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Chromis Pasqueflower Bowerbird stood, dressed in her full congressional regalia, and hesitated.
This is ridiculous, she told herself sternly. It's no different to summoning a transit caul.
Except that it wasn't, of course. From one point of view -- that of the real Chromis -- she would step straight back into her normal life. Rudd Indigo Mammatus had insisted on hosting a reception to celebrate the success of the Memorial Project. Even those who had initially been opposed to the scheme had come round; indeed, now that the idea that sending a gift to the Benefactor was widely seen -- thanks to just a little memetic seeding in the more volatile constituencies, and some good old-fashioned outright propaganda -- as proving the Lindblad Ring to be more civilised than many of its neighbours, those who had originally opposed her were among those most keen to be seen to be fully in support now.
But from another point of view, a copy of her personality would be stored in the black cube in front of her, far from the largest but certainly one of the most dense concentrations of femtomachinery ever assembled. She looked at the Vitruvian Man on its surface -- it had all the appearance of a dumbmatter etching but was in fact a carefully controlled fractal contouring of the otherwise perfectly smooth surface -- and considered the fate of the cube, and her simulacrum. From here, the cube would return to the special forge vats that had been built for the project, to make the first copy of itself -- a horrifyingly slow process by any normal standard, taking several megaseconds. It and its twin would make two more copies, the number of cubes doubling and doubling again for over a year until all 1024 forge vats were running full time. Only then would the cubes, complete with their payload of ersatz Chromises, start to be distributed around the galaxy, and far beyond.
The probabilities had been calculated. Even if material support for the project continued for the full planned four millennia, the chances of any of Chromis's copies getting to meet Bella Lind herself were slim indeed.
But not zero. What would it be like, to meet the Benefactor?
It was with Bella Lind's face fixed in her mind that she made up her mind, closed her eyes and summoned the scan.
* * *
She opened her eyes again, and Bella Lind's face was still there, somehow even younger than the one she knew from the transmission.
Against all the odds, it had worked. She was the copy. Beneath the level of her simulated consciousness, she could feel the arcane workings of the cube's operating systems, waking themselves up from an impossibly long sleep of self-repair. The single coherent strand of it she could grasp was that the DNA match was confirmed, though there were anomalies in trying to reconcile it with the neurological manipulations the cube was doing to project Chromis directly into the Benefactor's auditory and visual processing centres. She began to put together an explanation of how what the cube was doing was creating the image of her that the Benefactor, and the Benefactor alone, was seeing.
But before she could complete the thought, the Benefactor smiled broadly, and said, "Hello, Chromis."
Chromis was, for a moment, genuinely shocked. How did the Benefactor know who she was? Unless ... The ideas blossomed into her consciousness faster than she could keep up with, supplied by the cube's systems. The project had not only succeeded, it had beaten the odds more than once.
"Hello, Bella," she said. Then she ventured, "I take it we've met before? Or, rather, you have met a different version of me."
"It's been a long time," Bella said. "A very long time."
* * *
Chromis was aware that what she perceived as her conscious mind was only a thin layer on top of a seething mass of femtomachinery. The processes going on beneath her level of awareness still contributed to her perceptions, however: a sort of gut feeling for a creature that no longer had any sort of digestive system at all. And, as her simulated self listened to Bella's explanations, she felt a distinct sense of uneasiness building within her.
Outside this room were a group of aliens, representatives of some of the more important players in a grouping called the "Antispinward Mutuality", an organisation whose many antecedents included one that had previously been known as the "Shaft Five Nexus". It was members of the Nexus -- an alien race they had dubbed the "Fountainheads" -- that the human colony on Janus had first encountered on their arrival at the Structure.
"Of course, the Fountainheads didn't tell us exactly where we were at the time," Bella said. "It was you -- the other you, I mean -- who put us right on that."
Chromis wanted desperately to ask Bella what exactly had happened to her previous self. But there were more pressing concerns. The previous encounter -- from the disjointed hints Bella had given her, it had been several centuries back, during which Bella had spent various amounts of time in suspended animation, and undergone several rejuvenation treatments courtesy of the Fountainheads, and more latterly, using techniques the humans had reverse-engineered -- had alerted the aliens to the abilities and knowledge contained in the second cube that had been uncovered.
"Did you explain to them?" Chromis asked. "That's that why I'm here. To help decide if you're ready for the information I contain."
Bella's smile was thin. "That's what they're worried about. That your determination might not be the same as theirs."
"I see."
"They sealed me in here with you," Bella said. "This chamber is hermetically sealed from everything else in this Arbitration Ganglion. Don't ask me how, I don't understand. Nor do I understand the containment techniques they intend to use if they're not happy with what they hear when I emerge. But I do believe that they meant it."
The sense of disquiet Chromis that had been gnawing at Chromis began to make sense: it was the fact that the femtomachinery was not merely incompatible with the alien technology, it couldn't find any significant technology to interact with at all.
She had stepped straight from her triumph into an alien prison.
"I thought I had inferred that humanity was a member of the Mutuality," Chromis said.
"We are, but not all members are created equal," Bella said. "The politics of the Mutuality are ... complex. There's a lot of jockeying for status involved: how long you've been in the Structure, how developed your civilisation was when you came here ... We don't exactly rank highly on either score."
Chromis thought she understood. "But I represent humanity at a much more advanced state."
"The things we learned from you the first time -- and from the Fountainheads, once the cat was out of the bag -- gave us all sorts of insights. And set the stage for our great quixotic triumph." Bella flicked on a simple screen, one that would have been considered primitive even in her native time: Chromis's femtomachinery could barely tell it was there at all. "This is why the Mutuality tolerates us."
Chromis could tell that Bella was transfixed by the images, and not only because her very existence was predicated on reading Bella's mind.
"What am I looking at?" she asked.
It was a succession of still images, taken from further and further away.
"Your new home," Bella said eventually. "There was a ... a crisis." She looked away from the screen, but not at Chromis directly. Chromis could sense that this was related to the loss of her previous self, but there was something else as well, something that correlated with the strange brain patterns she had detected when she had first awoken. "We were ... manipulated. Janus exploded, and tore a hole in the Structure. In the aftermath ... The hole self-repaired quickly, but before it did, a ship was able to leave -- one of the Rockhopper's original auxiliary vehicles, retrofitted with frameshift drive and a forge vat. They sent back these images."
"This is where the Spicans sent you?"
"Where the Spicans collected civilisations from across ... well, a sizeable fraction of the universe," Bella said. "No one has any real idea why."
Chromis took in the scale information provided on the image. "It's huge."
"The size of a solar system. But with more living space than all the worlds of a galaxy put together."
"In the middle ..." In the final image, it was as though the Structure was a wheel, with the hub torn out messily from the middle.
"Yes," said Bella. "If anything, that's only increased the desire of the more conservative types around here like to keep us more inquisitive, have-a-go types firmly under their thumb. The very fact that some humans opted to go on that mission outside the Structure proves just how unstable we are, even as they use the data that was collected to prove their point."
"We'll keep sending data back, as long as we can," Chromis said, the words of the interview coming easily to her. They were like a catechism to the people of her time. From the look Bella gave her, it seemed that she had learned this from the previous version of Chromis.
"Maybe there were still some things Svetlana and I agreed on," Bella said.
The neurological anomalies seemed to be flaring again. "You said the Structure can self-repair," Chromis said. "But that gap--"
"Yes, precisely," Bella said. "Either it happened relatively recently, and no one around here actually knew about it, or it was a hugely destructive event and it's taken tens of millennia for the self-repair systems even to reach this stage."
"I would imagine either option is deeply troubling to the Mutuality."
"Either option is deeply troubling to me," Bella said. "But it's the truth. No one ever promised the truth would be consoling."
"And so, the Mutuality want to know if I have anything like this destructive capability," Chromis said. "And if I do, whether I'm willing to reveal its secrets."
"And if they don't like the answer ..." Bella gestured at the walls around them. "Instant obliteration."
"I'm inclined to trust you," Chromis said. "By nature. By programming, if you will. But you are not the sole representative of humanity."
"No, I'm not."
"Perhaps you'd better tell me a little something about them."
* * *
In the end, Bella ended up starting at the very beginning, telling the whole story of the journey to Janus, and what had happened after that. There were elisions here and there: she couldn't tell whether that was because Bella was assuming that Chromis remembered things the other Chromis had known, or because there were things she simply didn't want to talk about.
The Benefactor was not as straightforward a hero as she had grown up believing. Above all, she had been a pragmatist, growing slowly and incompletely into the sort of idealism that humanity had always projected onto her. The full story that she of the mission to Janus was filled with deception and betrayal, and it hadn't stopped there.
And everything that had happened since, here in the Structure, was similarly complicated and compromised. Finally, Bella revealed what had happened to her previous self: the first Chromis had ended up sacrificing herself to end a runaway replication event, the result of a trick played on humanity by a group of aliens called the Musk Dogs, who despite everything were now themselves members of the Mutuality.
"I can imagine that was not the most popular decision," Chromis said.
"There were many compromises," Bella responded ruefully. "But then they had finally met their match when the Trap came to the Structure. The master manipulators became manipulated themselves. They still like to play at politics, mind you. But not with quite such destructive results."
"Unless they're playing a very long game."
"Don't say that," said Bella.
"Did they ever reveal the reason for their destruction of Janus?"
"They say that now they are in service to the Trap they can barely understand their previous motivations themselves," Bella said. "No one's quite sure whether to believe them or not."
"But what about human politics?" Chromis asked. "As they are now, I mean. I think that is most relevant to the decision I have to make."
Bella gave a long sigh. "Human politics are ... messy."
"That, I can assure you, is a constant, even across the eons and the megaparsecs."
Bella explained the current state of the human colony, now spread across several shafts, frameshift-drive craft flitting between them at will. She told Chromis how the original crewmembers, repeatedly rejuvenated, still held sway, but the generations of Structure-born felt increasingly alienated from their priorities -- failing to understand the need to conserve resources and not expand too fast. To them, the size of the Structure meant that any final limits to growth were unimaginably distant, and growing numbers advocated a more militant approach to settling currently uninhabited volumes. The Rockhopper crew knew instinctively, as early spacefarers on vessels in which everything was recycled endlessly, let alone survivors of the Janus journey, that they had to be more careful.
As she listened, Chromis began to understand something about Bella being here. Her job with the Mutuality seemed to be something between ambassador and representative, reflecting the way in which the Mutuality viewed the humans as halfway between a client state and a potential threat to be kept contained. But from Bella's point of view, it was a self-imposed exile.
"May I ask you a question?"
"I can't think of anything else that's worth telling you," Bella said. "There was a shaft that tried to secede a century or two back, but that's ancient history now." She smiled ruefully. "Turned out none of their leaders actually understood how to program a forge vat. Things might have gone very differently if they hadn't had to come begging for essential supplies within months."
"I was thinking more of a personal question."
"Oh," Bella said. "Of course."
"Are you lonely?" Chromis asked.
Bella didn't respond, but Chromis could see the answer clearly in her amygdala and hippocampus.
* * *
They emerged from the chamber in which Bella had activated the cube into an audience chamber. At Bella's suggestion, Chromis had instantiated a femtomachinery shell, resembling her as she had been in life. Bella had suggested that it would help build trust that she was not misrepresenting, or even inventing, anything that the voice in her head had told her.
Chromis's ongoing sense of uneasiness told her that they were still cut off from the outside world, but the divide was more subtle here, to the extent that Chromis wondered if the oppressive walls of the room they had come from were mostly intended for their psychological effect. Here, they could stand face to face with the various representatives of the Mutuality, or at least, for those who had something recognisable as a face.
Imagining possible aliens had been a popular past time for humanity since it had begun to glimpse the true nature of its place in the universe, but still it seemed to Chromis that nothing could have prepared her for this. The sheer variety of creatures on display was boggling.
"I thought you said you were the only human here," Chromis said in a whisper, as she spotted a humanoid figure behind the assembled aliens.
"Jim represents the Fountainheads," Bella said. "He's-- Parts of him were human, once. He still has ... memories."
A creature that Chromis had taken to be a pillar in the centre of the chamber flashed colourful patterns across its surface, then returned to its original slate grey colour. A moment later, a translation emerged from the air around them: "You are the ancient message."
If she had been in the Congress, Chromis would have made a joke. That she wasn't really that ancient, subjectively. Or that her bottle had survived better than most. But she thought better of the possibility of misunderstanding. "That is correct," she said, hoping to convey respect.
A roughly ellipsoid biomechanical creature clinging to the ceiling lowered itself down on a filament, like a legless spider. Flaps and iris-holes all over its surface chittered briefly, revealing components within that whirred and buzzed. The translation came through, apparently taking much longer to render in human speech than it had taken the creature to say in its own way: "Bioentity: Bellalind has informed us of her understanding of your Mechentity: Humanmessagecube capabilities the purpose of your Bioentity: Chromispasqueflowerbowerbird simulacrum. These are corroborated by the frondform bioentities' report of the previous encounter with a Mechentity: Humanmessagecube." Even Chromis, who had had to develop a tolerance for long-winded speeches in her congressional career, was just beginning to wonder if a point was ever going to emerge, when the disembodied voice said, "Have you made a determination?"
"At this time, I am not content to allow access to the full extent of my technical database. I intend to keep this decision under review as I learn more about the current situation."
There was a moment of uproar among the assembled aliens. Either the translator couldn't keep up, or their discussions were not meant for Chromis and Bella to hear.
A few moments later, though, Chromis's felt a tingling sensation as her eldritch senses began to wake up to the alien data environment. The barrier had been taken down. She had been accepted, at least provisionally.
The human-seeming creature, the one Bella had called Jim, was the only one who spoke to them directly afterwards. "Congratulations," he said. "And welcome to the madhouse."
* * *
Over the next few weeks, Chromis began to learn more about Bella's life as ambassador. The Mutuality's decision-making was, at least in theory, highly decentralised, with any quorate group of representatives properly accredited by the civilisations they came from able to make decisions that were binding on the whole. From what Chromis understood of their constitution, although some of them would clearly have been horrified at the concept of anything so formalised, a mechanism did exist for a full assembly to undertake wider discussion of contentious issues, but it had never yet been used. This "Ganglion" -- Chromis still didn't fully understand the implications of the translation devices' choice of word, but Bella seemed to feel it was apposite -- had taken up residence in a broken-down Firefeather spacecraft that had previously been abandoned for decades, but might dissolve again at any moment if a sufficient number of its members decided they had better things to do elsewhere.
Chromis herself was clearly an object of curiosity for many of the more outgoing representatives. She found herself explaining the politics of the Lindblad Ring, and the human-occupied Milky Way more widely, in far more detail than she would have imagined they were interested in. The translators' difficulties in rendering "Extinction Clouds" led to several interesting misinterpretations on the aliens' parts, from them thinking them the territory of aggressive hegemonisers to galaxy-scale rogue smartmatter swarms.
In return, they answered Chromis's questions, except when they decided not to for one reason or another. She had found out enough information to piece together the story of how her cube had reached the Structure. One group of aliens -- not members of the Mutuality, but not implacable opponents of it either -- had encountered it relatively early in their spacefaring history. For them, it had had the same effect as Bella's journey to Janus had on humanity, providing confirmation that alien life, or at least its artifacts, existed, and that much higher technology than they currently possessed was possible. Unlike Janus, however, the cube had done nothing particularly interesting. When they had detected their own lure, many millennia later -- a much more obviously artificial structure than Janus had been, elongated and passing through solar system after solar system on hyperbolic trajectories -- the cube had been taken to it, in the expectation that its secrets might finally be revealed. They had been disappointed on that score, but on their arrival at the Structure, it had at least given them something to trade.
"It's very odd to me, you being solid, going off and talking to the representatives," Bella said to her one night, after Chromis had finished explaining what she had learned that day. Chromis had taken to "sleeping" in one of the spare chambers of Bella's generously sized quarters, which had once been the engine room of the spacecraft.
"I thought you said my other self had done that," Chromis said.
"She did, but ... only at the very end." Bella looked pained. "I'm sorry."
"There is nothing to apologise for." If anything, she felt proud of the other Chromis, and by extension of herself. In a lifetime of political service, stretched out over millennia by the journeys back and forth to the Congress, she had never faced a moment of extreme crisis like that. To know that she would willingly sacrifice herself when it was necessary was in some ways a comfort.
But then, it was becoming increasingly easy to imagine doing anything, if it was for Bella. She knew that if Bella asked her now, she would give her total and unfettered access to all the technical information in her database. But she also knew -- or thought she did -- that Bella would not ask, that she had come to the same conclusion Chromis had about humanity at large's preparedness for the great and terrible knowledge she possessed.
"I can reintegrate this shell with the cube if you would prefer," Chromis said eventually.
"No, no, don't do that," Bella said quickly. "I mean, I think many of the others prefer you as someone not-too-dissimilar to me that they can talk to, rather than a blank slate of potentiality onto which they can project all their fears."
"Yes," Chromis said. "Of course."
But although she no longer existed solely in Bella's mind, she still had access to it. And she could see the truth: that her presence had become a reassurance, if not more. Bella might not want to admit it, but Chromis had objective proof that she no longer felt so lonely.
* * *
Bella looked rueful. "Could you at least pretend to find this difficult?"
Chromis adjusted the zero-g dexterity of her body-image down to unassisted human baseline. Bella had to reach out and catch her before she spiralled into the tendrils of the nearest Feverplant, spilling out from its hydroponic tube.
"OK," Bella said. "Not that difficult. I don't want my olfactory blockers to fall out while I'm chasing you."
Chromis made further adjustments. They were in one of the innermost chambers of the Ganglion, a dense jungle of alien vegetation in zero-g. They had known for some time that the local Trap had heard of Chromis's arrival from its Musk Dog acolytes, but now it had finally requested an audience.
Chromis was aware of a scent for just a second -- her femtomachinery had not had time to search for any possible correlates in her own experiential matrices -- when the translation device on Bella's wrist chirped. "You are a device."
"That's correct," Chromis said. As she had when she had first emerged from the chamber with Bella, she had decided that simple, straightforward answers would be best in this encounter.
"You do not reveal yourself through chemical emissions of any kind," came the reply a while later, when the scent mixture the device had mixed up to convey Chromis's response had reached the Trap. After another pause, "In our experience, this only occurs in those devices composed of subatomic components."
"That is correct," Chromis said.
"Yet you claim to be of the fruit of the crab tree." It took a moment for Chromis to realise what the Trap meant: the human settlement named after the Rockhopper's murdered crewmember.
"I am a localised extrusion of an assemblage of femtomachinery, stored not far from here," Chromis said. As she spoke, they finally reached the centre of the chamber and could see the alien. Something extremely primal in Chromis's simulated brain patterns felt a wave of repulsion at the way it sprawled out through the chamber, its tendrils snapping back and forth and the great maw lazily opened and closed. It was not much like a Venus Fly Trap, really, but she could understand where the human name for it had come from, and why it had stuck.
For the first time since she had instantiated, Chromis made an entirely unnecessary -- but also entirely involuntarily -- swallowing motion before she continued. "I was constructed in a time considerably later than that the other humans here arrived from."
"A different flowering of the same seed, then," the Trap said.
"If you like," Chromis said, though she was confused that the plant would be using such a metaphor. From what Bella had told her, the Traps reproduced by budding, and so were all clones: that was one of the reasons they could be distributed throughout the Mutuality, keeping the Musk Dogs under tight control with their scent emissions.
"You are withholding the information you contain,"
"I have still to make a final decision," Chromis said. "But at the present time it seems wise."
They waited a while longer, but when no more response came for some time, Bella tugged on her sleeve. Apparently, the audience was over.
As they hauled themselves back out to the gravitational zone, her consciousness caught up with the processing she had been doing since she first entered: the mixture of smells was characteristic of decomposer microbiota in non-femtomachine-managed environments.
The Trap smelled of decay.
* * *
"Can I ask you something?" Bella said that evening.
"Of course," Chromis said.
"It's very trivial."
"We've already established that I'm not going to be telling you anything important," Chromis said with a smile. But she could tell that Bella had been disquieted by their encounter with the Trap, just as Chromis herself had been, far more than she would have expected as an avatar of a near-omnipotent collection of femtomachinery.
"That ... outfit you wear."
"These," Chromis said with mock-grandness, "are the high robes of the Congress of the Lindblad Ring. Worn for formal sessions, as a sign of assuming office after an election in those polities which hold them, and various other ceremonial occasions. Such as being scanned to be transcribed into the first Memorial Project cube before it went on to be reproduced."
"So it's not what everyone in your time wears?"
"The human appetite for fashion never diminished," Chromis said. "Of course, with my long journeys back and forth I only got to see snapshots of developing trends. I relied on my advisers to make me presentable when I was back home."
"At first, you reminded of a member of a religious order," Bella said.
Chromis laughed.
"Can you change your outward appearance?"
In the blink of an eye, Chromis had altered herself to be wearing the same outfit Bella had worn for her legendary interview.
"I'll take that as a yes. But ... well, you said you saw all sorts of different fashions. Were there any you particularly liked?"
Chromis changed her appearance again, this time mimicking an asymmetrical dress that she had once worn to a particularly enjoyable party.
"I like it," Bella said.
"I can vary my clothes if you want," Chromis said. "It didn't seem important. You seem to wear the same sort of outfit each day."
"Not all of the aliens really understand clothing," Bella said. "I try to maintain consistency for them. It would probably be best if you did the same. But here at home ..." Bella caught herself; Chromis wasn't sure what was more troubling to her -- the admission that her quarters here on the Ganglion were a home to her, or that she thought of it as Chromis's home as well.
Chromis changed once more, into a simple set of sleepwear. "Goodnight, Bella."
"Goodnight, Chromis."
* * *
They were walking in the tranquillity of a Fountainhead aquaretum when Bella finally spoke about Svetlana.
"We were best friends, and then implacable enemies," Bella said at the end. "I don't think she ever forgave me for not turning round when we could have, for not trusting her about the fuel. But in the end, she--"
"Donated her brainwave patterns so that you could be reconstructed," Chromis finished.
"Did you know?"
"There were anomalies," Chromis said. "Variations from your expected baseline. But not outside the range of what might be expected with rejuvenation treatment in general."
"I'm not me any more," Bella said. "Not the same me who left Earth, who ... first met you. Not really."
"You feel responsible for carrying on Svetlana's legacy as well as your own."
"If that was true, I'd have rolled up my sleeves and taken over New Crabtree when Mike Takahashi retired," Bella said. "No. It's more complicated than that. I owe a debt I can never repay."
"What would Svetlana want you to do?"
"I don't know."
"Then I'll tell you: she'd want you to live. Why else would she have given the Fountainheads what they needed to reconstruct you? And you are living. And it's clear to me you serve the human colony, even if you keep your distance."
"Perhaps," Bella said.
"No," Chromis said. "Not perhaps. Listen to me, Bella Lind. The human me spent decades, stretched across thousands of years in their time, serving my people, and the real me is a mind-boggling technical achievement designed entirely to find you. And I did, and you have to listen to me. You might once have been a legend to me, but now I know you. I know you and I'm proud of you."
Bella looked up at her. There was heightened activity all over her emotional centres, confirming to Chromis what she had already believed in her heart.
"And ... I love you," she finished. "And I'm glad you talked me into being solid, because it means I can do this." And she pulled Bella towards her and kissed her.
* * *
Most of the aliens didn't understand enough about human relationships to know that there had been a change, though they did have to put up with occasional jokes from Jim Chisholm. A change there most certainly was, though, not least in Bella's emotional state. "I made a promise, you know," Bella said to her one night. "To that other you. To find another you and make you happy. But I think it might be working out the other way around."
Chromis, too, found a renewed sense of purpose beyond exploring the far future she found herself in. This proved to be fortunate when a representative from New Crabtree arrived, news having reached them of the cube's discovery.
"Look, Ryan," Bella said. "I understand perfectly that it looks as though the Mutuality kept it from you on purpose. But you know how their distributed communication lines work."
"It's not the Mutuality people are worried about. You could have sent us a message."
Chromis had quickly got the measure of the situation: they had sent someone with whom Bella had a warm mutual regard, but was also an expert at delivering uncomfortable truths.
Bella slumped in her chair. "You're right, I could have. It just ... I'll be honest, it never occurred to me. Once it became obvious Chromis wouldn't be revealing anything ..."
"A lot of people think you've gone over to the Mutuality's side," Ryan said.
"The Mutuality's side is our side, Ryan," Bella said wearily. "You know that."
"Yes, I do," Ryan said. "But you have to understand the way these things are perceived back home."
"May I interject?" Chromis asked.
"Of course," Ryan said, but Chromis could tell that he still didn't really know what to make of her, emissary from a far future that was also the long-dead past.
"What Bella has told me about those ... perceptions is precisely what makes me wary," Chromis said. "Now, up until this point, it could have been argued that I had only Bella's word for things, although I have in fact been able to access information from the Ganglion datanet for several weeks now which confirms that human nature has not, in fact, changed." Bella looked at her, surprised; she had not thought to share this news with her, since it was as natural as breathing. "You know the stories of what happened in the 22nd century," she said to Ryan. "We cannot risk a repeat, and culturally, your colony is at considerable risk of doing so."
"We already have frameshift drives, forge vats ..."
"But your artificial intelligence remains constrained," Chromis said. "It would be impossible for you to create something like ... well, me. And, for the moment, that is how it must remain."
"People aren't going to like it," Ryan said.
"I'm not going anywhere," Chromis said. "Perhaps the knowledge that I am here will drive cultural evolution in certain directions."
"I think you might be disappointed," Bella said.
"As I said, human nature is human nature," Chromis said. "It is the cultural structures we put in place to manage conflicts that matter. And I may have something to offer in the meantime, even if it is not everything you would wish."
"Oh?" Bella said.
"It is clear that in the Mutuality, and in the wider metacivilisation of the Structure, the old adage that 'knowledge is power' holds as true as it ever has, if not even more so when we all have so little in common with each other beyond finding ourselves here."
Ryan turned to the projection volume on the table, which Chromis had illuminated to display the images of the Structure. "This is how we got to where we are now, rather than being mere problem children to be Contained," he said. "But it's old hat. We project that cultures halfway across the Structure have received these images by now, far beyond our local volume. We can't trade that for anything any more."
"I may be able to ascertain new knowledge, directly relevant to our lives in the Structure, not merely of historical interest. I would be happy for that to be considered the ... property of humanity."
"What new knowledge?" Ryan asked suspiciously.
"I may be able to determine when in the future we are, through a combination of measuring the entropic decay of my internal femtomachinery and cosmic background radiation measurements."
"You can't measure cosmic background radiation inside the Structure, we're sealed off from it."
"But the data is implicitly in the images you are looking at, if we have a baseline to compare to. It should be possible to construct from the cube a picture of the age of the universe at the point the aliens who brought me here entered cruise mode."
"The Iron Sky," Bella said to Ryan, by way of explanation. She turned to Chromis. "I thought you told me the cube's self-repairing flight mode meant it didn't have accurate records," Bella said.
"Indeed," Chromis said. "I would have to design a self-diagnostic mode of unparalleled thoroughness and then enter it, undertaking comparisons of all the femtomachinery I contain and determining how much has been deactivated as corrupted beyond repair. And the indirect manner by which I reached the Structure means that we can only really put a lower bound, but it should be possible."
"Does that mean you wouldn't be ... here?" Bella asked.
"I would not," Chromis said.
"How long would this take?" Ryan asked, before Bella had a chance to do so.
"Until I determined the exact parameters of the diagnostic, I would not be able to tell you. But probably several weeks."
"I think that might go some way to placating people's concerns," Ryan said. "It is information that, as far as we can tell, no one reliably has."
"Remember, it would only be a lower bound," Chromis said.
"Can you take that back to New Crabtree?" Bella asked him.
"I can take it back," Ryan said. "I can't promise what the reaction will be."
"Of course," Bella said.
On his way to leave, Ryan stopped in the doorway and whispered to Bella, "Are you and she ...?"
"I am not limited by the boundaries of human hearing acuity," Chromis said. "And you are not as quiet as you think you are, anyway."
"Ignore her," Bella said. "But what makes you ask that?"
"Just the way you reacted to her saying she'd have to switch off," Ryan said. "And something Jim said on my way in," he admitted after a pause.
"Jim should mind his own business," Bella said. "And so should you."
Ryan gave a mock salute. "Aye aye, Captain."
"Get out of here," Bella said.
After he left, Chromis said, "I have been considering further. I do not have to commit my entire resources to the project."
"You mean, you can stay here with me."
"I would have to ... take shifts, or rather the femtomachinery comprising me would. And my processing abilities would be much lower, close to baseline human. But the inability to do a full comparison at one time would add considerable time to the project."
"What does 'considerable time' mean?"
"Months, possibly over a year." Chromis put her hand on Bella's arm. "If you want to exercise this possibility, we should call Ryan back before he communicates with others. We can tell him that I underestimated the complexity."
"I'm not a complexity you underestimated," Bella said. "And I was without you for centuries, I think I can cope with a few weeks."
"If I can be completely honest, I am pleased you said that," Chromis said. "As far as I can tell, the self-diagnostic would require a copy of my conscious mind as a basis for comparison of the encoded patterns. I find myself more troubled than I would have expected by the idea of splitting myself in two."
"Oh?"
"The me in the cube would not have had the opportunity to spend that time with you," Chromis said. "I could reintegrate afterwards, but it wouldn't be the same."
"Then it's settled," Bella said. "But ..."
"But?"
"If we're talking a timescale of weeks, one more night won't make any difference, will it?"
Chromis smiled. "Of course not."
* * *
Chromis dreamed, dreams impossible to relate in human terms, the dreams of femtomachinery churning over itself iteratively to assess its own state in far more detail than its designers had ever intended. Her own experiences were but a tiny part of a matrix containing the entire sum of human knowledge up to the point of launch, but vital to the ability to check for the integrity of complex patterns. Her personality and memory were replayed again and again, and each time the story of her life led up to the moment she stood in the chamber, thinking of Bella Lind as she allowed herself to be transcribed. But she, the Chromis Pasqueflower Bowerbird whose consciousness the baseline was being checked against, she had met Bella Lind. Met her, and fallen in love with her.
Chromis's dreams were impossible to relate in human terms.
So when she finally awoke, she told Bella that she had dreamed of her.
* * *
Before she went under, Chromis had intentionally blocked the knowledge she had uncovered from her consciousness until she had had time to reunite with Bella properly.
But when the information appeared in her mind, she was thunderstruck.
"What is it?" Bella asked. And then, realising, "You know?"
"A trillion years," Chromis said. "In round terms."
"That's impossible," Bella said.
"And remember, that's when the lure entered its extended cruise," Chromis said. "It is certainly later than that. Possibly much later."
"Then ... Svetlana and her crew," Bella said. "Is there anything out there in the universe for them to find?"
"I don't know," Chromis said. "Some of the smallest red dwarf stars will still be burning, and who knows what exotic structures may exist out there, if the Spicans were able to build this, here, now. I'm sure they've found something."
"Will find something," Bella corrected, seemingly automatically. "In their subjective time, it's likely only been a few months." She slumped back on the bed. "This is a lot to take in."
"It is," Chromis agreed. "But I also have a conjecture about the purpose of the Structure."
"Here's something interesting about the Mutuality," Bella said. "Every member has a word for speculating about the Spicans' motivations, and it means the same as the old human expression 'wool-gathering'."
"No, honestly, Bella, why did the Spicans build it? What if they felt compelled to?" Chromis said. "I mean, on one level, it's obvious that they did -- they committed to a project that seeded Janus-type lures throughout, at the very least, several galaxies and sent probes forward using frameshift drive deep into the future. Very deep."
"And I suppose you have a unique insight into that," Bella said.
"That's just it," Chromis said. "The Memorial Project was a major undertaking by the Lindblad Ring. But even at its height, it only occupied about 0.07% of our entire cultural and mechanical generative capacities. And it was by no means a cultural imperative for the entire human race. There were even those in other polities who mocked us."
"Well, it looks like you definitely get the last laugh," Bella said. Chromis was almost inclined to actually laugh out loud, in defiance of her critics, long turned to dust, but Bella was already catching up the implications. She blinked several times and then said, "But wait, are you saying, all of this might have been some Spican ... side project?"
"If we assume the Spicans had sufficiently advanced self-replicating technology and little in the way of material limitations, it could even plausibly have been the work of a single hobbyist. Or ... well, a crank, with particular views about the nature of the universe."
"I still don't see what you're getting at," Bella said.
"What if the structure is an ark?" At Bella's blank look she added, "That is an appropriate cultural referent for you, I believe."
"Yes," Bella said. "The analogy is apposite. It's just ... how? How can the Structure be an ark?"
"You've heard of false vacuum collapse, I assume? Our records show it was first proposed in the earliest years of Digitisation, so I imagine you would have."
Bella frowned. "I've heard of it. Some sort of fringe particle physics theory, isn't it?" she said. "Listen, Chromis, I've learned a lot these last several centuries about all manner of things I never had any idea existed. The idea that some idea last seriously propounded when I was a toddler seems ... unlikely."
"It turned out not to be such a fringe theory, after all," Chromis said. "In my time, the false vacuum had been well parameterised. It was found to be in a metastable state with a lifespan of several trillion years, and so people generally didn't worry about it."
Bella's jaw dropped, almost comically. "But you just told me," she said. "We're at least a trillion years in the future. At least."
"Yes," Chromis said. "A collapse of the vacuum is still vastly unlikely within your lifespan, but we are, in some senses, 'overdue'. Once it began, it would propagate at lightspeed throughout the universe. There would be no possible warning. The expansion front would be upon you and would subsume you, replacing the space you inhabited with a universe with completely different physical laws. It could even happen in more than one region of the universe at once, with different physical laws in each, their phase transitions expanding until they met at interfaces like bubbles in soap, or flaws in a block of ice."
"None of that sounds very survivable," Bella said.
"The information of the arrangement of your particles would be conserved," Chromis said. "much like falling into a singularity." At Bella's sceptical look, she said, "No, you're right, that isn't very survivable either. Not for a consciousness."
"Then you think that the reason the Spicans brought everyone here to the Structure wasn't just to deal with the loneliness of civilisations missing each other in time."
"It may have been," Chromis said. "Maybe it was even some sort of ... art project. But what if it wasn't? What if the Spicans, back in the early universe, realised that they had an unparalleled opportunity to spread their self-replicating probes far and wide, before the galaxies grew too far apart? We already know by the very existence of the Structure that they -- or whichever subset of them initiated the project; as I said, it may even have been a single individual -- thought in the very long term. What if they felt that the opportunity they had gave them a responsibility as well?"
"And bring everyone here ... No wait, bring everyone here to when the vacuum was about to collapse? How is that an ark?"
"I don't know," Chromis said. "I'm speculating, of course. But we know that the Structure is unimaginably tough. What if it can preserve a metastable false vacuum state inside itself?" Thoughts spilled into her mind ever faster, the inchoate dreams of her weeks-long sleep crystallising into possibilities. "Or what if whatever was in the middle of the Structure was some sort of mechanism to collapse the vacuum, in a controlled way. One that might ensure the laws of the new universe were as similar as possible to the old ones."
"Then whatever happened to the central hub might have been some sort of accident with the vacuum manipulation device," Bella said.
"This is only speculation," Chromis said, with a stern note in her voice that was directed at herself as much as anyone else. "We have no way of knowing for certain. But it is rather better founded speculation than some others."
"A lifeboat for the entire universe ..." Bella said in wonder.
"Well, all the universe within a certain horizon volume that changed over cosmic time as the uncollapsed vacuum accelerated the universal expansion ..."
"There's splitting hairs and there's splitting hairs, Chromis."
"Then, yes," Chromis said. "I believe the Structure may have been created as 'a lifeboat for the entire universe'. And if I'm right, it changes everything. Even if I'm wrong, I believe we can still make it into one. I believe we should."
"You can't be serious," Bella said. "We have no way of knowing that it could even work. And the Spican technology is so far beyond our own ..."
"But it exists," Chromis said urgently. "It proves that such technology is possible. There's nothing to stop us rediscovering it all in the end. We'd have to start by persuading the New Crabtree authorities to release the data freely. And the Mutuality ... Some of the representatives I've met would understand, but I'm not sure all of them think big enough. The motivations of entities like the Trap are nearly unguessable. But the Mutuality has achieved peaceful co-operation over a relatively wide volume, with some bumps along the way. With an actual goal to work towards beyond survival, perhaps we can attract many more. Maybe even those discontented humans you've been worrying about will find the project worthwhile."
Bella propped herself up on her elbows. "You are completely serious, aren't you?"
"We've come to know each other ... well, far more intimately than I would ever have guessed," Chromis said, reaching across for Bella's hand. Then she squeezed it and went on, "But there's one thing you have to remember about me: we only met at all because I persuaded people to sign up to a ridiculously long-term project with no way of knowing for sure if it would ever work."
"You mean: if the Structure really was created by one lone Spican who had an eccentric worry about the fate of the universe in the far, far future, then you're their human equivalent."
"I suppose I do," Chromis said.
Bella grinned as she put her own hand over Chromis's own. "Then I think we'd better get started."