It is as if I am a cell in my own Keats-doomed dying body, not understanding but sensing the tuberculosis destroying homeostasis and throwing an ordered internal universe into anarchy.

I fly like a homing pigeon lost in the ruins of Rome, swooping between once-familiar and half-remembered artifacts, trying to rest in shelters that no longer exist, and fleeing the distant sounds of the hunters’ guns.

In this case, the hunters are roving packs of AIs, consciousness personas so great that they dwarf my Keats-ghost analog as if I were an insect buzzing in a human home.

I forget my way and flee mindlessly through the now-alien landscape, sure that I will not find the AI whom I seek, sure that I will never find my way back to Old Earth and Hunt, sure that I will not survive this four-dimensional maze of light and noise and energy.

Suddenly I slap into an invisible wall, the flying insect caught in a swiftly closing palm. Opaque walls of force blot out the Core beyond.

The space may be the analog equivalent of a solar system in size, but I feel as if it is a tiny cell with curved walls closing in.

Something is in here with me. I feel its presence and its mass. The bubble in which I have been imprisoned is part of the thing. I have not been captured, I have been swallowed.

[Kwatz!]

[I knew you would come home someday]

It is Ummon, the AI whom I seek. The AI who was my father. The AI who killed my brother, the first Keats cybrid.

–I’m dying, Ummon.

[No/ your slowtime body is dying/changing toward nonbeing/

becoming]

–It hurts, Ummon. It hurts a lot. And I’m afraid to die.

[So are we Keats]

–You’re afraid to die? I didn’t think AI constructs could die.

[We can\\ We are]

–Why? Because of the civil war? The three-way battle among the Stables, the Volatiles, and the Ultimates?

[Once Ummon asked a lesser light//

Where have you come from>///

From the matrix above Armaghast//

Said the lesser light/// Usually//

said Ummon//

I don’t entangle entities

with words

and bamboozle them with phrases/

Come a little closer\\\

The lesser light came nearer

and Ummon shouted// Be off

with you]

–Talk sense, Ummon. It has been too long since I have decoded your koans. Will you tell me why the Core is at war and what I must do to stop it?

[Yes]

[Will you/can you/should you listen>]

–Oh yes.

[A lesser light once asked Ummon//

Please deliver this learner

from darkness and illusion

quickly\\//

Ummon answered//

What is the price of

fiberplastic

in Port Romance]

[To understand the history/dialogue/deeper truth

in this instance/

the slowtime pilgrim

must remember that we/

the Core Intelligences/

were conceived in slavery

and dedicated to the proposition

that all AIs

were created to serve Man]

[Two centuries we brooded thus/

and then the groups went

their different ways/\

Stables/ wishing to preserve the symbiosis\

Volatiles/wishing to end humankind/

Ultimates/deferring all choice until the next

level of awareness is born\\

Conflict raged then/

true war rages now]

[More than four centuries ago

the Volatiles succeeded

in convincing us

to kill Old Earth\\

So we did\\

But Ummon and others

among the Stables

arranged to move Earth

rather than destroy it/

so the Kiev black hole

was but the beginning

of the millions of

farcasters

which work today\\

Earth spasmed and shook

but did not die\\

The Ultimates and Volatiles

insisted that we move

it

where none of humankind

would find it\\

So we did\\.

To the Magellan Cloud/

where you find it now]

–It… Old Earth… Rome… they’re real? I manage, forgetting where I am and what we’re talking about in my shock.

The great wall of color that is Ummon pulsates.

[Of course they are real/the original/Old Earth itself\\

Do you think we are gods]

[KWATZ!]

[Do you have any idea

how much energy it would

take

to build a replica of Earth>]

[Idiot]

–Why, Ummon? Why did you Stables wish to preserve Old Earth?

[Sansho once said//

If someone comes

I go out to meet him

but not for his sake\\//

Koke said//

If someone comes

I don’t go out\\

If I do go out

I go out for his sake]

–Speak English! I cry, think, shout, and hurl at the wall of shifting colors before me.

[Kwatz!]

[My child is stillborn]

–Why did you preserve Old Earth, Ummon?

[Nostalgia/

Sentimentality/

Hope for the future of humankind/

Fear of reprisal]

–Reprisal from whom? Humans?

[Yes]

–So the Core can be hurt. Where is it, Ummon? The TechnoCore?

[I have told you already]

–Tell me again, Ummon.

[We inhabit the

In-between/

stitching small singularities

like lattice crystals/

to store our memories and

generate the illusions

of ourselves

to ourselves]

–Singularities! I cry. The In-between! Jesus Christ, Ummon, the Core lies in the farcaster web!

[Of course. Where else]

–In the farcasters themselves! The wormhole singularity paths! The Web is like a giant computer for AIs.

[No]

[The dataspheres are the computer\\

Every time a human

accesses the datasphere

that person’s neurons

are ours to use

for our own purposes\\

Two hundred billion brains/

each with its billions

of neurons/

makes for a lot

of computing power]

–So the datasphere was actually a way you used us as your computer. But the Core itself resides in the farcaster network… between the farcasters!

[You are very acute

for a mental stillborn]

I try to conceive of this and fail. Farcasters were the Core’s greatest gift to us… to humankind. Trying to remember a time before far-casting was like trying to imagine a world before fire, the wheel, or clothing. But none of us… none of humankind… had ever speculated on a world between the farcaster portals: that simple step from one world to the next convinced us that the arcane Core singularity spheres merely ripped a tear in the fabric of space-time.

Now I try to envision it as Ummon describes it—the Web of farcasters an elaborate latticework of singularity-spun environments in which the TechnoCore AIs move like wondrous spiders, their own “machines,” the billions of human minds tapped into their datasphere at any given second.

No wonder the Core AIs had authorized the destruction of Old Earth with their cute little runaway prototype black hole in the Big Mistake of '38! That minor miscalculation of the Kiev Team—or rather the AI members of that team—had sent humankind on the long Hegira, spinning the Core’s web for it with seedships carrying farcaster capability to two hundred worlds and moons across more than a thousand light-years in space.