Ondo. Ondo stood there, his back to her, ear pressed to the wall as he, too, tried to make sense of his surroundings. Like her, he was clad in his EVA suit undergarments, the skin of his chest tufted with grey hairs. He didn't appear to be aware of her presence.
Her voice was oddly loud as she spoke. “Ondo. How are you here?”
He turned to face her and it was him, the same crazy hair, the familiar scribble of wrinkles on his face. His eyes were wide in wonder. “Selene. You're safe. Oh, that's good. Isn't this wonderful? So much to study and understand. What is this ship? How does it function? How did we get here?”
She found herself laughing out loud at his words. It was a strange kind of laughter: tears brimmed in her eyes at the same moment, a thrill of joy released through her. They hurried together and embraced. His body was even thinner and bonier in her arms than usual, but it was definitely him, alive and well.
She held him at arm's length to consider him. “I don't understand. You died, or at least you suffered tissue damage severe enough to kill you. You can't be alive.”
He shrugged, the delight on his features clear. “Yet, here I am. If anything, I feel better than I have for a long time. If I'm not mistaken, I haven't just been revived, I've been … fixed. One of my knees has been giving me trouble for a few months, but now it's completely pain-free. And my eyes: I use the multiglasses to let me see in non-visual ranges of the electromagnetic spectrum, but also to correct for the age-related degeneration, but now I can see you perfectly. It's quite remarkable.”
“I'm experiencing something similar,” she said. “I'm struggling to make sense of it. Let me look at your diagnostics.” She saw the flash of amusement on his face at her terminology. “Your vital signs, I mean.”
He consented, granting her access to the medical flecks that monitored his body's health. He was correct: what he was feeling wasn't some drug-induced euphoria; his tissues had been repaired. Not only had localised damage or trauma been healed, some of the debilitating effects of age had also been reversed: his blood oxygen volume was elevated, his muscle-tone had improved by a few percentage points.
She said, “The question is, how far is this process going to go? If we wait long enough, will we revert to childhood, become embryos, then vanish?”
Ondo, inevitably, had a theory. “I suspect our bodily structures are being repaired to their optimum levels for their current state of development. We won't get younger, although we may not be ageing right now.”
“Any idea what's going on?” she asked.
“You know what I'm going to say: this is what we were supposed to find. The trail we were following brought us here.”
“You died, Ondo. From what I can tell from my internal records, I died too. That's a pretty rough trail to have to follow.”
“Whether that was intended, I don't know. But here we are.”
“Which is where, exactly?”
“A ship, I think, but it's hard to be sure. It's possible our conscious minds are plugged into some kind of virtual space, but it feels too solid for that. You feel too solid.”
“How far have you explored?” she asked.
“Not far at all. I emerged a few moments before you found me.”
“Which suggests our awakening was coordinated. Do you have any recollections of being rescued?”
“None,” he said. “I recall our conversations at the archway, then a few confused memories that might have been delusional, and of course the distress involved in running out of oxygen. Then greyness, and I woke up here.”
“I left you,” she said. “I'm sorry.”
“You did?”
“I did. At the archway. I was going back to Coronade to face them.”
Amusement twinkled in his eye. “How far did you get?”
“I didn't make it,” she said. “This distracted me.” She unclenched her fist to show him the new bead, still clutched in her hand.
Ondo plucked it from her palm, studied it between thumb and finger. “It's the same as the one from the ice.”
“Why didn't they take it from me?”
“I wish I knew,” said Ondo, “Why are we even being allowed to have this conversation without someone either stopping us or at least explaining to us what is happening? Did you see anything when you were brought here?”
“I think so, although I'm not clear how reliable the memories are.”
“Go on.”
“There was a figure. Tall I think, but the light was too bright to see properly if that makes sense. It was … odd. At first I thought it was someone in an EVA suit, but now I think it may have been some kind of artificial entity, able to survive in the vacuum without environmental protection. A device.”
“Do you have recordings?”
She reviewed the images stored in her head. “Some. They're indistinct. Take a look.”
Ondo watched the images streaming into his brain. “I see what you mean.” He looked puzzled as he refocused on her – but also oddly delighted.
“You recognize this figure?” she asked.
“I don't, but let's say it puts me in mind of stories I've heard.”
“What stories?”
“Odd fragments of folklore picked up here and there around the galaxy. It's probably nothing; I may be seeing patterns where there are none.”
“I assume you noticed the three eyes.”
“Three eyes, three circles, yes. It's obviously a familiar pattern. It's tempting to think that this entity is a product of the same civilisation that built the Depository, but it's also possible you imagined the whole thing. Your mental state was under severe stress when you captured these images, to the extent that even your flecks might have been registering false images as backwash from your biological brain. Extreme oxygen starvation can have that effect.”
“I got to this ship somehow, and I sure as hell didn't
