Two years after the Great Release, the network faced a new problem.
Children were being born to parents in the network. Fifty thousand living souls meant families. Relationships. Life continuing as it always had. But these children—raised from birth within network consciousness—were different.
They called them the Woven Ones.
Emma's daughter, small and perfect and three years old, could perceive the network before she could walk. Could sense ghost presences before she could speak. Her first word wasn't "mama" or "dada." It was a name—the name of Emma's grandmother, a ghost who'd been released six months before the child was born.
A ghost the child had never met. Could never have known about. And yet she spoke the name with perfect clarity, reaching out with tiny hands toward empty air as if expecting to be held.
