The nothingness around her gave way to darkness, the darkness to twilight and the first dull stirrings of sensation, then to soft ground beneath her and warm golden light breaking above and her own awareness swimming hazily in the midst of it, her own small form lying curled in a bed of pink and yellow flowers that seemed familiar somehow, though she couldn't remember where she had seen them before.

MOMO sat up slowly, flowers brushing against her arms. Her head felt fuzzy, her vision glazed at the edges. When she pulled herself to her knees and tried to stand, the ground suddenly dropped out from under her as it did sometimes when she dreamed of falling and awoke with a jolt, only this time she saw pale watery blue and a blur of lights and faces beyond it, and she couldn't tell which side of dreaming she was on.

"--artificial personality layer activated--"

"--not responding--"

"--damn it, she's malfunctioning again, shut it down--"

She felt her body shudder and draw breath as if she was tethered to it from a great distance, and just as suddenly the images and voices retreated like the view at the far end of a telescope, and she crumpled to her hands and knees in the field, the soft ground pillowing her fall.

Instead of trying to stand again, she looked past the bed of flowers to the trees at the edge of the clearing, pastel foliage blending into watercolor clouds hanging low in the sky under the last fading stars. Patches of mist drifted nearer over the ground, spun to gold as they burned away in the light of morning. She recognized this place, felt certain she had been here recently, but her memories kept slipping away from her, insubstantial as the mist.

Then she saw the ship, a blue-white blade half-submerged in tall grass in the middle of the clearing, and her heart leapt and sent her staggering to her feet again, and she laughed this time when she stumbled and fell without pain and got back up and kept running.

"Jr.!" she cried, an instant before he caught her up in his arms and hugged her and swung her around so fast it felt like flying, and when he set her down her head was still spinning and his face was a blur. "I missed you so much!"

"I missed you too," he said, feigning nonchalance, but his voice was hoarse with emotion. "Man, you haven't changed one bit."

"I--I haven't?" She dropped her gaze self-consciously, realized her body was a child's, and then wondered why she thought it should be any different. "Oh."

Jr. laughed and broke into a broad grin. "Hey, don't worry about it. I'm still the same, aren't I?" Now that the world had stopped spinning and she could see his face clearly, she realized he hadn't changed either. But there was something strange about him too, something she couldn't place at first; maybe he just seemed unfamiliar because she hadn't seen him in two years. He jerked a thumb back toward the open airlock. "C'mon, the others are all inside. I can't wait to see the looks on their faces when they see you."

MOMO started to follow him, but hesitated. "Jr., wait. Are we ...." She looked back across the clearing. "Where is this place?"

He stared at her. For a moment his face went blank, and she realized what she had found so unsettling about him before, but then she stumbled again and the earth lurched away from her feet, and she glimpsed the room submerged in cold blue light, heard snatches of distorted conversation, before she came back to the ground, blinking, grasping at the important thing she had been trying to remember a moment before, but she had already forgot what it was.

Jr. kept staring at her, his hands perched on his hips and his head tossed back, the smile on his lips half-mocking, half-affectionate, the way she had remembered him these last two years. She wanted to run up and throw her arms around him again, but something held her in place. "The others are here too?" she said, trying to stare past him into the darkened passage.

"Yeah, and we even met up with chaos and KOS-MOS, can you believe that? And now that you're here, we can all be together again, just like the old days. Pretty cool, huh?"

MOMO nodded tentatively. "Y-yes, it's ... oh, Jr., it's wonderful! But ...." She didn't understand what was holding her back; she had waited all this time to see them again, but now her feet refused to lift from the soft ground. Something she was forgetting, something she had missed--something she noticed only by the shape of its absence-- "What about Ziggy? Is he with you too?"

"Huh?" Jr.'s smile didn't fade, but it was starting to look a little strained around the edges. "Is who with us?"

MOMO frowned, but then she realized he must be joking with her. "You know, Ziggy. Ziggurat 8? The old man?"

"Old man, huh?" Jr. scratched his head. "Well, Captain Matthews is getting pretty crusty, I guess, but you better not say that to his face or he'll kick you off the ship."

"No, I mean ...." But she forgot what she had been asking him, and she laughed, as much at Jr.'s remark as at her own absentmindedness. Then a knot of emotion surfaced in her throat, cutting off her laughter, and she realized just how much she had missed the captain and his boorish remarks, and Tony and Hammer's antics on the bridge, and Shion and Allen and the others, and the Elsa itself, and her own bunk in the women's cabin with her books and pictures on the shelves above her bed, and how happy she had been, and she wiped away tears with the back of her hand. "Sorry, I ... I guess I was thinking about something else."

Jr.'s grin deepened and he shook his head. "So come inside already! Shion's making curry for everyone, and I'll bet she could use some help, since the boys sure aren't doing a damn thing, Mary and Shelley don't cook, and KOS-MOS only does the dishes. And then you can tell us all about your adventures since the last time we saw you, and wait'll you hear about the crazy stuff we've been through, you won't believe half of it, and the other half you really won't believe--"

She realized she could move again, and followed him into the airlock.

Inside, she stood blinking in the sharp daylight. She had walked into a room much larger than the passage into the Elsa, a spare gray room with no furnishings or decorations other than the piano in the middle of it. Confused, she looked around for Jr., then forgot he had been there at all when she saw her mother seated at the bench, younger than MOMO remembered her and wearing a slim dark blue dress.

Juli looked up at her as she entered the room, and smiled. MOMO realized she had never seen her mother truly happy before, without the lines of pain and worry permanently etched around her mouth and eyes. "You're just in time for your lesson, MOMO." Juli rested a hand on the bench beside her. "Why don't you have a seat and play what we've been practicing together."

Feeling dazed, MOMO walked around to the other side of the bench--

--and her mother stood peering in at her from behind the blue screen in the cold room, her mother as MOMO remembered her, no longer young, her face still delicate but wide-eyed and stamped with fear, her voice from a long way off sounding filtered through water, saying "MOMO, if you can hear me, I want you to--" and MOMO shuddered but couldn't speak or move to respond--

--and sat down to play.

"That was beautiful," said Juli at the end of the first piece. By then the light outside had turned the color and thickness of amber as the sun sank across the lawn, although MOMO felt certain it had been morning just a few minutes ago. Juli brought her arm around MOMO's shoulders, drawing her gaze away from the window. "Your father will be proud of you when he gets home."

MOMO gasped. "Daddy?" She pulled her hands off the keys and turned toward her mother in awe. "Daddy's coming home?"

"Of course he is." Juli reached over and gently pushed a lock of MOMO's hair behind her ear. "He comes home every day around this time, remember? In fact, I think I just heard him come in."

"Really?" She leapt up from the bench, and Juli pointed toward a doorway at the far end of the room; MOMO hadn't noticed it until then. The afternoon light faded from the window as she crossed the threshold into the dark on the other side.

Her father stood facing a column of blue-green glass at the center of a circular platform, surrounded by computers and monitoring equipment. At first she thought the room was only a laboratory, but the walls shifted and slid under her gaze, unfolding into several rooms at once like the places she visited in dreams, and she recognized parts of her own bedroom, her garden in the courtyard, the Durandal's park, and perhaps a dozen other locations superimposed on the same space. The one trait they had in common was the feeling of contentment she associated with being there, a sense of comfort and security and warmth that seemed to radiate most of all from the blue-green column, as if it had been the source of those feelings all along, and everywhere else she had sought comfort was only a shadow, a shell of that place.

"Daddy," she whispered, and he turned at the sound of her voice and bent down to her, and his face looked as wise and kindly as she remembered from when she had met him in Labyrinthos. He hadn't recognized her then, and for a moment she didn't know if he would recognize her now.

"My daughter," he said, holding out his arms. "It's good to see you again."

MOMO swallowed, clutching the medallion at her collar. "You know who I am?"

Joachim nodded. "My second daughter, my dear MOMO. I've missed you."

"Is this--" She glanced around the platform, at the green glass column and the banks of monitors that surrounded it, mixed up with the flowerbeds from the courtyard and the furniture from her bedroom and the drifting lights of environmental bugs from the park. "This is where I was born, isn't it?"

"Yes, MOMO. This is where you were created, and this is where you belong. Here you will always be protected, surrounded by the ones you love. You'll never have to worry about being hurt or rejected or abandoned, and you'll never have to say goodbye to anyone ever again. And you will never have to grow older. You can stay just as you are now, forever."

"Forever?" Her gaze came to rest on the empty column. It looked warm, and she wanted to curl up inside it; suddenly she realized she was very tired.

"Forever." But it wasn't Joachim Mizrahi's voice anymore, and when she looked back in alarm, into red-lit eyes that were not her father's, it was too late, and the world went dark and glassy around her as she swayed and fell.

∞

The operator spun from his station. "It's no use! I'm not even getting a response anymore."

"Life signs stable. Higher cognitive functions offline." One of the standard 100 series glanced at the monitor, then at the figure suspended in the sphere of blue light across the room. Juli had brought MOMO from the dive lab to the 100-series maintenance center in a different sector of the building. "Third resuscitation attempt unsuccessful."

Juli grabbed the operator's shoulder. "Try again. One more time. Please."

"Ma'am, she's already sustained extensive trauma to her emotional circuits. If we try to start her up again, the shock could--"

"Fine!" she snapped, making him flinch. In an instant her manner had gone from imploring to commanding. "We'll shut her down and send her to Vector for repairs. Hurry up!" Pulling her connection gear out of her coat pocket, she stormed across the control-room floor toward the exit. On the way out, she passed another technician walking in.

The technician placed a hand on Juli's arm, but it was his urgent look that stopped her. "Excuse me, you're Dr. Mizrahi?"

"Yes. What is it?"

"Ah, status report on your subject in the cybernetics lab, the, uh ... Ziggurat type 8?" The technician held out a holographic panel. Juli stared at it, frowned, then pushed it back at him and walked out without another word.