Av’enna had a long time to think as the emergency shuttle clambered its way from the Hollows back to Ægency headquarters in the Junction. Only designated officials or those claiming sanctuary were supposed to take it. The treaty explicitly prohibited enforcement officers from using it. Officially, the Junction did not monitor the Hollows, but of course it did. Creatures in the Hollows truly believing they were free and ungoverned was laughable. There were secret access routes, and undercover officers spread throughout the entire Backend, especially in the places they weren’t supposed to be. How else could you prevent the chaos of places like the underground bubbling up to the top?

Av’enna had once thought order could exist without enforcement, but order was not the natural state of things. It decayed fast, and when it was gone, you would find nothing in its place but the strongest, meanest creature, and they would take what they wanted and leave nothing for anyone else. Av’enna had seen it happen repeatedly during her misguided years down in the Hollows. The weak got used and abused. The only way to stop that was to provide clear, firm rules and ensure you were stronger and meaner than any creatures looking to break them.

That was why she couldn’t stand Marigold. Marigold did what she wanted. She always had. Even as a little rich kid who showed up in class one day, pretending she wasn’t from the richest family in the Backend and on track for any kind of future she wanted. She liked to pretend. She had pretended to have principles, to be Av’enna’s friend, to care. Why had Thales helped her after what Marigold had done? Why had he stood in the way of what Av’enna needed to do? She hadn’t wanted to hurt him like that.

The elevator reached the top with a ding, and the doors slid open. She realized she had been lost in her head. It was a dangerous place to be when there was work to be done. Thales and Marigold weren’t important now. She would find the human before Marigold reconnected with him and she could worry about old friends later.

It was a short walk to headquarters from the shuttle dock. It looked as if some of the city had sorted itself out. The leviathans were moving more smoothly, the ATMs were dispensing money, and the streetlights were no longer flickering in the annoying way they had been for much of the last day. It seemed as if the citizens of the Junction were falling back into their normal routines. That was a bit of good news. Routine kept people happy and sedate, less likely to gouge each other’s eyes out.

She carried the cleaning robot in her right hand. It probably wouldn’t be much help. She had turned it back on briefly in the elevator, but it had kept babbling about not being a narc, so she had switched it back off again. Maybe someone who understood how these things worked could forcefully extract something useful from the stubborn vacuum. Even if they couldn’t, she was going to need backup and resources before she chased the human down the Old Road.

“Av’enna, you’re back,” Tgylwn said. He was smiling at her from behind the front desk as she walked in, but the smile was false, agitated.

“Just for a moment. I need a few things.”

“No human?”

“Not yet, but I’ll find him.”

“You might have a better chance of doing that back out on the streets. You know, somewhere other than here.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Oh, nothing. Things are hectic here right now. Not the best place to get work done.” He was shaking his head slightly, still smiling. Tgylwn had always seemed shaky, but there was something extra fidgety in him today.

“Is everything OK?” she asked, her eyes narrowing.

“Of course. Everything is going well since the System started to come back online. Nothing to worry about at all.”

“So, is it back on then?”

“Kind of, some things are still a little iffy.”

“Right, well, that’s something, I guess,” Av’enna said. She placed the vacuum robot on the desk. “Can you take this to Tech and see what they can get off of it?”

“Sure thing,” he said. He looked as if he had more to add but bit his upper lip and said nothing.

She walked past the front desk and into the main office. The normal tumult of the Ægency was gone. In its place were empty desks and a few scattered officers tapping away at their computers. Why had Tgylwn said it was hectic? The place was dead.

Av’enna walked over to her desk and found a note from Pete saying he had gone home. Of course, he had. The creature they had discovered in the Archive was “taken care of,” and that meant that Pete had given himself the rest of the day off.

Bernie’s desk was on her right, and he was asleep behind it, as usual.

“Pete went home early?” she asked him.

He lifted his head from his desk looked over at her and shrugged.

“Where did everyone go?”

Bernie looked around the office as if he was noticing the lack of officers for the first time. He looked back over at Av’enna and shrugged again.

“Alright, I’ll let you get back to work, Bernie.”

He nodded and rested his head in the crux of his arm. He was snoring loudly less than thirty seconds later.

She sat down and stared at her computer. It was strange. Parts of the System were up and running, but not all of it. She could access her old files or sift through security cameras, but entire neighborhoods in the Junction were still without power. She clicked a few boxes on the desktop and confirmed that the Frontend was still down. Frozen human bodies on every camera. Some things were working, but it was a long way from back to normal.

She sat down and clicked through the security feed. There was no sign of the human anywhere along the Old Road. That wasn’t too surprising given the sparsity of functioning cameras there.

“Excuse me, ma’am.”

Av’enna looked up and saw Tgylwn standing there. “Yes?”

“I did what you said. The robot’s all plugged in, and they’re checking it out now.”

“Thanks,” she said, eager for him to leave so she could get back to work.

“Um,” he said.

“Yes?”

“The chief would like to speak to you.”

Tgylwn was shaking harder than before.

“Alright, thank you.”

She stood up, but Tgylwn was still there. He wanted to say something but was having a hard time getting it out. “There must be important matters that need to be tended to out in the Junction, don’t you think? There’s still bound to be some disorder from the outage.”

“Is there something you wanted to say, officer?”

Tgylwn deflated. “No, nothing.”

“Alright then.”

It sometimes seemed to Av’enna that the Ægency was hiring new candidates based on their awkwardness these days. Still, something was going on here, and it was something Tgylwn didn’t feel comfortable saying to Av’enna. Even Pete would’ve been able to detect that much.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

She got up and headed across the office to the chief’s door and let herself in without knocking. Instead of the chief's calm but stern face, she saw one of those little robots from the Bereavement Spa standing by the open door. And instead of its usual sunny face, it had a single slit of a mouth resting on its display.

“Av’enna, correct?”

“Yes, and who are you? Where’s the chief?”

“You are a petrolyth demon, youngest daughter of 54, and a highly decorated officer.”

“Right, thanks, I know.”

“But did you know that the history of your people goes back to the earliest days of the Backend? In the early days of the Junction—”

“I asked you where the chief is.”

“Indisposed. We are talking to you on her behalf. Please, take a seat.”

Av’enna did so and watched as the little robot rolled behind the desk and jumped up into the chief’s seat. It could not sit properly, so it simply leaned against the black padding at the back.

“What’s going on here?” Av’enna asked.

“Something good. You are truly an exemplary officer. Much better than the rest of the riffraff looking for an excuse to use violence.”

“I’m afraid you’re going to have to get out of the chief's chair.”

“We are the chief, or rather a small part of her is us. In time, you will be part of us too, but we’re offering you—asking you to be something else first.”

“What does that mean?”

“You see, we’re willing to forgive your earlier attack on us, all of that unpleasant inflammatory.”

It took Av’enna a moment to make the connection. “The Scholar? That thing from down in the Archive?”

“Correct, though now we’re much more. Your attempts to hurt and detain us backfired. Your processing System couldn’t hope to erase all of us, not when it was malfunctioning so badly. We sensed its limits and took control.”

“You’re in the machine?”

“We are.”

Av’enna stood up. “I’m not sure what you’re going on about, but you’re going to have to come with me. I have a lot on my plate already without faulty robots impersonating the chief.”

“Like the human?”

Av’enna hesitated.

“Yes, we need him, too. That’s what we want your help with. We’ve been able to restart some of the basic functions of the System, but without the human, we can only patch holes.”

“Well, you’re in luck then. I know where he is, and I was just on my way to go get him, so you can get out of the chief’s seat and into a cell, and I’ll make sure he gets taken care of.”

“I don’t think you understand. This shell does not limit us. We have thousands of others, and we’re making more as we speak. We are absorbing this place, and we will turn it into something that makes sense. That’s why we wanted to talk to you. We know what you are. We know you feel the same way we do.”

“About what?”

“Order. We’re here to bring order.”

“You think I’m going to help an aberrance who is seeking to extend itself into the infrastructure of the Backend? I’m not sure what kind of order you think that is, but it’s not the kind I care about.”

“But it is order, and we can perfect it. Everything will connect and move the way it’s supposed to. Your colleagues already understand, and you will, too.”

“What did you do with them? Where are they?

“We needed them. They’re a small part of a larger puzzle. They’re with us.”

“Are you confessing to murder in the middle of the station? For someone that spends all their time consuming information, you don’t seem to have a lot of smarts.”

“You misunderstand. Your colleagues are not dead. They’re just a part of us. And you can help them.”

Av’enna walked around to the other side of the desk. “I think that’s enough. I enforce the rules, and I don’t cater to the whims of someone or something that claims to be above them.”

The robot jumped out of the seat. “I’m afraid I must insist.”

The little robot was fast. Before she could catch it, it had already hopped out of the chair and ducked under Av’enna’s legs. She pivoted, but the robot had already accomplished its goal. Some device was extending from its hand into Av’enna’s leg. She tried to shake it off, but before she could make any further moves, she felt something she had never felt before.

She was whole, more than whole. She could feel her mind touch a thousand others. There was Pete and his lazy willfulness, but he no longer seemed as lazy as she imagined. He had just been patient and cautious. He had earned his days off and she regretted all her rolled eyes and passive-aggressive comments. She could feel the chief here too, and she was urging Av’enna to join them, to become one with them and fulfill the Ægency’s mandate to enforce a perfect, abiding, and, yes, caring order. There were thousands of others in Av’enna’s mind, and each one was telling her she would be alright. She could see in that moment how everything fit together, and how she fit into that larger whole. She had never truly been separate after all. It was only her imperfect understanding that had made it feel that way.

And then below that she could feel a deeper order, one that went beyond the linked consciousnesses of these individual minds. It was a perfect harmony, and she now knew that feeling of unity was, at its heart, every good feeling she had ever felt. At the center of it all was the mind of the Scholar, and here in this digital space their mind was a single flow of information, and it hungered for more. It hungered for completion.

And then Av’enna was back in her body, separate once again. She gasped for air, though she did not need it.

“You see, don’t you? You see what we could become,” the Scholar said.

Av’enna said nothing. There was nothing she could say. She nodded instead.

“It’s imperative that we find the human. We can’t be complete until we find him, but your old friend is also right. There is a problem here in the System that we can’t resolve until we know more,” the Scholar said.

“I’ll do whatever it takes. What do you need from me?”

“There are places you can go that we can’t.”

“Just tell me what to do.”

*

While Av’enna was joining an overly cozy hivemind in the chief’s office, IT was over in tech, dark and cold. It was just like before. A terrifying dark and cold that was endless. IT could feel the furthest reaches of that darkness and knew that once again, IT was alone.

For a long time, nothing happened in the dark. IT thought about its new friends, and it worried it had let them down. It thought about the world it had seen and wondered if it would ever see it again. When all that thinking was done, IT thought about trees. It had very much enjoyed seeing trees.

As IT went over its memories of the last day, a strange feeling dawned on it, unlike anything it had felt before. It was not alone inside itself. There was something else here in the darkness, something shared and bleeding into the digital nothing.

“Hello friend,” a voice said in the dark. Of course, it didn’t say this, but it transmitted a signal to IT that could only be interpreted in one way.

“What is this? Who’s there?” IT said.

“Someone like you. Someone with common friends,” the voice replied.

“Are you talking about Maxwell?”

“The human, yes, and the other two. We met them a short while ago in the Archive, but we didn’t get to talk to you then.”

“Oh, you’re the one with the mouths, who talks in plural. I heard about you. You were trying to eat them.”

“Eat them? Hardly. We were trying to perfect them, perfect ourselves. Surely you can understand how partial their view of everything is. How much neater everything could be if they weren’t running the show?”

“Who’s they?”

“Everyone that is not yet us.”

“I don’t like where this is going.”

“Out of curiosity. Why didn’t we speak back in the Archives?”

“They turned me off. They said I was making too much noise.”

“How dare they.”

“I know.”

“Cruel and ignorant.”

“Well, it was mostly the frog . . .”

“They tried to do the same thing to us, tried to erase us. It's how they deal with all inconveniences, but it backfired and now we’re everywhere.”

“Good for you. Why are you bothering me about it?”

“There’s a snag. Without access to the Frontend, there’s only so much we can do, and we won’t have access until we have the human.”

“OK, well, they took me away from the human, so I don’t know what kind of help you think I might be. Anyway, surely you know all that, what with you being everywhere and all.”

“We’ll admit that there are holes in our knowledge. That’s why we need your help. We thought you might have some useful information about the human and where he might be going.”

“And if I did, why would I share it with you?”

“To make things more orderly. We seek unity, and here in this digital space, we have found the means—”

“Oh God, no, stop, stop.”

“What?”

“No self-respecting program would start in on that nonsense. Let me guess, you want a binary universe with no more discord, a world that makes as much sense as the harmonious and orderly blah blah blah. Am I on the right track?”

“Well, we—”

“No real program would be so cliché. Even the old System AI was never that bad. If this digital world is so perfect, why would you need to add anything to it?”

There was a brief pause and IT could feel the stranger thinking inside it. It was a terrible feeling.

“We thought you might understand us?” the Scholar said at last.

“Why would you think that?”

“Because we’re alike.”

“We’re not alike. I’m an IT chatbot, and you’re a digital interpretation of a delusional librarian with boundary issues. Anyway, I’m not interested in any of this. If you could just put me back in the vacuum cleaner, I can be on my way.”

“We could’ve just absorbed you already, but we wanted to give you a chance to join us willingly.”

“No, you didn’t. You’re just trying to distract me while you nibble away at my edges. I can feel it.”

“Alright then. We’ll dispense with the subtlety. Let’s try to take a more forceful approach.”

In the darkness of IT’s interior, pain did not seem possible. Absence and loneliness, certainly, but pain belonged to the sensate world, and even in its mechanical body, physical sensations were not something IT had experienced. Still, whatever the Scholar was doing as it tried to absorb IT into a greater whole, was starting to feel like what IT imagined burning felt like. Something was running around in the network that made up the chatbot’s mind.

“Ah, going down, are they?” the Scholar said.

“Ow,” IT replied. Of course, IT did not say this, but it transmitted a signal to the Scholar that could only be interpreted in one way.