But before she could find him there, he disappeared. Her anger fueled her once again, but it was different than before, almost burnt-out.
Then she found his trail again.
Saturn.
This time, she was more careful. Changed her appearance once again. Polished her new backstory. Left some false trails around the system.
They finally met face to face aboard the Zephyr, deep in the clouds of Saturn. He was courteous, charming, and flirted with her. She pretended to take an interest, and after a few meet-ups, not too soon, suggested kite-flying in the clouds. He was delighted by the prospect.
She only regretted that she couldn’t see his face when she struck him down. The damaged wings fluttered about him as he fell. She flew lower to observe his fall longer, but he quickly disappeared in the underlying cloud layer.
Her work was done.
She returned home. Home… It felt like one no longer. She excavated the box. In it rested a small treasure: entirely worthless for anyone but her. A reminder of a fortune she had lost ages ago.
The photograph of Feven was the most precious item. She touched the smooth glossy surface of the Polaroid picture a bit uncertainly, almost hesitant to believe it was still there. It had faded so little in over a century.
She may have been looking at it for hours before she spoke.
“I’m so sorry,” she said with her throat tight, and abruptly closed the box.
The next day, she appeared at a local aug-clinic.
“I want a rewire.”
The words almost stuck in her throat.
She still hesitated when they sat her in the soft chair and explained the process once again, as the laws dictated. When she nodded, she was still full of doubts. She had changed her appearance and name many times, but never herself. She knew her concept of identity had become laughably outdated long ago, but she was still seized with anxiety when the rewiring started.
She had to be awake to keep telling them what she thought, felt, remembered.
She didn’t know at which point she stopped worrying.
The emptiness was not gone. But the guilt, sorrow, and anxiety were. The emptiness, she knew instantly, could now be filled very easily with anything that pleased her.
“Are you satisfied with the rewire?” they asked her.
She was.
It had been her first one, and certainly not her last.
As we stood there in mutual silence, I remembered all. I remembered myself, all the different selves of me during those years.
Most had been monsters.
Still, most of them had known.
They would play the endless games of hide and seek, extracting information, gaining advantage… Most chose not to dwell on the grim bloody past and focused on the sometimes bloody but bright now. They would climb the deadly slopes of Aamu’s cliffs, almost die performing the boldest feats of old-school exploration, daringly challenge every obstacle Nature and Man presented.
Drinking the finest, eating the rarest delicacies, meeting all the strange and wonderful people, allies, enemies, lovers, acquaintances (never friends). Enjoying the tingle of beams of different suns. Having fun. Always being a step ahead of the others.
Everything would become the game.
Except when they would wake up in the middle of the night soaked in cold sweat, shaking from the nightmares, scared and paranoid. Alone. Trusting no one. Always on the run.
Even with the rewires piling up, the woman who used to be Aster Sebai a long time ago grew restless. Would she have to remake herself into a complete psychopath to reach peace? But even that might not help. No, the only way was to end herself.
And so she did. She buried her past as deep as she could. Then, she forgot. I forgot.
“How could you do it?” I spoke. “How could you stay you?”
He shrugged. “I’ve had some help, but I guess I’m built this way.”
Silence fell once more.
I felt whole, yet set loose. Drifting without purpose. Whatever power play Bellugi had engaged me in, because there was no way this had been an accident, I wanted no part in it.
“So what are you going to do now?” Arienti shot me a sideways glance. “Will you try to kill me? Betray Bellugi? Let everything go and make a break for it? Build a small empire?”
I should have hated him, but I just felt indifferent about him. So many conflicting notions of the man, yet none of that mattered now. Enmities, romances, and alliances come and go.
“I want to have a look at the thing you discovered, if that wasn’t just an excuse to lure me out and kill me,” I said. “Then I’ll decide what to do next.”
“Why?” I asked once again on our walk outside. This time, we both meant why had he come here to pursue the Ramakhi question.
“The chemical composition again. By the time I left Tau Ceti, we’d already had some data from the Procyon system. Although it’s a binary and just one component is a white dwarf, it confirmed some suspicions about the chemical make-up of white dwarf systems. It also reinforced my suspicion that the probes had come from such a place. Preferably not a binary, though: A lone white dwarf system. One with lots of planetary material, perhaps, with strong metallic spectral lines. One that would be close enough to Tau Ceti and our Sun. There is only one such system.”
He stopped at the apex of a cliff and spread his arms. “Look around. Isn’t it fascinating? We may be seeing a world from which the probes originated. You know what is also interesting? About sixteen thousand years ago, van Maanen’s Star came within three light-years of the Sun. It’s a great distance to overcome, but it can be done, as we’ve amply demonstrated ourselves. Even a civilization with much less advanced technological capabilities could manage to send a probe across that gap.”
“Are you suggesting…?”
“That the Ramakhi have come from here? Exactly. But that’s not the end of it. Can’t you figure it out yourself?”
Probes less than a hundred thousand years old. A close encounter in a more recent period. I looked around. Extremely young surface. Most of the crust and mantle had vaporized in a giant impact, leaving behind this barren planet.
“This was their world,” I stated in disbelief. “They evolved here, around the white dwarf, when the planet perhaps had a strong greenhouse atmosphere and conditions for life, they built interstellar probes—but the destruction of their planet wiped them out.” I shook my head. “But that doesn’t add up, does it? If they had the capacity to go interstellar, even if just with uncrewed probes, they must have colonized the rest of this system. We should be able to find traces of them everywhere.”
“Everywhere in a system so unstable… and so sparsely explored by us?” Arienti said quietly. “The remaining planets are much further out, a difficult place to start colonizing. This planet has no moon. The debris around the star would constitute the best target for early space exploration. We got on well with colonizing asteroids. But our system was very stable. What if they just didn’t consider colonizing the rest of their system worthwhile? Instead, they turned to other stars. And at least once, they discovered life. They managed to construct interstellar probes with immense learning capabilities… but what if they never were an interstellar civilization themselves? What if every single one of our conjectures about them has rested on a wrong assumption?” I had never seen Arienti so excited, not even in the countless records I had found long ago. Maybe he never had been, until he embarked on his futile search.