SOBBING AND WIPING HER nose on the back of her hand, Amahle rode the lift back up to the main life support section. Her magnificent ship was eerily silent with the drive off, she was in freefall, the familiar corridors had become shadowed passages illuminated by inadequate back-up lights, the lounges were silent and cooler than she liked, the bots were inert, food printers had reverted to survival mode, squeezing out a single paste of basic nutri-porridge, the swim aquarium was a cascade of water balls, some with fish in, while the remainder flipped through the air, frantic in their new, deadly environment. Having the familiar pulled from under her so abruptly was deeply disturbing and quite creepy. She forced herself to eat some of the nutri-mush and went to bed shivering, not just from the lower temperature.
The next day, she made herself to go back down to the processing substrate. It felt as if she was revisiting a crime scene—Isn’t that what they say all criminals do? Floating amid the solid galaxy of broken crystal, Amahle gripped a handrail and switched on a maintenance display. The emergency manual was three thousand pages long. She started reading.
Four months. Four months of eating crud, wrapped in thick winter coats, too little sleep, no exercise, constant freefall nausea. Four months bypassing the broken crystals. Four months manipulating architecture functionality to eliminate high-order routines. But she did it. Rebuilt and realigned the processing substrate to produce a controlling network that was devoid of sentience but still smart enough to run the ship’s systems and that oh-so-complicated negative energy drive. Satisfied there was no trace of self-awareness left, let alone the purpose of The Exalted, she woke the ship up.
Gravity returned to the life support section as it spun up. The Mnemosyne was in a poor state. The damage from the swimming aquarium overspill was greater than she’d realized, and the stink from so many dead fish intensified as life support began to warm up once more. If only the cat had still been alive . . . But the maintenance bots were stirring, recharging and repairing themselves first. Then they emerged and began to clear up. A week later, with a basic systems maintenance procedure complete, she sat in the bridge and set course for Pastoria.
The journey would take five years. She didn’t cope well. After being released from the super intense focus of re-creating the AI in her own image, all the doubts and darkness rushed in on a defenceless mind, amplifying the incredible loneliness of a single human flying between the stars. She stopped bathing or eating, preferring instead the mind-numbing oblivion of alcohol. She cried and howled and slept wherever she fell. And now there was no one there to advise her otherwise; no AI to resuscitate her if she drowned in the bathing pool or choked on her own sour vomit. No reassuring voice to calm her and keep her company during the long, solitary nights. She was as alone as any human had ever been—an isolation that, coupled with Carloman’s revelations about the true nature of reality, forced her to withdraw further and further from the physical.
Her soul, however, remained intact. And when everything else seemed to have fallen away, she discovered within herself a small, unassailable fire. Lying on the floor of the Pacific Lounge, shrunken stomach wrapped like grape skin around a cauldron’s worth of imbibed vodka, she had a dream. But even as she dreamt it, she knew it was more than that. She remembered it. It had happened.
* * *
Amahle stood in the sea. The water came up to her ankles, cold and crisp and refreshing. Carloman was with her. He was young and good-looking, in rolled-up chinos and a loose cotton shirt. And his face . . . his real face. How could she have ever forgotten that face? The dark skin and high cheekbones, and the way the skin dimpled to the left of his mouth when he smiled at her.
And between them, holding on to both of their hands, was a child—
—Holy shit, we had a child! This body was once a mother—
—An eight-year-old girl who had inherited her mother’s looks and her father’s serious eyes. Her name was Wren. One day, she’d grow up to have a family of her own. One day, her mother would climb on a shuttle and travel to space and never return—and even, in the fullness of time, would forget her completely.
Amahle wanted to cry, but she wasn’t sure whether the tears sprang from the joy of seeing her family again, for the first time in thousands of years, or from the pain of their loss.
The sand stretched away in a smooth, perfect crescent. Whitewashed buildings lined the promenade and quayside. The water glistened clear and blue.
Greece, maybe. Possibly Italy or Croatia. Amahle couldn’t remember exactly where they were, but she remembered thinking that sometimes, we don’t know the good times until they’re gone; we don’t appreciate what we have until it’s lost; and she determined right then and there that she would remember this perfect moment forever and ever, as long as she lived.
She could not have possibly foreseen the aggressive, treatment-resistant cancer that would kill her husband within a decade. He didn’t have eight-letter DNA, while of course she did, emphasising the already-yawning gulf opening between them. A gulf that would prove to deepen the developing rift between her and her daughter in the months leading up to his death. She could never understand how he was so complacent about dying.
And when that time came, she had not known how to interpret his dying words.
“Remember me. I’ll find you.”
* * *
Amahle woke in tears. But these were different from the tears she’d shed earlier. These tears were clear and hard. For the first time in a dangerous number of months, she actually looked at her deteriorating environment. At herself.
Dear God, what have I become?
That one pitiable revelation was enough. Disgust rose to replace self-pity; the old Light Chaser personality looking up from the bottom of a very deep well to see a glimmer of light above. Hauling her now-emaciated frame to the bridge, she accessed the food printers and cancelled their ability to synthesise alcohol, opiates, or any other kind of mind-altering drug stronger than caffeine.
If Carloman was right—and he had been all along so far—then there was something deeply wrong with reality. If making a strangelet could set it right, she had to try. Because in that corrected reality, there might be another Amahle—and she might still have her family.
With that old level of unbreakable determination returning to the body it had abandoned, she nursed herself back to health using carefully planned diets and exercise routines. So that, by the time the Mnemosyne was four years out from Pastoria, her breakdown was behind her and she was physically fitter than she had been in decades.