Atalya lay comfortably webbed, linked to shuttle sensors, nearing the end of her short journey. The two Progeny ships, temporarily spine-locked by collapsible modules, rings spinning, filled her viewpoint. Her past and future, for the moment, still joined.

She interfaced with Shipguard, allowing access to her mind patterns. Recognition. Welcome. Entry into the main sensor net of receivers and transmitters.

The shuttle slid into the docking bay, was moved along the guideway by subsidiary alife and berthed. Atalya took a suit from shuttle storage, touched into its smallmind and waited as it slipped around her, then drew its transparent cowl down across her face. Popping the hatch, she dropped down. The bay was unpressurized, but rotated as did the ship’s hab rings, creating 1g. She bounded across the deck to the nearest ladder, climbed to the spine entrance, went through the lock and into a botcar. Told the suit to recede, pocketed it. Strapping herself in, she directed the car to ring 1, and shunted it onto the main track.

Blinking into Shipnet brought a webwork of glowing symbols. Atalya scanned quickly through layers of alife that monitored and inhabited the internal systems, forming the ship’s subconscious. Glyphs and purrs and clicks: assurances of stability. Then she linked into the populace communications hub and was startled by silence. It seemed no one was home. Though that was unlikely. Or all were locked into privacy. Even more unlikely.

The severing of Progeny 3’s populace wrought major changes, bringing inevitable turmoil and instability into their lives. But emotions were never allowed to run out of control. We’re far from being helpless nebs after all. And there was compensatory excitement in the shaping of their new shiplife.

Calling up the personality matrice schematic, she saw two srreals: Gedd linked into Navigation; Eyono in Engineering. Both srreals were shadowed, indicating privacy. But of course. Each would be developing more subtle blending with, and understanding of, the alife in their chosen work areas.

But where is everyone else? Obviously in Progeny 3. Farewells must have turned sentimental, or raucous. Atalya considered calling her cohere there, then decided to use the time alone, for her work. She was eager to merge the newest recordings into her developing virch. Thus far she’d kept it locked, shown it to no one. But she wanted its environment complete, as well as her own avatar lifeform, when the Progeny 5 docked, and their portion of the new populace settled in.

Atalya had high expectations of her artistry, and its place in the virtual life of the new ship’s culture. Her cohere, and other fans of her work, had tried to persuade her to copy Coral Resort into Progeny 7’s archive. But she refused. It had been one of the most popular virtual worlds of Progeny 3 for the past 2 longcycles. Scenes from Resort had been chosen for semi-permanent holo status in two public squares. And Atalya knew that’s where it belonged, to the past, to 3’s archives, a part of the culture that had severed to populate Progeny 7. For a while she’d felt a bit desperate, needing to begin some new creation, then realized her work on the remote-mining system provided a perfect background.

Now using grab bars she moved from the spine into the Ring’s lock, then out, and enjoying the g feel, loped down the short corridor to Garden Plaza and the entrance to her cohere’s apartment cluster. Passing beneath the plaza’s central treebot, Atalya slowed her pace, listening to the ever-changing song of its leaves. She glanced up through its branches to the light-tiles of the cupola. Three of her genetic parents had designed the plaza, and it was one of her favorite sites on the new ship. An idea occurred to her. She needed a place for the routine she’d copied into her amulet.

Clicking a local icon linked her to the plaza’s monitoring subsentient. Its smallmind recognized her, and she watched through its optics the interrelationships of the plaza’s software and hardware. One subroutine made its rounds, touching along each treebot module, scanning codes from root sensors and the evolving patterns of leaves, testing the chemical bath of the tree’s nutrient pool, querying each light tile and paving tile. The monitor-core gathered the data, compared it to a schematic and offered it to Atalya, forming a bright green srreal at the top of her vision. After an instant the subroutine moved into another identical round. Meanwhile the core flicked on a different subroutine. This one moved deeper into the treebot, examining the connections between modules, sites where separation would occur when the ship reconfigured for wormhole entry.

Atalya keyed in the file size and queried the monitor core for permission to enter her captured routine. It displayed a diagram of distribution possibilities. Atalya agreed, and the monitor readied a resequencing subroutine. Then its srreal turned pale, indicating alife stress.

It will take some getting used to, Atalya realized. For the deviant routine and the monitor.

She keyed its own pattern back to the core, as reassurance. Then placing her hand against a floor tile she accessed a data node, touched her amulet and let the routine flow through her, decompressing into the plaza’s system. For a moment she felt she’d betrayed it, watching its code taken apart, resequenced and distributed. But she stood beneath the treebot, tracked the rerouting, noting the infinitesimal changes in leaf song. When the plaza achieved its new equilibrium, Atalya smiled. “You see; I knew we could do it.”

Then she crossed Garden Plaza, moving into the corridor that bordered her cohere’s cluster. The door recognized her, and she went through into a common room, spent a few moments disliking the apartment’s emptiness, then went into her own suite, toggled a nutrient tap into a tall glass, and settled down on a couch, feet tucked beneath her.

Work. Everything else will wait. The room’s net held the entry code to her virch world — Swirling Orange — the world code itself already expanded into other nodes throughout the ship. Her internal awareness traveled the information strings, knowing what features of the world each segment represented. She moved the recordings from her computronium ring storage, sent each through a translation program, then spliced the code into the proper strings.

Then Atalya blinked the virch on and shifted into its waveband. The functions of her avatar gathered, surrounding her awareness. She gazed out at her world through its multispectral eyes. Above her, drifting among water clouds, a cluster of bright helium balloons carried the gridwork platform with its tethers- the perfect site for creature socializing.

Her jet-powered body could almost, but not quite, have evolved and lived within a physical gas giant. Atalya’s virches were a blend of possibility and fantasy. Though a few purists derided her creations, she felt comfortable with her aesthetic philosophy of rule-bending. And now she was pleased with the expanded range of sensations given by the new splicings.

With a whiplike motion of her fluked tail, she steered to her left, and up. A flick of back muscle spread her wings wide, and she lifted, slender arms crossed at her chest against a soft leather harness. Nearing the platform, she reached out and grasped a tether, hooking it to her harness. A school of purple and red blossom-like creatures trailed across her viewpoint. They were little more than delicate skeletons and buoyancy pods; similar skeletons made up the trim of her harness. Gradually, as she drifted, drinking in the sensations, the pleasure of it seeped away. Though her avatar possessed radio telepathy and chromatophore capability, the world was thus far a solitary place. Lovely, but lonely.

Atalya now felt consumed by the need to create another avatar from the prototype of the first. The second avatar will be Jan’s. She’d surprise him with it; he’d be the first of the cohere to see the virch. The avatars after that would belong to Loise and Freddmn. Leaving the virch, she clicked into her workspace, and began duplicating sections of code, making subtle changes and adjustments. The avatar couldn’t be completed until Jan decided its gender, but it would be inhabitable. Jan could be a part of her world. Finally she entered the avatar’s code into the program, creating an icon for it.

She wanted to tell Jan, right now, regardless of what he was doing. And what was he doing? What is everyone doing?