“Here,” she said softly, leaning her head back against the console. She felt it pulse with an answering warmth. “Did you feel that? Any of it?”

Jimex moved over to her. “Yes.” She shakily took his hand, allowed him to pull her to her feet. Her ears were ringing, and there was an ache at the back of her skull; she felt as if she had been picked up and shaken like a piggy bank, scattered ideas and thoughts rattling around inside of her like coins. She felt, horribly, as if she had been hollowed out, as if someone had yanked something vital and private out of her and examined it with rough hands. At the same time, something heavy and tumorous—something new—now seemed to sit somewhere in the back of her head.

“You’d better let us out,” Taban said again. The synthetics were all watching him as if they were children crowding around a wild animal in an exhibit: as if he was something they wanted to go and touch, but were afraid of at the same time. “You’re going to need us, for what comes next. We’ve seen it, the versions where we’re not there and the versions where we are. It’s better if we’re there.”

Park’s head spun with a feeling like déjà vu, as if she had experienced this moment before; she was sweating so hard she could almost hear it. “How much of me is me?” she whispered, feeling that new presence—or knowledge—crowd against her.

“It’s all you,” Taban answered calmly. “Just enhanced.”

“What am I merged with?”

“Ask yourself,” he said. “The part of you that knows that the message was sent.”

She looked—and then she saw it, the part of her that was Glenn and Sally, the part that was now ARGUS and METIS. The unity rain merges things that are most similar to each other, she thought. And she performed the same functions as ARGUS, which in turn was tied to METIS and the ship: phenotype and body language analysis. Recording and observing. Monitoring and evaluating. They were the same mind in separate bodies; the same entity in different forms.

Park put out a hand to the wall to steady herself; then she flinched away from it, imagining it as the gray skin of something living and elephantine. The Deucalion seemed to breathe around her.

“How do I go back?” she asked him. How did she return to normal, revert to how she was before? She did not even know if she spoke the question aloud.

Taban regarded her. “You knew it when you left Earth, Park,” he said. “When Dataran died, when you told Glenn you loved him. There is never any going back.”

Park opened the door and let him out.

24.