Линда Нагата - Edges

Kona’s early questions returned to haunt him: What will their status be? Will they have a choice of where you go? What you risk?

Urban did not want to submit his will to the choices of others, but that would happen now. He did not want to be responsible for so many lives, but now there was no choice in it.

Kona looked over the bios of all the newly archived ghosts, smiling as he encountered a scattering of familiar names. Over the years, he’d made the mistake of letting too many friendships fall away… but at least he hadn’t left everyone behind.

“You know some of them?” Urban asked, approaching out of an unexpected and undefined distance.

Kona looked up, looked around in confusion. Though the library appeared much the same, his immediate surroundings had undergone a quiet transformation. Clemantine had receded. He was aware of her, not far off and yet only half sensed as she continued to work with the Engineer.

“Have I been shoved off into my own workspace?” he asked.

“Something like that,” Urban agreed. “The library allows for privacy and strives to respond to a user’s shifting focus.”

“Huh.”

“About the engineers,” Urban said. “There are nine in the archive. You’re a better judge of people than I am, so I want you to pick one.”

Kona didn’t have to think about it. “The one we need is Vytet Vahn-Renzani.”

Urban puzzled over this. “Do I know that name?”

“Yes, you do. When you were a child, you knew Vytet.”

“She—” He broke off with a frown. “He… ?”

A distracted moment as they both checked the bio. “ She ,” Kona confirmed. “For now, anyway. Vytet’s a shifter.”

Vytet had never kept a fixed gender. She chose sometimes to be a man, other times a woman, or other, rarer variations. Always experimenting. She would change surface features too: the shade of her skin, the color of her eyes, the structure of her face. Retaining only the basic dimensions of her body.

Urban nodded. “I remember.”

“We’re incredibly lucky to have her here. She’s an exceptionally skilled engineer. Careful, determined, but daring, too.”

Long, long ago, Vytet had led the effort to bring the city of Silk back to life in the desperate early days after their arrival, and she’d made it a better place in the years that followed. The extraordinary passage of time since that age had not diluted Kona’s opinion of her. If Vytet had joined the expedition looking for new challenges, he could surely accommodate her.

“All right,” Urban said. “Wake her. Give her the tour. Help her to feel at home.”

Kona could not remember the last time he had talked to Vytet, or even heard her name mentioned. If pressed, he would have guessed her gone forever into cold sleep, as so many from that age were. Ruefully, he acknowledged to himself that Vytet might have assumed the same fate for him.

He sent a DI to fetch her ghost from the archive. An anxious moment later she instantiated beside him on the library’s surreal blue plain.

Kona smiled in recognition.

Regardless of how Vytet might change the envelope of her appearance, he was sure he would know her by her gaunt height and by the ceaseless curiosity of her gaze. She turned her head, assessing her surroundings with dark eyes set in a sharp-featured face—not a face he remembered. The hair that covered her scalp was short, thick as a pelt, and startlingly white. She stood several centimeters taller than he did but carried far less weight—always too preoccupied to devote sufficient time for the drudgery of consuming each day’s required calories. She’d dressed her ghost in a loose blue coverall and flexible foot gloves. Nothing in her face or figure strongly signaled a female identity but her bio made it clear that was how she chose to be seen—until she changed again.

“Hey, old friend,” Kona said gently. “I was surprised to see your name in the inventory.”

As Vytet’s wandering gaze settled on him, her eyes widened in surprise. “ Kona .” A disbelieving smile. “You’re here.”

“I am.”

She started to reach out, using both hands. Hesitated as if unsure. Then she gripped his shoulders. He felt the pressure of her fingers, registered the confusion on her face. “Ah, this is so strange,” she said. “You look the same as always—”

“And you, forever different.”

“I feel different.” She released him. Held her hands up, studying them, as if looking for a flaw. “We’re ghosts, aren’t we?”

“We are,” Kona confirmed.

“Ghosts in an artificial matrix,” she murmured, puzzling through the situation. She looked at him again and confessed, “I have not experienced this state before. I’ve rarely ghosted, and when I have, I always instantiated within someone’s atrium, riding on their senses. This is different. Very different. By the Unknown God, it feels so incomplete . ”

“Our natural senses are limited here,” Kona affirmed. “But this state is temporary. We’ll resume a physical existence once living space is assembled.”

Something drew her attention. Her eyes narrowed as if to bring a distant object into focus. “I have a new sense,” she realized. “I feel myself standing on the surface of a vast library.” She turned in a circle, scanning the featureless blue plain. “I feel the presence of well-ordered data.”

She reached out, and to Kona’s surprise, a curving side path appeared in response to her beckoning gesture. Files sprang up on the path, each one a thin, vertical pane large enough to step into. The first file in the stack showed a branching map of the library with all its major sections neatly labeled.

“How did you do that?” Kona asked. He could sense the presence of data too, but Clemantine had taught him to use a DI to do his research.

Vytet was too absorbed in discovery to hear his question. “Wondrous,” she whispered reverently as she stepped onto the side path. Then she stepped into a file, and disappeared.

Kona shouted in alarm. “Vytet!”

Corruption and chaos! Why was it possible to step into a file? Was there a flaw in the library’s environment that allowed it? Could the data that was Vytet’s ghost be lost within the data of the files?

No, he told himself. That was ridiculous. The library was surely designed to be used in such a way.

Gathering his courage, Kona followed Vytet’s lead. He stepped into the file—

And emerged into a circular room walled in stacks of horizontal files, much smaller than the files that had appeared on the path. Some were labeled with characters from writing systems Kona did not recognize, but most had labels he could read.

Vytet was there, her face luminous with delight. “This interface is for browsing,” she concluded as she surveyed the stacks. “Look.”

She touched a file with the label Planets . Immediately, it expanded into a doorway that led into a second room walled in more stacked files. She gestured at the room. “Through here, I suspect, we could begin to browse more deeply into the topic of planets. No doubt a chain of rooms will open depending on the specific query. A real planet? A fantasy planet? A gas giant? A terrestrial world?”

But instead of entering, she tapped the side of the doorway. It reverted to its original configuration of stacked files. She brushed the stack, causing it to scroll up. Then she touched another file, seemingly at random. Kona saw that it was labeled Plants . The doorway opened again, but onto a different room, colored a different hue.

“Plants,” Vytet mused. “Another vast topic. There must be tens of thousands of linked rooms beyond this starting point, no doubt cross-linked to many disciplines.”