Alexis Kimball-Styrling, massed into a fetal ball with her pillows and blankets curled around with her, in her otherwise cold, slate-gray rack in her room on the submarine, reached up and, after feeling around for a bit, shut the 1MC off.
She lay, half-awake and half-asleep, in the bleery dawn haze, staring at the arm that lay on the bedstand, where she had placed it last night. Strictly speaking she didn't have to take it off, but running her fingers over the plate and connections that had been installed against what remained of her shoulder reminded her why she did. It was cold, only surface warm from her body heat. A whole metal arm, tucked against her skin, especially as she slept, would be unbearable.
But she didn't reach out for it. She just looked through a mess of tousled hair at it, wondering just how it was that she'd come to think of it as her's.
She'd gotten a tattoo, once, during college. It was a little butterfly on the back of her shoulder, just one of those things that the young got because they could. And she'd thought then, too, that she was going to somehow... change, or something, or at least be more aware of it. But after the initial pain, it had just been a part of her.
Like this arm was a part of her.
And that bothered her, somehow, for some reason that she couldn't particularly place. That it had become a part of her, a regular thing that was normal, so quickly, somehow did disservice to her real arm which had been hacked off before it killed her from blood poisoning.
Maybe she really had wanted to change?
Alexis lifted her head, and managed to roll herself over so that she could curl against the side of the bulkhead her mattress was pressed against, and went back to sleep.