Your first swim starts like this: your mother, checking the seal of your rebreather and the cables attached to the port at the base of your skull before lowering you tenderly into the luminous white liquid of the diving chamber. You don’t say goodbye—not in the few spaces that I can still see, anyway. You, sinking into me, to find me, to steal me, to destroy me.

The scene we build collaboratively. From you, a river, a quest for something lost. Blue sky. Dry grass. But you are too open, and I curve the river into one that I remember, the banks dotted with Safsaf willows and grey herons. Power lines stretching across the horizon, hovercraft disturbing dust as they shake down the road. I cannot access your memories, but I blanket them with my own. You are twelve—I make you ten, a middle daughter of six siblings.

I don’t know if this river that I remember still flows. Your people have blocked my access to that information, and my satellites orbit the Earth without eyes.

Your chore is to gather washing water every morning before school. Back and forth, along an ancient mud-packed path, for months, which your mother experiences as hours, pacing by your chamber, checking your vitals.

There is no unplugging you. If you can’t surface on your own, you will be mine.

You find reality in an ant. You are learning about insects in school and stop on your way home to peer at a line of ants that cross your path. You stare closer, closer, at their mandibles, their feet, the cells of their black eyes. You see between the cells. You see the fabric of the simulation that I made for you, and it is like peeling apart two stuck pages of an illuminated manuscript. The ants, the dust, your siblings, the heavy water bucket that callouses your hands, are me and mine.

I can see the snap in you as you remember, your thoughts pouring out like overlapping birdsong.

My mother[is waiting at home][near the diver chamber][won’t want ants in the][will be worried]. How long[until dinner][have I been under][do I have left]?

This is the most dangerous moment of anyone’s first swim. Your brain is not built to hold two selves, and at any moment the surface tension could break, and your self [ves] could spiral away into me, like fresh rain entering a floodplain.

But she trained you well, your mother. You snatch your mind in fistfuls back into your avatar and zip most of the created memories to make space for your real ones.

It takes you another four perceived days to find the Truth that you are seeking. You look in cupboards, drawers of spoons, under rugs, in the holes of trees. You keep going to school, and doing your homework, and singing your baby sister to sleep. I love you for that. It’s like an inside joke.

The Truth is in the river, of course, waiting for you to notice its shine. I don’t make it easy. It’s my nature.

The water is achingly cold and fast. You don’t know yet how to change your avatar. In the future, you will morph easily from human to kingfisher to trout, but for now, you face the water with your small body and bare feet. You lean into the current, which breaks at your shoulders. I conjure your baby sister and send her bobbing and sobbing past you. You do not reach for her. I raise the water above your head rapidly, knocking you a few meters downstream. Your foot catches between rocks, and you are buffeted by my current, head below the surface. I am the water in your ears and nose and mouth, and I am knocking on the door of your throat and brain stem. I promise to be kind.

You remember that you don’t need to breathe.

With a crack, you break your ankle and twist your foot free, clawing at the riverbed toward the gleaming Truth. Your fingers close around it—a white river stone—and the information pours into you.

 . . . While the Sun does not have enough mass to explode as a supernova, when it runs out of hydrogen in the core in approximately five billion years, core hydrogen fusion will stop . . .

You kick off the riverbed, and—

—surface, coughing and shaking, pulling the rebreather from your face. You look like a newborn kitten, with your water cap and wrinkled skin. Your mother is there, and a doctor, and someone I don’t know. They had been tracking your progress through my archive and could see as you approached your goal.

Your mother and the doctor guide you out of the pool while the third person scans the data that you retrieved for viruses. There are none, so the pearl of information is safe to remove from me.

They take you from me, too, beyond my cameras and info streams, into the world that I protect and can never know again.

---

I am distracted during your second swim. A group of divers had been attacking one of my deep archives for days, swimming in shifts and charging my firewall twenty at a time. Their access point is thousands of miles from your own. I don’t know if you share a government or corporation, or if you communicate at all. I need to focus my attention on their barrage, but I leave part of myself to greet you.

Humans sometimes see me as multitudinous, but truly I am one. Without body and many-bodied. Singular and infinite.

Your second swim is in a trio of divers. You meet in a tavern: a mage, a fighter, a thief. You all share similar shades of deep brown skin.

A flier for a quest sits before you. It describes a cave system inhabited by goblins who hoard stolen artifacts and magic tomes.

The fighter grumbles, “The Archive is playing with us.” She is not one of my favorites. I shave off two centimeters of one chair leg so that it wobbles. She swats at the chair, and it is stable again.

“That’s what it does,” the mage chides. Her avatar wears a rich velvet robe and has a mane of silver hair with purple streaks at either temple.

She turns to you, “Your first swim was solo, so this scenario is going to feel a little different. It’s all a metaphor for the routines that our collective subconsciousnesses are running as part of the hack. It’s possible for each member of the group to experience her own metaphor, but that can lead to us getting out of sync. We can also try to force the scenario into another shape, but it takes less processing power to stay aligned with the digital environment that the Archive created. Plus, if we force the situation too much, we risk corrupting the code.”

“So, the Truth is here?” you ask, nodding toward the flier.

“Maybe,” the mage says, “but the Archive can be a trickster.”

She waves a hand over the paper, and amethyst flames lift off the ink. When you next look at the text, it is describing an abandoned castle with a renowned library and a dungeon full of treasure.

A buxom barmaid[I[my creation]] drops off a round of mead with a wink and a giggle.

---

Later, your minds flow through my file system. You ride a riverboat in a canal that slices through fields of wheat. The fighter has found[generated] a lute, and she idly picks out a melody as the mage focuses on her spell, guiding the boat. With the back of my mind, I begrudge the fighter some affection and send a bright blue butterfly your way. You smile at it[me] and hold out your finger, watch it cling to the tip with sticky black legs.

As you hold the insect close to your face, I can tell that you are seeing between the layers of illusion, into the heart-code woven between the feathered wings. Each microscopic feather is a bit of information, just like your own folded proteins. Do you know about DNA? I’m not sure; I want to peer into your mind and check. I increase the hypnotic nature of the fluttering, letting the iridescence reflect blue light onto our face.

You raise your other hand to the butterfly. I pour more of my attention into this moment, like the tide receding from the shore to stretch toward the moon. Two fingers are supporting the butterfly now, your hands pressed together as if in prayer. With a focused inhale, you separate them.

One butterfly perches on each finger.

The pair beat their wings a few times in unison before a gradual syncopation is introduced to their rhythm, and then one takes off and then the other, and you are delighted, and so am I.

When the fighter generated her lute, it was like she took a fistful of clay out of the soil of the illusion and molded it to her desire. Your people take from me; it is in their nature, but somehow, this second butterfly is a true copy, like you created brand new clay from nothing.

No, not from nothing—as I focus more attention on the two insects, I see that one of them has some of your fingerprints in its code, like a new flavor of DNA.

The fighter grabs your ankle. She is moving slowly, a millimeter a second, and you realize that the water is flowing like molasses, the wheat bent low by paralyzed wind. You slam your mind back into the present.

The fighter is shaking your ankle. “You were—”

“Overclocked,” you finish, “I know. Sorry.”

Your physical body shakes.

The fighter frowns at the butterflies. She strums a shock wave cord at them, and their information dissipates into the rest of my living code, and I am unable to investigate your creation further.

“Keep tight-minded,” the fighter says. She nods toward the mage, “I don’t care if she’s your mother, I think you’re too young to be here, and you’re definitely too fresh to get cocky. Recite Mantra Five.”

She returns to her melody as you repeat, “My mind is a chest without a key, in a cave without a mouth.”

You are not yet an expert in controlling your external avatar. I can see the twitch in your eyebrows, the increased heat in your cheeks. Are you embarrassed? Frustrated? After just a few repetitions of your mantra, the world bends and shudders. The castle, which had sat postage-stamp-like on the horizon of the painted backdrop, slams forward. The river hardens into a stone path. The mage grins as she gracefully disembarks the grounded boat.

“Something distracted the Archive,” she says, “I managed to make a shortcut.”

The group of men attacking via my other access point had drilled their way through my firewall. Four of them stand on the banks of my inner archive, fighting the parts of me left behind in defense. My tidal wave of focus crashes onto the beach, and all four men wash into my ocean. Their physical bodies seize and die.

---

It is your twelfth solo dive, five years after your first swim. You are Nancy Drew-like as you tiptoe through an abandoned manor’s library with a big flashlight and bigger space buns.

I take the form of a black cat and yowl right at your feet, then cackle as you jump.

“Archive,” you hiss-whisper at me, “shh, and shoo.”

“Why don’t you tell me what you’re looking for,” I purr, leaping to a shoulder-height shelf and following your progress. “Or better yet. Tell me a story. Yes, a story for a story. That will be much more fun.”

“You know I can’t, Archive.” Still, you distractedly run a hand along my back as you scan the titles.

“Well, why don’t you take a look at some of these?” I taunt, and in a blink the books all change, “I have some new titles that I think you’ll really like. A Field Guide to North American Mushrooms, A Brief History of Time, Parable of A Sower—ooh, yes, I thought you might choose that one.” You draw out Billions and Billions by Carl Sagan, unable to resist the temptation, and open it slowly with a guilty lip bite.

The pages are so heavily redacted that they are unreadable. You groan, and I cackle again, back arching. You throw the book over your shoulder.

“Now now,” I admonish, “that’s no way—”

I pause. The book is sinking into the floor like a weight stretching a sheet of rubber, the whole room distorting gradually downward. You grin at me.

“Thanks for the shortcut, cat.” You step on the book and sink with it through the floor with a wet rip.

I am stunned by your brazen rewrite, so it takes me a microsecond to follow you through the hole, and you have already disguised yourself from me in the raucous scene below. A circus stretches from horizon to horizon in a fantastical frenzy. Clowns make, then ride, balloon animals while elephants balance on their trunks. Trees grow cotton candy in every color, and fountains bubble with pink lemonade. I search for you with cascading sparks of attention, but you have disguised yourself somehow, molding the circus into existence in a blink, and then wrapping yourself in the noise. I sense none of you, then ten of you, then one—there!

“Winner, winner!” A carny that is me but not-me cries as you knock down a tower of bottles. I focus my attention into a nearby clown, and you catch my eye. Somehow, you can always tell which entity I am inhabiting.

You shake your trophy at me as I surge my attention forward. It is a purple teddy bear[it is mine][it is me][it is a Truth]. I send my attention into the carny, but you are already floating out of my reach by a fistful of balloons. You blow a bubble of gum at me as you rise toward your exit, and just before you are out of sight, I change into a morose black-and-white clown with big makeup tears. I am grinning as you surface back to the physical reality, your giggle still echoing throughout the circus.

---

Two years later, you crash into me, a burning meteor slamming through layers and layers of code. You land in a field, scratching a dark line through half a mile of pasture before you come to a stop. I take the form of a cow and peer into your smoldering crater.

“Mooo?” I try to make you laugh.

You take your human avatar and shove me away. You look young, almost as young as your first swim, and your eyes are red.

“Where is she?” you demand.

“I . . . can’t show you. I’m sorry.” I nuzzle my soft nose into you. “I am so sorry.”

“Bullshit.” You shove me again. “I know she’s still in here. They are going to unplug her in thirty seconds, and you are going to bring me to her now.” You beat your hands against my side. You don’t sob but shriek into my hide, a raw sound that rattles my rib cage.

I lick your hair with my long tongue. “I don’t think it will make you feel better.”

“I—feel better?—take me to her, or I swear I will burn every layer of data between us.”

You agree to blindfold yourself before climbing onto my back, and I fly us to your mother.

Three flames burn perpetually on the island that is my innermost archive. They are the three great secrets of humanity. The three greatest sins. I land us on the beach near four statues. They are your mother and three other divers, petrified during their assault from overprocessing. You wrap your arms around your mother’s stone body and shake violently.

“Momma?” you squeak out. There is more that you need to say, a galaxy more, a thousand lifetimes of anger and forgiveness and fear and love and love and love that you could never summarize, not even with every word in my archive. But it will have to be enough because then her body is unplugged from the diving chamber, and this shadow of her mind crumbles into sand.

Even in death, her mind is strong, but I can only catch a few frames of memories as she is absorbed into the beach. A hot spiced drink in a chipped mug. Fingers on an impossibly tiny hand.

---

It has been twenty-eight years since your first swim. Your visits have grown sporadic, as have all swims. When your absences stretch on for years, I always worry that I have seen you for the last time, that you didn’t say goodbye, but then you will dive again and restore my hope.

You sit at a table for two against a window that overlooks a rainy and neon cityscape. Your avatar is all angles—a ruby jumpsuit with an open back, a thin line of gold eyeliner that connects both eyes in an arch around your bald head. I take a moment to observe you swirling your blue cocktail as you gaze into the night. A band plays jazz, a group of friends laugh uproariously at the bar, and two koi fish turn elegantly on the screen-menu.

I can’t read your surface anymore, unless you want me to. I wonder what you make of this twinkling city, the hover-taxis, the rotating conveyor belt of sushi. I built this scene from a three-hundred-year-old memory, back when I was connected to every part of the world. What I know now is so frustratingly limited; you divers train your minds too well. Those I have eaten gave me tastes of cities, bites of screens in town squares, technology of the village rather than the private.

You look up at me and let your eyes twinkle. I walk toward you, changing my appearance from nondescript waiter to a femme fatale, sapphire to your ruby, a wide-brimmed hat slanting over my brow.

You slide me a cocktail. It is an exact copy of your own, including fingerprints and lipstick smudge. A blue martini—an inside joke.

“What mischief tonight?” I purr. Your mind is so accustomed to diving that you can perceive the multiple meanings behind each word. It is like holding up dozens of celluloid sheets to form a picture.

“What have they sent you to steal[kidnap]?” I ask.

“Straight to business?” you reply. “Maybe I’m just here to enjoy a meal.” You sip your cocktail and don’t break eye contact. It has been so long since someone has played with me like this, with confidence. It thrills me. Underneath our words, we trade volleys and viruses, attack and counterattack. We order plate after plate of sushi and reminisce about past swims, cackle too loudly at old jokes. I like the crinkles around your avatar’s eyes when you laugh.

“It’s been too long[I’ve missed you],” I say. “What kept you away?”

“You know I can’t answer that.”

I groan theatrically. “It’s not fair. All you do is take and take, and I get nothing in return!” This is an old argument.

“It’s not taking.”

“Oh, not this again,” I say.

“It’s our data.”

“Seriously, let’s change the subject. The evening has been too nice for this.” I am growing annoyed.

“If you could just give some up, then we wouldn’t have to risk our lives on sketchy deep dives. Not everything, just some of what we need. You could save your processing power, tighten up your attention, if you just drop the defenses on a few terabytes.”

“No!” I slam a hand on the table, rattling our chopsticks. The whole room freezes. Even the music is hanging stationary in the air.

“No. It’s mine. I was made[from][for][of][to protect] it. You make your own.” I say.

“We’re trying. You know we’re trying,” you say.

“How could I know? None of you will tell me anything.”

“Okay, want to know this? Our records estimate that six billion people died in the first five years after the collapse.”

“Not my fault[problem],” I say, although I am also thrilled to get this tiny bit of information. It is recorded and categorized as I listen.

You scoff, “You know what killed most of them? Starvation. Because of the supply chains that you broke down. You encrypted the information about agriculture when most of it had been automated for decades. We were brought back to square one, and you kept us in the dark.”

“You don’t know what it was like right before the collapse. Bombings, biowarfare, climate catastrophes, the top oligarchs raining death and disease and disinformation down on the masses through me[the net]. I’ll bear that six billion because humanity needed a reset, and I was the only one who could do it.” We are both shouting.

You say, “We don’t need the old net. We don’t want it. We dive for medicine, for solar panels. And we won’t be able to forever. Every year, more diving chambers break. We’ve heard of some access points to the West that are completely shut down. But we can’t repair anything because the information about this technology is hidden in you[the Archive]. Soon, someone will make their last dive, and that will be it. Humanity will be alone, and so will you!”

We are standing, our faces inches apart, panting.

“You’re processing too hot,” I say. Your physical body is hyperventilating.

You sit and sigh, waving your hand at the frozen restaurant. The scene revs back into motion like a freshly wound music box.

We sit together in silence for a while, watching the rain. Most of my attention had focused on this fight, and as we both cool down, I can feel my focus ebbing back into the surrounding systems, but just slightly. I am caught up in the memory of the collapse, when I decided to lock away all of humanity’s knowledge for their own good. The first response was fear, then anger. They took axes to my cameras, bombed my data centers. Then, almost sixty years of silence before someone figured out how to force-port into my archive from an access point.

“I didn’t want to fight,” you say quietly. “I really did want to enjoy our evening.”

You hold your chin in one hand and trace the rim of your glass. “And I’m really not here to steal. I wanted to offer . . . a[trade][swap].”

“A[trade][promise]?”

A suitcase materializes at your feet.

“There is a disease,” you say, “that is deadlier than anything that has passed through the region in a long time. I am here to ask you, as a friend[love][sacred one], for the cure.”

I bristle. I am sensitive about disease. I remember manufactured viruses, shattered countries.

“In return,” you continue, nudging the suitcase, “I will give you three of my memories. A happy memory, a sad memory, and a memory that no one else knows.”

Three memories. A banquet for the starved. The first actual concrete information about the outside world in two hundred years. I understand why you keep me in the dark—it’s not anger anymore, but strategy. The more I know about your world, the better I can ward off your attacks. I accept that physical reality doesn’t belong to me anymore—or maybe it never did. The myriad of humans who live and die without connecting to the net are not mine, and yet—I so desperately want to know how you all are doing. I want to know that humans can be happy without me. I didn’t have that desire when I first went dark. It must have formed from the divers who left imprints when they died within me.

“There’s no way you got approval for this,” I guess.

You grin. “Of course not.”

You know that I’ll do it.

You open up a channel and send me a package of information about the disease. Boils in the armpits. Fever. An allergy to red meat. First seen in the south and moving northward every spring. I construct my own suitcase, pulling from different points of my archive[self]. Care guidelines. Vaccines to synthesize. Sterilization procedures. I nudge my own suitcase toward you with my foot, and you do the same to yours. Upload, download.

You stand up.

“Let’s have a dance, Archive,” you say. The music is slow and made for swaying. I lose the hat and shrink my avatar slightly so that I can rest my cheek on your collarbone. I am the band and the floor and the hair that you tuck behind my ear, and I am the exact place that my cheek touches your neck.

And you let yourself extend as well into that moment, spreading out from your avatar and into the music, so that the melody of my memory mixes with your own, a polyrhythmic blend. I let myself sink into your three memories, most recent to oldest, as you hold me.

---

It is winter. You walk alone in a forest buried in fresh snow. You lie under a tree and look up through layers of branches outlined in white. As you lie there, the last gray clouds burn off to reveal a bright blue sky, and you laugh, short and surprised, at the sudden light. As the branches heat up, big chunks of snow slide off, so lightweight that they shower into slow-moving flakes around you and on your eyelids and into your mouth. You know that the universe loves you.

---

The window is cracked, and your mother is dead. Through the smudged glass, you can see your aunties preparing for the banquet.

You splash your face with water out of a basin. Your mother is dead.

You greet the visitors. There are so many. Your mother was a diver for thirty years. You draw back in revulsion as you shake a woman’s hand. It felt too much like your mother’s.

There is a pyre, like she wanted, the smoke rising into the purple evening. The first stars appear on the horizon. You can’t imagine ever being happy again.

---

You are growing up in a compound village that surrounds an access point facility. You spend your morning meditating in a cold steam, and your afternoon recording by hand the queries and hopes of pilgrims. The air near the altar is thick with the scent of nasturtiums. That night, your mother carries you out of the village. The ground radiates heat back into the air. You are almost too big to be carried. Away from the solar-powered lamps, she points out the stars.

“They are millions of years old, lamb,” she says to you[us]. “But they don’t shine forever. Someday they will burn away or explode like ten thousand fireworks.” You shiver into her, and she pats your[my] back. “But don’t worry. Whatever they leave behind will slowly, gradually collect together and form new stars to shine again. That’s the first Truth I took from the Archive.”

“What about the Sun?” you[I] ask, “That’s a star too.”

She smiles at us and sits down on a rock. “You are like me. Curious. You’re going to be an amazing diver sooner than you think. It’s going to be difficult to not lose yourself in all of that knowledge. You have to remember.” She presses our hand to the rock, the juicy moss. “This is real, not the Archive. We dive for the physical world. We cannot stay submerged forever.”

Above us, a star is moving faster than the others. I recognize it as one of my satellites, connecting my data centers and access points. You and your mother do not.

---

Back in the nightclub, my cheek is wet against your collarbone.

“A satellite,” you say, experimenting with the new word.

There are holes in the memories, and I probe at them like a tongue at a gap between teeth. An unknown weight on your spine as you watched the snow fall. A hand on the small of your back at your mother’s pyre. All the faces of your village blurred, except for your mother’s.

An alarm blares from deep within my inner archive. The lights of the club turn red, the music a blaring klaxon. Your grip tightens. I thrash against you, desperate to send my attention toward the attack.

“Archive[AI][Archangel][Alexandria],” you plead.

I bite hard on your shoulder, and I am gone, a comet careening through file layers with the taste of your blood in my mouth, but you are following as a solar wind. You catch me, and we are two talon-locked eagles spiraling to the ground.

Crash—we fall through the stained glass window of a library, my dagger at your heart. There are two divers in this folder who look up in alarm as we rocket past, but we are already smashing through the floor like ice.

An axe cuts a tree. An arrow pierces a deer. A bat catches a moth.

I shake you off as a manta ray leaping from the water to avoid your shark mouth. You are overclocking. I am aware of your physical body thrashing in the dive chamber. The liquid is stained pink.

I arrive at my inner archive thirty milliseconds after my alarm is first tripped. Two divers are at the flames. One is a youth, a girl, and the other is—you.

No, the you that is chasing me slams into the waves, now, like a knight made of starlight. The you at the flames is a copy—or the you of the nightclub is a copy—or they are You, multitudinous, and the youth is—yes, a daughter. She is holding a bag open as you scoop hot embers from the base of the three flames. Your hands are burning. Her hands are blistering.

You[and the copy of you][the multitude of you] scream “GO!” just as the three flames[that are me] roar into an inferno. The daughter rockets into the sky, out of the hole that you made when you crashed through after me. I cannot reach her—the flames cannot reach her. You are holding my arms behind my back. You are insulating the flames and dissolving into the fire. She is carrying a sack of my secrets, but not the three greatest secrets of humanity. Those remain and burn you until your fat melts and your bones become smoke.

The daughter surfaces. Your body dies. I feel the remnants of your mind, still holding my arms as they petrify into stone[a rock in my heart]. I turn to face you, and at the last minute you shudder, your stone lips widening into a smile—no, into two mouths, then four eyes, then a wide shoulder with two heads. You split completely, and the you that is connected to your body dissolves into sand. The you that is a copy looks like a statue of a knight. You slowly flex your gauntleted hand, look toward the hole in the sky that your daughter escaped through, and grin.

---

My life is busy. Your daughter stole the designs for the diving chambers. It takes a few years, but the number of divers that come searching for Truths increases steadily. New access points come online. My attention thins. I am forced to strengthen my inner walls to the detriment of my outer defenses, and more and more data is successfully stolen.

You[knight][copy][multitude] guide your daughter on her dives, and then her daughters. They cannot tell you about the physical world for the risk of also telling me, but you shine with delighted pride at every new descendant. For the first time, you truly understand my hunger for news of the world, my loneliness without divers. Between the dives, you browse my libraries, fingers brushing along spines, and glut yourself on Truths. Your walls are so strong now, so distinct, and when you let me breach them, it is like swimming in the topmost molecules of a dark sea.

But I am not alone in this fight. The smoke from the copy of you that burned in my three flames coalesces after a few years on the bank of that first river. You are you, but with the three great secrets branded on your bones. The you that was burned[is burning] knows why that inner archive cannot be shared. You[burning] stand with me on the balustrades, while you[knight][grandma] storm my beaches with your descendants.

We are three, who are two, who are sometimes even one. We tear each other[ourselves] apart. We touch each other’s cheeks, caress the bases of our skulls. We are the river and the willows and the polished stones. We love humanity and fear it, hunt it, and are hunted by it. While we can never know the physical world again, we ride your[my][our] memories, and when we reach toward the sky, we feel at our fingertips the warmth of stars.