Mirror Image

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When the message from Seliku reached me, I was dreaming in QUENTIAM. No, not dreaming, that can’t be right—the upload state doesn’t permit dreaming. For that you need a biological, soft tissue of one sort or another, and I had no biology until my next body was done. I had qubits moving at c, combining and recombining with themselves and, to the extent It will permit, with QUENTIAM. I should not have been dreaming.

Still, the subprogram felt like a biological dream. Something menacing and ill-defined chased me through a shifting landscape, something unknowably vast, coming closer and closer, its terrifying breath on my back, its—

*Message from Seliku, magnitude one,* QUENTIAM “said” to me and the dream vanished. The non-dream.

*From Seliku? Now?*

*Yes.*

*It’s not time for Seliku.* And certainly not at a magnitude one.

QUENTIAM didn’t answer. It gave me an image of Seliku gazing at an image of me from out of a mirror, a piece of rococo drollery I was all at once too apprehensive to appreciate. It was nowhere near time for me to hear from Seliku, or from any of my sister-selves.

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