~I am aware. An honour.

~Your current status?

~I am walking alongside the airship Equatorial 353 awaiting confirmation from the Churkun regarding the disposition of its forces and that of the other side. Media reports indicate that those in charge of the airship have undertaken to open the vessel to the public sometime in the next few minutes. I intend to board then. Or before, should we find our adversaries are already aboard.

~Permit me awareness through your own senses.

~Of course.

The sensation of manipulating aspects of his sensorium was a new one for Agansu, and yet one which felt perfectly natural. He briefly marvelled at all the thought and careful design that must have gone into making it seem routine for something like himself – something which felt like a human – to delve into what was basically its own being and adjust the settings it found there so that a live link of what it was experiencing through its senses was now being sent to another person.

At the same time, Agansu was becoming aware of how many differences there were between his own, biological body and this one. With the possible exception of being considerably heavier than the bio version – despite being precisely the same volume – all the differences were positive.

How much more powerful, capable and sophisticated this new form was. How much more sensitive where it needed to be – his own bio-body held many augmentations and desirable amendments over the human-basic standard, yet in this new one, for example, he could see in much greater detail and over a far greater spread of the electro-magnetic spectrum than the old version was able to – yet how much less vulnerable it was where it didn’t require such sensitivity (this android body felt no pain at all; one’s motivation for avoiding harm was knowing that harm reduced one’s ability to function, while the indication that harm had been inflicted was no more than that – a sign; something to be noted, taken into account and acted upon, but no more).

~Thank you, the marshal sent.

There had been almost no delay between him agreeing to let the marshal see through his eyes and generally sense through his senses, him setting this up and her beginning to receive the data, and yet he had had time to take a look round inside himself as it were and start to appreciate all the differences between his bio-body and this one, and then to think about all this, all before the marshal had thanked him.

Agansu marvelled at how little time it had all taken. His bio-self would hardly have had time for one completed thought in that half-second or so.