He said: “As for what is hidden within me, whatever is behind the barrier of the Eighth Mental Structure, that I do not know. Perhaps my superiors encoded whole populations of noumenal personalities, copies of every one on Earth. Obviously you could not get those people out of me by torture, since I do not know myself.”
“Was Ulysses a real person, or fiction? Is a copy of him inside you?”
“I don't know. Could be. If you build a logic diamond large enough to house him, maybe he'll come out. Or lure him out with something he wants. But we cannot know beforehand. We are acting blindly.”
Her last words were these: “My machines can no longer edit my thoughts and satisfy my yearnings. I am no longer a Lady of the Silent Oecumene, since to be a Swan means to control all reality. I repent that we have destroyed the galaxy together, you and I. If we do not make peace now, if we do not love each other now, then all human life must die.”
By the time she was done speaking, Ao Ahasuerus was obliterated, her memories and thoughts overwritten and deleted, and, in her thought-space, wondering, astonished to find herself alive, was Penelope.
And Atkins felt Ulysses stir inside his thoughts and begin to wake.