Wade still couldn't fathom how huge planet Zharus' continents were. He'd arrived by space elevator, headed for Gondwana where most of the colony's excitement and construction were. The route to most city-states was a hurtling suborbital flight, like a missile. Land travel meant speeding through an Asia-sized desert, much hotter than the real Gobi, or going around it. With dwindling funds his options were few. Worse, he'd had the bad luck to travel with several other professional welders seeking jobs. He needed time to recover from cryosleep and to adjust to the planet's slightly wrong air and lower gravity. And to how the technology was a throwback to centuries past, mixed with advanced nanotech and those robots he'd heard such rumors about. He spent two weeks waiting tables at a restaurant that really didn't need live servers. The mindless job cushioned his money just enough for him to make plans. With that, he boarded a slow shuttle to Nautica. The city stood on the southeast coast of Gondwana Continent, first appearing as a distant haze. The ocean glowed as the sun set. Surface ships with actual sails drifted above hints of sunken domes. "Atlantis," he said. A fellow passenger grinned. "First time here?" The man had wolf ears and a handheld game console like an ancient plastic brick. "Yeah. Hoping to work on the underwater construction." "With a RIDE?" Wade nodded and glanced toward those fuzzy black ears. "I know about the transformation thing." "You wouldn't be the first newcomer who didn't! Did you know there's a 'passive mode', if you're not comfortable with the side effects?" He gave some advice for piloting robot armor without the full assistance of its onboard AI. Wade asked questions and concluded, "Thanks! I have the trade skills, so I just need to not screw up the piloting." The flier made a wobbly landing on a shoreline pad. "Good luck! I work at the Alterra Hub if you ever want to say hi." # Wade found a cheap hotel in an archaic Japanese style, with coffin-like rooms. He walked around the surface by night. Tropical, not the lethal heat of the Dry Ocean farther inland, and humid. Somebody sped by on a sleek red hoverbike. He went to a shop labeled "7-11" and bought a few days' supply of lunch meat, bread and noodles. The people he saw around here looked suspiciously at his too-modern clothing and the welts still lingering from the cryopod. He backed off and rested. Getting better established would make him better informed, and safer. The next morning he went to the shore of this alien sea. Still blue like Earth's tropics, and little of the underwater district was visible beneath the dazzling sun. His job contact was a prefab titanium garage on the waterline. Antique bells jingled when he entered. The shop held RIDEs. A metal chassis on each of several benches posed as a hoverbike, a suit of armor, or an animal statue. As Wade approached the counter a mechanical leopard crossed his path, startling him. Hardlight fur flickered into place as its machinery booted. Wade waited for his own heart to restart. "Sorry," said the leopard, in a growling voice. "Welcome to Gungan Rentals. Can I help you?" He stammered and said, "I'm new. Here about the welding job." The machine whistled. A human arrived, wiping his hands on an oily rag. A long feline tail matching the RIDE's flicked behind him, and he had matching ears. "You're on time. So you were going to rent a RIDE and prove you know what you're doing, and we tattle on you to SeaQuest Construction to say how you did. Right?" "Yeah." "Trouble is, a VIP rented the otter I'd set aside for your test run. But Tya can help you if you're willing. You were going to go passive, right?" Wade nodded, and the man led him to a pool built into the garage's corner. Just outside it, a blue-grey machine rested in a maintenance cradle. The leopard padded in behind Wade, unnerving him, and whistled. The dormant RIDE lit up with what were for some reason called "tron lines", in green. The big cat said, "She's all yours for the day. The welding tools are over there. Don't drown or you lose your deposit." The human clerk assured him, "Your dive certification checks out. You won't do anything stupid, right? You'll be fine. But run the tutorial sim." "Can't in passive," the leopard said. "Right. Stick to the shallows at first, then." Wade walked up to the rental machine. It currently looked more like a motorcycle than like armor, but it clicked and whirred and began hovering, opening wide to be worn. As he'd been coached, he stood with his arms out and tried not to flinch. The RIDE floated over and engulfed him. The world went dark, then lit up with a headset view. He felt heavy, encased tightly in alloys and machinery, but built-in motors made movement easy. He clumped around, narrowly avoiding banging into anyone. "Walk outside before you swim," advised the clerk. Wade did. The sun didn't warm him, due to the excellent life-support that was one of the reasons RIDEs were invented. The HUD displayed nametags above some of the townsfolk. He also had dive-computer software, this unit's specialty. So he raised one arm to point at virtual buttons for planning his first dive, and caught sight of the suit. The blue-grey metal gleamed in the sun, and the armor was distinctly curvy. "Weird." He was glad to have a full helmet on and not to be seen like this. The other distracting thing was the tail, a long wiggly thing with several joints and a vertical fin like a scimitar. It dangled as a dead weight behind him. When he walked back inside he said, "Uh, you gave me a woman's suit." The leopard's glowing eyes flickered to display punctuation, "^w^". He said, "Thought you'd notice sooner. It doesn't matter though; you'll be underwater and anonymous. Now get down there and show us what you've got." Wade returned to the pool, trying to be professional and impress his potential bosses. But he did look at his reflection: a shark-styled armor suit with a distinct overbite jaw. On any other planet it might be taken for a costume, but from his studies he recognized connectors on each limb for weaponry it'd once had. "Was this a war machine?" he asked. "She did naval work but rarely saw combat." Unnerving to be wearing what the local culture considered a person! He entered dive info into the suit computer, then stepped backward off the ledge and splashed down. He carried his tools using a magnetic clamp on the suit's back. The HUD became more helpful, showing a waypoint. Fifty meters down, well beyond what a basic diver might do with scuba gear. His air supply was dry and cold. Supplemental gills were built in, but they needed more active software. Once he'd confirmed the survival gear worked, he gave a thumbs-up and descended. The city glittered even by day. Domes and blocky buildings stood out beneath the waves. The continental shelf was a gradual slope. Alien coral grew in hexagons and whorls. His HUD led him to a dead spot not yet used for construction, where someone had anchored a steel plate a meter across. Wade opened his toolkit. The test was to make this plate into a small foundation for an equipment box. He picked up a rod, and fiddled with the suit's optics to shield himself. To his surprise the system not only supplied safety reminders but highlighted tiny dents as weak points. He supposed most RIDEs were military surplus, equipped to attack even if designed for support roles. He circled the construction site and ran through his own knowledge, as much to practice the suit's swimming method as to prepare for work. He wasn't using the tail at all, which seemed silly. He cautiously fired up his tools, creating sparks in front of him. He had a sense that he was doing this wrong, but couldn't place it. He stopped to look for a dangerous mistake. Instead he saw two images of his hand at once, one of them unarmored and the other armored, mechanical. The water smelled of iron. Something glitched. The suit froze, then convulsed. Error messages flashed. He overheated, even though he could feel seawater directly on him. *Emergency surface!* he thought, and activated a buoyancy system. He felt a dense power source contracting somewhere near his heart. He remembered a battle off the coast of Sturmhaven against some crazy ladies in micro-subs, and having to resort to good old biting... except he'd never been there. Felt like he was waking up even while passing out. Wade floated to the surface face-down, inert, shedding pounds of glittering dust that melted into the water. # He woke up groaning and seeing lines of text about status errors. He had no access to the planet's network, a disconnect that felt like being deaf. Even though he'd barely used it since arriving, he'd used it or the restricted nets all his life. The contradiction jammed his thoughts. "Where am I?" asked a synthetic female voice. Wade sat up, looking around. He lay on a maintenance cradle in the shop, hooked up to cords and sensors. He felt heavy and could hardly move. "Hello?" His voice came out sounding exactly like the one he'd overheard. The leopard RIDE padded closer, followed by the human clerk. "You're awake! We were just arguing whether to report this. Tya, are you there?" Wade spoke without meaning to. "I'm offline. What happened? Fusers are down, disengage disabled. I was in passive mode and then --" Wade's right arm lurched upward, and it was armored without being a bulky suit. More like hexagonal scales. Wade said, "What happened?" The human whistled. "This looks like an Integration event. Never seen it in person. We barely know how to diagnose it. Uh, Wade, did you read up on what that means?" "Rumors." But then he spoke again, and it wasn't *him* making his mouth move, nor his normal voice coming from it. "Ah hell! I wasn't even awake and I don't know this human." Wade sat up involuntarily. "Lost some mass." Wade stared down. This wasn't a RIDE on him, but sleek segmented metallic plates and something like rubberized cloth. His chest still had the prominent curve for women's armor but instead of a solid breastplate it was more like, well, breasts. His *ears* blushed, long and angled backward. So did some kind of wounds along his back. "Who's talking?" "Me! Tya!" he said. "Your rental RIDE. This isn't right. I can barely see your vitals and we're stuck in a messed-up fuse mode." The clerk held up one hand. "I'm watching you argue with yourself. Listen for a minute. Sounds like both you, Tya, and you, Wade, are in there. We detected two-way data transfer, so you should both have some access to the combined body and maybe other things --" "Combined body!" said Wade. "Stuck as some half-biological..." muttered that shark-lady AI. The clerk pressed on. "You're lucky this didn't happen a few months ago, or you'd be kidnapped by that cult. Now that everybody knows this really happens, it sounds like you two need one of those advanced comm units and a checkup." The panther said, "And you owe us for the merchandise." Wade and Tya both spoke objections at once. The panther RIDE said, "Tya was legally ours, and not just off some auction block. She, you, were decommissioned scrap before we put in the work to rebuild you. Also you wrecked a motor unit while we were rescuing you, thrashing around and biting." He kind of remembered chomping on something metallic, crushing it like a can. He shuddered and tried to focus on his heartbeat, but there wasn't one. Instead he sensed a warm core with a fizzing sensation in the middle of his chest, at 21% charge, and his lifters were badly out of tune. "Lifters? They're embedded in me?" "I have *intestines*? Yuck. Or... I can't tell, doc. If you're going to bill me for something I didn't cause, make yourself useful and give me a good scan." "Who am I talking to?" asked the human. The panther said, "That's Tya. I can understand not wanting to have full human biology. I'm programmed to not care much about doing the life support stuff, but I wouldn't want a lot of blood and organs permanently hooked up to me. No offense. Hey, you! What do we call you?" "Wade!" said Wade. "Tya!" said the RIDE that shared his speech system, at the same time, managing to overlay the sound output. Wade felt at his metallic throat. He probably wasn't pumping air through his lungs to speak. "They've got it bad," the panther commented. "You two, I thought how it worked was you were supposed to be lovey-dovey and act like one person. If you're still divided, you need more help than we can give. There's a garage licensed for work on Integrates; maybe they can figure this out. Can you walk or float or whatever?" Wade's changed body wobbled and threw itself to the floor. He got up dizzy. "Walk, maybe." # He was in a daze as the company brought him in an ordinary hovertruck, to a sandstone bunker. He spoke aloud: "You're a RIDE in my head?" Static fuzzed out his vision and hearing, then faded. That voice he'd heard coming from his metallic snout was now speaking in his mind. *"The name's Tya. Angry to meet you, but not at you. You were just a renter newbie, and Integration supposedly almost never happens except when a human and RIDE are closely bonded."* He tried answering the same way, directing his thoughts at this alien presence. At least his own mental voice was the same as usual. *"Wade. I don't have anything against RIDEs themselves, but buying and owning them?"* A rough, raspy laugh. *"It's screwed up, yeah. We just had a little war over the status of Integrates. The short version is the good guys won. They and RIDEs are going to be treated better now."* *"Humanity was oppressing the Integrates too?"* *"No, that group was abusing itself. Killing anybody who stepped out of line of some wacko cult, saying 'we're so special and oppressed we have to beat down anyone who questions our leadership, and take over everything'. Rumor says that's still not totally put down, but most of the people were forced into it by peer pressure and violence. They're okay, I guess."* Wade said, *"History rhymes, huh? And currently I'm an Integrate?"* *"Yeah. Uh... If I were talking to another RIDE I'd send you a file about it. With a human pilot I'd display the text or sort of project it into your brain. Right now I'm not sure you actually have a brain made of meat."* *"That's disturbing."* *"I'm trying not to freak out about being half blind right now. No network at all! I'm at least more used to having a bad connection than most, since I'm an aquatic."* Wade said, *"What about sonic or blue-laser repeaters? I've used them."* *"So have I, and there's talk about some kind of quantum comm now. The trouble isn't that we literally can't pick up a signal. In fact, can you see this?"* The truck was full of colors. At least that's how he interpreted it at first. A three-dimensional energy field around him. The visual part of the field faded out as what passed for his brain re-interpreted it. *"Now it's like smelling something but everywhere at once. Iron, maybe."* *"Network strength and traffic. As I was saying, that part of my wiring that can unscramble any of this got fried. It's like losing the speech parts of your brain."* Wade shuddered. *"Fixable?"* *"So I've heard. Let's see what the mecha-docs say."* # They entered a fancier garage where a hologram-covered raccoon was playing with projections of shiny shapes. A man was stomping back and forth in an alarmingly well-armed lion suit. Both paused when they saw Wade staggering in, under Tya's direction. Wade had tripped when they both tried to move their fused legs at once. Their body had kept most of the mechanical features. There were lenses embedded in his arms and legs like jewels, there were visible seams, and his feet felt more like boots thunking on the concrete floor than like bare soles. It might have been the stress, but he felt like he was constantly gritting sharp teeth. The "doctor" was a man with fuzzy ears and a prominent white stripe down his black hair, wearing greasy overalls. "Glad you called ahead. You're my first Integrate patient who wasn't shot full of holes." "Then we're ahead of the game," Wade said. "But what happened?" "You tell me." The doc, going by Mint, had them lay down on a padded table surrounded by tools like a nightmare dentist. Wade's sudden tail forced him to lay on his front, which meant having these breasts squashed beneath him. He and Tya explained. Mint looked at the rental shop's supplied data and took his own scans. "Physically you're pretty normal for an Integrate. And I've got good news. As often happens, your internal battery self-refined in the transformation, basically upgrading itself. And you apparently already had an above-average model." "Ha!" said Tya. "I told them a good battery was important for underwater work." Wade said, "I have a sarium battery?" Mint nodded. "You'll still need to eat, somewhat, but you also need power. As for the network problem, that's normal, and the technique is standardized now. It'll take me hours to do it carefully; this is new to me outside a training class." Wade watched the proceedings. On the back of his neck was a metallic plug. He imagined hair in that region prickling, but instead he had only a mop of synthetic fibers on his head. The rest of his altered skin was either slick plating or had the rough scaly texture of sharkskin. The doc was scanning his new hardware and working with a skunk RIDE to design and fabricate an adapter for Zharus' network protocols. "Like custom eyeglasses," Wade said. Tya spoke by their mental link. *"Always disturbed me that humans can't easily swap out an eye or something. Even with modern tech it's messy."* He answered, *"The world's seething with microbes that will literally eat us alive if not for our living nanotech zealot army."* His body shivered, but it wasn't him doing that. Tya said, *"That was weird! I am not looking forward to being stuck like this."* Aloud, Wade said, "Doc, can you fix us? Peel Tya off of me?" The doc's tail drooped. "I'm sorry. I'm helping you get equipped for this new phase of your life. As far as I know, Integration is permanent." Wade felt Tya's presence like a shark swimming in angry circles. "Why'd it happen?" "I'll send your data along to the experts if you don't mind. I'd say cosmic rays, given the planet's unusual radiation and atmosphere problems." "Wouldn't hit us underwater," said Wade. "Maybe before I dived, something glitched." Tya mused, "So you know some underwater science?" "More the practical side. I worked on a nuke reactor's cooling pond once, welding some struts." The shark paused. "Construction and demolition were my specialty in the war. I repaired subs. Ever do that?" "No, but I did pressurized gas vessels." The doc looked up from his console. "Personality compatibility is usually high when this happens. Maybe you have more in common than you know." "I was in passive mode. I didn't even wake up till this hit." He brought over a metallic plug resembling a pearl, and attached it to the port on Wade's neck, making him shudder. "Try this." "My turn," said Tya. Soon she said, "Aha!" Wade felt data. A stream of files flew seemingly past him, incomprehensible. Tya was adding notation on the fly, seeing news headlines and random banter. "Too much!" Tya mentally said, *"90% of it is garbage. Wait, you can see the data?"* *"A little."* The flood slowed. He saw the notation more clearly than the raw data, now. Tya's filtering system. Then it halted and she said, *"I was about to connect to the New Integrate Forum. Maybe better to lurk, though."* *"Is that a shark thing?"* *"So is suddenly leaping out at people."* The doc watched. "I see encrypted network traffic; are you back online?" Tya spoke aloud. "Yeah. Thanks. Just need to figure out... everything else." "Can't help you there. But I'll give you some replacement plugs, and my partner and I are around to talk." The skunk RIDE said, "Don't know if I'd ever want to end up where you are. But it sounds like you two need to learn more about each other. Go out exploring, talking." Wade said, "Can you at least change me physically? RIDEs reshape themselves, so can't I at least look like my human self?" Both the doc and his teammate looked grim. "Sorry. We still don't understand how all this works. This is you, now." # Wade and Tya stood on the streets of Nautica, in one body, beneath hot sun. Tya said, *"I guess getting stuck in girl mode is a shock for a human. I feel like I'm stuck in some broken fuser mode; can't shift to my submarine shape."* *"I have nowhere to go, now. And from what you said about past Integrates I'm not eager to fall in with any group eager to recruit me."* They ended up back at the same dingy hotel Wade had been in. Except now, they used a power cord to attach to the ridiculous shark tail coming out of Wade's back. "Ridiculous?" said Tya aloud. "What are you talking about?" "I wasn't talking." "Well now I'm curious. I want to see how well this shape can swim." Wade found himself veering toward the door unwillingly. "Wait!" he said. He'd been possessed by this robot's AI and it was even steering his body now. A body that was completely the wrong shape and felt like a mix of permanent armor and alarmingly sleek wetsuit curves. His mouth spoke in the same voice he now used. "I can feel you're uneasy. Is it that bad, that you're afraid of me?" "A little. And you're... we're still plugged in." "Oh right." Tya reached back to detach the power cord. They paced restlessly. "I'm not going to eat you." "You already did. Not your fault. You're stuck with a human, now, with all my worries." "Can you share files at all? I don't know how this mixed-up brain is structured. I'm just glad I'm still here." Wade tried remembering his family, his schooling, the trip from Earth. It was still there without obvious gaps. He focused on a particular party he'd enjoyed, trying to package that and push it toward Tya's mind. The shark laughed. "Humans are terrible swimmers." There'd been a birthday party at a water park, with a giant wave pool. "The slides do look fun, though. Can't do that at my size." "Are you sure? You're not a mini-submarine anymore." Wade looked this mixed body over again, and wasn't sure if it was him or Tya tilting his head. Tya said, "Smaller, yeah. I wonder if we could..." A flicker of data reached Wade. Tya had put out a search query about Integrates at water parks. There was a big one here in Nautica and several more in other city-states. Integrate customers were welcome except for a particular incident involving "too many otters". "You hit the Net by a thought?" Wade said. "It's a standard command. My settings got reset though, so it feels all wrong. Try it, maybe?" She pushed some kind of file at him. His mind didn't know how to classify it. A search engine, sure, but more like a trail into hazy water. He thought at it, *Cape Nord*, the name of another city. Images and articles came flooding in, showing a Viking dance party and a restaurant list. "Neat. So long as it's firewalled heavily." "That's what I'm trying to check. So what do you want to do? I'm used to being steered around by a human. It... it might be better if you drove." Wade sighed. "If we really can't get peeled apart, then you have an equal share here. I'm not happy about that meaning a claim on my body, but there's no other good choice." "So?" "Let's go swimming." # They returned to the sea. Neither of them were sure how to get started, from their different perspectives. They walked until they were neck-deep, then went sideways. *"Gills,"* thought Wade. The slits felt like bellows along his upper back. *"I'm sensing they aren't enough for full breathing, but they'll extend our air supply. Bah, we can only spend a few minutes at a time below without renting an air tank!"* Wade experimentally swam forward and down. He tried listening to the data that flitted around Tya like minnows. *"I think I'm feeling sensor readings. Do these mean we're basically immune to the bends?"* *"I always was. But yes. Is this how you'd normally swim?"* *"No. Like this."* Wade tried to do a normal swim as though diving with rubber fins and a tank. The plates and synthetic armor of his changed body felt the water directly as though nude. *"So slow!"* said Tya. She acted on her own, thrashing their mechanical tail side to side. They plowed through the water. *"Even with the tail we're slow."* *"You're wiggling!"* *"We're wiggling. And that's normal for a shark."* The RIDE's movement made Wade feel weird. It wasn't a human style. He thought about the machinery built into him now. *"I feel these lifters in my hands and... head? Don't know why they're there, but can they push water away?"* Tya scanned them in her own way, and surfaced. Their breathing was a quantifiable thing, visible to Wade as a meter as well as a human feeling. The shark felt puzzled by coming from that from the other direction. She said, *"These are placed like a supercavitation drive. I'd been wanting to get that installed but it was too expensive and wasn't needed when I was in military life."* *"How are they used?"* asked Wade. Tya held their right hand out, and pushed water away to create a vacuum. *"Feel what I'm doing?"* Wade tried the left hand, pushing energy into it. Water swirled away. *"Great. Now the head..."* Water vanished from a bubble around them. *"And forward. Not sure if the arms go forward or back for this."* Wade tried kicking through the water, then consciously felt the artificial muscles of their shared tail. It drove them forward, and there was little in their way, less water and more open space. They rushed into the open sea as though bobbing to the surface. Waves roared around Wade in layers that his skin caught and deflected. With a slight headtilt he swerved and cut through the ocean, their tail thrashing for balance and propelled by jet and muscle. Navigating by brain and sensors. Somewhere he got the idea to spin, and looped up into bright sea and back down. *"Much faster!"* said... Wade thought it was the shark, but it might've been himself. They surfaced, and Tya definitely answered. *"An upgrade! Faster than our usual mechanical form."* *"What now?"* said Wade. They bobbed at the surface, tens of kilometers out to sea. Wade wiggled their tail for balance. It was just part of his spine, feeding him the sense of water pressure and temperature and the slight strain of his motor-fibers. *"Sounds like we owe the rental company."* *"It'll be practice to work on some welding."* They jetted back toward the city, hopping out of the water like a dolphin and relying on lifters to float above it half the time. Tya thought, *"Wonder if I could ignore the debt and let them sue. I just got to this planet; how can they own my body?"* Wade floated onward, learning how to adjust the cavorite intensity that kept him skimming just above the waves. *"Kinda used to being considered property anyway, so... wait. Did you just...?"* Tya laughed nervously in his head. *"Scrambled files. Uh. Maybe working off the debt is a way to get our head together and practice. Gives us something to do."* Wade *remembered* hanging around in a military garage, being charged and tinkered with. Having a no-nonsense pilot wear him like a suit, eager to get the job done and not to chat. He was vaguely hurt by never getting to know her. Now, maybe... Tya was lost in reminiscing, too. *"There was a farewell party on Earth. I've never been to Earth. But your friends were congratulating... me?"* *"Something like that."* *"Never had humans treat me like that. It's nice."* He thought about the city here that he'd barely explored. *"I should wander around and introduce you to people. It's an excuse not to hide."* Tya said, *"Aren't we supposed to have clothes for that?"* He felt the sensation of a blush despite not having true blood vessels along his sharky snout. *"Been thinking of this as a suit. Nobody has objected so far."* *"Not sure anyone knows what the rules are for Integrates."* *"So. Clothes shopping. Great."* The shark chuckled. *"New for me, too. Um, Wade? Would it be okay when we talk, sometimes, to try saying 'I' instead of 'We'?" I barely know you."* He didn't want some stranger speaking in his name, having access to all his passwords. He felt a distant sense of hurt from Tya brushing against the edge of the thought. Under normal circumstances he was right to keep his distance from her, but it was no longer an option. He finally said, *"Yeah. On a trial basis."* Over time, they might do that more and more. Wade floated to shore, standing up shakily, feeling his tail wobble. He felt files and radio signals, batteries and the feedback of stretchy synthetics he couldn't remove. It was unfamiliar, but not completely so. His merged-in memories included working with construction tools underwater, just while in a different shape. New planet, new body, yet he now had a local guide more familiar to him than anyone else could be. The shark Integrate said aloud, "What if we agree to pay, but negotiate so they're paying our upkeep and housing while we get retrained for a good job?" And the same voice and almost the same mind answered, "Sounds good. Let's go."