by Zack Jordan
I see, says Network. You need motivation.
I need a hell of a lot more than that, says Sarya coldly. You are my murderer, the murderer of my mother, and the murderer of my species. If you think for one nanosecond that I am going to forget—
How do you feel about a second chance for your people? asks Network.
Her stream of objections stutters to a halt. A…what?
You are right. We do not yet know what the Humans could become without interference. Eliminate Observer, and we will find out. I will give your people a new egg. A new solar system, brimming with resources. I will plant the Humans there, and this time they will grow without interference. Millennia from now, they will be free to hatch on their own. Or not. But either way, Humans will receive what few species ever have: a second chance to become a Citizen of the Network.
She is not sure what is happening in her mind. A second chance for her species. A place for them, protected from the galaxy that killed them the first time. Maybe, says her mind, maybe that’s a place where she can go, where she can live…where she can have everything she’s ever wanted. Friends. Family. Goddess help her, a mate. She could be, honest to goddess, a real live Human.
Oh goddess. She doesn’t mean to say it, but it slips out of her mind. Oh goddess.
Little Daughter, says Network. When you were small you purchased your life. Now that you are grown, it is time for you to purchase your species. Eliminate Observer; that is the price. Remember that He is a murderer and a liar, that He would love nothing more than to see the galaxy perish in fire and chaos. It does not matter whether you prefer to call it a desire for justice or a thirst for retribution: your nature—and the tools I have given you—will take care of the rest.
Oh, goddess, she says again. She can’t help it.
Go, tiny mind. Observer is waiting.
The following is greatly abridged from the original Network article, in accordance with your tier.
XENOMYTHOLOGY FOCUS: THE “FIREBRINGER”
One of the more controversial branches of xenology is known as [comparative xenomythology], the study of the myths that different species tell. This science sorts myths into two categories.
NATURAL MYTHS
The first category is made up of so-called “natural” myths. These are stories that spring from characteristics common to all intelligences, or that derive from the very laws of physics. In this class are creation myths, apocalypses, (incorrect) explanations for laws of nature, and stories that showcase actions beneficial to a successful species (e.g., self-sacrifice). These are the myths that one would expect any species to develop.
UNNATURAL MYTHS
The second category is made up of accounts that most likely sprang from actual events. The more popular name of this category is Firebringer myths, named after the archetypal story in which a superior being introduces a technology to the species in question.*1 In pre-Network galactic society, Firebringer myths were common. In fact, at several points in galactic history Firebringer myths have been nearly universal, because nearly every species had been meddled with at some point in its development.*2
Today, the Network protects all its potential members with strict regulations, disallowing any form of contact before a species is able to leave its solar system on its own. This means that unnatural myths—like the Firebringer—have all but disappeared in our galaxy. In fact, of all the species who have developed an interstellar society in the last ten million years, only one told a Firebringer myth: the [Humans].
*1 This name is unusually specific because the original author was a Category F individual, for whose species the discovery of fire was a pivotal moment.
*2 For a list of negative results of pre-Contact meddling, see [Unnatural Species Development].
Sarya does not awaken. She is instead hammered into consciousness, as though she just came to a screeching halt in her own body. That body, for its part, tells her that something is very wrong. It swears its eyes are wide open, but Sarya sees nothing. Its limbs flounder, reach in all directions, but Sarya cannot even feel the floor beneath her. The universe is black and empty, and a sullen and subdued roar vibrates her skin. She can feel her new body’s pulse begin to rise as chemicals are dumped into its bloodstream. Danger! say the chemicals. Do something!
But she can’t do anything, because she is floating. She is outside, she has to be, that whole Network-is-a-person thing was a hallucination and now she is sucking void in the boundless infinite of open space and in a second she’ll feel the water begin to boil off her eyeballs and tongue and oh goddess this was a terrible idea she is going to die she would do anything to be back in Eleven’s reinforced cockpit—
[Network not found], says a sudden orange warning across her vision. In this total absence of sensory input, her mind seizes onto those words as if they were handed down from the goddess herself. Their meaning doesn’t even matter, she is so thankful to see anything at all—
“Sarya?” says a plaintive voice in her ears, startling her. “I know you didn’t call me but your biometrics are crazy right now so the system called me and here I am but I can’t help you because I can’t find the Network and also there’s this weird gap in my memory like I was gone for a while and the last thing I remember was this huge silver thing coming for us and oh Network I’m scared—”
“Stop!” she gasps. As annoying as Ace’s voice has always been, this time it’s brought her back from the edge of panic. She can hear. She can breathe. She is alive.
“Okay,” says Ace quietly. “It’s just…I’ve never seen a Network blackout before. I mean—”
“Ace,” she says before he can get rolling again. “Where am I?”
“I don’t know!” he wails. “I can’t tell and I really think I’m going to lose it if I don’t—”
“Stop,” she says again. “Okay? Just…stop.”
You can go where I cannot, says a memory in her head, to the dark regions of the galaxy. Maybe it wasn’t a hallucination. Maybe she’s already been dropped into one of those regions. Is this her first task, when she begins earning a second chance for her species? If so, shouldn’t she be…goddess, a little more prepared?
And then there is light. And with the light comes a thunder so incredible that she can feel it shake her very bones. The light is far away, but it’s slowly spinning around her—or she is spinning, perhaps. She tracks it with hungry eyes, squinting as she tries to make out what she is seeing. It grows larger in waves, in one identical section after another, and the more illumination there is, the larger this structure seems. And finally it’s beginning to look familiar. She’s seen this before, this is—
“Oh goddess,” she whispers.
She is floating, with millions of half-lit Citizen members, kilometers above the floor of the Visitors’ Gallery. That’s what the roar was; it was drifting multitudes coming to the same conclusion. And it is a horrifying conclusion: when you are in zero-g, every direction is down—and in this case every down means death. All around her, distorted by emergency lighting, they thrash. They reach, with what limbs nature and technology have given them, toward anything that looks like safety. And almost without exception, they scream.
She is still being taught, she realizes. Network may be not found, but It is still instructing her. This is chaos. This is what It was talking about.
“Okay,” says Ace, still sounding shaky. “I think I’ve figured out where we are. We’re in the—”
“Visitors’ Gallery,” says Sarya tightly. “We are floating in the middle of the Visitors’ Gallery, in a goddess-damned Network blackout.” This is not at all what she expected to come back to. The dark regions of the galaxy indeed—this is literally as close as you can get to the beating heart of the Network. All right, fine. She twists her body, as far as she is able, to look in all directions. The nearest bridge is a good ten meters away, and it’s no
t even below her—whatever below means right now. And in the direction she would normally call below—she swallows and averts her eyes.
“Maybe it’s just me,” says Ace quietly. “Could it be just me? I mean, it wouldn’t be possible for everybody to fall off the Network, right? Because that would mean—”
“Look around,” Sarya says quietly. “Does this look like Networked civilization to you?”
Panic is an ugly thing. It strips away the intellect, tier by tier, and reduces the most civilized being to an animal. These intelligences are not acting like intelligences at all, in fact. There is no communication between the thousands of different species represented in this space. There is only fear, and panic, and violence—good goddess the violence, what are they doing to one another? She watches, horrified and spellbound, as terrified intelligences collide with each other, tear each other apart, send one another sailing into bridge supports and inactive Network drones. Their common language is gone. The mundane trappings of the Network, the threads that bound them to one another—it’s all gone. Network has disappeared; in its vacuum is nothing but fear.
And then Sarya realizes, with the largest jolt of her short second life: holy goddess, she can see. She can still see the delicate gossamer lines drifting between struggling Citizen members, between the millions of Network drones tumbling among them. They are difficult to focus on. They’re different from the living threads that Network showed her; these are dead and dark. But of course they are: Network is not found. There’s no animating force here, nothing to fill those lines with life and light.
“Goddess,” she whispers to no one in particular. “I can see it.”
“I don’t mean to constantly talk when I know you don’t want me to talk all the time,” says Ace, “but in this case I think you would want to know that we’re surrounded by—”
“Millions of panicking intelligences,” murmurs Sarya. “I see them, don’t worry.”
“Actually,” says Ace. “I was going to say…that giant silver thing.”
And then Sarya freezes. As if waiting for Ace’s warning, a silver glob drifts through her field of view. Close behind it is another…and another. All around her, nearer than any of the struggling Citizen members out there in the black space of the Visitors’ Gallery, silver spheres drift through the air. Dozens of them gleam in the emergency lights, none of them more than a half meter across. And now that she is listening for it, she hears the ringing—soft and discordant and splintered, a different tone coming from each trembling, jerking fragment.
“What’s wrong with it?” asks Ace after a moment. “Is it…broken?”
Sarya watches these parings of Librarian drift, gleaming in the emergency lighting, and remembers her mother’s musings on its lightyears-spanning mind. “It’s not broken,” she says, watching ripples move across the face of the nearest piece. “I think it’s…broken off.” Broken off from the Network, like her…except it’s not designed to be. It doesn’t know how to function on its own. These are no more than neurons, violently excised from a mind.
Which gives her the germ of an idea.
“Well, whatever it is,” says Ace, “it’s getting a little close and I really don’t want to be eaten again.”
Sarya cannot stop her slow zero-g tumble, but she can track the nearest silver shape with her head. She watches her reflection in its surface, surprised at how calm her mind seems to be. But then, as Network recently told her: she is a Human, shaped by a Widow, amplified by a gigantic galaxy-spanning intelligence. She is not just Sarya the Daughter staring down her own killer. She is, in a weird way, Shenya the Widow gazing at the small being she nurtured all those decades near lightspeed. She is, in an even weirder way, Network looking at Itself. Somewhere in all that mess, some instinct belonging to some part of her surely knows what to do. In fact—yes. Slowly, not quite understanding why she’s doing it, she raises a hand toward this nearest piece of Librarian—
“Uh,” says Ace. “Are you hissing at it?”
She finds that she is. Not an aggressive hiss, but the croon of a mother Widow toward a Daughter. One of the many parts of Sarya the Daughter knows that this thing is frightened and alone. Another knows that it is potentially useful. Yet another knows what to do. Just as Network said: she is responding with all the parts that make up her nature. Now she reaches out again, tentatively, not with hands this time but with mind. Your mind is where your power lies, Network told her. She traces the delicate threads streaming from this small piece of Librarian. Her instincts tell her that all she has to do is touch its mind like this—
Nothing.
“Is something supposed to be happening?” asks Ace anxiously. “Because it’s kinda…getting closer.”
Sarya watches the humming globe drift toward her, her own concern rising as her distorted half-lit reflection grows. The closer it gets, the louder it calls, as if it’s…hungry. And now Sarya is paddling backward in midair, kilometers above the floor, all thoughts of minds and threads forgotten as she attempts to save her brand-new body. She puts her hands up—both biological and mechanical—then draws them back when she realizes the Librarian will simply absorb them. Frantically, she reaches for its mind again. She can feel it, it’s right there, but it’s closed to her. But she’s done this before, she would swear she has, she’s touched a mind, all she has to do is follow this thread, this thread she’s yanking on right here, goddess damn you, listen, you shiny—
And then the thread she is holding, the dark line that links this being to Network, breaks in half. It takes a moment for Sarya’s conscious mind to realize what has happened, but some part of her unconscious is way ahead of her. You are a new Network, she was told. Which means, says some instinct, that she can do…this.
Quickly, smoothly, instinctively, she pulls the thread into her own mind. She can see the tension on her own face as Librarian drifts to within centimeters of her trembling body, waits to feel her own skin dissolving—and then the thread, stretched between her mind and Librarian’s, glows with golden life. Librarian’s tone shifts up a few degrees and stabilizes. It brushes against her leg as it passes, but she does not feel it take a bite.
“Goddess,” she breathes. If this is a lesson from Network, it’s a bit higher pressure than she would prefer.
“It didn’t eat us!” cries Ace. “Um…why didn’t it eat us?”
Sarya has no time to reply. One by one, she plucks the other Librarian pieces off the old Network and joins them to the new—to her. Their threads illuminate one at a time, and she can’t help but smile as she feels them join her. Now that they can feel one another, they attract one another. One by one, like drops of mercury, they run together. Their individual notes join and harmonize until Librarian has absorbed every scrap of itself in the area. Its call is thunderous now; it vibrates her gut, it tickles her skin. There must be fifty tons of liquid metal flowing around her in the darkness, a sinuous shape gleaming in the emergency light.
And then it seizes her.
She stiffens, but she manages to strangle her cry. She holds her breath as something impossibly heavy and warm wraps itself around her leg. It flows up her tense body, flowing over her utility suit, then spirals down one arm and fills Roche’s hand with burning metal.
“Are we being eaten?” asks Ace in a quavering voice.
For a moment Sarya is sure that’s exactly what is happening. She helped this thing, she brought it out of darkness, and now it is repaying her by consuming her. She reaches out, tentatively, to touch that mind again. It’s so much larger now, so much more complex, its emotions manifold and many-layered—and then she laughs.
“You wouldn’t be laughing if we were being eaten,” says Ace. “Would you?”
“We’re being nuzzled,” she says. She flexes her fingers, as well as she can with a handful of silver. How do you pet a giant chunk of sentient metal? Surely you can’t hurt it; you
could pound it with an ice hammer and it would do no more than purr. Maybe it’s enough to just touch its mind, like this—
A warning emanates from the mind of Librarian, flashing down the glowing cable into Sarya. Danger, says the warning.
Danger? Who could be in danger when wrapped in this thing? What could possibly threaten her tiny Network now?
The metal quivers, its ring shifting through modulations she can’t understand. Its entire mass begins to spin slowly, rotating around her body in the darkness. She feels it spread itself out, its edges thinning to knife edges.
“Now are we being eaten?” asks Ace.
Sarya hears his voice, but she is already too far away to bother answering. She is doing what Networks do: she is protecting herself. She is reaching out, crawling down dark threads, following her instincts. There are tens of millions of Network minds here, from the drones that drift through the darkness to the small helper intelligences in each citizen’s Network implant, and each one radiates terror. They are used to continual communion with one another, but now they are walled into their own private hells and awaiting Network’s return with an anticipation that approaches hysteria. When she breaks a thread and draws a mind into herself, she can feel its joy and relief like an explosion within her. These minds will do anything to stay attached to their Network. They will fight, they will die, they will destroy any threat. Sarya, on her end, finds that she would do anything to keep them. They amplify her and add their senses to her own, spreading her mind over multiple cubic kilometers. And yet, amplified as she is, it still takes her a moment to see it. Or rather…It.
