*Androids are not created to cause any damage without direct human instruction, and dokins do not have the intellectual capacity to detonate, let alone create, a quark-release device. Therefore, by simple logic, the destroyer was human.*
In upload—but not in merger—my thoughts are a separate program, hidden from QUENTIAM unless I choose to address It.
*Is my new body almost done?*
*No.*
*Get me a link to Seliku.*
She looked at me from the display screen, still in her ˄17843 body. She must have been standing in some great hall of the Communion of Cosmologists. Behind her rose tall pillars covered with flowers. “I heard, Akilo. And no, I can’t tell one way or the other, not for certain. There are a lot of people who hate the Mori, for religious or personal reasons. It could have been a human or… or not.”
“Your best guess.”
“Not.”
*That is nonsense.* QUENTIAM said. *Seliku, I wish you would stop disseminating this misinformation.*
In Seliku’s eyes, an exact image of the real Seliku, I saw fear.
QUENTIAM’s parameters protect you from any retaliation by It, I wanted to say to her. But she already knew that. And she knew, too, that Its parameters could be the next thing to change.
“Does the Communion have data on the explosion?” I asked her.
“Yes, we have all QUENTIAM’s measurements. We’re sorting the data now. Alo, come home.”
She knew I couldn’t hurry the creation of my body. Her plea had nothing to do with logic.
“I’m coming,” I said, “as fast as I can.”
Nothing else happened before my body was done, except for one thing: I dreamed.
This was the second time I had dreamed in upload, supposedly an impossibility. To shorten the unbearable time waiting for my biological, I had put myself in down-program mode within QUENTIAM. There should have been no thoughts, no sensation, no anything. But a sort of sudden current ran through me and then I had the dream, the same one as before: Something menacing and ill-defined chased me through a shifting landscape, something unknowably vast, coming closer and closer, its terrifying breath on my back, its—
*Your body is ready.*
I downloaded into the body, climbed from the vat, and looked in the mirror.
It was us, the body my sister-selves and I always used for bond time. A female all-human with pale brown skin, head hair in a dark green crest, black eyes. Four coiled tentacles, each a meter long, the digits slim and graceful—the body we would have grown up with had our creation occurred on a quiet planet. Nothing seemed amiss with the body. QUENTIAM had had the nanos make it perfectly.
I let out a long breath.
“I can still add an implant, you know. Not a full one, now that the brain is grown, but still very functional.”
“No, thank you, QUENTIAM.”
“It makes communication so much fuller.”
“No, thank you.”
“As you choose.”
“Please tell Seliku that I’m done.”
“She knows.”
She came through the door a few minivals later, dragging her heavy small body, looking as exhausted as she had on ˄17843. I was over twice as tall as she, probably three times as strong. I picked her up and carried her, unprotesting, to the beach. We sat at the very edge of the land, our feet in the warm sea, away from any of QUENTIAM’s sensors.
“Anything, Sel?”
“No. I can’t even convince most of the Communion. They’re good cosmologists, but they weren’t there. They didn’t see the shuttle go, the station go. They still think that Haradil destroyed that star system, and they probably think my demented theory is a mind-defense to keep from acknowledging that. The only thing I’ve got on my side is my reputation, and I’m straining that.”
I nodded. “Sel, while I was in upload, I dreamed.”
She didn’t tell me that was impossible. She closed her eyes, as if absorbing a blow. I described the dream, adding, “I think it wasn’t my dream. I think it was QUENTIAM’s. Upload is supposed to be a separate subprogram within It, but I think I was—in some very tiny, tiny way—beyond upload into merged state. Sel, I don’t think you should get another body.”
Her eyes remained closed, and her face grimaced in pain.
“I’m not saying that nanomachinery and even t-holes aren’t safe. Or if they’re not, it will be one finite explosion, like Haradil’s system or the Mori Core, and we’ll be dead before we even realize it. But the upload state, even the machine state…” I remembered Haradil saying, I was QUENTIAM.
“Yes,” Seliku said. “You’re right.”
“Once before I dreamed in upload, the same dream. It was the day you first told me about Haradil. So even then… even then.”
“Yes. You were just lucky about your body.” She opened her eyes and looked at it longingly.
“I’m sorry,” I said, inadequately.
“Not your fault. Will you carry me to the Communion hall? I’m very tired.”
“Of course I will.”
Tenderly I carried my sister-self back to her work. It was almost like cradling a child. I saw that there must come a new relationship between me and my one remaining sister-self, physically frail on this planet but mentally leading a crusade to convince the galaxy of cataclysmic danger. I would be her protector, caretaker, aide. The change between us was permanent. Nothing would ever be the same again.
I was wrong. Many things are the same.
Seliku has been unable to convince the galaxy of her theory. She has won a few adherents among cosmologists, but for most people, the idea that QUENTIAM might be decaying, might be unreliable, is impossible to even consider. It’s like saying gravity is unreliable. Which, I suppose, might happen next. That would convince everybody, or at least everybody who survived it.
Meanwhile, some do not survive. There have been mistakes in vat nanos, creating bodies other than ordered, or killing the bodies before they were done. No one knows how many mistakes; I no longer trust QUENTIAM’s records.
A new quasar has appeared in the sky, and six supernovas, all outside our galaxy. They filled the sky, night after night, with brilliant light. Seliku says that is too many supernovas to be statistically random, but not even her colleagues all believe her. She works night and day to find the evidence, physical or experimental or mathematical, that may convince them. Her big question is this: Is the unseen other universe just brushing ours in passing, creating supernovas and quasars and small reconfigurations of spacetime that also change and reconfigure QUENTIAM? Or are the two universes set for a full collision, from which neither will emerge without changes so fundamental that basic particles themselves are affected, and all life ceases?
The Arlbenists were wrong, in ways they could never have foreseen when Arlbeni created his Divine Mission over a hundred thousand years ago. We were never alone in the galaxy, and not only because spores have drifted in from beyond its edges and seeded non-DNA-based life here. Even without that panspermia, we were not alone. Humans were already everywhere because QUENTIAM, our collective and historical selves, filled spacetime. And we weren’t alone in a much more profound sense.
I have suggested another question to Seliku, as well. Is it possible that the other universe, too, has a membrane like QUENTIAM, but more advanced? And that It knows what It’s doing in probing ours? On ˄17843, Seliku likened our brushes with the other universe to stones dropping in a pond. Dropped stones sometimes have droppers. Seliku dismisses this question, not because it’s completely stupid but because for that there really is no evidence. But I know she can imagine it. She is my sister-self, still, and sister-self to artists as well. She can imagine a Dropper of stones into the cosmic well between universes.