The Caconym, in the shape of its virtual avatoid, returned to the castle-made-of-castles it had modelled within the near-unending recesses of its computational matrices. Its humanoid shape set out from the gatehouse that was made of tens of thousands of already mighty gatehouses, and walked all the way to the high tower which sat like a fat flagpole on top of the great composite tower, many subjective kilometres away into the fractal architecture of the baroque edifice.

It had waited all this time to hear anything from the mind-state of the Zoologist – anything at all that might have helped it and its colleagues in their attempts to understand the workings of the Sublime – and, despite being tempted to do so many times, it had not come back here to attempt to force the pace or the issue.

Now that the matter in hand appeared to have been settled – without, it had to be said, any help from the Zoologist – it had something to report, and could release the soul of the other ship from whatever obligation to help that it might have felt under. Not that that appeared to be very much, given the continuing silence. At least the instances of weird, ambiguous intrusions into its substrates, maybe from the Sublimed realm, had tailed off to nothing recently. That was a good sign, perhaps.

Or perhaps not. It was starting to worry about that.

It arrived, at last, after a climb of many thousands of steps, at the door to the airy, enclosed lair inhabited by the consciousness of the Sublime-returnee, the abstract of what had once been the Mind of the Zoologist.

There was no answer when it knocked. The place sounded quiet. It already felt that it knew what it was going to find. The door was locked, but only at a crude physical level, within the sim. Unlocking it was hardly more complicated than the act of turning the handle and pushing the door open.

The door swung, stuck, had to be pushed.

The Caconym’s avatoid walked in and looked around.

The space was, as it had guessed, empty of the Zoologist’s mind-state. It was full of almost everything else, including debris, litter and rubbish of every kind, stained glassware, bulbously gleaming electrical gear, intestinal quantities of tubing, foul smells, loudly protesting, unfed animals, and multitudinous ropes hanging from the ceiling, but of the strange creature with the pale red, mottled skin and the long arms with six fingers, there was no sign.

After it stopped looking for the avatoid of the Zoologist it started looking for a note. It didn’t find one.

“You might have said goodbye,” it said, eventually, to the air, in case its departed guest had left some sort of message behind that might be triggered by speech … but its voice just disappeared into the clutter and the dust and the hazy sunlight coming through the tall windows, and brought no response.