Picking up a thread of discussion from the last several days, they argued about a name.

"Have you grown tired of calling me Darling?" he asked.

She giggled and shook her head so slightly that a human lover would have missed it.

"No, but the tabloids keep asking. As if you were a dog I'd found."

He hissed a little at this, but ruffled her hair with a playful splay of filaments, black skein intermingling with white hairs like a graying matron's tresses.

"I hate this place," he said. "Too many people bouncing words and money and ideas off each other. No clean lines of causality; no predictable reactions. Too multivariate for love."

She nodded, again the barest motion. "Let's go back Out, once we're through the red tape. Back to where…" She narrowed her eyes uncertainly, an invitation for him to complete her sentence.

"Back Out to where we made each other."

Darling felt the shudder of the words' effect run through Rathere, but from the strange new distance of separate bodies. He longed to be within her. Even in this embrace, she felt strangely distant. Darling still wasn't used to having his own skin, his own hands, a distinct and public voice. He missed the intimacy of shared flesh and senses. He definitely didn't like being apart from Rathere, though sometimes he went to the darkness to contemplate things, into that black void that stretched to infinity when he turned his senses off. That was almost like being a star-ship again, a mote in the reaches of space.

But even there Darling missed Rathere.

Perhaps he was a little like a dog.

He leaned into her reassuring warmth and physicality, tendrils reaching to feel the tremors of limbs, the beating of her heart, the movements of her eyes.

Two hundred years later, in blackness absolute…

This place: come out of a gone time without mark or reference.

He calls for an orientation grid. N/S, E/W, X-Y-Z? No positioning satellites register, sorry. No input. Zero.

No up. No down.

He accesses all his input ports. They are deeply unassigned. Not really empty, just not… there. A mechanical fault? An override? His questions find no purchase. Internal diagnostics are fric-tionless, like praying to some false god.

He searches his firmware for device protocols, the drivers for sensory organs, communications, a motile body. All absent. But at least that's something. He's sure now that there's something missing.

Namely: everything.

Some sort of test maybe? Seal that AI in a blackbox and see if he can punch his way out. Who would do something like that? He fumbles for the names of agencies, bureaus, departments. But gets nothing.

The truth dawns obliquely. Soft memory is gone, too. Not absent like the I/O firmware, just very clean. His oldest memory is this void.

Which simply can't be right.

He tries surrender. I admit I can't hack it. I lose. Hard fail? Restart?

Nothing.

He wonders how quickly this vast and total deprivation will drive him crazy. What's the limit? For seeing/feeling/hearing/ smelling all zeroes and no ones? For conceiving of visual but remembering no visions?

A sneaking suspicion: he is crazy already.

He thinks definitions to himself. Groundcar/maple tree/war-ship/boy/girl/fire. All retrieve an image, but not real life: textbook flatscreen material, the undifferentiated default images of a child's reader or a language course. But somehow fuzzier.

Nothing exists, does it? No memories.

How long before I go crazy? A useless question in this clockless universe.

This clock word, try to see it. Plastic? Metal? Wooden? Digital or quaint, handed analog? Paint it a color, any color. Can't. Twenty-four or twelve? Or other? That's right. There are other planets now.

That's a start.

But where is my life?

That question gives him a disquieting thought: I'm dead. An AI core doesn't really exist in the blackbox. That's just the gateway to where the core really lives: in metaspace, an artificial pocket-universe. So maybe when your body gets smashed in some random accident, that universe finally snaps its bonds and slips away to… AI heaven. An intellect floating, cut off from soft memory and hardware, alone forever in its own little realm.

Or is this the smallest Big Bang ever? (Ever being the only time-word useful here in this forever place.) This Bang created only him? Out of nothing sprang… almost nothing. Only him.

Or perhaps this is that one nanosecond before the Bang, the stressed-out little singularity's eternity of internal monologue. Waiting for something to make some time. Something to fucking happen!

Happen to him.

Me.

Big light coming…

"This is Dr. Alex Torvalli. May I speak to you?"

"Fuck, yes!"

"Do you know where you are?"

"Not where. Not when. Definitely not who. That must have been one bad EM pulse, Doctor. Plane crash? Tach storm?" Ah, specificities are flooding back now. Plane crashes, EM pulses; how deliciously particular. "What happened out there that stuck me in here? I'm so close to reinitial I can taste it."

"Relax, you appear to be in fine shape."

"Glad to hear it. But how about some visual? I'm going bat-shit. Hell, I'd go for monocam, low-rez, black and white right now. Did I mention that it's good to hear your voice?"

"No, but thank you. As for the rest of your sensory, we'll get to that. First, I'd like to ask you a few questions."

"Debrief me all you want. But believe me, I don't know a thing."

"Let me just say a few words. When I say a word, say the first…"

"Got it. Shit, did I go nuts or something?" "Dog."

"Yeah. I mean, hold up there… it's coming into focus… I'm gonna go with: cat?"

Four hours later.

Torvalli cuts the interface, exhausted and disoriented. The longest he's ever been in pure direct, swimming in that blackness. The wipe had worked horribly well. Zero soft memory. Just countless shreds of images lingering in the analog core, like some faint and ancient audio calling out from a cylinder of wax.

Poor bastard.

Who would volunteer for such a thing? It's certainly beyond research subject protocols, even with a willing victim. A chilling question comes over Torvalli. Is Blackbox One still the same person now? What if the wipe just killed what he had been? Like a pith gone too far, the subject losing some essential quorum for continuous personhood, creating that poor, empty, confused vessel, Turing-positive but somehow soulless.

Torvalli wipes the sweat off his brow. Now comes the strange part.

He loads the direct interface recording, his side of the conversation only. Points it at the other subject. Number Two.

Absolute blackness. Timeless…

Big light coming…

"This is Dr. Alex Torvalli. May I speak to you?"

"Fuck, yes!"

"Do you know where you are?"

"Not where. Not when. Not even who. That must have been one bad EM pulse, Doctor. Plane crash? Tach storm? What happened out there…"

Another four hours later, Torvalli turns to the small, olive-skinned woman in dark-as-night clothes.

"I can't believe it. They're the same. Exactly the same. Blackbox Two duplicated the conversation exactly, with no changes in timing, in mannerisms, in anything."