The café artist put the finishing touches on my latte – its creamy sunset melting into a sea of foam, flecks of chocolate like birds silhouetted against the russet sky. It had taken him eleven pours to get the breakers just right, but that wasn’t the point.

My gaze drifted from the cup held in his trembling hands. He was a plain-looking man, flat-faced with eyes just a little too close together, cheap highlights of plasticized indigo accentuating the darkness of his backswept hair. Even his ambia was relatively nondescript, a sort of glassy flatness that extended to everything but his hands.

“There.” He leaned back with a smile, and we stood in silence, basking in the fragile perfection radiating from the cup on the counter.

“It's probably cold, sorry.” He glanced up as I took it from him, his shy smile already wilting as he took in my ambia. “Oh.”

There it was, the moment I’d been dreading since I walked up to his slipside café, the moment where he stopped seeing me, stopped hearing me, the moment when his implant sensed my ambia. To his credit, he didn’t flinch or stutter, but I could tell he was uncomfortable to be this close to me by the way his posture subtly angled away.

I took the hint and was on my way. There was no mention of payment. I’d already given him my attention, and that was all that really mattered.

More kiosks lined the transit tube – mid-level artists competing for the attention of passersby, creating everything from coffee, to light sculptures, to bespoke typefaces. I stepped into the eddy of commuters on the transit pad, wading into a river of projected clothing. Freed of the constraints of fabric, the crowd around me was a riot of colours and shapes, their ambia accented by streamers of hard light. Unlike realcloth, projections could be altered on a whim, and styles rippled like waves across the flow of commuters, everyone in joyful flux.

“In a world where trends shifted moment-to-moment and anyone could look like anything, ambia provided a stolid constant, feeding into the human need to judge and to be judged.”

Hoping to stand out, I’d settled for something more old-fashioned: a suit of dark-blue realcloth with embedded fibre optics so the shadows would always fall just right, every line, every crease pressed sharp enough to cut. Sub-dermal LEDs cast my skin in soft focus, contrasting with the shaded hollows of my eyes, my hair a playful sweep of plasticized silver. It was a joke of sorts, a throwback to classical style accented with a nod to what people in the past imagined we’d be wearing in two-hundred years.

But it hardly mattered. Since the body studios had released the new sense implants last year ambia were all the rage, and mine lingered like a bad odour. It wouldn’t have been so bad if they were like auras – tied to your personality or habits – but ambia were just something you were born with, deep and very difficult to change, like height or bone structure. In a world where trends shifted moment-to-moment and anyone could look like anything, ambia provided a stolid constant, feeding into the human need to judge and to be judged.

“I’m going to get an operation,” I said to Charlotte the moment I stepped from transit into the foyer of her high-orbit design studio.

“Is it your heart, dear?” She waved a Technicolour hand, bits of fractal glow bleeding into the air. Charlotte wore nothing but a projection, a kaleidoscope of shifting colours and shapes that tugged at the eye, never settling on one outfit for more than a heartbeat. “Your liver?”

It was a bad joke, and I wasn’t in the mood. I set down my coffee, now just a mess of muddy foam, and waved my hand for a generated latte, accepting the steaming cup that emerged from the plycrete wall.

“Keep the pout, it makes you look thoughtful.” Charlotte rose from her pillows, not so much standing as uncoiling in the low gravity.

“It’s my ambia.” I flicked my fingers at the dirty wash of plainness that hung around me like a cloud, so unlike the feeling of bristly depth that trailed behind Charlotte like the tail of a comet.  

“Ambia are a new sense, Lottie. People aren't going to go back to being blind.”

“Never got the implant, myself.” She pivoted to squint at me, then shrugged. “It’s a fad, dear – like skinny jeans or smarthair. Give it a few years.”

“Ambia are a new sense, Lottie.” I followed her, sipping at my generated latte – dark, sweet, and perfect to my taste, if wholly uninspired. “People aren't going to go back to being blind.”

“Maybe, maybe not.” Charlotte set about adjusting the various lenses in her observatory studio. Sunlight filled the room, clear and unaffected by atmosphere or gravitic distortion.

“There’s a body studio near the old space elevator,” I said. “The sculptor who runs the place specializes in ambia grafts. It won’t be like my natural aura, but I figure if I–”

“You’re beautiful, dear.” Charlotte drifted down to put her long-fingered hands on my shoulders, her ambia swallowing me up so it felt like being deep underground. She met my eyes, expression suddenly serious. “But nothing lasts forever – that’s what makes this all so special.”

I made a sour face. “Did you get that from a greeting card?”

Charlotte’s scowl was spoiled by the slight uptick at the corners of her mouth. “Sympathy card, actually.” She pushed off, chuckling. “Now, strip out of that dusty old suit. I’ve got to get models for the new fractal projections down to Lin by tomorrow.” Her grin turned sharp. “That is, assuming people still have eyes tomorrow.”

“I think that’s a safe bet.” Smiling, I set my coffee down next to the latte, my hand lingering for a moment. Two tiny cups, one the result of skill and long practice, the other extruded by end-user taste algorithms. An hour from now I wouldn't be able to tell them apart, but it hardly mattered.

That had never been the point.