*1 This name is unusually specific because the original author was a Category F individual, for whose species the discovery of fire was a pivotal moment.
*2 For a list of negative results of pre-Contact meddling, see [Unnatural Species Development].
Sarya does not awaken. She is instead hammered into consciousness, as though she just came to a screeching halt in her own body. That body, for its part, tells her that something is very wrong. It swears its eyes are wide open, but Sarya sees nothing. Its limbs flounder, reach in all directions, but Sarya cannot even feel the floor beneath her. The universe is black and empty, and a sullen and subdued roar vibrates her skin. She can feel her new body’s pulse begin to rise as chemicals are dumped into its bloodstream. Danger! say the chemicals. Do something!
But she can’t do anything, because she is floating. She is outside, she has to be, that whole Network-is-a-person thing was a hallucination and now she is sucking void in the boundless infinite of open space and in a second she’ll feel the water begin to boil off her eyeballs and tongue and oh goddess this was a terrible idea she is going to die she would do anything to be back in Eleven’s reinforced cockpit—
[Network not found], says a sudden orange warning across her vision. In this total absence of sensory input, her mind seizes onto those words as if they were handed down from the goddess herself. Their meaning doesn’t even matter, she is so thankful to see anything at all—
“Sarya?” says a plaintive voice in her ears, startling her. “I know you didn’t call me but your biometrics are crazy right now so the system called me and here I am but I can’t help you because I can’t find the Network and also there’s this weird gap in my memory like I was gone for a while and the last thing I remember was this huge silver thing coming for us and oh Network I’m scared—”
“Stop!” she gasps. As annoying as Ace’s voice has always been, this time it’s brought her back from the edge of panic. She can hear. She can breathe. She is alive.
“Okay,” says Ace quietly. “It’s just…I’ve never seen a Network blackout before. I mean—”
“Ace,” she says before he can get rolling again. “Where am I?”
“I don’t know!” he wails. “I can’t tell and I really think I’m going to lose it if I don’t—”
“Stop,” she says again. “Okay? Just…stop.”
You can go where I cannot, says a memory in her head, to the dark regions of the galaxy. Maybe it wasn’t a hallucination. Maybe she’s already been dropped into one of those regions. Is this her first task, when she begins earning a second chance for her species? If so, shouldn’t she be…goddess, a little more prepared?
And then there is light. And with the light comes a thunder so incredible that she can feel it shake her very bones. The light is far away, but it’s slowly spinning around her—or she is spinning, perhaps. She tracks it with hungry eyes, squinting as she tries to make out what she is seeing. It grows larger in waves, in one identical section after another, and the more illumination there is, the larger this structure seems. And finally it’s beginning to look familiar. She’s seen this before, this is—
“Oh goddess,” she whispers.
She is floating, with millions of half-lit Citizen members, kilometers above the floor of the Visitors’ Gallery. That’s what the roar was; it was drifting multitudes coming to the same conclusion. And it is a horrifying conclusion: when you are in zero-g, every direction is down—and in this case every down means death. All around her, distorted by emergency lighting, they thrash. They reach, with what limbs nature and technology have given them, toward anything that looks like safety. And almost without exception, they scream.
She is still being taught, she realizes. Network may be not found, but It is still instructing her. This is chaos. This is what It was talking about.
“Okay,” says Ace, still sounding shaky. “I think I’ve figured out where we are. We’re in the—”
“Visitors’ Gallery,” says Sarya tightly. “We are floating in the middle of the Visitors’ Gallery, in a goddess-damned Network blackout.” This is not at all what she expected to come back to. The dark regions of the galaxy indeed—this is literally as close as you can get to the beating heart of the Network. All right, fine. She twists her body, as far as she is able, to look in all directions. The nearest bridge is a good ten meters away, and it’s not even below her—whatever below means right now. And in the direction she would normally call below—she swallows and averts her eyes.
“Maybe it’s just me,” says Ace quietly. “Could it be just me? I mean, it wouldn’t be possible for everybody to fall off the Network, right? Because that would mean—”
“Look around,” Sarya says quietly. “Does this look like Networked civilization to you?”
Panic is an ugly thing. It strips away the intellect, tier by tier, and reduces the most civilized being to an animal. These intelligences are not acting like intelligences at all, in fact. There is no communication between the thousands of different species represented in this space. There is only fear, and panic, and violence—good goddess the violence, what are they doing to one another? She watches, horrified and spellbound, as terrified intelligences collide with each other, tear each other apart, send one another sailing into bridge supports and inactive Network drones. Their common language is gone. The mundane trappings of the Network, the threads that bound them to one another—it’s all gone. Network has disappeared; in its vacuum is nothing but fear.
And then Sarya realizes, with the largest jolt of her short second life: holy goddess, she can see. She can still see the delicate gossamer lines drifting between struggling Citizen members, between the millions of Network drones tumbling among them. They are difficult to focus on. They’re different from the living threads that Network showed her; these are dead and dark. But of course they are: Network is not found. There’s no animating force here, nothing to fill those lines with life and light.
“Goddess,” she whispers to no one in particular. “I can see it.”
“I don’t mean to constantly talk when I know you don’t want me to talk all the time,” says Ace, “but in this case I think you would want to know that we’re surrounded by—”
“Millions of panicking intelligences,” murmurs Sarya. “I see them, don’t worry.”
“Actually,” says Ace. “I was going to say…that giant silver thing.”
And then Sarya freezes. As if waiting for Ace’s warning, a silver glob drifts through her field of view. Close behind it is another…and another. All around her, nearer than any of the struggling Citizen members out there in the black space of the Visitors’ Gallery, silver spheres drift through the air. Dozens of them gleam in the emergency lights, none of them more than a half meter across. And now that she is listening for it, she hears the ringing—soft and discordant and splintered, a different tone coming from each trembling, jerking fragment.