She had the nearly infinite resources of the empire behind her, the survival of humanity on her shoulders, and a research protocol so streamlined it would have failed out of an ethics review board from just the table of contents.
There were two levels that she had to figure out. First was the civilization that had built the protomolecule and the gates, then the forces that destroyed them. On her best days, she’d thought of herself like a medieval monk struggling to understand the saints to better see the face of God. More often, she felt like a termite trying to explain dogs to her fellow Isoptera so that they could all speculate about fusion jazz.
She understood the protomolecule engineers and what had killed them better than anyone else in all of humanity. Except, if this worked, for Cara. And Xan.
“It was like being in a dream,” Cara said, “only bigger. I don’t remember really tasting things in dreams, you know? This was tasting things and hearing things, and the shape of my body seemed like it was changing. It was . . . everything.”
“I didn’t feel anything,” Xan said. He sounded disappointed.
Originally, Elvi had done the debriefings with the two siblings separately, talking first to Cara and then to Xan. The idea being that by keeping them from hearing each other’s accounts she could keep them from influencing those reports, but it stressed both of them to be apart.
Now, she brought them into her private lab together, the two of them on the float while she braced herself at her desk and wrote up her notes. The décor was rich psychiatrist’s office: blond grasscolored padding on the walls, spider plants in capillary-fed niches, the low pulse of a dedicated air recycler. Everything about it was designed to say that the woman who used it was a very important person. She hated it more than a little, but she didn’t spend the energy to examine why.
“Was it different from the last time?” Elvi asked.
“There was a . . . stutter? Like a moment when everything fell apart, and when it came back together, everything was brighter and more immediate? That’s not the right word. There may not be a right word.”
“How did it compare to your experience of ‘the library’？” Elvi asked.
Cara went eerily still for a moment, the way she and Xan did sometimes. Elvi waited for a breath, and then Cara came back. “The library isn’t sensory at all. It’s just knowing things. But this? It isn’t the library, but it’s where the information all comes from. I’m sure about that.”
Xan made a soft noise. Cara put a hand on his arm and pulled him close to her. A primate’s instinct to comfort by cuddling unchanged by its translation across light-years of vacuum into a bubble of ceramic, steel, and carbon lace.
“Were you able to interact with it at all?”
“I think so,” Cara said. “I mean, I didn’t understand what I was doing, but I think I can figure it out. I feel fine. I’m ready to go back in.”
Elvi typed SUBJECT SHOWS STRONG DESIRE TO RETURN TO INTERFACE CONSISTENT WITH DROP IN DOPAMINE AND SERO-TONIN LEVELS POST-EXPERIMENT. ADDICTIVE?
“That’s good,” she said out loud. “There are a couple recalibrations we need to make, but we should be ready for another run in a couple shifts. And I’m going to want to run a scan or two while we’re doing that. Check your baseline.”
“Okay,” Cara said, almost hiding her impatience. “Whatever you want.”
Xan fidgeted against his sister’s arm, setting both of them turning a little. “I’m hungry.”
“Go ahead,” Elvi said. “I need to write this up, but you two should eat and rest. I’ll be along in a little bit.”
Cara nodded once, gathered Xan close to her. “Thank you, Doctor.” She pushed off Elvi’s desk with one long, graceful leg. The children—or test subjects, or human-alien hybrids, or however Elvi thought of them in the moment—closed the door behind them. Elvi pressed her palms against her eyes until colors bloomed, and she let out a sigh. Her body was rattling with exhaustion and excitement and anxiety. It felt like drinking too much coffee, and she hadn’t had any at all.
She wrote down the rest of her observations of Cara and Xan and attached the raw data to the report. Then it was just her summary still to go. She shifted the interface to Dictation and let herself float away from her desk. Her leg wanted her to stretch, but it also wanted to cramp. Ever since she’d regrown the hole in her thigh, it did this sometimes.
“We are seeing definite progress,” she said, and the words laid themselves out on her screen. “The triadic relationship between protomolecule catalyst, conscious subject, and the BFE—” Elvi scowled and made a clicking sound with her tongue that backed out the last two words. “—the presumed alien data core seems to be finishing what we’re calling its handshake protocol. I am concerned that the primary subject and the interface weren’t designed for each other, and the interaction between them might be—” She clicked twice again. “—has the potential to be destructive to one or both of them.”