It was a pointless anachronism to preserve the cycle of day and night, but my mortal body preferred it. Days, I basked in artificial sunlight. Evenings, I read ancient books reproduced from the Voxish archives, or reread the memoirs Turk and Allison had left me.

Nights, while my body slept, I expanded my sense of self to include all of Vox Core. I modeled the aging galaxy and my place in it. I tapped trickles of information from the ever more complex skein of the Hypothetical ecology. Stars that had been young only moments ago exhausted their nuclear fuel and decayed into simmering embers: brown dwarfs, neutron stars, singularities in their bottomless graves. Compared to the passage of time in the exterior universe, my consciousness was vast and slow. This would have been the true viewpoint of the Hypotheticals, I imagined, had the Hypotheticals possessed a unitary consciousness.

Signals propagating at the speed of light passed between stars as quickly as one neuron communicated with the next in Isaac Dvali’s mortal brain. I began to become aware of the galaxy as a whole form, not just a collation of stellar oases separated by light-years of emptiness. Hypothetical networks ran through it like fungal hyphae through a rotten tree. In my night vision I saw this activity as threads of multicolored light, revealing a complex and otherwise invisible galactic structure. Thriving world-rings stood out like the closed chains of carbon atoms in an organic molecule. Ancient, dead rings shimmered like pale ghosts as the Hypothetical machines associated with them died for lack of resources or scattered to nearby stellar nurseries.

The living galaxy pulsed with exhaustion and renewal. New technologies and energy sources were discovered, exploited, shared.

And as the universe aged and expanded, other galaxies, already immensely distant, fled toward the limits of perceptibility. But even these faint, far structures had begun to reveal a hidden life of their own, emissions of stray signals suggesting they had evolved their own Hypothetical-like networks. They sang like unintelligible voices in the darkness, fading.

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