Bexie flinched as the lifeboat gave a sudden hard lurch.
He had been huddled here, uncertain what to do but knowing that if he left the comfort of this place he would be washed away. Yet, the only thing here was darkness so black he couldn’t feel his body.
Was he dead?
Had he been stripped of his body?
Was another version of himself cowering somewhere in the physical world in a darkness even more eternal than this one?
This was his state of mind when the lifeboat rocked.
He felt their touch but did not at first believe it.
“Bexie?” Kinji’s voice came to him from nowhere. “Bexie? Open your eyes.”
He saw them. Dim faces in the blackness.
“Where am I?” he said.
“We’re connected in a deep lock of Think Space. They can’t see us here.”
“But—” Bexie thought hard, trying to frame a question he didn’t have tools to ask.
The other essence responded. “It’s all right, Mr. Montgomery.” Her voice was more distant than Kinji’s.
“This is Tania,” Kinji said. “She’s going to take care of you while I do some work, all right?”
“What’s the last thing you remember, Mr. Montgomery?” Tania said. Against the dead space of the null, her touch was like a thunderbolt of lemon and strawberry, filling his lungs, then rolling through every part of his body.
Embarrassment flushed over him.
“It’s okay,” Tania said. “Tell Kinji the last thing you remember.”
“I couldn’t move,” he said, fighting the need to cry. “I think I was restrained. But I couldn’t feel anything. Except,” he said, swallowing hard against the cottony constriction growing in his throat, “the worm that was running through my head.”
“I see,” Tania said.
“They’re cutting you,” Kinji added from a distance. “Adjusting you down. Taking away a part of you. You’re lucky to have made it here.”
As Kinji spoke, he felt the world around him shift. A column rose in the darkness — hard, like plastic, tall like a skyscraper.
“No reason to feel bad, Mr. Montgomery,” Tania said.
“Don’t tell me how to feel.”
Warmth came like a blanket.
“Yeah,” Tania said. “I can see why you want to jump his bones.”
“Shut up,” Kinji replied.
Another column coalesced from the darkness, this one at his foot.
“Where are we?”
“Your body is still in Geo-Span,” Kinji said. “But the rest of you is in a safe bubble that some hackers made. I left you a link when we talked in the mall.”
“Ah.”
“The security gates here are quirky, but breakable. The CIO can get in if it gets lucky, so I’m building you a new place.”
A third wall went up, rounded this time, connecting the other two.
“It’s not going to be very big, but it’ll be yours. Do you understand? I’m storing your mind somewhere you can’t be cracked.”