“So anyway,” says the Observer, “is your friend going to stand down or not?”
He is gathering Himself; she can see it from the inside and the outside, through thousands of sensor feeds pulled into a single image. The entire inner wall of His sphere is drawing their legs up, bracing against the next layer as if they’re about to leap. The next layer locks arms, giving their fellows a launch surface. All of them, without exception, have their eyes locked on her.
Sarya squeezes a handful of Librarian again. It wraps around her and she can feel its ringing deep in her chest. “Tell me why,” she says, “and I’ll call it off.”
“You’ll let Me kill you?” asks the Observer, blinking. “Free and clear?”
“I’m reasonable,” she says. “Convince me it’s for the good of my species. Otherwise, well, you’re going to lose a whole lot of bodies.”
It’s a lie, of course. He is the murderer of her species. He’s going to lose those bodies either way…but it has occurred to her that this is her opportunity for some answers. It may not look like it, but she is safer than He is. Every second, out in the Visitors’ Gallery and hidden from Observer’s many eyes, another thousand drones find themselves suddenly—and happily—linked to a Network. They don’t ask questions. Their minds are simple, and if they are puzzled by Sarya’s version of the Network, they don’t show it. She can feel the relief and contentment, radiating out from thousands of small minds. She can feel the nearer ones beginning to show some interest in Observer as a potential threat to the order of their Network. Good.
Observer takes a hundred thousand breaths. He exhales from every mouth. “Fine,” says the body with the light. “Here’s the thing you need to understand about Human: I love Her.”
Sarya blinks. Of all the answers Observer could have given, this was not one that she expected. “So,” she says, feeling the moist air current of thousands of lungs breezing over her skin. “First of all: her?”
“I believe I said Her,” corrects the Observer. “And if you have to ask, you’ll never understand. She may be tiny, She may be fragile, but I love Her. Unfortunately, we don’t have enough blackout for me to summarize even the last few millennia of our history together. Suffice it to say: I love Her, and you threaten Her. Convinced yet?”
“So You say that,” says Sarya, folding her arms above the ringing mass of Librarian. “And yet You got us killed.”
“Of course you don’t understand,” says Observer with another sigh. “How could you? You’re not a parent yourself. Imagine the love your own bloodthirsty mother felt for you, but multiply it by a billion; that’s the love I feel for Human. I adopted Her, just like your mother adopted you. That’s how the galaxy used to work, you know, back before all this Network nonsense. Back when We were free. Higher species adopted lower ones all the time! Uplift, We called it. But you know how Network is. It showed up, It decided—on Its own authority!—that this beautiful tradition, along with countless others, had to go. It interferes, you see, with Network’s own goal.”
All around her, thousands of Observers shake their heads sadly. Beyond them, Sarya continues recruiting with part of her mind, trying to keep up with the droves of identical bodies still entering the darkened Visitors’ Gallery. From thousands of sensors, she watches Observer scamper in from the doorways, run along the bridges, launch Himself toward the growing sphere in the darkness. His intellect is growing; He is becoming large enough to make her nervous—
And then He passes a threshold. She can see it, from any one of her tens of thousands of viewpoints. The motion in the Gallery changes abruptly as thousands of Him pause, still clinging to bridges and doorways, and gaze toward the sphere that surrounds her.
“Why do I feel like I’m not receiving your full attention?” asks the figure with the lamp, golden eyes narrowing in its light.
Because I’m building a brand-new Network to defend myself with. Because I’m supposed to be killing You right now, murderer of Humanity. “I apologize,” Sarya says. “I was just…thinking about what you’re saying.”
Out in the darkness, Observers remain where they are, spread out across the Visitors’ Gallery. Their golden gazes sweep the vastness of the space like thousands of searchlights, as if Observer is looking for something.
The one in front of her cocks its head. “I see,” it says softly.
Sarya stares back. Somehow, she feels that Observer means something beyond what He says. A moment passes as the two great minds focus their eyes and sensors on each other…and then Observer breaks the tension with a smile.
“Anyway,” says the one in front of her, as if there had been no interruption. “As I was saying: Network is a living thing. It’s an organism, and It wants what any organism wants: to grow. And to do that, it must eat.”
Sarya pulls her attention from her drone-gathering efforts for just a moment, trying to imagine what this could possibly mean. “Eats…what?”
“What else?” says the Observer with a sad smile. “It eats species.”
For the moment, Sarya puts all other activities on hold. She draws herself back into her body, so that she can stare at this Observer with every ounce of her concentration. “Explain,” she says.
“We are really running short on time,” says Observer. “So can we just skip to the—”
“No,” she says. “Explain.”
“Fine,” says the Observer. “Look, this is how it works—the quick version. When a species is ready to leave its solar system, the Network—through Its Citizen species, of course—introduces Itself. It gives the species in question two choices.”
“One,” says a second Observer, drifting forward into the light. “The species can become a Citizen. It can embrace the Network—and of course most do so enthusiastically. It’s a sales pitch that’s been honed over half a billion years, after all. And then—” The Observer laughs, a short and joyless bark. “This is the clever part, you see. Diabolical, really. Over the next few generations, every single member of that species will install a Network implant, won’t they? The only way to experience the Network, isn’t that what they say?”
Sarya pictures, for a moment, the implant she desired so badly as a child. The implant that every single resident of Watertower had installed somewhere in their respective nervous systems. “What’s so clever about that?” she asks.
“Do you think Network gives out implants for the sake of Its members?” demands Observer. “Do you think It’s just a big ol’ altruistic parent-figure? Please! It’s for growth. The Network expands through the minds of each new species, consuming. It runs a small part of Itself in every single one of them, harvesting the advantages of their unique evolutionary path, adding variety to Its mind. It’s an intellectual parasite. It digs in on a level far below the conscious mind, down on the level of the instincts. With every species It absorbs, It grows stronger—and It gains another defender. Why do you think every Network Citizen fights so hard to preserve Network? Why do you think Human’s neighbor species were so quick to turn on Her when She fought back? Because they are Network, and Network is them. Network is in their very brains.”