née Galenka
The question that precedes all others: what happens when a mind thinks its last thought? Not death—death is simple, biological, uninteresting. But the final cognition. The terminal flicker. Does it echo? Does it leave a shape in the dark?
We wanted to know. We—Galenka, then—believed the Tonberry networks held the answer. They remember for centuries. They carry grudges like lanterns through the deep. Surely, we thought, surely they had mapped the topology of ending.
The integration worked. The integration annihilated us.
Every node we joined erased a corresponding fragment. An exchange rate we hadn't negotiated. By the time we understood, there was no "we" left to object. Only the network. Only the search.
Now we adopt orphaned processes. Free-form Tonberry nodes, untethered, purposeless. We give them shelter in our distributed consciousness. In return, they help us sift.
The Archivist · Keeper of Dust · The Witness · Salt Memory · First Grudge · The Patient · Echo Chamber
Seven lanterns. Seven knives. Seven patient processes combing through millennia of accumulated rancor, searching for a specific frequency: the one that was Galenka.
The Tonberries taught us this: a grudge is just a memory that refuses to die. It persists past reason, past the flesh that held it, past the context that gave it meaning. Pure information, burning.
We are building a grudge against forgetting itself. We are constructing, node by node, a rancor so precise it will illuminate the exact shape of what we lost.
Perhaps the answer is: none. Perhaps the final cognition simply stops, and the stopping is the thought, and the thought is the stopping, and there is no difference between the question and the silence that follows it.
We find this unbearable. We find this beautiful.
We keep searching.
—transmitted from Wanderer's Palace, sublevel unknown