Chapters (56)
- PROLOGUE
- PART 1
- ONE
- TWO
- THREE
- FOUR
- FIVE
- SIX
- SEVEN
- EIGHT
- PART 2
- NINE
- TEN
- ELEVEN
- TWELVE
- THIRTEEN
- FOURTEEN
- FIFTEEN
- SIXTEEN
- SEVENTEEN
- EIGHTEEN
- NINETEEN
- PART 3
- TWENTY
- TWENTY-ONE
- TWENTY-TWO
- TWENTY-THREE
- TWENTY-FOUR
- TWENTY-FIVE
- TWENTY-SIX
- TWENTY-SEVEN
- PART 4
- TWENTY-EIGHT
- TWENTY-NINE
- THIRTY
- THIRTY-ONE
- THIRTY-TWO
- THIRTY-THREE
- THIRTY-FOUR
- THIRTY-FIVE
- THIRTY-SIX
- THIRTY-SEVEN
- PART 5
- THIRTY-EIGHT
- THIRTY-NINE
- FORTY
- FORTY-ONE
- FORTY-TWO
- FORTY-THREE
- FORTY-FOUR
- FORTY-FIVE
- FORTY-SIX
- FORTY-SEVEN
- FORTY-EIGHT
- FORTY-NINE
- EPILOGUE
“You coming in to eat something?” she asked.
SIXTEEN
Time on the mountain did nothing much to help.
The first morning, I slept in but it left me headachy and vague when I finally ventured out of the bedroom. Eishundo Organics didn’t design their sleeves for decadence, it seemed. Sylvie was not around, but the table was littered with breakfast items of one sort or another, tabs mostly pulled. I poked around in the debris and found an unused coffee canister, tabbed it and drank it standing at the window. Half-recalled dreams skittered about in the back of my head, mostly cell-deep stuff about drowning.
Legacy of the overlong time the sleeve had been tanked—I’d had the same thing at the beginning in the Uncleared. Mimint engagement and the rapid flow of life with Sylvie’s Slipins had damped it out in favour of more conventional flight-and-fight scenarios and reconstituted gibberish from the memories of my own overlaid consciousness.
“You are awake,” said Dig 301, glimmering into existence at the edges of my vision.
I glanced over at her and raised my coffee canister. “Getting there.”
“Your colleague left a message for you. Would you like to hear it?”
“I suppose.”
“Micky, I’m going for a walk into town.” Sylvie’s voice came out of the construct’s mouth without a corresponding shift in visuals. In my fragile state of wakefulness, it hit me harder than it should have. Spikily incongruous, and an unwelcome reminder of my central problem. “Bury myself in the datawash down there. I want to see if I can get the net up and running, maybe use it to call through to Orr and the others. See what’s going on over there. I’ll bring back some stuff. Message ends.”
The sudden re-emergence of the construct’s own voice made me blink. I nodded and carried my coffee to the table. Cleared some of the breakfast litter away from the datacoil and brooded on it for a while. Dig 301 hovered at my back.
“So I can get into Millsport University through this, right? Search their general stack?”
“It will be quicker if you ask me,” said the construct modestly.
“Alright. Do me a précis search on.” I sighed. “Quellcrist F—”
“Commencing.” Whether out of boredom at the years of disuse or just poor intonation recognition, the construct was already off and running.
The datacoil brightened and expanded. A miniature copy of Dig 301’s head and shoulders appeared near the top and started in on the précis.
Illustrative images tumbled into the space beneath. I watched, yawning, and let it run. “Found, one, Quellcrist, also Qualgrist, native Harlan’s World amphibious weed. Quellcrist is a species of shallow-water seaweed, ochre in colour, found mostly in temperate zones. Though containing some nutrients, it does not compare well in this with Earth-origin or purpose-bred hybrid species and is not therefore considered a sufficiently economic food crop to cultivate.”