Линда Нагата - Edges

She closed the doorway again. “I could wander happily in here for ten thousand years!” She reached for another file.

“Vytet,” Kona said, holding out a restraining hand. Urban had urged him to help Vytet feel at home, but clearly she was going to master this bizarre environment far faster than he. “Vytet, there will be time for all this. Right now, we’ve got a complex project to undertake, and we need your skills.”

As the warren neared completion, Urban assembled resurrection pods in each of the four residential chambers. Soon after, he awoke, his newly grown body held close to the chamber’s curving wall, prevented from drifting in the absence of gravity by luminous white, warm ribbons of wall-weed.

The flattened tendrils lined the entire chamber. Most were short, ten centimeters, their soft glow the only source of light. They swayed in concert: slow, beguiling patterns designed to stir the air as they absorbed pollutants and regenerated the oxygen content. For several seconds Urban made no move, content to watch the hypnotic motion, to breathe, to exist.

The wall-weed, this chamber, his living breathing avatar—all roused in him a sense of wonder. When he’d hijacked the courser, he had not imagined a day would come when he could exist aboard it as a physical being. He had thought it impossible to establish a human outpost amid the hostile alien tissue—but time had extended his ambition. Now his plans, his hopes for the future, were becoming actualized, real at last.

He stirred. The extended tendrils of wall-weed that held him sensed the intent in his muscles and retracted. He kicked free, brushing away the sticky remnants of his resurrection, grateful to be alive and even happier knowing this avatar’s existence would not need to end in some short time.

A gap opened in the wall-weed, enough to allow clothing to bud from the wall’s generative surface. He dressed quickly and hauled himself through the chamber’s gel door, eager for company.

In her virtual existence, Clemantine could tap the ship’s senses and perceive its mass, its relative motion, its ever-growing distance from Deception Well, its position among the stars—factors that assured her of the reality of her situation, as strange as that still seemed.

But when she woke into physical existence, that reality felt tenuous. Nothing in her tiny residential chamber anchored her to a specific place or time. She might have been aboard Long Watch , or even back on the Null Boundary Expedition—and wasn’t either option more plausible than resurrection in a chamber stashed deep within the bio-mechanical tissue of a Chenzeme warship?

She entertained the possibility that she was caught within a strange corrosive dream born out of want and madness and information decay. A head game that made her heart beat a little faster.

Then her atrium connected to Dragon ’s network. Immediately, she created a ghost and sent it to the library. That ghost sent a slow-pulse of subminds back to her, effectively linking her again to the ship’s senses, affirming the reality of her existence aboard Dragon . She sighed in relief and then messaged Urban: *You there?

*Waiting for you , he answered with no perceptible delay.

She dressed in the simple clothing and quiet colors she preferred, then hurried to join him, speeding down the empty passage outside her residential chamber. A U-shaped turn brought her to a common area she called the forest room.

It was an expansive space, with room enough to play in, and nooks around its perimeter to contain cozier gatherings. “Up” was defined by a projection of a pergola entwined with a climbing camellia that became real wherever its branches descended; chips of bright blue sky glinted past dark glossy green leaves. “Down” was a floor of light-gray cushioned tiles imitating the look of sandstone, but with a soft texture. White panels rose halfway up the side walls—a visual cue to separate accessible space from the projection of a sunlit forest that lay beyond.

Clemantine had engineered the forest room so that the brightness and angle of simulated sunlight coincided with ship’s time, now late afternoon. She was last to arrive, coming in just behind Kona. The relief of her renewed physical existence demanded contact so she touched his muscular shoulder. He turned to trade a quick hug.

“Thank you for this,” he told her. “It’s beautiful. A welcome respite from the library.”

“A work in progress,” she said.

When Dragon began to accelerate, they would have a sense of gravity. Until then, they had to put up with zero gee. So why not try to enjoy it? She kicked off to join Urban and Vytet, who were already bouncing and tumbling in the open space beneath the pergola.

Vytet had traded her ghost’s coverall for silky soft-brown pantaloons and a creamy tunic with deep pockets, a contrast to Urban who was, as always, dressed in snug trousers and a long-sleeved shirt, both in utilitarian dark gray.

Happily, his mood was brighter than his clothing. He saw her coming and reached for a pendulous gray-barked camellia branch that snaked to meet his hand. The branch became rigid just long enough for him to pivot off it and launch himself toward her. They met in a whirling embrace. Traded a quick kiss before she pushed him away.

“Go make me breakfast,” she ordered, baring her teeth in a fierce and playful grin. “I’m starving.”

“Already done.” He twisted to kick off the ceiling. “I’ve ordered breakfast for everyone.”

They gathered in a large nook on the side of the forest room. Distant birdsong could be heard past the soft rustle of wind in the canopy. The light shifted as clouds drifted past the face of a simulated sun. Bulbs of water and sweet juices budded from the ceiling, low-hanging fruit, ready to pick.

Clemantine plucked a pink bulb. Sipped it as she hooked a foot through a stirrup. Guava, she decided—then pasted the bulb to a pedestal table, freeing her hands to accept a warm bun passed to her by Urban. She bit into it to find a spicy protein filling inside bread rich with calories.

Calories were the cost of physical existence. Though they had retained the look of ancestral humans, internally they were highly evolved. Hosts of Makers inhabited their bodies, continuously repairing damage to their cells and protecting them from infestation—and consuming energy to do it. Their atriums burned calories too, at a terrific rate. So they were burdened with more demanding metabolisms than their ancestors, making frequent large meals a necessity, and an important part of their social culture.

Clemantine took another bite of the bun, relishing the taste of spice and fatty oil. “You were always good with a fabricator,” she told Urban, deliberately bumping up against him.

“Hey!” he objected as water squirted from the bulb in his hand.

A dart glided out of the forest, unfolding into orange and brown butterfly wings that swept forward to embrace the water globule, corralling the spill. The artificial creature released a jet of air that changed its trajectory, sending it to the pergola overhead where it shifted back to a virtual object, and then fluttered out of sight.

“Nice,” Vytet said with admiration.

“Butterfly tenders,” Clemantine told her. “I found the pattern in the library.”

More buns emerged—an easy food to eat in zero gee—and fresh fruits in bite-sized pieces stacked in edible, transparent tubes. Colorful blocks of dense jellies too, packed with nutrients and calories.

Clemantine could not resist playing with the butterflies that swooped among them. By blocking the slow-moving creatures from their task of gathering escaping crumbs, she could induce more butterflies to emerge. Urban joined in, the nook fluttered with wings, and for a few minutes, laughter prevented eating.