A short story set in Year 5 of the Integration Era.

The overlay is always there.

Tohr had told me once that he barely sees his anymore. After a while it just runs in background, he’d said. Like breathing. I believed him. His stats cluster in Frame and Drive, physical, immediate, things his body already knows. The overlay confirms what he can already feel. It has become ambient.

Mine never gets ambient.

Lattice 14 means the system has given me more architecture than I asked for. More processing depth, more cross-references, more pattern-recognition running in background I did not request. I close my eyes and there is still the quiet turnover of information, the system correlating, the sense of the map filling in.

Right now it was mapping this.

We were on the couch in his room with the lights low and his arm around me and his mouth at my jaw and I had my hands in his hair and it was the way it always is with Tohr. Gravitational. Immediate. Frame 10 is a thing you feel before you think about it. The system’s reinforcement of him is legible in proximity. There is a solidity to the way he occupies a space that is different from anyone I knew before Integration decided what he was going to be, and when we were this close that fact was specific and constant.

I knew where this was going.

That’s Lattice. Not prediction, not foresight, rather pattern recognition, already mapping several steps ahead of the moment. I had not reached the question yet, but the shape of my answer was set. This was not complicated information. My own mind, surveyed completely, had returned a clear result.