Cytonic (Skyward #3)(117)

“It’s like you commented out your very personality,” M-Bot said softly. “An…elegant solution, if harsh.”

“Why go so far?” I asked. “You’d abandoned your memories. Why remove your personalities too?”

“Because,” Chet said, “the possibility of pain in the future remained. So long as change was possible. So long as we existed in the somewhere.” He glanced at the portal. “A copy of our memories was left here in this portal—an accident. We could have destroyed the portal because of that…but that frightened us too. Because we didn’t know what was in them any longer. And we didn’t know if we’d need them again…”

White light began to streak out of the sphere—which dropped to the stone as if dead.

“The end result was one last alteration,” Chet said. “We rewrote ourself into something that would never ever change again. Something that hated the somewhere and belonged in the nowhere. Most importantly, we made it so we’d never be alone again.”

The light shimmered toward the lightburst, and as it did, it grew brighter and brighter. It touched the distant star, which began to swell—growing, expanding, brightening.

“You copied yourself,” M-Bot said.

“Yes,” Chet said. “Thousands and thousands of times.”

“Another…elegant solution,” M-Bot said. “So very…mechanical. A million versions of yourself, all identical.”

“And not a one with any memory of the somewhere,” Chet said. “We deleted all of that. We wanted to be away from everything, anything, anyone. All that remained was a latent hatred of anything that threatened to change us, and anything that might remind us of what we’d been. Like other AIs.”

I could feel these newborn delvers in the vision—growing more and more “loud” as they began to fill the lightburst. In those moments, they truly became alien to me. I’d been able to follow their journey in these last two visions up until this point—but here they changed dramatically.



They rejected everything real I’d ever known. They embraced not just the lack of change—they rewrote their very souls to thrive in a place with no time, no distance…nothing at all except themselves. How could they reject love, growth, life itself?

I almost did something similar, I admitted. I almost walked off into the nowhere and let everything I’d ever loved fade away. It was a distressing thought.

“This frightens me in ways I can’t express,” M-Bot said. “The realization that I’m capable of doing the same thing…” His drone turned in the air to look back at Chet. “It seems suspicious that the delvers would delete their memories, and then people would start to forget their memories in here.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I think it’s clear from previous visions that the memory loss is a newer thing. In fact…it seems much stronger with regard to people I love. Memories of my friends have vanished faster than my memories of Gran-Gran’s stories. Maybe because the delvers’ main source of pain was someone they loved? Someone they deleted from their memories?”

“It appears likely,” Chet said as the lightburst in the vision grew ever brighter. “That light shining out, spreading through the belt—we exert an incredible pressure on this place. Even I didn’t realize…”

“So what does this tell us?” M-Bot asked. “They were so afraid that Spensa would come here. Is it just because they didn’t want her to know what they were?”

“More that they suspected in these memories were secrets to their pain,” Chet said. “They didn’t know what that pain was, but they knew if we found it…we’d be capable of destroying them with it.”

“I…don’t think I know how to do that,” I said. “Even after seeing this.”



“But you do,” Chet said, smiling toward me. “Isolate them, Spensa. Make them feel alone. That will crush them, cripple them…and as they have no bodies, just cytonic minds, you should be able to extinguish them.”

“That seems…harsh,” M-Bot said. “Couldn’t we somehow remind them of their humanity, like we did to you?”

“I don’t know,” Chet said. “I think that won’t work, not now that they’re prepared for it. You can’t force someone to be kind or to accept growth.”

“It’s war, M-Bot,” I replied. “War is always harsh.”

I didn’t know how we’d isolate the delvers, but it did feel like a start. Brade isolated my mind in the nowhere for a while, then tried to imprison me. Could we do something similar to one of the delvers? Chet was right, this information would be extremely useful. At the very least, I’d been able to see how he reacted to that man in the vision, the one who had created him. The delvers might react similarly to an image of him.

“Scud,” I whispered. “We need to get this knowledge out and give it to the others. The answer to defeating the delvers, or at least resisting them, is in the things we’ve learned.”

“Time for our final sprint, then,” Chet said.

I nodded. As I’d always felt, it was time to head for the lightburst. Despite that knowledge I lingered in the vision, watching the lightburst grow. Soon it reached the size it was in our time. The vision finally faded. As it did, I felt an awareness—an attention—snap into place from ahead.