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“There’s nothing wrong with that, Mira. Just remember to think about how others perceive a situation. If any of the interface team thought you were wandering around the Syrtis desert without enough oxygen, I doubt any of them would rush to join the search party. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
    The field frame darkened. Romaine stepped through into the main interface chamber. “Yes, Uncle Sal,” she said, like a schoolchild acknowledging a lesson. Then she added quickly, “Unfortunately.”
    The main interface chamber was the largest natural bubble of the hundreds scattered throughout the asteroid, frozen in place eons ago when the planetesimal had coalesced from the gas and dust of what once had been a young star, and now was nothing more than a burned-out dwarf. Artificial gravity gave the chamber a floor of equipment and an arching vault of a ceiling that disappeared into darkness. The walls resonated with the low pulse of self-contained fusion generators and the whirr of recycling fans. Its dim light and exposed natural walls reminded Nensi of Novograd on Mars, the theme-park reconstruction of the first permanent human habitation on that planet in modern times.
    Garold, the Prime interface for Pathfinder Six, waited for them in the chamber. He was a tall, black, Terran humanoid who wore his long dark hair in the fashion of Veil: the left side of his skull hairless and glistening, the other half producing a wide, shoulder-length braid that hung like a partial helmet. He gestured to Nensi and Romaine, the metallic implants that had replaced his fingernails gleaming beneath the constellation of status lights that ran across the towering banks of computer equipment.
    Like most of his team, Garold was reluctant to talk, as if that real-time act was somehow beneath the dignity of a Pathfinder interface. More and more, the interface team was delegating its interaction with the rest of the Memory Prime staff to associates, as had happened to Nensi this morning. Later, after the outlogicked associate had replayed its recording of the meeting to its programmers, Nensi had almost enjoyed the discomfort he had heard in Garold’s voice when the Prime interface had called to arrange this access. The chief administrator wondered if Garold was what all of humanity might have become by now if the Federation hadn’t outlawed enhancement, with only a handful of exemptions, more than a century ago. Even Vulcans with their finely honed minds displayed more personality, and more life, than these machine-wired humans. Nensi did not feel comfortable around them. But, he reminded himself, no doubt they felt the same way around him.
    Even without Garold’s words, Nensi and Romaine found their way to the large interface booth, one of a dozen that ringed the multistoried central equipment tower of the chamber. Before he left them, Garold motioned them to sit on a padded bench away from the console with its screen of flashing, floating, blurring colors that presumably meant something to those who knew how to read it, but was like nothing Nensi had seen before.
    â€œDo you recognize the design?” he asked Romaine.
    â€œMostly Centauran. Native, not colonist.” She pointed to the abstract shapes of color that intermixed on the black background of the screen. “I’m out of practice, but a trained operator can read numerical data from the fringe effect of the colliding data sets. If you’re good at it, it’s much more rapid than reading data a single symbol at a time in alphanumerics. I believe it was the preferred interface method with the Pathfinders before enhancement was perfected. Difficult, and not easily understood by observers.”
    â€œIt’s odd that Starfleet doesn’t insist on standard instrumentation. They’re paying for all this, after all.” Starfleet was almost maniacal about ensuring that its technology was accessible to all beings who served