Getting on the cord wasn’t difficult. Depth was controlled by the state of her mind, and she understood that two particular factors, familiarity and acknowledgement, would coax up the reflections that were most buried. Familiarity was the recognition of reflections that she’d seen before as they were displayed. But it was the registering and cataloguing of that reflection which seemed to quash the brain’s desire to continue presenting it inside the dredge. Like digging a hole, an unacknowledged reflection was a shovelful of dirt dumped back in. Seeing it and processing it meant the dirt would be tossed aside, outside the hole, permitting the spade to plow deeper. As each subsequent trip into the dredge meant fewer reflections that had to be seen and appreciated for the first time, the dives went deeper. And this time she knew what she was looking for.

The most recent of Naecia’s priors, of course, were the twin sister mathematicians. When they weren’t arguing, they were building their revolutionary stacking algorithm, and Naecia was tapping into the thread of consciousness that ran through them both. It was that bit of math that had allowed her to build a machine with the ability to process and organize unfathomable quantities of data at mind-boggling speed. Yet the sisters had been unable to get beyond that point.

They had built their own machine with its algorithm in an attempt to bridge the gap between the theories of their first prior –Naecia’s third – and the realization of instantaneous transport. What those theories had been, however, Naecia didn’t know. They weren’t accessible to her. Either it wasn’t on the shared strands of memory that she could see, or the theories had not imprinted when the twins learned them.

Naecia thought she understood why. Usually, if a person’s experience of an event was poignant enough, at least some information about that event was preserved. But if the concepts allowing for instantaneous travel had been acquired passively – like the twins simply perceiving thoughts that bubbled up from their own priors – rather than as a reward for scientific inquiry, they might not have been etched into the record of their consciousness for Naecia to see.

Yet, even armed with the theories that had spurred them on to develop the math and build their own machine, the twins couldn’t make it go. The last reflection Naecia had seen from them was a catastrophic depressurization before running a test. She could feel their horror, their disbelief as they realized they would die because of something so trivial as a faulty seal in an airlock. And everything they’d known or learned had disappeared into the vacuum with them – that is, until Naecia came along. As a Stringer, she made salvage of abandoned memories. She had rescued their algorithm, but she needed more.