“All of them?”

“Hmm-mm. Well, except for your friend. He’s the only normal one here.”

There it was. The answer. Suddenly, my whole life leading to this point made sense. I wasn’t crazy, I was just... possessed? “I’m Virginia Tighe,” I said.

“That means nothing to me. Explain.”

With my arm still stuck between the glass, I said, “Past life regression. Virginia Tighe swore that she had the memories of this dead lady named Bridey Murphy. She knew all this stuff about Murphy’s life that she had no business knowing. They discredited her because it came out that she’d grown up next door to another Irish immigrant much like Murphy. I’m who she thought she was.”

“Congratulations on getting closure,” said Aptat with increased agitation. “Now please withdraw your arm before I liquify it.”

“No.” My voice cracked. My eyes filled – which caught me off guard. “No.” Maybe it was the years of wondering, never knowing. Of doing nothing more with my life aside from searching. Wanting an answer had become my purpose. Now that I had it, a thousand more questions spawned in its wake. “I want to know why. Why am I like this? You owe me that much. I saved you.”

Aptat tilted their head and displayed a skeptical grin. “That’s debatable – Dekies was girding for a fight. And even if hypothetically your warning did give me a teeny, tiny, little advantage, you saved yourself as well. The last place you’d want to be is in a Vortu slave dungeon. Let’s call it even.”

“No,” I grumbled, trying to force more of my flesh through the narrow gap. I managed to get a calf and some belly through. Now I probably did look like an exploded can of biscuit dough. “You explain. You tell me what I am. Why I’m like this.”

“Pathetic,” said Aptat with a lazy sweep of the hand, opening my chamber all the way, causing me to stumble out and nearly trip to the floor. “But fine. You are a Stringer, Ben. Someone with access to your downcord priors. But it isn’t reincarnation.”

“Downcord?”

Aptat stepped casually over one of the Vortu sprawled on the floor on the way to the captain’s chair at the ship’s sleek console. They slumped into it with a dramatic sigh. “Sentience... self-awareness – whatever you want to call it, is just another form of matter. All around us, in fact. Ubiquitous.” A twirl of finger. “Your scientists have speculated on a substance they cannot yet see, giving it mysterious names like dark or exotic matter, polaritons, quasiparticles, “background” particles. They hypothesize and infer its existence but haven’t actually observed it. They will at some point, and once they do, it will be generations before they gain any understanding of what it actually is. Eventually, maybe, humankind – if it lasts long enough – will learn the truth.” A series of finger taps called up a holographic display from the console, a three-dimensional closeup that looked vaguely like the inside of a sponge, with densely concentrated areas adjacent to empty vacuoles. “This is the Oblivion Fray.”