Allison had preserved, or perhaps inherited, her namesake’s penchant for writing. I discovered she was setting down a narrative of everything she had experienced between the Equatorian desert and the holocaust of the Vox Archipelago, the words painstakingly hand-printed on crisp white paper. When I asked her who she was writing it for, she shrugged. “I don’t know. Myself, I guess. Or maybe it’s more like a message in a bottle.”

And wasn’t that what Vox Core had become? A bottle adrift and far from shore, its glass baked green by sun and starlight, bearing messages of bone and blood?

I encouraged her to keep writing and I memorized each page she showed me: that is, I committed it to every repository of memory available to me, not just my mortal brain but the processors of the Coryphaeus and the archival clouds of the Hypothetical entities surrounding us. One day these words might be all that remained of her.

I suggested to Turk that he might write his own story, but he didn’t see the point of it. So I settled for conversation. We talked, often for hours, whenever I sent my mortal body to visit their forest home. I knew everything the Coryphaeus had once known about him, including what Turk had said to Oscar about the man he had killed, and he was able to speak freely.

“I made it my business to learn about Orrin Mather,” he said. “He was born with some kind of brain damage. He lived most of his life with an older sister in North Carolina. He got into a lot of fights, drank some, eventually left home and made his way west. He held up a few stores when he ran out of cash and put a man in the hospital once. He wasn’t a saint—far from it. But I didn’t know any of that when I did what I did. Really he was just somebody who got dealt a bad hand at birth. Other circumstances, he might have been something else.”

Which was true of all of us, of course.

I told Turk that if he wrote down what he remembered about Orrin Mather and Vox Core I would keep the words safe, along with Allison’s, as long as Vox and the Hypothetical ecology survived.

“You think that’ll make any kind of difference?”

“Not to anyone but us.”

Turk said he would think it over.

These people, Allison and Turk, were my friends. They were the only real friends I had ever had, and I was sorry I would have to leave them. I wanted something of theirs to carry with me.

*   *   *

The Hypothetical ecology was a forest, lush and mindless, but that didn’t mean it was uninhabited. You might say it was haunted.