The scale of it took her breath away, and she would scan the heavens until the cold stopped her fingers working and sleep finally pulled her down into dreams of travelling among those endless worlds.
So it was, one frosty night, that she saw a star that happened to be in her eyepiece flashing in puzzling ways. She was used to their random twinkling: the effect, she'd read, of motes of dust in the Earth's atmosphere, light that had travelled unhindered across the universe for countless years being briefly blotted out by the tiniest fragment of dirt a little way above her head. But this was different. A clear flash, like the lights of an aeroplane or a satellite, except not moving. Something stationary up there was sending her a message.
She counted to herself the pauses between the flashes. At first, they appeared random, the intervals increasing, but then they repeated, following precisely the same pattern. Then they stopped. Intrigued, she scribbled the numbers down before she forgot them. Perhaps she could make sense of them, work out the puzzle being given to her. She watched for ten minutes more, twenty, but saw nothing else unusual.
In the morning, slightly to her surprise, the numbers were still there in her notebook. She hadn't dreamt them. She stared at them for long hours, trying to understand what they might mean.
Part 3 - Galactic
1. Artificial Constellations
“Coronade, Ondo? That again?”
Ondo considered her through his multiglasses, their intelligent lenses making his eyes bulge as they reshaped themselves from microscope mode. Refracted light from one of his laboratory's trickling waterfalls sparkled in their glass.
“I told you it wasn't a myth, however much Concordance might claim it was,” he said. “It existed and now we know how to get to it.”
They'd spent days picking over the fragmentary memories contained within the brain flecks of the dead crew-members of the unknown Alliance ship. Selene had worked until her own brain was exhausted, correlating scraps of data streaming through her augmentations, looking for patterns, picking out potential traces of useful information. The datastores they'd recovered had been badly degraded by three centuries of exposure to the high-energy protons and ionizing radiation of the background cosmic rays. Inevitably, there'd been some damage during the flecks' retrieval, too, careful as they were with the grim surgery. The neural augmentations were designed to be impossible to extract data from, given that their contents were intrinsically intimate.
“Even if we can get data off them, how do we decrypt it?” she'd asked.
“I have some experience with Omnian War-era flecks; it's those designs which I adapted to create the devices we both carry in our heads. Ours are more secure, if I may say so. My impression is that the golden age galactic culture had a strong social taboo about intruding on the artificially-stored memories of others and that their approach to security was rather less paranoid as a result.”
She snorted at that. “I don't believe it. You're claiming they were universally benign and considerate? Billions of individuals across countless worlds?”
“Of course not. Their devices had security, strong protection, but they were designed to be easier to open up, extend to others. Openness was their default. This was a culture based on trust and mutuality, and their technology reflected that. We, in our age, have no such luxury. The sudden rise of Concordance must have been an existential shock to them. I believe they'd lived in harmony for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years.”
She couldn't resist asking. “You can hack their brain flecks, but you can't hack mine even though you designed them?”
He was always patient, always ready to reassure her. “Our flecks are locked-down by default. If I could dissect your brain, I could eventually recover the encryption keys your augmentations have generated, it's true, but doing so would trigger self-destruct signals to fry the data stored upon them. Also, my encryption is time-limited: the entire artificial store re-encrypts itself using a freshly-generated key every time you sleep, meaning that even if I could disable the self-destruct, I'd have to work impossibly fast. You've seen the schematics, Selene, you know this is true. It's one reason I entangle the artificial and natural neurons so closely. If Concordance catch either of us, I want to be extremely sure that they can't recover the location of the Refuge.”
The data they'd extracted was, for the most part, disappointingly mundane. Mostly it was glimpses of lost lives: grinning family faces; snatches of mountainous scenery; the throng of colourful crowds; the beauty of planet after planet seen from orbit. All of it was without context or explanation. Whoever these people were, however they'd lived their lives, this was all that was left of them: fragments of lives long-over, locations she couldn't identify. What struck Selene more than anything was how normal the images were. These were people like her, living in different times. Their lives, like hers, had been turned upside-down, blasted unexpectedly into fragments by the intrusion of galactic events.
She and Ondo treated the recovered memories with due reverence, the two of them silent as they studied the flashes of past existences. She felt bad about how she'd treated the bodies, the lack of remorse as she'd severed their heads. It troubled her that the Selene who'd lived on Maes Far could never have done such a thing. Had she changed so much? She vowed to return to the hulk at some point, reunite heads and bodies and give the dead some sort of reverential send-off, perhaps immolate their remains in that yellow star around which they'd orbited for so long.
Finally, the images revealed something useful. One of the dead had been a navigator, the flecks in her brain closely integrated with the ship's control systems so that glimpses of flight paths and metaspace routes were
