Dearest Siob,

Perhaps there’s something perverse in my urge to write to you.

I don’t succumb to it often. The last time was about eight hundred local years ago. I suppose, if you’ve found this letter, you’ll have found that one too—they should be archived at all the same cache-points. If you’re still alive, and still functioning, and still coherent, and still interested, and still mobile enough to find a cache-point, and it’s still operating . . .

I hold out hope. These signals should penetrate a good chunk of sky, perhaps two hundred light years across. I think you’re in there somewhere.

So much of what I am, Siob, I am in resonance with you.

I’m writing you from the place you last saw me, 239.48 seconds ago in my inertial frame of reference. Yes, from that same little world. I know: it’s not like me to have stuck around so long. Twenty thousand local years! But after so much wandering, I wanted to arrive, Siob. I wanted a home.

Whoever designed this place did an admirable job. The ecoforming is a marvel of sobriety and restraint. The people here are ancient stock, paleohuman with no frills, fragile and short-lived—a choice which has worked out admirably. They’ve trundled along here, age after age, while . . . well, I hardly need to tell you what has become of more robust and ambitious designs, like you and me.

I’m enclosing a story from this world, a tale I recently came across. It’s a true story, more or less . . . everyone here is enmeshed in a thick skein of data, and the local parasentiences can do quite a good job of weaving a biography out of the analysis of electronic excreta. Someone took that and turned it into a linear textual narrative . . . and while I’m sure there are some embellishments and errors, I expect it’s reasonably accurate.

I don’t know why I picked this one. I do appear in it myself, briefly, and that’s amusing; but that’s not why. No, I think that it reminded me of us, so long ago when we were young. You were as headstrong and forthright as Shria, I think, and perhaps I was as stubborn and unpredictable as Fift.

Or so I tell myself. But we have existed so long, you and I, accumulating so many layers of memory and interpretation . . . what do I know, really, of who we once were? All I have left is myth.

And surely you’ve now drifted even farther. What might you have become, Siob, in all these centuries since we last met?

Even if I found you again, would you know me? Could we still decipher each other?

Well . . . here’s a story, anyway. A gift for you. A lure. A pattern-seed from which to grow a bridge between our minds. It is a tale of children, so I’ve translated it into the language you and I spoke as children, back in our creche in the Margin, long before any of these worlds were made.

A lure, yes. I would lure you here, Siob, my strange and ancient friend. No matter what you have become.

Be alive, Siob. You have to be alive.

No one here will ever understand me as you could.

Be alive, and find me. Find me soon.

Your friend,

Thavé