“It refills itself. It has its own metabolism. It draws a little blood during the injections and uses that as raw material to catalyze active molecules. It runs on body heat and ambient light. For you, it fabricated a drug to suppress anxiety. What it gives me is something different.”

I had stopped taking doses when she offered them—I had decided to live with my anxiety, for better or worse. “How does it know what to synthesize?”

She frowned the way she did whenever she tripped over a concept for which her ghostly tutor Allison Pearl didn’t have a ready word. “It samples blood chemistry and makes an educated guess. But no, it isn’t bottomless. It needs to be refreshed, and this one is getting tired.” She added, “If you want to use it, though, that’s all right.”

“No. What’s it giving you?”

“A kind of … you could call it a cognitive enhancer. It helps maintain the boundary between my real and my virtual memories. But it’s only a temporary solution.” She shivered in the firelight. “What I really need is the Network.”

“Tell me about the Network. It’s what, some kind of internal wireless interface?”

“Not exactly what you mean by that, but yes, in a sense. Except that the signals I receive are expressed as biological and neurological regulators. Everybody on Vox wears a node, and we’re all linked by the Network. The Network helps us formulate a limbic consensus. I don’t know why it hasn’t been repaired. Even if the transponders at Vox Core were destroyed, workers should have been able to restore basic functionality by now. Unless the processors themselves were damaged … but they were built to sustain anything short of a direct hit from a high-yield weapon.”

“Maybe that’s what happened—a direct hit.”

She shrugged unhappily by way of response.

“Which means there’s a good chance we’re marching toward a radioactive ruin.”

“We don’t have a choice,” she said.

*   *   *

I sat up after she fell asleep, nursing the fire.

Without the calming drugs, my own recent memories had begun to firm up. Just days ago I had been trying to survive a series of earthquakes generated by the temporal Arch as it rose from its dormant state in the Equatorian desert. Now I was here on Vox. You can’t really comprehend events like that, I thought. You can only endure them.

I let the fire burn down to a glow of embers. The Arch of the Hypotheticals glimmered overhead, an ironic smile among the stars, and the rush of the sea was amplified by the echo from the nearby cliffs. I wondered about the people who had nuked Vox Core, the “cortical democracies,” and why had they done it, and whether their reasons were as superficial as Treya had suggested.