“Ondo, I've identified how Concordance triggered your aberrant behaviour. The restructuring of your engrams is spreading. I've slowed it down by suppressing your metabolic activity as much as possible, but I can't stop it. I have two options: cauterize that whole chunk of your mind or attempt to completely restore your head from backup. I mean, from the you that I'm now talking to.”
The tone of his response was pure Ondo: he wasn't alarmed, or angry. Instead, he was fascinated by the suggestion, intrigued to know whether it could work. “I've never attempted such a procedure. All the data we need is in your head, in this me that's talking, yes, but to reimage the physical structures of my neurons in that way would be extremely risky. The mind is so fluid, its patterns in constant flux.”
“We'd have to accept there wouldn't be a 100% success rate, given that the process couldn't be instantaneous. There'd be some … blurring, perhaps some duplication or data missed. I think it gives us a better chance of restoring more of your mind. These are not normal times; we're about to fly into a black hole on a dying ship while a Concordance battlefleet pursues us. There are no risk-free options at this point.”
He saw immediately the flaw. It encouraged her enormously that he was able to do so. “The engram exploit will be in the copy, too. We'd be restoring that as well as everything else.”
“Except, we know it's there, we know which chunk of apparently junk neuron-encoding is actually their encrypted code. I don't know how it functions, but I should be able to filter it out during the transfer.”
“You can't be completely sure where the exploit ends and my original brain structure starts.”
“That's the risk. I'll need to put you deep under, trigger the transfer and let it run. You're going to be out of it for a long time. You obviously may never recover; we may end up with a mind-image that is simply inviable. I think the decision has to be yours.”
“If we do this now, and assuming this Tok individual has survived from millions of years ago, I'll be missing the most incredible encounter of my life.”
“Thanks, I'll try not to take that too personally. If the process works, and if we survive, you have my word I'll give the real you full access to every sensory recording I capture of what happens.”
He gave her his assent to begin, without any more debate. She uploaded a copy of his engrams from her brain into the Dragon's med systems, and set about preparing his brain for its restructuring. There were existing procedures in the suite's catalogue that she could make use of, although they hadn't been designed to achieve anything so comprehensive as a full brain reimage. They would have to do. She took a fresh copy of his current brain patterns – carefully quarantining it as infected – then sedated him as deeply as she dared, reducing his brain activity to a bare minimum. Then she instructed the system to begin its work.
She watched him as the procedure began. The muscles of his face winced and contracted subtly as connections in his brain were severed and reconnected. The flashes of expression passed across his features with alarming speed. Would he come through this? It was very possible she'd never be able to talk to him – the real him – again.
She squeezed his hand tight, although he couldn't possibly be aware of her touch, then turned and left the room.
She became more and more aware of the shudders rumbling through the Dragon's superstructure as they flew. The alarms that appeared to be carefully engineered to shred her nerves sounded almost constantly. They were deep into another expanse of Dead Space, and she could almost taste the ship's revulsion at what they were doing as a bitterness in her mouth. The vessel's agonies were her own. She found herself looking at the flesh of her hands and her sides more than once, expecting to see physical wounds there. The Dragon fought against its ingrained instincts. It endured. More than once, Selene went to stand beside Eb's couch in his sanctum. His eyes were closed as he concentrated on the inner battles he was fighting. As with Ondo, brief expressions of agony flashed across his features as he completed each stage of the complex sequence of metaspace jumps. Once, he whimpered out loud like a child with a high fever. She wished she could do something, lend him her strength, but she could not. There were three of them on the ship, but they were each of them alone.
In the end, she stood on the cartography deck, watching exterior reality, monitoring the tactical map of their progress. They'd lost most of their Concordance pursuit, none of the Cathedral ships being capable of traversing the dead zones. Only a pair of Void Walker craft clung to them. She wondered if there were AIs on those craft going through the same ordeal that Eb was.
They all emerged, finally, in a region of normality that was completely encased within a sphere of Dead Space. It was the eye of the storm: in its very centre lay the black hole their journey had led to. It might almost be an eye: the central blackness with its iris of superheated, glowing gas around it. The object was alarmingly close, the distortion of spacetime and the gravitational stresses on the Dragon already significant.
They began to power towards the singularity under reaction drive. They would rapidly reach the point where the thrust wasn't needed; the black hole would clutch them harder and harder to itself. They would then be irrevocably trapped – with only the Dragon's swoop capability giving them any hope of returning to normal space. She checked on Eb again. He was calm now, at least, but
