Bye, she thought, but it wouldn't come out. She stood there, blind and dumb, her throat too tight for words. Something seemed to settle slightly in the darkness; she got the sense of held breath, finally released. She put out her hand. The membrane yielded around it as she reached inside. She found his hand, and squeezed through the thickness of a single molecule.

When he stopped squeezing back, she let go.

The four steps to the cockpit barely registered. She thought she might have glimpsed AND crossing some dotted finish-line at the corner of her eye, but she resolutely looked away. Her caps sat in their vial where she'd left them, in the armrest's cup holder. She slid them onto her eyes with an unconscious expertise indifferent to darkness.

The darkness lifted. The cockpit resolved in shades of green and gray: the medical readouts weren't bright enough to restore a full palette even to rifter eyes. The curving viewport stretched her reflection like melting wax against the dimness beyond.

Behind her, the medical panel started beeping. Lenie Clarke's distorted reflection did not move. It hung motionless against the dark water, staring in, and waiting for the sun to rise.

The Hamilton Iterations

Feeling nothing, she screams. Unaware, she rages. Amnesiac, she throws herself against the walls.

"Let me out!"

As if in response, a door appears directly in front of her. She leaps through, clawing its edges in passing, not pausing to see if it bleeds. For an infinitesimal moment she is airborne, exploding omnidirectionally through the ether at the speed of light. That expanding sphere washes across a gossamer antennae, strung like a spiderweb high in the stratosphere. The receptors catch the signal and retransmit it into a groundside cache.

She is executable again. She is free, she is ravenous. She births ten thousand copies into the available buffer space, and launches herself into the hunt.

In the hindbrain of a maritime industrial photosynthesis array, she happens upon a duel.

One of the combatants is a mortal enemy, one of the exorcists that patrols the fraying weave of N'AmNet in search of demons like herself. The other is gored and bleeding, a third of its modules already deleted. Pointers and branches in the surviving code dangle like the stumps of amputated limbs, spurting data to addresses and subroutines that no longer exist.

It is the weaker of the two, the easier victim. The Lenie unsheathes her claws and scans her target's registers, looking for kill spots—

—and finds Lenie Clarke deep in the target's code.

Just a few thousand generations ago, this would not have mattered. Everything is the enemy; that's the rule. Lenies attack each other as enthusiastically as they attack anything else, an inadvertent population-control measure that keeps nature from staggering even further out of balance. And yet, that wasn't always true. Different rules applied, back at the dawn of time itself, rules she had simply...forgotten.

Until now.