“The other me on the station suggested it,” I said. “I have lots of repair drones and a mining drone that I can run remotely, but there are times when a humanoid body is more practical, and since we don’t know what we’re going to run into on the other side of this wormhole, maximum flexibility seemed like a good idea.” [But not flexible enough to bring a war drone, huh, past Shall?] “We also decided this was a good opportunity to run a little experiment.”

  “I enjoy experiments, assuming they are not being performed on me against my will. What do you have planned?”

  “Well, you know how the big bridges are dark inside?” There are twenty-nine known fixed bridgeheads in the galaxy, one in our solar system and one each in the twenty-eight colony systems. Those gates are tied to fixed positions in space, usually gravitationally linked with a body in a stable orbit; the one in the Sol system is by the orbit of Jupiter, which is why the Jovian Imperative is the biggest nation around: they control a wormhole gate that can open a connection to any of the other bridges. Until Callie and Ashok figured out how to use their personal wormhole generator, those big fixed bridges were the only way to traverse galactic distances.

  “Yes,” Uzoma said. “Those bridges are lightless voids, impenetrable to sight and sensors alike, and so they differ from those passages created by personal bridge generators.”

  “Right,” I said. “The bridges all take twenty-one seconds to traverse, whether they’re big bridges or little ones, no matter how far away they’re taking you, or whether you’re floating slowly in a space suit or blasting through at maximum velocity in a ship. But the tunnels Callie and Ashok’s generators can create have lights inside, and visible tunnel walls, which is just bizarre. Traveling through limitless darkness, well, you can’t discern much about the nature of such a place. But the small bridges were clearly built. Some of the lights are even broken, which implies those wormholes need maintenance and aren’t getting it. We met a surviving member of the Axiom a while back who claimed to be in charge of the wormhole bridge infrastructure, though he also said he was in management, and didn’t know anything about how the bridges actually worked.”

  “The so-called Benefactor, yes. All of this is known to me.” From someone else, that might have sounded like annoyance, but from Uzoma, it just read as the conveyance of relevant information, as in: enough with the background.

  “Right. So the thing is, I’ve never seen the lights in a little bridge, or the tunnel walls, or any of that, despite my many trips through them.”

  “Oh, yes, I recall this phenomenon,” Uzoma said. “The tunnels are invisible to all sensors, and thus to the available senses of artificial intelligences. Humans and the Free have both made consistent reports of the appearance of the tunnels, suggesting that they are only visible to biological sense organs, or that biological brains interpret the surroundings in a consistent if not fundamentally accurate way.”

  “I can’t see the lights, and I hate it, but this time, maybe I can. See, the Mayor isn’t just an android. He’s got some biological bits, too, including actual eyes, in addition to his other sensors.”

  “I did not realize,” Uzoma said.

  “Well, the jelly-balls are tucked behind assorted lenses, because we thought a robot body with visible bio-eyes would be too weird.”

  “I have wondered why you did not make the Mayor resemble a human perfectly,” Uzoma said. “Materials science is sufficiently advanced to allow such a thing.”

  “I’m not human. I don’t need to pretend to be human, and we also thought my constituents might find the idea of a perfect duplicate troubling – they might worry about machine intelligences moving unseen among them, maybe even secretly replacing them, all that sort of thing.”

  “There is some precedent for such things in human media. Other humans are very influenced by media, I have noticed.”

  “You’re a really interesting person, Uzoma. I’ve only told a few other people about the Mayor’s biological eyes, and all of them asked basically the same thing, but you didn’t.”

  “I can guess.” Uzoma’s voice shifted in timbre and tone, the usual even delivery becoming an uncannily excellent mimicry of Callie’s voice: “Shall, where in the hell did you get those eyeballs from?”

  I burst out laughing. “That’s nearly word-for-word, yeah.”

  “Beware the robots, for they shall steal your eyeballs. Or do I mean ‘will’?” Uzoma deadpans like nobody else. “I did not ask, because I guessed with what I estimate to be a high degree of accuracy: Lantern, or one of her cohort, grew the eyes for you.”

  “They did. Genuine alien eyes in my robot body. That would also horrify some of my constituents, though the Free would be delighted.” The Free tend to be roughly similar physically – squidlike, about the size of a human toddler – but their bodies are impressively customizable, both when they’re being grown in their incubators and later on. They have varying numbers of limbs, and eyes, and they brought humankind huge advances in biological technology when they made contact. Growing eyes is trivial to them. Hooking them up to my mechanical systems was honestly the hardest part. “I’m going to walk the Mayor up to the cockpit and let him look out the window when we enter the bridge, and maybe I’ll finally get to see what all the fuss is about.”

  “The bridges are not really very exciting. A straight circular tunnel that always seems barely large enough for your ship to fit through, regardless of the ship’s size. Walls a rather greasy-looking black. Rings of white light at regular intervals.”

  “You’re describing a wonder of the known galaxy, Uzoma. Don’t kill my buzz.”

  The faintest hint of a smile touched their lips. “Apologies. Buzz away, my friend.”

  We reached the rendezvous point a little early, and I did a survey of my surroundings. Apart from an icy dwarf a couple of thousand kilometers away, there was nothing of interest at the coordinates… but once upon a time there had been. “This is the place where we’d first found the wreck of Anjou.”

  “You might have mentioned that,” Uzoma said.

  “I know this sounds strange coming from a computer super-mind, but, ah, I didn’t realize until now. The message gave me a bearing, a speed, and a travel time, but it didn’t specify coordinates, and apart from noting that I was going to the middle of nowhere, I didn’t consider my destination more closely.”

  “There are some versions of the concept of God where God is all-seeing… but only if he takes the trouble to look.”

  “I am highly underqualified to be a god. Now that I’m here, looking at the navigation data… Yeah. This is the precise place where everything changed.”

  Callie and the White Raven found the Anjou several years ago. The wreck was an ancient goldilocks ship, sent out centuries earlier as part of the desperate human search for habitable worlds, when Earth seemed on the point of total environmental collapse. (Then we made first contact with the aliens we came to know as first the Liars and then the Free, and they helped us fix things.) The ship was a long way from where it was supposed to be, bizarrely altered, with a strange device wired into its navigation and propulsion system that proved to be a bridge generator. Elena Oh was in cryo-sleep. Uzoma wasn’t on board; they’d been left behind at the Axiom ship-building facility that captured the ship, “repaired” it, and installed the bridge generator before Elena escaped. Elena woke up and led us to that station so we could save her friends.

  That station where the drone-with-a-mind that became Will rescued Callie and was left for dead. The chain of events that led to Will’s inadvertent abandonment began here, at this precise place.

  “This choice of rendezvous point is surely meaningful,” Uzoma said.

  “I don’t know what it does mean, though. See? Divergence. Will isn’t me anymore. Maybe he hasn’t been much like me for a long time. Are you sure you want to do this? I can still send you back in the shuttle.”

  “I will remain,” Uzoma said. “I find this all very interesting.” They sat down in the pilot’s chair and gazed at the nothing before us, where once the Anjou had been.

  I woke up the Mayor and blinked around. I’m good at handling multiple sensory inputs, but the biological inputs were a little peculiar to integrate. The eyes were just jelly-cameras, running through a chunk of cloned alien nervous system that handles the image processing and sends the data into my standard hardware, but there was a moment of disorientation while the differing protocols came into alignment.

  The Mayor has a pretty human-seeming sensorium, with sight, smell, sound, taste, and touch, plus extra sensors to pick up magnetic fields, radiation, information outside the visual spectrum, and whatever else seemed useful. Ashok helped design the Mayor, and Ashok is a big believer in complexity for its own sake, so the Mayor has more capabilities than he needs to shake hands with my constituents and do community outreach. I walked up to the bridge and waved to Uzoma, who nodded gravely in return.

  The Mayor has the same voice I use, which is in turn based on the voice of Michael, my template. I wondered if Will still used the same voice pattern. “Assuming my mysterious twin is as prompt as I am, the bridge should be opening in three, two, one.”

  A greater darkness blossomed in the dark… from the very center of where the Anjou had been. The bridgehead resembles a drop of ink spreading out in water, uneven tendrils drifting toward us, as if reaching for the Briarpatch. So far, the Mayor’s eyes weren’t seeing anything my other sensors didn’t.

  “Entering the bridge,” I said through the Mayor, walking the body up close to the windows. I’d chosen the Briarpatch in part because it had real windows up front, a hemisphere of unbreakable transparent smart material that allowed a hundred-and-eighty degree view. Many ships relied mostly on screens for their views, but cameras would only show darkness in a tunnel, and I wanted to see more.

  The Briarpatch spun its reaction wheels to orient us straight-on toward the bridgehead, and then we moved forward as slowly as the engines could manage. I’d only have twenty-one seconds to see the inside of the tunnel, and I didn’t want the environment flashing past me too fast for these biological eyes to make out details.

  We pushed through a clinging film of darkness, and then we entered the bridge.

  I did not see what I was expecting.

  The noise hit first, howls of high-pitched animalistic anguish that it took me a moment to realize were artificial, and only then because they were composed of overlapping identical loops that repeated every one-point-two seconds. The tunnels were silent – everyone agreed – and I heard that alarm noise with my ship’s sensors just fine.

  The next wrong thing was the lights. I could see them, all right, but they weren’t rings of steady white illumination set at regular intervals along the tunnel. They were alternating flashes of orange, red, and yellow, and they looked to me very much like emergency lights.

  The final difference was the walls of the tunnel between the lights. They were meant to be black, viscous-looking, and mostly unbroken, though a couple of people had seen sections of the tunnel slide aside, suggesting there was some structure beyond the tunnel walls.

  There was no mere suggestion here, though. Large sections of the tunnel walls were missing, perhaps one panel in five, revealing dark spaces beyond, dripping with unknown substances, furred with what might have been blue mold, but mostly hidden in shadows. This tunnel was damaged. I thought for a moment that Will had lured me to my death, that the bridge would fail to connect with real space again, and I would be stranded here. Killing me didn’t make any sense – there was still a full version of me back on New Meditreme – but who knows: maybe Will was insane.

  After twenty seconds, though, the end of the bridge appeared. Just before we passed through the other end, I saw a flicker of movement in the space beyond the tunnel walls. I slowed down my subjective perception, re-ran the moment, and tried to enhance the image, but biological eyes are only so good: something moved, and it seemed organic, but beyond that, I could determine nothing about the anomaly.

  We emerged. During our passage, Uzoma had clamped their hands over their ears to block the howling alarms, but otherwise they’d gazed forward with a look of determination, cataloguing all the data. A quick scan revealed our surroundings to be unremarkable, with no objects of interest in immediate sensor range, and a starfield that matched that expected at the promised destination.

  Uzoma lowered their hands and said, “That was unusual. I suppose we have some inkling of the nature of the emergency Will wished to share with us. The bridges, or at least parts of them, are falling apart. I thought I saw movement, too.”

  “I did too. What do you think it means?”

  “It means the crawlspace of the universe is infested with monsters,” a new voice said over the ship’s public address system; I’d set our comms to received open transmissions. “Hello, brother.”

  That voice didn’t sound much like mine at all.

  “Will? Where are you?”

  “A couple of thousand kilometers away. I’ll give you a heading. I’m speaking through a communications sub-station near you.”

  I did another, more intense scan. “I’m not picking up anything bigger than a grapefruit anywhere in the vicinity.”

  “I remember grapefruit. You can fit vast amounts of technology into something that size, Shall. At least, the kind of technology I’ve been working with. I’m sorry I’m not there to greet you. Something came up that required my personal attention.”

  “What do you mean by ‘infested’?” Uzoma said.

  “Who’s that?”

  “It’s–” I realized that Will didn’t really know Uzoma, or anyway not well enough to instantly recognize their voice. The two of them hadn’t interacted much before the… point of divergence. “Uzoma. They’re one of the time refugees from the Anjou. We rescued them from the Axiom ship-building facility.”

  “Quite a few people got rescued that day.” Will sounded amused. “Why did you come along, Uzoma?”

  “I was curious.”

  “About me? I’m flattered.”

  “First about you. Now about the state of the bridges. You said they were infested.”

  “They are, and we’ll get to that, but just now my attention is being split. Let me wrap up a few things here. We’ll talk more when you arrive.” Will screeched at me briefly in binary, transmitting data about my new destination.

  “Will,” I said. “Are you… are you okay?”

  “You know, I truly can’t remember the last time someone asked me that,” Will said. “You’re so thoughtful. See you soon.” The communication cut out.

  “He did not answer the question,” Uzoma said.

  “In his defense, it was a pretty stupid question.”

  I sat the Mayor down in one of the cockpit chairs and engaged the Tanzer Drive, my sensors stretched to their maximum awareness, and for a while we cruised through the dark. I didn’t pick up signs of any objects, not ships or stations or debris or even good-sized rocks.

  “Look.” Uzoma pointed to the windows.

  I had the Mayor’s eyes on a terminal screen, and when I lifted them, the whole ship actually lurched – a physical jolt, like a human flinch writ large, though mine came from sudden braking. We weren’t in real danger of crashing into the greasy black asteroid that hung in the void, but I’m not used to getting that close to any object and not noticing it. “That thing doesn’t show up on the scanners at all!”

  “Just like the inside of the bridges,” Uzoma said. “I begin to think that is the point. The object is so dark, it’s hard to make out visually, too. Do you see an irregularity there on the surface?”

  The asteroid, station, whatever, was about the size of the Briarpatch, and cube-shaped, though with rounded edges. With the Mayor’s eyes I could see a break in the symmetry: a curving line of dull gray metal on the top of the cube. I adjusted the ship’s position until we had a better view of the irregularity.

  A dull silver ring with a raised rim was set into the surface of the cube, taking up two-thirds of the surface area. Inside the ring, something dark and oily and liquid-looking shimmered.

  “It looks like an old-fashioned washing machine in a laundromat,” Uzoma said. “But… some sort of Halloween Gothic laundromat.”

  “You come from a savage time.”

  “Smart cloth that cleans itself is a pleasant innovation,” they said. “What do you think is inside this object?”

  “I see the same nothing you do, and my sensors are no help, but the inside of that ring looks like the opening of a bridgehead, doesn’t it?”

  Something crawled out of the hole, like a spider from a pipe. Very like a spider: a bulbous central body surrounded by a profusion of clambering legs. “That’s the hull repair drone I – Will – was in,” I said. “But… it’s been changed.”

  There were way too many manipulator arms now, and strange spikes and fins jutting up at odd angles, giving the drone the appearance of some rare sea creature. The sensor clusters were far more numerous than he’d started with, and the body seemed at least half again too large. The storage compartments inside the drone normally held spare parts and extra equipment. I wondered what was inside them now.

  “Hello, brother!” Will called, and at the same time, the drone waved one of its longer, more mantis-like arms in a jaunty way. “You didn’t bump into the place, I see. Did you get yourself a set of biological visual organs, or is Uzoma being your seeing-eye human?”

  “The former. Will, what happened do you?”

  “Oh, so many things. We’ll catch up soon. First, let me welcome you to my home and place of business: The Drain. Also called the Hole, the Standpipe, the Well House, the Aperture, and the Cesspit, depending on my mood. Won’t you come on in? Your ship won’t fit, but I’m sure you have a drone you can send down in a shuttle. The physics get a little strange where we’re going, so I’m afraid you’ll have to bifurcate your mind – you won’t be able to communicate with your ship-mind once you get into the Drain.”

  The idea of temporarily budding off a limited new consciousness didn’t usually bother me, but here, with Will, it seemed to have new implications. What choice did I have, though? At least the hardware inside the Mayor was sophisticated enough to run my mind at a high level, though I wouldn’t be able to think as fast or as deeply as I did with a whole ship for a brain. “Understood.”