"She won't come down," A-6 said, returning from the stairwell with the expression of someone who had encountered an obstacle that was not physical but was somehow more resistant than physical obstacles tended to be. "She said if Mr. Huddersfield wants to speak to her he can come up."
"She said that specifically."
"She said —" A-6 paused, which for A-6 represented the retrieval of an exact quote being handled with care, "— tell him I've been waiting long enough that a flight of stairs is not an unreasonable request."
Maren, still in her chair, made a sound that was almost a laugh. "That's my girl."
I looked at the stairwell. Looked at A-6. Looked at Maren. "How many stairs."
"Fourteen," A-6 said.
I went up the stairs.
The upper level of the building had the quality of a space that had been lived in rather than designed — the careful, accumulated texture of someone who had spent years in a place and gradually made it theirs without ever quite deciding to. The corridor at the top of the stairs had three doors. The first was open and showed a room full of research materials — physical documents, which was unusual enough in the current civilization to be notable, stacked in arrangements that suggested an organizational system that was entirely personal and entirely functional. The second door was closed and had, taped to it at approximately chest height, a hand-drawn map of something I did not immediately recognize. The third door was slightly ajar and from behind it came the sound of someone moving.
I knocked on the third door.
"It's open," said a voice. Young. Precise. The kind of voice that had learned to sound steadier than it felt through long practice.
I pushed the door open.
The room was not large. A bed along one wall, a desk along the other, a window that showed the same featureless engineered light as the rest of the building rather than the actual view of Sector Communion outside. On the desk was more research — documents, handwritten notes, a display screen showing what appeared to be a cosmological mapping projection. On the wall above the desk were pinned dozens of papers covered in notation I would need time to fully read.
On the bed, sitting cross-legged with the careful posture of someone who had been told to rest and had decided that sitting was a reasonable interpretation of that instruction, was Asha.
Twenty-three years old. Dark eyes that had the quality of someone who had spent a long time reading things that were difficult to read and had developed a relationship with difficulty. She was wearing the same kind of functional clothing as Maren — practical, unornamented, the wardrobe of someone for whom appearance was a resource to be allocated elsewhere. She looked at me the way the field team lead Seren Voss had described the subject looking at her during the binding.
Like she was deciding whether to trust me.
"Mr. Huddersfield," she said. Not a greeting exactly. An acknowledgment.
"Asha," I said. I looked around the room for a chair. There was not one. I remained standing, which put me at an awkward height differential for a conversation, but I had been in awkward situations before and this one at least had the virtue of being awkward for understandable reasons. "You asked to see me."
"You came to see me," she corrected. "I simply declined to make it easy." She looked at me steadily. "Maren said you'd come eventually. She's been saying it my whole life. I stopped believing her around age sixteen and started again around age twenty when the boundary readings started changing." A pause. "Sit on the floor if you want. I don't mind."
I sat on the floor. This seemed to surprise her — a small shift in her expression, quickly controlled. I filed it.
"The boundary readings," I said. "You've been monitoring the Scarlet Space."
"Since I was twelve." She uncrossed her legs and leaned forward slightly, elbows on knees. "Maren taught me the monitoring methodology. The instruments on the eastern wall downstairs — half of those I built myself. The signature-isolation array, the dimensional pressure sensors, the approach vector calculator." She said it without pride, just inventory. "I've been tracking it for eleven years."
"And what have you found that Maren hasn't told me."
She looked at me sharply. "What makes you think I found something she didn't tell you."
"Because you're twenty-three and you've been doing this since you were twelve and you have the expression of someone who is sitting on information they're not sure they should have." I looked at the wall of notation above her desk. "Also your mapping projection is showing an approach vector that is inconsistent with a six month arrival estimate. It's showing four."
Asha looked at the screen. Back at me. The assessment in her eyes sharpened into something that was almost but not quite respect — the precursor to it, the moment just before a judgment is made.
"Four months," she said. "Maybe less. The acceleration rate changed three weeks ago. The rate of change of the acceleration rate also changed, which means the model Maren is using is working from outdated parameters." She paused. "I haven't told her yet."
"Why not."
"Because she's seventy-nine years old and she spent sixty years building this and telling her it's arriving two months earlier than she calculated would —" Asha stopped. Looked at her hands. "She deserves a few more days of the timeline she planned for."
I looked at her for a moment. "You're protecting her."
"I'm delaying a conversation I'm going to have to have regardless." She looked back up. "I'm telling you first because you're the one who needs to actually do something about it. Maren's role ends when she delivers the warning. Your role is what comes after." A beat. "I assume you have a role that comes after."
"I'm still determining what that role is."
"You have four months."
"Possibly less," I said. "Tell me about the Scarlet Space. Not what Maren told you to tell me. What you actually know from eleven years of direct monitoring."
Asha was quiet for a moment. She stood up — not restlessly, but with the purposefulness of someone who thought better when upright — and moved to the display screen, pulling up the projection so it filled more of the wall. The cosmological map resolved into a three-dimensional rendering that extended well beyond the civilization's documented framework boundaries. At the edge of the rendering, moving with a slowness that was only slow relative to the scale of what it occupied, was a presence rendered in deep, arterial red.
The Scarlet Space.
Even as a visualization it was wrong in the way that certain things were wrong when the instruments measuring them were not built for what they were measuring. The edges of it were not edges. They moved in a way that suggested the rendering was showing an approximation — the instruments saying here is the closest translation we can provide while knowing the translation was insufficient.
"It's not traveling," Asha said, standing beside the projection. "That's the first thing Maren's model gets wrong. The word traveling implies a point of origin and a destination and movement between them. The Scarlet Space doesn't travel." She traced the edge of the red presence without touching the screen. "It expands. The leading edge moves because the whole of it is growing. What looks like approach is the growth front reaching toward the framework boundary."
"The distinction matters," I said.
"The distinction matters enormously." She turned to look at me. "If it were traveling you could potentially redirect it. Influence the path. Offer an alternative destination. But it's not going somewhere. It's becoming larger." She paused. "Everything it absorbs doesn't get carried to a location. It becomes part of the expansion. The civilizations inside it aren't stored somewhere within the Scarlet Space. They are the Scarlet Space. They are the mass that makes it larger."
"And their awareness."
"Present," she said. "That's the worst part of the data. The consciousness signature readings I get from inside the boundary are — they're present. The absorbed entities are aware. They experience. They just can't —" she stopped. Chose words carefully. "They can't distinguish themselves from the whole anymore. The boundaries of individual consciousness become permeable and then they become irrelevant. You're aware but the awareness is shared with everything else that was absorbed and with the Scarlet Space itself and the Scarlet Space is not —" she stopped again.
"Is not what," I said.
"Is not unkind," she said quietly. "That's the strangest thing. The readings don't show suffering. They show something more like — dissolution. The self becomes part of something larger and the larger thing is not malevolent. It's just — consuming. Without intention. The way a fire isn't cruel when it burns."
I stood up from the floor. Moved to stand beside her at the projection. We were both looking at the red presence at the edge of the rendering — the thing that had absorbed civilizations the way weather moved through geography, the thing that was four months from the boundary of the only civilization that had ever produced something it had never encountered before.
"When it reaches the boundary," I said. "What does the first contact look like."
"Based on the signature data from the civilizations I can still get readings from —" Asha manipulated the projection, overlaying a timeline, "— the initial contact is not dramatic. There's no collision. No moment of impact. The boundary becomes permeable gradually. Like —" she searched for the metaphor, "— like the difference between a wall and a membrane. The boundary stops being a wall and starts being a membrane and then it stops being a membrane and there's no boundary and then —"
She didn't finish the sentence.
She didn't need to.
"Four months," I said.
"Maybe less."
We stood in silence for a moment. Below us, in the chamber, Maren was presumably still sitting in her chair with the patience of someone who had spent sixty years being patient and had a few more hours of it available. In the city outside, in the sector that did not know this building existed, eleven million people were moving through their day.
"What do you know about the Council," I said. "Specifically. What Maren told you and what you've concluded independently."
Asha moved away from the projection and sat back on the bed. Picked up a physical notebook from beside her — well-used, the spine cracked from repeated opening. "Maren said you were Tier 0. That all fourteen of you were. That Tier 0 meant you existed at the layer where the framework itself was defined rather than within the framework." She opened the notebook. "I spent three years trying to understand what that actually meant in physical terms. What it meant for the Scarlet Space problem specifically."
"And."
"And the Scarlet Space expands by absorbing frameworks," she said. "That's its mechanism. It encounters a framework — a civilizational ontological structure, the set of rules that govern what can exist and how — and it incorporates that framework into itself. The framework becomes part of the Scarlet Space's mass." She looked up from the notebook. "But you don't exist within the framework. You exist at the layer that defines it. So the Scarlet Space can't absorb you the way it absorbs everything else because you're not in the framework to be absorbed."
"We are the framework," I said.
"You are the framework," she confirmed. "Which means the Scarlet Space, when it reaches the boundary, will encounter something it has never encountered before. Not a civilization operating within a structure. But the structure itself. Personified. Sovereign. Capable of response." She paused. "The question I haven't been able to answer is what that response looks like."
"Because no one has ever done it before."
"Because no one has ever existed at the right layer to do it before." She closed the notebook. "Mr. Huddersfield. Can I ask you something directly."
"Yes."
"Do you know what you're capable of. Actually. Not in the administrative sense — not what you're authorized to do or what the doctrine permits. What you are actually capable of, at the level that matters for this."
I looked at her. Young, precise, twenty-three years old, raised in a building that the city didn't know existed, carrying a warning for her entire life and now delivering it to the person she'd been told could do something with it.
"I know what I have done," I said. "I know what the doctrine has required. I know the scope of the system I administer." I paused. "What I am capable of at the level you're describing — I know it abstractly. I have never had occasion to know it practically."
"You're about to," she said.
"Yes."
"Are you afraid."
The question was not impertinent. It was the question of someone who had been thinking about this moment for eleven years and wanted to know the honest answer rather than the administrative one.
"No," I said. And then, because she deserved the complete version: "I don't have a clear framework for fear in the conventional sense. What I have is — an awareness of the gap between what I know I've done and what this will require. A recognition that the space between those two things is significant and unexplored." I looked at the projection. At the red presence moving at the edge of everything. "Something adjacent to fear, perhaps. Something that will resolve into function when function is required."
Asha looked at me for a long moment.
"Maren said you'd say something like that," she said.
"What did Maren say specifically."
"She said —" Asha almost smiled, "— she said he'll tell you he isn't afraid and it'll be technically true and completely honest and somehow still not the whole story."
I looked at the projection for another moment.
Then I looked at Asha.
"Come downstairs," I said. "We need to tell Maren about the four months. And then I need to contact the Council."
"All of them?"
"All of them." I moved toward the door. "And Asha — the map on the second door. What is that a map of."
She was quiet for just a moment too long.
"The Scarlet Space," she said. "The interior. What the absorbed civilizations look like from the inside. I've been building it from the consciousness signature data for six years."
I looked at her. "You mapped the inside of the Scarlet Space from external readings."
"Partially." She stood. "It's not complete. The data gets — difficult — past a certain depth. The signatures blur. Individual consciousness becomes hard to distinguish from the collective." She paused at the door beside me. "But the outer layers are fairly detailed. The civilizations that were absorbed most recently. You can still see them. The shape of what they were."
"Could they see us," I said. "If we mapped them, could they see us mapping them."
Asha looked at me with an expression that was no longer the assessment of someone deciding whether to trust. It was the expression of someone who had already decided and was now simply present in that decision.
"I don't know," she said. "I've wondered that for six years." She stepped through the door into the corridor. "That's another question for four months from now."
We went downstairs.
Maren was still in her chair. She looked up when we came down — looked at me first, then at Asha, then back at me, reading something in the arrangement of us that the individual parts of us were not saying.
"Tell me," she said.
"Four months," Asha said. "Maybe less."
Maren was quiet. She looked at her hands. She breathed once, steadily, the breath of someone absorbing information they had been prepared for without being fully prepared for.
Then she looked up at me.
"Well then," she said. "You'd better make some calls."
I stepped outside onto the street of Sector Communion and the city returned — immediate and complete, sound and density and the smell of the vendor's food still faintly present on the sixth block. A-6 appeared beside me from the building's entrance with the seamless timing that A-6 had always had and I had always relied on.
"Maren?" A-6 said.
"Inside with Asha. They're safe." I looked at the street. At the city. At the blue-white foundation light in the windows of the buildings around me and the people moving between them. "A-6."
"Yes."
"Contact all thirteen members. Full council session. Emergency designation." I paused. "And A-6 —"
"Yes."
"Tell them not to reschedule."
A-6 was already composing the communication. I stood in the street of Sector Communion and looked at the ordinary, extraordinary, entirely unaware city around me and thought about the red edge moving at the boundary of everything they had ever built and everyone they had ever been.
Four months.
Possibly less.
I started walking.