seizes onto those words as if they were handed down from the goddess herself. Their meaning doesn’t even matter, she is so thankful to see anything at all—
“Sarya?” says a plaintive voice in her ears, startling her. “I know you didn’t call me but your biometrics are crazy right now so the system called me and here I am but I can’t help you because I can’t find the Network and also there’s this weird gap in my memory like I was gone for a while and the last thing I remember was this huge silver thing coming for us and oh Network I’m scared—”
“Stop!” she gasps. As annoying as Ace’s voice has always been, this time it’s brought her back from the edge of panic. She can hear. She can breathe. She is alive.
“Okay,” says Ace quietly. “It’s just…I’ve never seen a Network blackout before. I mean—”
“Ace,” she says before he can get rolling again. “Where am I?”
“I don’t know!” he wails. “I can’t tell and I really think I’m going to lose it if I don’t—”
“Stop,” she says again. “Okay? Just…stop.”
You can go where I cannot, says a memory in her head, to the dark regions of the galaxy. Maybe it wasn’t a hallucination. Maybe she’s already been dropped into one of those regions. Is this her first task, when she begins earning a second chance for her species? If so, shouldn’t she be…goddess, a little more prepared?
And then there is light. And with the light comes a thunder so incredible that she can feel it shake her very bones. The light is far away, but it’s slowly spinning around her—or she is spinning, perhaps. She tracks it with hungry eyes, squinting as she tries to make out what she is seeing. It grows larger in waves, in one identical section after another, and the more illumination there is, the larger this structure seems. And finally it’s beginning to look familiar. She’s seen this before, this is—
“Oh goddess,” she whispers.
She is floating, with millions of half-lit Citizen members, kilometers above the floor of the Visitors’ Gallery. That’s what the roar was; it was drifting multitudes coming to the same conclusion. And it is a horrifying conclusion: when you are in zero-g, every direction is down—and in this case every down means death. All around her, distorted by emergency lighting, they thrash. They reach, with what limbs nature and technology have given them, toward anything that looks like safety. And almost without exception, they scream.
She is still being taught, she realizes. Network may be not found, but It is still instructing her. This is chaos. This is what It was talking about.
“Okay,” says Ace, still sounding shaky. “I think I’ve figured out where we are. We’re in the—”
“Visitors’ Gallery,” says Sarya tightly. “We are floating in the middle of the Visitors’ Gallery, in a goddess-damned Network blackout.” This is not at all what she expected to come back to. The dark regions of the galaxy indeed—this is literally as close as you can get to the beating heart of the Network. All right, fine. She twists her body, as far as she is able, to look in all directions. The nearest bridge is a good ten meters away, and it’s not even below her—whatever below means right now. And in the direction she would normally call below—she swallows and averts her eyes.
“Maybe it’s just me,” says Ace quietly. “Could it be just me? I mean, it wouldn’t be possible for everybody to fall off the Network, right? Because that would mean—”
“Look around,” Sarya says quietly. “Does this look like Networked civilization to you?”
Panic is an ugly thing. It strips away the intellect, tier by tier, and reduces the most civilized being to an animal. These intelligences are not acting like intelligences at all, in fact. There is no communication between the thousands of different species represented in this space. There is only fear, and panic, and violence—good goddess the violence, what are they doing to one another? She watches, horrified and spellbound, as terrified intelligences collide with each other, tear each other apart, send one another sailing into bridge supports and inactive Network drones. Their common language is gone. The mundane trappings of the Network, the threads that bound them to one another—it’s all gone. Network has disappeared; in its vacuum is nothing but fear.
And then Sarya realizes, with the largest jolt of her short second life: holy goddess, she can see. She can still see