“You’d frighten them less if you destroyed the hull cells and sculpted this ship into something human,” Clemantine pointed out. Nothing in her manner suggested this was a joke.
“I don’t want to look like something human—not while I’m still in Chenzeme space.” His attention shifted as an update reached him.
“What is it?” Clemantine asked.
“We’ve got twelve ghosts in the archive and another coming through.”
“That’s all right, isn’t it?”
“I was expecting ten or twelve.”
“Word must have spread,” Kona said. “Pasha picked up a few extra volunteers. I’m not surprised. It’s an exciting project.”
It was more than he’d expected.
The thirteenth ghost cycled into the archive. A fourteenth began to come in. He waved off the Pilot. Brought back the Engineer and the Bio-mechanic.
The Apparatchiks did not have access to Urban’s thoughts and memories but they were derived from him, knew him well, and generally intuited what he was thinking. “You want to know how many individuals the new habitat can support,” the Bio-mechanic said before Urban could present the problem.
“The warren is designed for a population of fifteen,” the Engineer reported.
But the fifteenth ghost was now arriving. Add Urban, Clemantine, and Kona to that count, and the capacity of the warren was already exceeded.
It was far too late to send a stop order. Light-hours separated Dragon from Khonsu, the trailing ship in the outrider fleet.
“You could close the data gate,” the Bio-mechanic suggested.
“No!” Clemantine snapped. “This is not just random data. We’re talking about people. They could be expecting to meet friends, family. We’re not going to erase them.”
“Closing the gate is not an option,” Urban conceded though he felt hollow as he said it, caught up in chaos, no longer in control.
With so many new people, everything would change.
He opened a window above the boundless blue plain of the library. Contained within its perimeter was a chart listing names and brief bios of each newly arrived ghost.
He watched in horrified fascination as the chart expanded to include sixteen, eighteen, twenty ghosts, the number continuing to climb.
Privately, he messaged the Engineer: *Is there a limit on how many fully realized ghosts the library can support?
*Yes, of course. Resolution is presently set to an efficient margin but as the number of simultaneous users grows, it will begin to drop.
Urban wasn’t willing to endure the sensory deprivation of a low-res interface. *We need to expand capacity.
*Yes.
Clemantine had summoned a three-dimensional schematic of Dragon’s structure. “This is a huge ship,” she was saying. “Far larger than Null Boundary. It should be able to support large numbers—”
Urban stopped her. “No. You have to remember, Dragon is a hybrid ship.” He reached into the projection. A thin gray filament embedded within the ship’s tissue brightened at his touch. The silvery glow rapidly expanded, illuminating the structure of a branching network, the filaments densest beneath the hull cells, though they left no part of the ship untouched.
“You see this? This is my neural system. I inhabit it continuously. I’m there now. This is the bridge that translates between my mind and the Chenzeme mind. A neural bridge. It’s how I monitor the ship, and guide the thoughts and temper of the philosopher cells. But from the Chenzeme perspective, this bridge is still all alien tissue. Not integrated. Something to be purged from the ship’s body, if possible.
“That first day, those first minutes when I breached the courser’s defenses, there was a hot war on the molecular scale. My Makers evolved to meet the threat. I won, but it was close.” His gaze shifted to acknowledge the Bio-mechanic. “There have been a few more skirmishes since then.”
“You’re still here,” Kona said warily. “So you won those skirmishes. You’re in control.”
“That’s what you said,” Clemantine reminded him.
“I am in control.”
“Thanks to my constant vigilance,” the Bio-mechanic amended.
Twenty-five ghosts.
“I’m in control,” Urban repeated, “but I never let myself forget there’s a quiet war ongoing at molecular scale across every square micron of the boundary between my neural bridge and the Chenzeme zones. Right now, the situation around the warren is stable. But if we push deeper, radically expand the surface area of our safe zones, the existing balance could be overthrown.”
The Engineer expanded on this, saying, “Our challenge isn’t just about the volume we inhabit. It’s also the resources we require, the heat we produce.”
Thirty.
“So we take it slowly,” Clemantine said. “Expand carefully.”
“Always,” the Engineer agreed.
“Most of our people will choose cold sleep anyway,” Kona said. “They understand it. When we first came to Deception Well, all but a handful of us were in cold sleep.”
“And when we reach the Hallowed Vasties?” Urban asked.
“Even then,” Kona said, “centuries between star systems.”
“Centuries between now and then to make this an entirely human ship,” Clemantine added.
Urban’s gaze shot to the Bio-mechanic. The Apparatchik loomed dark, menacing, within the confining boundary of his window. Before he could speak, before he could object to this call to wipe out centuries of his work, Urban silenced him with a look. Not now.
*Not ever, the Bio-mechanic said, speaking through Urban’s atrium.
*Agreed.
Clemantine wanted to believe it was possible to remake the ship, and on a theoretical level it might be, but Urban would never consent to it. The hull cells were in some sense sentient and together they contained tangled memories accumulated over millions of years—an overwhelming sweep of time that he’d hardly begun to understand.
But this wasn’t the moment to explain that to her.
“We’ll take it slowly,” he agreed.
Thirty-five.
“And find me that engineer.”
SECOND
You wake, cradled in a cocoon of warm gel with only your face exposed to cold night. Your chest rises as you breathe deeply, gratefully, of sweet, clean air. Still alive.
Glimmers of light play on the periphery of your vision. You recognize them as little bio-machines, existing to serve your purposes.
Your senses extend beyond this physical body you inhabit. You mentally map yourself in your surroundings: afloat in a subterranean ocean.
There is a layer above the ocean—still subterranean—where computational strata are distributed throughout a vast complex of fluid-cooled tunnels and chambers. This is the network of your existence, though your mind is not what it used to be. You have a tentative recollection of terrible, crushing acceleration, shattered strata, the components of your mind snapping loose, collapsing into dust.
Panic shoots through you. You flail upright, your head above the cloying gel, your feet thrashing, reaching a deeper, colder layer. A slant of pale light flicks on, reveals a ladder close at hand. You reach for it. The solid feel of it is soothing and calms your fear.