Into the Unknowable Ch. 21

The question remained nonetheless. Where should she go? What could she do? What of her mission?

There were no clear answers to any of these questions, but it had become obvious that there was nowhere to go and whatever was happening had made it unlikely that she would continue to exist long enough to make the mission any more of a success than it already was.

And that, of course, was no success at all.

As someone who didn't exist as an integral being in the way that might be generally understood, Vashti's demise was more decomposition or disintegration or dismemberment than death. It wasn't that Vashti the person had ceased to exist but rather that the community of nanobots of which Vashti had for so log been its most visible manifestation was no longer cooperating, collaborating or even coexisting with each other. It was as if an anti-solvent had been sprayed on the nanobots and they were no longer capable of working as a community but only as individual non-replicating units.

At the end there was nothing to mark that Vashti had ever existed beyond what she had achieved. And these were impressive, although perhaps not what she'd intended. The Proxima Centauri and Sirius missions had both been thwarted. The Intrepid's original mission had been perverted. Beatrice had been killed. The Intrepid's human command structure had been thoroughly humiliated.

And Vashti's civilisation was no more the wiser as to what the Anomaly might be than if she'd never traversed the intradimensional membranes.