energy out along each of the interlocking ropes in a way that turned her into the center of a huge psychic organism.
She touched Shanta’s zone, overlapped it to the very center. She touched Prabhyx’s zone, overlapped that, too. Then the As on her remaining sides. She was now the biggest anchor in the entire Substrate.
CANTO’S breath caught.
She was glorious. The fibrous “weeds” had softened and taken on the blue glow of an anchor mind in the Substrate, Payal the nucleus of a huge living cell that had veins and arteries that flowed with energy. The NetMind had given them one final gift before the Psy race burned it out with their terrible choices and their inability to embrace their natures. “You’re magnificent.”
“I feel bigger. Stronger.” Energy pulsed along the veins and arteries, a stunning light show that cleared out all the smog that had erased the clarity of the Substrate.
He forced himself to pay attention to the practicalities. “The thorns, they only attach to the Substrate if an anchor is feeding them energy.”
“Yes. But they’re not feeding off me. More … amplifying.”
A sudden cold fear in his gut. “Can you disengage?”
“There’s no need,” she said. “These weeds—we need another word—are now a part of my anchor point. They allow us to spread ourselves far thinner, because the anchor point will hold as a result of all the tiny anchor points created by the thorns along the way.”
Canto’s mind was pulling him back to his anchor point—because even while he existed in the same physical space as Payal, his anchor remained locked in place. “We need to talk more about this.”
“I’ll follow you to your zone.”
Canto allowed himself to whiplash back to his zone, only relaxed when her mind appeared after his, as normal. Her anchor point might have bloomed into an unearthly entity, but it hadn’t tangled her up in ropes she couldn’t escape.
As she stood watch, he moved into a thicket of weeds.
They closed around him, the tendrils becoming a part of his mind, until he saw why Payal wasn’t worried. He now controlled these tendrils, and as they unfurled, his anchor point grew and grew.
And grew.
“You’re a constellation, Canto,” Payal whispered before whiplashing back to her zone.
The next time they spoke, it was telepathically, both of them in their bodies on the physical plane in Vara, their minds entwined in a dance of glowing blue.
Did you see the small white sparks on the weeds?
Children. Joy seared him. Baby anchors. We can pinpoint them, protect them.
Is this the answer? Can we save the Net this way?
No. It was a terrible thing to say but it was the truth. The Substrate is only one part of the Net. And the rot continues above. Anchors continue to die. But this gives us time to find another solution. Not months. I think two or three years.
We should test it. See if it works for all of us.
They asked Suriana and Arran. Suriana took a deep breath and agreed, while Arran was leery but game. Both soon exclaimed at the acute clarity of their minds, the sudden abundance of life in the Substrate, no sluggishness to it.
Bjorn went next … and he cried. They heard the tears in his voice. “The wonder … My heart aches for the NetMind, this child we broke too young. And still, it watches over us.”
Canto’s own anguish was intermingled with a brittle anger—and sharp shards of hope. He needed to talk to Sophia, see if she was okay with sharing her knowledge of the NetMind’s survival with the rest of Designation A.
Ager they’d left for last, as they were the oldest and most apt to suffer from shock if it went wrong—but they would not be deterred. And the effect on them was the most astonishing of all. “I can breathe,” they said on the comm the day after the experiment, their face fuller and less lined, their eyes bright sparks. “I feel twenty years younger!”
They began the next level of experiments the following day.
Each of the merged As brought in a neighboring A and had them merge, too. All succeeded.
But the real surprise came when Canto said, “Let’s see if we can attach tendrils to each other, so that if one day we do have no choice but to cut the Net into pieces, we can keep the Substrate together so no one anchor starves.”
It turned out Canto couldn’t attach to anyone. But he could be attached to.
“You’re built to be the nucleus of any such