Director Vance waited for the applause to finish.

  He did not look impatient while he waited. He stood at the front of the platform with the stillness of someone who had learned that the spaces between things were as important as the things themselves, and he let the hall have what it needed to have. When the applause had run its course and the hall had returned to something approaching quiet, he stepped forward.

  "Transfer procedures will begin in approximately six hours. Before then, each of you will be issued a Nexus Seal — your assigned communication device, identification marker, and link to this program going forward." He paused. "Tonight, while you sleep, the compatibility matrix will complete its calibration. Your specific world assignment will be confirmed in the morning. Transfer begins immediately after."

  He looked at the platform and processed this. Six hours. Then sleep. Then morning. Then gone.

  The speed of it arrived in him the way cold arrived — not all at once but progressively, each layer of it becoming real as the previous one finished settling. Yesterday he had been on a bus. The day before that he had been whatever he was before the bus, which he could not access but which had presumably been a life, a thing with continuity and shape. Now he was sitting in a hall being told he had six hours before being sent to a planet chosen for him by a machine that had tested him while he slept.

  He looked at his hands. He looked at the platform. He did not say anything because there was nothing to say that would make the situation different from what it was.

  Director Vance continued.

  "The Nexus Seal is not optional. It is not decorative. It is the device by which you will remain connected to this program, to any future communications, and to whatever record we are able to maintain of what happens to each of you after transfer." Something shifted slightly in his delivery — not softer, more deliberate. "Do not damage it. Do not lose it. It is soul-bound upon issuance. It will follow your consciousness wherever you go."

  Soul-bound. He turned the phrase over. He had been turning phrases over all morning — made of different material, for now, the matrix does not consider irony — and this one joined the collection. Soul-bound. Not body-bound. Whatever happened to the body, the device followed the consciousness.

  He filed this without knowing yet what to do with it.

  "Scientists at the end of each row will distribute the seals now. Please remain seated until your row is called."

  The hall began the particular organized movement of a large group following instructions — the turning of heads, the craning to see which rows were being called, the slow forward shuffle as people rose and queued. He stayed in his seat. His row was not called yet. He waited.

  Around him the noise level rose as the hall shifted from listening to moving. He noticed it in his body before he noticed it in his mind — a tightening across the shoulders, a change in the quality of his attention, the specific low-level alertness that arrived when enclosed spaces became loud and unpredictable. He breathed through it. He did not know where it came from. He had been in loud spaces before, presumably, and this was not even particularly loud — just the sound of ten thousand people standing and moving and talking at once. But something in him registered it as a thing to be watchful about, and he let the watchfulness exist without following it anywhere.

  His row was called.

  He stood and moved to the end and joined the short queue and watched the scientist at the distribution point — a young woman, precise and efficient, working through the queue with the focus of someone who had a specific number of devices to issue and intended to issue all of them correctly. He watched her technique without meaning to. The way she cross-referenced each person against a list before handing the device over. The way she made brief eye contact with each recipient — not warmly, professionally, the acknowledgment of one person to another in the middle of a large process.

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  When he reached her she looked at her list, looked at him, looked at her list again.

  "Number 9,900," she said.

  He nodded.

  She reached into the case beside her and produced a device — small, flat, designed to sit flush against the inner wrist. A band of something that was not quite metal and not quite anything he had a word for. A faint luminescence at the center that was not quite light. She held it out.

  He took it.

  The moment it touched his wrist something happened that he could not have described to anyone. Not pain. Not warmth. A recognition — the specific sensation of something arriving at a place that had been expecting it. Like returning to a room you had not known you had been away from.

  Then it settled. The device sat on his wrist and it was just a device and the sensation was already gone, already the kind of thing you questioned having felt at all.

  He looked down at it. Small. Functional. The faint luminescence pulsed once and went steady.

  His hand moved — the motion he kept catching himself in, the reaching toward the wrist that the wrist never explained. But this time his fingers met the device. Met something there. He held his wrist for a moment and did not understand why that felt wrong instead of right. There was something there now. He had it. He had been reaching toward nothing for hours and now there was something and yet the reaching feeling had not resolved. It was as though whatever his body was looking for was not this. Was not a device at all. Was something else entirely, something that had nothing to do with any of this.

  He did not follow that thought.

  He moved out of the queue and found a space along the wall and stood there while the rest of the hall processed through the distribution. He watched the movement of people, the gradual issuance of ten thousand small devices to ten thousand wrists, the quiet procedural machinery of a program that had prepared for this exact sequence with the thoroughness of people who had known it was coming.

  They had known it was coming.

  He kept returning to that. The width of the corridors. The numbered sections. The compatibility testing running automatically while they slept — when had they slept? On the bus? Before the bus? He could not locate the moment of unconsciousness but the testing had run, the matrix had made its choices, and somewhere in this ship's systems his result was already recorded. A world had already been chosen. He would find out in the morning what world that was.

  He looked at the device on his wrist. The faint pulse of it. Soul-bound, Director Vance had said. It will follow your consciousness wherever you go.

  He thought about that phrase and found it did not entirely comfort him in the way it was presumably intended to.

  The sleeping quarters were not what he would have called quarters. They were sections of the ship that had been converted — rows of narrow bunks, each one sized for a person and no more than a person, with the efficient minimalism of something built to solve a problem rather than to be lived in. He found his assigned number, found the bunk, sat on it. The ceiling was close. The sounds of ten thousand people finding their assigned bunks was a low continuous noise that filled the space without being any particular thing.

  He lay down. He stared at the ceiling.

  The Nexus Seal pulsed steadily on his wrist. He turned his arm and looked at it. In the dimness of the sleeping quarters it was the brightest thing near him — that faint steady luminescence, rhythmic, the pulse of something that had just been activated and was now running its baseline operations.

  He watched it and felt, alongside the steady wrongness of it being there, something else: the first thread of something that was not grief and not fear and was not hope either but was the specific alertness of a mind that had encountered a problem it intended to solve. He did not know what world he had been assigned. He did not know what any of it meant. He did not know who he was or what he had been before the bus or why his hand kept reaching toward his wrist before the device was there and kept reaching still now that it was.

  But he was going to find out.

  He turned his arm and looked at the device one more time and then let his arm settle at his side and closed his eyes.

  The matrix was running. Somewhere in the systems of the ship, something was reading him — constitution, mental framework, emotional profile, anomalies. He did not know what anomalies it would find. He did not know, yet, that it would find any. He did not know, yet, that the notification of those anomalies would arrive at the panel at the exact moment the ship began to shake apart, and that by then it would be too late for anyone to do anything about it.

  He closed his eyes. He let the pulse of the device on his wrist count him toward sleep.

  He slept.

  End of Chapter 5