But this is not her mother. Her mother wouldn’t say such things. This is her, this is her doubts and fears laughing at her.
You are adorable, says her shame. Why, if I didn’t know better—
Don’t say it.
I would say—
Don’t fucking say it.
You are no Daughter.
From somewhere deeper than any voice, deeper than language itself, Sarya’s rage erupts, screaming. She is small again. She is staring into her mother’s face, its every dark surface gleaming and outlined with white light. She can feel that prison of chitin around her, those smooth-jointed limbs surrounding and crushing her, and she is furious. And once again she hears it before she feels it: the sizzle of her own skin being atomized into the atmosphere of the room. She does not pull away; no, she digs in. She watches that rectangle sink into her arm and smells her own flesh and clamps her jaw on the cry that has clawed its way up from her vocal cords. The mocking voice tries to make itself heard but it doesn’t stand a chance against the rage that burns like a sun within her. Her doubts and fears are garbage in an incinerator—no, in a supernova. I am Sarya the Daughter, says the anger. I was not given life, but took it. I wrested it from the jaws of death itself, and it is mine.
And with this thought in her teeth, she crushes Roche’s finger into her arm and drags it through her flesh. Muscle rips and nerves vaporize into a spray of gas and sparks and now Sarya’s eyes are locked to the glistening surface of her own bone, set in a devastation so complete that she no longer knows if she is clutching the Memory Vault or if her fingers have fallen dead but she will hold this pain in her mind until the end of time if it will prove one thing.
She is Sarya the Daughter, and she faces pain without fear.
“Congratulations!” says the Memory Vault, its globe blazing a violent gold around her head. “Your key has been accepted. Transferring memories now.”
The following is greatly abridged from the original Network article, in accordance with your tier.
NETWORK FOCUS: HAPPY BILLION DAY!
Fewer than a million years ago, the Network celebrated its one billionth Networked star system. Every Citizen species—nearly one and a half million species in total—took part in the festivities, from one side of the galaxy to the other. One billion Networked star systems, each one representing a disc of civilization over ten billion kilometers across. All together, these systems add up to an incredible eight cubic lightyears of Networked space.
That’s one heck of a party!
It’s difficult to imagine exactly how large eight cubic lightyears is.*1 The best comparison is the one we have already made: eight cubic lightyears is enough space to fit one billion solar systems. Therefore it may seem counterintuitive to your limited mind that this massive space is actually a very small percentage of our galaxy. It’s stunning, really: for every one of those eight cubic lightyears of Networked space, there are one trillion cubic lightyears of non-Networked space—and that’s just in this one galaxy.
Now that party doesn’t seem so big, does it?
CONSIDER LIGHTSPEED
In order to fit this massive idea into your limited mind, let us approach it from another direction: lightspeed.
When a photon leaves any one of the stars in the Network, it is traveling rather quickly: nearly three hundred thousand kilometers per second!*2 And yet, at that speed it still takes more than eight minutes to reach the orbit of the average Type F terrestrial planet. In another four hours, it will reach the edge of Network coverage in that solar system. There it begins its interstellar journey. In a few decades, it could reach the nearest of the more than one billion Networked solar systems.*3 If these neighbor systems are near the galactic edge, that same fragment of light will take fifty thousand years to reach the galactic center and twice that to reach the far edge. And if that doesn’t impress you, consider that it still has a twenty-million-year journey ahead of it to the next galaxy of comparable size, and nearly fifty billion years to reach the edge of the observable universe.
Four minutes to your planet. Fifty billion years to the edge of the universe. Feeling small yet?
The scale of reality is yet another reason that Network Citizenship is so vital to every species within it. Within the Network, threats to an individual species are small, understandable—and most important, easily avoided. We know what lies within the eight cubic lightyears of the Network. But what lies outside that, in the vast darkness of the universe? The answer is simple.
We don’t know.
*1 For tiers under four.
*2 Don’t get any ideas: this is far more quickly than the highest legal speed in Networked space.
*3 Of course, if light traveled via Network it could be there nearly instantaneously.
[AivvTech Mnemonic Restoration]
[Stage 0]
* * *
#
[Welcome to the AivvTech Memory Vault mnemonic restoration process! I am sub-legal intelligence name not set and I am here as your guide to the past. I will be observing your responses and crafting your personalized transfer process to give you the best possible experience. My goal is to keep emotional trauma to a minimum.]
[We will begin with a random memory, and I will use your responses as a baseline to order the rest.]
* * *
#
[Initiating memory transfer…]
* * *
#
Shenya the Widow crouches on a forest floor, a sharp and gleaming shadow in the warm half-light. She is surrounded by giant plant life that her implant identifies as trees, listening to the rustling of their red and gold leaves as they fall, one by one, to the ground. The place is a tumult of color…and surprisingly beautiful.
[See this, Shokyu?] she says internally. [My mother told me that happiness is made of moments like these.]
[I’ve never heard you mention your mother before], says Shokyu the Mighty, the small intelligence in her Network implant. It chose its own name some years ago, and Shenya the Widow has always found its choice amusing. It is her own jest, of course; a sub-legal Network implant cannot earn a title. But one may be lenient when dealing with small intelligences.
[I would not expect you to understand the complex bond between Mothers and Daughters], says Shenya the Widow, heading off her implant’s analysis before it happens. She imagines the hard-edged face of her own mother as she says it.
But the little intelligence cannot be stopped. [I wonder why you’re reminiscing so much], it says. [Perhaps you’re getting old. Or lonely.]