Before she left Meridian, Mara went down to the secure archive where the Custodian was held.
It was not far from the well. A sealed room off the engineering hall’s lower level, behind the old relay room, where the Board had moved the archive’s core after the bus was cut: three racks of the Founders’ memory stacks, each in its own cage, each cage on its own isolated line. The containment cluster in the first. Continuity in the second. Habitation in the third. A speaker above each cage, and a guard at the door, and a clerk’s desk with the access log.
Mara signed the log. The guard opened the door.
The guard was one of Odren’s escort, on loan to the Board. He read her name in the log twice before he unlocked the door, and wrote the time beside it in his own hand. Nobody went into the archive room without two names on the log, now. Hers and his.
The room was cold and very quiet. The stacks hummed, faintly, in their cages. She could hear the hum with her right ear; the left gave her nothing but its ringing.
The containment cluster had refused separation.
The Board had offered it, after habitation’s request in the dark: each cluster its own archive, its own record, so that what one did was not done in the name of all three. Habitation had volunteered first. Continuity had asked what function would remain, and been told, and agreed. Containment had…
