Save us. That is what we told it. Make us endless Gardens, and save the Human animal from extinction.

~,~’~{~{@ ((●(●_(ө_ ө)(Ο_Ο)(◌_◌)_●)●)) @}~}~’~,~

Old Bess was tired of meditating. It was restful in some ways but utterly dull in others.

Some of her interest had been rekindled when Kanen’eh asked her to create a “Mind Fortress.” Unfortunately, as interesting a name as that was, it was equally dull. All it was was an imaginary place, one only she could ever go to. It was a place that didn’t exist that she filled with other things that didn’t exist to remind her of important stuff. That might have been interesting, except she wasn’t supposed to share it with anyone.

What was the point of imagining something interesting if she was the only one who ever saw it? Who needs doors or walls when the temperature and weather can be whatever she wanted? Why even have weather?

Kanen’eh told her it was an “anchor point.” It was a place for her to touch base before, during, and after meditating. He said it would be important, but she couldn’t for the life of her understand why.

“I think you are ready,” Kanen’eh grumbled, his voice enough to call her out of her meditation. The noise of Manifest Destiny, with people working and machines humming to keep them all alive, rushed back to her, though it never really went away.

“Ready for what?” Old Bess asked.

“To separate yourself from your mind,” he said. “In waking, and even in meditation and within your mind fortress, you have had strict control over your mind. You speak, and it listens, no?”

“Right,” Old Bess said hesitantly. “I’ve kind of just been telling myself what to do. It feels really forced,” she admitted.

He nodded. “Your inner voice. Most have one, though I have met a few who do not. For your next task, I want you to play a game. You have placed objects within your mind fortress. Now you shall imagine that someone has entered your mind fortress and hidden something. Your goal is to figure out what has been hidden,” he said.

Old Bess stared at Kanen’eh dubiously. “How am I supposed to hide something from myself?” she asked incredulously.

“By separating yourself from your mind,” Kanen’eh insisted. Old Bess wasn’t very familiar with Viribus facial expressions, but she thought the flick of one of his ears was smug for some reason. “I felt the same way when my teacher, my –“ he said something with a softer whooshing sound in it, a Viribus word, “- first gave me this task, I was also skeptical. For you, I think I shall not do what my teacher did and leave you for six months to ponder the puzzle for yourself. I will only give you a suggestion and a hint: Imagine your shadow is the one doing the hiding, and do not make the mistake of assuming your inner voice is a part of your soul.”

“That’s it?” she asked incredulously. “I’m supposed to somehow hide something from myself, that I put in my mind fortress, and then find it again? But if I’m the one who-“

“You will not be the one who hid it,” Kanen’eh snapped with a dismissive flick of his claws. “Your mind will hide it. You will find it,” he insisted.

Old Bess didn’t quite sigh or groan, but she took a deep breath because that’s what she wanted to do. Instead of arguing it further, she set to return to her meditative state and the comfort of her ideal apartment. By now, Old Bess could relax each part of her body in only a few moments. She hardly needed to imagine the water or the basin. And despite the rapidity of the exercise, it didn’t fail to align her intents and thoughts.

Soon enough, Old Bess could picture her mind fortress, her apartment – but better.

It hadn’t been a large apartment, a single room with a kitchen and sanitation station shoved next to each other, and a bed that folded against one wall. In Old Bess’s mind, the apartment had expanded, but not by so much that its cozy closeness was lost. The bathroom, kitchen, and bed all had their own dedicated spaces now, each cleaner than they’d ever been in reality and of higher quality.

Some of it was junk, a backdrop that didn’t matter much. Old Bess spent a long time considering the other ones, though.

The sheets on Old Bess’s bed had been a gift from Brettn: something with a thread count she never could have afforded – neither could he, but he’d stolen it for her, which was sweet in its own way.

A book of recipes was in the kitchen. Old Bess never owned anything printed, but the idea of bound books had always held a romantic corner of her heart. And she liked good food, so it went in the fortress too.

There were clothes, too, in a hamper near the bed. They were a reminder of the career Old Bess had had for as long as she could remember. A passionless job that was only a bandage over the real problem: sleepless nights and waking up in cold sweat with no memory of the fear that had summoned it. She’d been in brothels for as long as she could remember, running errands at first and only allowed to sleep in the whores’ beds because they pitied her. It hadn’t gotten any better when she’d started doing that work, too, but the extra money let her have her own little apartment.

A media player sat on the floor, with colorful data-cards scattered nearby. The Singer had never given her something like that. If anything, the Human had been more impoverished than Old Bess had ever been, but the music was the important part. The Singer had loved to sing and hum. Even when they’d both been in a horrible, cramped, and dim prison ship. Her voice was the gift she’d given to Old Bess, so she’d added something for that.

She’d tried adding a window because she wanted to add a meadow outside. But she couldn’t figure out how the grass was supposed to look on the ground. At first, she’d just imagined concrete with grass on top of it, like it had been glued there at the bottom. But it didn’t feel right, so she gave up on the idea and got rid of the window and the meadow. The door stayed, but it would never open.

Plenty of stuff, plenty of detail, she hoped, but how to hide something without knowing where she’d hid it?

Kanen’eh had said her inner voice wasn’t part of the real her, her soul. But how was that supposed to work? Her inner monologue was a constant drone. Even that thought was rendered in plain words only she could hear. She could almost feel the muscles in her neck and mouth when she thought words. Like she was talking to herself, just not out loud. And it wasn’t just something she could shut off. Even just imagining walking across the room first originated in the words that reflected the action’s thought.

And what about her shadow? Frankly, she wasn’t sure she’d had one until the thought crossed her mind. It was one of those details that got left out of meditative trips to her mind fortress because it was a detail that generally went unnoticed during her day.

With a thought – accompanied with her inner monologue – she stepped to the side, and her shadow stayed where she’d been standing. She imagined, or more like commanded with her inner voice, for the shadow to stand up off the floor. It moved, staying the right size in her vision but still stuck to the walls and floor as a shadow – now with the vague impression that it wasn’t lying on the floor.

“This isn’t going to work,” she grumbled – or rather, thought. “You’re just like a puppet. I’m still the one moving you,” she said, again, in her mind. The distinction was subtle; it was speaking and thinking. It only made her feel silly. Why have a conversation, even a rhetorical one, when she didn’t have a partner?

It didn’t even have a voice. It’s not like it could talk back in anything other than Old Bess’s voice with Old Bess’s words.

On impulse, she gave the shadow her voice. She wasn’t even sure how she’d done it, but something changed.

The moment she’d decided to do it, it was gone. Her inner monologue disappeared, suddenly enough that the silence that suddenly accompanied her thoughts felt deafening and smothering. Panic started to close on her heart, and a disturbingly familiar fear crawled into her bones.

“Don’t worry, you’ll get it back when you leave,” Old Bess said. Her voice, but not her words.

The voice hadn’t necessarily come from any other direction than it had before, it was still her inner monologue, but she turned to look at her shadow anyway. It tilted its head at her in the way that Old Bess did when she wanted to play off a wry comment as something cute, and Old Bess hadn’t been the one to tell it to do that.

“Wanna play a game?” Old Bess’s shadow asked with a barely contained smile in her words.

Old Bess didn’t get the chance to answer, her eyes snapped open without her intent, and the meditative state slipped away from her.

“An interesting expression on your face, but if I’m not wrong, not uncommon among students,” Kanen’eh commented. His ear flick was definitely smug. “Go back, find what is missing,” he instructed.

Reluctantly, Old Bess closed her eyes again. Relaxing her body took much longer this time. She was tense and hesitated. Before, her hesitation had stemmed from disbelief, but now it was fear. She didn’t feel like she was in control anymore. It felt like a nightmare.

When she had finally slipped back into a meditative state, the fear had subsided along with her beating heart, her breathing was calm. But the mind fortress was changed.

She could have changed it back in an instant, she knew where everything was supposed to be, but she didn’t. If she followed that impulse, then she wasn’t sure she’d have the courage to give up control like that again. So instead, she looked. It didn’t take long to figure out what the shadow had stolen.

The Singer’s music player wasn’t where she’d left it.

~,~’~{~{@ ((●(●_(ө_ ө)(Ο_Ο)(◌_◌)_●)●)) @}~}~’~,~

“Thank you for the flood,” Eabha recited.

“No, no,” Mason panted behind her. "Food. Thank you for the food,” he corrected.

“Thank you for the food,” Eabha said, more careful this time with the pronunciation. “Why the hell are the words for food and flood so similar?” she grunted as she pulled herself up over a ledge.

“I don’t know,” Mason said between gasps of air as he struggled to follow her. His arms shook, even though he didn’t carry any of their supplies.

“Let’s take a break,” Eabha suggested with a sigh of relief as she set down their supplies on the ledge. She turned as soon as she could and helped settle Mason onto the shelf as well.

Stolen story; please report.

“Rest,” Mason recited for her between breaths, and she repeated the strange Viribus word as she sat with him.

Climbing the structure was not so easy as Eabha had hoped, and Mason struggled at every step. Between his old injuries and a brief stint of starvation, it was little surprise that he’d lost whatever muscle he’d been born with. She could see red spots on his silk clothes, barely healed injuries pulled open again by the climb.

Eabha wasn’t doing much better. Between a bundle filled to the brim with as many silkworms as they could boil and the copper cauldron tied to her back, her entire body ached. At first, they’d hoped to just fill the cauldron, but the silk could not seal the cauldron, and Eabha couldn’t even walk without sloshing the water out.

Mason had divined a different solution, surprisingly. Instead of filling the cauldron with water, they filled it with strips of silk soaked in water. The silk remained impossible to tear with her bare hands or teeth, but a more thorough search through the Viribus detritus uncovered a bone knife that could cut the silk. Soaked silk couldn’t hold as much water, but it didn’t slosh.

Still heavy, though. Very heavy.

“Here,” Eabha huffed as she retrieved a strip of soaked silk, “drink.”

He took the rag and sucked the water from it between gasps for air. His hands shook, and she could see the muscles in his arms struggle just to lift the wet rag to his lips.

Something warm and sweet brushed across her shoulders and across her face. A breeze, she realized with a start. It was distinct and soft against the cold and rough sterility of the air she’d been breathing for as long as she could remember. She spun to try to track the smell. Eabha felt like she could feel it settling across her skin as she realized that it could only be from outside, heavy and humid.

Eabha’s arms and legs suddenly trembled with the desire to keep moving, all tiredness forgotten. She felt her heart and her breath quicken in her chest. She wanted to go. She wanted to follow that breath of something new more than she’d ever wanted anything. But her breathing came up short as her chest tightened, and a familiar ache took hold of her heart: she couldn’t just run off.

“It’s going to take me a little while,” Mason gasped as he hesitantly rested a hand on hers. “Go,” he said with a weak push in the direction of the warm wind.

Eabha spun back to look at him, but he’d closed his eyes and rested his head against a pipe that was cold and lifeless. His breathing was still fast, but there was no chance he’d fall. And he had the supplies with him. And she felt like if she didn’t start moving now, her legs would just run off without her.

But one of those earlier moments rattled around the back of her mind. Another disappointing excursion into the confusing tunnels and rooms. And Mason. Crying. Bloody.

He patted her hand reassuringly, and she hesitantly asked: “You promise to wait here for me?”

“I promise I’ll be right where you left me,” he huffed. There was a wheeze in his breath.

It was a frail promise, and she wasn’t sure if she believed it. But so long as she only went as far as finding the opening and came back, Mason would probably be fine.

She jumped up to the next ledge directly from where she was crouched, supplies left behind her as she scrambled up the pipes and greebles. She found an actual ladder and followed it for a few meters, but it soon tilted and disappeared into a wall. She ignored it and followed the feeling of warm wet air across her bare shoulders farther up.

As with most of the structure, the twisting ladder echoed familiar architecture but lacked context and purpose. It was like it was just there because that’s where something that didn’t quite understand what a ladder was for thought it should go.

She climbed until her arms and legs started to burn again, which didn’t take long but was almost as much progress as she’d made carrying supplies and watching Mason like a hawk. She climbed so far that the pipes and greebles and senseless attempts at compensating for human mobility ended, and there was only a solid wall of metal. It wasn’t even lit, though the only consistent part of the lighting in this place was how inconsistent it was.

Still, she couldn’t see an opening. There was no sunlight through a crack in the wall. Just a crystalline wall of cold steel that hung over her head at an angle. She could practically feel the weight of it as she slammed the palm of one hand against it and felt nothing. No tremor or tone that might have hinted at how thick the barrier was between her and what she wanted.

It could be miles thick for all she could tell, as unyielding as a mountain.

But the breeze persisted, stronger now. Eabha could smell trees, and grass, and pollen, and the metallic scent of coins held in hand.

Eabha followed it with her skin and her nose. She trusted the subtle shift of vellus hair across her shoulders and the tantalizingly new scents in her nose as they guided her to a break in the tightly woven structure of supports and tubes and wires under the metal ceiling. The opening was wide enough that she didn’t need to bend down or turn sideways, but it was surrounded by sharp-edged vents that sucked at her toes and fingers as she carefully walked across them.

And then she saw sunlight. Eabha couldn’t put into words what was different about it or what exactly told her that it wasn’t artificial. Maybe it was something in the brightness or a subtle understanding of the frequency of the light the structure’s diodes emitted.

She ignored the sharp edges of the vents as they cut into her feet and pushed forward. The light that reached her was only a reflection, but she looked up, and the metal ceiling parted there. She could see layers and breaks in the metal where toothed doors waited to slam shut at the smallest provocation, but she could see blue at the top.

The parting wasn’t wide, but it was enough that both palms only just met opposite walls. Eabha could climb it herself, she realized, and in the next moment scrambled upward with only the friction of her hands and feet against the smooth walls to hold her up.

The metal was indeed layered, the outer parts of her mind pondered, almost drowned out by the desperate need to climb out that the innermost parts of her demanded. The chimney was interrupted every several meters by a square segment that ran for the next few meters. The walls of opposite sides looked like they could mesh together in an interlocking pattern, and that same detached part of her wondered if they were some sort of palisade. Eabha counted twenty-one of the palisades. She stopped three times to rest her arms and legs on the thin ledges those breaks created.

She vaguely wondered at the purpose of the palisades, if they were to keep something out. It didn’t matter, though. Eabha wanted out. And if they were open, then that was all she needed to know as the sliver of the blue sky slowly filled her vision.

The chimney was partially shut at the top by a panel that screeched in protest as she pushed on it. She wasn’t sure what she would have done if she couldn’t have opened it, but that anxious thought was dismissed as it slammed open.

Then she was out.

The sky was such a rich and deep blue, she almost felt like she would fall into it if she let go. But only for a moment.

Then her eyes followed the subtle purple gradient of the sky, and she had to scramble her way out of the chimney to find the source. Purple and orange and red gave way to a green richer than she’d ever imagined. Orange-red spears pierced through fingers of green leaves taller than she dared to comprehend. She could see the ocean and the sun like a puddle of metal that was still too hot to look at directly, but only the barest sliver. The colors peaked through the leaves in other places below her, but she could not see what threw the light back through the glare and the pillars of green. There were mountains too, bare and brown, that reached out from either side like the edges of a gigantic bowl.

The sunset was beautiful.

The wind was warm, and Eabha felt it tug at the silk wrapped tight around her chest. It played in her hair and stung at her eyes as she stared out toward the setting sun. She wished the wind would blow harder, that it would pick her up and carry her higher. She could smell the greenery below her, and compared to the sterile air within, it almost burned in her nose. She almost felt like she could fly.

And then Eabha leaned just a bit too far out from the chimney, she half expected the wind and the light to hold her up, but her foot slipped.

In an instant, panic swept Eabha away from her joy and peace and replaced it with the gut-wrenching reality of gravity. The structure’s walls were too steep to stand on, and they were slick with water and unnervingly smooth. Where the chimney’s smooth walls had offered grip and steady support, the outer walls only battered her on the way down. It was not a sheer drop, thankfully, but she had no hope of slowing herself as she tumbled down the outside.

And the metal below her only grew wetter as she fell. What was just moisture at the top became rivulets, which became a steady sheet of water that carried her along. She only realized she’d been screaming when she finally hit the bottom of the slope, and water filled her mouth.

The water slapped her back as she slid into it and punched the air out of her chest. In the next moment, it rushed in and down her throat, choking and cold. She scraped her face across the ground below the water and twisted around in panic as she tried to get her feet under her. The water flowed and gently dragged her along.

Eabha coughed and gasped as she felt herself surface on her hands and knees. The water was deep enough that even on her hands and feet, only her head managed to break the surface. The current was slow but strong. The danger suddenly over, she lurched onto her feet as she coughed the water out of her lungs and snorted to clear her nose.

She braced herself, briefly, for the tumbling and pain to continue, but it never came. Other than the panicked thump of her heart in her ears and her ragged attempts to suck down air instead of water, it was quiet. The water trickled around her and tugged at her silk covering as it meandered down a slope she couldn’t detect.

Embarrassing and painful.

Eabha stumbled as she tried to take a step. Her panic of drowning had hidden the pain before, but she could finally appreciate how battered she was with the danger passed. Her knees and elbows felt like they’d spent several minutes under the gentle ministrations of a jackhammer, and her back and face felt hot in strips. Soberingly, she wondered if she’d scraped off one of the disks attached to her spine or a part of her face, and the pain just hadn’t registered yet.

“Fuck,” she hissed as she took another step and bashed her toes against a wall. She fell forward and caught herself on the edge of a stone wall. Her elbows felt like they were creaking as she braced herself against the edge of what she now realized was a shallow canal. She groaned as she reached up to pull her hair out of her face and frantically flicked water away from her eyes.

Something ceramic shattered, and Eabha’s eyes snapped open as she turned her head to face the sound. Her breath froze in her chest, and her heart pounded as panic returned, and she realized she wasn’t alone.

~,~’~{~{@ ((●(●_(ө_ ө)(Ο_Ο)(◌_◌)_●)●)) @}~}~’~,~

At first, it was overwhelming.

It was like dipping her head into the arctic ocean, and the cold flowed up through her spine to freeze her brain. The flow was strong, too. If the Singer wasn’t careful, it swept her away.

But every now and then, she found something. A voice, whispering past the rush. Or a pattern of light, like pressing her palms against her eyes until she could see spots, but they spelled out words or flashes of images. Trillions of written and spoken words flashed by her perception, some of it she even managed to read.

It was raw information: A Library.

She trawled through hundreds of hours of music and video. Read fifty thousand pages of websites that didn’t exist anymore. Absorbed documents and reports and manuals that were stamped with vaguely familiar governmental seals for countries she now knew didn’t exist anymore.

The information wasn’t all academic or even coherent. There were moments where the Singer was sure she was reading DNA in a way that allowed her to picture protein folds. Lines of ones and zeros that she somehow understood as synthetic equivalent, encoding molecular blueprints for machines the size of a macromolecule. And impressions of something so vast and complex that she felt like the terms alive and dead were at once oddly appropriate and distractingly unable to encompass the concept in a satisfying way.

All of it in seconds, or maybe decades, she wasn’t sure.

It didn’t matter, though. The Singer didn’t feel tired. At times, overwhelmed and frustrated by an inability to understand or place what she saw in context. But she was never tired or bored. The next time she swept away to something equally transfixing, and the frustration was forgotten only to be renewed again by what she saw.

There was so much, and she wanted to see more of it. She could almost fit together what happened. She was so close to knowing, but it wasn’t enough.

Why?

Why? Why? Why?

It didn’t make sense, and she needed to know. Each time that question slipped across the surface of the Singer’s brain, the flow of the Library swept her away again.

And then, like surfacing from the rapids, it stopped.

The Singer could still feel it, just on the other side of that hole in the back of her mind. She could hear it and feel it like Niagra falls right outside the window of her house.

She could feel her breath in her chest, ragged from between her lips. She only realized she was shaking when she opened her eyes to see the polished wooden floor under her knees. She hadn’t summoned the sensation of that falsely familiar floor, but she welcomed it alongside the smell of moist dust. They were things she remembered from a home she’d never lived in, but they were comforting.

Crouched on the floor, she didn’t look past the baseboards to the ancient papered walls. She just breathed in the familiar smell and clutched at her head. She knew it wasn’t real for some reason, but the sensation of her fingers through her hair still manifested itself. She wanted to cry, but she could not command her body to do so.

“Diaspora,” she shakily whispered instead, mostly just to hear the sound of her own voice. It wasn’t real, though. It was just the voice in her head.