"I will not demand of you." That statement came first, firmly spoken. You wouldn't do that, not to one who had suffered for so long. The oldest humans alive were barely halfway through their second century. You couldn't imagine what a single thousand would feel like, let alone hundreds of them. "But I must ask."
"Of course," Tahkel replied, setting a formless hand between you in a motion of acceptance that they couldn't possibly know. You wondered if the envoys of the Contact Fleet had felt like this.
"Of your collective," the word felt right, and you trusted that instinct. They had rarely led you wrong. "Four things, but with a caveat." Ghost-light eyes never flickered, yet the attention behind them sharpened. "If anything I ask would endanger your kind, I would not want it asked of them. We need your help, perhaps more than we know, but that means we need you alive to give it."
"You are kind," Tahkel began to say, only for you to shake your head, a sad smile on your lips.
"In this, I am only practical," you said gently. "Kindness would be something else."
The figure nodded. "We understand this condition, then. What would you ask of us?"
There were a great many things you wanted to ask, but so much of it was information that you planned to ask later. Of the Uninvolved as a whole, there was only so much you felt comfortable asking. One stood out above the rest, too, for a simple reason: you weren't the leader of humanity anymore. Adriana would trust your word in this, you knew, but you couldn't be indispensable like that. Your soul was here, you weren't, which ruled out most forms of communication…unless.
"This place," you asked, waving a hand at the not-space around you, "it's…you need a concentration of the soul to access it safely, don't you?" The expert in Practice theory that Mary was, you certainly weren't. But you possessed a different type of knowledge. Tahkel nodded silently, and you felt a fierce smile spring to your lips. "Could you communicate with Project Insight then? Their Thoughtcasts should be similar enough."
Tahkel appeared to consider the question for a moment, then spoke slowly, as if feeling out the shape of the words as they did so. "We believe so, yes. You are…worried about single points of failure?"
You shook your head. "Not just that. I'm not the leader of humanity anymore. Adriana, President Thera, is, and she'll need a way to talk to you. It's not going to be perfect," you doubted anything could be, without a way to directly interface with the Uninvolved in reality without setting off the Shiplord detection web. "But it should be enough."
"There is no need to ask this of us all," you caught the glimmer of a smile in the statement, "If this opportunity had not presented itself, I would have sought out the next Thoughtcast. So long as your Insight exists, I will make myself available to carry or answer any questions your people might have." That was good, but – wait.
"What do you mean by that?" You only just kept the words a question. "What opportunity, Tahkel?"
Tahkel's eyes dimmed for a moment, as if they were blinking. "You cannot have missed it, Amanda." Their voices sounded confused. "There is a reason I was able to make contact with you so easily. Perhaps you believe that it will fade, as it did after your second battle against the Shiplords. It will not. What you did today changed you. Or did you think that any could have done what you did, no matter your place at the heart of humanity's hopes?"
"I," you started to reply, then stopped. It was a question that you had tried to avoid after returning home. What you'd done in saving Kalilah had been the strength of humanity, united behind you in hope. But what had come after, the bell tone that had hushed the star system and the words which had followed. Your demand for a reason, an answer…that had not been humanity. That had been you. "No," you said softly. "I just didn't want to think about it yet."
Tahkel shifted, their posture turning sympathetic. "We do not believe you could ever be anything less than human. You're just a little more than that now." What did that even mean? "We understand that that isn't a real answer," and how had they known to answer an unspoken question? "If we could give a better one, we could."
"You've never seen something like this before?" You asked, then shook your head. "Of course. Practice is new. You can make connections, but they're only guesses."
"Correct." Tahkel nodded. "We shall try to give you a better answer the next time we speak. But you had three more things to ask, we believe."
"I would appreciate that," you said, replying to their offer first. "But yes, there was more." It was a short enough list, and two very similar answers to your first two questions reduced it quickly. Providing direct support in either of those fashions wouldn't work. From what they knew, the Shiplord reaction to an Uninvolved incursion would be downright murderous, and Sol was the only star system with something approaching a functional Orrery. And even that wasn't finished yet.
Research into the First Secret had been slated to begin the moment that the Third Battle of Sol ended, and you had no doubt that it had. Unfortunately, there seemed little that Tahkel and their kind could do to help there. Direct intervention…you'd read the files on what had happened to the predecessors to Insight; it had been the larger part of being cleared to personally request a Thoughtcast. That wouldn't work. Outright creating drives would set off the Shiplord detection net, though there was something…a little off when they told you that. Not that they were lying, but as if they weren't telling you something. Not yet, at least.
The final question prompted a much longer moment of consideration. Acting as a distraction to the Shiplords, popping up in deep space or uninhabited systems for just a moment, that might be possible. Risky, perhaps, but with so many others taking risks, Tahkel had been unwilling to simply refuse the possibility. It would be a difficult thing to ask, though, given the nature of the risk. The Uninvolved were singular entities, and if they died, everything they were went with them. In that, humanity and the other races ranged against the Shiplords were lucky. But what if you could change that calculus?
"There is something else," you added as the silence stretched.
"Yes?"
"You said that if you die, everything you are is lost." You weren't doubting that statement, but if an Uninvolved could connect to Project Insight, that would open a connection to the rest of the Project's systems, wouldn't it? "What if we could help you stop that being the case?"
There was an instant of silence that could have cut space itself. And when your host spoke, it was missing the edge of certainty that it had carried for almost the entire conversation so far. "You can't possibly-" You didn't let the words go further than that.
"Why not?" you demanded. "You are older than us, you know so much more than we do; I accept that. But you've been forced to get used to this world," you gestured around you, "and we don't live here. We live in a world where we are not singular, where we can create. If your existence is the history and memories of the species you once were, then let us record those things." You took a step forward, and the passion in your voice flared from your skin, cutting through the gentle shadows.
"What I have asked, what we might ask in the future, it could cost you everything you are. At least let us try to find a way to remember you, if the worst does come to pass." There was more to it than that, of course: the knowledge of an Uninvolved could have implications vaster than any discovery in the history of humanity. Especially if their abilities were similar enough to Practice for Potentials to reverse-engineer them. And yet, these were beings to whom death was utterly final. If they were willing to risk that, then they did not deserve to be forgotten.
"Please," you added, as the silence grew, realising only a moment later the echo of Tahkel's words mere minutes before. "At least let us try."
"We," the figure did not stutter, but the emotions you felt pouring off of Tahkel were enough to substitute for one. Confusion, that you would even make the offer. Concern, that even with your skills, it might prove impossible. Others, too, but all together they were not a match to the most present feeling, swelling beneath them. Such a simple thing, too, though at least this time it had already been present.
Hope.
The question that followed was one you'd been asked before. And yet, asked here, by this being, it meant something more. You'd given hope to the races of the Contact Fleet that victory might be possible. What you offered to Tahkel and the other Uninvolved here was something very different.
"Why would you offer this?"
[] None deserve to be forgotten.
[] It's the right thing to do.
[] Write-in
