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Two Amber Eras after Ruan Mei’s ascension, Herta discovered something: apparently, becoming an Aeon had done nothing to stop her ex-girlfriend from “loving” her. Even the ex in ex-girlfriend was technically still up for debate. Her girlfriend no longer possessed a human body, but Herta had the misfortune of remembering that neither of them had ever actually brought up breaking up. Somehow, this made the entire situation simultaneously better, worse, and considerably harder to describe. (The Simulated Universe was still being maintained after her ex-girlfriend left. It just had not been updated. Thanks for asking.)
The first problem was that Herta had stopped aging, and she noticed quickly because it had become impossible not to. Rejuvenation was not a miracle, and it was certainly not an Aeon’s blessing. It was a problem humanity had already solved—or, more accurately, a problem Herta herself had solved. Reversing the damage a body accumulated under the indignity of time still required an irritating amount of preparation, calibration, and energy, but demanding conditions did not make a method less elegant. If anything, repeated, stable success only made the achievement more deserving of other people’s admiration.
So when her next scheduled examination came due and every metric she cared to measure informed her that there was nothing to correct, Herta’s first conclusion was that the instruments were broken. They were not. She dismissed the staff, reran the tests herself, replaced two sensors, recalibrated three others, and insulted an entire generation of cutting-edge medical diagnostics before she finally conceded that her telomeres, mitochondrial function, proteostasis, cellular senescence markers, and several other indicators of human aging were all behaving with offensive consistency. Her body had been fixed in place: not rejuvenated, not slowed. Fixed—like a butterfly specimen pinned forever at the brightest, most beautiful moment of its life, except Herta herself was still alive.
Herta stared at the results for a full fifteen minutes before saying to the empty laboratory, “No. Absolutely not.” Evidently, no one answered.
By then, Ruan Mei had been gone for nearly two Amber Eras, although gone was becoming an increasingly inaccurate word. The woman named Ruan Mei was disappearing from the records of the universe with a thoroughness Herta might have admired if it had not been so personally inconvenient. Citations collapsed into anonymous sources; old collaborations remained perfectly intact while the outline of the person who had led them blurred. People fortunate enough to have known her could usually still remember that there had once been a brilliant biologist—sometimes a colleague, occasionally a friend—but the moment anyone pressed them for a detail about Ruan Mei as a person, the memory slipped away before it ever reached their mouth.
The problem was that, when Herta’s ex-girlfriend erased the traces of herself as a human being, she seemed to have forgotten the portion that belonged to Herta. Their correspondence remained intact and readable; Ruan Mei’s handwritten annotations were still offensively neat; the face in their photographs was exactly the face Herta remembered. The pearl necklace that had once rested against her throat still lay coiled in its case, orderly and useless, waiting to be worn by a body that no longer existed, and deep inside the vault where Herta kept her most dangerous Curios was a gold hairpin shaped like a strand of DNA, with a small white plum blossom worked into one end. Sometimes Herta wore it. She had never bothered to ask herself why, perhaps because the answer was so self-evident that the question itself would have been painful.
At first, Herta filed the survival of these things as a bug the universe had, in a rare fit of generosity, neglected to patch. Of all people, she should have known better than to call anything involving an Aeon a simple coincidence. Not aging was only the beginning: a fracture healed too cleanly; radiation damage that should have required intervention disappeared before she had finished deciding which intervention would be least boring; once, after a laboratory accident that would have killed anyone less prepared, Herta woke furious in intensive care and discovered that the missing tissue had reconstructed itself completely—no scar, no loss of function, and no respect whatsoever for her consent. After that, she stopped treating the incidents as statistical noise. The interference was deliberate.
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The problem with the kitchen surfaced later. Herta’s home had always contained a kitchen far larger than she personally required, because sensible architecture anticipated future use and because, on rare occasions, Herta cooked for Ruan Mei. Cooking, in Herta’s hands, had never meant following a recipe so much as treating one as a preliminary hypothesis with substantial room for improvement. Ruan Mei would usually stand on the other side of the counter and watch with approximately the same patience she had shown during the fifty-six seconds before Tayzzyronth disintegrated.
After Ruan Mei left, Herta gradually stopped going into the kitchen—not deliberately; there had been no dramatic decision, no room sealed up in mourning. The kitchen simply lost most of its practical use. Her puppets kept it clean, watered the plants, and maintained the indoor growing beds because dust looked ugly in Herta’s house, dead plants looked worse, and a greenhouse system that still worked perfectly well gave her no reason to dismantle it. Years passed before she noticed that it was working too well.
One evening, while looking for a particular Curio, Herta stepped inside and found basil dense enough to have started territorial disputes with the neighboring vegetables, strawberries round and glossy and brilliantly red, and tomato vines bent under clusters of fruit so heavy that the automated supports had begun reinforcing themselves. She stopped in the doorway and immediately pulled the system logs to see whether the puppets had secretly dosed the plants with growth hormones. Nothing. The environmental parameters were optimal—of course they were; she had set them. Nutrient levels: correct. Irrigation: correct. Light cycles: correct.
Given what she had already observed in her own body, Herta’s presence almost certainly produced some degree of spillover in the life around her. The main symptom appeared to be that plants and animals in her vicinity were simply a little too vigorous: Peppy, an elderly dog whose life the IPC had already gone to considerable lengths to prolong, could still perform three backflips in a row. Even so, that did not justify the vegetables trying to invade the neighboring planter.
“This is excessive,” Herta informed the overflowing room. The miniature Herta puppets, having apparently reached the limits of their agricultural competence, clustered around their creator in helpless agitation. Herta summoned a few full-sized puppets, harvested far more than she had intended to, and, for reasons she declined to examine too closely, became angry enough to cook dinner herself; halfway through, she had already replaced half the ingredient list and half the procedure.
Herta glanced down at the cutting board. “I’m cooking because I want to.” A peeled tomato sat there, offensively red. “This has absolutely nothing to do with you.” Herta split it cleanly in half. The basil smelled unusually strong, and when she checked the puppets’ measurements, the concentration of aromatic compounds was, sure enough, significantly above the average for plants grown on The Blue. “Pathetic.” She ate the entire meal.
For a long time, Herta filed the kitchen under spillover effects. The proof that it was something more arrived in a vase.
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Herta had been awake for thirty hours, which was not relevant except insofar as it left her with even less patience than usual for phenomena that bordered on superstition. Beside her terminal sat a vase containing three lilies left over from some academic symposium: decorative, pleasantly fragrant, and otherwise uninteresting. She had just finished proving, for the fourth time, that the phenomenon surrounding her could not be reduced to regeneration. It was not healing her; it was enforcing Herta as a concept, and the distinction itself disgusted her.
Herta gave one cold laugh; the second broke in the middle. “Who gave you permission?”
The flowers moved.
Their stems visibly lengthened by nearly ten centimeters in under three seconds. Fresh leaves unfurled from joints that had not existed a moment earlier. One pale lily turned toward her, then a second, then the third, all with such earnest coordination that Herta’s laugh finally collapsed into something humiliatingly close to a sob. A new shoot reached over the rim of the vase, just long enough to brush the back of her hand, and Herta stared at it. “You have got to be kidding me.” The shoot brushed her again. “Oh, don’t you dare act cute.” It lengthened another fraction and almost curled around one of her fingers.
Herta covered her eyes with her other hand and laughed until she had exhausted herself, until at last she allowed the tears to run beneath her palm. “You absolute—” She stopped. There were plenty of nouns available; none of them were adequate for a being whose mode of existence had become a matter of cosmology. “Who gave you permission to decide that I should exist forever?” The flowers had no usable mouth, so they bloomed harder.
That was the first time Herta admitted to herself that this might not be merely a remnant. If it were only a rule written at the moment of ascension, the situation would have been much simpler: Ruan Mei, while she was still Ruan Mei, could easily have slipped an exception into whatever law of life she was about to become, preserving Herta out of excess sentiment and terrible boundaries. Annoying and invasive, but finite; it would only have been a residual mechanism, maintaining her existence out of inertia. The flowers suggested something worse: they had answered her.
Herta hated ambiguous answers, so she spent a quarter of an Amber Era eliminating every other explanation. It would have taken longer if she were anyone else.
The trail eventually led to a planet that had never supported complex life before Ruan Mei’s ascension. Now it did, although complex life was a rather inadequate term for an organism that covered more than half a continent, appeared to possess a collective consciousness, and perhaps had no true individuals at all. From orbital images, the continent looked like a dark green sea threaded through with gold; on the ground, Herta decided the structures resembled sunflowers only because the human brain was lazy and reached automatically for familiar categories. Each stalk rose taller than she was, crowned by a vast radial photosensitive organ that tracked light with exquisite precision. Beneath the soil, conductive filaments linked them into a network dense enough that the place felt less like any forest humans would recognize and more like the nervous system of one enormous plant.
They had not existed before, and their planet-wide signaling patterns resembled, in ways too indirect to quantify cleanly enough for publication yet too precise to dismiss, certain structures Herta had recorded during Ruan Mei’s ascension. That alone was enough to hold her attention.
She spent ten days testing them. They responded to temperature, sound, pressure, magnetic fields, and several stimuli no humanoid organism had any sensible reason to care about; only Herta herself failed to provoke any response at all. By day twelve, she was in a foul mood. By day fourteen, she had personally overturned her favorite simulation result. By day sixteen, Herta was standing alone in a field that stretched beyond the horizon, surrounded by several million organisms that might, from beginning to end, have been only one, and beginning to suspect that she had crossed half the galaxy to interrogate an unusually ambitious vegetable.
“Ruan Mei,” she said. Nothing happened.
The gold DNA hairpin was in her pocket, and she had brought it on purpose—a fact that had annoyed her for most of the journey. A keepsake was not evidence. Sentiment was not a variable. There was no rational basis for assuming that an object Ruan Mei had once worn could increase the probability that an intelligence distributed across a planetary biosphere would recognize her. Herta had brought it anyway.
If the thing on this planet could not recognize her—not Herta, Genius Society member No. 83; not Herta, founder of the Simulated Universe; not the woman whose name had occupied other people’s citations for centuries, but her—then Herta had made a private decision, one she had no intention of explaining to anyone: this would be the last time she tested the hypothesis. She would stop looking. Whether she could stop remembering any of it was a separate problem and therefore irrelevant.
Herta took out the hairpin. Gold flashed between her fingers; the little white plum blossom caught the light of an unfamiliar star. Ruan Mei had worn it often enough that Herta could still remember the exact angle at which it usually sat in her hair, how by the end of the day one loose black strand would always catch underneath it, and how, when Herta took it out for her, she would occasionally pull free two or three strands with it. She probably should have saved those hairs for sequencing. At the scale of a god, of course, none of it would have meant anything.
Ruan Mei had always been difficult to reach. Even Herta could not have said exactly what it took to warm her, and few people ever persuaded her that they deserved entry into the small, private world she guarded so carefully. But once something truly made it inside, she held on with the unreasonable determination of a child clutching a favorite toy and refusing to let go. Herta had always known that; she had simply failed to calculate what that faintly childish possessiveness might become after Ruan Mei actually turned into an Aeon.
The memory returned with irritating clarity.
“If that day really comes,” Ruan Mei had asked not long before everything changed, “if I succeed—what will you do?”
They had been sitting across from each other with two cups of tea and a plate of pastries slowly going cold between them. Ruan Mei had asked the question as calmly as if she were asking whether Herta wanted to attend a seminar with her. Herta had gone still for several seconds before looking away first. “Don’t you think you’re assuming rather a lot?”
“So do you.”
“That’s different.”
Ruan Mei smiled. Herta hated that particular smile; whenever it appeared, it usually meant she had already lost an argument that had not even properly begun.
Eventually, she said it. “If that happens, I’ll let you go.”
Ruan Mei’s fingers paused against the rim of her cup. “It’s what you’ve wanted all this time,” Herta continued, her voice sharper than she had meant it to be. “I’m not going to pretend otherwise just because I dislike the answer.”
Ruan Mei looked at her for a while, then smiled again, much softer this time. “I don’t think I would do the same.”
“Obviously. You’re nowhere near as reasonable as I am.”
“If I succeeded,” Ruan Mei said, “I think I’d want to keep you.”
Herta laughed. “Keep me?”
“Preferably somewhere close.”
“How reassuring.”
“Perhaps I would ask whether you’d like to become my Emanator.”
“How exactly are you planning to ask me? By then, I have serious doubts you’ll still have a mouth.”
“Hm…” Ruan Mei considered this. “I’ll ask properly. Very politely.”
“How generous, for someone planning to become a god.”
Ruan Mei’s eyes curved. “Or perhaps I could steal you from Nous.”
That finally earned her a genuinely fond look of disbelief. “You aren’t even an Aeon yet and you’re already planning to steal me from that Droidhead?”
“You know me. I’ve always considered preparation a virtue.”
“You’re unbelievably arrogant.”
Herta remembered leaning back in her chair after that conversation, the tea Ruan Mei had made for her, and even thinking that, under Herta’s influence, Ruan Mei had finally managed to grow something resembling a sense of humor. She also remembered that she had never really taken the remark as a joke.
Ruan Mei could call people “dear” with effortless warmth and smooth over a social situation with perfect grace; none of that was the same thing as intimacy. She knew plenty of people, but very few were people she actually kept. And beyond that—the shape of her ordinary days, her private life, the parts of herself she had no reason to put on display for anyone—the door was usually shut tight. Once Ruan Mei truly made room for someone somewhere deep inside herself, she seemed never to have learned how to let them go. At the time, Herta had thought that was cute. In retrospect, perhaps she should have asked a few more questions before everything happened.
Under the light of an unfamiliar star, Herta closed her fingers around the gleaming gold hairpin.
“I let you go.”
The field remained still. The wind did not change direction; the light fell exactly as it had before, and all around her the radial faces continued following the star. Herta stood there for another minute, then reached up and removed her hat.
The familiar weight left her head. She tucked it against her chest with one arm, not because this made the experiment any more useful, but because if she was already about to ask one humiliatingly unscientific question, she might as well commit fully to the methodological failure. She lifted the gold hairpin and, for a moment, nearly put it back in her pocket. Instead, she slid it into her hair. It looked wrong on her. That was the point.
There was one question left that she wanted to ask. No measurable variable, no falsifiable formulation; she had not even established a channel through which the other side could conceivably answer. She asked anyway.
“Do you remember me?”
For the space of a single breath, nothing happened—then the whole world turned. Every gold-rimmed face within sight swung away from the light and toward her in the same impossible instant. The motion raced across the field like a wave, far faster than any biological signal should have been able to travel; beyond what Herta could see, satellite data showed the same turning continuing across the continent.
The star remained exactly where it was. The wind did not change. Everything living turned toward Herta.
For several seconds, she forgot to breathe. Somewhere between fear and delight, a laugh escaped her before she could stop it. “You—” Herta began, then stopped when her voice abruptly refused to cooperate. She wiped at her face with the heel of one hand and was annoyed to find it wet.
“That hardly qualifies as an answer.”
The entire field remained motionless, pointed at her. Herta laughed again, breathless now, her voice rough with exasperation and the sheer helplessness of it all—and, against every reasonable instinct, happiness.
“Show-off.”