Read Online Singularity's Ring by Paul Melko - Free Book Online Page A

could smell the anger, the fear. I had scared myself. Good, I thought.
    “She was going to be a starship captain,” Moira said. We remembered Proust. Usually pods sundered in the
creche, with time to re-form, but Veronica had broken into a duo and a trio. The pair had bonded and the trio had transferred to engineering school, then dropped out.
    “Not anymore,” I said. I pushed past them into the kitchen, and as I did so, I balled up the memory of fucking Malcolm and threw it at them like a rock.
    They recoiled. I walked upstairs to our room and began packing my things. They didn’t bother coming upstairs and that made me angrier. I threw my clothes into a bag, swept the bric-a-brac on the dresser aside. Something glinted in the pile, a geode that Strom had found one summer when we flew to the desert. He’d cut it in half and polished it by hand.
    I picked it up, felt its smooth surface, bordering the jagged crystals of the center. Instead of packing it, I put it back on the dresser and zipped up my bag.
    “Heading out?”
    Mother Redd stood at the door, her face neutral.
    “Did you call Dr. Khalid?” He was our physician, our psychologist, perhaps our father.
    She shrugged. “And tell him what? You can’t force a pod to stay together.”
    “I’m not breaking us up!” I said. Didn’t she understand? I was a person, by myself. I didn’t need to be part of a thing .
    “You’re just going to go somewhere else by yourself. Yes, I understand.” Her sarcasm cut me. “I used to be a four.” She was gone before I could reply.
    A four? Of course we knew that. One of Mother Redd had died … Was she saying that the fourth had left the composite voluntarily? My decision was nothing like that.
    I rushed downstairs and out the front door so that I wouldn’t have to face the rest of me. I didn’t want them to taste my guilt. I ran the distance to Malcolm’s cottage. He was working in his garden and took me in his arms.

    “Meda, Meda. What’s wrong?”
    “Nothing,” I whispered.
    “Why did you go back there? We could have sent for your things.”
    I said, “I want an interface.”
     
    It was a simple procedure. He had the nanodermic, and placed it on the back of my neck. My neck felt cold there, and the coldness spread to the base of my skull and down my spine. There was a prick, and I felt my skin begin to crawl.
    “I’m going to put you under for an hour,” Malcolm said. “It’s best.”
    “Okay,” I said, already half asleep.
    I dreamed that spiders were crawling down my optic nerve into my brain, that earwigs were sniffing around my lobes, that leeches were attached to all my fingers. But as they passed up my arms, into my brain, a door opened like the sun dawning, and I was somewhere else, somewhen else, and it all made sense with dreamlike logic. I understood why I was there, where the Community was, why they had left.
    “Hello, Meda,” Malcolm said.
    “I’m dreaming.”
    “Not anymore,” his voice said. It seemed to be coming from a bright point in front of me. “I’ve hooked you up to the interface box. Everything went fine.”
    My voice answered without my willing it to. “I was worried that my genetic mods would cause a problem.” I felt I was still in my dream. I didn’t want to say those things. “I didn’t mean to say that. I think I’m still dreaming.” I tried to stop speaking. “I can’t stop speaking.”
    I felt Malcolm’s smile. “You’re not speaking. Let me show you what’s possible within the Community.”
    He spent hours teaching me to manipulate the reality
of the interface box, to reach out and grasp it like my hand was a shovel, a hammer, sandpaper, a cloth. The interface box was no simple machine; it was a quantum computer, more powerful than any organic or silicon computers we could build.
    “You do this well,” he said, a brightness in the grey-green garden we had built in an ancient empty city. Ivy hung from the walls, and within the ivy sleek animals