Back when Vox had sailed the oceans of habitable worlds, this platform had not been enclosed. Now an osmotic perimeter had been established—I told Turk it was a “force field,” a quaint and inaccurate term but one he more or less understood. “It doesn’t seem to be working too well,” he said. “Smells a little like a pig farm out here.”

I guessed it did. The air was rank and windless, though we could see clouds speeding past aloft, seemingly close enough to touch. I felt sick with vertigo even before we approached the rim. For the first time I almost regretted the loss of my node: missed its calming presence, an invisible anchor. I felt as if a brisk wind would carry me away.

Vox was moving steadily south by southeast, out of the Indian Ocean and into the South Pacific. The sea here was faintly purple to every horizon, the sky a poisonous shade of ocher. I hated the look of it.

Turk peered into the misty distance. “The whole world’s like this?”

I nodded. It was the decline and death of these oceans that had spurred the great Terrestrial exodus, which in turn had fed the bitter rivalries and conflicts of the previously settled Middle Worlds. “And the Hypotheticals did nothing to prevent it. Doesn’t that seem strange? That they would protect the planet from the expanding sun but do nothing to prevent a catastrophic human die-off? Apparently they’re happy with an Earth populated exclusively by bacteria. No one knows why.”

“Your people expected to find something different.”

They weren’t my people. But I didn’t correct him. “They expected to enter into direct communion with the Hypotheticals as soon as they arrived on Earth. It’s a religious idea, really. The people who founded Vox were fanatics by any rational measure. The history books won’t tell you so, but it’s true. Vox is a cult. Its beliefs were built into its Network and scripted into its limbic democracy. When you’re Networked all these doctrines feel reasonable, they feel like common sense…”

“But not to you.”

Not anymore. “And not to the Farmers. The Farmers are something less than citizens. They were Networked into compliance but not into communion.”

“They were slaves, in other words.”

“I suppose you could say that. They were taken as prisoners back in the Middle Worlds, generations ago. They refused to accept full citizenship, so they were modified into cooperation.”

“Harnessed and put to work.”

“That’s why they destroyed their nodes as soon as the Network crashed.” Though the survivors—the ones who had stayed in their environmentally sealed farmlands under the out-islands—would have been reyoked by now. The rebels, of course, were all dead. Including Digger Choi, whose life Turk had attempted to save. Saved him for all of half an hour, maybe. If the warplanes hadn’t got him, he would have died choking on the poisonous air.