It was beautiful, a sculpture of light and crimson smoke.

“This is Mine One,” Geador said gently. “The first mine of all. And it is built on the ruins of the primeval galaxy — the galaxy from which humans first emerged.”

“The first galaxy?”

“But it was all long ago.” He moved closer to her. “So long ago that this mine became exhausted. Soon it will evaporate away completely. We have long since had to move on…”

But that had happened before. After all humans had started from a single star, and spilled over half the universe, even before the stars ceased to shine.

Now humans wielded energy, drawn from the great gravity mines, on a scale unimagined by their ancestors. Of course mines would be exhausted — like this one — but there would be other mines. Even when the last mine began to fail, they would think of something.

The future stretched ahead, long, glorious. Minds flowed together in great rivers of consciousness. There was immortality to be had, of a sort, a continuity of identity through replication and confluence across trillions upon trillions of years.

It was the Conflux.

Its source was far upstream.

The crudities of birth and death had been abandoned even before the Afterglow was over, when man’s biological origins were decisively shed. So every mind, every tributary that made up the Conflux today had its source in that bright, remote upstream time.

Nobody had been born since the Afterglow.

Nobody but Anlic.

“…Come back,” Geador said.

Her defiance was dissipating.

She understood nothing about herself. But she didn’t want to be different. She didn’t want to be unhappy.

There wasn’t anybody who was less than maximally happy, the whole of the time. Wasn’t that the purpose of existence?

So, troubled, she gave herself up to Geador, to the Conflux. And, along with her identity, her doubts and questions dissolved.