It was qis voice, of that I had no doubt, but slower, richer. Rencki had always been fast and light; but some of the urgency of limitedbattery power and overclocking processors seemed to have vanished from qis tones. I wondered what qis core was now, what kind of atomic reactor fuelled qis contemplations. I wondered if qe was still qimself, when everything about qim was changed.
“I am very grateful – very grateful indeed – to see you. Is see right? To be inside you? Either way, I am grateful. But I have to know how you came to be here, Rencki. We were lost. We were lost. How did you find us? And why,” I tilted my chin across the dark to the waiting darkest of the Slow, “is qe here?”
“That is at once both simple and difficult to answer,” Rencki replied. “The simplest version is this: I have been waiting for you. The more complex version would involve predictive mathematics and modelling, which, frankly, is so far beyond my capacity as to make my circuits sluggish merely contemplating the simplified form of it. But perhaps it is enough to say: the Slow has been waiting for you. Out here in the dark, qe has been waiting – I do not know how long. Qe wants to speak to you. Maw? Maw, you appear to be distressed. Would you like to sit down? I do not have many facilities for organic comfort, but I am in the process of recovering your ship, and there may be items there that bring you emotional relief. Maw? Are you well?” And then, the question, the oldest question: “Maw, are you safe?”
“Yes, Rencki,” I snuffled, though I was falling apart, inside and out. “I am well. I am safe.”
“Good. I am sorry. I have removed much of myself that was attuned to organic emotional needs. But I trust you know that if you want anything, you only have to ask.”
“No. I’m fine. Honestly. I’m fine. It’s just been… it’s been a long time. It’s been… long. I thought I would die and then die and then keep on dying. It has been… I don’t know how to express what it has been. I don’t know how to explain any of it.”
“When you are ready, I have prepared a shuttle. Flight time will be ninety minutes. There is no rush. You can rest.”
“We are not talking over comms?”
“No. You are extraordinarily lucky, Maw. The Slow has invited you inside.”
A part of Rencki piloted the shuttle.
It was a smaller part, running on the shuttle reactor, and at once I could hear the slight speeding-up in qis voice, the elevated brightness of the Rencki that had to watch qis charge. Qe was still networked to the ship, to the original Rencki, which was now a great floating vessel drifting in the night, but as we travelled across the dark, that connection grew slower, thinner, and so a smaller Rencki, a sharper Rencki – a Rencki that I thought of as almost younger – emerged as we flew.
The shuttle had no furniture. It was purely a vessel of utility, designed for the transportation of goods. Nor was there a control panel, nor view ports, nor anything for me to see, or touch, or do. Instead Rencki chatted away as we moved across the dark, relaying the experience of becoming what qe was now – a combat support frigate, specialising in refuelling of far-off vessels on long-term assignment – and how it had felt when qe downloaded qis memories into the mainframe, how that experience had changed not just qim, but the entire operating system of qis kind.
“We saw the end of a world, you see,” qe explained. “A thing no one had ever seen before. And we asked ourselves: what would we want to be our legacy if this happened to us? If all that was left of us was a story, what would we want that story to say? We have thought about that for nearly thirty years, and it has redefined what we prioritise in our algorithms, our predictions, our reactive parameters. We did that, Maw. Just by witnessing, we did that.”
“You sound proud.”
“I am. I know there are cultures that would find that distasteful, but I am proud. I think Gebre would be proud of us too.”
I didn’t answer, and Rencki let the silence sit a moment. When it became clear that I had nothing more to say, qe added: “Would you like some music while we travel? Something familiar?”
“No thank you. I think… I am all right, just sitting here.”
“If you are sure.”
“I am. Thank you. I am.”
I do not know how we entered the Slow, if some piece of qim opened up and swallowed us whole. I did not even know such a thing was possible. All I know is that at the end of our journey, the back airlock of the shuttle opened, and I stepped inside, and then it closed behind me, and opened up into the dark.
Chapter 57
There is a single light, shining in endless blackness.
I head towards it, because what else is there to do?
The air smells of…
… nothing.
The temperature is…
… nothing.
It feels like nothing against my skin.
My feet echo on a smooth black surface like polished stone, and the echoes seem to bounce around for a good long while, but I cannot see walls, or ceiling, or where this cavern starts, stops, ends.
Only the little light ahead.
