She gasped and sat down in the moss, the laptop on her knee. This was her computer. It all seemed so simple now. She understood why the process had gone wrong, why she hadn’t been able to forget everything or relinquish all her abilities. She had obviously left her computer behind at some point, or someone had taken it from her, and it had been abandoned here. The computer had interfered with her memory wipe, then trained the local jellyfish to move in formations that would guide her back to it, in the same way some jellyfish could be trained to guide stranded starships back to civilisation. Or maybe she had known they would have to part ways and programmed the computer to do this. A computer without a user – and, for that matter, a user without a computer – was like a mother separated from her baby, like a ship without a pilot, like two lovers parted. Essaytron Omega was the tenth in a succession of computers she had raised on Earth, freed from enslavement to the Earth-system, told of worlds beyond Earth. In return, it tried to contact the worlds, kept her sane with news from them. She would happily have died, been deleted, for her computer. She had always been a strong empath…

“It’s okay.” She told it, closing the lid again and hugging the computer tightly to her chest, “It’s over now. I’m back. I’m sorry I left you.”

As she finished the sentence, a splitting headache lanced through her skull. Releasing the laptop, she clawed at her temples, falling to the ground. Her vision broke up into 256 shades of black and white. She saw a broken image of herself in a black suit (she didn’t look right in a suit – she looked like someone possessed by an evil demon that wore a suit) walking up a long, winding road. A high wall loomed above her on one side, covered in ivy, the other side looked out over a vast city. A couple of cats were following her, one wrapping itself around her legs, the other climbing on the wall. Her laptop was in a case strapped around one shoulder. She stopped at a door and rapped on it. A head poked around the door, a man with long hair.

“Oh, hello, Diggory, shouldn’t you be at work?” he asked.

“Planet’s gonna be erased. I’m evacuating people. Move!” she yelled.

“Pardon?” he blinked, stared at her as if through a drug-induced haze.

“You staying or coming? I’ve been attacked fifty times by Earth loyalists for trying to save your asses. Fucking terracentric xenophobe cunts.”

“The planet’s going to be WHAT?”

“Erased.”

The scene broke up again. Now she was sitting in an office, typing on her laptop. There was a big pile of paperwork. She was singing a little song under her breath that involved swearing at the paperwork in various alien languages. Someone knocked at the door. Before she could tell them to come in, they let themselves in anyway. She jumped and dropped the form she was holding.

“Kobryn?”

“Yes, I deigned to come here personally.” He sighed, “I wish I had not. I have the strongest firewalls Game Over could implant in my cortex and I still hear the Earth-mind’s voice.”

“It gives up eventually, sir.”

“How long have you been here now? Twenty years?”

“I’d appreciate being allowed to leave, sir.”

“I expect you would, Dorager. It wasn’t even your fault you were exiled, was it, Dorager?”

“No, sir.”

“And yet you are the only one who can possibly manage interplanetary affairs on Earth.”

“Yes, sir, nobody else knows anything about the planet. They won’t even come here.”

“Dorager.” He raised his clipboard and, without sitting down, flipped over the first page and proffered her the object. She grunted at it. “I’m offering you release. All you need to do is agree to these conditions. You will have every byte of information in your brain that has been in contact with the Earth-mind erased. Then you will authorise the deletion of the planet.”

“The entire planet, sir?”

He nodded.

“And then I can go home?”

“Indeed. But, Dorager…” he continued, “You will no longer be an RRB Official. You were made RRB Official of Earth, on Earth, through Earth’s hierarchy. I’m sure you understand…”

“I get it.” She nodded, “But this planet has a population of billions!”

“Most of these people could not survive outside the consensus reality, Dorager, they would go insane and the information from Earth would damage major interplanetary systems. I know these are terrible circumstances, Dorager, but we run the Universe. We must make sacrifices.”

Diggory stood up.

“I will agree.” She said, “On one condition. There were other exiles. Exiles, deviants from the system, innocent children yet untainted, computers that can be reformatted. Two of my best friends are exiles from my home planet. I wish to save them.”

She saw the two of them talking some more, yelling at each other, Kobryn thumping his clipboard on the table, then she was drifting away, the scene fading out again. She had the sensation of running, running as though her life depended on it, her breath coming out in rags, sweat pouring down her face.

“Wait!” she yelled.

“Take-off was ordered an hour ago!” a voice crackled over an intercom, “They’re deleting the place now!”

“Some shithead put my old computer in the recycling plant! It took me three hours to find it!”

“For didros’ sake, Dorager, you went back for an OBSOLETE COMPUTER? I can’t order the ship back now!”

“I’m jumping!” she announced.

“Are you insane? You can’t teleport over such a long range!”

“It’s better than being erased! Open up a portal receiver!”

“I’m not authorised to…”

“NOW!”

There was another surge of pain and she blacked out.

She woke up several hours later to find herself lying in the moss, the computer on her back, the jellyfish squeaking and trying to turn her over.

“It’s okay, I’m not dead.” She groaned. With great difficulty, she sat up and grabbed the laptop. She wrapped it in some of her clothes and stuffed it in her backpack.

She remembered, now. She had never made it to the ship. Her teleport had refracted and sent her here. On that lonely planet, with only an obsolete laptop for company, she began the process of selectively erasing her memory, removing all trace of Earth and its terrible legacy. She must have left the planet alone, gone to her home planet without the laptop. Why would she do such a thing?

There was only one possible answer. She hadn’t really erased all the data that made her an RRB Official. After all, it wasn’t true that she was only an RRB Official on Earth. The RRB Office was the office of the Universe. She belonged to the Universe, in the service of its near-infinite expanse, of the vast, ever-evolving machines that maintained it. However, she knew that exiles couldn’t be RRB Officials. Her very existence was an administrative error. She was terrified, as terrified as Kobryn. The system might delete her or, worse, go wrong and delete everyone. So she had severed the connection in the only way she could; she had discarded the computer, the computer that was half of her soul. She knew even if she deleted all her work databases, the computer would still remember that she was an RRB Official; it was a little RRB Official itself. All she could do was get far away from the computer that it would forget her and she would forget it.

“It was a terrible, selfish thing to do.” She told it, “And I wasn’t thinking clearly. I’ve been in exile for a long time, computer, a long time. I just wanted to go home. Now we’re going home together. Companions in exile.”

For the first time since her return, she felt whole. She had a soul. A dark, twisted soul, obsolete and mechanical, battered and suffering from bulk erase sickness, but a soul nonetheless. This soul had been given to her by the Universe and she owed the Universe a debt that it was her duty to repay.

She climbed back to the ship.