The fringes of my conscience dimming.

I’m not sure how, exactly. It wasn’t a bout of tunnel vision, like when I stood too fast on an empty stomach, and all the blood rushed from my head. But something on the edges began to shrink and break away, its once-supple borders ossifying, becoming brittle. I sensed it crumbling bit by bit as we sent our last few thoughts, shuddering and flaking off, like a sculpture of sand in the highest of winds. For the first time in longer than I cared to admit I wondered where those bits were going. For they were really pieces of me, and wherever they were going, I knew I was going too. Elysium? Purgatory? Shangri-La, or Tartarus? Did I even believe in any of those? And

(did believing even matter)?

was it too late to change the outcome, even if I did? Perhaps. But then again, perhaps not. Perhaps, even now, with the seconds I’d been granted in this echo of the final bell, there were things that could be done…

The mild throbbing in my chest.

It wasn’t pain, but it tried to be. Instead a dull pressure, radiating from the wound, like fingers trying to spread in in a cast. A squishy, blood and oil-filled cast. With a jolt I realized what it was…the chords, already starting to form. In my mind’s eye I saw bamboo sprouting from its clusters, or maybe throngs of deep-sea sponges huddling around jets in the ocean floor, and was revolted. How could those…those things move in like that? How could they treat the body that had so recently been mine as nothing more than real estate?

They think they’re helping, a voice whispered. My fairy, still pretending to be Britt. They think they need to heal the wound. They don’t know it’s usel…er, ah…they don’t know any better. But they recognize that they can never do their job if their host turns into earthworm food, and they’re doing what they can. Here his voice grew melancholy, low and breathy. Strange, for something so inhuman. Forgive them, it said pleadingly. They, ah…they were never meant for this.

The wall.

I didn’t know what else to call it. It wasn’t really a wall, I sensed. Not in the traditional sense of a barrier separating two spaces. But a plane of demarcation. On one side there was me, my body, my fairy, the lab. There was perception, and memory, anticipation and light. There was predilection and design, pathos and yearning, temperance, and at least the illusion of causality, if not the thing itself. The idea that, if one were strong enough in the formers, one could use the latter to shape a desired result. On the other there was nothing at all. The world just kind of bled away to an inky, oily, misty darkness. I stared into it for an undetermined length of time, searching for some sort of clue. A glow, a spark, a face in the fog, the entrance to some mythic path, something to serve as a mental anchor as I tried to process what I sensed-slash-saw, but there was nothing. Just the whispers of a thrush of voices, filtering gently through the void in no language I could name. Some seemed to almost beckon, though I couldn’t have said how I knew, or whether it was me they called. Some seemed to try to warn. Some screamed, some sighed, some cackled, some gasped, and some just were. Sitting, silent, sensed but never really acknowledged, like a patient in a waiting room with no particular sense of urgency, and no particular end in mind. Some I almost thought I knew.

I asked the bots if they could tell me what it was, but they could not. That place was not for them, they said. They were not allowed to pass.

I sensed myself moving towards it. Or maybe it towards me. Or both. Frames of reference meant nothing here. One was as likely as the other.

I wondered, almost as an afterthought, if I would be.

The future of the human race.

It wasn’t pretty. The playbacks raged, showing all the same scenes they had when I’d been playing them for Banks: the families, the cities, the lonely, lost, ruminant survivors, dying of starvation and disease. Only now, the chords weren’t part of it. They resolved themselves, it seemed. Already the bots were learning, realizing that the chords did more harm than good, and couldn’t help them do their job. Already they were evolving another way. I sensed Ramsay’s slackening, shriveling and pulling back, leaving only minor damage to the skin and underlying fascia. But the holos offered no such end. They kept up their cruel charade, showing all our basest thoughts, stripping souls of all their trappings, exposing half-formed wants and needs.

And they spread.

Through air, they spread. Through water, they spread. Through earth, wood, metal, and plastic, they spread, spread, spread, and spread. By touch, by cough, by breath, by waste, from one person to ten, ten to a hundred, a hundred to a thousand, a million, a million to…all. They spread, until every man, woman, and child on this planet had themselves a little fairy. Even fauna weren’t spared. Everything advanced enough for neural impulses to be firing, from the lowliest mouse to the largest whale, found themselves staring over one of whatever passed for their shoulders at a ghastly square of pallid blue. Even over open tundra, miles from the nearest hosts, it somehow found a way to move.

They showed me how it was to happen. And this time, they got personal.