Obviously, I couldn’t participate. Even if I had wanted to, everyone in Vox Core knew me from the newsfeeds. I was a traitor to my own past, a dissonant note in the story of the Uptaken, and because I was nodeless my behavior would seem opaque and untrustworthy. I wasn’t in any danger from the crowds—at least, not yet—but I would be ostracized and ignored if I tried to join them. So I found a place where I could be alone, a wooded patch overlooking the market zone. A half mile or so downslope, as ambient light dimmed toward night, the market square filled with celebrants. They carried luminous rods of various sizes and colors, and they gathered behind a leader who conducted them through the maze of market stalls in a sinuous moving line. The effect was spectacular in the dark and from a distance, a glowing multicolored snake twining around and through itself, swaying to the beat of the drums.

I felt sad, I felt perversely nostalgic. I wasn’t Treya anymore and I didn’t want to be Treya, but I missed the pleasure Treya had once taken in events like this. That is, my pleasure. She, me, mine, hers. Deceptively simple words, not as easy to parse as they had once seemed.

Even nodeless, I could tell when a fresh rush of excitement swept through the crowd. I had to look across a gap of treetops to one of the festival’s huge video displays to see what had happened. The display showed a group of snakedancers unfurling a banner; on the banner was a portrait of Isaac Dvali, literally glowing in the dark. Cheering and applause echoed up the terrace like the sound of a hard rain falling.

But it wasn’t really Isaac they were cheering for. They were cheering for what Isaac represented: the fulfillment of prophecy, the imminent end of days. It was the voice of the doomed Coryphaeus, worshipping itself through the body of Vox.

*   *   *

How do you measure a universal madness? I took as signs the contagious irrationalities, the bland indifference to real problems (shortages of grain and animal protein, for instance), the public obsession with the Hypotheticals that followed the massacre in the Antarctic desert. Images of the Hypothetical machines were everywhere now, and a belief had begun to emerge that the soldiers and scientists killed in the vanguard expedition weren’t really dead but had been Uptaken.

Presumably, when the machines eventually arrived at Vox, the rest of us would be similarly raptured into communion with the Hypotheticals … or killed; the terms were commutable. Prophecy had always been a little vague on that point. Vox’s founders had believed the end of Vox would take the form of what they called ajientei, for which the nearest English equivalent might be “enlargement”—the diffusion of human consciousness over galactic space and geologic time, the scale on which the Hypotheticals were presumed to operate.