Alison could sense them, sometimes: the minds of the Posticthyans. They existed at what she thought of as a much deeper level of the Ice Mind than she usually accessed. From their fleeting contacts, she gathered only that they were very alien minds to hers, and had little interest in her. She fancied that at the heart of the Ice Mind was a vast simulated space, a recreation of their civilization in its halcyon days, and that they had no inclination to stir themselves from it. Only very occasionally did she have a sense of them, like ponderous shapes passing in the depths far beneath her.

The Ice Mind itself extended further than that. Partly it was following its deep programming to protect and preserve the minds of its creators—but partly it was a vast computer system of near limitless capability which would roll over and do tricks for just about anyone who asked. The engineers who built it had never considered that they might need to restrict access, because they hadn’t thought there was anyone outside whom they might need to exclude.

It didn’t think and wasn’t conscious, or that was her tenuous guess. However, it was also a system of inconceivable complexity, self-organizing and self-improving, with a planet’s resources at its disposal. Sometimes she felt she had cast her lot in with a genie or demon, all that power reduced down to something she could petition. Impossible to shake the impression she was dealing with a personality rather than a system, no matter how hard she tried to be distant and professional about things.

She’d had to limit her access, because the ice cream headaches were only getting worse. Possibly she was doing permanent damage to her brain, every time she reached out to it. The headaches only really bit when she cut the connection too, so while that communion endured, she had little feedback on the self-harm she might be inflicting.

It was addictive, though: who wouldn’t want to know everything, especially someone in her profession? Sometimes she felt that she could merge with it, become its genius loci, the ghost in the machine and the god out of it. The thought was intoxicating—yet because she was who she was, that was when she cut the link and spent some time being human amongst other living people. There was something to be said about being brought up in a culture of guilt, self-denial and being told you weren’t worthy. It meant that when someone offered you all the kingdoms of the Earth, you tended to pass. You went back, of course, after a little abstinence, like a smoker who quits a dozen times each day.