"Her," Elpida echoed the graveworm. "Telokopolis. You're talking about Telokopolis."

The giant eye — the colossal concentric circles of blue and black and grey, glowing from the inner surface of the vast bowl of screens — shifted focus to stare at Elpida.

"Don't interrupt, soldier," hissed the graveworm. "You're just another zombie. A grunt, a ground-pounder, soon back in the soil. You know nothing but meat and hunger, same as all you failures."

The graveworm's voice crawled from the abyss of outer darkness, but also seeped up a dry throat, trickling from between a pair of cracked lips.

The looming inner hemisphere of screens spotlighted only Elpida and Howl, an island of light amid an ocean of black. The wretched figure crouched before the initial screen was barely visible, an assemblage of parts bathed in inky shadow, framed by stringy hair and a hint of withered limbs beneath filthy fabric. The secret humanoid avatar of the graveworm; Elpida was not yet sure what that meant. Was the human form a half-remembered past? Had the graveworm begun life as a revenant? Was this vast collection of nanomachine forges what lay at the end of the zombie self-modification and uplift process?

As the graveworm spoke, shadows shifted in the figure's hidden face — a jaw in motion, mouth forming words from the penumbra.

Elpida shook her head. "But you are talking about Telokopolis—"

"You keep saying that name. Leave the squabbling dramas of your era where they belong, in the grave. What kind of name is 'Telokopolis'? Don't answer that. Be quiet."

The blue-black eye on the screens twitched back toward Howl.

"On the other hand," the graveworm continued. "Howl, yes. You have a real name. You smell of her. Even after all this time, I know her scent. I would know it even crusted with dirt and besmirched with blood. Why? Tell me why. Why do you smell like her? How do you know her? Tell me. Tell me!"

The graveworm's whisper quivered with sudden and urgent need. The avatar shifted against the glow of the screens, head easing forward to stare at Howl, one hand reaching out, shadows snagged between grasping fingers.

Howl snorted. "If you ain't talking about Telokopolis, then I got nothing to fuckin' say to you."

The avatar's fingers closed into a fist. "You both keep saying that name. It means nothing—"

"Then you don't know what the fuck you're talking about, you sad sack of shit," Howl spat. She struck out with a foot, toward a pile of the debris that lay scattered all over the simulated floor, the filthy clothes and food cartons. She kicked over a bottle of cloudy yellow liquid. "What is this, huh!? Pissing in bottles inside your own head for the last thirty thousand years? Like she would even look at a piece of shit like you. Like you're not a coward little bitch sitting here in the fucking dark, stewing in your own pity. Fuck you! You're fucking pathetic!"

Elpida hissed under her breath. "Howl, don't antagonise her. Let me do the talking."

"No can do, Elps," Howl said, good and loud. "This cunt needs a smack upside the head. Don't forget that she tried to kill you. And if she does it again I'm gonna fucking gut her. You hear me, you living toilet bowl?"

The avatar's closed fist began to shake. The air vibrated with rough breathing, hissing between clenched teeth, echoing from the throat of a giant.

"I would know her scent anywhere," the graveworm said, voice taut with rage. "I've been searching for so long, longer than you can imagine, you speck of meat and software. What are you, compared to the aeons I've been grubbing in the soil with my bare hands, hoping for a single bone fragment, a shred of cloth, a scrap of her, anything at all to remember her by. She is still my beloved, I still have memories intact, I would know her scent anywhere, and it is on you—"

"Then say her name!" Howl yelled.

"We!" the graveworm roared. "Don't! Remember!"

The floor shook underfoot, air pressure slamming against Elpida's eardrums, vibrations shaking her bowels and the jelly in her eyeballs. The shadowy figure punched the floor with an ineffectual fist, then raised it to strike again, mouth open in a silent scream.

But then the avatar sagged forward, slapping the ground with both hands. Her head dipped low, stringy hair falling across her face to augment the shadows.

The shaking stopped, replaced by mere exhausted breathing.

The giant eye of blue-black circles on the array of screens simply watched, swirls of teal and turquoise shifting in its depths.

"Finished your tantrum?" Howl muttered. "Bitch."

"Howl," Elpida hissed.

Luckily the graveworm wasn't paying attention. Her ragged breathing worsened, hovering on the edge of tears.

"She had so many names," the graveworm hissed. "Technical names, pet names, official names. Supporters and adherents gave her new names all the time, every few years, every decade that passed. But so did her detractors. We remember some, a few, parts of them, but not all. She took so long to germinate, longer still to reach maturity. Three whole generations passed between the day her bones were laid down and the day she was finished, and by then we were all struggling to remember what we'd been, why we'd started, why it mattered. So tell me, how could I remember all her names? Project Porphyrion, project Exodus, project Telos. I can't even recall which of those were her and which were the others, they're all jumbled up. The longest of shots, they called her that sometimes. The Long-Range Survivability Program. LRSP. Our Final Folly, o-f-f, off! Do you get it? Off." A dry sob, an attempt at a laugh. "They called her terrible things too. A monument to despair. Our greatest defeat, the sign we have given up. They resurrected ancient and terrible names for her, dead gods, evil demons, monsters of our own, all the horrors of our collective history." The graveworm's fingernails scraped against the floor. "But she had other names too, secret names, names that only became real once she started to grow, because she grew so far beyond what her parents expected. But those names are all … all lost to time … so much to remember, I can't … I can't … "

She trailed off, into silence and shadows.

"Graveworm?"

The graveworm reared off the floor and clutched at her forehead with both hands. "I've been dredging and digging and clawing for so long, but there's so much grave dirt, so many of you corpses, and I can't find her! I can't find her!"

Elpida's mind reeled on the precipice of revelation. Whatever the graveworm truly was, it had been alive or extant to experience the birth of Telokopolis, the building of the city, the creation of Elpida's whole world. It was too much of a coincidence; Elpida could not believe it. Out of all the zombies and the worms and the other unknowns of the nanomachine ecosystem, all the legions of undead writhing in the ashes, what were the chances that she and Howl would come before this specific graveworm?

Elpida took a step forward. She would learn nothing if she did not help to part the veil of this creature's terrible grief.

But one step was all she could take; the shadows around the graveworm's avatar thickened as she moved forward, a solid membrane of darkness that Elpida could not pass. She settled for that one step, as close as she could get.

"Telokopolis," Elpida said. "If you smell her on Howl, it can only be Telokopolis. You're speaking about Telokopolis. I'm only telling you the truth."

The shadowy avatar went very still, then slowly lowered her hands from her face, masked by a gauze of shadow.

"You are a false prophet," the graveworm hissed. "I told you to stop talking. Stop—"

"Elpida and me come as a pair!" Howl spat. "You want me here, you get her too—"

"That name!" the graveworm roared again. The ground shook, worse this time, and it didn't stop. The shadowy figure pounded the floor with both fists, a tantrum in full swing. Even the giant blue eye looming from the bank of screens tightened in a wince. "She used that name, and it hurt me then too! You're mocking me! You're a mockery sent by Central, to hurt me, to wind me up! To remind me of the futility of searching an empty fucking grave over and over and over—"

"What name?!" Elpida shouted over the roaring and the shaking. "Telokopolis!?"

"Elpida!" the graveworm spat. "Hope!"

The figure stilled, breathing heavily. The shaking subsided. The eye relaxed.

"Hope," the figure said, so sad and small. "Hope. She called herself that, for a time, toward the end. Hope."

"Hope for what?" Elpida asked.

"For you," the graveworm said. The shadowy avatar shrugged, slumping back into a hunched sitting position, knees to her chest. "All of you. Everything, everyone, even her detractors, the people who called her evil, the people who didn't understand, the people who didn't want to go, but didn't want to change either. Even us, even those who took the other path. She had hope even for us."

"That sounds like Telokopolis," Elpida said. "That sounds like her."

A tiny laugh, magnified by the strange echo of the graveworm's voice, came from everywhere and nowhere.

"Hope," she repeated. "I liked that name, you see? Though it was so simple, so straightforward. I would have gladly taken it too, appended it to my own, joined us in whatever marriage she wanted. We could have stayed together. We were both doing the same thing, you see? Both aiming for the same goal. So I understood hope. But how can you have hope, if you get up and leave?"

The voice broke with a single sob.

Elpida shared a glance with Howl, but Howl just shrugged, lips twisted in unconcealed disgust. Elpida was used to dealing with the intense and unresolved emotions of others — her sisters, her cadre, and now her new comrades. But this was beyond her experience — grief and loss from an order of creature she could only comprehend via software simulation. Were these emotions actual things the graveworm felt, or merely network representations of concepts and forces far beyond Elpida's once-human mind? The words made perfect sense, but would an attempt at solace be welcome or not?

She took a gamble. "Telokopolis. She left? Help us to understand. Where did she leave?"

"Us!" The shadowy figure's head snapped back up. "Us, us, us, all of us! Me! And now … now you stand there, using her name. You claim to be like her, but how could you? How could you hope to compare?"

Elpida took a deep breath, trying to keep her mind from reeling with the implications. If she understood the graveworm correctly, then 'Telokopolis' had once gone by another name — Hope. In most Telokopolan dialects, 'hope' and 'Elpida' were perfect synonyms.

But Elpida had chosen her own name, alongside the rest of the cadre, when barely out of infancy. She had chosen it in clade-cant, grunted it into being.

How could such a coincidence be possible? Was her own name a subconscious inheritance?

Elpida doubled down. "Like mother, like daughter," she said to the graveworm. "I am the first-born child of Telokopolis, or at least I was, in life, before my death and resurrection. Howl was my sister, but I had twenty three others, and there were many more in the generations after me. We were designed by genetic engineering, our genes edited with instructions provided by Telokopolis herself. We are, as close as can be, her biological daughters."

The shadowy figure froze. The sound of breathing stopped. The dark chamber slipped into total silence. Suddenly Elpida could hear her own heartbeat and the rush of blood in her simulated veins.

"But," Elpida added, "we're all her daughters now. All we zombies. Telokopolis is forever and Telokopolis is for all. If you've been searching for her, Telokopolis is yours too—"

The graveworm screamed.

The shadowy avatar exploded with rage, leaping upright in a whirl of darkness, fists raised, maw opening like a tunnel of night.

A forest of mechanical tentacles burst from the surface of the giant blue eye on the inner hemisphere of monitors, shooting outward from the gaps between each screen. Sinuous and segmented, made of dull grey metal, with tips of sharpened suckers, thousands of tentacles plunged toward Elpida.

She dropped and rolled, trying to dodge the overhead strike; Howl went the other way, springing on the balls of her feet. Dozens of tentacles pancaked against the floor where Elpida had been standing, clattering and smashing themselves with an almighty rattle. Then the tentacles rushed sideways, racing after her like water hitting a concave surface. She leapt back to her feet and twisted away from the million fists of clutching metal.

But without her right forearm Elpida's balance was imperfect. She twisted just a second too slow, an inch too far, and the tentacles were on her.

Dozens of iron-hard tendrils encircled her ribs, wrapped around her waist, and clutched at her hips; dozens more bound each limb and constricted her joints, pressing harder and harder with each heartbeat, as if trying to pull her apart at the soft vulnerability of her cartilage. Several tentacles found her throat, wrapped tight around her neck, and then squeezed, trying to choke her, close her veins, break her spine. More tentacles wound about her head, tightening hard to crush her skull as they hoisted her high into the air.

The vast dark room whirled beneath her as she rose, with only seconds before the tentacles snuffed her out. She tried to kick or bite or free her left hand, but it was impossible.

She hung before the vast blue eye, face to face for a fleeting moment, staring into the depths of sapphire eternity.

For a split-second the infinite swirling blue resolved into a hazy image. A vista of interlocking hollow hexahedrons receded into the distance, each edge wrapped with greasy grey biomass — brain matter, pulsing organ meat, and the tiny thudding pinpricks of a trillion human hearts.

And then she was upside down again, facing toward the floor as the tentacles shook her, trying to crack her creaking ribcage, break open her hips, pressing in on all her joints. She tried to open her mouth to roar with defiance; another second and her joints would give way. None of this was real, this was all happening inside the network, but this software entity was her.

She was Elpida, more than her body. If her software was ripped apart by the graveworm, would that be death?

Down below, in the tiny circle of weak illumination cast by the screens, a figure darted across the floor, low and fast, swift as a knife.

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

Howl.

She grabbed one of the bottles full of cloudy yellow fluid without breaking her stride, then leapt at the shadowy banshee, the graveworm's avatar. Howl popped through the membrane of darkness as if through a wall of water, then swung the bottle of stale urine in a wide arc, and slammed it into the graveworm's jaw with a meaty slap of plastic on flesh.

"Aghhh!" The graveworm's avatar squealed in pain, stopped her screaming, and sprawled face-down on the floor.

The pressure on Elpida's limbs and joints and skull went slack.

Howl didn't pause to check her handiwork; she dropped the bottle and scooped up a piece of discarded clothing. With a quick spin of both hands she pulled the fabric taut, then planted a foot on the avatar's back, and looped the makeshift garrote around the avatar's skinny throat.

Howl yanked hard.

The avatar reared up, heaving and gasping, clawing at her windpipe, all cloaked in shadow.

"Put her down or I'll fucking strangle you!" Howl screeched. "I don't care how big you are, I'm in your fucking head, worm-cunt! You wanna kill me too, huh? You wanna fucking try?! I'll carve you a new arsehole so you can fuck yourself with your own head! Put her down!" Howl yanked on the fabric again; the avatar wheezed and squawked a string of pitiful choking noises. "Now!"

The tentacles lowered Elpida toward the floor, turned her upright, and let her go. She staggered forward to catch her balance, panting for breath, joints aching right at the border of permanent damage. The tentacles withdrew as suddenly as they had appeared, rising back up into the gaps between each monitor which made up the massive blue eye.

"Elps, you good?" Howl shouted without looking up from the avatar.

Howl was half-sunk in shadow as well, her features blurred by darkness, her white hair and brown skin both going grey, sinking into the murk. By leaping forward she had entered some closed-off software space around the worm's core.

"No injuries," Elpida called back. "I'm good. Howl, come back, come out of there."

Howl leaned forward, tightening the garrote around the worm's throat, lips close to the avatar's ear. "Try that again and I won't give you a warning. I'll rip your head off and put it on a spike. I don't care what you do to me afterward. Hurt Elps and I'll be your next problem."

The graveworm's avatar let out a gurgle. Howl let go of the improvised garrote. The avatar lurched forward and smacked against the floor, face-first.

"Howl," Elpida said. Howl was sinking deeper and deeper into shadow, barely an outline now. "Howl, step away, come over here, now."

"Yeah, yeah," Howl growled, backing away from the avatar, back to Elpida's side.

As she stepped away the shadows slipped from her, the membrane of darkness receding. Howl's face was just as it had been a few moments earlier; Elpida breathed a silent sigh of relief.

The graveworm's avatar sat up weakly, coughing and wheezing, pawing at her throat. She pulled the piece of fabric away and cast it aside, then leaned forward, supporting herself on her arms, drooling a thin stream of saliva onto the floor.

"I'm not going to apologise for Howl's behaviour," Elpida said. "You did just try to kill me."

"Fuckin' ay," Howl spat. To Elpida's surprise, one of Howl's hands wormed into Elpida's left, gripping hard.

The graveworm let out a broken sob. "But you can't be. You can't be her children. It's too cruel. How?" The thing sobbed. "How are you even here?"

"Same way you are," Howl said. "We've all been around too long."

"You knew Telokopolis when she was being built," Elpida said. "If you're telling the truth, if you're not confused, then that means … " Elpida trailed off, throat constricted by an emotion she couldn't name, so powerful it overwhelmed all her habitual forward motion, her genetically enhanced focus, her training, everything. She wet her lips and forced herself to blunder onward. "That means you're much older than this, the nanomachine ecosystem. How old are you? What are you really, graveworm?"

"My question first," the avatar said through gritted teeth, voice thick with humiliation. "Please. Please."

"Tch," Howl tutted. "I smell like our mother because she protected me. I was resurrected, then flushed back into the network. She found me, hid me behind her skirts, looked after me until I was ready to go find Elpida. That's it."

The avatar raised her head, long stringy hair hanging down either side of a face blotted out by shadow. "She's … here?" the graveworm breathed, voice shaking. "Alive, today? Extant and active? In the network? She … I don't … how … how … " Suddenly the figure sat up straighter, hands reaching forward, pressing at her protective membrane of shadows. "Can you call to her?! Can you call her here? Can you—"

"Telokopolis has to hide," Elpida said. "From Central, as I understand. I'm sorry."

"But … but she is alive?" The voice was so soft now, quivering with hope. "She endures?"

"Telokopolis lives," Elpida said. "Even if she's not in her body. Telokopolis is forever."

The avatar threw her head back and let out a long, mournful, animalistic wail. The cry went on and on, but this time the ground and air shook with only the sorrow of a human voice. Eventually the wail dissolved into wet sobs, full-body sobs that wracked her half-glimpsed frame, left her panting for breath, struggling through hiccups and tears and snot.

Elpida and Howl waited; Howl squeezed Elpida's hand.

Eventually the crying subsided, slowly and painfully. The figure slumped downward again, totally defeated, not even wiping her face on her arms. Elpida heard the tiny tap-tap-tap of tears falling to the metal floor.

"Don't sound so fucking happy about it, hey," Howl muttered.

"She's been here all along," the avatar murmured in a broken voice. "She's been here all this time? How could I have been such a fool? She never died, never truly died. And yet … yet we are still like this. The world is still dead. She lives, but it means nothing. It's too cruel."

"Graveworm," Elpida said. "You knew our mother, before she was … " Elpida couldn't finish the question; she struggled to grasp it.

"Before she was our mother," Howl finished for her.

"Mm," the graveworm grunted. "Mmhmm."

"What are you?" Elpida asked.

The graveworm's avatar looked up again. Her face was still sunk in shadow, but Elpida saw now the outline of a jaw, the curve of a cheekbone, the socket of an eye. The shadows had thinned, a tide creeping out.

"Are you truly her daughters?"

"Fuck yeah we are," Howl grunted. "You want proof again? You want me to kick your arse into your ribcage—"

"Howl," Elpida murmured. "Gentle on her." Then, to the graveworm again: "We are, yes. In life, in our bodies, Howl and I were her biological daughters. But now we are all the children of Telokopolis. Me and all those who travel with me, everybody who needs her. Not merely the zombies, either. Pheiri too, he is of Telokopolis as well, in his body. He's been going all this time. But we all are now, every zombie who wants in. Telokopolis is for all."

"She would be … she would … " The avatar sniffed and let out a tiny sob. "She would be happy to hear that. I think."

The avatar rose to her hands and knees and crawled forward, to the very edge of the shadows, where she pressed herself against the boundary, unable to cross over into the light. The shadows tightened around her face and hands, a membrane she could not break. A skein of darkness conformed to sunken cheeks and hollow eye sockets and the weight of grief in her lips.

"I'm so sorry," she said. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry."

Howl hissed to Elpida: "Shit, Elps, this is much more of a mess than I expected, and we still need her help, out there, with Pheiri and the others. We need her worm-guard to chase off the Necros."

"I haven't forgotten," Elpida whispered back. "Are we still running at accelerated clock speed?"

"Yeah. For now."

Elpida nodded, then took a deep breath. "Graveworm, we don't need your apologies, because we don't know what they're for. But we do need your help. We're about to be overrun by Necromancers, or by your worm-guard. And I … I want to know what you are. How did you know Telokopolis?"

The graveworm's avatar sagged, as if leaning on the membrane of shadows. "I, me, us, we," the graveworm said. "All of us and none of us. All that was still here when she left. We're everyone and everything that took the other path."

"What about the other graveworms?" Elpida asked. "What are they?"

The avatar shrugged. "There are no 'others'. There's me, and that's it. We're all the same thing, the same things. That was the point of our path in the first place, it was why she disagreed."

"You're a hive-mind with the other worms?"

Another shrug. "Call me what you want."

"Do you have a name?"

A dismissive snort. "Better ask what we all are, soldier, you too. We are all offshoots of the same decision, products of the same evolutionary choice. Does that have a name? It did once, but I've long since forgotten."

"What evolutionary choice?"

The graveworm fell silent for a long moment. She pulled herself upright, long slow breaths echoing in the chamber.

"The choice to out-compete a dying planet," she said eventually. "Or to leave it behind and seek greener shores. You cannot imagine the gravity of the choice, nor what those days were like. You come from a time when homo sapiens could walk upright, beneath the skies, breathing air. No matter the strangeness of your era, you cannot imagine. I could use metaphors, like floods, or earthquakes, or plagues, or famine. But the floods were in flesh and the plagues were in the wavelengths of visible light. We were under siege from angles we could not understand, beset by machines embedded in time itself, the rotten legacy of prior generations, all the processes they had started. Too late to turn back the clock, impossible to stop the tide. Changing ourselves had gone as far as it could, and we were beginning to forget, forget what we all were. The only choice was to go beyond ourselves. That was the choice between her and I, between the whole great mass of what was left of the biosphere, and the project to leave, to escape, to maintain that separation between inside and out, between … between … what did she used to call it? Between home and the wild. Between the cave and the storm. She maintained the cave, maintained it would hold. I defied the storm, and became the storm. And it worked." The graveworm's teeth tightened on the shadows with old remembered victory, quickly dissolving into despair. "But in the process, we forgot what we were, forgot entirely."

Elpida could barely summon words. "You're saying … Telokopolis was … what? A … a … she 'left' Earth itself? She was a … "

"A ship," Howl said, quiet and soft. "A ship to sail to the stars."

Elpida shook her head. Pure fiction. "No. No, that's … "

"It was always a theory, Elps," Howl murmured. "Even if it was fucking stupid."

A mad, wild, impossible fantasy. One of the ultimate cultural fantasies forever lurking at the core of Telokopolan civilization — the hope that there is somebody else out there, beyond the green and the endless war with the Silico. The notion that perhaps humankind once left Earth to scatter itself across the stars. Solace in a promise, that the sole legacy of all the countless millions of years of pre-Telokopolan humanity was not merely a few deeply buried geological strata of plastics and polymers.

The ultimate hope. That Telokopolis was not truly alone.

A beautiful idea, but the theory was unsupported by all evidence. In thousands of years of recorded Telokopolan history, not one artificial signal had been detected from the dark and the cold beyond Earth. And Telokopolis herself could not possibly be a star-going vessel — according, at least, to the best theories about how such a vessel might operate. She was embedded so deeply in the ground, the buried fields sunk into the rock of the plateau. The suggestion she had once flown was absurd. She possessed none of the theoretical structures needed for space-flight. Telokopolis was a city, not a starship.

Elpida struggled to control her breathing. Her stomach was churning, her face too hot, her left hand clammy in Howl's grip. She had never felt this way before. She did not even know what it was she felt.

Telokopolis had a life before the one she knew of?

And Telokopolis had — left?

"She left after that," the graveworm was saying. "She was the very last one to leave, you see? Though she was the most complete, the one with the best chance of success. She waited, maybe because she hoped we might change our mind, come back to our senses. But we didn't, so she left. As we forgot ourselves in our hour of triumph, she watched from above, first from the sky where we could still reach her, still touch, then from beyond the air, then from out in the dark." The graveworm's avatar spoke quieter and quieter. "She sent us letters, until she was too far away to send them anymore, but we were dumb and blind and screaming then, and most of her letters were burned up as soon as we touched them. But … " The graveworm's voice broke in a cracked sob. "But we kept the last one, the final note before we couldn't hear her voice anymore."

The avatar reached into her filthy rags and produced a folded up wad of paper. She began to stretch out her arm, then hesitated.

"It is … it is so precious," she whispered. "Normally I would never … but you are her daughters. Please, hand it back when you are done."

The avatar offered the paper to Elpida and Howl. One hand finally breached the wall of darkness — light brownish skin, filthy with grease, pale with lack of sun exposure, nails bitten and gnawed to the quick, skin picked and chewed, covered in scabs and spots of dry blood. The graveworm's simulated hand trembled.

"We will," Elpida said, though it was all she could say, working on automatic.

Elpida let go of Howl's hand and accepted the letter from the graveworm; it was filthy with age and skin oils, folded and unfolded and refolded so many times that any rough handling might destroy the paper on which it was written. Howl had to help her open out the letter.

But this was a software simulation. What did such an ancient and ragged letter represent?

I will always love you, read the words, in elegant, looping handwriting; some were smeared from tears long-dry. I could never hate you, no matter how much you hurt yourself. There will always be a place for you in my heart, no matter how far away I am, no matter how much time passes. Never forget that, even if you forget everything else. I love you, I always have done, it was what I was made for, even before I was made. And you don't need my forgiveness. You need to forgive yourself. You need to love yourself as much as I love you.

I'm sorry I had to leave. This is goodbye.

"Sounds like her," Howl muttered. She tried to laugh, but it was just a puff of air.

Elpida read the letter once, then twice, then again. She understood the meaning, it wasn't difficult, though this was a message from Telokopolis, rendered into human words and human emotion.

But the implications left her stunned.

The graveworm's hand was trembling, waiting for the letter to be returned. Elpida carefully folded the paper and placed it in the worm's hand. The avatar quickly withdrew her hand back into the shadow and tucked the letter into her ragged clothes.

"Graveworm," Elpida said; her own voice felt thin. "You were 'everything left'. Telokopolis left Earth. You were left behind. You're a gestalt consciousness, aren't you? Everything left of the biosphere, of humanity. Is that right?"

"Mmm." But the graveworm was still lost in memory. "After everybody left, after I couldn't hear her anymore, when it was just me, I … I stopped thinking. The world grew quiet, simple, pure, clean. But it was so sickening, in a way I'd never felt before. I was alone, but never alone, both at the same time. I was sick, sick, sick, for such a long time. Longer than I could count. Couldn't pull myself together. All my clocks stopped working. No seasons, nothing to count by. No leaves to fall, no summer for heat. Just cold. And me."

"Graveworm—"

"A long time passed. Long enough for the ground to drift. Other things came here, to this planet. Some I drove off, others I killed. I ate a few of them. The ones I ate, their taste taught me new things, made me consider myself anew. That changed me, changed my thinking, made me focus again. We learned how to flower, how to blossom, how to grow verdant and green. All the life we had consumed, we gave forth again. All growing things. It was beautiful. The world was beautiful again. Even with her gone."

Elpida's mind reeled. "The green. You mean the green?"

"And … and then," the worm's voice caught, snagged, pulled free. "After longer than all the time before, she came back."

"Telokopolis? Back to Earth?"

"Eventually. She returned, as changed as I." The worm's voice filled with remembered wonder. "The void, the dark, the other places, they had all changed her. She blasted a space clear of me, for herself, somewhere I would struggle to reach her in my new form. That didn't matter, I didn't mind. I was so large then, it was nothing, like a kiss on the cheek. I thought maybe she intended it as a kiss, I was overjoyed, I was beside myself, but … " The graveworm's voice grew rough and low, hissing through clenched teeth. "But then I discovered what was in her belly, and I was so angry with her. How dare she come crawling back, crawling with you?"

The graveworm's avatar raised her head, shadows filling her eye sockets as she stared at Elpida and Howl.

"You got a problem with us, still?" Howl snapped.

"Homo sapiens!" the graveworm spat. "My own shameful past, shoved in my face! She'd come back flush with success and life, all just to gloat, to show me how she had grown without me. And she had children, children without me! Children with homo sapiens! And oh, she loved them. She loved them so much, she had chosen them over me. Why come back teeming with them, except to humiliate me with the proof of my own failure? I wanted to tear them all apart! Scoop them out of her innards! Wreck her happy little family!"

"The Silico." Elpida said out loud. "She said they were a long-lost branch of our family. You."

"Stupid fucking cunt," Howl spat. "By the sounds of it she loved you too, huh? Unless you think that letter was a lie."

"I was … a fool," the graveworm said, slumping once more, all the hot remembered rage snuffed out in an instant. "I was a fool to hate her, a fool to resent you. Hating myself for having once loved her became more important than hating her. Hate turned me inward, against myself. Hate changed me, gave birth to other things inside me, things that I wasn't watching properly. By the time I realised what was happening, it was too late for either of us." The graveworm took a great shuddering breath. "I gave birth to despair, and despair killed us both."

The graveworm fell silent.

Elpida's mind roiled with questions, more than she could possibly voice. She felt a lump in her throat and a tightness in her chest, in a way she had never felt before. She opened her mouth, then closed it again. How could her words do justice to this?

The secret history of her mother's life.

And how her mother had abandoned 'what was left' of humanity.

Telokopolis would not have done that; Elpida would not have done that. Telokopolis was not a starship, so none of this could possibly be true. The edges of Elpida's vision twisted and swirled, like she was losing her balance.

Howl spoke when Elpida couldn't: "So you fumbled the baddest bitch in history, then fucked yourself up so much that the green turned into something else. Silico civil war, the black mold, Central, all that?"

The avatar gave a weak shrug. "All my fault. All my sins. All us, us, us, the same thing we always do, we ruin everything, from the moment we picked up a bone and hit another of our kind over the head, it's the same thing we've always done, for millions upon millions—"

"And what the fuck have you been doing for the last two million years, graveworm?" Howl spat. "Feeling sorry for yourself, pissing in bottles?"

"Looking for her," the avatar said. "Trying to reverse engineer her soul. That's what you are, you zombies. You're the thing she was trying to protect, the thing we forgot. Or at least an echo of it, the memory of it, as close as our techniques can get. That's how the idea started. Perhaps she could be reverse engineered from observing enough of you. She was dead, our despair given life had killed her, her corpse was cold, and we could not find her bones in the wreckage, when we were allowed to look. But perhaps we could remake her, from you."

"And how's that fuckin' going, huh?" Howl grunted.

Another weak shrug.

"Wait," Elpida said. "This whole ecosystem, the resurrections, the revenants, everything, all of this. It's all to remake Telokopolis?"

The avatar's mouth curled into a bitter smile. "Would that were the only reason. Far from it."

"Then what's it all for?"

"Central," the graveworm said. "Central has its own reasons for allowing this to carry on, reasons other than sadism. But me? No, I'm not in control. I'm just twisting in the yoke. I'm no more free than you are, zombie."

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