She said abruptly, and with no pretense that the constructions were actual people, “End program.” Back in her body again, she stood in order to take the plate from the biomachine. “Thank you,” she said.

“Where do you go when you become still like that?”

“I am accessing virtual reality resources in my head,” she said.

“Yes, but you become still here.”

“I cannot divide my consciousness the way you can.”

The Thing was certain that what it felt right now was incredulity. “Have you tried?” it asked. “Are you sure? Perhaps it is simply that you haven’t practiced enough. It’s very easy.”

“It’s not something humans usually do,” she said. “My tutor explained it to me once. Most self-aware creatures share a particular mode of consciousness that is a single point. Not all, for sure, but most. He told us that was because it was the most natural form, but he said many things that sometimes turned out to be much more complicated than he had led me to believe.”

“You could try, nonetheless,” the Thing told her.

“Perhaps another time.”

The Thing said, “Could you allow me to access the space with you?” It felt intensely curious about this idea, plus it seemed utterly unfair to it that there was a space literally within its own body that Atlanta—and probably the others with her, it thought uneasily—could go, where it could not.

“I can’t begin to think how that would work,” Atlanta said hastily, shocked by the thought. It was not something that anything from her society would have suggested, a violation intensely personal. To let someone else see your interior landscape was something shared by lovers or soulfriends, perhaps, but not something to be given casually.

“Very well,” the Thing said somewhat sullenly, but it stored the thought away to be revisited at some future time.

As it moved to the exit, she said, “Where is Captain Niko right now?”

“In the dining room.”

She nodded. She didn’t bother to return to PriVS, but instead ate the three cookies, alternating them with the tea as directed. It was a surprisingly satisfying combination, the squashy warm cookie, the sweet hot wash.

Niko was where the ship had said, in the dining room where they’d been threatened with that first, horrible meal, only to be rescued by Dabry. At least, even though they were hurtling toward pirate enslavement or worse, they were being fed as well as Atlanta had ever eaten, which was no mean matter in a life at the palace, where sometimes the best chefs in the galaxy came to cook for the Empress and her guests.

Niko was watching out the window, standing in her habitual erect posture, arms folded on her chest and scowling out absently. She didn’t move as Atlanta crossed the room and joined her.