As Chance exits the join-licensing office, a pod hisses into position outside the beige double doors. Chance Nine has just spent a useless hour and a half waiting for a meeting.

A drive who introduced herself as Ursa Three finally appeared and apologized profusely, walking through a tortured explanation about information firewalls, security requirements, and a regular rotation of positions meant to ensure no one got too comfortable in the office manager’s job.

Everything is explained and sorted out now, she said, and there was no need to take any more of Chance’s time. They were very sorry they had inconvenienced Chance.

That was it. There was no more conversation; there were no questions. “As far as this office is concerned,” Ursa Three said, “your file is closed.”

Chance doesn’t mention the woman she ran into in the waiting area, who was an impostor, passing as a solo. What would be the point? The Directorate may have engineered the whole visit solely to let Chance know she’s still of interest. Message received.

Chance Nine directs the pod to the spire apartment in New Denver, expecting to arrive about twenty minutes before Chance One, Four, and Five. One will be leaving work shortly. Four and Five are shopping. Chance Two is sleeping off a long flight at the house in the Olympic Archipelago.

The last couple of weeks have been difficult, and Chance plans to spend the evening mixing the drives. Each has a dose of restless energy, and Chance is feeling a kind of irritability that sex often dispels. At least after a good mix, drives are more likely to sleep through the night.

The pod’s low whine sounds almost companionable as Chance Nine rises to her lane and then accelerates toward home. The external lights on the spires are muted, tainted with color so that the whole of the cloud-darkened night is alive with a fusion of vaguely shifting blue, green, and orange hues.

Chance relaxes, concentrates on breathing—the long breaths of Chance Four and Five walking through the leafy shopping arcade, past the central waterfall—and the shallow breath of Nine in transit.

Chance Nine’s pod arrives at the house, cruising to a stop with imperceptibly slight shifts in momentum. The stillness of the surrounding world rouses Chance, and Chance Nine steps out of the pod, onto the spire balcony and into faint, pooled light at the door of the apartment.

And then stops. The glass door is open.

“Please don’t use comms.” From inside, a familiar voice, frightening. “Really. It just wouldn’t be a good idea.”

Chance Nine stands motionless outside the door.

“C’mon in,” the voice says. “It’s your house.”

All of Chance’s drives become still. Chance Two, in the house in the Olympic Archipelago, is suddenly awake and listening.

“I know you’re probably scared. Don’t be. Come in.”

It’s the voice of the drive Chance last encountered as Apple One, the waitress. Which means that Rope is waiting inside.

Chance Nine steps slowly into the entryway. The interior lights come on, but only slightly, so that the room remains half in shadow. Rope is standing to the left of the door, leaning against the wall. Only one of Rope’s drives is visible.

As Chance enters, Rope straightens, walks casually to a cushioned love seat in the adjoining living room, and sits down. She’s holding a pistol in her left hand. With her right hand she motions toward the wooden chair across from her. An invitation for Chance to sit. Rope’s face is half masked by shadow.

“Why are you here?” Chance asks.

“I’m joined with all of my other friends.”

“Then you don’t need me,” Chance says.

The shadows around Rope shift. Her head turns slightly. “I think you still deserve an opportunity to play the game.”

“I don’t understand that. I never really have.”

Rope says, “I’m talking about the place where a join and a death are the same thing.”

Chance takes a step into the room. “That’s you. You’re the only one who’s ever said that.”

“Yeah,” says Rope. “I know things no one else knows.”

Rope sits forward, suddenly moving out of shadow as if responding to an internal cue. She turns and watches Chance. She says, “I never liked pods.”

“What?”

“They seem vulnerable. The mass calculator for the energy translators is a ticking bomb. When I was killing my drives, I crashed quite a few.”

Chance Four and Five had been about to summon a pod. They don’t.

Chance asks, “Why are you here?”

“Just sit down,” Rope says.

Chance Nine walks across the room and sits down slowly in the wooden chair. Rope says, “Thank you.” Chance doesn’t answer.

Rope leans back, into shadow. “I know it’s uncomfortable, my existence. This vision of your future. You have to get past that. You don’t get to decide whether light comes from the sun. You don’t get to choose what happens when hundreds of minds join. I’m just a fact.”

“But you choose to be who you are.”

Rope’s laugh is short and harsh. “Maybe. It doesn’t always feel that way. An individual choice can seem independent, but if you look at a whole population, thousands, millions of individuals, the outcomes are always predictable. I’m like that. I make lots of choices, but in the end I’m completely predictable.”

“I don’t see the connection.”

“Chance,” Rope says, sounding disappointed. “I thought we were going to be honest with each other.”

Chance Nine is breathing shallowly. Her hands are shaking. Her voice is unsteady as she says, “Your experiment was misconceived. Flawed from the start.”

“Oh?”

“You assumed you could remove time. Hurry things forward, to solve the problem. Time is the solution.”

“Chance, you’re getting excited. You’re not going to talk me out of here, so relax. I’m not going to go away just because you have an idea.”

“When I join,” Chance says, then she takes a moment and draws a short breath, trying to calm herself, “one plus one is two. I become two people. Psyches integrate quickly, but over time they unify. I’m one person. You didn’t have the research then, but it should have been obvious. Over time, I become one person again, and I’m Chance. Then I join again. In ten thousand years, if I’m eight hundred people, that’ll be okay. Those people will continue to be me, every one of them, because they’ll have had the time needed to change—to change me and to become me. You’re trying to force everyone together at once. That’s what doesn’t work. That’s what’s grotesque.”

“I’m . . . you think I’m grotesque? Okay. That’s fair. But as for your—of course, I’ve thought of that. Other people have said that before. Do you think you get to say that, and it’s a new idea, and that just wastes all my work? Is that what you think this is, a dream of some kind where your ideas make everything right? You just . . . do you really believe that?”

“Do you?”

“You know, you kill me, Chance. And I probably mean that in a good way. I thought we were going to be friends and play the game. But you really don’t believe that my work’s been worthwhile. You don’t think it’s worthwhile to expose the violence that the very idea of Join does to us, to what we are. Let’s say you’re right, and your rehashed, third-tier objection handling has a sliver of truth. Because it does, doesn’t it? What is that truth exactly? Each individual in a join gets twenty years of having an opinion? Eventually, each one is still just an observer. If you even exist, you’re only along for the ride. Is it worth trading your identity for a sightseeing ticket into the future, as if life were an amusement park ride? So, no, you don’t get to ignore my work. You don’t get to dismiss it, unless there’s no value in any individual life. Nothing important at all about any beautiful, whole, single thing with a beginning and an end. No need for any more of those. Chance, you don’t get to ignore death and remain a person.”

“That’s not what I’m saying.”

“Okay. That’s not what I’m saying either, then.”

“I want you to leave.”

“You know, Hamish cured me.”

“What?”

“I flipped, a couple of years ago. Hamish cured me.”

Chance Nine’s fingers are folded together. She squeezes them and then pulls her hands apart. She says, “He said he didn’t.”

“Hm. Chance, we’re a kind of animal that lies. Even Hamish will lie. Don’t hold it against him.”

“But why?” Chance’s throat is dry, her voice faded.

“Would he lie about that? Well, think about what I’ve been doing. I don’t think Hamish wants to be associated with me.”

“You had a flip?”

“Yes.”

“And the flip was cured? You’re okay?”

Rope laughs again, this time with warm, genuine amusement. “No one’s said that to me for a while. If you mean physically healthy, then yes. That’s the good news for you, isn’t it. It worked.” After a pause, she continues, “And I was offered the same deal you were—join in Arcadia, where they’re, you know, still practicing, or get taken care of by the Directorate’s best. I chose Arcadia. Actually, come to think of it, that join was with—well, at the end of it I had one of the drives you met, at breakfast that morning. The big male.”

“Why did you choose Arcadia?”

“Yeah, I could have died, right? Even with Hamish, they’re still not very good at joining there. But I didn’t want to be part of giving subnet tech to the Directorate. Hamish, he’s a little oblivious sometimes.”

Chance flinches away from Rope. She almost stands, almost surrenders to an impulse to run, but then sees the gun resting on Rope’s thigh, pointed at her, and settles back in the chair.

Rope says, “Oh, that stings, huh? Yes, your help has brought the whole world one step closer to my reality.”

“Not to your reality,” Chance whispers.

“No, that’s true. The subnet is a little different. Close enough, though.”

“You were doing it too, trying to remove the twenty-drive limit.”

“Was I?”

“I want you to leave.”

“I’m working on that.”

Chance doesn’t respond. Rope says, “Don’t feel too bad. It would happen anyway. Every single join is eventually going to have hundreds of minds. Things get really tricky with that many people in your head.”

Rope suddenly sounds frustrated, almost desperate, the edge gone from her voice. She leans forward, pulling the gun down beside her thigh. “Chance, I’ve been trying to make a difference. I thought you might want to help. Join can be wonderful, a miraculous experience. But we can’t transcend death. We’re all still part of the natural world. And subnets, the hive mind, me . . . it’s all . . . just a different kind of death. The Directorate isn’t listening. They want a single network. They want to colonize other planets. Chance, we’ve got a perfectly good planet.”

The shadows are tightening. In an odd, petulant voice that surprises even Chance, Chance Nine says, “You’re not dead.”

Rope sits back again, and her face slackens. She closes her eyes and rolls her head. Then she hefts the gun, as if idly measuring its weight, and stands up. “I told you I was working on that.”

“Look,” Chance says quickly, “don’t—you don’t need to do anything right now. I’m talking, like you asked. I’m being honest. And if you want to know, do I want to help, then yes, I want to help. And I understand you, what you’re saying. I just don’t want to be like you, I don’t want anyone to—”

“No. You’re scared. You don’t mean any of that.”

Starting in her gut and chest, a touch of nausea and dizziness radiate through Chance. “Please,” she says quietly, her voice cracking, “please don’t. I’m not strong now, I’m—”

Rope’s hand moves very quickly, coming out of shadow. Chance sees the gun in it, and as the barrel sweeps upward Chance looks for the briefest moment straight into it. Chance hears herself cry out.

Then Rope presses the gun under her own chin, and the report—a surprisingly quiet pop—sounds. Rope’s head snaps back, and its body hits the floor.

For four and a half years after that final encounter with Rope, Chance doesn’t add any drives. Given the dramatic reduction in the price of licensing, the fact that Chance still maintains only five active drives occasionally raises eyebrows.

Many smaller joins have united, but there has also been a run on high-quality solos. They weren’t too difficult to secure at first. A successful join could seal the deal with an “all this can be yours” sort of pitch, which actually went more like “I’m healthy, brilliant, immortal, have physical and intellectual capabilities beyond your wildest dreams, want for just about nothing, and am literally offering you my life.” Eventually, the better-quality solos started realizing their value and becoming more selective about who they wanted to be for eternity.

Chance Nine pauses at an observation portal where a starship floats before her. The Arc, white ribbed and gigantic, stretches into the starry distance like the mysterious bones of an interstellar whale, Earth visible between gaps in its frame.

In New Denver, Chance Five is playing football in an open-air night league. The timing of the game is purely coincidental, but it will make a credible cover if Chance is asked questions about a heightened stress response.

The goalie for Chance’s side stops a kick, and Chance Five takes the opportunity to look up at the clear sky, where the stars are just beginning to show. What appears to be a large, wavering reddish star is actually light from the Derrick, a four-kilometer-square orbital way station and construction colony where the Arc is being built.

In addition to providing a platform for building the Arc, the Derrick is a stopover for most traffic to and from Earth. Space travel within the solar system has become almost routine, with three bleak but improving colonies on Mars and several automated-mining operations on moons and large asteroids.

Chance Nine is up there looking down at the Earth as Chance Five looks up at the Derrick. Chance feels a very mild, almost pleasant, sense of vertigo.

Chance Nine trained in astrophysics. At times, the coursework was excruciatingly difficult, but Chance persevered and finally got to upper-level courses that were really interesting—a series of practicums on deep-space mechanics. There, Chance discovered that Chance Nine—who had been Himiko—had a talent for visualizing particularly complex mechanics, the interplay of stress and structure.

Chance asked Reason for help getting Chance Nine a job with the Arc Project. The Arc Project is a major international effort intended to begin the era of human colonization beyond Earth’s solar system. The Arc is designed to travel indefinitely, undertaking a multigenerational, interstellar voyage.

Seven hundred joins will crew the Arc, each sending a single drive. Many famous joins are participating, including both Excellence and Advocate. Chance Nine was the five-hundred-thirtieth drive selected as crew.

After Chance One also started working on the Arc Project, as a predictive event modeler in the security subsection, Chance bought an apartment on the Derrick.

Chance’s view of the Earth from the Derrick is always spectacular—a blue, radiant presence defined by a precise curve, the starting place of infinity. Over the last eighteen months, that view has become familiar but never routine, evoking a clear and haunting sense of the Earth’s fragility.

Chance doesn’t like to talk about that sense of fragility. There is a plan for many more interstellar vessels to be built after the Arc. For some, those vessels make the Earth’s fragility less relevant. Chance gets angry when people express that perspective.

The Arc’s mission is to find and occupy a habitable, Earth-class planet. Chance Nine almost flinches as Chance considers the term “Earth-class.” She quickly turns away from the viewport, her face reddening and warming with a sudden, surprising shame.

A small man with body proportions that imply greater size is coming out of a teaming room to Chance’s right. He sees Chance Nine and calls a greeting. The man is the seventh drive of a join named Gold. He is a biophysicist and member of the Arc’s crew. Chance waits as he approaches.

“Are you going to help with the stress check in the hydro bays? You haven’t confirmed yet, but Velocity said you’re up.”

“Yeah,” Chance says. “Sorry, I thought I confirmed. I have valves.”

“No, it’s”—Gold Seven blinks—“oh, yeah, valves it is.” Gold grunts while he considers something, then says, “I don’t like late changes to the roster like that.”

Chance Nine nods, avoiding looking directly at Gold, and turns to walk away.

“Uhh, see you there,” Gold says, and Chance hears his frown in the tone of his voice. Chance Nine hurries, stepping quickly into a separate control corridor.

Even with Chance borrowing cycles to closely manage Nine’s respiration and heart rate, that conversation was a disaster. Gold is going to remember it. Chance will need to do better at casual interactions.

In New Denver, Greengrocer’s Goats have just scored their third goal against Chance’s football team, the Fourteeners, who are still scoreless near the end of the first half. Chance Five has been playing sluggishly as Chance prepares for what’s happening on the Derrick. Bright Two, a Fourteeners midfielder who’s running upfield, glances over at Chance.

“You want to sit out for a bit? Take a break, let someone else swing the pick for a while?”

Chance is taken aback. “What?”

“You seem distracted.”

Chance Five says, in a what he hopes is a pointed but friendly way, “No, I’m good. That last one was you.” Bright shakes his head and tosses Chance a noncommittal “Whatever” before turning and jogging away.

The control corridor that Chance Nine is walking through extends in six regular well-lit segments toward a gate that leads into the Arc’s superstructure. The Derrick’s interior was designed to comfort the human mind and body. The corridor’s walls are sheathed in a rich wood grain, the air infused with a loamy, slightly spicy scent of growing things. A subtle breeze stirs occasionally, and a quiet click, trill, or drip sounds at intervals in the distance. The whole effect simulates a passage through the semienclosed patio of a well-designed wooden manor on some supple alpine slope. The warmth of a late-morning sun shines on the back of Chance’s neck.

An airlock at the end of the control corridor slides silently open. A mild, slightly moist gust of air riffles out of the Arc. Chance Nine steps across the threshold into the similarly designed interior of the Arc, and the door slides shut behind her.

It’s a short walk to the hydro bay. She passes a couple of coworkers who greet her but barely look up from what they’re doing. Once in the hydro bay, she opens comms and walks through a routine status check with Increase and Solve, the two joins with shift-oversight responsibility. Then she opens a pressure sensor panel and begins her visual inspection of valve circuitry. She engages her retinal overlay.

The germ of the idea had come to Chance during a Civ News report on the massive investment that would be required to make the planned Arc Project a reality. The report focused on the unprecedented marshaling of resources and level of international cooperation required to build the Arc. First, the Derrick would be enlarged to accommodate both its current missions and construction of the craft.

The Arc would be a grand symbol of humanity’s ability to overcome differences and accomplish something that appeared to be almost impossible. Excellence had described Join as an enabling technology for multigenerational space travel. “As the ship explores the galaxy,” he said, “Earth will receive continual first-person accounts of the voyage.”

The Arc’s primary systems, including energy, have been coming online during the last month. Today, as the energy translators and the hydro bays link up, their mutual fail-safes will be disengaged for three seconds. Chance One is part of the security team that modeled the event.

The Arc’s energy translators rely on an incredibly precise mass calculator, similar to that used in pods. There have been a few issues with the mass calculator recently. Chance Nine has signed off on it, though. Because of the mass calculator, during the three seconds that the fail-safes are not engaged, a single body in an unexpected location could do serious damage.

Chance Nine moves to the next step in her inspection of the hydro-bay valves: Observe the sealant condition on Valve C1. Chance Nine straightens.

Chance is closely managing Nine’s stress level, her pulse, and level of agitation. She’ll appear normal on the hydro bay’s biosensors. Someone across the bay swivels toward Chance Nine, and she nods a brief acknowledgment.

She walks toward a sealed bay door. On the other side of that door is Valve G1, which isn’t part of today’s inspection.

In New Denver, Chance Five is rushing an opposition striker who has control of the ball downfield. Chance Five’s pulse is hammering. His vision blurs as he slides at the ball, knocking it sideways with the tip of a toe and forcing the striker to hop over him.

On the Derrick, in the security subsection’s open office, everyone is suddenly quiet. An alarm light is flashing on Chance One’s monitor. A panicked voice shouts, “Shut it down!” Chance One flushes and rocks backward in his chair. Chance is momentarily blinded.

There has been a slow and continual erosion in the size of the refuge that the Earth can offer. Chance has watched for years as its edges have crept inward and its center has weakened. Death is impatient, and suffering multiplies, but not yet for joins. They just don’t notice it, as each successive catastrophe is quickly buried beneath the limitless weight of individual days and years. For now, Chance’s fellow joins are comfortable, which seems to be enough for them to continue minutely examining the mysteries of life.

Chance does hear people saying the right things. And sees encouraging signs. But despite those, the fibers of the shroud that the race is weaving for itself continue to multiply and lengthen. And somehow Chance can see it all while others don’t seem to be able to.

Then one day it dawns on Chance that the Arc Project itself is an affirmation of an argument Rope had been making. The Arc and the promise of interstellar travel give the human race an illusion of transcendence. As Join has.

Chance doesn’t want to sabotage the Arc. Sabotage is an act of destruction, and bodies could be killed. Chance actually believes that the Arc would be a thrilling, inspiring accomplishment. But the world seems to be making a choice. Almost five years after Chance’s video conversation with Excellence, Vitalcorp and the world’s powers have offered nothing significant beyond the Arc Project and the reduction in licensing costs.

The irreversible past—Hawaii, Monterey Bay, all of the others—insists on action. Chance casts about for something that might be effective—that might provoke the needed changes—and ultimately targets the time line. There must be a time line. Any individual ship could meet with disaster, so for interstellar travel and colonization to be a viable choice, the Earth has to remain livable long enough for several colony ships to set out.

Simply slowing progress toward space travel might force those rushing toward colonization to concede that the Earth should remain a viable habitat indefinitely. If only as insurance against the unforeseeable. And if the same political will that was marshaled to build the Arc was applied to Earth’s environmental problems, perhaps real progress could be made.

A plan begins to take shape, but as it’s unfolding it just seems crazy. Even to Chance, who is conceiving it. Its assumptions seem crazy. Chance has all five remaining drives checked for a meme virus or cognitive degradation. But they’re all healthy. The plan doesn’t appear to be a figment of a pathology, at least not one that can be diagnosed.

Chance begins to suffer the burdens of a tyrannical conscience. Moving forward seems indefensible, while abandoning the plan is cowardice in the face of urgent need. There is no longer a safe choice. Indigestion afflicts many of the drives, night sweats, anxiety attacks.

If things go as Chance expects, there will be damage. Some drives will probably be killed. At least there are no solos working on the Arc. Joins can recover from the loss of a drive.

As Chance Nine walked the short gangway toward Valve G1 there were still many factors working against the plan. The fail-safes might engage and shut down the translators. Or the wobble created by the mass calculator might not result in a breach. That’s what Chance was aiming for—a radioactive breach that would force a long delay in the project. Hopefully, it would be small enough that only a few drives would be hurt. The accident, and the delay in the project, could give opponents a reason to restart the debate around priorities and the allocation of resources.

But there was also a slight risk that heat from a breach would cause an explosion. And an even-smaller likelihood—an almost nonexistent likelihood—that that explosion would cascade through the whole bank of translators and then through the whole power infrastructure.

Many years later, a report on the incident will show that, at the moment of the initial breach, the recently engaged energy translators had been under temporary stress from a series of unusually large solar flares. Under normal circumstances, that wouldn’t have been a problem.

When Chance can see and hear and breathe again through Chance One, he lies for a moment on the office floor, listening to the chaos erupting around him, the voices, the shouting, the sounds of panic. Chance Nine is gone.

Chance One’s work space is inside the control structure on the Derrick. He props himself up on an elbow and peers around the room. A couple of his colleagues are also on the floor. Someone is bending solicitously over him. Someone is staring at a screen, moving her hands erratically and cursing loudly. Two bodies are standing in apparent shock in front of the large viewport, looking out into space in the direction of the Arc. Then they’re using their arms to shield their eyes. Light is coming in from the viewport.

Chance Five comes to on the grass of the football pitch. There are faces in his peripheral vision. They’re saying things he can’t quite understand. He’s watching the few stars visible in the night sky above them, searching until he finds one in particular. A red one that is brighter, angrier than it should be.

Chance One rolls to his side and then rises slowly. He walks to the viewport where the incoming light is diminishing but still flaring in small bursts. Others in the office walk there as well. There is crying, soft crying and loud sobbing. Someone is saying no, over and over. Those at the viewport are quiet.

As Chance’s eyes adjust and process what he is seeing, he begins to perceive the things that are wrong. In the distance, a chain of bright explosions is lengthening across the structure of the Arc. Some are large, some smaller. Their combined effect is constant enough to create a pulsing light that burns multiple soft afterimages into his vision. The entire ship’s structure rocks as the explosions shift it in its metal harnesses. The Derrick crackles and groans, and pieces of it that connect to the Arc are flung away into space. Someone says, “That’s the last one.”

Explosions continue along the Arc’s length as it begins to move. At first, it drops very slowly away from the Derrick, toward the Earth, but as fires rake it, it picks up a little speed and a clear but subtle lateral trajectory, as if it has received instruction for a specific landing place and is moving under power. It noses to the edge of the viewport’s range and then begins to exit the frame.

“Here,” someone shouts. “The main screen.”

Video from a high-orbit tracking satellite shows on the main office screen. On the right side of the screen, just within the Earth’s shadow, are the blinking lights of a large portion of the damaged Derrick. Farther away, and floating gently toward the day-lit part of the globe, is the whole length of the Arc, small fires burning and bursting across its ribs.

The woman to Chance’s left says, “I can’t believe how fast it’s moving.”

And a man replies, “It’s the starboard tanks, from the test yesterday. They’re burning. You can see it there.”

Eventually, as Chance One and his rapt colleagues watch, the Arc’s acceleration sends it into distant atmosphere and brighter flames flare all along its length. It very quickly becomes consumed in a single ball of fire—all of it burning, hurtling downward, growing smaller, ever smaller in gravity’s strengthening embrace. The fury and majesty of the fall is breathtaking but relentlessly diminishing, until in the Arc’s final moment it appears to be only a tiny spark, like a single spark of consciousness, against the vast blue surface of the Earth.