Turk and Allison had expressed curiosity about the journey. I would have liked to show them where we were—show them directly, I mean, without mediation—but it was impossible to look at the exterior universe from inside Vox—to human eyes it would have appeared as a literally blinding cascade of blue-shifted energy, even the longest electromagnetic waves compressed to lethal potency. But I could sample that cascade at intervals and downshift it to visible wavelengths to create a series of representative images. I compiled these images and displayed them to Allison and Turk in their forest home. The result was spectacular but not soothing. The sun was a sullen ember against the darkness of space, the Earth already invisible at the edge of the heliosphere. Stars rolled past as Vox Core slowly rotated—a remnant motion I hadn’t bothered to correct. “Lonesome,” Allison remarked in a small voice.

To an outside observer we would have looked like something paradoxical: an event horizon without a black hole, a lightless bubble from which nothing escaped but a few wisps of radiation.

In fact the barrier that enclosed us was more complex than any natural event horizon. There were no words in any human vocabulary to describe how it functioned, though I told Turk, when he asked, that it was both a barrier and a conduit. Through it, I maintained my contact with the Hypotheticals. And as we counted years for seconds I began to feel the long rhythms of the galactic ecology—the voids of abandoned or dying stars, the bright World Rings (only one of which was the familiar human one) thriving under Hypothetical cultivation, the intense activity that surrounded newly formed stars and emerging biologically active planets.

But there was no soul or agency in any of this, only the mindless pulse of replication and selection, unspeakably beautiful but as empty as a desert. The ecology of the Hypotheticals would churn on inexorably until it had depleted every heavy element, exhausted every source of energy within its reach. When the last star blinked into darkness, the Hypothetical machines would mine the gravity wells of ancient singularities; when those singularities evaporated and the universe grew dark and blank … well, then, I supposed the Hypotheticals would die too. And unlike human beings, they would die without complaint. No one would mourn them, and nothing would inherit the ruins they left behind.

It became ever more difficult to remember to tend to the needs of my organic body. I lived in the quantum processors at the heart of Vox Core, and, increasingly, I lived in the cloud of Hypothetical devices that surrounded and followed us as we fell between the stars.

I allowed myself to wonder what would happen when Turk and Allison eventually left me. Where I would go. What I would become.

*   *   *