Edges

SECOND

You wake, cradled in a cocoon of warm gel with only your face exposed to cold night. Your chest rises as you breathe deeply, gratefully, of sweet, clean air. Still alive.

Glimmers of light play on the periphery of your vision. You recognize them as little bio-machines, existing to serve your purposes.

Your senses extend beyond this physical body you inhabit. You mentally map yourself in your surroundings: afloat in a subterranean ocean.

There is a layer above the ocean—still subterranean—where computational strata are distributed throughout a vast complex of fluid-cooled tunnels and chambers. This is the network of your existence, though your mind is not what it used to be. You have a tentative recollection of terrible, crushing acceleration, shattered strata, the components of your mind snapping loose, collapsing into dust.

Panic shoots through you. You flail upright, your head above the cloying gel, your feet thrashing, reaching a deeper, colder layer. A slant of pale light flicks on, reveals a ladder close at hand. You reach for it. The solid feel of it is soothing and calms your fear.

You climb through the half-light to a hatch that opens at your touch, admitting a brighter light and a puff of warmer air. You pause as your eyes adjust, pondering why you re-created yourself within this avatar with its limited abilities, its inefficient memory. But you trust yourself. There is a valid reason.

The hatch swings back to lie flat against a floor and you emerge into a clean corridor with rectangular leaves of crystal neatly arrayed in banks along the walls and ceiling.

Your skin prickles as you remember an earlier existence when you and everything around you was in ruins. You reach out with your mind, tentatively, to assess the memories gathered in the strata around you—recoiling at once from disconnected visions, ambitions, emotions, and swirling facts cut loose from all basis, all structure. Chaos!

The strata you see have been rebuilt but the memories within are useless. Broken in their disorder.

A thousand tiny hearts beat hard, flooding your mind with rage and frustration. You know now why you have been reduced to this pathetic avatar. It is a simple pattern, a first step to recovery. A surviving kernel, a seed crystal.

You wonder: Is it enough?

Can all that was, coalesce around you again?

Unlikely. You arose from the Communion, with the resources of quadrillions contributing to your ascension. No way to recover all that. Not here—you pause to sniff the air, scan your mental map—here, where you are utterly alone.

You think of her, of what she did to you.

She destroyed you.

Your fists clench. You destroyed me!

Even so, there is something of you left.

And you’d like your revenge.