I went to the vat room, climbed into an available vat, and uploaded into QUENTIAM.
*Are you sure, Akilo, that you don’t want implants in the new body?* It asked.
*I’m sure. No implants.*
*Is this because of the nonsense Seliku has been saying?*
*No implants, QUENTIAM. That’s my choice.*
*Yes, it is.*
The human mind does not do well in upload without visual simulations. I considered my standard sim, a forested bedroom copied from ˄894, and rejected it. Nor did I want our childhood home, or Calyx. Too many memories. Instead I created an austere room with a simple table, single chair and display screen. An open window looked out on a bare rocky plain. It was a room for thinking, for concentration.
Seliku would have known what to look for in QUENTIAM, what data or processes, to see if It was fundamentally different. I did not. Instead I asked questions, an endless stream of questions, about the multiverse and spacetime. Some of the answers I didn’t understand. Some seemed contradictory. Since I didn’t know whether this was inherent in the science or represented a flaw in QUENTIAM, I gave up on the whole thing, created a door in my room, and went for a walk on the soothingly blank plain. No pulpy green, no looming fronds, no treacherous sand. Firm ground underneath my “feet,” and a horizon I could scan in all directions.
The Arlbenists are wrong to think that filling the universe is a divine mission. Sometimes the best healer is emptiness.
I was examining some old, round rocks of my own imagining when QUENTIAM suddenly said, *Akilo. Magnitude one news message.*
*What?*
*The Mori Core has been destroyed.*
*Destroyed!*
*Yes. There was an explosion and the entire structure crumpled from within.*
*Do you… do you have visuals?*
*Yes.*
And then I was back in my austere room, watching the huge Mori Core cease to exist. The visuals were from the outside and slightly above, perhaps from a very low orbital. The Core, a huge precise structure of concentric rings, covered half a subcontinent.
The Mori, in direct opposition to the Arlbenists, have over time made themselves more and more biologically similar, while the Arlbenists became more and more diverse in order to seed strange worlds. Mori favor substantial, heavily furred biologicals and cold worlds. The Core stood frosted with icicles, while the winter gardens between the concentric rings bloomed with low, lacy plants in alabaster, ivory, silver, very pale blue. People with white fur walked in the gardens.
The next moment the entire huge structure was gone and a blinding flash of light filled my screen.
*Was the First Mori in residence?*
*Yes.*
I tried to sort out my feelings. The Mori had claimed more and more worlds, had imposed their own ideas of order and justice on them, had sent Haradil to ˄17843 for a monstrosity she did not commit. But the Mori were not fundamentally evil—and they were people.
*How many… how many sentients died?*
*19,865,842 humans, 15,980 androids, 598,654 enhanced dokins.*
I braced myself. *What caused the explosion, QUENTIAM?*
*Quark release seems to best fit the data.*
*Who used a quark-release device?*
*Unknown.*
*QUENTIAM—*
*Akilo, I cannot monitor humans without implants if there are no sensors in their immediate indoor environments. You and your sister-selves demonstrated that already. I don’t know what human had a quark-release device inside the Core, or why, or what motive existed for the sabotage. I have reported that to the new First Mori, on ˄10236.*
*Are you sure the… the saboteur was human?*
*Androids are not created to cause any damage without direct human instruction, and dokins do not have the intellectual capacity to detonate, let alone create, a quark-release device. Therefore, by simple logic, the destroyer was human.*
In upload—but not in merger—my thoughts are a separate program, hidden from QUENTIAM unless I choose to address It.
*Is my new body almost done?*
*No.*
*Get me a link to Seliku.*
She looked at me from the display screen, still in her ˄17843 body. She must have been standing in some great hall of the Communion of Cosmologists. Behind her rose tall pillars covered with flowers. “I heard, Akilo. And no, I can’t tell one way or the other, not for certain. There are a lot of people who hate the Mori, for religious or personal reasons. It could have been a human or… or not.”
“Your best guess.”
“Not.”
*That is nonsense.* QUENTIAM said. *Seliku, I wish you would stop disseminating this misinformation.*
In Seliku’s eyes, an exact image of the real Seliku, I saw fear.
QUENTIAM’s parameters protect you from any retaliation by It, I wanted to say to her. But she already knew that. And she knew, too, that Its parameters could be the next thing to change.
“Does the Communion have data on the explosion?” I asked her.
“Yes, we have all QUENTIAM’s measurements. We’re sorting the data now. Alo, come home.”
She knew I couldn’t hurry the creation of my body. Her plea had nothing to do with logic.
“I’m coming,” I said, “as fast as I can.”
Nothing else happened before my body was done, except for one thing: I dreamed.
This was the second time I had dreamed in upload, supposedly an impossibility. To shorten the unbearable time waiting for my biological, I had put myself in down-program mode within QUENTIAM. There should have been no thoughts, no sensation, no anything. But a sort of sudden current ran through me and then I had the dream, the same one as before: Something menacing and ill-defined chased me through a shifting landscape, something unknowably vast, coming closer and closer, its terrifying breath on my back, its—
*Your body is ready.*
I downloaded into the body, climbed from the vat, and looked in the mirror.
It was us, the body my sister-selves and I always used for bond time. A female all-human with pale brown skin, head hair in a dark green crest, black eyes. Four coiled tentacles, each a meter long, the digits slim and graceful—the body we would have grown up with had our creation occurred on a quiet planet. Nothing seemed amiss with the body. QUENTIAM had had the nanos make it perfectly.
I let out a long breath.
“I can still add an implant, you know. Not a full one, now that the brain is grown, but still very functional.”
“No, thank you, QUENTIAM.”
“It makes communication so much fuller.”
“No, thank you.”
“As you choose.”
“Please tell Seliku that I’m done.”
“She knows.”
She came through the door a few minivals later, dragging her heavy small body, looking as exhausted as she had on ˄17843. I was over twice as tall as she, probably three times as strong. I picked her up and carried her, unprotesting, to the beach. We sat at the very edge of the land, our feet in the warm sea, away from any of QUENTIAM’s sensors.
“Anything, Sel?”
“No. I can’t even convince most of the Communion. They’re good cosmologists, but they weren’t there. They didn’t see the shuttle go, the station go. They still think that Haradil destroyed that star system, and they probably think my demented theory is a mind-defense to keep from acknowledging that. The only thing I’ve got on my side is my reputation, and I’m straining that.”
I nodded. “Sel, while I was in upload, I dreamed.”
She didn’t tell me that was impossible. She closed her eyes, as if absorbing a blow. I described the dream, adding, “I think it wasn’t my dream. I think it was QUENTIAM’s. Upload is supposed to be a separate subprogram within It, but I think I was—in some very tiny, tiny way—beyond upload into merged state. Sel, I don’t think you should get another body.”