I sank to the ground, my back to the portal wall.
“It was the hit to your head!” M-Bot said, hovering down beside me. “I’m so sorry!”
“It wasn’t that, M-Bot,” I said. “I promise.”
“Oh, thank Turing!”
“Who?”
“One of the fathers of computing,” he said. “It felt appropriate to say.”
“You did not harm her, abomination,” Chet said. “I saw the vision too.”
“Did you feel that last part?” I asked. “Like a voice…helping guide me…”
“I didn’t feel anything like that,” he said. “I saw the first fragments, the first portals, and the first cytonics…then a hint of the next place to go?”
“Yeah, I saw that,” I said. “Another fragment with ruins.”
“Yes,” Chet said. “That’s a fragment deep inside Broadsider territory, I’m afraid. But…I know that we must go there. I feel…overwhelmed.”
I felt elated.
Yes, elated. I realized that ever since I’d discovered my powers—what my people called “the defect”—I’d been worried they were something nefarious. I’d thought that maybe I was something terrible. A delver in embryo, or something monstrous.
But I wasn’t. Cytonic powers were just a mutation. Granted, a bizarre one caused by my ancestors being exposed to the nowhere’s leakage into the somewhere. But nothing terrible grew within me. I was just…well, me.
Saints. I’d needed to see that. A simple revelation, yes, but it changed everything. I knew what I was. I knew how I had come to be. And it was no wonder that powers manifested in our people—Detritus had one of these portals, perhaps helping activate the latent talent from our bloodlines.
This was part of the information the elder cytonics had left, the thing they’d wanted me to know. You are not a monster, the impression lingered. You are one of us. You are wonderful. You are natural. You are loved.
And along with that, a nudge to help me develop further in my talents. A push, and some understanding. I had the sense that if my talents had been different, I would have been nudged a different way, to develop those abilities instead.
I glanced at Chet, who was grinning practically ear to ear.
“I feel left out,” M-Bot said. “You’re both experiencing different emotions from the ones I am. And…this is all very confusing. What is one supposed to do with all of these emotions? What are they for? What’s the purpose?”
“I don’t think they have any specific purposes,” I said.
“Of course they do. Otherwise they wouldn’t have evolved in you and then been programmed into me. But…I suppose there are things that are evolutionarily neutral, and perhaps saying ‘purpose’ implies too much volition behind the process. Unless you believe in God, which I’m not sure that I do. I mean, I was created by someone. Hummmm…”
I took a few deep breaths, trying to digest what I’d seen. “Chet,” I said. “Did you see those varvax on the nearby fragment?”
“I did indeed, and I find it curious. The two fragments were relatively near to one another. Diones and varvax.”
“Well,” M-Bot said. “I don’t know what exactly you saw, but histories show that those two peoples traveled between worlds cytonically before they did it with starships.”
“Yeah,” I said. “The same thing happened to humans and the kitsen, and maybe other species. I never realized the hole in that. A cytonic usually needs a direction to go, instructions, to hyperjump—at least very far. But this explains how; they met in the nowhere before hyperjumping between worlds.”
“Abomination,” Chet said, “do you have a record on when the delvers first appeared in the somewhere?”
“The initial records of the delvers occur after the First Human War began,” M-Bot said. “That was when the Phone Company—a human organization—gave hyperdrives to the people of Earth. Humans then spread throughout the galaxy. War began, and near its end the first delvers appeared. Before that time there were no reports of delvers, or even the eyes.”
I looked to Chet. He’d sensed it too—no delvers had existed at the time of this vision. So how had they appeared? What were the delvers?
My contemplations were interrupted as an enormous jolt shook our fragment, accompanied by an overpowering crash.
I grabbed my makeshift club, which I’d dropped near the front of the cavern, and stumbled out onto the loamy ground. Chet joined me, unsteady on his feet, holding on to the wooden supports at the mouth of the cavern.