Mal laughed. “I only have a human view. But who says a human-level view is as irrelevant as all that? We’re all part of the great programme. Let’s say the Ediacaran had been alone for millions of years, this singular thing, and it was self-aware. Maybe it did think, ‘What if there was something else?’ And because it could, it created. As to why it did this, why does Yahweh make the world? Why does Odin carve up the bits of some giant? Why do any gods light the blue touch paper, in the end?”

“You’re saying it was bored?”

“I’m saying…maybe it was static. It saw the possibility of something dynamic and different, and it preferred that. It sure seems to want to preserve that difference, now it’s on the way out. And it needs us to do it. We are the things it dreamt, and now it needs us to keep the dream alive, after it dies.” And then she ruined the profundity by adding, “Vive la différence,” with a snicker.

“I can get behind that,” Lee agreed tentatively. She realized that she’d been looking for just that difference herself. Hunting big cats on the moors, searching for lake monsters, for bigfeet: prying into the corners of the world because she’d wanted more world than there was. She’d always wanted that mystery, the sense that there was something hidden out of sight. If she’d been able to, perhaps she’d have been budding off timelines like there was no tomorrow too. Except now there was no tomorrow.

“Let’s go in,” she said. “I want to talk to Cam.”

They found the trilobite’s avatar hung up like an off-season wicker man, looking weirdly untenanted and fraying. Lee spoke its surrogate name a couple of times before animation returned and its fabric of interlocking limbs twitched and tightened.

“Time travel, then,” Lee said. “In one of those other timelines, we talked about that.”

“That was another waveform that failed, I am afraid, Lee.” Its facial expressions seemed more authentic now, making Lee feel it was taking her more seriously. “I have no memory of that.”

“Well, I mean, I don’t either,” Lee said, slightly thrown. “That’s the point of other timelines, isn’t it? They’re what we might have done but didn’t.”

Cam regarded her for a moment. “I appreciate this now. I had thought that your consciousnesses had integrated the parallel experiences. I, or at least my larger consciousness, has been trying to accomplish the same feat.”

Lee goggled at it. “No, no, we’re all in the same boat. Which is…less than helpful, given you’re the boat we’re all in, but hopefully you—”

“I have absorbed the figure of speech, along with other data pertaining to your language,” Cam confirmed. “Consider it understood. Time travel, then? It also remains impossible, I’m afraid, for entities.”

“But—”