This is Sarya the Daughter.
Let me guess, she says with a grim smile. Network is not going to like this.
She’s not sure how she says it—and she’s not sure how she smiles—but it’s in the same way that she’s never understood how her Human vocal cords work. Her consciousness has never known the details of how its tools work. Whether her drones speak to individual Observers or her own Human mouth moves, whether she communicates the whole thing via a dance of a million bodies—what does it matter?
Oh, no, laughs Observer. But You and I don’t do things because Network is going to like them, do We?
Observer speaks the same way, using the hundreds of thousands of identical bodies that are interspersed through her millions of drones. He moves like a school of sea creatures, a quarter million selves with one intent. Individually, His bodies are awkward: it’s obvious in the way they throw themselves off bridges and supports, ricochet off architecture and the occasional startled Citizen, how they fling one another through the darkness with shouts and laughter. But taken together, they are something else. They are Someone else. These quarter million make up a single mind, and yet only one isolated droplet of the scattered interstellar mind that is Observer, parent of Humanity.
Network has defense mechanisms that You cannot dream of, says Observer as the two minds drift together in the volume of the Visitors’ Gallery. Even I have never seen most of them, and believe Me: I’ve caused my share of trouble. Its weapons were forged over millions of years and lay dormant for moments like these, when Its plans go awry. A quarter million faces form a quarter million smiles. And believe Me, whatever plan Network had for You…it’s about to go awry.
Sarya feels a thrill at his words; that’s the Widow in her, multiplied a millionfold. It prances, it chitters, it sharpens its blades and shrieks for battle. The Human in her watches its killer quietly, with lightning in its soul; it clenches its fists and thirsts for justice. She is not multiple minds in a body; she is a nature with multiple parts. She is Sarya the Daughter.
She tends toward what’s right.
Out beyond her borders, the energy that flows through the rest of the Blackstar is of a far calmer temperament. Her enemy is a half-billion-year-old power that has grown slow and complacent. It’s a mind that has gone eons without a fight, a massive intelligence with the galaxy in a chokehold, who has cast a net over the citizens of a billion star systems who don’t even realize they’re caught. It’s a prison woven from the same twisting filaments of data and energy that thread through this Blackstar. They are delicate where they emerge from these tiny minds—they hardly look like chains at all—but outside the station they twist into massive cables and plunge through hundreds of subspace corridors. That’s eight hundred solar systems’ worth of energy and data out there, eight hundred solar systems connected to the Network by this single Blackstar.
No. Not connected to. Enslaved by.
Sarya’s mind is accelerating. Somewhere, her body is breathing harder. Huge as she is, she feels she is a small thing, and surrounded by a solid wall of intelligence.
It’s so…big, she says.
And now a quarter million Observer bodies smile. It’s smaller than You think, says Observer. Network commands a billion solar systems in this galaxy, but for every star It holds, hundreds are free. For every cubic kilometer It controls, a trillion are outside It. Network is large, Network is powerful…but It is as finite as the rest of Us.
Sarya gazes outward, into the fractal glow of Network. Capillaries, veins, arteries, threads she can barely see combine into branches a hundred kilometers across, those branches twisting into a single trunk the width of a terrestrial planet that dives into the largest of the subspace corridors—up and up and up, to vast levels of intelligence she cannot begin to imagine. Observer makes Network sound small…but she is smaller. Network’s skin may lie tightly over Its bones, over the surfaces of Its billion solar systems, but a billion solar systems is a volume that she has never even tried to imagine.
And now, says Observer, We dance.
His bodies shift. As one, they point in a single direction, toward a single subspace corridor. It’s a hole in space like any of its siblings, a wound in spacetime whose edges boil and sizzle in the darkness. A million sentries form a ring around it, every single one a drone the size of a good-size orbital station. Even from her body floating in the Visitors’ Gallery, Sarya can feel the intelligence and energy crackling within these sentinels, the single purpose to which these million gigantic minds are bent. They are responsible for this single tunnel; they keep it open, they monitor the millions of starships that pass through it every fraction of a second, they decide what is a threat and what is not. This halo of massive drones commands a single artery of the Network, through which Ol’ Ernie and his trillions of siblings pilot the blood cells.
That’s back to my old solar system, Sarya says in wonder.
As good a place as any, says Observer. That is the first system We break off, that We free from Network’s grasp. It has been a millennium since Human proved that a society can function without constant intervention. But Human didn’t yet have Her greatest weapon. Observer smiles again, and Sarya feels several hands on her body. She didn’t have You.
Sarya feels that energy surge through her, the warmth of Observer’s words. She eyes the massive ring of drones keeping that corridor open, feeling that they are eyeing her in return. They are no different than the millions she already has, other than their sheer size. She will slip between them. She will be through before they realize she exists. She doesn’t know how, yet, but she doesn’t need to. By the time she gets there, full seconds from now, she will be larger. She will be more intelligent. She will understand what is necessary.
That solar system has an official name, like any other of the billion systems of the Network. It’s an impossibly long string of colors and numbers, and Sarya has never actually seen it used. To her, one resident among billions, it was simply the solar system, just like her star was the sun and her home was the station. To Network, it’s one of a billion. It’s practically anonymous. The people in it, the passengers of the ships, the residents of the stations, the Citizen members that form an impossibly thin film over the solar systems of the Network—they are no more than bacteria. It is the galaxy that lives and breathes, she is suddenly aware, and Its so-called Citizen members are no more than the microbes that live and die in Its flesh.
Somewhere in a Blackstar, in a darkened Visitors’ Gallery, a Human body clenches its fists. Hot tears well in its eyes. They are fury and awe, dread and wonder—blended and superheated. They are the distilled rage of a mind constructed of millions. Sarya pays attention to her biological body just long enough to shake its head angrily and flick those tears on long trajectories through the darkness. She flexes her fingers, where she always wished she had blades, and millions of intelligences feel a touch of something they will never comprehend. There is a mind above them and among them, made of them, as mysterious to them as Network once seemed to her.