alone lovingly construct them. Roche, on the other hand, has gone to great lengths to retain complete control over his life…and death…and next life…and so on. Each time he dies, his next body is ready. His—and Phil’s—last conscious moment flits across the Network like a delicate insect, coming to rest in its new home. There it experiences a beautiful awakening: for it is made new, filled with verve and vigor. The old body, meanwhile, is free to be ripped apart by a panicking beast of burden or disassembled and sold to pay a debt, blown into homogenous protons or pounded into a thin metal sheet. All of these things have happened at least once. The mind, this dual pattern that calls itself Roche and Phil, has gleefully survived them all.
And I wouldn’t trade it for anything, says Phil.
Let’s not get sentimental, thinks Roche.
And now the borrowed gravs have brought Roche within a hundred meters of the ceiling. This is, quite possibly, pushing the limits of what take them for a spin could be construed to mean. He drifts here for a moment, just enjoying the precariousness of his current position. He’ll have to return to the shop eventually, but for now he spreads his senses over the cubic kilometers of the Visitors’ Gallery. Up here, interestingly enough, the crowd is more homogeneous. The top dozen balconies—each of them twenty kilometers in circumference, at least, are almost entirely filled with members of a single species. They are small, bipedal, all dressed identically—actually, now that he takes a closer look, they are completely identical. High-tier group mind, most likely; they always get the best apartments.
Uh oh, says Phil. We might have missed it. There was a Network response over a minute ago. Guess where.
Missed it? How could we miss it?
I…got distracted.
Roche is not angry at Phil, exactly; he is angry at himself. Some might say that works out to be the same thing. Here he is, full kilometers from where he should be: the arboretum. He prepares to dive. He could be there in minutes, even if he sticks to the speed limit. He feels the tickle of his gravs powering up—
And then something happens that Roche and Phil have never, in any of their sixty lifetimes, witnessed. From the ceiling meters above to the floor almost invisible below, every light is extinguished. In Roche’s head flashes a warning, danger-colored.
[Network not found.]
With fingers she no longer possesses, she holds on to her sanity. Her mind floods with sensations. She cannot even begin to organize this information; it’s pure white noise. Her mind is overloaded, a snowflake in a solar flare, an insect in a supernova. She is deluged with color; these are infinities of tint and hue that she’s never imagined. She is crushed by sound, a billion cacophonies compressed together and shoved into ears she doesn’t have. She is being touched, caressed, stabbed, stroked in a billion spots. She is stationary. She is spinning a million times per second. She is hungry, thirsty, sated, nauseated, dizzy, solid, liquid, gas, plasma—and then a trillion information feeds snap into focus, and she screams.
You asked Me to blow your tiny little mind, I believe? says Network. Did that do the trick? Welcome to My mind, little one. This is what it feels like to be an unimaginably small percentage of Me, the largest intelligence ever to grace this galaxy.
For a moment she is sure her mind is broken. She waits, frozen, as more information than she suspected existed in the universe blows through her. The Blackstar is laid out before her, larger than she ever comprehended. She saw it as a point once, in that gigantic display at the top of the Visitors’ Gallery. It was a pinpoint in a web so large that her Human mind refused to process it, linked to a million other pinpoints by uncountable strands of information. She was aware at the time that she did not come close to grasping its complexity, and yet her mind shrank from it. Now she knows without question that she is amplified a billionfold, her mind running at an unimaginable scale, and she has just realized that this one single point of that vast web contains more complexity than the web itself. She has become intelligent enough to realize how limited she really is.
And yet she is a goddess. No secret is hidden from her. Three hundred ten trillion, one hundred forty billion, sixty-one million, fifty-three thousand, nine hundred