Urban still had no network access to Long Watch, but the data gate that linked him to his chain of outriders remained open. Subminds started to arrive through it—partial personas, derived from ghosts but requiring far less data to define them—finally completing the hours-long journey from Dragon.
Some of the subminds belonged to Urban, some to Clemantine. They brought memories from their ghosts aboard Dragon, so Urban knew the status of the ship and of Clemantine’s reaction to it.
He grinned, knowing he had won her over. “You’ve seen it all now,” he said to her. “You know it’s real.”
She nodded, not answering at first. To his dismay, he saw apprehension in this version of her. Rising fear, now that the moment had come. He worried she would change her mind, that she would delete her ghost from Dragon, leaving him alone again—but she extinguished that doubt, saying, “All right. Let’s do this. I’ll pass the access code to Pasha. You and I, with these final memories, can go on ahead.”
Ghost patterns required vast complexes of data. Their transfer took time.
Urban departed first. He left his husk unconscious, with disintegration processes underway to ensure no one could revive that version of himself against his wishes.
Clemantine watched his consciousness leave his body, and then the swift decay process that followed, beginning with a clouding and then a blackening of the eyes. The sight disturbed her enough that she turned away.
Urban had not always regarded his physical self as something disposable. This was a new aspect of him. It troubled her how easily he had abandoned this incarnation of himself.
Still, there was no other way to reach the courser.
She drew a deep breath, preparing herself. The ghost she’d sent to inspect Dragon remained there, but its experiences had returned to her through the arriving subminds and were now integrated. She possessed a memory of visiting the ship and of affirming everything Urban had told her. She looked forward to her return—but she was despondent too.
All or nothing, Kona had said. Clemantine felt the truth of it.
She instructed her personal DI: “After my ghost has gone, dissolve whatever is left in this room. Dissolve my husk that is aboard Silent Vigil. Then dissolve yourself.”
The DI acknowledged these instructions.
Clemantine created a new ghost—a final rendition of this phase of her life—and sent it to Dragon, but of course she still remained behind, the consciousness that abided in this body. For this version of herself there was no way out.
A flutter of panic, quickly suppressed.
Just one last act left to do.
Sleep. A command carried out through a biochemical reaction.
This life was over.
Chapter
6
Urban’s ghost left Long Watch with transmission protocols set to ensure no copy would be left behind. The data that defined him passed first through a gate on Khonsu, the closest ship in the outrider fleet. From there, the ghost was relayed to Lam Lha, and then Artemis, and on up the chain until at last it reached the courser. There, it melded with the ghost Urban had left behind.
That moment did not produce a revelatory burst within his core persona; he experienced no high of enlightenment at the awareness of another life lived. Instead, the arrival of his ghost induced a sense of absentmindedness. Because its memories were already his own, receiving them was like waking from an artificial amnesia, the abrupt recovery of a history he’d always known, but had temporarily forgotten.
Two distinct timelines now accounted for his recent past: one in which he’d gone to find Clemantine and the other where he’d stayed aboard Dragon, waiting in suspense to learn if she would come.
She had come, and to his profound relief her visiting ghost had chosen to stay.
He turned to her, this version of her that had arrived through the data gate hours ago to undertake an inspection of Dragon. She’d sent subminds back to Long Watch bearing the memories of what she’d found, but she remained here, with him. The virtual environment of Dragon’s library contained them in a simulation of physical existence, so that they appeared identical to their living avatars aboard Long Watch.
Clemantine watched him curiously, sensing the difference in him brought on by the melding of timelines.
“You’re back,” she said.
“Yes.” He raised a hand, touched her cheek. The simulation conveyed a sense of gentle pressure, but not her warmth, or the faint spicy scent of her skin—a poverty of detail intrinsic to the library’s virtual world.
She kissed his hand with dry, breathless lips before smiling a sly smile. This version of her bolder and more confident, already at home here.
Her first question upon arriving had been, “Is this library a copy of the one on Null Boundary?”
“Yes,” he’d told her. “Though I’ve worked on it since. Organizing, indexing, adding new observations. And I modified the interface.”
The baseline visual architecture was deceptively simple, just a bright white path crossing a boundless, blue-gradient plain that grew darker with distance. There appeared to be nothing there, but an extra sense available to their avatars allowed them to perceive the data embedded at every point.
Clemantine had adapted easily to the new system. After she’d mastered search functions and the summoning of windows, he’d briefly introduced her to his crew of Apparatchiks, all six of them derived from his persona but diversified into distinct individuals with machinelike natures that allowed them to focus obsessively on their specialties: the Engineer, the Bio-mechanic, the Pilot, the Astronomer, the Scholar, and the Mathematician.
“It’s interesting,” she had observed, “that you utilize both a swarm of outrider ships and a swarm of personas.”
“A modular existence,” he’d agreed. “Expanded senses and an expanded intellect, all supporting my intentions.”
The Engineer was the only Apparatchik on deck now. He looked out at them from within a frameless two-dimensional window, standing with arms crossed, a flat brown background behind him. Superficially, the Engineer looked like Urban but his speech patterns, his expression, the way he carried himself, and the way he dressed—in dull brown coveralls—all distinguished him from the master copy. Within his frame he appeared at full scale, his intent gaze focused on a three-dimensional illustration of a new project, floating head-high above the library floor.
The illustration depicted a small warren of tunnels and chambers that together would suffice as a simple physical habitation where a handful of people could live. Temporary quarters, quick to grow. Clemantine had taken on the task of overseeing the design.
“I like working with the Engineer,” she mused, still eyeing Urban with that sly smile. “He’s blunt, but so calm and efficient, and he answers questions in an instant.” Her finely shaped eyebrows arched. “I wonder why you’ve always hidden this aspect of yourself?”
The Engineer snorted. “Other than my blunt speech, the qualities you’ve named are all artificial additions to my personality’s original framework.”
“Then he isn’t you?” Clemantine asked in feigned innocence.
“No more than necessary,” Urban agreed. He’d long ago grown accustomed to the incessant preening and self-regard of all the Apparatchiks, not just the Engineer, who was the most tolerable among them.