It was a dreary Wednesday in November, and the rainy season managed to project its monochrome grey drizzle indoors no matter how dry and inviting a room otherwise appeared. For Deepti, it meant that she was particularly insensate as she stumbled into the break room for the first of her several morning coffees. She slouched back to her desk with her cup of steaming liquid life-force, winding her way through tables stacked high with tablets and unplugged lab equipment, racks of samples and substrates piled as they awaited sorting.

It was quiet in the lab most mornings, given the sleep habits of her fellow postdocs, and theoretically she arrived earlier than most in order to get work done in a distraction-free environment. In practice, she had almost finished logging into her computer by the time that first cup of coffee was empty.

It wasn’t until the second cup was halfway gone that she noticed the screen. An old surplused display sat perched haphazardly on an upturned milk crate full of dusty and questionably secured electronics - but that wasn’t the odd part. The screen had been there, glowing it’s piercing green and displaying a cartoonish thumbs-up, for as long as she had worked at the lab.

The odd part was that the screen was now a glaring red, a black X scrawled in the center. Frowning, Deepti hauled herself up and stared blearily at the screen, trying to remember who put the stupid thing there and what experiment it was linked to.

She was still staring at it a handful of seconds later when one of her likely suspects walked in, and she accosted him on her way back for more coffee.

“Morning, Chris,” she said, sliding her cup under the dispenser. “Hey, funny question for you. You know that monitor on the milk crate near my desk? Whose experiment is that and what project is it for?”

Chris stared blankly at her for a few moments, the words worming their way into his half-operational brain. “Unh,” he grunted. “You talking about Dr. Russell’s quantum topographical… thingy?”

Deepti nodded uncertainly. “Maybe?”, she said. “The one that always has the green screen?”

“Yeah, that’s the one,” Chris nodded. “Do you need to move it or something?”

She shook her head, a tangle of black curls flopping messily to the side as she did. “No, I was just curious what it was measuring. The display changed today.”

Chris frowned. “Let me take a look,” he muttered, striding towards the lab.

“Red! Yes, red,” Chris said frustratedly, nearly shouting into the earpiece. “What? Look, I’m not sure-” He paused, listening. “Okay, I’ll call her. Okay. Goodnight, Dr. Russell.” He disconnected the call and sighed, tossing the earpiece onto the desk.

“He says it must be broken,” Chris reported, shaking his head. “Apparently it’s sort of a joke experiment that he and a few buddies have been tracking since they were in school, he keeps it going for sentimental value. He actually kind of seemed upset that it had broken. He won’t be back from his conference for another week, so he asked if we wouldn’t mind calling up his friend at Pavonis to help fix it.”

Deepti blinked. “Pavonis? Dr. Russell knows someone at Pavonis?”

Chris shrugged. “Apparently there’s only a handful of people with this kind of equipment. His friend Dr. Chartres was one of the people who helped design it.” He tapped a few queries on his tablet and nodded. “It’s just past midday there, we should be able to reach them if I call the lab.”

“Can we just call them like that?”, Deepti asked nervously.

Chris shrugged. “We have a good reason. It’s not like everything there is top-secret.” He slotted his earpiece into his ear and tapped his tablet.

They waited silently while the subwave connected, then Chris perked up noticeably. “Hello, I’m looking for Dr. Chartres? Oh, great! My name is Chris Flores, I’m a postdoc in Liam Russell’s lab, he wanted me to-”

Chris stopped speaking and a troubled look came over his face. “Yes, actually,” he said, “How did you know?”

He listened further, his brow furrowing and sweat beading on his forehead, before finally mumbling a barely audible farewell and disconnecting. He slumped against a nearby table, his face pale and his hands shaking. “Shit,” he whispered. “Shit, shit, shit.”

“What’s wrong?”, Deepti asked, concern on her face. “Did something happen?”

He shook his head and closed his eyes. “Yes. No,” he said angrily. “Dammit, I’m going to kill Dr. Russell.”

Deepti slammed her hand down on the table, making him jump. He looked back at her accusingly, but she stared him down without flinching. “Chris, if you don’t tell me what’s going on-”

“We’re on lockdown!”, he shouted. “Some top secret military bullshit after all. We’re not to make any calls, take any calls, access any networks or leave the lab. Someone will come by to collect us and Dr. Russell’s experiment.”

She stared back at him, shocked. “What? Why? Where are they taking us?”

Chris gave her a pained grin. “I don’t know, I don’t know, and Pavonis.”

Deepti’s mouth hung open in surprise. “But that’s-”

“Yep,” Chris said ruefully. “We’re going to Mars.”

The next several hours passed in a blur. They were collected from the lab by a dour-looking pair of MPs and escorted to a windowless building where they were allowed to compose a carefully reviewed message to one family member explaining their absence as an ‘unexpected consultation’. A few long shuttle flights later, they stepped out into the clean, white hallways of the Pavonis Naval Research Institute in Tharsis.

They couldn’t help but look around as they walked - Chris was in a poorly-concealed panic, but Deepti was in awe. This was one of the preeminent research facilities in the galaxy, the first dedicated lab established on another planet.

Tradition held that every new ship was christened with a bottle of champagne broken over the bow, but the shipwrights held their own ceremony where they smudged the keel beam with red Martian dust for good luck. They didn’t build ships at Tharsis these days, and the only place you could get the old, dead Mars soil anymore was on top of Olympus Mons - but from barges to battleships, any ship flying had a dab of rust-red close to her heart to remind them of Pavonis. It was the alpha and the omega of human advancement.

They weren’t there for the tour, however. The MPs briskly marched the two through a series of hallways, past a few security checkpoints and into a spacious conference room where a handful of people were already sitting. They were surprised to see Dr. Russell there, looking a bit rumpled but otherwise no worse for wear.

A severe-looking woman with short grey hair stood up as they entered, walking over to shake their hands. “Dr. Flores, Dr. Banerjee. I’m Helene Chartres.” She gestured for them to take a seat, which they did. Dr. Russell gave them a sheepish wave in greeting as they entered, but said nothing. Two others were already seated - a serious-faced woman with sharp features framed by thick braids peered intently at Dr. Chartres and a slightly pudgy man with dark hair greying at the temples sat reading a tablet.

“I apologize for calling you here so abruptly,” Dr. Chartres began. “Secrecy is paramount, for reasons that I hope will be obvious shortly.” She wheeled over a cart, on which was a complicated-looking machine in a brushed-steel housing. A small inset display was showing a red background and a black X.

“This is my version of a device I’m sure you’re familiar with,” she said, gesturing to it. “It’s more or less identical to the variants doctors Russell and Adebayo have maintained in their labs.” She indicated Dr. Russell and the serious-looking woman, who nodded in return.

“The device measures the Kolmogorov complexity of Planck-scale spacetime fluctuations, as well as performing a few other pattern analysis operations. Assuming that the fluctuations are found to be isotropic and c-incompressible it displays green. If the fluctuations are anisotropic or c-compressible it displays red.” She pointed to the screen, which was helpfully displaying its cherry-red glow. “After about thirty years of constant and uneventful analysis - on three different planets, I might add - about sixteen hours ago each machine independently and consistently was able to derive a solution that proved the fluctuations it observed were c-compressible.”

Feeling lost, Deepti looked around the room. This was not her area of expertise. The man with the tablet looked as confused as she was, but Chris had gone white and sat up in his chair as Dr. Chartres spoke.

To her relief, the man with the tablet spoke up first. “Ah, for those of us without advanced degrees in mathematics…”

Dr. Chartres nodded. “You’ll have to take our word on this, without the fundamentals to back it up, but…” She hesitated. “At a quantum level, there are always minor and unpredictable variations in the topology of spacetime. These devices were originally constructed to settle a bet with an old colleague where we contended that they were indeed unpredictable, totally random in nature. We had to build our own because almost nobody bothers with the experiment anymore - the matter has long been considered settled in most academic circles. We kept them running for personal reasons, but in my case it was a pleasant reminder of school combined with a salve for - well, let’s call it ‘existential paranoia.’”

Dr. Russell snorted in amusement. “Just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they’re not after you,” he muttered wryly.

“Indeed,” she responded. “And now the experiment is justified, although I truly wish it weren’t. The fluctuations that have up until now been totally random are displaying deterministic patterns. There are a few reasons why this might be, some of which we can take steps to rule out. Unfortunately for us all, the most likely explanation by far for these observations is that the recent fluctuations are algorithmically generated.”

A sharp pang of adrenaline jolted through Deepti’s stomach as the words registered. “But wait,” she objected, “if that’s true-”

“Yes,” said Dr. Chartres somberly. “It would indicate that our reality is a simulation - and that it has been running for approximately sixteen hours.”

The conference room was silent for several seconds following her pronouncement.

“So,” said the man with the tablet, “I’m trying to be open-minded, but you realize how that sounds.”

“We do,” she agreed. “Which is why we’re going to need to come up with a way to provide some evidentiary proof before we spread any word of this past this group.”

Dr. Russell spoke up, shaking his head emphatically. “Helene, we can’t tell anyone. Even this is too many people. Heaven forbid we convince the public that it’s the truth, don’t you see what that would do? We would alter the simulation. Until we know more, I contend that would be an incredibly stupid idea.”

She shrugged. “So we do it quietly, with just the people here.”

“And then?”, Dr. Russell retorted. “If we do find proof, demonstrable proof, then what? We just waltz up to the Secretary General and tell him? Hell, we shouldn’t even be talking about it, not out loud.”

“Let me handle involving the government,” said the man with the tablet. He smiled at Chris and Deepti, extending his hand. “I never got the chance to introduce myself properly. David Kincaid, Naval Intelligence. I’m the liaison officer for the lab.”

David walked back to his office, a grim look having edged out the smile on his face. Dr. Chartres had arranged for temporary quarters for the four offworld doctors and was busily planning ways to prove their theory. For his part, David was still incredulous. It was too big of a change, too much of an alteration from his worldview. He had known that there were thought experiments about simulated universes, and that some multiverse theories even held it as likely, but it just didn’t fit in his head.

It did dredge up a memory, however, which was the thing that quickened his pace as he strode down the long corridor. Upon receiving the post as the Pavonis liaison, he had met briefly with the section chief for Naval Intelligence assigned to the region. After some pleasantries, the section chief had looked him in the eye and quietly told him to commit something odd to memory.

If in the course of your duties at Pavonis you ever hear of an existential threat to mankind you are to call your local section desk…

David reached his office and opened the door, sealing it shut behind him and activating the security measures. Baffling fields, jammers and other more subtle protections hummed into existence around the office - for all the good it would do, he thought ruefully.

He initiated a voice-only contact to the section desk and was immediately picked up by the reception AI.

“Yes, I’d like to request the latest intercepts bundle for my region,” he said, trying to keep his voice steady.

“Confirmed, sir,” responded the AI. “If there are any inquiry targets or areas of interest you wish to have highlighted, please let me know.”

He swallowed. “I’m looking for something that will help me sleep better at night,” he said carefully.

The AI paused for the briefest of moments before responding. “Very good, sir. I’ll have the intercepts sent to your personal terminal.”

A few seconds later, a ping from his terminal heralded the arrival of the data packet. It looked deceptively normal at first, but the normally lengthy header string that described any restrictions on the enclosed material was replaced by a single code - “TS//MANTRA”.

David felt a hard knot in his stomach. He was a low-level intelligence analyst, normally accustomed to batching up progress reports and acting as a representative at meetings. He shouldn’t have any reason to look at Top Secret Codeword materials. The allocation AI certainly shouldn’t be giving it to him. And yet, here he was. If he was wrong in requesting this, it would probably cost him his career. If he was right, well - he supposed his career was less important in context.

Opening the file, he began reading the report. It was a normal intercept bundle, a dry compilation of various signals intelligence sources that had been packaged, sanitized and redistributed by various data sorting AIs. Upon request, any field agent could obtain a regional report appropriate for their location and clearance levels to keep them abreast of local issues.

This one started out in a fairly standard fashion, immediately plunging into a dry summary of external investment in local corporate groups.

Current regional sales records indicate that nearly five billion tons of this c-chondrite sourced material per quarter may be subsidized by Teb-er-Di familial holdings not publicly disclosed. The clandestine arm of their operations will continue to be monitored, both through intercepts of their written directorial communications and analysis from agents placed farther down in the corporate hierarchy.

David frowned. Teb-er-Di had been a major business interest in neighboring space nearly a century ago, but they had been rather famously crushed by the 5th and 7th Fleets in a joint action after an ill-advised attempt to blockade a handful of Terran colonies. They hadn’t been relevant for decades, yet here they were in the report. How old was this document?

He skimmed to the next column of text, trying to find some context. Three pages later, he stopped reading and frowned.

Current regional sales records indicate that nearly five billion tons of this c-chondrite sourced material per quarter may be subsidized by Teb-er-Di familial holdings not publicly disclosed. The clandestine arm of their operations will continue to be monitored, both through intercepts of their written directorial communications and analysis from agents placed farther down in the corporate hierarchy.

Buried within another paragraph were the same two sentences from before. He pulled up the previous instance and compared them side by side, confirming the wording was identical.

David stared at his screen, thinking hard. This was a top-secret document. The fact that the AI responded to his codephrase with this particular document meant that it was important. The content of the document didn’t seem to relate to any large-scale threats to humanity. The duplicated sentences were… odd. He just had to figure out why. Why this particular document? Why those sentences?

He read through the mirrored text again and again, his mind straining to pick out any causal link, any relevant detail, but none came. He sighed, his eyes blurring with the strain of staring at his display for so long.

And he saw it. It was absurdly simple, a child’s trick, but there it was - a basic stereogram.

Minor variations in the spacing of words caused a few of them to jump out as if hovering slightly in front of his display. He almost laughed at the absurdity of seeing it in this most secret of documents, but there it was in front of him. He deliberately defocused his eyes to merge the two paragraphs, seeing the words jump out once more.

this material may not be written down

He frowned, then returned to the document to search for more paired sentences, finding another set a few pages in. He grabbed both snippets and lined them up next to each other.

do not speak this material aloud even when alone

He felt the knot in his belly once more. This felt like someone playing a prank on him. If it weren’t for the absurd events of the day he would have disregarded it as such. This level of precaution was reserved for the names of fairy tale villains, not legitimate intelligence resources… Unless, he realized with a chill, the adversary you were guarding against had surveillance capabilities that stretched beyond the realm of the possible.

As would be the case if you were trying to keep a secret from the people running the universe.

A deep chill settled into his stomach and a wave of nausea hit him. It was one thing to see the scientists blithely talking about algorithmic quantum fluctuations - troubling, yes, but still somewhat abstract. Seeing independent confirmation of their theory in this highly restricted document somehow made it real for him in a way that no amount of scientific proof ever could have. His agency had anticipated this. The instructions landed at his desk. Now the problem, too big to even think about properly, was his to handle.

He forced himself back into a semblance of focus and returned to the document. Carefully, scanning through each page of dry synopses and summaries, he found the paired sentences and the subtly designated words. Some of them contained no marked text that he could see, or had extra words sprinkled here and there. Some had gaps in the sentence structure. He pieced them together, line by line.

Hours later, his head pounding at the constant effort of defocusing his eyes, he reached the end of the document. He couldn’t write down what he had read, but he doubted he could forget a word of it if he tried.

This material may not be written down. Do not speak this material aloud even when alone. If nature of the threat at hand does not relate to fundamental nature of the universe, close and destroy this document immediately.

The Terran Federation recently encountered a collective intelligence with stated intention to destroy the universe, threat on which can credibly deliver. Technology and capabilities of adversary make direct confrontation impossible. Does not consider any existing life aside from itself worthy of preservation.

Have begun extensive program of deliberately absurd exercises designed to invalidate previous behavioral models of humans. Publicly stated intent of exercises is to force the adversary to study human cognition, may cause it to abandon plans for universal annihilation if views humans as sentient. This outcome unlikely. Unstated goal of exercises is to prompt adversary to create accurately modeled human intelligences within own data network. This outcome highly probable.

Adversary is likely to gather data before commencing simulation. Several documents like this covertly embedded in military intelligence structure in hope that a sufficiently comprehensive simulation will capture and include them. If reality not conclusively proven to be simulated, research suggests simulated quantum phenomena may behave in a measurably distinct manner on very small scales. Covertly research this to ascertain status.

If confirmed reading this from simulation, do not attempt to inform government, military or intelligence leaders of this information. Widespread officially-sanctioned action within simulation may reveal efforts to the adversary and result in reality being terminated. Act locally and independently. Suggestions for helpful covert actions have been included using similar methods in the fifteenth, thirty-seventh and eighty-fourth documents in this report’s cited material list.

Distribute information only in ways that rely on the human visual cortex to be interpreted. Research suggests that adversary monitoring AIs built on more efficient architecture may overlook optical illusion ciphers.

Keep this information secret.

If external communication possible follow instructions in referenced documents to contact us.

Good luck.

David rested his aching head in his hands. He wanted to cry, or shout, or scream, but he found himself laughing instead. He convulsed with it, the absurdity of the situation tearing a mad giggle from him and plastering a silly grin on his face until the dark mirth faded and it was just him, sitting alone in his office with the fate of the universe in front of him.

“Ah, shit,” he said softly. He wondered for a moment if anyone was listening, then shook his head. Time to figure out how to quietly tell five scientists they couldn’t talk about the most exciting discovery of their lives.

The arcing corridor of the lab’s main conference facility was empty today. One of the increasingly rare planet-wide dust storms had made atmospheric travel hazardous, leaving the normally bustling hall quiet save for David’s echoing footsteps. His almost suspiciously casual stroll led him towards a minor conference room with its door ajar.

He walked in, sitting at the central table. Deepti was already there, tapping at a tablet connected to a small black box sitting on the table in front of them. Deepti flipped the switch, a low hum sounding as power surged into the tiny device.

“Is it working?”, David asked, leaning in close to inspect it.

Deepti smiled nervously back at him. “We’ll see in a minute. Chris is taking readings from another room across the hall.”

David sighed, impatient. After nearly a year of covert messages and elaborate cover stories, a few additional seconds shouldn’t feel this long. At least he got to be here for the test this time - their labyrinthine operational security protocols prohibited gathering together as a group too often. He’d missed the last few tests for that reason, something he might have resented if he hadn’t authored those protocols himself.

Deepti had begun counting out loud while he mused. She continued until she reached thirty, at which point she reached over and flipped off the switch. “There,” she said happily. “Let’s go ask-”

Chris barged into the room carrying a small handheld scanner, his face beaming. He gestured silently and emphatically to the device on the table, which Deepti turned back on with a raised eyebrow.

“It works!”, Chris burst out. “The no-chamber works!”

Deepti leapt up and pulled both men into a crushing hug, jumping excitedly. “Hah, I knew we had it this time!”, she cried gleefully before shooting a dark look at Chris. “But we are not calling it that.”

“Nobody appreciates the classics anymore,” sighed Chris. “Anyway, have a look at this.”

David took the offered scanner from Chris and played it back while Deepti crowded close to watch. He saw the door to the room and the spare wall of the corridor, but overlaid on that was an interior diagram showing Deepti, David and the table in the center of the room. As he watched, Deepti flicked the switch with an audible click and sat down.

David frowned. “Chris, are you sure-”

“You didn’t ask if it was working,” Deepti whispered in awe. “We’re still just sitting there.” David looked and saw that it was true. Their two forms were sitting, silent, with no indication that their short conversation had ever happened. Deepti was sitting quietly rather than counting, until she smoothly reached over to the device and turned it off with another click.

Chris was grinning practically from ear to ear. “What else did you say, anything?”

David shook his head. “Just a few sentences and the count,” he whispered dazedly. “So, does this mean…”

Deepti nodded. “The generated mask covertly hides the interior from all external observers. Nobody can hear us. Nothing can hear us.”

David felt a lead bar topple from his shoulders. They had finally done it. “Amazing,” he whispered. “What are the restrictions?”

Chris scratched his head. “The masker is pretty good at generating plausible alternate activity patterns, but it needs a reference set. We have to feed it scan data for what’s ‘supposed’ to be going on in a room before we can use it. Right now it just simulates everyone sitting down if there are chairs available and generates a smooth merge to current positioning if it detects anyone moving their hand towards the physical off-switch.”

“A small price to pay to be able to talk freely,” Deepti said. “I think I’ve actually damaged my eyes looking at all of David’s encoded dispatches.”

“Hey, I didn’t make the rule,” David shrugged. “Besides, it got the job done. I hope.” He winced. “I still can’t shake the feeling that there’s some invisible boogeyman looking over my shoulder.”

Deepti shook her head. “We have to trust our work at some point or we’ll never advance. If the simulation monitors are good enough to catch us through the masking then we never had any hope to begin with.”

“Cheery,” Chris snorted. “But true. Look, it gets super technical and there’s a lot of stuff we don’t have good models for yet, but the math checks out. We can ‘forge’ any activity we need to given proper references and the random seed provided by the quantum fluctuations.”

David nodded. “I’ll take it on faith. So now what? Want to deploy it at the staff meeting tomorrow and fill in everyone else?”

Chris grinned and reached into his pocket. “We still have one more test,” he said excitedly, withdrawing another small black box and placing it on the table. Like Deepti’s masker, his box had a cable connected back to his tablet.

“What is it?”, David asked curiously.

“The modem,” Deepti said. “Chris, is it working?”

He shrugged. “How should I know? Couldn’t exactly test it until now.”

“Wait, wait,” objected David. “You’re done with that too? How could you work on it without the masker?”

Chris scratched behind his ear awkwardly. “I didn’t have much to do with it,” he admitted. “Turns out Dr. Adebayo is a genius with this sort of thing, so she cobbled together a prototype for me to test. No clue if it’ll work, but the theory is good.”

David held out a hand in caution. “Wait a second,” he said quietly. “What’s our exposure turning this thing on? This is active probing, isn’t there a risk they’ll notice?”

Deepti shook her head. “This isn’t like jacking into a data network,” she explained. “We’re calling it a ‘modem’ because it’s meant to eventually fulfill the same function, but this is a very early prototype and the mechanism of action is totally distinct.”

David shook his head emphatically. “I don’t like it, we’re moving too fast. Let’s do some more tests of the masker field to make sure we’re covered-”

“It won’t help,” Chris interjected. “David, we need this additional data to make any forward progress. You remember the maintenance routines Dr. Adebayo theorized? All this version of the modem does is induce an altered fluctuation pattern at its location. If her theory is correct, it will attract a maintenance routine to correct the pattern.”

David stared. “And that’s good? That sounds like attracting attention!”

Chris grunted and stared off into space, fishing for words. “It’s like,” he said frustratedly, “ah, think about this building. You know the maintenance robots are cleaning the floor because the floor is clean where it would otherwise be dirty.”

David nodded his head. It rankled when Chris talked down to him like this, but he’d been working with the guy for long enough to know he didn’t mean anything by it. Theoretical mathematicians were not the sort for social subtleties. Besides, it was the only way he understood what Chris was talking about half the time.

“But if you want to find one you can’t just sit and watch for it,” Chris continued, becoming animated as he got into the metaphor. “Because they’re invisible maintenance robots.” He ignored a flat look from Deepti and charged forward. “They’re also silent and intangible. Just like the maintenance routines we’re trying to isolate. So how do we spot them?” He paused, his hand halfway through a dramatic flourish and an expectant look on his face.

David nodded, feeling a wave of relief wash over him as he got it without further explanation. “You drop some dirt, and wait for it to disappear.”

“Exactly!”, Chris proclaimed triumphally. “You drop some dirt. Which raises no red flags because they expect dirt to happen at some point. Then you can watch for it to disappear. Time how long it takes, vary the conditions it’s placed in…” An evil grin snuck onto his face. “...or even drop something that isn’t dirt.”

David gaped at him. “You’re saying we can hack the maintenance routines?”

Deepti winced. “I think we have to break away from the analogy, since it’s less apt for this part. Suffice to say that the disrupted quantum topology is an input for the programs, and we may be able to influence their behavior constructively by controlling that input.”

“Constructively and quietly?”, David asked pointedly.

“As quietly as we can,” she shrugged. “This is another instance where we’d be toast already if they had that degree of monitoring in place.”

David nodded. “Okay, I’m in. Let’s see if the prototype works.”

Chris plopped it down on the table and pressed a button, which lit up red and began to pulse gently. They all found themselves leaning in, staring at the fluctuating light as it worked invisibly to ruffle the fabric of reality.

“Here, fishy fishy,” Chris whispered.

The light went out.

“And then what?”, Rhuar asked excitedly. “Did you hack into the system? Gain control of the simulation?”

David chuckled. “No, nothing so grandiose,” he said, visibly deflating the excited dog. “We continued to move in small, discrete steps. After we figured out how to trigger diagnostic modes in the maintenance routines by varying the input, we-”

“I think we have the rough shape of it,” Jesri said tiredly. Sometime in the last hour she had taken a seat on the floor. Anja lay stretched in front of her - she had fallen asleep almost instantly, exhausted and shattered by the day’s events. One hand stretched out to grasp Jesri’s wrist, fingers dimpling the skin on her arm where they gripped tightly.

“I agree,” said Qktk, who had stayed quiet and still through David’s story. “You are a simulated human consciousness. You-”

“Ah, point of clarification,” David interrupted. “Not a simulated human consciousness, a simulated human. The computer simulates my atoms and I simulate me.”

Jesri frowned. “Kind of a fine distinction to make.”

“Well,” David shrugged, or seemed to. “I hail from the kind of uncomfortable philosophical territory that makes such distinctions depressingly relevant.”

She found herself grinning, despite her mood. “Fair enough,” she allowed. Carefully sitting up so as not to wake Anja, she imagined making eye contact with the altar for a moment before remembering that David couldn’t see them anyway.

“You realized you were in a simulation. You found a way to manipulate it enough to sneak out.” She frowned, considering. “Or did you duplicate yourself?”

“Ah,” David said hesitatingly. “That’s more of that uncomfortable philosophical territory. I can explain it if you like, but it’s tricky stuff and not particularly relevant to our discussion.”

Rhuar perked up, but Jesri nodded and continued. “By whatever means, you found a way to exfiltrate,” she said. “Then made your way here? Why?”

“Station activity logs,” David answered. “In our initial inventory of stations we found only one where someone was consistently using administrative overrides. It’s the same flag we used to locate you two on Indomitable, actually.”

“That’s why we actually didn’t come here first, though,” he continued. “For that first little bit after we got external eyes and ears, we were at the most paranoid we’d ever been. We took risks to break through to the sensor systems, so we were locked down and laying low while drinking in all the data we could.”

He sighed. “And what do we find? Humanity is dead. All the planets and most of the stations, wiped out by the thing we’re still stuck inside. At that point we were living in dread, waiting for the other shoe to drop and reality to end around us. When we chose a target for escape, it was the least active station we could find that still had half a functioning computer core.”

“Sensible,” Jesri agreed. “So you’ve just been watching, waiting?”

David laughed boomingly at her question, startling Anja awake. “No, not just,” he chuckled. “We’ve been quite busy. We’ve been out here a long time now, but there’s always more work to be done for the project.”

“Project?”, asked Jesri. There was a pause, and she had the sudden impression that David was staring at her.

“Project MANTRA?” he said slowly. “The weapon against the Gestalt? Secret last-ditch Navy project? You’ve been looking for it since you left Indomitable?”

There was another pause before he spoke again, during which all four stared blankly at his altar.

“Ah, right.” he said. “Well, you interrupted the story. I was getting to that part.”