Emissaries from the Dead

24. MURDERER

I bumped along that dark passage, propelled by forces that could not have been limited to mere air jets, for what felt like more than an hour. Once or twice my body jerked from sudden accelerations. Once or twice I felt strong wind against my face. Once or twice I just languished, unable to discern any movement, wondering if I’d stopped, and forced to hope that I wasn’t being abandoned in the AIsource equivalent of gaol.

I shouted questions, including endless variations on “How long is this going to take?” but received no further answers. Maybe they didn’t want me to remember the route. Maybe the majority couldn’t speak to me at all once I left the territory they considered their own. Or maybe the whole point was to make me wait—teaching their new property that she existed according to their timetable, and not her own.

Whatever the explanation, the journey did, eventually, end.

My back came to rest on a smooth, rubbery incline. I slid a few meters, through an opening just large enough to admit me, onto a padded floor soft enough to rob my landing of any inconvenient drama.

As I stood, blinking after all my time in the darkness, I found myself in a place unlike any I had seen in One One One.

You could call it a corridor, I suppose. But it was less than a third as wide as the one where I’d left Oscin and Skye, its walls so close together that I couldn’t fully extend my arms. The ceiling, by contrast, was too high to see, the walls converging in some high-altitude vanishing point where distant lights flickered an irregular, random cadence. The vague blue light was dimmer and colder than any I remembered, casting high-contrast, ghostlike shadows. The corridor itself didn’t curve away after a short distance, as the corridors outside the main hangar and the Interface access portal did. It extended for what seemed an infinite distance in both directions, its endpoints pinpricks that didn’t seem any more promising in either direction. If it ran the length of the Hub, as I suspected, I was in for a long walk. I could easily collapse from exhaustion, or thirst, before I got anywhere near a recognizable destination.

But even as I stood in the center of all that immensity, a black pinprick popped into existence in front of me, hovering at eye level like a blind spot formed at the spur of the moment. I took a step toward it and it expanded horizontally to become a line, then vertically to become a black rectangle: the first conventional AIsource avatar I’d seen since my arrival on One One One.

It said, ((you are not welcome here))

It was the same kind of voice used by the AIsource I knew, still speaking to me from inside my own head like something that belonged there, but its character was different. This one felt abrasive, like broken glass: less something intent on drawing my blood than something that couldn’t move without tearing at its own scabs.

After everything else I’d learned on One One One, I couldn’t help knowing where I’d been touched by intelligences by this before.

I could have been paralyzed. I could have regressed to childhood, collapsed into a fetal ball, and begged it not to hurt me. Or I could have raged, cursed it for a murderer, and hurled myself at the black shape as if believing I actually had a chance of hurting it.

Instead, I felt myself go cold. “My name’s Andrea Cort. I’m a fully deputized representative of the AIsource Majority, operating on this station under their auspices and with their full legal authority. Who are you?”

The flatscreen shrunk to the size of a dot, as if considering its options, before once again inflating to its previous size.

((we know you, andrea cort * we know you’ve been hurt * we know you hold us responsible * we know you think you know the cause you’re serving * we know you imagine this is an opportunity to avenge old wrongs * but the issues here are more complicated than you can know * they speak to the auto-genocide of an entire order of intelligent beings* your interference here is foolish * and it is not welcome))

They almost seemed to be pleading.

But I could still hear pleas I’d heard on Bocai. “I’m not here for you.”

((not today at least))

“No,” I agreed, staring them down. “Not today. Today I’m only here for the human being responsible for the crimes on One One One. And today I have authorization to pass.”

((you have already defected once today * how about twice? * you know how powerful we are * you know our cause is just * you know we can reward you in ways beyond your capacity to measure * the one you seek has been a disappointment to us * agree and we will provide your prisoner as the first installment of a reward that will enrich the rest of your natural life))

“It’s tempting,” I said. “If I didn’t blame you for the deaths of my family and a life spent considering myself a monster, I’d almost consider it. But no thanks. Now step aside or take it up with my superiors.”

Their retort was sharp: ((we are your superiors too, andrea cort))

It happened to be true. They were smarter than me, faster than me, more powerful than me, more advanced than me, and more dangerous than me. Against them, I had nothing but attitude.

But attitude I had plenty of.

“Are you theirs?”

For several heartbeats it kept me guessing, floating before me as uncommunicative as any other blank slate, leaving me to wonder whether I was about to find out the consequences of going too far. Then the flatscreen contracted to a single point, and the broken-glass voice grumbled in retreat.

((we will have to discuss the price for this someday soon))

A single portal had opened, on the right side of the infinite corridor, about fifty meters down. The light spilling from that portal cut a brighter wedge in the overall gloom. I thought I saw a shadow briefly eclipse that region of relative light, before once again joining the realm of the unknown and unseen.

Whatever it was passed too quickly to reveal its shape. But I could see its haste.

I felt, rather than saw, the presence of the Heckler.

I flattened myself against the wall, and moved toward the wedge of light, hating the soft sibilant sound of my tunic sliding against corridor wall. My own breath, controlled and calm as it was, was nevertheless deafening. I pursed my lips, remembered the armor my quarry had used against the skimmer carrying Oscin and Skye, imagined trying to take on an enemy armed with such weapons in a corridor so narrow that I couldn’t even dodge from side to side, and ignored the internal voice that tried to assure me I had nothing.

Because I had more than nothing.

I had Bocai.

The wedge of light spilling into the corridor didn’t flicker again. It took on a sickly yellow tinge, the color of old paper, but it revealed nothing of the room that cast it. The Heckler could be waiting just inside, or could have fled far beyond my reach. Short of following, there was no way to know.

My eyes stung from cold sweat. I cleared them with the back of my hand, fought dizziness as a wave of exhaustion overcame me, wished once again that I’d put this off for an hour or day or year, and whipped myself around the edge of the portal, hitting the floor in a blind roll.

Big joke. Nobody tried to ambush me.

I’d entered an industrial vestibule of some kind: one of those places, common to all technological societies, where the machinery is tucked away to keep it from marring the smooth, presentable facades everywhere else. Nothing here looked like it had been made for the convenience of human beings. The walls were lumpy with protrusions, some of which were nothing more than solid geometrical shapes, others of which shifted and flowed and formed new combinations, like recombinant candle wax. Some gave off colors I could see but could not recognize from the visual spectrum I knew. They hurt my eyes when I looked at them, and left nasty afterimages when I looked away.

The nastiest was right in front of me.

The platform beside another portal on the opposite end of the chamber bore a bloody severed head.

I’d only encountered the indenture, Cartsac, a few times. I think I’d seen him awake a grand total of once. He looked alert enough now, even if dead. Both eyes looked like protruding marbles, too glossy with blood to admit the existence of irises or pupils. Whatever had reduced him to this state had done a sloppy job of it, not severing the neck clean so much as brutally ripping the head free of his shoulders. The ragged, browning flaps of skin hanging over the edge of his platform still dripped enough to testify to a murder mere minutes old.

I was not impressed.

I stood, crossed the room, and passed my hand through the horrific image, revealing it as just another projection.

“Is that all you can do?” I asked.

Nobody answered.

I didn’t even bother to duck and roll as I passed through the next portal. I just darted on through, half expecting to be attacked as soon as I showed myself.

Inside I found the place where the Heckler had been sleeping.

It was a home only because the walls, just as amorphous as the ones in the chamber I’d just left, were here just backdrop to a scene of almost comical domesticity. A hammock, of the old-fashioned, open kind, meant to accommodate a supine human being, hung unoccupied to my immediate left, its anchor points hidden behind shifting, kaleidoscopic shapes in the ceiling. Their movements didn’t affect the cords, or the hammock, at all as far as I could see. The canvas itself bore stains I recognized from Hammocktown and, more recently, my own clothing: manna sap, leaking from a patch of Uppergrowth overhead. Fresh pears hung in bunches at its center. To me this resembled nothing so much as a dispensary kept stocked to feed any small creature confined to a cage.

I snorted. “And is this your great reward? All your masters have to give you, for the rest of your life?”

Something shifted behind the next open portal, an open wound in the wall to my right. Two more images of violent death bracketed it on both sides.

The right side of the room bore another portal, bracketed on both sides by more images of violent death. The one on the left was a gaping Cynthia Warmuth, looking much as she must have looked when crucified on the Uppergrowth: her limbs splayed, her eyes wide in uncomprehending horror. Bright red circles had been painted on both her cheeks. The one on the right was Peyrin Lastogne, his skin blackened and crisped beyond comprehension, his identity obvious by the burned-meat visage that insisted on retaining the man’s trademark grimace. His untouched eyes testified that he, too, had been denied death: he had to sit there, aware of what had been done to him, suffering more than his capacity to register anything else, but unable to count on release.

The Heckler had slept with these images, woken to them, taken pleasure in them, drawn strength and motivation from them. Used them as reminders to hate.

I imagined taking on an enemy armed with that kind of obsession, and ignored the internal voice that tried to tell me I had nothing.

Because I had more than nothing.

I had purpose.

I took my time stepping through the portal into the chamber after that. It turned out to be a great oval room, an ampitheatre really, large enough to swallow Hammocktown and all its residents several times over. It bore the Heckler’s art gallery: hundreds of images, no two of them alike, clustered around the walls, with every single member of Gibb’s crew singled out for at least one violent death. They’d been beaten, starved, exsanguinated, strangled, perforated, skinned, burned, impaled, inflicted with diseases that had made the flesh rot off their bones, or simply chained in place and left to starve. At least a dozen separate executions, all nasty, had been reserved for Cynthia Warmuth. I spotted almost as many versions of myself, including a couple identical to messages I’d already received. The Porrinyards shared only one: a cute image of the two indentures, rendered so thin and ravenous they were reduced to gnawing the meat from their respective bones. There was one even worse, reserved for Stuart Gibb: and if I ever again feel any doubt about my mind’s ability to police itself, I only need remind myself how kind it had been to flense that one image from my own permanent memory.

The chamber’s centerpiece, dwarving everything else, was Cif Negelein. He stood on a pedestal of gold, his legs apart, his fists on his hips, his face resolute and noble, his body idealized well past the enhanced muscle tone so prevalent among the indentures of Hammocktown. Every soft line, every imperfection, that rendered the man human had been chiseled away, rubbed out, reimagined, replaced with an aesthetic that went well past the admirable into a realm I could only see as cartoonish. His jaw was an edifice, his forehead a monument. But he was not a man, and not just because he had the dimensions of a god. His eyes were empty, soulless, unloving.

It was impossible not to feel small in the presence of that judgmental gaze.

I circled, facing every mutilated corpse in turn. “Is this what they offered you, for defecting? A canvas? The tools to create what your own talents could not?” My words echoed against the high walls. “Art as a substitute for feeling human?”

The deck here was too spongy for the furious running footfalls to ring out loud. They were audible only as soft, padding thuds. I couldn’t place the exact location, but I knew they came from someplace behind me. But even as I whirled, expecting to see hate-filled eyes staring centimeters from my own, the footfalls faded, disappearing somewhere behind a simulacrum of Mo Lassiter.

I charged into the image, experiencing a queasy flash of blindness at the moment of contact, emerging on the other side to confront a flicker of a human shadow racing along the curved wall. I followed it, not caring about stealth or safety anymore, caring only about seeing this through to the end.

The vague blue light spilling from another hole in the wall flickered, as someone passing through that doorway eclipsed whatever lay on the other side.

I was roaring by the time I charged through it.

But even as I passed through the portal I knew that it had been a mistake, because this time the Heckler was waiting in ambush. This time something hard and blunt and heavy slammed down against the top of my head with enough force to drive me to the deck. The impact came as a burst of light arriving at the same moment as a wave of darkness and a single thought, pure and alone and disconnected from anything else: I’m dead. But then my knees buckled and I started to fall and I knew that if I fell over I would be struck again, so I directed what strength I had to my legs and transformed the forward movement from a fall into an uncontrolled headlong run. I was still blinded by the pain when I collided with the opposite wall, but I had enough mind left to know that to stand even a chance in hell of surviving I had to roll and face whatever had come for me.

Instead I caught a glimpse of a human form dropping out of sight.

The world grayed before I understood what had happened. I was alone, in a narrower chamber with shifting walls and an egg-shaped portal in the floor. The blow to the back of the head had been meant to knock me into it. Rolling with it had driven me over the gap without any suspicion that the gap existed.

I ran a hand over the knot of pain in the back of my head, and brought it back slick with blood. The sight sickened me, but I’d been hurt worse. I staggered over and looked down, into the hole.

Whatever existed down there swallowed all light. A light breeze, blowing upward and cooling my face, felt so similar to the atmospheric conditions on the Uppergrowth that for a moment I paled, thinking that if I dropped on through I’d just pass on through, into the Habitat. The only indication that it wasn’t was another of those soft shuffling noises, just a few feet below…and the conviction, certain as my own name, that once I dropped down into that place, there would no longer be any place for either the Heckler, or me, to retreat.

I reminded myself that the Heckler had a weapon, familiarity with the environment, and enough malice for both of us, and ignored the internal voice that tried to tell me I had nothing.

Because I had more than nothing.

I had a reason to stay alive.

I looked down into the darkness, and thought I saw a dull, diffuse reflection maybe three meters below me. If it was not much farther away than that, it would serve, about as well as anything could, as something to land on. But it was a drop. Even if I didn’t break my legs, I could stun myself long enough to hand myself over to another blow on the head, or two.

But I hadn’t heard a thud when the Heckler went through.

Maybe it was safe.

Maybe not.

But given that there was choice, there was no point in debating it.

I placed my palms against the deck and lowered my legs into the opening, feeling any number of panicky moments between committing to the descent and the eternity I spent hanging on to the edge by my fingertips, trying to make up my mind.

Then I let go.

For less than a heartbeat I knew I’d just made a horrible mistake.

Then the sharp but welcome pain of impact reverberated all the way from the soles of my feet to the vertebrae in my neck. My legs buckled. My knees took the secondary impact, hitting a hard, cool surface unlike any I’d encountered on this station. My outstretched palms landed a second later, feeling a breeze that seemed to blow straight through this floor. I continued to fall, but by the time I felt the last of the impact it arrived as no worse than a slap on the cheek.

Aside from my own involuntary gasps, none of this made any noise.

I slammed the floor with my palm. This impact was silent. The floor was solid enough, even if dotted here and there with the pinprick openings admitting the most odd, upward breeze. But the floor itself made no sound.

A hiss screen of some kind? I risked an experiment. “Hello?”

Loud and clear.

Sound was possible here. I just wouldn’t hear footfalls anymore; not even muffled ones, making this a less than desirable arena for any fight in the dark, let alone one with an opponent who knew the ground well.

The voice of the rogue intelligences whispered in my ear. ((again * join us and we’ll stop this now))

Not wanting to give away my position, I subvocalized my answer. Why would I do that?

((because we are not monsters * we are only fighting for our lives * and now, of all times, you must be able to empathize with the sheer instinct for survival))

I felt my lips curl in a grin.

Not good enough.

Had I just heard someone gasp, a few meters ahead of me?

In this near silence, it was as telltale as an explosion. The Heckler had been hoarding breath. But a minute or two of holding air inside your lungs makes that sudden gasp, at the end of it, just a little more audible. Normal breath is harder to pick up, more difficult to track.

Another sound, not far away: the rustle of the Heckler’s clothes.

((suicide for them is genocide for us))

I don’t have the time to talk to you.

The sounds ahead of me came not with the metronomic regularity of a machine, but with the clear hesitancy of something afraid.

I rose to my feet, hating the audible creak of my knees and downright deafening rustling of my own clothes. The air was cool and clean, and despite my preference for artificial environments, a little too filtered for my tastes. But there was something else in it too: the tang of human perspiration.

My own was part of it. I’d popped a serious sweat since starting this hunt.

But not all of it came from me.

Another rustle: so subliminal that the Heckler must have been very close for me to hear it. I guessed five meters. Within five meters, in some direction: behind me, ahead of me, off to one side, whatever.

I did not need vision to know that my enemy was frozen, like a nocturnal animal paralyzed by the sudden attention of a beam of light.

“So?” I asked, dripping contempt from every syllable, “not going to taunt me? Just going to remain hidden and hope I miss you?”

No answer.

How delicious, after how small I’d been made to feel, to know that something in the universe held its breath, to avoid being heard by me.

I took a single tiny step. “Those were some pretty imaginative messages you sent. Vicious, all of them. I confess I mistook them it for ordinary hate mail. But it wasn’t a grudge that made you send them, was it? It was fear. You knew the AIsource wanted to recruit me, and you knew your side was less than pleased with you. You knew there were limits to how much you’d be protected.”

More silence.

“None of this had to happen. You didn’t have to terrorize anybody. Considering the conditions in the Habitat, you could have faked a simple accident. And even if your keepers gave you free rein to do whatever you wanted to do next, you could have harassed Hammocktown in any number of subtler ways. You didn’t have to pursue old grudges. You didn’t have to put on a show.”

The unseen presence surprised me by laughing out loud, closer to me than I would have liked. “I did if I hated the bitch.”

I turned toward the voice. “And that’s the real problem, isn’t it? Growing up with no love. Denied human interaction. Always feeling apart. Hate was the only thing you were ever any really good at, wasn’t it. You let it make you a monster.”

“Look who’s talking.”

The comeback drew no blood whatsoever. It just made me sad. “But at least I’ve spent my life being judged for it. What about you, Christina?”

I sensed, rather than heard, her charge.

The impact against my gut knocked the breath out of me and propelled us both several body-lengths backward, in what would have been an immediate plunge to the floor had I not wasted several of those feet struggling to stay upright.

We hit the floor together, without so much as a thud, the only sounds being her curses and my own gasps of pain.

Something solid exploded against the side of my face, splitting my lip and filling my mouth with the taste of blood. Another wild swing grazed my temple, drawing a line of fire and slamming the already injured back of my head against the silent floor. I groped for her jaw, my stunner already hungry on my fingertips, but I’d already used it twice on this station and had lost whatever element of surprise I might have enjoyed with her otherwise; she just wrapped her hand around the fingertips in question and yanked it off, enduring the momentary zap in exchange for the savage pleasure of flinging my only weapon into the darkness. She didn’t seem to feel any pain it must have caused her. She was too busy screaming words saturated with lifetimes of humiliation and deprivation and pain.

By now she was straddling my upper abdomen, keeping me pinned to the floor as she raised her hands over her head for another blow. I brought my legs up in a vague attempt to kick her in the back of the head. I failed. She was leaning too far forward now, too lost in the need to scream whatever she was screaming. My legs fell back down and slammed the floor hard, an impact that may have been silent but which in rebound gave me just enough momentum to attempt a roll. She had to brace her right hand against the floor to compensate, an act that took her weapon out of play for maybe another three seconds. It gave me the opportunity I needed to take all my strength and all my desperation and all my need to survive and put it into a single roundhouse punch against the side of her face.

I might as well have done nothing.

I understood why when she went for my neck and I grabbed her wrists to hold her arms in place. It was a ridiculous contest. Like so many of Gibb’s people, she was all corded, hypertrophic muscle. I had always kept myself fit, in part through Dip Corps regimen and in part through regular rejuvenation treatments from AIsource Medical, but fitness for a representative of the Judge Advocate was nothing compared to the fitness required of the high-altitude specialists who staffed Hammocktown. They were all used to lifting their own weight, at length, with minimal muscle strain.

Even with my hands wrapped tightly around Santiago’s iron-cable wrists, straining to hold back the inevitable, I could offer only token resistance as the screaming woman forced her hands downward, toward my throat.

I had been places like this before. I had been small and I had been helpless and I had been irrelevant in the face of power greater than my own.

I felt my mouth twist in the beginnings of a strangled scream as Christina Santiago’s hands, undeterred by any of my attempts to hold them back, closed tight around my neck.

Her thumbs dug deep into my windpipe.

Her grip was unbelievable.

It not only cut off my breath, it eliminated the possibility of breath.

It turned air into an abstraction.

My world turned blood-red around the edges.

I felt that blood-red start to go gray.

I realized I knew what Santiago was screaming.

I knew I was about to die and I knew she had all the advantages and I ignored the internal voice that tried to tell me I had nothing.

Because I had more than nothing.

I was Andrea Cort, dammit.

And that’s when my own thumbs, clutching at Santiago’s face, located her eyes.

I had gone straight for those points of weakness, showing no more restraint, or for that matter common decency, than her own.

We were both screaming now. Santiago because she was sure she’d been permanently blinded, me because her grip around my throat had given way and provided me with the air that made screaming possible.

I withdrew my bloodied right hand and jabbed her again in the face, this time feeling her nose go.

The space between us became a slapstick battle of fingers as we each clutched for the wrists of the other. I managed to evade her grip long enough to rake again at her face. She reared back to avoid another attack on her eyes. I took advantage of that fleeting moment of unbalance by rolling to my left and this time, miraculously, succeeding in shaking her off.

((last chance, counselor * decide which side you’re on))

Santiago and I were both dazed, battered figures, crawling away from each other as we struggled with the wounds already inflicted. She was bleeding into her eyes from twin gouges just below the brow. I was dazed, disoriented, concussed, gasping, and in shock.

In that moment, we both knew the winner of our battle would be entirely determined by whichever one of us managed to get up first.

Santiago recovered faster.

But I was the one who seized the hair on the back on her head and with all my might, slammed her face into the floor.

The absence of any impact sound brought the sounds of her battered flesh into sharp relief. I could have been repelled, but instead I pulled her head back and slammed it down again, two, three, and then four times, feeling the impacts reverberate all the way up my wrists.

Then I fell back and watched in case she got up again. But Santiago was, if not unconscious, for the moment at least too dazed to fight; her slight stirrings slow and clumsy and no longer an imminent threat.

She even wept.

It was several seconds before I collected enough air to speak. “Damn you.”

The words could have been intended for Santiago, but the rogue intelligences or Unseen Demons—whatever name I’d eventually decide to stick with—knew who was being addressed. ((that’s what they want of you, andrea cort * they want to be damned * it’s up to your conscience whether you choose them))

And that’s when some idiot turned on the lights.

We were at the midpoint of a wide oval chamber, with a low ceiling and indistinct blue walls that looked much farther away than they really were. I could tell the difference because a hatchway, opening within my line of sight, seemed much closer than the walls that surrounded it. More blue glow waited on the other side. I knew, without asking, that the hatch would be the first of several, and that when I finished wandering whatever route back the AIsource had mapped for me, I would find the Porrinyards, waiting to see whether I’d survived.

A more immediate concern was the realization that the defeated woman beside me was not the only Christina Santiago in this chamber.

There was another: just a short walk away, demonstrating by her very presence what little I still had left to learn.

This Christina Santiago was naked and on her knees, struggling against chains that bound her to the floor on four sides. There were chains on her wrists, on her ankles, and wrapped in bundles around her neck. She fought them so fiercely that she bled wherever they touched her skin. Her upper arms and legs were corded in sharp relief from the sheer strain of the battle. The wounds inflicted by the fight were open, oozing tears in her back, her chest, and her limbs. Her jaw hung open in a soundless, yet defiant scream: part agony, part rage, mostly damned knowledge that struggle against her unseen captors was all she’d ever know. Her eyes shone with yearning, with contempt, and with the madness born of not having any other options.

Like all her work, it was a still life of pain. But she’d painted others as lost in defeat. She’d represented herself as still at war.

I considered what little I’d been told of the world she’d come from, and wondered just how much worse it must have been than any of the lesser horrors I’d known.

I was still trying to picture it when a pinprick of darkness, erupting in the center of my field of vision, expanded to become a full-sized AIsource flatscreen.

It spoke in the voice I’d come to know as the station’s central intelligence. Congratulations, Andrea Cort. It is now time to discuss the terms of your future employment.

I rubbed my neck, providing my raw throat precious little relief. “And if I said, to hell with you? That it was a deal made under duress? That I don’t want to work for you? Do you even care at all about what I want?”

Of course we do. We promise you: whatever it costs us, you will usually be free to act as you wish. You will just be doing it on our behalf, that’s all. Because it’s from that that we’ll take what we need.

I could only stand there, my chest heaving. Their assurances provided no sense of freedom whatsoever, even if I could trust their commitment to that promise. If anything, they only intensified my isolation from the race that birthed me, and which I had spent most of my life regarding from the perspective of an alienated stranger. From this point on, wherever I went, whatever I did, and whatever reactions I received, I would never be able to tell for sure whether I was dealing with the legitimate messy, unpredictable, selfish, selfless, cold, passionate, sane or lunatic whims of other people, or something else.

The bastard AIsource had known what they were doing, in standing aside while I confronted an enemy closer to my own size. They had allowed me time to build a hatred well within my ability to carry for the rest of my life. Or at least, as long as it took.

I didn’t want that feeling inside me. I wished I could put it down.

“Go to hell,” I said.

The AIsource took no special offense. As we have already said, Andrea: our ambitions on this matter coincide. And if it’s to happen, it will take a very interesting sentient to put us there.

I linked that to certain other things the rogue intelligences had said. “And that’s what you want? That’s what you’ve been trying to find out, all this time? How to die?”

To reiterate: we have much in common.

The hatchway continued to beckon me. I didn’t take a single step in that direction. I just swayed, my eyes shut against the force of the inevitable one last question.

What? the AIsource asked.

“I want to start with Bocai.”

Look back to the moment of your personal nightmare. Find out what else was happening, elsewhere in the universe, at that time, and be assured: it’s not just synchronicity. There’s a pattern.

It had the ring of a send-off, and that’s what it turned out to be. Though I stood there for another ten minutes, demanding further answers, the only reply I received was a distant, subliminal murmur that could have been nothing more than the distorted echo of my own voice, rebounding off some surface too far away to see.

Even after that I stood there for several additional minutes, trying to summon back the despair that had once threatened to overwhelm me, and which seemed easier to deal with than the infinitely more frightening prospect of facing whatever came next.

The worst thing, I found, was the awareness that when I walked through that distant portal I’d be returning to a world whose opinion of me would remain unchanged.

I thought of the last words I’d spoken to the broken woman at my feet. At least I’ve spent my life being judged for it. What about you, Christina?

She had spent the entire fight screaming anguished variations on the lament that she’d been judged all her life.

Looking down at her, now, I could only murmur, “Join the club.”