Lights in the Deep by Brad R. Torgersen

a feedback squeal like a migraine peeled across my consciousness.
    It was Howard who saved me. Or, rather, his memories.
    On the chance that I’d be able to access what was left of Howard’s intellect, I’d networked his old arrays in a cluster adjacent to the main set of blanks I’d set up for myself. In desperate panic, I mentally reached for Howard, and felt a quick jolt of information flow across the link. Suddenly I was on solid mental ground again, my field of vision rapidly narrowed to one camera view, and my ability to hear narrowed down to a single, neutered computer voice that simply said, “Command access granted, Mirek. Awaiting further instructions.”
    The system knew my name.
    I’d made it.
    Only, I couldn’t feel excited about that. Intellectually, I think I was relieved. But the glandular feeling of satisfaction, of triumph, that should have been mine, was absent. All that remained was the coolness of pure, rapid thought. Thought so fast, I felt staggered by the implications. And capability. No mathematical calculation ever need be beyond my grasp again. The moment I could conceive of a problem, the answer was in my mind at the same instant. Memory recall proved similarly instant, and I took a few moments to ponder this reality, which brought on a further jolt of data from Howard’s banks, which were actively integrating with my own, now that they had a reliable cerebral matrix to map to.
    It took me only a few minutes to master the network, and another few to access and test all the remaining, functional systems in the observatory.
    At once, it became obvious how sloppy and haphazard I’d been. Total facility efficiency was down to forty-two percent, with a list of yellow, orange, and red-lined items stretching into the hundreds. While I scanned and prioritized, I received continual jolts of data from Howard’s arrays. One moment, I’d be wondering how to fix a certain problem. The next, the knowledge would be there, as if it had always been there. As if I’d done it a hundred times before.
    Though his personality was barely perceptible in the data, like a tiny aftertaste on the tongue, Howard was still, for all intents and purposes, gone. I sent numerous mental thank-yous to the man’s memory, then made ready to depart the buoy, and begin the down-hill leg of my journey towards the Outbound.
    • • •
    One thing about being a computerized mind: I could make time go as fast or as slow as I wanted to. Weeks and months evaporated in a blink while I made necessary fixes to reactors and set up a schedule to ration the fuel supply, all the while thrusting gently up the relative velocity curve, being careful to have more than enough fuel left over at the end-point for slowing down. I had no idea what might be waiting for me there, but I knew it’d probably be bad manners to go speeding past the Outbounders like a semi that’s lost its brakes on a steep hill.
    I turned my radios forward and began gently peppering my flight path with greetings for whomever it was that would meet me.
    I suppose there was always a chance that nobody would meet me, and that the buoy, for all its promise, could have been a deception, or even a relic from an effort that had since failed. But my computer-dictated intellect didn’t have the capacity for real fear. Such strong emotion, I found, was purely a residual memory—like a stimulus response, now delayed. I knew I should be afraid, but this was largely a past-tense knowledge, and did not affect my overall progress, nor my determination to reach my goal.
    What happened when I got there…well, I purposely tried not to wonder about that. What use would the Outbound have for a computer mind like me? It wasn’t like I could just put myself back into my own head again. Nor, I began to think, would I want to. The expanded capacity of the neural arrays was almost intoxicating, and after a couple of years had passed I suspected that if ever I had to be restricted again to