She hears Roche’s servos whine as he sits up straighter. “Are you suggesting there’s someone bigger?” he says.
Sarya sits, shredding blade after blade of grass as she thinks through the thought that has just occurred to her. “If there’s…if there’s another level, where Network itself is just a brain cell—” She stops.
“What would that mean?”
Sarya swallows as she imagines what that does mean. “If other galaxies are as crowded as this one,” she says, “then they are going to act like ours, in some ways. I mean, they’re going to act alive. And even if they all make up some gigantic universe-sized mind, there are going to be bad actors. Like Observer. Like…the Humans. Except they’re going to be galaxy-sized. Imagine Network going head-to-head with a neighbor galaxy. The sheer destruction—” She stops again, unable to imagine what her own words could mean.
“And yet,” says Roche, “according to your philosophy, it would all be ultimately meaningless.”
Sarya is too far gone in her own thoughts to correct him. “Was this really about Observer?” she murmurs to her most recent blade of grass. “Was it an accident that Network has gone millions of years without a war, and then this happens?”
“Other than your species,” says Roche.
“That wasn’t a war,” she says. “It was a blip. It was a Network response. And even this.” She waves her arm upward again, toward a blue sky that covers the glow of tragedy. “That isn’t a war. Yet. But could it be preparation for one? Is Network…inoculating? Strengthening the galaxy’s immune system?”
“That’s an interesting theory.”
“It’s terrifying,” Sarya says, bringing her gaze down from the sky. “But what if something worse than Observer—something far bigger than Observer—is coming? And what if it’s going to land right here?”
“That,” says Roche after a moment, “is a sobering thought.”
Sarya leans back on the grass, her mind full of possibilities. Massive and terrifying events may be afoot out there…but they are also inside her. This person who reclines in the light of a false sun, in the orbit of a Blackstar, under an unfolding tragedy—this is not the false Spaal who fretted about landing a low-tier job on an orbital water-mining station. She is not the Daughter who dragged her dying mother across said station, only to fail to save her at the last moment. She is not the Human who nearly cut her own arm off to find out where she came from. She is not the Destroyer who wrenched this Blackstar out of the Network. She is not the avatar of Network who drew Observer to a single spot and killed Him there. She is not even the person who sits here in the grass and thinks about the future while people die in the present. She is all those things, and infinitely more. She is a spectrum in a single body.
She is what she is, just like anybody else.
A mingled crashing and cheering has been growing in the forest for some time, but now it can no longer be ignored. She sits up and turns her gaze to the trembling undergrowth. It parts, and Mer ambles out on all sixes, his fur stiff with blood. Sandy perches on his head in her traditional spot, and clinging to his back are a half dozen cheering Observers.
“Told you,” says Roche, nodding toward him.
And then the cheering cuts off, because they’ve seen her. The Observers slide off Mer’s back and slink back behind him, peering at her around his massiveness and between his solid limbs. Sandy clings to his head, blinking furiously.
“Got two!” says Mer. “Big ones, too. I gotta teach these little guys how to hunt. They’re not quite so eager to throw their lives away anymore, so that means they all hide in trees now.”
“I know the feeling,” murmurs Roche.
“See?” says Sarya, pointing with Roche’s former hand. “Looks like they’re afraid of me, right?”
“Yeah, they were talking about that,” says Mer, pausing a few meters away to lick the blood off his fur. “Sounds like they remember you, if that makes sense.”
“They remember me?”
“Yeah. Talking about you like you’re a—” He stops mid-lick to squint in concentration, then gives up. “Dunno, can’t think of the word off the top of my head. But they won’t shut up about some kind of epic battle. Under a gray sky, upon a silver sea, that kind of stuff. There’s poetry.”
And then Roche begins to laugh. “They’re not avoiding you,” he says. “They’re worshipping you.”
Sarya’s eyes widen. “Oh goddess,” she says.
“That’s the word,” says Mer. “Goddess.”
Sarya falls back on the grass and covers her face. She groans through her fingers. “Goddess,” she repeats. She’ll never say it the same way again.
And then she feels the earthquake of Mer flopping down next to her, and she is spattered with something warm. “Oh, come on,” she says, hands still shielding her eyes.
“So what’s next?” he asks between licks. “They still up there? Your people?”
Sarya sighs. “Yep.”
“Gonna go up there and meet them?”
Another sigh. “Eventually.”
“You should hear her theories,” says Roche, hitching a black thumb her way. “Terrifying.”
“I like terrifying,” says Mer.
“No, you don’t,” says Sarya. “You don’t know terrifying.”
But she does. She is a speck of dust in a galaxy that is also a speck of dust, in a universe that is not much bigger. She has held this universe, under an infinite sky, and she has seen how small it is. She has seen more death than she would have believed possible, and she knows that she’s seen nothing yet. Reality is larger and smaller than she ever imagined, and she is everything and nothing at the same time.
She is Sarya, Daughter and Destroyer. And she is not afraid.
For London the Daughter
Lydies, gentlexirs, fuzzies, creepy androids, legal and sublegal intelligences, so on and so forth, you’ve just finished four and a half years of my life. Four and a half years of what some might justifiably call obsession. You probably finished it in hours. How was it? If you enjoyed it—or, I suppose, even if you didn’t—you should know that I didn’t make it alone.
Four and a half years ago, my friend Kevin Grose and I sat at a counter at a rest stop outside Bilbao and argued passionately about superhuman intelligence. I was so incensed by this argument that I immediately bought a three-inch notebook for a euro and began writing, in the back of a tour bus, what would eventually become two and a half million words—a few of which you now hold in your hands.