I had had hints of this before. I wasn’t the first human being to access the memory of the Hypotheticals, though my case was certainly unique. The Martians had attempted such connections, sporadically, in the years before the bionormative movement suppressed all such experiments. The first human being on Earth to make the link was Jason Lawton: he had survived his own death by colonizing the computation space of the Hypotheticals—still survived there, perhaps; but his capacity to act, his agency, had been very limited. (It occurs to me that this is almost the definition of a ghost.)

And many of the nonhuman civilizations that had come before us had found their own ways into the forest.

They remained there still, long after their physical civilizations had declined and vanished. They were difficult for me to detect, since their activity was disguised to prevent the Hypothetical host networks from identifying and deleting them. They existed as clusters of operative information—virtual worlds—running inside the data-gathering protocols of the galactic ecosystem.

I sensed their presence but could discern little else about them. The content of these clusters was fractally distributed and impenetrably complex. But there was genuine agency there—not just consciousness but deliberative action that affected external systems.

So I was not alone!—though these alien virtualities were so well defended that I couldn’t contrive a way to contact them, and so ancient and inhuman that I probably wouldn’t have understood anything they might have had to say.

*   *   *

Most of a year had passed since our initial conversation when Turk handed me, without comment, a sheaf of papers on which he had written the history of his experiences in Vox Core. (My name is Turk Findley, it began, and this is the story of the life I lived long after everything I knew and loved was dead and gone.) I thanked him gravely and said nothing further about it.

We were approaching one of the stars that hosted a planet in the Ring of Worlds. I decelerated Vox Core, dumping kinetic energy into this new system’s energy mines (thus raising the temperature of its sun by some imperceptible fraction of a degree), and began to ramp down the time differential between Vox and the external universe. As we passed the orbit of the star’s outermost planet I showed Turk and Allison an image I had captured: the host star, just beginning to show a discernible disc, seen past the rim of a cold gas giant orbiting far outside the habitable zone. Deep in this stellar system, but still too far away to be visible as anything but a pinprick of reflected light, was the planet its human occupants called (or had once called) Cloud Harbor (in a dozen languages, none of them English).