Naecia took hold of the lid and leaned in, voice soft. “Don’t get stupid down there. Unfortunately, you can’t die until we have the Chime. Make sure you come back with all your coherence.” She stood from the machine. “Your friend is still here. He’d miss you if you went away.”

I closed the lid and, feeling some relief, realized that I quite preferred having my brain dredged to any further berating by Naecia. I dialed in, quickly pushing aside any flotsam-like reflections of Mr Bugs or Mr Watches, and dove for the depths of Aszerat.

It floated there, in the soup of my consciousness, much like the real Aszerat floated in space, looking a bit like a spherical pinecone with all of its monster radiation shields cantered to the dueling stars. My version was a three-dimensional blueprint drawn in glowing blue and purple and amber. I pushed into the Blue Quadrant and floated about through great halls, bays, and power systems, hoping to feel some tinge of familiarity or pull in one direction or another like a hillbilly using dowsing rods to divine water and witch a well.102

I didn’t feel jack shit.

I swam into the deepest, darkest crannies of Blue Quadrant, down a sewer passage in Golden Teacher, into every utility closet lining the halls of Wavy Caps. I went through the low-ceilinged ducts of Pajaritos, zig-zagged the maze-like power corridor of Philosopher’s Stone. As detailed as the schematics were, they still rang hollow.

I exploded the view on one of the large residential units, breaking its components into chunks of reflections, then slid them away from each other to get down to the smallest building blocks of memory. I picked one, a simple, bluish, rectangular polyhedron, squared off at the top and rounded near the bottom. I drew it longways through the lid to check the glimmers.

They were still blank as ever.

I repeated this over and over: at a section of the docks, a navigational outpost, even some type of space laser things set out on huge arms that extended beyond the habitable space. The fragments were all the same as they had been since I’d been building Aszerat: full of glowing blue or purple glimmers, capped at the top with a single layer rimmed in bright amber.

And then I laughed. The answer. I was right there. How could I have missed it?

I pushed my mind up the cord where I might find scrap reflections floating around from Bugs or Watches. I grabbed the first one I saw, a neon blue roughly hammer-shaped polyhedron packed with very detailed glimmers about Strepsipterans, which are these tiny bugs that live inside wasp assholes.103 I pushed through the very graphic, and disturbing, description of Strepsipteran reproduction, all the way to the glimmer capping the top. Blue. Just like the rest of it. No outline drawn in another color.