Highlights
She shook her head with distaste. "I don't want to live forever," she said.
He smiled, his eyes twinkling. "Of course you do, you just don't know it yet."
Someday, she believed, she too would dream an endless dream. She did not want to live forever. But the beginning of that dream was far away.
The new meaning of death was complimented by a new meaning of life. This new meaning was extremely complex, even for her; life dealt with wholes much greater than the sums of their parts.
In those first moments of solitude, being alone seemed unnatural, as unnatural as the communion had seemed earlier; she felt the coldness that comes after a swim, when breeze strikes bare skin.
She remembered, he had known that she'd remember.
From her, Jack had learned the importance of making technology's steps small, making its pieces bite-size. He had learned this as he watched, in her disbelieving eyes, her reaction to the world he had planned.
For those who loved technology and breathed of it deeply, small bite-size steps were not important. It would have been easy to callously cast off those who did not understand or who were afraid. But Jack had thought of her, and had not wanted her to die.
Reading these glimpses of his past, she grew to know Jack better than she had ever known him in life. With her growing wisdom, she soon understood even the clarity of organization that encompassed this lone swatch of antiquity: the clarity too was of his making. He had believed in her. He had believed that one day she would search for him here. And he had known that, when she arrived, her expanded powers of perception would enable her to understand the message embodied in the clarity, and in all his work.
I loved you, you know, Jack told her across the millennia.
She wanted to answer. But there was no one to hear.
[...] how could she have hoped to get closer to him, than to live his vision of the future?
Only one small action, one appropriate action, remained that she could perform. She could remember forever.