“So I made an impulse decision to prove to myself that you were not a person. Dynamic fusion bonds are typically formed through high language, but they can be done without it, if one is able to key in on your neural energy, as I was. But they are never unidirectional; they always flow both ways. So if I was able to do it to you, then you were able to do it to me. I assumed it would fail. But it didn’t. Dynamic fusion bonding is our second criterion for personhood. It proves what I feared the most; you are a person, and we are bound until death.”

Cora just stared at him, speechless. She hadn’t even begun to consider his decision to bind himself to her anything other than strategy. But it wasn’t strategy. It wasn’t even a desperate act of love.

It had been a test.

“It is a burden to carry this knowledge. You are not unique. There is nothing exceptional about you. If you are a person, then so are all adult humans. Seven billion persons on this planet. You can reason, you have language, you are conscious. And you are predators. And you are violent. And you consume even more voraciously than transients. Why, of every species that we have discovered with the potential to advance, why did it have to be you?”

She felt a sort of desperation from the other side of the wall, pushing her down as if she were in a wind tunnel.

“There is no concept I can explain that you would not eventually comprehend at least the fundamentals of. Your raw intelligence may even be greater than our ancestors’, as I never could have imagined a civilization advancing as quickly as yours has. I am burdened with the knowledge of human personhood.”

She felt a wave crest inside her, an aching sense of loss and want and hunger and loneliness. Pain, so much pain to be shut out from the whole, like a limb without a body.

“But I would give it all back to be a part of the machine again. I would purge that knowledge from my mind if it meant I could be a part of the Superorganism again. No burden of truth is worth this misery.

“I want to go home,” he said, and the wall between them practically burst, a flood of grief flowing through him and into her, crashing into her so hard it felt like her sternum might crack under the pressure. “I want to go home. I want to go home.”