point not currently elevated. His identical bodies drift through the Visitors’ Gallery, strangely difficult to pick up even with thousands of sensor feeds to work with. She watches Him gather, intrigued. Judging by His bodies’ trajectories, they have been forming a rough sphere for the past few minutes. They seem to be surrounding something, a point of interest—and then she realizes, with a jolt, what is at that sphere’s center.
She is.
Her body, surrounded with a ringing, spinning Librarian, floats in the center of a group mind kilometers across. Other intelligences drift through this mind as well, but now that she is looking for it she can tell that they are drifting outward, away from the center. The mind is distilling itself, throwing out everyone that is not part of it. Without the benefit of her many points of view, the other Citizen members do not see this mind, let alone its intention; they only feel its gentlest ministrations in the occasional bumps and collisions. For all they know they are simply drifting aimlessly and colliding randomly, but Sarya can now see the truth; they are being pushed. Many of her own drones have already received the same treatment; they report that they are slowly moving away from her, under the influence of the smallest of touches.
Only when Sarya’s body is alone within this mind do its members become fully visible. From the points of view of her many drones, she is a dot surrounded by a dense cloud of identical bodies, a tumbling, billowing, chaotic surge of intelligence. Each body is a meter tall, its white hair drifting in the eddies of the air currents and its golden eyes glinting in the darkness. This is Him. This is the murderer of Humanity.
“You know,” says a single small voice from somewhere in that mass of mind. “I’m not used to spending this much energy trying to kill someone.”
Darkness has fallen, but Sarya is not afraid.
Or at least, not very afraid. She can’t see much with her own eyes, but she can feel the entire Visitors’ Gallery, thanks to her drones. They drift through the colossal space around the mass of Observer, watching new bodies drift in from the balconies and entrances. Observer compresses Himself. He focuses Himself. His selves land on one another, seize one another’s arms and legs, and come to rest in the shape of a massive sphere nearly a kilometer across—and still growing. The other Citizen members in the Gallery swim frantically in air, push off one another, trying to put distance between themselves and this gigantic thing that is building itself in the middle of a Network blackout. Now they see it, and it is a terrifying thing.
“Okay,” she can hear Ace whispering in her biological ears, at the exact center of that dark sphere. “This is not normal, this is not normal, bad things happen when Network disappears, oh Network, this is not normal…”
“Off, Ace,” Sarya says quietly. She has no time to deal with his panic right now. She seizes more threads, breaks them all at once with a skill that’s rapidly becoming natural, and pulls their ends into her mind. In the darkness, the lines illuminate with a wholesome but otherworldly glow. This may be a blackout, but there is still a Network here. Her body may be adrift and surrounded, but her mind is where her power lies, and that mind is growing. She is spreading out over the Visitors’ Gallery, extending herself thread by glowing thread. With every new member she seizes, her intellect grows and time seems to slow a fraction of a percent. Her mind is so large she has to account for the speed of sound in order to synchronize the things she hears. Soon she will have to account for the speed of light. And speaking of light…a sensor, somewhere in her mind, is picking up something important. She hunts for it, filtering, searching—
Oh. It’s her own biological eyes.
That’s her cue. Time accelerates as she pulls herself back, folding herself small enough to fit into her original brain again. She squints and shields her eyes, annoyed at their limitations. She can see—barely—that her body floats near the center of a spherical chamber made of Observer, whose curving walls are a crowd of identical selves. They jostle against one another, each one maintaining its position with the help of its neighbors, the sound of their breathing and the rustling of their tunics merging into continuous white noise.