The medicos let her go after some snap-scans. “Just a mini,” a slender woman reassured her. “No damage. Little shook, is all. Just take it easy, right?”

“Easy… yeah… oog…”

“There was one anomaly. Have you had a tap-in recently?”

“Um. No. What kind?”

“Looks like neuro-memory complex. Some search fingerprints, as we call them. Fading, so maybe a few weeks back? Trying to access old recalls?”

“I have plenty of past I don’t want to revisit. Nope—not my kind of thing.”

“Our mistake, then. Looked pretty incisive, though.” The nurse scowled skeptically at her. There were freakos Earthside who chose to dwell in their own favorite times, usually old people. A whole tap-in industry helped them relive those eras. Rachel felt that, as in grammar, the past was tense, the future perfect. Or might become.

She felt a century old, though, as she walked shakily away. She hadn’t called Cat or anybody. The medics had shot her up with the fast-repair micros. They worked best if blood pumped them around, fed them oxy. So she strode and puffed and let the mini-miracles do their stuff. Even her aches started easing away.

She passed an archway that twanged in memory. Here was the special small Vault where Hounds took damaged Message Minds. The thick metallo buttresses firmly isolated the Minds from electromagnetic leakage, so none could escape. She went in past the ribbed defenses, her inbuilt ID getting her through. The catacombs were narrow and nearly deserted. Here Librarian engineers tried to relieve Minds of their addled content. Then teams helped the diseased, intelligent fragments reunite. They also at times had to destroy malignant portions of those same Minds, to stop them from corrupting the rest, like clever digital diseases. There was the usual acronym on the front door, but below it was a handwritten sign, SCHLACHTHOF-FÜNF—Slaughterhouse-Five in Anglish, either a joke or a literary reference.

She had earlier found it was both. Because some of the “frags,” as the term went, were forever dangerous. They were virals made by machine-minds that meant to eliminate all naturally made life—“originals,” as some put it—to eliminate danger to what these virals termed the “Immortals.”

These frags had to die. So they did.

The lead attendant asked, “What Mind do you seek for?”

That Minds wanted to reunite with their wreckages had not occurred to her. “Sigma Structure.”

The attendant was a willowy woman with angular cheekbones and a smile that blossomed. “Ah! We have found connectors to it by cross-lacing with similarly ancient origins.”

“What came with those?”

“Conversations other societies had, about the Sigma Structure. Even aliens gossip! Here, we allow the Minds to frolic. They continuously integrate strands of code and references. It is like a sport, for them. We access these deliberations only when asked by such as you.”

“Why not regularly?”

“If we interrupt, lines of Mind-thought can be lost, decorrelated.”

“So now I’m asking.” She tapped her Trainee emblem on her sleeve. “What’s up with the Structure now?”