Call her Anlic.

The first time she woke she was in the ruins of an abandoned gravity mine.

At first the Community had chased around the outer strata of the great gloomy structure. But at last, close to the core, they reached a cramped ring. Here the central black hole’s gravity was so strong that light itself curved in closed orbits.

The torus tunnel looked infinitely long. And they could race as fast as they dared.

As they hurtled past fullerene walls they could see multiple images of themselves, a glowing golden mesh before and behind, for the echoes of their light endlessly circled the central knot of spacetime. “Just like the old days!” they called, excited. “Just like the Afterglow…!”

Exhilarated, they pushed against the light barrier, and those trapped circling images shifted to blue or red.

That was when it happened.

This Community was just a small tributary of the Conflux: isolated here in this ancient place, the density of mind already stretched thin. And now, as lightspeed neared, that isolation stretched to breaking point.

…She budded off from the rest, her consciousness made discrete, separated from the greater flow of minds and memories.

She slowed. The others rushed on without her, a dazzling circular storm orbiting the exhausted black hole. It felt like coming awake, emerging from a dream.

Her questions were immediate, flooding her raw mind. “Who am I? How did I get here?” And so on. The questions were simple, even trite. And yet they were unanswerable.

Others gathered around her — curious, sympathetic — and the race of streaking light began to lose its coherence.

One of them came to her.

Names meant little; this “one” was merely a transient sharpening of identity from the greater distributed entity that made up the Community.

Still, here he was. Call him Geador.

“…Anlic?”

“I feel — odd,” she said.

“Don’t worry.”

“Who am I?”

“Come back to us.”

He reached for her, and she sensed the warm depths of companionship and memory and shared joy that lay beyond him. Depths waiting to swallow her up, to obliterate her questions.

She snapped, “No!” And, willfully, she sailed up and out and away, passing through the thin walls of the tunnel.

At first it was difficult to climb out of this twisted gravity well. But soon she was rising through layers of structure.

Here was the tight electromagnetic cage that had once tapped the spinning black hole like a dynamo. Here was the cloud of compact masses that had been hurled along complex orbits through the hole’s ergosphere, extracting gravitational energy. It was antique engineering, long abandoned.

She emerged into a blank sky, a sky stretched thin by the endless expansion of spacetime.

Geador was here. “What do you see?”

“Nothing.”

“Look harder.” He showed her how.

There was a scattering of dull red pinpoints all around the sky.

“They are the remnants of stars,” he said.

He told her about the Afterglow: that brief, brilliant period after the Big Bang, when matter gathered briefly in clumps and burned by fusion light. “It was a bonfire, over almost as soon as it began. The universe was very young. It has swollen some ten thousand trillion times in size since then.… Nevertheless, it was in that gaudy era that humans arose. Us, Anlic.”

She looked into her soul, seeking warm memories of the Afterglow. She found nothing.

She looked back at the gravity mine.

At its center was a point of yellow-white light. Spears of light arced out from its poles, knife-thin. The spark was surrounded by a flattened cloud, dull red, inhomogeneous, clumpy. The big central light cast shadows through the crowded space around it.

It was beautiful, a sculpture of light and crimson smoke.

“This is Mine One,” Geador said gently. “The first mine of all. And it is built on the ruins of the primeval galaxy — the galaxy from which humans first emerged.”

“The first galaxy?”

“But it was all long ago.” He moved closer to her. “So long ago that this mine became exhausted. Soon it will evaporate away completely. We have long since had to move on…”

But that had happened before. After all humans had started from a single star, and spilled over half the universe, even before the stars ceased to shine.

Now humans wielded energy, drawn from the great gravity mines, on a scale unimagined by their ancestors. Of course mines would be exhausted — like this one — but there would be other mines. Even when the last mine began to fail, they would think of something.

The future stretched ahead, long, glorious. Minds flowed together in great rivers of consciousness. There was immortality to be had, of a sort, a continuity of identity through replication and confluence across trillions upon trillions of years.

It was the Conflux.

Its source was far upstream.

The crudities of birth and death had been abandoned even before the Afterglow was over, when man’s biological origins were decisively shed. So every mind, every tributary that made up the Conflux today had its source in that bright, remote upstream time.

Nobody had been born since the Afterglow.

Nobody but Anlic.

“…Come back,” Geador said.

Her defiance was dissipating.

She understood nothing about herself. But she didn’t want to be different. She didn’t want to be unhappy.

There wasn’t anybody who was less than maximally happy, the whole of the time. Wasn’t that the purpose of existence?

So, troubled, she gave herself up to Geador, to the Conflux. And, along with her identity, her doubts and questions dissolved.

The universe would grow far older before she woke again.

“…Flee! Faster! As fast as you can…!”

There was turbulence in the great rushing river of mind.

And in that turbulence, here and there, souls emerged from the background wash. Each brief fleck suffered a moment of terror before falling back into the greater dreaming whole.

One of those flecks was Anlic.

In the sudden dark she clung to herself. She slithered to a stop.

Transient identities clustered around her. “What are you doing? Why are you staying here? You will be harmed.” They sought to absorb her, but fell back, baffled by her resistance.

The Community was fleeing, in panic. Why?

She looked back.

There was something there, in the greater darkness. She made out the faintest of patterns: charcoal grey on black, almost beyond her ability to resolve it, a mesh of neat regular triangles covering the sky. Visible through the interstices was a complex, textured curtain of grey-pink light.

It was a structure that spanned the universe.

She felt stunned, disoriented. It was so different from Mine One, her last clear memory. She must have crossed a great desert of time.

But — she found, when she looked into her soul — her questions remained unanswered.

She called out: “Geador?”

A ripple of shock and doubt spread through the Community.

“…You are Anlic.”

“Geador?”

“I have Geador’s memories.”

That would have to do, she thought, irritated; in the Conflux, memory and identity were fluid, distributed, ambiguous.

“We are in danger, Anlic. You must come.”

She refused to comply, stubborn. She indicated the great netting. “Is that Mine One?”

“No,” he said sadly. “Mine One was long ago, child.”

“How long ago?”

“Time is nested…”

From this vantage, the era of man’s first black hole empire had been the spring time, impossibly remote. And the Afterglow itself — the star-burning dawn — was lost, a mere detail of the Big Bang.

“What is happening here, Geador?”

“There is no time — ”