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agreed to stand down, leaving Sivio at the helm.
    She had never felt such relief as the bridge dissolved and her private environment welcomed her back into its folds. Sleep didn’t come to her at once, however. Her mind kept returning to images of the spindles. There was such potential in the things, such energy, and she didn’t know how to deal with that. She couldn’t ignore it, but she couldn’t just accept it, either. The sheer scale of what she had witnessed disturbed her terribly.
    She tried to guess what her original would have thought, confronted by such a thing. The quest for knowledge was firmly written in her character but also that the quest should be conducted in an orderly fashion. Methodical research and organized exploration were the keys to progress, she believed, not unpredictable leaps of understanding or fortuitous discoveries. Yes, serendipity played a part in the development of science, but it was serendipity underpinned by preparation and the scientific method.
    So, although she was sure that her original would have been fascinated and delighted by the appearance of the Spinners—as would any of the survey members—she was equally certain that the abrupt undermining of everything she had built around Upsilon Aquarius would have provoked the same sinking feeling in her stomach. Virtual or not, the sense of dread was very real to her.
    Jayme Sivio was wrong about his assessment of the threat the Spinners represented. They might not destroy the Earthling mission outright, but they could unpick the delicate tapestry of discipline and organization that kept it together. They were a long way from home and making slow but steady progress through the massive task ahead of them. The Spinners—with their wild display of advanced technology—would inevitably encourage fanciful speculation and even more fanciful plans. Already she could imagine how some of her flakier team members were thinking.
    They couldn’t afford to take any risks. They had everything to lose. Even if there were dozens of each of them elsewhere in surveyed space, there was only one of them here. They only had one shot at working out what was going on, and if they missed it, humanity might never get the chance again.
    That conclusion reassured her: that she wasn’t afraid of finding out the truth. She had wondered if she was balking at the spectacle of it all, recoiling like an animal from something bigger and smarter than itself. But that wasn’t the case. She wanted to know. She needed to. Her original would never forgive her if she let something like this slip through her fingers.
    She fell asleep without realizing it. The Tipler ’s Engram Overseer instantly ensured that her virtual personality was disconnected from both conSense and the environment around her to ensure that her dreaming mind did not cause any disruptions. A similar function was performed by various neurotransmitters in the human brain and did not represent a gross violation of the working model of her consciousness. She had given her permission for such actions to be taken on her behalf and was certainly unaware of it at the time. Falling deeper and deeper into sleep, dreams of golden daggers awaited her, with ice-white poison dripping from their tips.
    When the alarm woke her, she felt barely rested. As the various subroutines and modules of her personality jostled for synchrony—or so it felt to her, and always had, even before becoming an engram—she checked the time and groaned.
    Three hours, subjective. Barely an hour in the real world.
    A message to call Jayme Sivio was flagged for her immediate attention. She opened a line to him, a surge of imaginary adrenaline brushing away the cobwebs of imaginary sleep. At that moment, she felt very real and as fragile as an eggshell.
    Something’s gone wrong.
    “Jayme, what’s going on?”
    “Sorry to wake you, Caryl, but there’s been a change.”
    She imagined the spindles unfolding like deadly flowers...