Inside each of us, infinitesimal lacerations were turning our cells to mush. Plasma membranes sprang countless leaks. Overwhelmed repair enzymes clung desperately to shredded genes and barely delayed the inevitable. Anxious to avoid the rush, patches of my intestinal lining began flaking away before the rest of the body had a chance to die.

By the time we docked with Theseus both Michelle and I were feeling nauseous. (The rest of the Gang, oddly, was not; I had no idea how that was possible.) The others would be presenting the same symptoms within minutes. Without intervention we would all be vomiting our guts out for the following two days. Then the body would pretend to recover; for perhaps a week we would feel no pain and have no future. We would walk and talk and move like any living thing, and perhaps convince ourselves that we were immortal after all.

Then we would collapse into ourselves, rotted from the inside out. We would bleed from our eyes and mouths and assholes, and if any God was merciful we would die before splitting open like rotten fruit.

But of course Theseus, our redeemer, would save us from such a fate. We filed from the shuttle into a great balloon that Sarasti had erected to capture our personal effects; we shed our contaminated space suits and clothing and emerged naked into the spine. We passed single-file through the drum, the Flying Dead in formation. Jukka Sarasti—discreetly distant on the turning floor—leapt up in our wake and disappeared aft, to feed our radioactive cast-offs into the decompiler.

Into the crypt. Our coffins lay open across the rear bulkhead. We sank gratefully and wordlessly into their embrace. Bates coughed blood as the lids came down.

My bones hummed as the Captain began to shut me off. I went to sleep a dead man. I had only theory and the assurances of fellow machinery that I would ever be born again.

Keeton, come forth.

I woke up ravenous. Faint voices drifted forward from the drum. I floated in my pod for a few moments, eyes closed, savoring absences: no pain, no nausea. No terrifying subliminal sense of one's own body sloughing incrementally to mush. Weakness, and hunger; otherwise I felt fine.

I opened my eyes.

Something like an arm. Grey and glistening, far too— too attenuate to be human. No hand at its tip. Too many joints, a limb broken in a dozen places. It extended from a body barely visible over the lip of the pod, a suggestion of dark bulk and other limbs in disjoint motion. It hovered motionless before me, as if startled in the midst of some shameful act.

By the time I had breath enough to cry out, it had whipped back out of sight.

I erupted from the pod, eyes everywhere. Now they saw nothing: an empty crypt, a naked note-taker. The mirrored bulkhead reflected vacant pods to either side. I called up ConSensus: all systems nominal.

It didn't reflect, I remembered. The mirror didn't show it.

I headed aft, heart still pounding. The drum opened around me, Szpindel and the Gang conversing in low tones aft. Szpindel glanced up and waved a trembling hand in greeting.

"You need to check me out," I called. My voice wasn't nearly so steady as I'd hoped.

"Admitting you have a problem is the first step," Szpindel called back. "Just don't expect miracles." He turned back to the Gang; James on top, they sat in a diagnostic couch staring at some test pattern shimmering on the rear bulkhead.

I grabbed the tip of a stairway and pulled myself down. Coriolis pushed me sideways like a flag in the breeze. "I'm either hallucinating or there's something on board."

"You're hallucinating."

"I'm serious."

"So am I. Take a number. Wait your turn."

He was serious. Once I forced myself to calm down and read the signs, I could see he wasn't even surprised.

"Guess you're pretty hungry after all that exhausting lying around, eh?" Szpindel waved at the galley. "Eat something. Be with you in a few minutes."

I forced myself to work up my latest synopsis while I ate, but that only took half a mind; the other still shivered in residual thrall to fight-flight. I tried to distract it by tapping the BioMed feed.

"It was real," James was saying. "We all saw it."

No. Couldn't have been.

Szpindel cleared his throat. "Try this one."

The feed showed what she saw: a small black triangle on a white background. In the next instant it shattered into a dozen identical copies, and a dozen dozen. The proliferating brood rotated around the center screen, geometric primitives ballroom-dancing in precise formation, each sprouting smaller triangles from its tips, fractalizing, rotating, evolving into an infinite, intricate tilework…

A sketchpad, I realized. An interactive eyewitness reconstruction, without the verbiage. Susan's own pattern-matching wetware reacted to what she saw— no, there were more of them; no, the orientation's wrong; yes, that's it, but bigger— and Szpindel's machine picked those reactions right out of her head and amended the display in realtime. It was a big step up from that half-assed workaround called language. The easily-impressed might have even called it mind-reading.

It wasn't, though. It was all just feedback and correlation. It doesn't take a telepath to turn one set of patterns into another. Fortunately.

"That's it! That's it!" Susan cried.

The triangles had iterated out of existence. Now the display was full of interlocking asymmetrical pentagrams, a spiderweb of fish scales.

"Don't tell us that's random noise," she said triumphantly.

"No," Szpindel said, "It's a Klüver constant."

"A—"

"It's a hallucination, Suze."

"Of course. But something planted it in our head, right? And—"

"It was in your head all along. It was in your head the day you were born."

"No."

"It's an artefact of deep brain structure. Even congenitally blind people see them sometimes."

"None of us have seen them before. Ever."

"I believe you. But there's no information there, eh? That wasn't Rorschach talking, it was just—interference. Like everything else."

"But it was so vivid! Not that flickering corner-of-your-eye stuff we saw everywhere. This was solid. It was realer than real."

"That's how you can tell it wasn't. Since you don't actually see it, there's no messy eyeball optics to limit resolution."

"Oh," James said, and then, softly: "Shit."

"Yeah. Sorry." And then, "Any time you're ready."

I looked up; Szpindel was waving me over. James rose from her chair, but it was Michelle who gave him a quick disconsolate squeeze and Sascha who grumbled past me on her way to their tent.

By the time I reached him Szpindel had unfolded the couch into a half-cot. "Lie down."

I did. "I wasn't talking about back in Rorschach, you know. I meant here. I saw something right now. When I woke up."

"Raise your left hand," he said. Then: "Just your left, eh?"

I lowered my right, winced at the pinprick. "That's a bit primitive."

He eyed the blood-filled cuvette between his thumb and forefinger: a shivering ruby teardrop the size of a fingernail. "Wet sample's still best for some things."

"Aren't the pods supposed to do everything?"

Szpindel nodded. "Call it a quality-control test. Keep the ship on its toes." He dropped the sample onto the nearest countertop. The teardrop flattened and burst; the surface drank my blood as if parched. Szpindel smacked his lips. "Elevated cholinesterase inhibitors in the ret. Yum."

For all I knew, my blood results actually did taste good to the man. Szpindel didn't just read results; he felt them, smelled and saw and experienced each datum like drops of citrus on the tongue. The whole BioMed subdrum was but a part of the Szpindel prosthesis: an extended body with dozens of different sensory modes, forced to talk to a brain that knew only five.