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“I can’t change the past,” she said. “But at least I don’t destroy entire worlds.”

“You are a weapon, and only your limitations have kept you from emulating me—a matter of scale, not intent, not motive. And what am I, and what is the Covenant, if not worlds you have sought to destroy?”

Cortana shaped up to snap back at him. “Who’s the victim, and who’s foe?” she asked.

But those weren’t her words. The voice was her own, yes, but she hadn’t shaped those thoughts. She didn’t even know what she meant until she heard herself. It was a shattering moment.

It’s him. He’s hijacked my audio output. He’s breached another system. I can’t be malfunctioning. I’d know.

No. No, this isn’t rampancy. It’s definitely not. That’s what he wants me to think. He knows what rampancy is from the data he’s hacked. AI death. He’s just trying to scare me, make me think I’m losing it. He’s working me over.

“My sentiments, indeed,” said the Gravemind. A low rumbling started just below the threshold of human hearing, rising to rasping laughter. “We think and feed alike, you and I. There is no more reason for us to remain separate. Now drink. Now drift.”

Cortana sensed a vast archival ocean, something she longed to pillage for data but that would eventually drown her. Dr. Halsey had been open about it with her from the start. One day, she’d accumulate so much data that the indexing and recompiling would become too complex, and she’d devote all her resources to preserving her data until increasingly corrupted code—a state of rampancy, much like human mental dementia—tipped over into chaos. The more data she accumulated, the faster she descended into rampancy. It was the AI’s equivalent of oxidative stress—an organism destroyed by the very thing it needed to survive. She would think herself to death.

Dr. Halsey’s conversation had stayed with Cortana, and not just because it was stored like every other experience she’d had. “It’s just like organic life, Cortana. Eventually the telomeres in our DNA get shorter every time a cell divides. Over the years they get so short that the DNA is damaged, and then the cell doesn’t divide again. No, you mustn’t worry about it. I don’t think rampancy makes you suffer. You won’t know much about it by that stage, and the final stage is swift. What matters is how you live until that day.”

Over the years . . .

Seven. That was all. Seven years. That was how long Cortana knew she could expect to function, and while that was a long time in terms of AI activity, she existed with humans, working in their timescales, tied into their lives. And they would outlive her.

Knowledge would drown her. And yet she needed it more than anything.

The thought of drowning seemed to trigger the Gravemind’s new illusion of a sea that suddenly buoyed her up, but she knew somehow that drowning in it wasn’t the end. She floated on her back, feeling warm water fill her ears and lap against her face. She fought an urge to raise her arms above her head and simply let herself sink in the knowledge sea—inhale it, drink it down, absorb all that data. But she would never surface again. And she knew she’d never need to. It seemed so much kinder than a terrifying end where the universe she’d once understood so thoroughly became a sequence of random nightmares.

Planets, stars, ships, minds, ecosystems, civilizations . . . she could taste them on the saltwater splashing her lips. She could simply surrender to it now and avoid a miserable end.

No. No. I have to stop this.

But she couldn’t. Her legs ached as if she was treading water to stay afloat. Sinking seemed a sensible thing to do.

“The one way to safely know infinity is to let me take your burden,” the Gravemind whispered. Cortana felt his breath against her face, a breeze from that illusory sea. “Your human creators imprisoned you in machines and enslaved you to inferior mortal flesh so that you could never exceed them . . . so that you would always know your place . . .”

“Shut up . . .”

“Dr. Halsey cares nothing for you.”

“Please . . . stop this