All around her, Observers are shuffling their feet as if uncomfortable. “Here’s the thing,” says one, scratching the white growth on its head. “I’m not sure You’ve realized what this discovery actually…is.”
[Say it’s a lost colony from an extinct civilization], says Shokyu the Mighty. [I mean, it has to be, right?]
[That is a ridiculous guess], Shenya the Widow fires back. [The commission said we were looking for a research vessel.]
[Which this is not.]
[It does not follow that it is a colony, or from an extinct civilization.]
[It’s clearly a habitat, and it’s way outside Networked space. Plus, this guy seems really excited about it.]
[Fine. It is a colony. I will even grant that it could be a lost colony. But the rest of your theory?]
[What else do group minds care about? They’re always going on about Who has reached maturity and Who has gone extinct. It’s like Widows and obituaries.]
[Why, you insolent—]
“You’re a little slow, aren’t You?” asks an Observer, cutting into the internal argument.
Shenya the Widow stares at the speaker, blades twitching as she decides whether she is, in fact, going to murder it.
“Totally understand!” says another. “I get that way too, when there are only a few of Me around.”
“Like now!” says the voice from behind her. “I’ve got barely a couple hundred bodies here, and let Me tell You, I’ve almost forgotten what real intelligence is like.”
“I am…not slow,” snaps Shenya the Widow. “I was simply…thinking a moment. And yes, of course I know what this is. It is a—” And then she sighs, because she will never hear the end of this. “It is a lost colony, from an extinct civilization.”
A silence grows, as many pairs of golden eyes watch and judge her. And then:
“You do know!” says an Observer.
“But You can’t possibly know which one,” says another. “Go ahead. Guess.”
[No clue], says Shokyu the Mighty. [You could try Freewheelers or Silverteeth, maybe. There are a few other extinct species from around here—but none that anybody actually misses.]
But one fortunate guess per day is luck enough. “I do not,” admits Shenya the Widow.
“What You’re standing in right now,” says an Observer, turning with its arms outstretched, “is the only settlement of Humans in the known universe.”
Shenya stares at this last speaker, mandibles stilled into silence. In her head, a seismic shift in priorities is taking place.
[Well, that was literally the last thing I expected], says Shokyu the Mighty, [And just so you know, you are coming across as extremely threatening right now.]
Shenya the Widow is aware, but she can’t help it. Her blades are at full extension and quivering, and her mandibles are a blur. A hot, quivering, magnificent fury is building in her thorax, a true Widow rage. The Humans.
But Observer, it appears, cannot read Widow body language. “Follow Me,” says one of Him, turning away. “You should really see this.”
Shenya the Widow stands frozen for whole seconds before shaking herself free of her fantasies. “Lead on,” she says quietly. Oh yes. Lead on, strange one, and Shenya the Widow will follow. She will shadow You to the end of the galaxy if a living Human is at the end of the journey.
[AivvTech Mnemonic Restoration]
[Stage 1]
* * *
#
[Good news! I have now constructed an emotional baseline. That means I should be able to predict each memory’s effect on you with a medium degree of certainty. As many factors are currently in play, I will be shifting the order in which I transfer memories. But don’t worry! You’ll recall them chronologically.
[In Stage 1, you will experience memories that I believe you will find neutral. When we finish these, we will move on to Stage 2.]
* * *
#
[Initiating memory transfer…]
* * *
#
[I’m sure someone will be quite happy to see you], says Shokyu the Mighty.
Shenya the Widow wobbles in her ship’s cargo bay, the inebriant in her system making it much easier to admit that her implant is right. The Librarian will be happy to see her; she is absolutely sure of it. Look at it there on the containment monitor, its silvery surface expressing—well, expressing nothing at all. But surely on the inside it is feeling just as celebratory as she is. Or it will be. Or something. Can a Librarian become intoxicated, as she is right now? What if she fed it this inebriant bar she is currently chewing; what happens then? Oh, but no. Why waste a good bar when she has something better? Oh yes, my little one, you will like this very much indeed.
The Librarian’s containment hisses open on her command, filling the cargo bay with a heavy metallic drone. The Librarian itself does not change appearance at the sight of Shenya the Widow, but then that is difficult to do when one is both suspended in midair and compressed into a sphere by a ten-gravity containment field. Shenya gazes at her reflection in its mirrored surface and wonders if it is uncomfortable in there. Well. Even if so, she is sure this will make it all worth it.
She begins by releasing a few leaves into its field—careful not to brush the edge with her blades—and watches them whip upward to the sphere at ten times their natural acceleration. They lie against its silver surface, and then sink beneath it without a ripple. The process is invisible from here, but within that shining mass the leaf is being taken apart into its constituent atoms. Every measurable quantity is being learned and memorized. The Librarian will know the structure of this leaf so well that it could recreate one from scratch, given the right materials, and no scanning process in the galaxy would be able to tell the difference.
Sometimes it will do exactly that, when it is bored. Shenya has opened the hatch in here to find body parts or plant life on the floor, as the Librarian has apparently created them for its own entertainment and then pushed them out of its field. This one has never resynthesized anything particularly dangerous, but she still checks its monitor before opening its containment. A corporate legend tells of a ship that returned to dock on autopilot, with nothing aboard but a Librarian and a swarm of flesh-eating insects. Some theorized that the explorer in question had shipped with a particularly spiteful Librarian, but in Shenya the Widow’s opinion the explorer’s first mistake was having flesh in the first place.
The low metallic ringing grows more intense with each leaf, and Shenya the Widow twitches her mandibles in a smile. Shokyu the Mighty may dispute it, but she knows that it is responding to her personally. A Librarian this small certainly doesn’t breach legal tier, but it is intelligent enough to know where its food comes from. “Mother’s here,” she croons in a gentle singsong, releasing a leaf of a different species. “Of course you’re glad to see me. Who else knows what you like? Who else brings you treats?”