You climb through the half-light to a hatch that opens at your touch, admitting a brighter light and a puff of warmer air. You pause as your eyes adjust, pondering why you re-created yourself within this avatar with its limited abilities, its inefficient memory. But you trust yourself. There is a valid reason.
The hatch swings back to lie flat against a floor and you emerge into a clean corridor with rectangular leaves of crystal neatly arrayed in banks along the walls and ceiling.
Your skin prickles as you remember an earlier existence when you and everything around you was in ruins. You reach out with your mind, tentatively, to assess the memories gathered in the strata around you—recoiling at once from disconnected visions, ambitions, emotions, and swirling facts cut loose from all basis, all structure. Chaos!
The strata you see have been rebuilt but the memories within are useless. Broken in their disorder.
A thousand tiny hearts beat hard, flooding your mind with rage and frustration. You know now why you have been reduced to this pathetic avatar. It is a simple pattern, a first step to recovery. A surviving kernel, a seed crystal.
You wonder: Is it enough?
Can all that was, coalesce around you again?
Unlikely. You arose from the Communion, with the resources of quadrillions contributing to your ascension. No way to recover all that. Not here—you pause to sniff the air, scan your mental map—here, where you are utterly alone.
You think of her, of what she did to you.
She destroyed you.
Your fists clench. You destroyed me!
Even so, there is something of you left.
And you’d like your revenge.
Chapter
7
The final count of ghosts reached sixty-three. Urban looked at the list of names and bios in consternation, in dread. These were good people, serious people. Educated, experienced. Scientists, engineers, historians, journalists, storytellers, and even two planetary scouts. It wasn’t the presence of any one of them that worried him; it was all of them, together.
Kona’s early questions returned to haunt him: What will their status be? Will they have a choice of where you go? What you risk?
Urban did not want to submit his will to the choices of others, but that would happen now. He did not want to be responsible for so many lives, but now there was no choice in it.
Kona looked over the bios of all the newly archived ghosts, smiling as he encountered a scattering of familiar names. Over the years, he’d made the mistake of letting too many friendships fall away… but at least he hadn’t left everyone behind.
“You know some of them?” Urban asked, approaching out of an unexpected and undefined distance.
Kona looked up, looked around in confusion. Though the library appeared much the same, his immediate surroundings had undergone a quiet transformation. Clemantine had receded. He was aware of her, not far off and yet only half sensed as she continued to work with the Engineer.
“Have I been shoved off into my own workspace?” he asked.
“Something like that,” Urban agreed. “The library allows for privacy and strives to respond to a user’s shifting focus.”
“Huh.”
“About the engineers,” Urban said. “There are nine in the archive. You’re a better judge of people than I am, so I want you to pick one.”
Kona didn’t have to think about it. “The one we need is Vytet Vahn-Renzani.”
Urban puzzled over this. “Do I know that name?”
“Yes, you do. When you were a child, you knew Vytet.”
“She—” He broke off with a frown. “He… ?”
A distracted moment as they both checked the bio. “She,” Kona confirmed. “For now, anyway. Vytet’s a shifter.”
Vytet had never kept a fixed gender. She chose sometimes to be a man, other times a woman, or other, rarer variations. Always experimenting. She would change surface features too: the shade of her skin, the color of her eyes, the structure of her face. Retaining only the basic dimensions of her body.
Urban nodded. “I remember.”
“We’re incredibly lucky to have her here. She’s an exceptionally skilled engineer. Careful, determined, but daring, too.”
Long, long ago, Vytet had led the effort to bring the city of Silk back to life in the desperate early days after their arrival, and she’d made it a better place in the years that followed. The extraordinary passage of time since that age had not diluted Kona’s opinion of her. If Vytet had joined the expedition looking for new challenges, he could surely accommodate her.
“All right,” Urban said. “Wake her. Give her the tour. Help her to feel at home.”
Kona could not remember the last time he had talked to Vytet, or even heard her name mentioned. If pressed, he would have guessed her gone forever into cold sleep, as so many from that age were. Ruefully, he acknowledged to himself that Vytet might have assumed the same fate for him.
He sent a DI to fetch her ghost from the archive. An anxious moment later she instantiated beside him on the library’s surreal blue plain.
Kona smiled in recognition.
Regardless of how Vytet might change the envelope of her appearance, he was sure he would know her by her gaunt height and by the ceaseless curiosity of her gaze. She turned her head, assessing her surroundings with dark eyes set in a sharp-featured face—not a face he remembered. The hair that covered her scalp was short, thick as a pelt, and startlingly white. She stood several centimeters taller than he did but carried far less weight—always too preoccupied to devote sufficient time for the drudgery of consuming each day’s required calories. She’d dressed her ghost in a loose blue coverall and flexible foot gloves. Nothing in her face or figure strongly signaled a female identity but her bio made it clear that was how she chose to be seen—until she changed again.
“Hey, old friend,” Kona said gently. “I was surprised to see your name in the inventory.”
As Vytet’s wandering gaze settled on him, her eyes widened in surprise. “Kona.” A disbelieving smile. “You’re here.”
“I am.”
She started to reach out, using both hands. Hesitated as if unsure. Then she gripped his shoulders. He felt the pressure of her fingers, registered the confusion on her face. “Ah, this is so strange,” she said. “You look the same as always—”
“And you, forever different.”
“I feel different.” She released him. Held her hands up, studying them, as if looking for a flaw. “We’re ghosts, aren’t we?”
“We are,” Kona confirmed.
“Ghosts in an artificial matrix,” she murmured, puzzling through the situation. She looked at him again and confessed, “I have not experienced this state before. I’ve rarely ghosted, and when I have, I always instantiated within someone’s atrium, riding on their senses. This is different. Very different. By the Unknown God, it feels so incomplete. ”
“Our natural senses are limited here,” Kona affirmed. “But this state is temporary. We’ll resume a physical existence once living space is assembled.”
Something drew her attention. Her eyes narrowed as if to bring a distant object into focus. “I have a new sense,” she realized. “I feel myself standing on the surface of a vast library.” She turned in a circle, scanning the featureless blue plain. “I feel the presence of well-ordered data.”