“It might! But I’m really interested in the interface. You like to have multiple arms, you said?”

“Yeah. For what little it’s worth.”

“And you control it with your brain, once it’s plugged in?” Kenzie asked. When Rain nodded, she asked, “How does the brain know how to control it?”

“I map the brain patterns for input and output and the panel here, between the attachment and the actual arm, it acts like an extension of the brain.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Sveta said.

Tristan was fiddling with the remote, and seemed to be having trouble with the progression of time, with images jumping all over the place. Sveta, Kenzie, and Rain were all focused on the arm, with Ashley periodically joining in when prodded.

Chris was sitting on the bench, cloth around him as he shrunk down to a more ordinary size. He was smiling more than before as he rummaged for his headphones and a chocolate bar.

“Your mood seems better,” I said to him.

The smile dropped away. He looked at me and shrugged. “It’s different. I feel more human, mentally and emotionally.”

The change hadn’t seemed to make any difference in how he looked, either. Were the changes subtle?

“I’m not sure I grasped it all,” I told him. “Once you change, it’s…?”

I trailed off.

“It’s like a hit of a drug,” he said. “Focus, surprise, sadness, appreciation, disgust, fear, anger, and then this one.”

“Joy?”

“I call this particular flavor of it Wan Indulgence,” he said. He bit down on the chocolate bar, then closed his eyes, clearly enjoying it. He talked with his mouth full, “Can be enjoyment. I’ll feel it more normally for a few days now that I’ve changed.”

“Oh my god,” Kenzie said. “Tristan, give that back, you suck at it.”

Tristan was still fiddling with Kenzie’s remote for the projector box.

“It doesn’t make any sense. Why isn’t it easier to move forward and back in time?”

“Because the box doesn’t perceive time, you dummy. It perceives images.”

“Why not have it perceive things like time, so you can go backward and forward in time without doing… whatever arcane thing you’re doing right now?”

“Because if it perceived time,” Kenzie said, patiently, her focus on the smartphone remote, “Then it wouldn’t perceive images. And that would be a dumb thing for a projector box that works with images. Dummy.”

“You can stop calling me a dummy now.”

“I will if you stop being dumb. This stuff is obvious.”

“It’s really not,” Chris said.

Kenzie sighed, very dramatically. “Who are we following next?”

“It’d be nice to show Rain the entire thing,” Tristan said.

“It works best with a point of view,” Kenzie said. She looked at Tristan and rolled her eyes a little.