They thought we might be hostile. They knew we weren’t an ordinary Hypothetical machine—they had learned a great deal about the nature of the Hypotheticals in the centuries since Vox left Earth. As soon as we dropped our temporal barrier, they isolated Vox Core from local energy sources and infiltrated our processors with finely tuned suppressor protocols. The effect was that the Coryphaeus went to sleep. And since much of my awareness was embedded in the Coryphaeus, I promptly lost consciousness.

I was eventually able to reconstruct what followed. Spacecraft with human passengers swarmed through the disabled barriers and docked with Vox Core. Unopposed, they entered the city and tracked down Turk and Allison, who were able to explain—once linguistic difficulties had been sorted out—who they were and where they were from. They insisted that I was not dangerous and demanded that I be released from what amounted to an induced coma. The troops of Cloud Harbor declined to do that until they were certain I was harmless.

It was an inauspicious meeting, but by the time I came to myself again it had become a more or less friendly one. I woke in my mortal body, in a comfortable bed in a medical suite in Vox Core. My mental functions had been fully restored. A woman who claimed to represent “the combined polities of Cloud Harbor” entered the room, introduced herself, and apologized for the way I had been treated.

She was tall and dark-skinned. Her eyes were large and widely set. I asked her about Turk and Allison.

“They’re waiting outside,” she said. “They want to see you.”

“They’ve come a long way, looking for a home. Do you have one to offer them?”

She smiled. “I believe we can make them welcome. If you’re curious about our world, I’ve made public records from every polity available to your external memory. Judge for yourself what kind of people we are.”

I accessed the records in an eyeblink and was reasonably satisfied, though I didn’t tell her so.

She said, “You’ve come a great distance yourself, Isaac Dvali. We can make a place for you, too.”

“Thank you,” I said, “but no.”

She frowned. “You’re a unique individual.”

“Too unique to leave this city.” I repeated what she already knew, that I shared too much of my consciousness with the processors of the Coryphaeus to allow me to leave—my body would be little more than a drooling piece of meat if it was extracted from Vox Core.

“We can address that problem,” she said confidently.

Humanity had learned a few things about the nature of the Hypotheticals, she explained. The polities of Cloud Harbor had already begun to establish virtual colonies inside the computational space of the local Hypothetical networks. Colonists were generally the elderly and infirm, who were eager to leave their physical bodies behind—I could do the same, she said.