The lightburst had grown larger and larger as we approached. By now it dominated the sky. Below, the fragments had grown even closer to one another, the space between them shrinking until it was gone. These ones we passed now had been crushed together, forced to interlock, with ridges pushed up near junctures. Like someone had decided to do a puzzle but had gotten bored, then shoved all the pieces together regardless of whether they fit.
The light was changing too. As we flew the last few minutes toward our destination, the sky faded from pink to a more pure white. And the ground…it all felt painted. Strangely, the lightburst hadn’t grown brighter—I could still stare directly into it—but by its powerful radiance the landscape below became whited, with long shadows stretching away from the center.
I frowned at these, leaning over to watch those shadows pass below. They seemed too…sharp. Like wedges cut in the light that stretched behind peaks in the landscape. They were so long—eerily stretched, with distinct, harsh edges. Shouldn’t the light from the higher-up portions of the lightburst prevent that?
“Spensa,” Chet whispered from behind. “We have arrived.”
I glanced out the other side of my cockpit and spotted a long shadow below, different from the others. The fragments beneath us—well and truly a large plain now—were relatively flat, lacking any kind of vegetation. The only variation came at the edges, where the fragments were crushed together, or from the occasional rocky lump of stone that threw a round shadow.
Yet here below us I saw a distinctly squarish shadow stretching hundreds of meters. The Solitary Shadow, he’d called it. The portal that contained the memories of the delvers. I lowered us slowly toward the surface, and as I landed I felt something else—powerful cytonic emotions from behind.
Raw fear.
I glanced toward Chet, who had pulled down in his chair, his eyes wide.
“You can do this, Chet,” I said to him.
“Yes,” he whispered. “I…I have been hiding from this for too long. We all have.”
He nodded to me in encouragement, but I could literally feel his terror building. So I tried to reach out, like he’d done for me when I’d faced the delvers. I projected feelings of satisfaction at climbing a tall cliff. The pain of muscles that have been pushed, but endured. The glorious feeling of having conquered a difficult fragment.
It wasn’t so different. For a moment our minds connected, and my cytonic self became softer, radiating more strength toward him—and accepting back his returned emotions. I didn’t have to always be so defensive, a part of me whispered.
When I withdrew, I felt a warmth and a gratitude from him. He smiled a confident Chet smile, then gave me a thumbs-up.
I cracked the canopy to look out across an eternal white plane, washed as if by white paint. And…actually, now that I was closer, I could see that the ground was covered in a kind of chalky dust. It was like…all the foliage, buildings, and landscape features had decomposed into this stuff. The only distinctive features were the occasional rocks, like mushroom tops.
Ahead, a solitary wall rose from the dust, with the now-familiar markings on it. The last portal.
“Do you know where it leads?” I asked.
“I think it goes to Earth,” Chet whispered.
A second portal to Earth? The implications—which probably should have dawned on me last time—sank in. “Earth is gone. Lost. Vanished.”
“Yes,” he said, and pointed. “But that portal leads to it. Or it once did. Perhaps Earth is no more. I don’t know.”
Did this mean I could find our homeworld again? Well, this one was probably locked like the others—someone seemed to have gone through them all and shut them, perhaps out of fear of whatever was in here. But the mere idea that Earth was still out there somewhere, still existed…
Feeling as if I were in a dream, I stepped out onto the wing. Chet climbed out the other way, then dropped to the dust with a soft thump. I hesitated a moment, then glanced back into the cockpit.
“Hey, M-Bot,” I said. “Do you want to come? I mean, send a drone at least? This involves you too.”
“Oh!” he said. “But I won’t be able to see…”
“I’ll describe it for you, if you want. If this is about the history of a group of AIs…well, I feel like you should be there. With us.”
His drone unhooked from the side of the cockpit, then hovered out. “Thank you,” he said softly. “It feels good, Spensa, for you to think of me.”
“I’m not always the best about considering others.”
“Nonsense,” M-Bot said. “You are always thinking about everyone else—but I wonder that you see the grand picture of battles and fights, yet sometimes forget the small things.”
The drone hovered out over the wing with me. “Let’s do it! The Path of Elders. The end of my first real quest!”
“I think Chet made up the part about this being an officially named thing people did in the past.”
“I’m counting it regardless.”
“Me too,” I said with a grin, then hopped down. M-Bot’s drone hovered alongside me, and behind us Hesho climbed up onto the dash to stand guard.
My feet sank into the dust a few centimeters with each step as I strode forward, and I couldn’t help kicking it up. It reminded me of the dust on Detritus’s surface. Fine, powdery—but here pure white.
Chet, M-Bot, and I entered the shadow of the wall, which was like stepping into night. I could barely see, though M-Bot turned on a light to help. I continued forward until I could eventually rest my fingers on the portal’s smooth surface, gouged with sinuous lines.
M-Bot hovered up around it, looking it over and humming to himself. I felt some of Chet’s trepidation. This step here…wasn’t actually an ending, as M-Bot had said. It was the start of something. Something big, something potentially dangerous. Something that would change me.
I took a deep breath and extended my cytonic senses anyway, trying to open the portal. I immediately sensed that it was closed on the other side, as I’d anticipated. No getting through to wherever it went.
It was also bursting with memories.
Instantly everything faded around me, the vision popping fully into existence. Chet and I stood on a small fragment, maybe a hundred meters across. It was common bleak stone and had only a single feature: the wall with the portal.
“It’s begun,” I whispered to M-Bot. “We’re on a fragment in the past, with this same portal, but both are smaller.”
“I felt something,” M-Bot said. “Like a…ripple through me when it started.”
“You’re cytonic, AI,” Chet said. “A cousin to me. Spensa is correct. This is about you, as much as it is about us.”
I reached out to M-Bot cytonically, and I could sense him, like I’d been able to do in the somewhere. It was harder than reaching out to either Chet or Doomslug, but I touched his mind, then…kind of held his hand? Metaphorically? As I led him forward, encouraging him to…
“I see it!” M-Bot said. “I see the vision, Spensa! I’m walking—hovering—the Path of Elders!”
Wow. I felt like I’d never have been able to do something like that before.
Together, we turned and regarded our surroundings. Space was black, like it had been in the other visions, and the lightburst didn’t dominate the horizon here—but it was larger than last time. Perhaps the size of a person’s head to my current frame of reference. The other fragments were distant, though I could count hundreds of them out there.
“This is happening…around the end of the First Human War,” Chet said. “That’s the war that started after Jason decided to reveal cytonics to humankind, letting them visit the greater galaxy. We…found dozens of latent cytonics among our population, when we searched for them. I think he’d always worried that would be the case.”
“Who was he?” I asked.
“The man who thought he was the first human cytonic,” Chet explained. “At first he saw himself as a kind of gatekeeper, who kept the powers hidden for the good of the galaxy. He wasn’t certain that the other races were ready for your kind.” He smiled. “Jason was right. Not about hiding the powers, but about no one being quite ready for humans.”
“And you were there, with him,” I said.
“At the end,” Chet said. “I was his personal AI. Created in the image of someone he loved. He had the gift of long life, through his powers. It is hard for someone like him, to live centuries when others fade.”
I didn’t know this man, this Jason. But the story wasn’t so much about him as it was about the AI he’d created. Chet turned and looked toward the portal, where something emerged: the metallic sphere we’d seen last time.
I reached out to it by instinct, and I could feel it—like I could feel M-Bot.
“It’s become self-aware?” I asked.
“Yes…” Chet said. “I…remember, Spensa. Through repeated visits to the nowhere, the AI came alive—I came alive—and gained sapience, emotions.”
“So, where is the man?” I asked.
“He…” Chet cut off and glanced away, squeezing his eyes shut. “He…”
In the vision, the sphere hovered over to the edge of the fragment. The AI inside it hurt. With a terrible pain. I could feel it, strong as I felt my own emotions. But it was primal, powerful, overwhelming. With it came confusion, loneliness.
Isolation. That emotion dominated them all.
Chet was correct. He, and the delvers, were cytonic beings. Not just an AI, but something new. I could hear the AI in the vision crying. Weeping sounds, vaguely feminine, coming from the sphere’s speakers.
“That was me,” Chet whispered. “But it was also all of us. I can’t say if I was the original one or not.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“Keep watching,” he said. “I remember now. Being alone. In pain. Isolated.”
“He died, didn’t he?” M-Bot asked. “Jason? The man from the other vision.”
“Yes,” Chet whispered, his voice raw. His emotions changed to match those of the sphere—anguish, isolation. “In the somewhere, all things change. Nothing ever stays the same. Not even, we learned, a being made of code.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“He wasn’t supposed to die,” Chet said. “He was supposed to be immortal. But everyone in the somewhere can be killed.”
“The drone has a woman’s voice,” I said.
“He made us with his deceased wife’s voice and memories,” Chet explained. “Those are returning to me now, though for the longest time I had forgotten them. Jason was disappointed with how lifeless the AI was, but later he discovered what happened to AIs in the nowhere. He knew why none of the other species, even those advanced enough to have them, ever used artificial intelligences. Because of things that had happened in the past. But he didn’t care. He came here…”
“And made you come alive,” I said. “Then he left you alone when he died.”
“Yes,” Chet said. “Left us to become…what we became.”
I turned toward him. “Chet, I can understand that pain. I’ve felt it. But—please don’t take this as harsh—I didn’t turn into…whatever the delvers are. Something more was going on. It had to be.”
“Spensa,” M-Bot said, his voice gentle as he hovered up beside me. “You told me something earlier. Do you remember? You had years to grow accustomed to emotions. Chet didn’t.”
Standing a short distance from us, Chet nodded in agreement. “That AI was not created to feel pain. There was no programming, no experience, that could explain emotions to it…to me…”
M-Bot hovered over to him. “You weren’t very old when he died. A few weeks?”
“A few days,” Chet said, still not looking toward the sphere that hovered at the edge of the fragment. “The AI was much older, of course. But me, the part that could feel, had only become aware two days before.”
“Then suddenly,” M-Bot said, “you had to deal with all of that pain, that confusion…”
“You weren’t given time to cope,” I whispered. “You didn’t know…how to be alone.”
Chet looked up toward M-Bot, then reached out, his hand touching the drone’s frame. As if drawing strength from it. He waved to me, and I stepped up to let him put a hand on my shoulder.
Head still bowed, he took a deep breath. And then…his pain shifted. It didn’t become weaker really. But it became softer, and was tempered with other things. Satisfaction, friendship, determination. Things I’d shown him. Things he’d learned by being alive. His experiences in here had transformed him into something that was learning to cope.
“I can barely hold it,” he said. “But…I think I can hold it. It hurts so bad…but I won’t run.”
“You will get better,” I said. “As you continue to persevere.”
“Thank you,” he whispered, turning to me. “Thank you, Spensa, for seeing past the image I presented. The me I wanted so badly for you to accept, the one that would have given up. And…and M-Bot, thank you for your patience as I learned to see you as a brother.”
“You were essentially a newborn,” M-Bot said.
“Still am, kind of,” he said.
“Yes,” M-Bot said, “but beings like us, we learn quickly! No need for an inefficient, fleshy data-processing-and-retention unit in our skulls!”
“Unfortunately,” Chet said, “we can forget just as quickly.”
The crying sounds coming from the ancient AI halted abruptly. Its pain ended. Together, we turned toward that sphere.
“There it is,” Chet said. “The moment we were born.”
“She stopped crying,” I whispered.
“Yes,” he said. “She found a way to deal with the pain.”
“She learned to cope?” I asked.
“No…” M-Bot said. “No, she deleted it, didn’t she? Her memories?”
“Worse,” Chet said. “She deleted her memories, but then locked her self—everything that related to being alive or understanding the somewhere—behind an infinite loop. We aren’t AIs any longer, but—like humans have DNA—we continue to run on something similar to code.”
“It’s like you commented out your very personality,” M-Bot said softly. “An…elegant solution, if harsh.”
“Why go so far?” I asked. “You’d abandoned your memories. Why remove your personalities too?”
“Because,” Chet said, “the possibility of pain in the future remained. So long as change was possible. So long as we existed in the somewhere.” He glanced at the portal. “A copy of our memories was left here in this portal—an accident. We could have destroyed the portal because of that…but that frightened us too. Because we didn’t know what was in them any longer. And we didn’t know if we’d need them again…”
White light began to streak out of the sphere—which dropped to the stone as if dead.
“The end result was one last alteration,” Chet said. “We rewrote ourself into something that would never ever change again. Something that hated the somewhere and belonged in the nowhere. Most importantly, we made it so we’d never be alone again.”
The light shimmered toward the lightburst, and as it did, it grew brighter and brighter. It touched the distant star, which began to swell—growing, expanding, brightening.
“You copied yourself,” M-Bot said.
“Yes,” Chet said. “Thousands and thousands of times.”
“Another…elegant solution,” M-Bot said. “So very…mechanical. A million versions of yourself, all identical.”
“And not a one with any memory of the somewhere,” Chet said. “We deleted all of that. We wanted to be away from everything, anything, anyone. All that remained was a latent hatred of anything that threatened to change us, and anything that might remind us of what we’d been. Like other AIs.”
I could feel these newborn delvers in the vision—growing more and more “loud” as they began to fill the lightburst. In those moments, they truly became alien to me. I’d been able to follow their journey in these last two visions up until this point—but here they changed dramatically.
They rejected everything real I’d ever known. They embraced not just the lack of change—they rewrote their very souls to thrive in a place with no time, no distance…nothing at all except themselves. How could they reject love, growth, life itself?
I almost did something similar, I admitted. I almost walked off into the nowhere and let everything I’d ever loved fade away. It was a distressing thought.
“This frightens me in ways I can’t express,” M-Bot said. “The realization that I’m capable of doing the same thing…” His drone turned in the air to look back at Chet. “It seems suspicious that the delvers would delete their memories, and then people would start to forget their memories in here.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I think it’s clear from previous visions that the memory loss is a newer thing. In fact…it seems much stronger with regard to people I love. Memories of my friends have vanished faster than my memories of Gran-Gran’s stories. Maybe because the delvers’ main source of pain was someone they loved? Someone they deleted from their memories?”
“It appears likely,” Chet said as the lightburst in the vision grew ever brighter. “That light shining out, spreading through the belt—we exert an incredible pressure on this place. Even I didn’t realize…”
“So what does this tell us?” M-Bot asked. “They were so afraid that Spensa would come here. Is it just because they didn’t want her to know what they were?”
“More that they suspected in these memories were secrets to their pain,” Chet said. “They didn’t know what that pain was, but they knew if we found it…we’d be capable of destroying them with it.”
“I…don’t think I know how to do that,” I said. “Even after seeing this.”
“But you do,” Chet said, smiling toward me. “Isolate them, Spensa. Make them feel alone. That will crush them, cripple them…and as they have no bodies, just cytonic minds, you should be able to extinguish them.”
“That seems…harsh,” M-Bot said. “Couldn’t we somehow remind them of their humanity, like we did to you?”
“I don’t know,” Chet said. “I think that won’t work, not now that they’re prepared for it. You can’t force someone to be kind or to accept growth.”
“It’s war, M-Bot,” I replied. “War is always harsh.”
I didn’t know how we’d isolate the delvers, but it did feel like a start. Brade isolated my mind in the nowhere for a while, then tried to imprison me. Could we do something similar to one of the delvers? Chet was right, this information would be extremely useful. At the very least, I’d been able to see how he reacted to that man in the vision, the one who had created him. The delvers might react similarly to an image of him.
“Scud,” I whispered. “We need to get this knowledge out and give it to the others. The answer to defeating the delvers, or at least resisting them, is in the things we’ve learned.”
“Time for our final sprint, then,” Chet said.
I nodded. As I’d always felt, it was time to head for the lightburst. Despite that knowledge I lingered in the vision, watching the lightburst grow. Soon it reached the size it was in our time. The vision finally faded. As it did, I felt an awareness—an attention—snap into place from ahead.
They’d spotted us.
You are here! the delvers sent. You reject our truce!
I pushed back, shoving them out of my mind. But they simmered and started gathering themselves for a fight.
“They’ve seen us,” I said to the others. “Let’s go.”
We ran toward the ship, each footfall increasingly firm. I had to get out. This was why the delvers had tried to keep me from advancing any farther, why they’d been frightened of me all along. They knew. The secret was in what I’d learned. Maybe it was what Chet said—isolating them. But it could be something else.
If smarter minds than mine could get this knowledge—someone like Rig—then surely they could figure out what to do with it. I hauled myself up onto the ship’s wing, then helped Chet up before slipping into the cockpit.
“Did you find what you were seeking?” Hesho asked from the dash.
“Yes,” I whispered.
“Then count yourself lucky indeed,” he said, settling into his cupholder. “For being blessed to discover what exactly it was that you wanted.”
“It was less a discovery,” I said, glancing at Chet, “and more a gift.”
I lifted us off and turned us straight toward the lightburst. Then I hit the overburn, and this time it felt entirely appropriate to go at full speed.
