P362 Direct

"Kaelen," a voice vibrated directly into their auditory cortex. It was Jara, or at least the consciousness that currently occupied the Jara-unit. "The transport to the Central Asian colony is departing. Are you still coming?"

Kaelen sat on the edge of the glass-walled observation deck, looking down at what used to be called the Atlantic. From this height, the ocean didn’t look like water; it looked like a shimmering sheet of liquid metal, reflecting a sky that no longer held any clouds. "Kaelen," a voice vibrated directly into their auditory

Kaelen ran a hand through their hair, which felt more like fine optic fibers than protein. For Kaelen, the ancient worries about "men" and "women" felt like worrying about which side of a coin was up when the coin had long since melted into a single sphere. Are you still coming

Kaelen looked at the fragment of p362 again. The author had been worried about planes falling out of the sky or nuclear weapons in Southeast Asia. Those "bad guys" were gone, replaced by a global collective mind that didn't know how to hate because it didn't know how to be "separate." For Kaelen, the ancient worries about "men" and

"I was just thinking about the Old World," Kaelen sent back, the thought-pulse tinged with a melancholy Jara wouldn't quite understand. "About when they were afraid of losing who they were."

"We didn't lose who we were," Jara replied, appearing as a soft glow beside them. "We just stopped being parts and started being the whole."