Suddenly Vox was a dark patch on the surface of the Ross Sea far below us, the scuttled islands of the Farmers surrounding it like a sunken reef. We rose at a vertiginous speed until the sea was lost in mist, rose until we soared above a deck of clouds that ran to every horizon.

Turk confirmed our destination with the aircraft’s onboard protocols and managed to lock out any signals coming from Vox. Which also isolated his node from the activity of the Coryphaeus—he shuddered once, then shook his head as if to clear it. He instructed the vehicle to alert us in the event of pursuit (there was none, probably thanks to Isaac) and sat back, drained and pale, from the control surfaces. The clouds below us looked as forbidding as a range of wild mountains.

He looked at me with his eyes narrowed. I remembered that feeling—the way Treya had felt when the Network shut down, as if all the color and sense had been drained from the world. “Promise me something,” he said.

“What?”

“The thing they attached to my spine—once we get where we’re going, promise you’ll cut it out of me.”

Solemnly, I promised I would.

*   *   *

Once we get where we’re going. We hadn’t been able to talk much about that.

Back at Vox Core I had spent a lot of time viewing material from the Voxish archives (using only manual interfaces, a slow and frustrating process) and reading the histories that had been prepared for Turk. Vox had been persecuted for centuries by jealous cortical democracies, or so I had been taught. But without the cheerleading of the Coryphaeus, those familiar stories seemed ambiguous and even disturbing. The founders of Vox had been the activist wing of a radical belief system, ostracized by the bionormative majorities of the Middle Worlds for their experiments with banned Hypothetical biotechnology. In response the founders had chosen to create their own closed polity, a limbic democracy with a built-in metaphysics.

Vox must have seemed, at least at first, just a slightly more eccentric example of the many artificial island communities that grew and thrived in the oceans of Ester, a watery Middle World. The founders had abandoned experiments with Hypothetical biotech in favor of their belief in an eventual human-Hypothetical union, which was why they made saints of everyone who had ever been touched by the Hypotheticals—beginning with Jason Lawton at the dawn of the Spin era and including countless longevity cultists, ancient Martian Fourths, and the reckless or unlucky souls who had been taken up by temporal Arches.