“What does that have to do with me?”

“Well, you’ve been a busy little source of signal yourself – asking the internet about the Chime for decades, I’ll guess. Anyone out here with an open ear could hear you. What is the Chime? Why don’t I know what the Chime is? Is the Chime a weapon? Is the Chime a religious icon? Did you ask those questions, Ben?”

“Maybe.”

“You did, because I heard you ask those questions a few years after you asked them. Anyone listening, even casually, for messages like those you sent would have heard them. Like me.”

“All my searches?” Gulp.

“You have some interesting tastes and proclivities,” said Aptat, surrendering their hands. “No worries, this is a judgment – free zone.”

“So when I tried to learn about the Chime–”

“You were like a giant homing beacon shouting ‘HERE I AM. I AM A STRINGER. I KNOW WHERE YOUR IMPORTANT CHIME IS. PLEASE COME AND KIDNAP ME’.” They laughed. “You didn’t use your real name and location, so it took me a while to narrow down your geographic location based on your active hours and the occasional reference to some uniquely regional item, usually something about a fish. I made my post on Déjà Who at a time when I figured you’d see it. And, well, you bit.”

“So you’re a scavenger, not a bounty hunter.”

“I never claimed to be,” Aptat said. “But it’s still a roll of the dice. The amount and quality of knowledge possessed from Stringer to Stringer varies wildly. Some are sources of vast knowledge – several lives worth, with good coherence, while others are limited. The neural dredge,” they thumbed in the direction of the space coffin that Naecia had been forced into, “can be useful to coax more of that buried knowledge to the surface – perhaps open the doors to a few more rooms. Brains are potential treasure-troves, but they have flimsy walls. Sometimes the ceiling falls in. Trying to get at that treasure can be dangerous...” eyes flicking to Naecia, “as you’ve seen. The more time spent downcord, the more familiar it will feel, the greater the chance that the silt of past lives gets churned into the current. It’s one of the reasons I rarely dredge the cargo. You spend enough time in someone else’s home, you start to think you live there. You come back up, unsure of who you really are. You risk decohering from your present state.”

“Is that what happened to Naecia?”

“No. She wasn’t down long enough. Though the dredge allows us to see the depth of her descent and the demarcations between priors, it can’t display exactly what she is visualizing. That remains in her mind. But I surmise she was chasing a memory and slipped the cord – dropped onto the lower reaches of a distant prior. The farther down you go, the closer you come to the bottom, where the cord meets back up with the Fray.”