Thank you to the wonderful cosmogyral-delirium for the descriptions! 

Red could see Ember's face on the screen. She looked so different than she had the past few days. He punched in a few keystrokes and the image widened and zoomed out showing her body suspended in the air. Her face was raised skyward with a rapturous grin on it. Her eyes were wide open seeing the open space in front of the ship.

From his seat he could only stare, his mouth going dry. She was beautiful.

Even with all of the wiring in her back, sheathing her hands and feet, she looked like some sort of cybernetic angel flying through space and time, immune to the gaze of a lowly being like himself.

He zoomed in again to just her face. The look on her face said this is exactly where she wanted to be. This is where freedom for her lay. Her eyes seemed expressionless but he wasn't sure if it was because they were augmented or is she truly was looking elsewhere.

He knew in flight her body would tilt and roll with the ship, wherever she moved the ship would go as well in an instant. A simple movement would send them in a new direction should she choose.

He placed his palm on the screen. Immediately the interface connected him to the ship.

Ember immediately responded. "Registering you as the Co-pilot." Her voice carried into the small room barely above a whisper meant only for him to hear. She would be able to feel him examining the general coding, sifting through the lines of binary. Her voice had an odd ring to it. They hadn't yet spoken about what he'd seen.

An urge rose up in him, one that he couldn't deny or push away. There was one way he could show her that it didn't matter. That she could start over with her identity as a Neo-Tokyan hanging over her with every step.

The lines in front of him were like a book that he could easily read. There was one thing he could do for Ember, something that would make it easier for her if she had to plug in anywhere else and he wasn't the only audience.

He placed both hands on the interface and closed his eyes, leaning back into the chair and letting his body relax. It had been ages since he'd entered Cyberspace. Most people did so for entertainment, virtual reality had been a booming business and Red couldn't see that stopping just because of the purge. They would just find new ways to do it. Not everyone in cyberspace had been an augment.

A shifting sensation was all the warning he had and then he was standing in a vast landscape that made up the inner workings The Ember.

It didn't stop the sudden nausea that developed from the transfer. He hadn't stepped into cyberspace in more than seven years. He sank to his knees and started retching before his augments took over, smoothing the feelings away. He knew his body sitting in the pilot's chair would not have moved a muscle. It wasn't completely frozen in time, but everything that happened here happened in the mind. He shouldn't have done more than twitch in place.

He was not expecting the scene that laid before him, a scene he realized was completely Ember's own doing. It was the cyberscape belonging totally to the ship, not the usual cyberscape that connected worlds, which when he'd gone there in the past had resembled some neon lit city scenes from movies from by-gone years. It had proved to be easy form to advertise in, several levels of signs would light up the "streets" with brightly colored neon right above your head as you walked.

The name cyberspace had simply stuck for the world that existed whenever you plugged in.

Most people forgot it was completely comprised of binary code as they walked the streets. The place even had restaurants you could dine in for a taste, they couldn't actually feed you. In the beginning people had starved to death when they didn't leave cyberspace.

But not here.

In Ember's mind the space was open and empty, completely devoid of the grandiose sky-rises and city-scapes he'd associated with cyberspace. He sensed more than saw that he was in the part belonging solely to the vessel. And the vessel wasn't connected through any node or access point.

In the field in front of him stood a single wooden door in the distance. That was it, there was nothing around it, certainly nothing behind it. But going through it would lead him into Ember's innermost being, the part that was her mental landscape, or mindscape as it was termed. The only part where they had complete control of their environment.

He stopped, hesitating as he stared at the door. To go through it would be an expression of trust that he wasn't sure she would give him. But he needed to get to her core to do what he had in mind.

Those able to jack into cyberspace saw it in one of two ways. It could be nothing more than its binary building blocks, or it could be a vast landscape, depending on how your mind rendered it.

Most humans preferred the landscape: it was less taxing to the organic mind. Red could see both, and neither failed to snatch his breath away. Whether it was made of entirely of binary or whether he could walk through it.

He shifted to the binary for a moment to make sure of his direction. He smiled. The pathway in binary was a straight shot to her through that door, she was literally the heart of this entire ship, indeed of the entire world, he saw here. The landscape was just an extension of herself, what she saw when she was in her own mind.

Red, what are you doing? Her voice carried over this place, echoing around every corner.

"I'm giving you a gift," he said out loud. "If you will allow it."

"What do you mean?" He could hear her confusion. She appeared in front of him, her appearance flashing in and out of the binary. He stayed with just the landscape so he could make out her physical features.

In here her hair was longer, and pulled back away from her face but she left the rest of it hanging down her back. Her clothes had shifted to just a blue sleeveless tunic, over black pants and boots. In here there was no hint that her eyes were augmented. At least none that he could make out She'd traveled out to meet him and fell into step next to him as he moved towards the door.

"Your name," he whispered. It was so quiet in here that speaking too loud felt wrong, almost sacrilegious.

He felt more than saw that she stopped at some sort of boundary just outside the door. "You can do that?" She whispered.

He turned to her and nodded, letting the silence stretch between them.

It was her call. From here onward he would be inside of her, even more intimate in a way that went beyond sex. Her augments were incredibly complex but all within her physical body. Here he could do real damage, hurt her in ways she'd never recover from by changing a few lines of code.

And she didn't really know him, other than someone who'd escaped from prison with her.

He held his breath and then tentatively put a hand out on the door knob in front of him. He felt a momentary resistance to his entry, but then she yielded to him. He shivered as the door swung open in front him, and reverently he stepped inside.

She followed him warily, her presence stronger here, she was everywhere and slowly following behind him. What he was about to do would either foster her trust in him or shatter it. Hoping she would continue to trust him he kept moving, straight towards his goal.

He felt her presence in a completely new way... The breeze ruffling his hair, the prairie grass swaying to and fro... the magnificent sunset in the distance, and the stars opposite it emerging from the darkness... everything around him was her. He shivered in her reality even though it was quite warm. This was her realm, her rules -- if he put one foot out of line, she could skewer him where he stood. Cut him off from himself... He'd vanish leaving only an echo in the code.

Cyberspace was just as real as the waking world, and those venturing inside it had tags built in to track every virtual move. Every augment had a registered tag built inside their connective hardware. It held your real name, nothing more, but it watched you as you went about your day in the data stream. It was meant to be difficult to change once you'd been given a tag, except for a few who'd learned how to do it.

There it was looming in front of him like an altar.

He shifted between binary and surreal and then back to binary. Her name swam in front of his eyes and he was aware more than ever that Ember was watching him. Trust me, he thought but only to himself. He dared not do anything else other than what he'd said he was going to do.

He pulled the code out in front of him as if he was unrolling a scroll, the zeroes, and ones flashing in front of him. It should have been an easy task to change a few letters to simply read "Ember" but the complexities that had been interwoven into the system meant you had to move lines of code that amounted to an entire novel in the real world.

Difficult, but not impossible.

"Your name," he spoke out loud for the first time in what felt like ages. His shoulders felt stiff with tension. The tag encryption were designed to be unbreakable. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he remembered he'd trained for this but he couldn't immediately pull up the memories of it. His mind worked subconsciously pulling up the data. He'd commanded and controlled a legion of star ships once. This was much harder.

He wasn't sure how long he'd stood there shifting code around but when he was finished he shifted to the landscape again and exhaled feeling mentally drained. Her name simply read "Ember" as it sat on top of a pedestal.

Ember stared at the name in surprise reaching a hand forward to touch it. A single tear rolled down her cheek as she lifted her face to stare at him. She was anonymous now, no one would be looking for "Ember." "Hannah Emberline Dawson" was a ghost.

He smiled back at her and stepped back and then without warning felt his own body hurled out of her realm. It didn't hurt him in any way but he was surprised and slightly hurt at the speed at which she'd expelled him.

He could only watch as she stood next to the pedestal growing smaller and smaller in the distance as he flew backward away from her, his arms outstretched towards her in a futile gesture.

His eyes flew open. Red inhaled sharply and glanced around. He was back in his seat, his hands still in the interface. Swiftly he pulled them away leaning forward at the same time to see his handiwork.

He couldn't help but smile when he read the subject line reflecting "Ember" back at him.

He was covered in sweat, although only about twenty minutes had passed. That's got to be a record or something, he thought to himself. He turned the chair and stood around only to find Ember standing behind him.

Her hair was unkempt as she ran her fingers through it before looking up at him again, not at all like the woman he'd seen inside The Ember. She was still attached to the ship via Cable, her arms were held loosely against her sides. She looked unsure of herself as she put out her hand.

"Thank you," she whispered as he swallowed her tiny hand with his. "Thank you, Red." He felt energized by her touch, any exhaustion he had melted away as if she'd jolted him with an electric charge.

"You're welcome," he replied just as solemnly.

And then much to his disappointment she turned and yanked her hand away, fleeing back into her chambers rising up in front of him like the cybernetic angel that she was and retreating back into her sanctuary.

He stood there for a moment unsure of what just happened when the ship jolted, knocking him to the side.

"Red," Ember's voice came from the console this time. "We have company."