The Whole smirked and said nothing. Their stony eyes fixed absently on the passing rock formations.
The more I studied that other body, the more my heart ached. I had forgotten it was possible to feel such a powerful sense of belonging. It had been so long since I’d felt this safe that I could barely recognize the sensation—but at the same time, a tension crept steadily into the air between the two of us. I was going to have to tell the rest of me what I’d done. I had no way of knowing what they would do with me once they knew.
We’d climbed so high that the sun’s red disk was visible again along the horizon, and the air around us was perfectly clear. Below us and in every direction, the canyons and towers of rock were rushing by at unbelievable speed, and then suddenly the entire landscape was closing out of view at the far end of an entrance tunnel, and I craned my neck sharply to stare around at—
At what? My senses reeled. Abruptly my brain couldn’t parse any of the information my optic nerves fed it. I saw a dark space full of liquid shape and moving lights and people, but I couldn’t find any of its edges. My head ached from trying to grasp its geometry.
“It really happened,” I gaped. “The intelligence explosion. Our singularity! It happened, didn’t it?”
“Sort of,” the Whole responded. “What’s that word? Sanctuary. That’s what I would call what you see. In Euclidean space, we’re still just above Redhill—except we’re safe here.”
We moved along networks of interconnected shapes: spires of unidentifiable machinery, root systems bound by overlapping membranes, glistening organelles through which irregularly shaped corridors and rooms were vaguely discernible.
“This is more than I could ever have done in five years,” I murmured.
The movement of human bodies cast blurry shadows on that nacreous, translucent material, and there were hundreds of them—many hundreds. We slowed until I could see them more clearly. They wore simple, formless, gray tunics. They were all the same short height.
“Something wrong?” the Whole asked me, reading my expression.
“Children?” I stammered. “You’ve unified with children?”
They shook their head, embarrassed. “No, you misunderstand. I grew them all myself. Switching from mainly adult bodies to young clones enhanced the quality of my consciousness more than I could tell you.”
“What? But . . .” I grasped for words. “Enhanced in what way?”
“Many ways.” My other self smiled giddily, as if they had been itching to tell someone about this for a long time. “Their natural neuroplasticity lets me learn much more quickly than I could before, and I’ve genetically modified them to increase their cognitive abilities. They need fewer resources and require less upkeep than full-grown bodies. Above all, they think much more clearly: they never crave sexual release or romantic attachment, and controlling the conditions of their prenatal development lets me eliminate a range of other impurities.”
“Impurities,” I echoed.
“Differences,” my other self clarified. “Innate instincts. Epigenetics. Disparities of development. Mosaic abnormalities. Generational trauma. You know—all the things that create dissonance between brains in the gestalt.”
I didn’t dare to question the Whole aloud, but a knot tightened in my stomach at everything they told me—at calling difference ‘dissonance.’ Unity sounded worse than hollow to me if the component minds within it were all hardwired to agree with each other. Unity was about difference—and yet the immensity of the Whole’s sanctuary, the staggering genius and scientific mastery that swirled all around us, intimidated me into silence. Bit by bit, it all lulled me into the comfortable assumption that I just didn’t understand what my other self was telling me.
“You must have hundreds of them,” I muttered.
“Three thousand, nine hundred and eighty-eight.”
I tried to stifle my shock as I tried to mentally calculate. “That would mean—”
“Yes?”
I took a deep breath. “At that rate, you would have stored tens of thousands of years of aggregate memory since I lost you! You’d gain over an hour of experience every chronological second.”
The Whole’s faces frowned slightly. “If my bodies were separated, yes, but they aren’t. For me it’s been only 592 subjective years since you were last part of me.”
I shook my head. “I still don’t understand.”
“All my bodies are always integrated,” they said. “I never break unity. I’m always whole.”
We sat there in nervous silence together, my other self and I, both trying to process my disbelief. I groped for words and said, “But . . . how do you engage with other people?”
I thought I saw the Whole shudder at this question.
“If I ever need to know anything about separate people,” they said, “I can learn it easily in nodespace, or observe through my eyes. My exophased drones, I mean. I have tens of thousands of them deployed at the moment. You saw one at the hilltop.”
Alexei must have encountered one of those drones in the sky over Antarka, I thought. I wasn’t sure I blamed him for mistaking it for something divine.
The Whole added distantly, “The eyes are all I need. Separate people are much too dangerous to study in person. You learned that the hard way.”
I tried to read the body next to me, to guess at what the Whole was feeling, but their eyes only stared out into the luminous maze of organic machinery around us: blank, pensive, inscrutable.
Our flying plate arrived at a larger platform and fused into it. The air pressure around me adjusted gradually before the bubble lifted and ambient sounds rushed in. A low, all-surrounding thrum. Moving air.
The Whole stood and reached down to help me up, but I was afraid to take their hand. I only stared strickenly out into the technological starlight that seemed to stretch away forever.
“You’re safe here,” the rest of me said. “You don’t have to worry about the Keepers. They’ll never harm anyone again.”
I was going to ask what they meant, but then I remembered. The abandoned mission at Crossroads
