three
A ripple solicited his attention. He arrived at the disturbance without thought, simply moving from one space to another, skipping or ignoring the constraints of time and distance. He was all; he was nothing.
The mote of self within asked a question. "Where are we going?"
He separated self from being and answered. "The Kepler Verge."
Talking to the kernel, the being that wanted a space of its own, had become habit. He did not know when it had begun, but suspected it had something to do with assigning a personal pronoun to the vastness of his existence. Change begged change and though time did not matter, the ebb and flow of it did. The galaxy was a creature. He had learned its habits and now he recognised his, or those of the person he used to be, the awareness awakening within. The man who liked a colour; a single colour.
A mass relay shimmered against the darkness. While he watched, energy cascaded around the rings and along the prongs. The gathering light simultaneously attracted and repulsed. A fever built, rings circling one another in a complicated pattern he understood. Understood! Then a ship exploded into being, shooting along the leading edge and out into the dark.
He followed the ship for a distance and then peeled off, coming away from that system and leaning into another like an arm reaching across the stars. Next to him, a different ship lay dead in the water of the starry expanse. He knew the name of the vessel, what it was. He did not know why he had been drawn to it.
Myriad pings and ripples had kept him occupied since the end of the war. He remembered that, the war. He'd given his life for it, after all; he'd plunged into the blue with a human cry and had given a new, inhuman oath, one that required no words, no symbols, only a dedication he could not foreswear as he had no other purpose.
The Bataille drifted in silence. He pushed through the skin of its hull and paused as he felt a different flicker. Two distinct breaths of life. One halfway fore, the other aft.
"Why are we here?"
"I don't know."
"We know everything."
No, they did not. He didn't. Even the vastness of his existence could not know all. That had been his first lesson: how much he did not know, would never know, despite being...
"Go on, say it."
"I'm not a god."
"We're a god."
"Shut up."
The kernel whistled. Or, he thought it did until he realised the sound actually came from inside the Bataille.
It had taken him a while to recognise sound. The explosion of his death left him senseless in the most literal manner. He saw nothing, felt nothing, heard nothing. Smelt nothing. Took him a while to remember the fact of smell. He couldn't remember the other sense. The fifth one. Couldn't remember why he thought there might be five.
Sight returned first. It felt like a crutch, the fact he needed to see. More often, it dizzied him. Worried him. He could see and he could see. Through the eyes of all he held, he could observe nearly everything. A thought and eyes would open on the other side of the galaxy and watch a hexapod shuffle across the rust-coloured surface of Sharjila.
Sound returned next. He expected it and it happened. Generations passed while he learned to hear what he wanted to hear, rather than every voice in the galaxy, every breath of wind, the susurrus of forests, the roar and sigh of every damned ocean. Bubbles rising from a glass of something on the Citadel.
Something blue?
"Can you hear that?"
"Yeah." The word, the drawn out affirmation, sounded like a sigh.
He should know what it was, but he didn't. The superstructure of the ship dissolved before him and reformed behind him. A convenient fiction to cover the fact he could pass through anything. He could surf the solar flares. He'd tried that while trying to figure out touch.
"Sunshine!"
The yell jarred, ripping through the incoherent substance of his self. He turned in the direction of the call and looked through half the ship, bulkheads winking out of existence. A human male, nearly two metres tall and massive, well over a hundred kilos of tightly packed muscle encased in glossy dark skin.
Did I used to look like that?
The kernel laughed.
"Damn it, Kat. Answer me." The large man hammered at the glow surrounding his left wrist as if he could wrestle the hologram into submission, make it report something it did not know. Then he cursed and issued a different set of instructions. The suit hanging from his hips like the skin of a half-peeled banana stiffened as he rolled himself back inside. A blue bubble of soap emerged from his neck, wavered in the dim light and began to grow around his head.
"We didn't have those," the kernel observed.
"A lot of time has passed."
"We going to find Sunshine?"
Sunshine. A memory tickled, of pale skin traced with lines; some dark, some light. Some red, some blue.
"Yeah." It was another drawn out sigh. A whisper of reluctance.
He turned around and pushed forward through the ship.