With each wire that she reconnected, Kira felt a brief shock as a small amount of electricity passed from one to the next. It was a sharp, satisfying feeling that left her with the faint taste of copper on her tongue. And sometimes, she thought she detected the ghost of a sensation from a neuron, like a tickle in the back of her mind.
Despite the microscopic scale she was working on, Kira found connecting the wires relatively easy. What wasn’t easy was the scale of the task. There were thousands upon thousands of wires, and each one had to be checked. After the first few minutes, Kira realized it would take her days to do the work by hand (as it were). Days they didn’t have.
She wasn’t willing to give up, which meant she had only one chance. Hoping against hope that she wasn’t making a mistake, she fixed her goals in mind—smooth the melted wires, attach them to the closest neurons—and did her best to impress them on the Soft Blade. Then she released her hold on the xeno, as carefully as if she were letting go of a wild animal that might react in an unpredictable manner.
Please, she thought.
And the Soft Blade obeyed. It slid along the wires in an atomically thin film, moving metal, pushing aside cells, and realigning wires with dendrites.
Kira’s awareness of her body (and the growths in her cabin) faded; every bit of her consciousness was divided among the many thousands of monofilaments the xeno was manipulating. At a remove she heard Hwa-jung say, “Forty-five percent!… Forty-seven … Forty-eight…”
Kira blocked out her voice as she continued to focus on the task at hand. Wires, smooth, attach.
So many wires were connecting, Kira felt them like a wave of cold and hot prickles washing through her head. Tiny explosions popping off, and with each one a sense of expansion.
The feeling accumulated, moving faster and faster. And then—
A curtain swept back in her mind, and a vast vista opened up before her, and Kira sensed a Presence within. If not for her experience with the Soft Blade, the experience would have been overwhelming, unbearable—a behemoth weighing upon her from all sides.
She gasped and would have recoiled, but she found she couldn’t move.
Vishal and Hwa-jung were making noises of alarm, and the doctor said, as if from a great distance, “Ms. Kira! Stop! Whatever you’re doing, it’s upsetting his neurotr—”
His voice faded away, and all Kira was aware of was the immensity surrounding her. *Gregorovich,* she said, but no response was forthcoming. She pressed harder, attempting to project herself: *Gregorovich! Can you hear me?*
Distant thoughts swirled far above—thunderheads beyond reach and too large to comprehend. Then, lightning crashed and:
A ship rattled around her, and stars spun outside. Fire streamed from her left flank: a meteoroid strike near the main generator.…
Flashes. Screams. A howling across the sky. Below, a tortured landscape of smoke and fire rose toward her. Too fast. Couldn’t slow down. Emergency chutes failed.
Darkness for unremembered time. Gratitude and disbelief at continued existence: the ship should have exploded. Ought to have. Perhaps would have been better. Seven of the crew still alive, seven out of twenty-eight.
Then a slow agony of days. Hunger and starvation for her charges and then, to one and all, death. And for her, worse than death: isolation. Loneliness, utter and absolute. A queen of infinite space, bound within a nutshell, and plagued by such dreams as to make her scream and scream and scream.…
The memory began anew, repeating as a computer frozen in a logic loop, unable to break out, unable to reboot. *You’re not alone,* Kira shouted into the storm, but she might as well have been trying to catch the attention of the earth or the sea or the universe at large. The Presence took no note of her. Again she tried. Again she failed. Instead of words, she tried emotions: comfort, companionship, sympathy, and solidarity, and—underlying it all—a sense of urgency.
None of it made any difference, or at least none Kira could tell.
She called out again, but still, the ship mind didn’t notice, or noticed but refused to answer, and the lowering thunderheads remained. Twice more she attempted to contact Gregorovich, with the same results.
She felt like screaming. There was nothing else she could do. Wherever the ship mind had buried himself, it was beyond her reach or the reach of the Soft Blade.
And time—time grew short.
At last the Soft Blade ceased its labors, and though she was reluctant to do so, Kira extricated the suit’s tendrils from the innermost parts of Gregorovich’s brain and carefully withdrew. The curtain in her mind drew shut as contact broke, and the Presence vanished also, leaving her once again alone with her alien consort, the Soft Blade.
…
4.
Kira swayed as she opened her eyes. Dizzy, she braced herself against the cold metal of the sarcophagus.
“What happened, Ms. Kira?” said Vishal, coming over to her. Behind him, Hwa-jung watched with concern. “We tried to wake you, but nothing we did worked.”
Kira wet her tongue, feeling displaced. “Gregorovich?” she croaked.
The machine boss answered: “His readings are normal again.”
Relieved, Kira nodded. Then she pushed herself off the sarcophagus. “I repaired his implants. You can probably see that. But the weirdest things happened.…”
“What, Ms. Kira?” Vishal asked, leaning in, brow pinched.
She tried to find the words. “The Soft Blade, it connected my brain to his.”
Vishal’s eyes widened. “No. A direct neural link?!”
Kira nodded again. “I wasn’t trying to. The xeno just did it. For a while, we had a … a…”
“A hive mind?” said Hwa-jung.
“Yeah. Like the Entropists.”
Vishal clucked his tongue as he helped Kira to her feet. “Forming a hive mind with a ship mind is very dangerous for an unaugmented human, Ms. Kira.”
“I know. Good thing I’m augmented,” said Kira wryly. She tapped the fibers on her arm to make her meaning clear.
Hwa-jung said, “Were you able to talk with him at all?”
Kira frowned, troubled by the memory. “No. I tried, but ship minds are…”
“Different,” Hwa-jung supplied.
“Yes. I knew that, but I never really understood just how different.” She handed back the headphones. “I’m sorry. I couldn’t reach him.”
Vishal took the headphones from Hwa-jung. “I am sure you did your best, Ms. Kira.”
Had she? Kira wondered.
Then the doctor plugged the headphones back into the sarcophagus. In response to Kira and Hwa-jung’s questioning looks, he said, “I will try to talk with Gregorovich in a more normal manner, yes? Maybe now he will be able to communicate.”
“You still have him isolated from the rest of the ship?” Kira asked, guessing the answer.
Hwa-jung made an affirmative noise. “Until we know he isn’t a threat to the Wallfish, we keep him like this.”
They waited while Vishal tried several times to contact Gregorovich. After repeating the same few phrases for a minute, the doctor unplugged from the sarcophagus and sighed. “There is still no response I can understand.”
Disappointed, Kira said, “I’ll tell Falconi.”
Vishal held up a hand. “Wait a few minutes, please, Ms. Kira. I think it would be most helpful to run some tests. Until I do, I cannot say with confidence what Gregorovich’s condition is. Now, both of you shoo. You are crowding my space.”