When I told Turk all this he asked me how long the trip to Antarctica would take. Turk still thought of Vox more as an island chain than a seagoing vessel. But although it was vastly larger than any ship Turk had ever sailed or even imagined, it was a ship, with a surprisingly shallow draft and decent maneuverability for its colossal size. A couple of months to reach the Ross Sea, I told him. I promised I’d take him down to see the engine decks sometime soon … and it was a promise I meant to keep, for reasons I wasn’t yet willing to explain.

There was a whole lot I couldn’t explain, for the simple reason that we had no privacy. In Vox Core, the walls had ears. Also eyes.

Not necessarily for the purpose of spying. All those nanoscale eyes and ears, embedded in structural surfaces, fed their data to the Network, which sorted it for anomalies and issued alerts whenever an unusual situation arose: a health crisis, a technological failure, a fire, or even a violent argument. I was guessing, however, that an exception had been made in our case. Back when I was Treya I had been taught that when interacting with an Uptaken like Turk Findley, no word or gesture was too trivial to be sifted for clues about the Hypotheticals or the state of existence the Uptaken had experienced among them. So we were almost certainly being listened to, and not just by machines. I couldn’t allow myself to say anything I didn’t want the administrators to overhear. Which ruled out much of what I needed to say, and needed to say quickly.

(And even if the administrators weren’t listening, the Coryphaeus surely was. I had been thinking a lot about the Coryphaeus … but I didn’t want the Coryphaeus to know that.)

I also wanted Turk to have at least a basic understanding of the geography of Vox Core and how it operated, because the knowledge might be useful later. So for the next few days I tried to act like a compliant and acceptable liaison, doing what Treya had been trained to do even though I was no longer Treya nor wanted to be.

I introduced Turk to the book room just down the corridor. The book room had been prepared years in advance as a way of educating the Uptaken, and it was just what the name suggested: a room housing a substantial shelf of books. Real books, as Turk said admiringly when he saw them. Books printed on paper and bound in boards, freshly minted but startlingly archaic.