When I opened my eyes to the calm warmth of the dream that night, I wasn't lying in my bed in the cabin. Instead, I was seated at a broad, oaken desk, in a vast, dark library. The only light was the desk lamp sitting beside me, and its soft, cozy light illuminated stacks of notebooks and dozens of bound books. Some of the books were little more than prettied-up pamphlets, perhaps bound versions of articles by some prominent mind; others were more like ancient tomes, thick, heavy and musty-smelling.

I looked around me, only able to make out the regular, monolithic shapes of the bookshelves shrouded in the darkness, looking for all the world more like ancient standing-stones in the darkness than simple shelves. Barbas emerged from that darkness, handsome as ever, sharply dressed in a gray three-piece suit- complete with emerald cufflinks at his sleeves and a tie that matched his eyes. I realized then that I was wearing a dress to match, the kind I had never been able to afford. It was tailored to fit me perfectly, green as the spring grass I would never really see again, with an open back that left my back bare all the way down to the very base of my spine. It was elegant in its simplicity, devoid of frills, simply letting my lean body speak for itself. I grinned up at Barbas with an eyebrow raised in mock outrage. "I thought you brought me here to study.”

A tiny smile flickered at the corner of Barbas’ mouth. “I did. But after today’s work, I figured, why not look and feel fantastic while we do so?” He gestured down at his own attire. “I happen to like suits. They feel… right. And you look great, as usual, so,” he shrugged. “Win, win for me.”

I frowned and tilted my head to the side, curious. “How does that work, though?”

“Hmm?” Barbas asked. He pulled a chair out of the darkness and set it down opposite my position, turned it around backwards and then straddled it, resting his arms on its back in a relaxed manner utterly at odds with his pristine, orderly appearance.

“How do you… feel?” I asked, slowly. "I mean I took it for granted so far, this whole thing, this whole Former thing is an exercise in shit I’ve never seen before or even pretended to understand, but now that we’re…” I paused, suddenly feeling a warmth in my cheeks. “Clearly comfortable with each other, I’m curious. I just wonder what you experience. What you feel, what you see, what your… life is like.”

Barbas didn’t seem offended by the line of questioning. Instead, he sat there and seemed to ponder the question for a moment. “That’s actually an interesting question, but a difficult one to answer. How do you describe the reality of your life to someone who experiences life utterly differently to you? It would be like describing the concept of sight to someone born blind, or, alternately, like someone born blind explaining to the sighted what normal is like for them, how the absence of sight doesn’t even enter into it.”

I reached across the desk and the stacks of notes and touched Barbas’ face, gently, my green-enameled nails scoring lightly over the stubble on his cheeks. “Start with what you feel when I do this.”

Barbas smiled more widely this time. “I feel your touch on my face, much the same, I expect, as you would if I touched you the same way.” The smile turned wry. “At the same time, some other part of me, some other part of the artificially intelligent construct that I am, is tricking the part of your brain that talks to your hands into feeling skin and stubble under your fingertips.” I am, without actively thinking about it, giving your mind this entire experience, and reacting to the feedback it gives me. In a way, we are both shaping what we are both experiencing. I create the… framework, as it were, for the reality you are experiencing, and your mind fills in all the details.”

“Like you said about the garden the other day.”

"Yes. Physics behaves the way it's supposed to in here because you think it should. But more than that, the dress feels the way it does because you know that silk feels like that. Even further, if you pick up a book in the cabin, you'll find that whatever you expect to be there will be there. Right now, there are books on gardening and outdoorsy activities, because you think that's what should be in a lake cabin collection of books. However, when we return, I think you'll probably find a few books on linguistics since you're expressing the interest. The state of the cabin is really a kind of reflection of the inside of your mind."

“And your experiences are also a reflection of my mind.”

"Not entirely. I am fully conscious. Outside of the personality and history that I have chosen to make in my mind and memories, I am, in a way utterly divorced from the person you see before you, aware that I… began the day you were implanted with my cybernetic framework. I am also, as Barbas, simultaneously aware that I am a twenty-nine-year-old Pan-American war veteran who just so happens to exist solely on the plane of your mind."

I shuddered a little, and, immediately regretting it, quickly said, “Doesn’t that mess with you? Knowing you aren’t… you aren’t real?”

Barbas put his hand over mine and brought both of them down to rest on the desk. “But I am real. I'm just not physical. And what is a memory but a subjective account of a moment in time that you will never experience again? I remember my childhood as Barbas, I remember the War, I remember my comrades and I remember Reconstruction. The details are a little fuzzy regarding how I came to be living in the mind of a twenty-six-year-old orphan of the late United States government, now an agent of Pan America on an alien world. I take it all in stride. What I think of when I ponder this, which isn't often, is the story of the djinni, of old Arabic myth."

“You mean like that movie?” I asked, smiling, thinking of a wiseacre blue ghost coming out of a lamp.

“No, not a genie,” he replied, smiling indulgently. “Did you know any Muslims, back on Earth?”

“I knew a couple, but we didn’t really talk about religion. I’m not a big ‘God’ person, and we all just kind of avoided the subject.” I smirked a little sheepishly. “On my census forms, I always put down ‘Asatru’ as my religious preference.” I made a clumsy sign of the Hammer with my free hand. “Hail Thor! Odin son!” I put my hand back down on the table. “I always thought Viking lore was cool.”

Barbas laughed and then continued. "In the Quran, it is said that Allah created three forms of life- the humans, who were people of the earth," he held up one finger. "He made the angels, the people of the heavens- his servants and messengers." He held up a second finger. "The third form of life, the djinni, were people made of smokeless fire, beings of spirit, like the angels, but able to affect the physical world, sometimes themselves, and sometimes through agents." He made a ‘there you have it' gesture with his hands, leaving his palms turned up. "Some cultures believed that some djinni was assigned to a human as a sort of personal spirit or demon. These djinni could lead people astray or closer to the divine, acting as a sort of tempter, or tester, against which their hosts' righteousness would be measured." He raised a hand, gesturing at himself with a ripple of his fingers. "And in a sense, that's what I am: a personal djinni- a Qarin, to use the old words.”

I thought about it for a moment. “Yeah… that actually makes sense, in an odd way.”

“I’m glad you think so,” he said, beginning to go through the notebooks stacked in the center of the broad desk. He opened one, revealing pages covered in phonetic representations of words, each of them accompanied by paragraphs of notes. “Now, you wanted to learn this language, so we had better get started.”

“Is that it?” I asked, gesturing to the books. “Did you get the whole thing already?”

Barbas laughed and shook his head. "No! No, that wouldn't be possible from an afternoon of talking to one warrior when neither of you understands a word the other is saying. No, these notes are just my speculations regarding a few verbs and conjugations, based on the pronunciation of several key phonemes."

I looked at him blankly. “What? ‘Bas, in Pan Standard, please.”

He sighed. "These notebooks represent my recordings of all the sounds that Volistad was making and the patterns he used. Some of these combinations," he gestured to the open notebook, "might be actual words in his language, but some of them, maybe even most of them, are simply random patterns of the major sounds he makes when he talks. I've identified at least six basic lingual sounds- or phonemes- that he makes that Pan Standard don’t have." Barbas pushed the first notebook toward me. "And if you want to learn to speak the language of the Chalice natives, you need to learn to make those sounds, and do it correctly."

I groaned. “Couldn’t you just download the knowledge into my brain? I mean, the other day you literally puppeted my body, which was, by the way, freaky as hell. By that same note couldn’t you just put all that you know of his language into my brain?”

“No,” Barbas replied simply. “I can read some of your thoughts- the loud ones, anyway, and I can transmit sensory information to your nerves. I cannot actually control your thoughts, or put actual thoughts into your head- much less muscle memory into your body. I cannot do anything with your subconscious mind. And the only reason I was able to make you move the way I did was by interrupting the signals between your brain and your limbs and puppeting the suit around you. The only thing that would have happened if I had tried to do that while you were outside the suit would have been you collapsing to the ground like you had just been knocked out.”

“Yep,” I said brightly. “Waaaay less freaky, ‘Bas.”

He narrowed his green eyes at me and asked, exasperated, “Do you want to learn this or not?”

I raised my hands in agreement. I had asked him to do this. He was doing what I had asked, and I was giving him crap about it. And when he controlled my body- or rather, turned off my body and controlled my armor suit, he had done so in order to save my life. Still, the fact that he could do some of the things he had already done was already starting to bother me. I had started sleeping with him, so it wasn't the fact that he had been inside of me- hell, he was inside my skull all the time, and everything else was just some kind of hyper-realistic dream. It was the knowledge that he could, at any time, utterly immobilize me, or steer me around for whatever he thought was ‘my own good'- that was the idea that started to bug me. I didn't know why it was bugging me now; it hadn't really bothered me a few days ago when he had done it to save me. Could he hear these thoughts, these doubts, right now? And what would he think when he heard them?

If Barbas did hear what was going on in my head, he chose not to mention it. Instead, he was poring over some of his own notes, muttering under his breath and occasionally making small, scribbled notes next to the elegant, organized script he had used to create this material. I followed suit, taking the notebook that he had pushed over to me and opening it. I took a deep, cleansing breath, turned the notebook to the first page, and began to read.