What she liked was art, and the most spectacular form of art was the ordered chaos of a mass-media broadcast act of terrorism.

It seemed so juvenile now, of course. But what artist could be blamed for their early work? She hoped she’d learned from it, had gotten better. She spent several decades on Titan under a new name, making intimate works, trying to puzzle out and make manifest the visions she had seen out in the Oort. The works she made there sold in galleries, some even made their way off-world. Poisoned chalices: they’d kill whoever possessed them, slowly.

Those, too, seemed so silly now.

When she was young and proud, she thought that death was everything. Historians and collectors now thought of the terrorartists as a single movement, but they were few in number and lived decades, sometimes centuries apart. Rohini was dust long before Nasu came along. “Mad” Rucker wasn’t even from Earth. And Sandoval was just crazy, Nasu always, privately, thought. She refused to acknowledge him as either a true artist or terrorist.

She was inspired by Rohini and the Jakarta bomb installation. That thing she’d half-forgotten in Dahab, that was pure copy work, a pale reflection of Rohini’s grander original. Rohini had redefined art and terror both. Later, of course, Nasu found her own style. It was the time of all the wars, so she was kept busy. That thing out beyond Neom, that was something to be proud of, even if they destroyed it in the end, and buried it so it would not be found.

But it was found.

When she was young she thought that death was everything. Now that she was old she knew that death was mundane. She knew too many who had died. She was no longer as inspired by death as she once was. The things in the Oort opened her mind and made new neural connections in her new organic brain. Even they, things the size of planets, did not truly know where they came from. Perhaps “Mad” Rucker seeded them the way he had the Boppers of Titan. Or maybe they were alien, if aliens existed. The things in the Oort were more like Others. They thought digital thoughts, but in foreign protocols, ones that shared nothing with the Conversation. And they hated noise.

She was thinking too much. This wasn’t about them. This was just some old unfinished business.

Such a leisurely trip. The crossing from Egypt to the peninsula. Nasu remembered a little girl growing up in the shadow of unfinished skyscrapers. Was that her? A dusty road, hot winds, a sleepy airport that was all that Neom was back then. She couldn’t be sure. Long ago she’d put most of her memories away in jewels and scattered them.

Who she was now was a ghost possessing a body.