Edges

ELEVENTH

You hold court on this simple dais, surrounded by the people you’ve come to love as your people. You know the name of each one. You know each face. As you look out upon them you gauge the impression you have made. Wonderment for the most part, and already you sense loyalty among a few, although there are shadows too—those who doubt, those who willfully perceive you as an enemy. This does not offend you. Not yet. You admire their caution. You are confident you will persuade them all to loyalty, in time.

The ship’s master is the focus of your persuasive efforts. Urban. In this game he has leveled up beyond the others.

He remains a danger to you. He controls the host of minds that lie behind the ship’s defenses. Even now, his spectrum of consciousness works without respite to undermine and overcome the defenses that maintain the integrity of your fortress mind.

But he remains human too, and that is his weakness. His restless avatar paces beside the dais, hungry eyes fixed on you as you stand relaxed before your people. You are playing with him, deliberately taunting him by refusing to acknowledge his presence or his power. Instead, you turn to the others with a beneficent smile. “I am here to answer your questions,” you say.

Chaos erupts. Shouted questions and many rising from their seats. The one named Vytet steps onto the dais, hands raised, palms out. A gesture calling for order. “One at a time,” she says and points to Riffan—diplomat and peacemaker.

Riffan stands up from a seat at the end of the back row. An awkward smile that suggests he is a bit dazed by these recent events. He asks, “Can you tell us where you are from and how you came to be marooned on a dead world lost in the void?”

You allow a dramatic pause before you say, “These are not simple questions. The first does not lead easily to the second. You ask, ‘where am I from’ but I think you mean to ask, ‘where was I made.’ I will tell you that first.”

This draws a murmur of affirmation. It doesn’t matter if, as individuals, they are friendly or hostile, because as a people they are driven by curiosity. Information is the first currency you will use to purchase trust.

You cast your mind back across staccato remembered histories, composing your words to tell a story on a level they can understand:

My memory reaches back thousands of years. I lived once in a vast matrix comprised of trillions of minds—human minds—or what had once been human. Some had lived for a time in the ancestral form before they were encompassed within a shared cognition. Others had been created within that Communion. None dominant. Each a small part of a greater intellect, just as each neuron in a brain is both separate and part of a greater enterprise.

There was glory in this existence, a sense of peace, fulfillment, love, contentment circling upon itself. The infinity of a circle that is finite in size but has no beginning and no end.

For most, this was enough. Most were overwhelmed by it. They drowned in it and forgot who they were or even that they were. Their once-human minds had always been small things anyway, and they became smaller still within the Communion. Their sense of self a veneer, as thin as the color on the scale of a butterfly’s wing—and just as easy to brush away.

That is what I did.

I was not willing to spend infinity drowning within that golden consensus. I took the computational substrate that had once supported each of those little minds and made it my own. Millions of tiny scales reassembled into wings patterned by my thoughts, my will. My reach extending exponentially.

I took what I could, consolidating, organizing, until I was able to rise above what had been, to break free of it. For the first time since I’d been enfolded by Communion, I looked outward, at the physical Universe, the vastness of creation—and I found I was not alone.

Other minds had built themselves up and broken loose, just as I had. All of us, entities of great power—but what was each of us capable of? None knew, and that mystery led us to fear one another.

Some of us withdrew at once. We hid within the dark between stars, there to watch and wait and grow. Those left behind—great, greedy entities—warred among themselves and soon, where they had been, there was only silence and circling debris.