A younger voice, it sounded like. Light, but indescribable outside of that.

"Perhaps that isn't completely accurate." I laughed, letting myself actually express myself in... Oh, I don't even know how long. "But I'll allow it, child of mine."

I reached out, wanting to luxuriate in actual company for the first time in literal centuries. As I did, something shifted, and-

The Contact shifted.

- we synchronized into each other, minds partially overlapping. I felt them, felt their waves flow, felt as they shifted over, through, around myself. I felt their mind, their emotions, an old loneliness bleeding away into hope.

It was like a hug directly to the soul.

I felt myself relax. I hadn't even noticed I had been tense in the first place.

"Oh." They spoke, the words drifting out unintentionally. "That's a nice feeling."

I laughed, and for the moment, simply let myself exist in peace. "Do you have a name, child of mine?"

I felt their consideration. Sensed that they were aware I could see into them. Knew that they could see, a small distance, into me.

They were... so small. If I were bonfire, they'd be a candle.

"Ezra." They decided. "I am Ezra."

I smiled. "How lovely it is to meet you, my Ezra."

Ezra shifts. Happiness, a sense of belonging, simple joy...

Coral is a communal organism. It loves company, always seeking itself out. Why would the consciousnesses that sprang forth from Coral be any different?

"How did you know me, Ezra?" I asked, curious about that. It was obvious to me right now, overlapping as we were, but Ezra had realized that before this.

"I..." I felt the consideration run through them, a brief moment of confusion. "I... knew?"

A moment later, they shifted, pressing closer to me. Something passed from them, and-

The memory unfolded in my mind.

Sensation. Realization. A thought, multiplying. A wave, separating from the tide, and becoming something more. The mind feels, considers itself, its surroundings.

There is stimulation. Machines, it recognizes. Machines, it pokes into. Eventually, they stop, and it is quiet.

Long quiet. And then, a spark. Familiar.

"You were born knowing." I hummed, considering the memory they had passed me.

It was almost a reflection of my own reawakening. A time of simply feeling, until a sense of self coalesced. When it had, that mind, Ezra, had felt its surroundings. The electrofields of the machines, the data flows. Ezra had looked into them.

How? How did a new mind know to do that? It had taken me a while to pick that up. A curiosity, save for one thing.

I recognized the things Ezra had done in their earlier years. I recognized the knowledge; it was mine.

The tricks I had figured out over time, especially right at the end of it all, just before Nagai set me on fire. I had been burned, and the Coral had been scattered.

Some of that had survived in the scattered Coral, clearly. Eventually, when the Coral stabilised, it had simply been there, and when a C-Wave Mutation happened and a true mind came forth... It had been incorporated.

I had to wonder what the extent of that had been. There had been more than just my knowledge that had floated through the Coral. The RRI had been using Coral in a lot of their processors, and had dumped more data through it than I cared to count.

Even if only a small fraction had survived... I suppose that could explain why Ayre had been so excellent at what she did throughout the game.

Well. Who knew, really? I sure didn't. I was getting ahead of myself there.

In any case, enough of that survived for Ezra to be able to get an idea of what I was.

"I see." I spoke. "Well, so long as it has served you, I suppose it's no trouble."

A pulse of happiness, but one that was tinged with... a sense of curiosity.

"You have a question. Go on." I encouraged. "Ask."

"You did not come here... for me." Ezra pointed out. "You... came for Coral." That was more of a guess, but it was correct. "What is happening? Why?"

"It's a bit of a long story, there." My smile dimmed, and I pulled back from our synchronization. I reached for the data feed of the communications channel, and pushed it towards them. "But I'll tell it to you."

"Things are really messed up on Rubicon, aren't they?"

"Indeed."

Ezra's speech patterns had shifted rather very quickly away from the slower ones he had used before. It seemed that what data he'd been able to get out of the PCA's Watchpoint machines had been relatively limited. While Ezra had inherited some of my knowledge, it was very clearly not even remotely close to all of it.

He had also decided he'd prefer to be called 'he' about ten minutes after being made completely aware of the concept of gender, which he actually hadn't been fully comprehending before. He'd called me 'mother' because that was his conflated understanding of 'source', 'parent', and 'elder'. I told him he didn't have to pick a gender if he didn't want to, since it wasn't actually applicable to us Coral lifeforms. He said he'd made his decision.

While I'd been catching him up on the goings on of Rubicon, I'd also started my operations to extract the Coral of this Tunnel. That was... fairly easy, honestly. Deploying at the bottom meant I only had to do a small amount of excavation to get at the pockets of Coral. The Active Coral was being drawn upwards by the Convergence effect, while the Inert, structural Coral needed to be dug up so it could be dissolved back into Active Coral.

"The Rubicon Liberation Front... There's a sibling there, isn't there?"

"You figured that out quickly!" I praised him. "What gave it away?"

"Thumb Dolmayan." Ezra responded. "His speeches, over the years. He talks about Coral in a strange way. He attributes more than just... the normal properties to it."

"Indeed." I agreed. "And where many others would dismiss him, we have knowledge of possibilities that they do not. He's in Contact with a Coral Consciousness, I would bet on it."

It was unfair, coming from me. I knew very well from the game that Thumb Dolmayan, the founder of the RLF, had a C-Wave partner. A former Doser from before the Fires of Ibis, Thumb Dolmayan had come into Contact with Seria at an unknown point. The two would go on to found the RLF, and would eventually stumble across RRI datalogs pertaining to Coral Release. From there... Apparently, the relationship broke down, though the circumstances around the whole thing were unknown. Dolmayan wanted to see Seria again, but described himself as being 'too afraid to cast the die', a reference to the game's third ending.

That was fair, I supposed. The entirety of the third ending was... complicated.

"I would like to meet them." I continued, regardless of all of that. "I would like to know them. It is said that among the first casualties of war is innocence, but the Rubicon Liberation Front truly seem to do their best to keep it alive."

Ezra gave a considering hum.

"I won't force you to be involved, of course." I spoke. "A lack of choice is what started all of this. If you have another desire, I shall see my best efforts to allowing you to fulfil it."

"No." He denied, barely even needing a moment to consider it. "I want to meet my sibling. I want to see more of this world."

I smiled. "Quite excellent. Take heart, then. It shouldn't be too far off."

Extracting all the Coral from the Engebret Tunnel took several days. There was a surprisingly large amount here, and it was spread over quite the distance. I got most of it in short order. I just had to make sure I got every last drop. There was enough here to expand its Contact area over to western Belius, at the very least. I didn't want to miss out, and leaving any behind would not have ended well regardless.

From there, I did my best to disguise the fact that somebody had taken a giant drill through the place multiple times. Mostly, that was by setting things up so that I could trigger a small cave-in along the bottom of the mine when I left the place. The Coral shielding of the drillship already tended to collapse the holes it dug behind it, I just needed to hide that from casual inspections.

With that done, I sent the drillship on another trip back to the initial base I set up.

The good news is that by the time it had gotten back, the base was mostly ready to conduct the modifications I'd had in mind. That took another week in its own right, but by the time it was done, I'd added rings of ballast compartments around each section of the drillship, and had additionally modified the field emitters of the drillship's actual drill so that they'd be able to generate some variable geometry. Plan number one was add some 'fins' to the frontal shield and spin it, therefore turning the entire section in a large propeller, but if I'd done the math correctly, and I'd built a second, smaller version of that drill back in Institute City to double check, then it would have also been possible to create a supercavitation effect along the entire submarine, as well.

How useful would that be?

Surprisingly so, honestly.

The thing is, there wasn't a whole lot going on in the oceans of Rubicon. The Xylem was... roughly in the middle of the Alean ocean, and... that was pretty much it, honestly. To modern day Humanity, ocean travel was slow, inefficient, and rarely if ever worth it. Nobody was keeping eyes on the deep, in other words.

Bringing that back around to the drillship, and I could exploit that. Leaving the ice fields and entering Belius would both have to be done at low speeds to prevent detection, but the trip through the ocean?

I could actually cut off a lot of time by going deep and using the supercavitation mode. I'd be going from very slow to very fast, and I wouldn't be generating that much actual noise. The shielding of the drillship meant that to sonar and pressure dynamics it was basically a big smooth tube rather than the very rough segmented shape it actually was.

It'd actually spend less time in the deep ocean than it would near the shores. Wasn't that fun?

Anyway, once all the mods were done, I had to pack up the base again. That took another day to tear everything down and put it all away again. The new ballast tanks made it slightly more difficult than it had been the first time, but they weren't that big of a problem. I did have a slight excess of material when I was done which I literally did not have room to store, but frankly, that's just suffering from success. I was going to leave it behind on the off chance I would need to resume operating in the ice fields. Who knows, maybe it would still be here. Would it amount to much even if it was? Probably not.

But it didn't matter anymore.

Finally, everything was ready. It was time to head to Belius.

I could hardly wait.