mindset used for the lock procedure,” says the tinny voice against her temple.
Can you face pain without fear?
And suddenly her resolution wavers. She is in pain, and she is not afraid…is she? Anger begins to burn at the foundation of her mind. Pain without fear, says the anger, that is what you told me, Mother, you said it a thousand times and you said you never lied but here when it counts—
But then some other part of her mind speaks up, and Sarya is shocked to hear it speak in her mother’s voice. You say you are not afraid of this little tickle, says Shenya the Widow. How brave of you! How proud I am. A little dribble of blood and you are not cowering in fear!
But this is not her mother. Her mother wouldn’t say such things. This is her, this is her doubts and fears laughing at her.
You are adorable, says her shame. Why, if I didn’t know better—
Don’t say it.
I would say—
Don’t fucking say it.
You are no Daughter.
From somewhere deeper than any voice, deeper than language itself, Sarya’s rage erupts, screaming. She is small again. She is staring into her mother’s face, its every dark surface gleaming and outlined with white light. She can feel that prison of chitin around her, those smooth-jointed limbs surrounding and crushing her, and she is furious. And once again she hears it before she feels it: the sizzle of her own skin being atomized into the atmosphere of the room. She does not pull away; no, she digs in. She watches that rectangle sink into her arm and smells her own flesh and clamps her jaw on the cry that has clawed its way up from her vocal cords. The mocking voice tries to make itself heard but it doesn’t stand a chance against the rage that burns like a sun within her. Her doubts and fears are garbage in an incinerator—no, in a supernova. I am Sarya the Daughter, says the anger. I was not given life, but took it. I wrested it from the jaws of death itself, and it is mine.
And with this thought in her teeth, she crushes Roche’s finger into her arm and drags it through her flesh. Muscle rips and nerves vaporize into a spray of gas and sparks and now Sarya’s eyes are locked to the glistening surface of her own bone, set in a devastation so complete that she no longer knows if she is clutching the Memory Vault or if her fingers have fallen dead but she will hold this pain in her mind until the end of time if it will prove one thing.
She is Sarya the Daughter, and she faces pain without fear.
“Congratulations!” says the Memory Vault, its globe blazing a violent gold around her head. “Your key has been accepted. Transferring memories now.”
The following is greatly abridged from the original Network article, in accordance with your tier.
NETWORK FOCUS: HAPPY BILLION DAY!
Fewer than a million years ago, the Network celebrated its one billionth Networked star system. Every Citizen species—nearly one and a half million species in total—took part in the festivities, from one side of the galaxy to the other. One billion Networked star systems, each one representing a disc of civilization over ten billion kilometers across. All together, these systems add up to an incredible eight cubic lightyears of Networked space.
That’s one heck of a party!
It’s difficult to imagine exactly how large eight cubic lightyears is.*1 The best comparison is the one we have already made: eight cubic lightyears is enough space to fit one billion solar systems. Therefore it may seem counterintuitive to your limited mind that this massive space is actually a very small percentage of our galaxy. It’s stunning, really: for every one of those eight cubic lightyears of Networked space, there are one trillion cubic lightyears of non-Networked space—and that’s just in this one galaxy.
Now that party doesn’t seem so big, does it?
CONSIDER LIGHTSPEED
In order to fit this massive idea into your limited mind, let us approach it from another direction: lightspeed.
When a photon leaves any one of the stars in the Network, it is traveling rather quickly: nearly three hundred thousand kilometers per second!*2 And yet, at that speed it still takes more than eight minutes to reach the orbit of the average Type F terrestrial planet. In another four hours, it will reach the edge of Network coverage in that solar system. There it begins its interstellar journey. In