She was wearing a suit.
She had not been wearing one in the spider-room. It was the same kind that she had used during her surface activities on Resurgam; the same kind that Sylveste would have taken with him into Cerberus. How could this be? If this experience was a dream, then it was unlike any she had known, because she could consciously question its contradictions without the whole edifice crumbling around her.
She was on a plain. It was the colour of cooling metal; almost but not quite bright enough to hurt the eye. It was as flat as a beach after the tide had retreated. The plain, now that she looked at it more closely, was patterned; not randomly, but in the intricately ordered manner of a Persian carpet. Between each level of patterning was another, until the ordering teetered on the edge of the microscopic and probably plunged down to even smaller realms, towards the subnuclear and the quantum. And it was shifting; blurring in and out of focus, never the same from moment to moment. Eventually it started to make her feel vaguely unwell, so she snapped her attention away to the horizon.
It seemed very close indeed.
She started walking. Her feet crunched into the flickering ground. The patterns rearranged themselves to create smooth stepping stones where she could plant her feet.
Something lay ahead.
It rose above the close curve of the horizon: a slight mound, a raised plinth stark against the tumbling starscape. She approached it, and as she neared it she saw movement. The raised part was like the entrance to a subway, three low walls enclosing a series of descending steps, burrowing into the world.
The movement was a figure emerging from the depths; a woman. She heaved herself up the steps with strength and patience, as if she were taking the morning air for the first time. Unlike Khouri, she wore no spacesuit. In fact, she was dressed in exactly the way Khouri remembered her from the last time they were together.
It was Pascale Sylveste.
“I’ve been waiting a long time,” she said, her voice carrying across the airless black space between them.
“Pascale?”
“Yes,” she said, and then qualified herself. “In a manner of speaking. Oh dear; this isn’t going to be easy to explain—and I’ve had so long to rehearse it…”
“What happened, Pascale?” It seemed impudent to ask her why she wasn’t wearing a suit; why she wasn’t dead. “Where is this?”
“Haven’t you guessed yet?”
“Sorry to disappoint you.”
Pascale smiled sympathetically. “You’re on Hades. Remember that? The neutron star; the one which was pulling us in. Well, it wasn’t. A neutron star, I mean.”
“On it?”
“On it, yes. I don’t think you were expecting that.”
“No; you could say that.”
“I’ve been here as long as you have,” Pascale said. “Which is only a few hours. But I’ve spent the time beneath the crust, where things happen a bit quicker. So it seems like considerably more than a few hours to me.”
“How much more?”
“Try a few decades… although time really doesn’t pass at all here, in some respects.”
Khouri nodded, as if all this made perfect sense. “Pascale… I think you need to explain…”
“Good idea. I’ll do it on the way down.”
“The way down where?”
She beckoned Khouri towards the stairs which descended into the cherry-red plain, as if she were inviting a neighbour indoors for cocktails.
“Inside,” Pascale said. “Into the matrix.” Death had still not come.
Over the next hour, using the suit’s image-zoom overlay, Volyova watched the bridgehead slowly lose its form, like a piece of pottery being inexpertly shaped. Gradually it began to dissolve into the crust. It was being digested, having finally lost the battle against Cerberus.
Too soon; too soon.
The wrongness of it gnawed into her. She might be about to die, but she did not like seeing one of her creations fail, and—dammit—fail so prematurely.
Finally, unable to take any more, she turned towards the ship, pointing towards her with daggerlike intent, and spread her arms wide. She had no idea if the ship was capable of reading her vocal transmissions.
“Come on then, svinoi. Finish me off. I’ve had enough. I don’t want to see any more. Get it over with.”
A hatch opened somewhere down the ship’s conic flank, briefly aglow with orange interior lighting. She half expected some nasty and dimly remembered weapon to cruise out; perhaps something she had knocked together in a spasm of drunken creativity.
Instead a shuttle emerged, and powered slowly towards her.
The way Pascale told it to Khouri, the neutron star was in fact nothing of the sort. Or at least it had been once, or would have been—had it not been for interference by some third party Pascale declined to talk about in any great detail. But the gist was simple. They had converted the neutron star into a giant, blindingly fast computer—one that, in some bizarre manner, was able to communicate with its own past and future selves.
“What am I doing here?” Khouri asked, as they descended the stairway. “No, better question: what are we doing here? And how do you know so much more than me all of a sudden?”
“I told you; I was in the matrix for longer.” Pascale paused on one of the steps. “Listen, Khouri—you might not like what I’m about to tell you. Namely, that you’re dead—for now, at least.”
Khouri was less surprised by this than she had expected. It seemed almost predictable.
“We died in the gravitational tides,” Pascale said matter-of-factly. “We got too close to Hades, and the tides pulled us apart. It wasn’t very pleasant, either—but most of your memories of it were never captured, so you don’t recall them now.”
“Captured?”
“According to all the normal laws, we should have been crushed to atoms. And in a sense we were. But the information which described us was preserved in the flow of gravitons between what remained of us and Hades. The force that killed us also recorded us, transmitted that information to the crust…”
“Right,” Khouri said slowly, prepared to take this as given for the time being. “And once we were transmitted into the crust?”
“We were—um—simulated back to life. Of course, computation in the crust happens much faster than realtime—which is why I’ve spent several decades of subjective time in it.”
She sounded almost apologetic.
“I don’t remember spending several decades anywhere.”
“That’s because you didn’t. You were brought to life, but you didn’t want to stay here. You don’t remember any of that; you chose not to, in fact. There was nothing to keep you here.”
“Implying there was something to keep you here?”
“Oh yes,” Pascale said, with wonder. “Oh yes. We’ll come to that.”
The stairwell reached its foot now, leading into a lanterned corridor, bright with randomly strewn fairytale lights. The walls, when she looked at them, were alive with the same computational shimmer she had seen on the surface. An impression of intense busyness; of unguessably complex machine algebra constantly churning just beyond her reach.
“What am I?” Khouri said. “What are you? You said I was dead. I don’t feel it. And I don’t feel like I’m being simulated in any matrix. I was out on the surface, wasn’t I?”
“You’re flesh and blood,” Pascale said. “You died, and you were recreated. Your body was reconstructed from the chemical elements already present in the matrix’s outer crust, and then you were reanimated, and quickened to consciousness. The suit you’re wearing—that came from the matrix as well.”