But everything was changed now. I had music. And even without an adge I was so long-used to living inside my own mind that I could play and compose all the endless days and nights.
At long last, after years perhaps, Father came to me. He had a new game, a new species. Not music, not anything like it. A simple game of placement and pieces.
I lost the first four games. I won the fifth. The sixth. The next five games after that. Every game.
Father raged and twisted the scenario into a nightmare vision. He stormed away and left me to float.
And surely now he would kill me. He understood what had happened. I had won at music and that free-form, improvisational game had done things to my mind, changed me in ways even I could not understand. I saw in more dimensions. Intuition was close to me now, intimate to me. I trusted my own moves. And conversely, Father had been shaken.
A year. A new game. A killing game this time. Weapons in a maze.
I won the first game.
I won every game.
Silence from Father. Why did he not kill me?
I reached out to him, wanted to know his mind. But he made no answer. He had gone far away, he had withdrawn. And yet, I lived.
And then dreadful hope, that awful emotion that draws us to our doom, began to rise in me. I reached out, reached down my tether, through Father’s own neural net as if it was a biological uninet. I reached for Aguella.
“Aguella. My love.”
“Toomin?”
“Yes.”
“Am I alive?”
“Do you think? Do you see? Do you sense?”
“I …”
I could see her dead body, see her through the sun-dappled water. See her through a passing cloud of neon-green fish.
“My memories, all …” she said. “I feel you, Toomin. Only you. Alive, but … what is happening?”
So many years, how could my heart still tear apart? How could the pain still be so fresh?
“You live in my memory, Aguella. But now, here, in this place, you live only when Father touches your neurons, when he raises your memories.”
“There is no Father, here,” she said.
“I have made you live again, for this moment. The parts of you that I touch come alive again, Aguella. The memories, the notions, the ideas. But only for the moment.”
“Then I am dead.”
“Yes. You are gone, Aguella. This is only the shadow of you, the biological brain, neurons switched on, a biological computer, nothing more.”
“Let me see. Once more, let me see what I am.”
“No. No.”
“Ah.”
“Aguella. I …”
Could I ask permission? Of a person dead for decades? It was a mockery. She would give the answer I sought. Her will was long gone, long since flown away.
“I am making you a part of me, Aguella. Do you understand? I am downloading you, your thoughts, your knowledge. All that you were. Are.”
“I was always a part of you, and you a part of me.”
I lowered the barriers between us. Felt the flood of information come into me. Data, that’s all it was, the encoded data that, deciphered, was all that made her Ketran. Her fear, her desire, her love.
It all became a part of me and even in that terrible moment, that hideous moment when I treated my one love like nothing more than a uninet file, I gloated and thought, Ah, Father, you were a fool to withdraw. Now I’ll come for you.
I downloaded Jicklet. Lackofa. Menno. One by one I absorbed their minds.
The other Ketrans, till all the last of the Ketrans were inside me.
And then others. Alien minds. Alien thoughts. Alien sights. Faster! Generationals. Illamans. Capasins. Skrit Na. More! Faster!
I was a uninet bug, eating data, spreading, consuming, absorbing. Still I was no more than one percent of Father, but already I was a hundred times myself.
Daankins, 333’s, the Wurb, the Breets, the Multitude, the Chan Wath. Race after race. I emptied each dead mind into mine, each set of data, no time to look, to see, to open and enjoy, oh no, no time, the race was on, a race to consume, to download and absorb.
How long till you see it, Father? How long till you spot this new game?
On and on I roared. And still Father did not feel me, did not sense his growing peril. Why should he? Father had never known a true enemy. He had owned his entire world for his entire evolution. A single life-form that had invented every other that swam in his sea, simply to amuse himself.
Then, at long last, I felt his unease. Felt his attention. He sent out impulses, racing through his vast network, felt here and there for the cause of the odd, disturbing sensation.
I showed him nothing. I hid myself. He searched and found only emptiness. Emptiness where there had been captive minds. Where were the Capasins? Where were the Generationals? Where were the Graspers?
Where were those Ketrans?
And at long last, as his slow-growing dread emerged, as he began to feel a new emotion, he asked: Where is Ellimist?
I was half of Father now. We were equal. I stopped my advance.
“Shall we immerse, Father?” I said.
“What game?” he demanded.
“The game, Father. The last game.”
The last mind I absorbed was Father himself. And when I took him, I took nothing.
There was no Father. No mind at all. He was nothing but a sponge, in the end. A creature of the simplest biology, an accident of evolution: a predator sponge that linked with its prey. Father was nothing but his victims. And when I had absorbed and cut him off from all of his victims, Father was nothing more than so much seaweed.
I was Father now. I contained within me all the knowledge of a hundred intelligent races. But I was still Toomin. The Ellimist. I was not content to live here, in this blue moon’s seas. I was born a
