“You used the word temple. Tell me more.”

I was lying here thinking I haven’t talked this much to a person in a long time …

Aynur.

Rustem felt that same combination of anger and terrible loss. It was relentless, this feeling—it found him wherever he was … at the Pera Palace, on the streets, in a café—always, like now, without warning, and as immediate as if he were reliving being told of her death the first time.

“I’ve never seen anything like it. No—that doesn’t even begin to describe this. I’ve never seen any AI structure that is in the same universe as this. There are a million metaphors you could use, I suppose. All of them insufficient. A labyrinth. A forest. A galaxy. Its density and its size are staggering. If I’d had to tell you what it was, at first I would have said it wasn’t a map of an AI network, it was a map of a human mind. It should be impossible to penetrate even the outskirts of it.”

A long pause. The hand wrote, “But…”

“But then I saw signs that it was built. There are places—you could call them … seams. Or edges. Like…” He laughed.

“Go on.”

“Another metaphor. Metaphors are all I have to talk with, anymore. I’m in this world now where words don’t work, so I keep having to dig around, find concepts somewhere else. I was going to say—like the Monster in Frankenstein. Not the staggering thing in the old movies, but like I would have imagined the monster: a human who, if you looked, you would see was built from many parts of other humans. You would be able to see the faintest scars where the parts were joined together. They wouldn’t be clumsy, or obvious: they would be almost invisible to the eye. This is like that. This is a mind built from other minds, fused together from many parts. And once I saw the seams—I was able to follow them. They were like pathways to the center.”

“You found a portal.”

“Yes. I found it three days ago.”

“And you have not told them.”