Free Stray by Andrea K. Höst

military facility.
    Thursday, December 27
    Overload
    Until today, I'd hardly seen any people.  Those couple of blacksuits back on Muina, and a few greensuits and greysuits and the guy who brought my meals.  The only people who have spoken to me were Sa Lents and Ista Tremmar.  At the KOTIS facility all I really saw were three rooms and a few corridors.  And, biggest change of all, my interface was at the most minimal level possible.
    During the flight – which was a military flight and not open to the public – Sa Lents taught me the different access options of my interface.  This is a bit like choosing to have subtitles when watching a DVD, but so much more.  I had to laugh when I turned on the 'Public information: people' option, and you could see people's names floating above their heads.  World of Warcraft without the shoulder pads.  You can't hide your name, apparently, any more than you can absolutely shut the government out of your head.
    There are tons of different display options or filters.  'Open' is full of things everyone can see, and is broken down into different levels – emergency and directional and décor and advertisement and entertainment and so on.  Then there's 'closed' or 'tight', which is things only you or a particular group can see.  Having made sure I knew how to filter all these display levels on and off, Sa Lents had me turn all but directional and décor off before we reached Unara.  This was a good move.
    Tare is fantastically crowded.  I hadn't realised the extent while I was locked away, but they're seriously packed in.  From Sa Lents' description – and the world map he showed me how to display – there are a lot of small islands, but only two decent land-masses, and even those are more Tasmania-sized than Australia-sized.  Unara is on an island called Wehana, which is almost all city.  Not suburbs, not even sky-scrapers, but this deep below the ground and high above the surface endless blocky whitestone mass – the same as the Institute, but monumentally larger, like a beehive of people.  External windows like the one I had are really rare and not even very popular because people feel exposed and unsafe.  I couldn't tell if Sa Lents meant that windows really did make you less safe, or if it was some kind of agoraphobia.
    So anyway, we flew through very bad weather over a lot of dark, uninviting water until we reached Carche Landing, which is a main 'airport' of Unara, and Unara pretty much tops what you'd get if you compacted Earth's biggest cities into a ball.  People everywhere , going every direction, and even the two display filters I had on were just Too Much.  The Unaran idea of décor involves holograms of fishes and clouds and winding patterns shifting all over the place and way too much colour and movement.  I shut it off.
    Sa Lents didn't seem to mind too much – or probably wasn't very surprised – at the way I clutched at his arm.  Thinking back it was really just a humungous shopping centre, but airier and with tons of plants (vegetables mainly) growing everywhere, and reminded me vaguely of the Jetsons cartoon with glass tubes with long train things shooting through them.  But the constant movement, the absolute mass of people and the height of the central atrium of Carche Landing had me the most freaked out I've been in ages.  And the noise.  The hive was buzzing.
    We boarded one of the glass-tube trains, which thankfully blocked out most of the noise so I could get my head back and look around just at the people inside of the train.  I hadn't realised that not everyone here is Asian (or looks Asian, whatever: with black hair and golden skin and 'Asian eyes' I'm calling them Asian).  Maybe one in ten Tarens don't look particularly Asian.  I haven't seen anyone really black-skinned or any bleached Nordic types, but there's all shades in between and I'm not the only pinkish, brown-haired girl, so I at least don't stick out completely.
    Unless