Линда Нагата - Edges

“Among us ?” Urban asked, selecting this last point from among all the many curious aspects of this remarkable speech. “You’ve made an effort to mimic the form but I don’t hear a heart beating. I have to wonder, if I cut you, would you bleed?”

The avatar smiled again, brighter and more dangerous. “If I choose to.” A gesture that took in Urban, head to toe. “You—your people—hold tight to an ancestral purity of form. A choice I admire. One I’ve encouraged in others. There are so many possible levels of existence, each worthy in their own way.”

“What others?” Urban asked. “Where are these others now?”

“I don’t know,” it admitted. “So much time has passed I don’t know what is left, but I will find them again. Return to them. Re-create them if I need to. I owe them life. I will restore all my players and the world I made for them. This time, as it was meant to—”

It froze, lips parted to frame a last unspoken word. At the same time, a DI dropped an alert into Urban’s atrium that let him guess where the avatar’s attention had gone. He said, “Clemantine is coming.”

“Yes,” the avatar agreed.

Urban used the moment to summon a personnel map. He saw Clemantine approaching up the walk and he saw his own location marked, but there was no indication that the avatar was there with him—an omission he found profoundly disturbing. Had the thing mastered the ship’s information system?

No . No, that wasn’t it. The fault was in the map, designed to track only the locations of the ship’s human company.

He messaged Clemantine: *Wait. Don’t come in.

The avatar spoke in a gentled voice. “You do not trust me and that is wise. Still, I mean you no harm and I have much to offer in return for your cooperation.” A half turn toward the door. “We will talk more later.”

Urban moved at last, crossing the front room as the gel door retracted. Clemantine stood on the patio, head cocked, brow furrowed, looking both offended and confused.

“Stay back from it,” Urban warned her. “Stay away.” He had no idea how physically dangerous it might be.

The avatar looked back at him with an amused smile. Then it inclined its head at Clemantine. “Pardon me,” it said, slipping past her.

Urban joined her. Together they watched the entity stride away, disappearing in seconds around a curve in the village path.

Clemantine spoke in a husky voice, “What was that?”

He hesitated, wondering how to phrase it.

“You were alone,” she said. “I checked the map. There was no one here. So who was that? What was that?”

“You know, don’t you?” he asked her. “It’s been there for years, lying dormant in Dragon ’s tissue.” He turned to meet Clemantine’s wide-eyed stare. “It’s awake now.”

“ By the Unknown God! ” she whispered. Then her voice hardened. “You’re watching it, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Link me.”

He did, just as it stepped off the path, onto the patio fronting Riffan’s home. “Ah, shit ,” he said. He could not cause a camera to bud in the private space of a cottage.

Clemantine took off after it. He followed, a step behind. The personnel map showed Riffan at the amphitheater. Probably the cottage was empty. Through his atrium, Urban watched the entity’s avatar disappear inside.

Seconds later, he and Clemantine reached the cottage door. She pushed through first.

A large sofa on one side of the room. It faced a generative wall that bulged with a half-dissolved human shape wrapped in a translucent membrane. A network of capillaries, swollen into visibility, pulsed as they worked to pump the avatar’s disintegrating tissue into the transport channels of the gee deck’s circulatory system.

“It’s erasing itself,” Clemantine breathed.

“ Sooth .”

“How is that possible?”

Urban pressed his palm against the pulsing capillaries. Generative walls were designed to be harmless to the human and animal inhabitants of the gee deck. The wall responded as it should, ignoring his touch. He said, “Its avatar wasn’t human.”

He drew back his hand. Shock yielded to fury. He had to resist an urge to punch the receding bulge. “It’s playing with us, Clemantine! It’s playing with me .”

“What did it want?” she asked, icily calm.

He thought about it. Reviewed what had been said. Important information had been revealed but he decided that was ancillary to the entity’s primary purpose. “It wanted me to know that for all the improvements in my defenses, I still can’t touch it.”

Only a few lumps remained in the wall.

Urban generated a ghost, armed with his anger and frustration. He transited into the library, summoned the Bio-mechanic.

For once, that Apparatchik appeared worried. He told Urban, “It came out of the ship’s bio-mechanical tissue, entering inhabited spaces through the warren.”

“How could you miss it? How could it grow to that size and you not be aware of it?”

“I don’t know,” the Bio-mechanic admitted. “Not yet. But I will know soon.”

Another aphorism: balanced on a knife edge .

A situation in which disaster will follow the least mistake.

You did not want to emerge this soon, to present yourself to your people.

Still, more than two billion seconds of quiet coexistence has muted their fear. Allowed you to become a mythological figure in their minds. Real but not real. There, but overlooked in the day-to-day. A prospective hazard. A notional threat.

During this interim you worked to rebuild and reorganize this remaining fragment of your mind. You’re nearly complete now, although grossly limited compared to your memory of greater things. No matter. This existence is only a stage, a transitory phase in your recovery. You’ve remembered the machinery at Verilotus. If you can get there, if you can slip in past her vindictive watch, you will level-up many times over.

Before then, you cannot risk an encounter with a god—and there is a surviving godlike being in Tanjiri System. You cannot doubt it. Only such a being could have restored Tanjiri-2 to life and assembled the living moon.

Your people—so bold and brave and curious—do not understand the risk they would take on by going there.

So you walk the knife’s edge. You have revealed yourself to them as an enigma, a puzzle. You will stoke their curiosity, offer them gifts of knowledge, soothe their fears, and persuade them that there is a more worthy target for their explorations.

You must gauge your approach with great care. You cannot command obedience, not yet, not with the second ship trailing within weapons range. In time, as you come into your power, your people will reach acceptance. Until then, you must be wary of igniting a war you cannot win. You must make no mistakes.

Indeed, you decide that “mistake” shall be an undefined concept. You will work to ensure that there is more than one possible path forward. If an action does not produce the desired result, you will change the parameters of the situation to make it right.

“Thank you for coming,” Pasha said, ushering Clemantine into her cottage. “Please, have a seat.”

Clemantine eyed her warily but said nothing as she took one of the two white cushy chairs arranged alongside a garden window.

Pasha signaled privacy screens to close across the door and the windows, cutting off the view of the garden and all outside light.

Clemantine’s finely sculpted eyebrows rose to put a question mark over a steely gaze. “You’re working on a contingency plan?” she asked as Pasha sat down. “Some harsh means to rid us of the entity?”