“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.”