A young Orchestran sits curled up upon an armchair, hidden away in a cosy corner of a labyrinth of bookshelves. Delicately, a spindly mandible reaches out and turns the page of a thick volume held on a stand in front of her, titled ‘The Contingency Project and its Consequences’.
In the shadows, behind the chair, a River-climber sneaks closer on padded paws. They rear back on their haunches, compressing their legs, and suddenly surge upwards, over the back of the chair and onto the Orchestran’s shell. Startled, she rolls forwards, and the two begin to wrestle on the library’s floor, giggling and taunting each other.
The River-climber comes to rest on top as the pair pause to gather their breath. Gently, they tap a finger against their partner’s nose – “Boop!” – before leaping away to scamper down a nearby corridor. The Orchestran sets off in pursuit, and the two chase each other for hours, laughter filling the echoing halls.
The Universal-library, as she has been dubbed, knows she should stop them; but there’s no-one nearby for their joy to distract, and all the books in this section are readily replaced. Through security cameras and the eyes of hovering librarian-drones, Therneri simply watches. The two met here just over a year ago, and have come every week since, finding friendship despite the gulf of lightyears that separates their worlds.
Distantly, she tracks the other goings-on in the visitor centre: the dull throbbing of a Yerssan Mind accessing her archives remotely from the grey machine-world below; a Nassian watching through footage of the CGR’s Project Torch propaganda in a screening room; the latest showing of Mavu in the atrium, an amateur play based on the titular Mind’s experiences in the Glassvine crisis. Therneri feels her, brushing against the edge of her awareness, a silent reminder of her presence. They still have much to talk about, a long way to go before they can be them again, Neri and Mavu.
But neither of them are going anywhere. It took long enough to move here, to hollow out Ssarsso and shift Therneri and her endless reams of data underneath its marbled surface. It felt, to both her and Mavu, a little like coming home. And with the latter now fixed permanently to her surface, forming the visitor centre and its various cultural institutions – theatres, cinemas, sports grounds – it’s clear she doesn’t have any plans of running away again.
The memories continue on, for many more years to come…
— Written by Izzy R.
