disabled barriers and docked with Vox Core. Unopposed, they entered the city and tracked down Turk and Allison, who were able to explain—once linguistic difficulties had been sorted out—who they were and where they were from. They insisted that I was not dangerous and demanded that I be released from what amounted to an induced coma. The troops of Cloud Harbor declined to do that until they were certain I was harmless.
It was an inauspicious meeting, but by the time I came to myself again it had become a more or less friendly one. I woke in my mortal body, in a comfortable bed in a medical suite in Vox Core. My mental functions had been fully restored. A woman who claimed to represent “the combined polities of Cloud Harbor” entered the room, introduced herself, and apologized for the way I had been treated.
She was tall and dark-skinned. Her eyes were large and widely set. I asked her about Turk and Allison.
“They’re waiting outside,” she said. “They want to see you.”
“They’ve come a long way, looking for a home. Do you have one to offer them?”
She smiled. “I believe we can make them welcome. If you’re curious about our world, I’ve made public records from every polity available to your external memory. Judge for yourself what kind of people we are.”
I accessed the records in an eyeblink and was reasonably satisfied, though I didn’t tell her so.
She said, “You’ve come a great distance yourself, Isaac Dvali. We can make a place for you, too.”
“Thank you,” I said, “but no.”
She frowned. “You’re a unique individual.”
“Too unique to leave this city.” I repeated what she already knew, that I shared too much of my consciousness with the processors of the Coryphaeus to allow me to leave—my body would be little more than a drooling piece of meat if it was extracted from Vox Core.
“We can address that problem,” she said confidently.
Humanity had learned a few things about the nature of the Hypotheticals, she explained. The polities of Cloud Harbor had already begun to establish virtual colonies inside the computational space of the local Hypothetical networks. Colonists were generally the elderly and infirm, who were eager to leave their physical bodies behind—I could do the same, she said.
“I’m happy enough here.”
“Alone?”
“Alone, yes.”
“Do you understand what you’re sentencing yourself to? Solitary confinement—for eternity, or until your sense of self erodes and becomes chaotic.”
“I can take precautions against that.”
I could tell she didn’t believe me. “What do you mean to do, then? Tumble through the galaxy until the end of time?”
“Long ago,” I said, “my father owned a library of books. One of the authors I read there was a man named Rabelais. When he learned he was dying, Rabelais said,
“But all he found was death.”
I smiled.
She smiled in return, though I think she felt sorry for me.
I said good-bye to Allison and Turk. Allison begged me to take up the offer the ambassador had made and stay here, embodied or not. She wept when I refused, but I was adamant. I didn’t want another incarnation. I hadn’t sought or wanted this one.
Turk stayed a while after Allison left the room. He said, “I sometimes wonder whether something singled us out for all this—for everything that happened to us. It all seems so strange, doesn’t it? Not like other people’s lives.”
Not much like, I agreed. But I didn’t think we had been singled out. “It all could have happened countless other ways. There’s nothing special about us.”
“You think you’ll find something at the end of it? Something that makes it all make sense?”
“I don’t know.”
“You have a long trip ahead of you.”
“It won’t seem long to me. I’m traveling light.”
“You carry what you carry,” Turk Findley said.
I enclosed the city in its bubble of slowtime and borrowed sunlight for acceleration. Vox Core soared beyond the orbit of the system’s outermost planet, out into the interstellar vacuum and far from Cloud Harbor. From my vantage point this took only a moment. The city’s clocks ticked seconds for centuries.
I had no destination. Occasional brushes with massive stars skewed my trajectory in unpredictable vectors, a drunkard’s walk through the galaxy. Apart from avoiding obstacles, I did nothing to intervene.
In the physical body of Isaac Dvali I often wandered the tiers and passageways of Vox Core. The city persisted in its daily rhythms, regulating its atmosphere, tending its empty parks and gardens. On these walks I occasionally passed robotic maintenance machines as they rolled down public passageways, steel monks hurrying to their matins. They resembled people but they lacked moral agency, and I resisted the unreasonable urge to speak to them.
It was a pointless anachronism to preserve the cycle of day and night, but my mortal body preferred it. Days, I basked in artificial sunlight. Evenings, I read ancient books reproduced from the Voxish archives, or reread the memoirs Turk and Allison had left me.
Nights, while my body slept, I expanded my sense of self to include all of Vox Core. I modeled the aging galaxy and my place in it. I tapped trickles of information from the ever more complex skein of the Hypothetical ecology. Stars that had been young only moments ago exhausted their nuclear fuel and decayed into simmering embers: brown dwarfs, neutron stars, singularities in their bottomless graves. Compared to the passage of time in the exterior universe, my consciousness was vast and slow. This would have been the true viewpoint of the Hypotheticals, I imagined, had the Hypotheticals possessed a unitary consciousness.
Signals propagating at the speed of light passed between stars as quickly as one neuron communicated with the next in Isaac Dvali’s mortal brain. I began to become aware of the galaxy as a whole form, not just a collation of stellar oases separated by light-years of emptiness. Hypothetical networks ran through it like fungal hyphae through a rotten tree. In my night vision I saw this activity as threads of multicolored light, revealing a complex and otherwise invisible galactic structure. Thriving world-rings stood out like the closed chains of carbon atoms in an organic molecule. Ancient, dead rings shimmered like pale ghosts as the Hypothetical machines associated with them died for lack of resources or scattered to nearby stellar nurseries.
The living galaxy pulsed with exhaustion and renewal. New technologies and energy sources were discovered, exploited, shared.
And as the universe aged and expanded, other galaxies, already immensely distant, fled toward the limits of perceptibility. But even these faint, far structures had begun to reveal a hidden life of their own, emissions of stray signals suggesting they had evolved their own Hypothetical-like networks. They sang like unintelligible voices in the darkness, fading.
It was inevitable that I would have to abandon my mortal body and live exclusively in the processors of the Coryphaeus and in the cloud of Hypothetical nanotechnology surrounding Vox Core. But I still wanted to be able to move about the city in a physical way. So—as I allowed the body of Isaac Dvali to lie in a self-induced coma, dying of starvation—I fashioned a more durable substitute, a robotic body equipped with equivalent senses, in which I could instantiate my consciousness. When this project was complete I gathered the remains of my organic self in
