Keri had never experienced the spheres like this. The way she felt, it was… it was a bird learning what it meant to fly, a circle discovering what it was to be a sphere, a song learning how to be sung. It was not only a voyage to the new world, but being that new world, and being the ocean that transported you there.

It was incredibly difficult to describe without waxing poetic, something Keri would ordinarily not be seen dead doing.

It would never have occurred to her that the spheres were limited without a direct connection, and she had never thought that the world of the mind moved slowly without a hardpoint. Now, it was as if she were seeing colours she had never been able to see, as if the world she had been viewing through scratched and dirty glasses had sprung into pure, vivid focus.

It was fantastic, but tainted with the painful knowledge that this was all temporary.

If someone told her, out in the real world, that she would die tomorrow, that would be in some measure comparable to this feeling. She knew she had come here for a reason, and she knew she had to do what she had come to do and leave. This powerful and direct a sensation was not possible for any extended period; she had to return to her reality, to where her soul resided within its prison of flesh and blood.

She wondered at her thoughts. Had she really just compared her body to a prison? Yet that was how it seemed from here; nothing on the physical plane could compare to the speed at which knowledge flowed through her here, but as long as she remained anchored out there she was a tube through which everything flowed but could not be held. The knowledge was here, she felt it and she knew it, but to grab at it was to see it slip away, ephemeral and lost. She needed to concentrate on what she could, on the details that were most important, to hold anything in her mind.

She moved faster than she had ever thought possible, diving faster and deeper through the thoughtscapes than her conscious mind could keep up with. Something was searching for what she wanted, but that something was not entirely her. Her fragile organic brain was unable to process at rates fast enough for this; it was something beyond her mind that made its way through the spheres, neither subconscious nor conscious but something new, a level of awareness that could not be felt in her biological form.

Call it… superconscious? she considered, but the thought of Cassandra’s derisive smirk stopped her. There'd be time to work out terminology later, anyway.

She called up everything on the Body Butcher era, or rather dived down into it, trawling through almost at random. There were masses of data, images and vid-clips, 3D holos and biographical accounts of that time, of the war that almost finished what the wars of the previous era had not. Blood, horror, and pain. A desperate fight against beings of metal and mutilated flesh that…

…killed far less people than she had assumed, she realised. Still, several hundred or several thousand, it shouldn't matter.

She had thought the number was far higher, though. You would have imagined so, from the tales on the fictospheres. It was a valuable lesson on how strained the words ‘based on a true story’ could be.

The fictionalised gave way to the real, and contemporary footage began to appear. It was odd to see the Body Butchers as they had been, before they had been brought low. Scenes of chaos and horror, of blood and violence, gave way to the era before that, to scenes of Butchers when they had been integrated into society. It felt strange, to see the augmented horrors striding through plazas and down streets amongst unaltered humans, the whole mass of people calm and going about their daily lives as if nothing were out of the ordinary. How could they be so unconcerned?

She called up thousands of feeds of the augmented creating the structures that would revolutionise the way people lived. The millions of structures. The habitats, the automated factories, Triton, the Space Elevator, even the Terminal in its earliest iteration - Keri hadn't known they had been a part of that. The Butchers in this earlier footage seemed more pioneer than monster.

A slow realisation crept over her as she went still deeper, past the dramatic recreations and second-hand retellings, away from the mass-produced, sensationalised tales made for mass consumption and into primary sources once uploaded then forgotten.

She understood why few came here. If the spheres were a building, this was the disused basement. Here, unsorted and uncategorized, data lay piled up in the equivalent of dusty boxes, saved because it would feel wrong to throw away but nevertheless discarded. It was… messy. Complicated. Dull.

She understood why few were interested in this. Why she had not been interested. It was information without spin, without narrative. Contradictory, and unclear. The sanitized levels above were far simpler and more comforting.

She understood what the Butcher had meant.