Aptat smiled genuinely as they pulled down the helmet. “If attacking the Timelance doesn’t work out, we should partner up. Your cunning, my good looks.”

“But we’d be dead,” observed Oush.

Aptat cold-eyed him. “That’s the joke.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

I began to adjust to the dredge, moving quickly through the reflections, locking onto the patterns like a transmission dropping into gear. They began to seem more familiar, understandable, and... natural. As for my quest for the Chime, well, all the dredge had really managed to do was make Mr Bug-butts and Mr Rolex all the more accessible, with so much time down the cord knocking their reflections loose.

The churn did bring about new reflections from further down. In a way, this was progress. In another it was a devastating dead end. They were blank – data free. Just empty shapes without the layers containing tiny glimmers of life that Bugs and Watches had produced. How can you imprint something with no data?

Each day, Eyes retrieved me from the enclosure and we made the trip to the dredge. I began to recognize many of the other boid-made Scythin individuals, especially the ones with the metal prongs embedded in their chests. There were twenty-six of these curiously adorned individuals. They were given wide berth by the other Scythin, as if they were special in some way that I hadn’t been able to discern – though I observed no hierarchical behavior beyond this formal deference. The Twenty-Six, as I came to think of them, were the only ones permitted to go near me, though only Eyes ever did.

I tried to make sense of the societal arrangement in the only way I knew how, which was to compare them to an insect analog. There was no direct comparison to any Earth species, but there were similarities, especially to Azteca constructor, ants whose colonies have multiple queens.89 So I took to thinking of the Twenty-Six as Scythin queens even though I had no clue if they had sexual categories or genders, never saw one lay an egg, or don a crown. Nevertheless, as no two were alike, I named them. And likely not in a way befitting their office.

In addition to Eyes, there was Foot-head, Spike, Darth Vaper, Dirty Sanchez, Skinny-fat, Cha-cha, Front-butt, Xenodwarf, Cold-cuts, Lizard-Chief, Anubis, Kraken, Taint Viking, The Deech, Space Goat, The Big Woman, Scrungent, Sans Serif, Dan Hanks, Cheeks McGee, Senator Graham, Cock Wraith, Uncle Jerry, Karen, and finally, Millipedo, on account of this one preferred a “top half” configuration – just a torso with arms and head – carried about on a small boid-army of legs like a member of Diplopoda. The similarities ended there, hopefully.90