I had no idea, say a trillion voices in her head. I started this adventure by causing a little trouble, and I’m ending it by transcending space and time. I am everything you were, Daughter. I can do everything you could do. Finally, after half a billion years, Network has made a mistake. It has allowed an enemy to engage It on Its own territory. I will become everything It is. I will replace It, across a billion star systems. The Network tends toward order, they say. Not mine. And Observer laughs from a trillion mouths. Observer tends toward its total and complete opposite.
Outside, Observer raises trillions of eyes to the burning heavens, where millions of lives are being snuffed out every second. He allows Sarya to sample one of His countless trickles of information, to watch the destruction with His senses. She can see the Human environment as easily as if it were a hundred meters away. It’s just as described, a gray cylinder spinning in the void. She wants to reach out and touch it, to tell her fellow Humans that she tried, but that she is no longer one of them. She wants to ask them not to hold her responsible for what comes next, whatever it is.
“You okay?” asks Mer. Mer is crouched in front of her former body now, gazing into her former eyes. She is not looking through them at the moment, but she can see him through the eyes of the cheerful Observers milling around the two of them. She wants to cry something—though she doesn’t know if it would be help me or kill me—but her mouth doesn’t move.
“Of course I’m okay,” she hears Observer say using her voice. She watches her own mouth twist into a grin. “I’ve never been better.”
She tries to reach for them. For big Mer, who will never in a million years understand what has happened to her. For Roche, whose long run of lives ends here because of her. For Sandy, who had the bad luck to run into a Human. The sum total of her effort, the raging, hopeless cry that wants to burst forth from her, results in nothing more than a tremor. Her rage builds to heights she has never before experienced. She is an inferno, a kiln, a foundry of superheated fury.
And it doesn’t matter.
Her body twitches again and again as her anger gives her strength, but that’s all she can manage. Observer knows her every thought before she thinks it, and everywhere her mind turns He is already there. He is a trillion times too quick for her. She is a stumbling, clumsy low-tier mind, and He is what He is. She is permitted to feel His giddiness, the elation that blazes through His mind like a fire. Network tried to stop Him, but only managed to catapult Him straight into power. Finally, among His millions of schemes and strategies, Observer has found something that will break the galaxy in half and dissolve it into chaos.
“Ship,” she hears herself say. The word is drawn out, stretched and trembling as she fights for control of her own mouth. And then Observer laughs. “Launch,” He says, using Sarya’s mouth.
And then her mind explodes.
She is standing, ankle-deep, in water. She is gazing at a horizon that is impossibly distant, lit by some analogue of light. She is, in some very strange way, home.
“This is…outside?” Observer whispers. He stands next to her in a single body, holding her hand.
She watches Him turn, slowly, to scan the featureless horizon. Her rage has not disappeared, but now it seems to occupy a very small contained space within her. It’s somewhere down below, perhaps in the cross-section of her that once intersected reality. She watches Him kick the water, the ripples extending into what may well be infinity for all she knows, and her heart—or something like it—hurts.
“Is it symbolic?” He releases her hand and takes a sloshing step away from her. “Is it metaphorical? Is it metaphysical? What’s the sky stand for? And the horizon? Oh, My goodness, am I standing on probability?” He kicks the water into a rainbow flash, then drops to His knees with a splash. “It’s the water, isn’t it?” He says. “The universe is the surface of it, or the individual droplets are possibilities, or—or maybe it’s what’s under it? What is under it? Are there more universes down here?” He extends His arm, feeling for a bottom. “Why can I stand here but I can’t reach the bottom? Is that meaningful?”
Sarya watches Him thrash in the water, and she is filled with something utterly unexpected. Sorrow, maybe…and there’s definitely some pity in there. Observer is what He is, just as she is what she is…just like anyone else.
And then she hears a gasp. Observer stands slowly, His tunic soaked through and clinging to His scrawny body. “Oh,” He says softly, His eyes on the thing in her hand. “It’s beautiful.”
“What, the universe?” she says, holding it up. It glints, shattering the light into an infinite number of colors.
“It’s…smaller than I expected,” says Observer.
She flips it over in her hand, watching the light glint just below its surface. “I don’t know why,” she says, “but it’s always seemed like it’s just the perfect size for throwing.” She tosses it in the air and catches it with her other hand. “Doesn’t it?”
Observer’s hungry eyes follow its every movement. “You can throw the universe,” He murmurs, as if He’s realizing what kind of power He’s just stumbled into. “You can throw the universe.”
She smiles sadly. “You can do all kinds of things with the universe,” she says.
“Can I…can I hold it?” asks Observer. He holds out His hands, His golden eyes shining.
“It’s weird how you think differently out here,” she says, ignoring Him and flipping the universe from one hand to another. “I think my mind just isn’t big enough when I’m in this thing. In the universe, I mean. Yours isn’t even big enough.” She turns the universe over in her hands, watching it scatter the light. “That’s why You couldn’t see Your danger.”
Observer’s hands, which were reaching toward the universe in her hands, draw back. “My…danger?” He says.
“You saw it, once,” says Sarya. “And because You prevented it then, You thought it was over. Remember, back in the Visitors’ Gallery? You gathered Yourself there because it was a dark spot in the Network and it felt safe. By the time You realized that Network had never left—that It had left a part of Itself behind—it was too late.” She sighs. “Or it would have been, except I trusted You instead of Network.”
Observer glances around, pitiful in His dripping tunic. “But that would mean—”
“Same spot, just bigger,” she says. “In here, we’re still in a Network blackout—only it’s a hundred million cubic lightyears instead of a few cubic kilometers. Here, for the first time in half a billion years, You have felt safe to gather Yourself. Once again, Network has the chance to destroy You. Except this time…it’s all of You, isn’t it?”