I slid like a hockey puck over the center of the deck, one hand over my head, the other down a pocket trying for the ampoule. I got it out just as I shot from the floor to the ceiling, smashing my face. Stars lit my vision. Blood from my nose and mouth spilled into air.

I spun into the middle space, flailing for a handhold, one eye obscured by the blood trailing up from my nostrils. I wiped at it, tried to orient myself. My jaw felt like it’d been ripped from my face. I’d be pulp before too long. I wasn’t going to get another chance to use the Amnesplid. I went to break it open, only to find I was no longer holding it.

One-eyed and drifting across the deck, I cast about until I spotted a shining constellation floating nearby. Shards of glass, perfect little spheres of liquid, and a pair of teeth.

A loud noise. An echo of metal. The ship instantly ceased tumbling and I pounded the deck, still miserably alive, still knowing where the Chime was.

I stood, dizzy, weak from the pummeling, and made for the distant wall, toward the black smudge I hoped was the neural dredge.

Other sounds echoed through the structure of the ship. I tapped the panel on the dredge and slid the power to maximum, then laid down inside with a grunt. The lid closed.

Fragments of the past presented themselves in jewel-like reflections. I felt my chest heaving. Stop being a little bitch, Ben. I didn’t want to die, or have my brain wiped, or whatever it was that happened when you slipped the cord. But I was tired – or more, weary. And while I wasn’t at peace, a part of me looked forward to it – the quiet – even if I would no longer be there to experience it. Just knowing that quiet would come... it settled my heart.

I didn’t know how many Stringers there were in the galaxy. Thousands? Millions? But now, at least, some other person born after my consciousness ceased would be spared a lifetime of questions. No bugs. No watches. No Chime.

I focused on the reflections and got on the cord. Pushing the memories up through the lid in order to go deeper, I flew past drifting glimmers of one man’s peculiar thing for insect privates, and the passionate, yet boring, ephemera of another person’s affection for horological curios. Then, to Aszerat, the sprawling and tedious work of the one who had come three lives before me – Jecca, without whose sacrifice none of us would have ever lived. I spun the massive architecture round like a globe and let go.