She settles onto the bench with relief, then tries repositioning her own anatomy in awkward ways until an arrangement sticks. There’s no relaxing in this position, exactly, but at least she’s not on the ground.
“Ace,” she says out loud.
“Hi, best friend! How can I, Ace, make your life easier? Ooh, I like this place. Hey, are we—”
“Compose a message,” says Sarya through her teeth. “To Sandy.”
“Sandonivas Ynne Merra?”
“That sounds right. Tell her—let me think.”
“Let me think, got it. Send?”
Sarya feels her jaw tighten further. After spending so much time with Eleven, it’s easy to forget what a sub-legal intelligence is supposed to be like. “Erase that,” she says.
“Erased!”
“And…” She sighs. “Stand by.”
“Ace standing by!”
Sarya glances over the arboretum, at its paths and perfectly placed flora, trying to control her breathing. She’s never seen any of these plants, of course, but they’re definitely plants. The sounds are unfamiliar too, but if you ignore the individual notes and listen to the ambience, the overall impression is a bit like…home. This—in concept, at least—is where she came so many times as a child, burning time while she waited for Mother to wake. She remembers the game she would play with herself, guessing which insect calls were real and which were emerging from hidden synthetic sources. This chorus is probably the same way, a mix of real and generated. That’s life aboard a station, though—or maybe anywhere in the Network. Everything’s always a blend of actual and artificial. The rustle of a breeze through vegetation, overlaid on that constant drone of metal…
She sits up straight, driving an inconvenient part of the bench into her back. She stares at Eleven’s shining shape thirty meters away. The suit squats there, its hatch gaping open and its massive arms slack on the ground. It makes a grinding sound from time to time, as its torso makes a quarter turn and then rotates back to face her. It’s still fighting something—maybe a call to return to Riptide? Again her anger at Sandy returns—is this what you wanted when you reported it stolen? A suffering pressure suit locked in some sort of instinctive response?
But then Eleven’s condition is bumped from the front of her mind. Something else is pricking her, some instinct of her own. She finds herself rising on trembling legs. She focuses on them, tells them to keep their balance so she can concentrate on figuring out why she is feeling so—
Afraid.
But she knows what it is. It’s that sound. It’s the drone that lies under the nature noises, that seems to fill the space between every sound in this arboretum. She shakes her head as if that would dislodge it from her ears, but it only grows. No, it’s definitely not in her head. It’s out there, and it’s familiar. She stands, then takes a shaking step toward the suit. This is danger; she doesn’t have to place it exactly to know that. “Eleven!” she shouts, but she finds the ringing has increased until she can barely hear herself. It’s metallic, it’s shimmering, it’s heavy enough to shake the ground itself—
And then Eleven reacts. A wail like a siren splits the air, and the suit flings its massive bulk into action. It is built for strength over speed, and its motion is hampered by its wide-open cockpit, but still it comes for her. It plunges its arms ten centimeters into the soil and hurls itself forward, flinging mulch and twigs every time its tripod lands. It is only ten meters away now but she can barely hear its siren because the air itself is saturated with sound. Her fear is growing, but she still can’t remember why she should be afraid. She takes another step toward the suit, but the soil is loose and she goes down hard with Roche’s hand twitching beneath her.
The humiliation of yet another fall snaps her out of her rising panic and she struggles to roll over, feeling ridiculous. Seriously, bystanders, she’s walked before. She just needs to calm down and concentrate. Legs, meet brain. Ears, if you could calm down for five seconds she could sit up. Just relax. Work that knee under herself, that’s right, and now the other—
And then her head snaps up. That’s where she’s heard that sound before. Replace Eleven’s siren with a Widow battle cry and you have it: her mother’s last few seconds of life. And there it is: that shimmer behind Eleven’s heaving body, that gathering wave. It’s come for her. Again. This is the thing that tried for her as a child, tried for her on Watertower. Twice she has escaped this thing. No, she didn’t escape; she was saved. Barely, and both times by her mother.
But the third time, her mother is not here.
“Help,” she whispers, reaching toward Eleven—but Eleven is still two strides away. Behind it, a silver tide rises higher than its domed head.
And then Sarya is crushed with all the weight of the universe.
The following is greatly abridged from the original Network article, in accordance with your tier.
NETWORK FOCUS: WHAT IS MIND?
What is mind?
The very fact that you can ask the question proves that you have one. You communicate with others every day, through the Network and other, more primitive means. Some belong to your neighbors. Some minds belong to your friends. Some are responsible for transporting you around your environment, keeping you clean, producing the food you eat, and even removing your waste. You even have a secondary mind installed in your own brain.*1 But what is it?
There is no official number for how many minds exist in the Network. This is not because of any challenge in counting, but rather the difficulty in distinguishing one from the next. A group of tier twos in conversation may think themselves very obviously separate beings, but a higher intelligence may instinctively classify them as multiple cells of the same mind. There are even (fringe) theories that say that every connected mind is actually a cell of a single gigantic intelligence. But regardless of which theory one subscribes to, one division is clear: some minds are native to the Network, and some have been grafted in.
NON-NETWORK MINDS
A non-Network mind is the type that a typical tier two might picture when they think mind. It almost always emerges from a biological structure, i.e., brain, that requires a support system, i.e., body. As non-Network minds are the result of billions of years of independent evolution, they may be found in stunning variety. Without exception, all Network responses are due to the less predictable natures of non-Network minds.
NETWORK MINDS
Network minds, on the other hand, are the result of a half billion years of careful research, development, and iteration.*2 While earlier examples occasionally displayed breathtaking errors in judgment ([The Aberration] being the best-known example), today’s Network mind is a study in rock-solid reliability. In fact, a Network response is simply the result of many Network minds instinctively teaming up to fix a problem that threatens Network stability. As they say, the galaxy wants to work.