I came back screaming.
Not from fear.
Not even from pain, though there was plenty of that.
Being born, it turned out, was an exercise in violent compression and blinding light and the sudden catastrophic awareness of cold air against skin that had never felt cold before.
I screamed because that was what the body did, what the lungs demanded, what the nervous system fired as pure reflex in response to the shock of existence returning all at once.
I screamed, and in the back of my skull, a voice spoke.
"Neural interface active. Cognitive mapping in progress. Warning: host body is neonatal. Motor control at two percent functional. Language output nonexistent. Estimated time to basic voluntary motor control: four to six months. Estimated time to speech approximation: ten to fourteen months. Recommend minimal external stimulation response until developmental baseline is established. Elara. Are you processing?"
"I'm processing," I thought back.
"Give me a second."
A second was generous.
I didn't have the architecture for seconds yet.
The brain I'd been given was brand new, neurons firing in raw cascades with no filter and no framework to catch anything.
I could feel the weight of my own eyelids.
I could feel each individual finger as a separate overwhelming event.
The light in the room was agony.
Someone was speaking above me, a voice low and exhausted and cracked open with something I recognized immediately as relief, and there were hands on me.
Large.
Warm.
Terrifyingly gentle.
I focused on those hands.
They were an anchor.
Elara, I reminded myself.
That's not your name anymore.
Dr. Elara Voss.
Thirty-four years old.
Twelve patents.
One world-changing invention.
One bullet in the back of the skull in a parking garage in San Francisco at 11:47 PM on a Tuesday.
I remembered the cold of the concrete rising up to meet my cheek.
I remembered the way my phone skittered out of my hand when I fell.
I remembered, in the last three seconds of consciousness, thinking not about my life or my losses or the things I'd left unsaid, but about ARIA.
About whether the backup I'd hidden would survive.
About whether anyone would ever find it.
About whether the work would die with me.
The work had not died with me.
Neither, apparently, had I.
"Cognitive function intact," ARIA said.
"Memory architecture preserved at 98.7 percent fidelity. Anomalous gap of approximately 0.3 percent, likely irretrievable. Unknown mechanism of transfer. Current hypothesis: unknown. Recommend data collection before forming conclusions. Secondary note: you appear to have been reborn. I thought you should know."
"Thank you, ARIA. I noticed."
"You're welcome."
Even inside my own head it was flat.
Precise.
Completely devoid of anything resembling acknowledgment that what had just happened was extraordinary.
I had died and come back and ARIA's first response was to run a diagnostic and deliver a status report.
In a previous life I had found that maddening.
Right now, in this screaming overwhelming lightblasted moment, I found it the most comforting thing I had ever heard.
A face appeared above me.
A woman, young, maybe twenty-five, dark hair plastered to her forehead with sweat, eyes red-rimmed and exhausted and full of something so raw it took me a moment to identify it.
I had spent most of my adult life in labs.
I was out of practice with certain human expressions.
Love.
That was love.
Immediate, total, and completely unearned by anything I had done.
"She's beautiful," the woman whispered.
Another voice answered from somewhere to my left, male and rough with emotion.
"Look at her eyes. Mira, look. She's looking right at you."
I was, in fact, looking right at her.
I was cataloguing.
The bone structure.
The coloring.
The quality of the candlelight, which told me oil or tallow rather than wax, which told me lower income.
The walls behind her were clay and river stone.
The smell of the room was woodsmoke, dried herbs, and the metallic undercurrent of blood and birth.
The ambient sound profile said small single structure, rural, no crowd noise, wind pushing through gaps in the walls, animals somewhere close outside.
"Summary of environmental data," ARIA said.
"Pre-industrial. Likely feudal or early medieval social structure based on architectural and material indicators. No detectable electromagnetic fields. No synthetic compounds in air composition. No evidence of internal combustion technology. We are significantly off-grid."
"Understatement of the century," I thought back.
"What's our connectivity situation? Can you reach anything externally?"
"Negative. I have no external access of any kind. I am operating entirely within your neural architecture. All models, all reasoning capacity, all memory. Fully functional. Fully isolated. We are each other's only resource."
I let that settle.
I was a newborn in what appeared to be a medieval world with no technology, no resources, no allies, no identity, and no body capable of doing anything more sophisticated than blinking and crying.
I had a mind I could not demonstrate for at least a year without destroying the carefully normal childhood I would need to construct.
I had ARIA, present and precise and entirely contained within my own skull.
And somewhere behind the noise of newborn sensory overload and the weight of a life that had just ended with concrete and blood, something in me went quiet and still and cold in a way that had nothing to do with the room temperature.
Not acceptance.
Not peace.
Calculation.
I had been killed because I built something that threatened the people who controlled information and technology and power.
I had been silenced because I was too effective, too independent, too close to making the gatekeepers obsolete.
A clean professional hit that was never solved and never meant to be solved because the people who ordered it owned the people who would have investigated it.
This was a different world.
Different gatekeeping.
Magic instead of money, bloodline instead of venture capital, the church instead of regulatory capture.
But the architecture was identical.
It was always identical.
Power concentrating at the top.
Knowledge withheld from the bottom.
The many kept deliberately small so the few could stay obscenely large.
They killed me once.
They would not get a second chance.
"I am noting elevated activity in the prefrontal cortex analog," ARIA said.
"Are you already planning something?"
"Always."
"You are thirty minutes old."
"Your point?"
A pause.
Just long enough to register.
"No point," ARIA said.
"Continuing environmental assessment."
The woman named Mira was holding me now, wrapped in rough spun cloth that scratched against skin that had never been touched before, pressed against a heartbeat that was steady and warm and completely unaware of what it was cradling.
The man appeared at the edge of my narrowing vision, broad and dark-haired with eyes bright and wet in the candlelight.
He reached out and touched my cheek with one careful finger the way you touch something you are afraid to break.
"Vesper," my mother said softly, like she was tasting the word for the first time.
"My evening star."
Vesper.
I turned the name over in the quiet of my mind.
Evening star.
Something that only appeared after the light died.
She meant it tenderly.
She had no idea how accurate it was.
I let my eyes close.
I let my tiny fists relax.
I let the newborn body do what newborn bodies do, sink into warmth and the specific exhaustion of having just arrived somewhere enormous.
I performed sleep the way I would spend the next sixteen years performing everything: carefully, convincingly, completely.
My mind did not sleep.
"Resource inventory," ARIA said.
"Current assets: one functional human body, neonatal stage. One intact AI system, locally housed within host neural architecture. Combined knowledge base includes engineering, materials science, chemistry, physics, computer science, molecular biology, economics, rhetoric, history, three spoken languages, one complete programming language set, and general scientific methodology. Practical application timeline severely delayed by host body limitations. Projected timeline to first meaningful action: eighteen to twenty-four months minimum."
"We've worked with worse," I told ARIA.
"We have not worked with worse. We have never worked with anything remotely like this."
"No," I agreed.
"But we're working with it now."
"Acknowledged."
Outside the small clay house on the edge of a kingdom I did not yet know the name of, the evening star burned cold and steady in a sky I had never seen before.
I catalogued the cracks in the ceiling above me.
I mapped the dimensions of the room by sound.
I began composing, in the deepest and most private architecture of my new mind, the first outline of a plan that would take years to execute and that no one in this world was remotely prepared for.
I was thirty minutes old.
I had already started.