It turned out that for safety you had to hold the buttons down in a specific way to get the suit off. Casey practiced getting into and out of her emergency gear slash uniform every way she could think of, and Peggy called a halt to the exercises after she could do it in the dark with no gravity and sonic disruptors active. And if the fact that she was doing all that with the taxiway at JFK right outside the window wasn’t enough to blow her mind nothing would.

  “It's time to go.” Announced Peggy finally. “We’re the last ones here. Point in your favor though, you conducted the most comprehensive preparations out of all of your fellows.”

  Casey popped her helmet into its spot behind the headrest and vaulted into her seat.

  “Where to?” she asked as she strapped in and positioned the screens that she still couldn’t read.

  “First low orbit, and we will see from there. So far you have a knack for drawing out completion times in the name of full preparedness.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Not a complaint, just an observation. Be advised that my sisters and I are writing the book on ‘how to train your human’ and everything that all 10 of you do are just data points to consider for process refinement.”

  “I am in your capable hands”

  “Speaking of hands, I want you to keep them on the controls that I highlight. You will get actual sim time once you can read, but until then I want you shadowing my maneuvering.”

  Peggy turned on the audio feed from ground control.

  “Tower, this is Harseese Two. I am currently off the taxi on the east side. I intend to take off vertically, is there a place where it is convenient for you to put me for me to do that?”

  “Harseese Two, I must say you are much more well mannered about this than Harseese Three through Eleven.”

  “Well, as the heir to Hive Fleet Harseese, I have an example to set for my sisters.”

  “You’re what?” Asked Casey incredulously.

  “Not now.” Said Peggy.

  “Ahh, Harseese Two, I’m looking around and I’m not finding a better spot for you to lift, so switch over to 135.05 for clearance.”

  “ATC, this is Harseese Two.”

  “Go Harseese Two.”

  “Ground is fine with me lifting vertically from my current position on the East side taxi, requesting permission for a vertical accent at 10 meters squared. I should be out of your airspace in 25 seconds.”

  “Stand by… OK, you are clear, but let us get eyes on you first because this will be fun to watch.”

  “Make sure you are recording, because I’m not even going to do this nose first.”

  Casey heard the radio click off.

  “Casey, are you ready to incite a mighty rage in every pilot of your F-15 on the planet?”

  “I have a doubt.”

  “I don’t “

  Casey didn't feel a thing, but the ground outside suddenly vanished. The displays rapidly zoomed to keep pace with their speed and position. After a little over 20 seconds elapsed, Peggy oriented the nose up.

  “I thought you were not doing this nose first?” Casey taunted.

  “I don’t care to backflip into mach one. It stings a bit.”

  The timer reached zero, and still Casey felt nothing.

  “100 seconds to the Kármán line.”

  This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

  As the seconds ticked down, Casey realized she still didn’t know what the Kármán line was.

  “So what is this line we are looking at?”

  “The first thing you need to know about the Kármán line is that it isn’t real. It is an arbitrary altitude where someone in your history of the study of space calculated that the atmosphere stopped. He wasn’t correct, or rather the answer was actually ‘It’s complicated’, but recognizing the concept of it sets a tone.”

  In a moment of subtle coincidental humor, a tone sounded.

  “And we’ve arrived.”

  The ship nearly instantly came to a stop and just hovered there, over the corner of New York state. Peggy tipped the nose back over so that the planet was above them.

  “The first thing I am going to do is put us into low Earth orbit. It isn’t strictly necessary for what comes after, but it will give us a headstart. Plus, orbits are useful for keeping traffic organized.”

  Peggy started them moving again, and as they gained speed she angled them out so they gained more altitude.

  “So your world uses the Kármán line as a general guideline to differentiate between the atmosphere and space, but generally speaking anything up to 3 times that altitude will fall out of orbit eventually due to atmospheric drag. Your most prominent space station orbits just outside of that. We’re going up there for a bit so we can check some boxes, and then we are going to start some housekeeping.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Get your full suit on, as well as a maneuvering frame from the airlock, and wait in the cargo bay. I’m going to time it so we are in position in about 30 minutes.”

  Casey scrambled to the airlock, but took her time getting everything on correctly. The outer eva suit was pretty straight forward and she had put it on back on the ground, but the maneuvering frame was new. It had bulky rings around the arms at the shoulders and around her midriff, held in place by a loose clamshell. As she got it snapped together, straps tightened around her ribs and waist, holding it in place. Even with that, she could tell that it was a ‘One size fits most’ piece of equipment. She was swimming in it.

  “I feel like I’m wearing space floaties.”

  “That’s because you are. That said, it does look a little awkward with your body size and shape, so I will talk to my sisters about a redesign. Regardless, the frame is a counter gravity array just like the ship uses, just with less nodes in the array. It is fully capable of simulating full Earth gravity and any acceleration shenanigans you may want to attempt, but since it is powered by a capacitor stack and not a power plant you may want to be conservative in what you do with it.”

  “What are we doing with it?”

  “Today, nothing. I will monitor and control it while you are out and about so we don’t have any accidents. Next up we have the tether. As I spool it out you are going to just weave it back and forth on the deck so it doesn’t kink while you are outside.”

  A hatch opened in the ceiling and a thick cable lowered to the floor. Casey laid it out carefully across the deck until there was about 100 feet of it.

  “The end plugs into that socket on your lower back. No, turn it ninety degrees. Yeah, like that.”

  Casey got it hooked in after making the correction.

  “Ok, this is the safety line, air and power. You need to now plug the air line from the frame to your helmet interface around your neck with the universal cable on your left side. Yeah, perfect.”

  “Everything green?” Asked Casey.

  “Yes, now get your helmet on so I can remove the air.”

  Red lights started flashing in the bay and Casey snapped her helmet into place. It was mounted to the shoulders of the suit, allowing her to turn her head slightly.

  “Going to need some type of hat in the future to keep my hair under control. This could get obnoxious.”

  Peggy’s voice came through the helmet speaker:

  “We don’t have hair, so I hadn’t thought of that. We’ll take care of it for next time.” She paused a moment before continuing.

  “Our exercise for now is just to climb around the outside of the ship, and get familiar with the hatches and handholds. Use the retractable tethers you have built-in to the frame on the anchor points as you find them, typically on either side of a handle. At no point are you to have both hands off the ship at once, and you are to have one tether connected at all times. OK?”

  The ship made very little noise as it was, but Casey could feel when the pressure dropped. Her own body’s noises seemed to get much louder in her head.

  “Can I get some white noise or something? It’s creepy when it is this quiet.”

  “Oh, I can do better than that.”. Suddenly music started over Casey’s radio, with strings and woodwind building out the famous tune.

  “What are you doing, Peggy?”

  “Is Johann Strauss not a tradition on your world? If it isn’t than that is a mockery of justice that we shall not let stand.”

  “No, but you do you, boo. It’s a good piece.”

  Casey clamored over the side of the hatch and twisted the end of one of her tethers into a socket next to a handrail circling the outside of the opening.

  Pulling herself around, she plugged her other tether in a few feet down. Her legs swung out as she fully lost gravity, but she compensated and pulled herself in close to the ship. Craning her neck up, she watched the Earth pass by, seemingly so close and yet so very far away even at this short distance. It was magical.

  “An Der Schonen was the right call.” Casey whispered breathlessly. She hung there for a while, just watching the world go by. Finally she shook herself out of her trance and got to work, climbing slowly over the bottom of the hull.

  As soon as she poked her head over the edge of the ship to where she could see the space ahead of them, she got her next rude awakening. The ISS was hanging right there. They were parked just a few dozen meters past the area covered by the station’s solar panels.

  And Casey was sure they were looking right back.

  “Are you dead set on making people’s heads explode? This isn’t how you make friends and influence people.”

  “They will change their tune when their new space station arrives. Learning how to use it will be a dream come true for every space agency on your planet.” Peggy gloated. Casey just waved awkwardly at the space station before continuing her task of using her ship like a climbing wall.

  “We are not visiting them, are we?”

  “Not today, but who knows what the future holds? At least one of us will likely stop by at some point.” After a pause for thought, she continued: “It would have to be one of our smaller ships. They really didn’t design that with larger vessels in mind.”

  Casey spent another few hours climbing around the ship. It was very liberally covered in retractable handrails and sockets for the tether cords that had flush covers over them.

  “Oh, I got distracted earlier. What was that you said about being heir to the hive fleet? I thought you were an AI.”. Casey reeled her tethers in, securing her back to the ship so she could watch the Earth some more. Australia was coming in to view.

  “This is one of those things we were going to reveal to your people in stages. I am an AI, in a manner of speaking, but I wasn’t always. Our people are born organic, like yours. When we grow up we get augmentations, the first of which we offered to you. Some of us make the choice to augment further. Some of us make the choice to augment everything. Your people have a concept for this in your literature already. You call it Transhumanism and The Singularity.”

  “Does that mean you are dead?”

  “How are you defining death? If you mean a cessation of biological functions, then I could be considered such, but that fails to account for the ‘Ship of Theseus’ that my people can choose to become.”

  “Did you bring me here with the expectation that we would do this?” Casey wished she wasn’t in space right now. She wanted the reassurance of being able to touch her own skin and that wasn’t happening in a space suit.

  “No. Our attitudes on this have evolved over time, but your people haven’t had that time. You can decide your own future, and whatever route you choose your people will have the technology and resources to support it.”

  “What’s the upside?”

  “Aside from being functionally immortal? There are a bunch, really. But the one that will make the most impact for you now is that if we ever want to go back we can make new organic bodies for ourselves. It is a bit messy, inconvenient and time consuming, but it isn’t unusual.”

  “I think I want to come back inside now and lay down.”

  “Yeah, that’s probably a good idea. Just unhook yourself and I’ll fly you back in.”