drumming her fingers on the little metal box as she did so. “As far as I know it just translates human thought into digital signals and vice versa. And my eye is the reason I got it, originally... to be able to actually see with it. It’s artificial, you see. Lost my old one when, eh, all of this happened.” She made a vague gesture at the scarred side of her face.
	She probably seemed somewhat less lively during this explanation than she had been with Enn most of the time until then, if not downright morose, which was probably one of her greatest regrets. Her artificial eye and the gate in her head were probably the two most advanced pieces of technology she had ever seen, and both were hugely fascinating to her to the point where she wanted to get enthusiastic about them the same way she did with other interesting devices, but somehow... the fact that they were [I]in[/I] her, and had almost become an integral part of her, made it somewhat awkward. The eye was not so bad, beside it reminding her of the eye she had lost, because she could turn it off and take it out; its socket allowed for the eye itself to be plugged in and out quite freely and painlessly, if one knew how to do it. She had been able to examine the eye – albeit only very cautiously as to be sure that she could restore it to working order again after – and figure how how it worked. The gate, however... it was plugged into her [I]brain[/I]. Removing it would probably kill her, or at least cause irreparable brain damage, and there was no telling what could happen if one tried tinkering with it while it was still connected to her. For a part of herself, she knew surprisingly little about the gate... too little.
	It had not been her choice to receive those two things; she had been sedated after her accident, and when she had regained consciousness the procedure had already been performed. She recalled having been pretty devastated by it at the time, and furious with the others for having altered her like that without her consent, but ultimately she had just accepted it because... well, frankly she had no other choice. The worst part of it all was that helping her was not even the primary objective of installing the gate in her head! The reason they had given her the cybernetic eye and the brain-machine interface was mostly just because they wanted to see if it worked, and how it would affect the recipient. Needless to say it was no one in Eighfour who had built either of the two artifacts. Rather, they really had no idea which faction had made them, or what purpose they originally served... and the only reason they had known enough to be able to install the eye and gate in her skull was because they had found them embedded into the skull of a corpse. The corpse had had several other cybernetic replacements, but they only had the one brain-machine interface, and the rest would not work without that. They had tried to pressure her into receiving the other replacements since, but she had refused.
	So now they were all just really hoping that she managed to get herself seriously hurt again... or better yet, died so they could install the gate into someone more cooperative.

	But soon enough she brightened and returned to her usual self. “As for Aitch, the way I control him is pretty ingenious, if I say so myself. It’s this glove here, you see; I built it to control all of my drones by having it register the position and movements of my fingers, and translate those things into commands.” She sighed. “When I say that I’m inside him, though, it’s because I can see and hear through him, through the gate. I haven’t figured out how to make the gate accept new signals, though, so for the moment all I can do is to make my drones copy the signal of my eye, since the gate recognizes that. Unfortunately that means that I have to turn my eye off while I use a drone... if I don’t the signals get all mixed together, and I see two images mixed into each other.”

	She did not pay too much attention to what Enn was doing with the birds, though, as her attention came to be more and more focused on her actions through Aitch, currently flitting through the leaves and heading for the clear view of the forest from above. She frowned, deeply concentrated, as she slowed the little drone’s movements. Something was... just slightly off, it felt like. She had not noticed it until Aitch had put some distance between itself and her, but now she was becoming increasingly certain that something was not right. It felt like there sometimes was a slight delay before Aitch responded to the movements of her fingers, and while the images remained clear, the sound... she seemed to be hearing a little bit of static. Odd.
	Until she actually got above the trees, that was, and got a proper view of the sky...
	[I]Oh.[/I]

	Kay remained unusually intent on what she was doing by remote-control for about another ten or so seconds, barely even paying attention to what was happening in the immediate vicinity of her body, until Aitch returned – much more clumsily than it had left – to her, she turned it off and reopened her artificial eye. Only then did she look at Enn, just about in time to see him remove his helmet – he looked surprisingly young – and take a bite of meat before asking her a question.
	“You noticed the static, huh?” she sighed, turning back to her cart to put away Aitch Cee and retrieve a bottle of water. “Yeah, the weather definitely won’t be kind to us, that’s for sure; judging by the sky, there’s a sunstorm coming. I won’t be able to use my drones while that goes on... but hopefully I won’t need to, either.”
	She turned back to him and offered him a plastic bottle, made to hold a liter of water and about two-thirds full of clear-looking liquid. “And Eighfour isn’t that far, really. Now that I know where we are, I’d say we’re probably just some twenty kilometers away.”
	Suddenly, though, she had a thought. “Will the, uh, Trenians, was it? Do you know if their drones will work in a sunstorm?”