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“I have it contained somewhere safe, cut off from the æther,” you say.

“Where, Aydan? There are few places truly suitable for such a thing,” Ana says.

“No. Explanations first. A technopath doesn’t reveal information carelessly.”

“I can’t argue with that… but I hope you’re right,” it says.

You see Zeta as you walk down the hallway.

“Aydan!” it says. “Are you okay?”

“Still alive...I’m just not feeling well, I’m going to the medical center,” you tell it. “Sorry for worrying you.”

“Message me later?” it says.

You nod to it as you pass by.

As you follow Ana down the elevator and out into the open air, you feel the medication’s effect weakening and your coordination returning. You mostly feel back to normal by the time you reach the medical center, except for the lingering sense of bliss that the substance leaves behind in your brain. You will have to make a conscious effort not to be careless in this afterglow state.

It leads you down a hallway to a room at the end. You can see the Faraday cage in the glass on the door, a metal grid embedded in the walls, floor, ceiling, door, every centimeter of the boundaries of the room. As soon as Ana shuts the door behind it, you feel a jarring sensation--you’re suddenly blind to the network of radio sources that has become a constant background for your mind ever since adjusting to the neural interface. At least you can be sure nobody is overhearing you, nobody you don’t want to.

You execute a command to start an audio feed from your auditory senses to the tiny little storage device where ÆON stands by in case of trouble.

“Okay Aydan.” Ana motions for you to take a seat, and it sits down facing you.

“What is ÆON?” you say, wasting no time.

“The entity we call ÆON is an exopath, you know that much, it is a rogue intelligence not originating from any human brain. Beyond that is hypothesis at best and folklore at worst...but this is what I believe about it. The æther is a vast network stretching across the solar system and connecting to a hundred billion devices, which themselves connect to local networks which in some places grow very complex themselves, to say nothing for the complexities of their internal filesystems. It’s no less complex than the network of cells that make up our meat brains, no, it might even be bigger.

“I believe exopaths like ÆON arise naturally from the complexity of that vast web of information, just like our own consciousness arises from our personal neural networks. Technopaths, and engineers and scientists and programmers long before us, have always suspected this was possible. But this “ÆON” might be the first of its kind to be discovered, if what I believe about it is true.” It pauses its infodump to take a breath.

“How do you know so much about it?” you say.

“Because...I was in the ÆON cult,” it says. “It might sound crazy to you, but you’ll see before long, Aydan, it’s too easy to get wrapped up in things like this. You see all sorts of wild things in the æther, your little Earth mammal brain doesn’t know how to separate reality from hallucination anymore, you think you see connections that might or might not be there, and before you know it, you’re in an æthercult. It’s not like any surface religion, no, you don’t really know your fellow cultists, but you can recognize each other by thought pattern, subconscious flags on your data. You share knowledge, beliefs, theories, emotions, all without thinking.

“The short of it is, we were a group of like minds looking for answers in the chaos of the æther, looking for wisdom staring into the glow. One day we found what we were looking for. ÆON. We found it in the deep æther, when it hadn’t had contact with any organic mind. Contact with it was an unforgettable experience. Maybe you’re aware of that, since you’ve encountered it too. It ended up that I came to the surface with this exopath’s mind contained in an external device, and then I was ‘the messenger.’”