“A refugee from the Hunker Down worlds. A Bishop.”
I have heard of them. There were some in a ship a long time ago, yes? I overheard spiral waves propagating down the field gradient, carrying frequency-floating messages for them.
“That was about my grandfather. You’re a, well, friend of the Magnetic Mind?”
I stream-team with the Mind. You could say that I am a subsectioned part of it. The Mind itself is the theme. I am a variation within it.
Walmsley said stonily, “That’s the best anyone can do.”
Toby searched the hovering strands of blue but he could see no pattern. “Where is she?”
I am dispersed. I express as tangled knots of flux spread over volumes. It makes for a slow life.
“But a happy one,” Walmsley said. Toby caught a sad, sour note floating beneath the dry irony. Walmsley’s leathery face gave little away but he had a sense of how this man had limited his pain with a cutting humor.
“What . . . happened?”
“She picked up something from the wormhole. Like a virus. Perhaps mech-made. It slowly took apart neural networks.”
“So she . . .”
“Aged, in a way. Lost her self, so slowly it was like an excruciating exercise in remembering who she was, just to look at her. She—”
Walmsley abruptly clamped his jaw tight, staring straight ahead. “It was subtle, I’ll give them that.”
Toby thought of Shibo, a woman now long dead and surviving only in some chips he carried. Slivers of her still flitted like darting small birds through him, but he could control those. “No way to . . .”
“Save her? No tech for it.”
Do not mind him. I owe this to the Old Ones. They made it possible, imposing my patterns on a form of maglife.
“They recorded you?” Toby remembered the Killeen he had seen on this same parapet. A sharp, clear representation, but after a while it repeated patterns.
Recordings have limits, recursions.
“So do people,” Walmsley said archly.
“She doesn’t seem like a, well—”
A narrow pattern? I am not. I am—as far as I can tell—the person I started out as. Evolved, of course, by experience.
“Experience I haven’t had the privilege to share,” Walmsley said crisply.
Don’t listen to him. He complains because I can’t sleep with him anymore.
“Not a small issue, I should think.”
No, lover, it isn’t. You know what I mean, though.
