a few decades, it could reach the nearest of the more than one billion Networked solar systems.*3 If these neighbor systems are near the galactic edge, that same fragment of light will take fifty thousand years to reach the galactic center and twice that to reach the far edge. And if that doesn’t impress you, consider that it still has a twenty-million-year journey ahead of it to the next galaxy of comparable size, and nearly fifty billion years to reach the edge of the observable universe.
Four minutes to your planet. Fifty billion years to the edge of the universe. Feeling small yet?
The scale of reality is yet another reason that Network Citizenship is so vital to every species within it. Within the Network, threats to an individual species are small, understandable—and most important, easily avoided. We know what lies within the eight cubic lightyears of the Network. But what lies outside that, in the vast darkness of the universe? The answer is simple.
We don’t know.
*1 For tiers under four.
*2 Don’t get any ideas: this is far more quickly than the highest legal speed in Networked space.
*3 Of course, if light traveled via Network it could be there nearly instantaneously.
[AivvTech Mnemonic Restoration]
[Stage 0]
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[Welcome to the AivvTech Memory Vault mnemonic restoration process! I am sub-legal intelligence name not set and I am here as your guide to the past. I will be observing your responses and crafting your personalized transfer process to give you the best possible experience. My goal is to keep emotional trauma to a minimum.]
[We will begin with a random memory, and I will use your responses as a baseline to order the rest.]
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#
[Initiating memory transfer…]
* * *
#
Shenya the Widow crouches on a forest floor, a sharp and gleaming shadow in the warm half-light. She is surrounded by giant plant life that her implant identifies as trees, listening to the rustling of their red and gold leaves as they fall, one by one, to the ground. The place is a tumult of color…and surprisingly beautiful.
[See this, Shokyu?] she says internally. [My mother told me that happiness is made of moments like these.]
[I’ve never heard you mention your mother before], says Shokyu the Mighty, the small intelligence in her Network implant. It chose its own name some years ago, and Shenya the Widow has always found its choice amusing. It is her own jest, of course; a sub-legal Network implant cannot earn a title. But one may be lenient when dealing with small intelligences.
[I would not expect you to understand the complex bond between Mothers and Daughters], says Shenya the Widow, heading off her implant’s analysis before it happens. She imagines the hard-edged face of her own mother as she says it.
But the little intelligence cannot be stopped. [I wonder why you’re reminiscing so much], it says. [Perhaps you’re getting old. Or lonely.]
Shenya the Widow has had much practice in ignoring her implant’s impudent questions, and she does so now. She is not old, she is barely in her second century. And she is not lonely. She is relaxed, she is carefree, she is lightyears from the pressures of civilization, and she is doing what she loves. And she is being paid for it! What more, quite honestly, could any Widow ask for?
“Hello?” gurgles a muffled voice beneath her. “About done here?”
[Uh-oh], says Shokyu the Mighty. [It’s intelligent, and it speaks Standard. This means paperwork.]
Of course it is intelligent, little idiot. Its obvious intelligence is the reason Shenya the Widow visited it like a thunderbolt from the treetops. And of course it speaks Network Standard; in all her travels Shenya the Widow has never met an intelligence who does not. Even out here, lightyears past the frontier of Networked space, one should expect to meet Standard speakers—if one meets anyone at all. No, there are stranger things about this creature than its intelligence and its language. The fact that it has only four limbs, for example: two upper and two lower. The fact that it is disgustingly soft, inside out from a Widow perspective, with the skeleton on the inside of its horrible pale flesh. Look at it, small and defenseless, not even a meter tall when it was standing. It stares at her with gleaming golden eyes under the white tuft of hideous growth atop its head—