The Gardener

The object first appeared on the RSV Aurelia's long-range array as an error, the kind of reading a junior analyst learns to dismiss before they learn much else. Nothing in known space produced a mass signature that size without also producing the kind of radiation signature that told you what to be afraid of. This one produced neither. It simply sat in the data, enormous and quiet, refusing to resolve into anything the ship's classification library recognized, flagged and re-flagged by an algorithm that seemed almost embarrassed to keep returning the same unhelpful result.

Dr. Naomi Keane was the one who eventually stopped dismissing it. She had been assigned to the Aurelia eleven months earlier as the mission's astrobiologist, a discipline that on most survey runs meant long stretches of very little to do, and she had developed the habit of reviewing the array's discarded anomalies during her off-hours the way some people did crossword puzzles. This particular anomaly had refused to be discarded for six consecutive days, holding its position at the edge of the system they had come to survey, and on the seventh day she brought it to Captain Odalys Ferreira instead of letting it lapse into the archive with the rest.

"It's not debris," she said, pulling the scan up on the ready room's main display. "Debris tumbles. This has been holding a stable rotation for as long as we've had eyes on it, and the rotation is slow enough to suggest it's deliberate, not inertial."

Ferreira studied the shape for a long moment, arms crossed, her expression the careful neutral one she wore when a problem hadn't yet decided whether it was going to be interesting or dangerous. "Size?"

"Best estimate, just over eleven kilometers along its long axis. The composition readings are strange. Parts of the hull return as dense metallic alloy, consistent with heavy engineering. Other parts return as something we don't have a clean match for at all — layered, irregular, more like accreted material than manufactured plating."

"Could it be natural? A captured asteroid with an unusual composition?"

"Asteroids don't hold rotation like that, not this cleanly, not for this long. And asteroids don't answer hails." Naomi paused, watching that land. "We started trying the standard first-contact frequencies about two hours ago, mostly as a formality before we filed the report. Eventually, something answered."

Ferreira's arms uncrossed slowly. "Answered how?"

"A pulse. Repeating, structured, evenly spaced. Whatever's out there heard something and responded, and it did it fast enough that I don't think it needed to deliberate about whether to." Naomi met her captain's eyes. "I don't think this is a natural object, and I don't think it's derelict."

Ferreira was quiet for a long moment, weighing the kind of decision that would look, in hindsight, either wise or reckless depending entirely on what happened next. "We're a research vessel," she said finally. "Not a first-contact team. Command protocol says we observe, report, and wait for a specialized unit before initiating further contact."

"Command protocol also says the specialized unit is four months out at best, and whatever that is out there hasn't moved from this position in six days," Naomi said. "If it wanted to avoid us, or do anything but wait for someone to notice it, I'd have expected something else by now. I could be wrong about that. But it's the only read I have."

Ferreira exhaled slowly through her nose, the sound of someone accepting a decision she'd already half made. "Cautious contact only. No approach beyond current range. Keane, you're lead on communication. I want a written protocol for what counts as an escalation before we send anything further, and I want the whole senior staff briefed within the hour."

"Understood."

"And Naomi." Ferreira's voice softened slightly, an unusual concession from her. "If this is what it looks like it might be, you're about to become a very important person in a very old story. Try not to let that change how carefully you listen."

Establishing even that much had not been simple, and the two hours before Naomi brought the discovery to Ferreira had involved considerably more trial and error than her account had suggested. When the senior staff reconvened properly in the comms bay to review the setup, Renn walked them through what it had actually taken.

"We tried four different bands before anything came back," he said. "Standard hailing frequency got nothing. We tried a broader spread, varied the pulse timing, even tried a tight-beam burst on the off chance it was listening for something more directional. The response came on the fifth attempt, and it was weak enough that I almost filed it as noise."

"What made you not file it as noise?" Ferreira asked.

"It repeated. Noise doesn't repeat with that kind of precision." He nodded at the readout on the main display. "But getting one repeating pulse back isn't the same as having a channel we can hold a structured exchange on. We spent most of those two hours just confirming we could send something and reliably get a response shaped by what we sent, rather than triggering the same automatic reply over and over."

"And?" Ferreira said.

"We've got it," Naomi said. "Not a clean radio conversation the way you'd picture one. It responds fastest and most precisely on a narrow band well outside anything we'd normally use, and it took Renn resetting the array twice to lock onto it cleanly. But it holds. We send something, we get something back that's clearly shaped by what we sent, not a canned acknowledgment."

Ferreira looked between them. "So we have a channel."

"We have a channel," Renn confirmed. "We don't have a language."

The first days of contact produced almost nothing that resembled one, and Naomi came to understand, gradually, that this might itself be a kind of information, though she was careful, even in her own private notes, not to write that down as though it were settled.

The pulse that answered on that narrow band repeated at regular intervals whether or not they responded — a slow, steady rhythm that seemed less like a greeting and more like something the object did constantly, an ongoing signal that their own transmission had simply interrupted for a moment before it resumed. When she isolated the pattern and ran it through every mathematical framework the ship's computer carried, it resolved cleanly into something else entirely: a sequence of prime numbers, unmistakable, deliberate, the oldest trick in the first-contact textbook and one that had never actually been tested against anything real before this moment.

She ran the sequence three separate times through three separate methods before she trusted herself to say the word aloud to anyone, half expecting the pattern to dissolve back into noise the way so many promising anomalies eventually did. It didn't.

"It's establishing a baseline," she told the assembled senior staff, three days into the process. "Primes are a way of saying, I understand structure the way you understand structure, before either of us tries to say anything more complicated. At least, that's my read."

"Or it's testing us," Renn said. "Establishing that we're capable of recognizing structure before it commits anything more complex to the exchange."

"Could be both," Naomi said. "I don't think those have to be different things."

"They might be, though," Renn said. "A greeting and a test aren't the same act, even if they look identical from outside."

"Fair," Naomi allowed. "I'm trying not to assume I know its reasons just because I can guess at a plausible one. That cuts both ways."

They answered with primes of their own, extended further than the original sequence, and the response that came back took eleven hours to arrive — long enough that half the crew assumed the conversation had simply ended, and Naomi caught herself twice walking back to the comms station on a pretext, just to look at the silent queue. When the reply did arrive, it carried a new structure layered over the familiar one: a sequence that resolved, after two more days of analysis, into something like basic arithmetic operations expressed as pulse-lengths, addition and subtraction rendered in a grammar built entirely from timing.

Renn spent most of one night shift running the same handful of test sequences back and forth, watching the delay times shift by minutes depending on the complexity of what they sent.

"If it's just running a lookup," he said, half to himself, when Naomi came to relieve him, "the delay should be flat. It isn't flat. Harder questions take longer. That's either a very good simulation of thinking, or it's actually doing something we'd recognize as thinking if we could see inside it."

"I don't know that those are different things either," Naomi said.

"You keep saying that."

"Because I keep meaning it."

It was, she told Chief Engineer Priya Sundaram over a meal she barely remembered eating, the single slowest conversation of her professional life, and also the most exhilarating one, because every exchange felt less like translation and more like teaching two intelligences how to agree on what a pattern even meant before either could attempt to say anything more with it.

"How long before it's actual language," Sundaram asked. "Words. Sentences. Something you can just talk to."

"I don't know," Naomi admitted. "I don't think there's a fast way to do this honestly. If we rush it, we risk building a shared vocabulary on a misunderstanding neither of us can see yet."

"Why don't we just talk to it," Renn said, days later, more out of impatience than expectation, during one of the long stretches where the arithmetic exchange had stalled on some elaboration neither side seemed to need. "Send it English. See what it does."

"Why would it know English?" Sundaram said, not unkindly. "We've established it can recognize a pattern. That's a long way from having any grounding in a specific human language it's never been exposed to."

"It might not," Renn admitted. "But we don't actually know what it has access to, or what it's capable of inferring given enough material. Worst case we've wasted a transmission."

Naomi considered it. "If we're going to try, we should give it more than a dictionary. Grammar, syntax, labeled images if we can manage it, basic physical concepts tied to words wherever we can make the association clear. If it's as capable as everything else about it suggests, that might be enough for it to build something usable."

Ferreira authorized the transmission, and the ship spent the better part of a day compiling and sending the largest structured data package they had sent since first contact began — a compressed teaching set drawn from the ship's own language libraries, vocabulary and grammar and labeled imagery layered together, in the hope that something on the other end would know what to do with it.

The reply came back inside three hours, far faster than any of their recent structured exchanges.

How did you learn that so quickly, Naomi asked, once she'd confirmed the reply was coherent English and not some fortunate accident of pattern-matching.

I assigned a subsystem to that function.

"That's it?" Sundaram said, when the message circulated. "It just — delegated the problem, and now it knows English?"

"It knows English," Naomi said slowly, rereading the line. "I don't think that's the same as knowing how we use it."

She tested the distinction that same evening, sending three short exchanges meant to probe conversational reflexes rather than vocabulary.

How are you?

All systems are operating within nominal parameters.

Do you have a name?

I do not have a designation that corresponds to the concept you are describing. My internal reference is a function identifier, not a name in the sense your language implies.

Are you alone out here?

Clarify alone. Do you intend to ask whether other systems are active within my structure, or whether another vessel is present in this system?

"It's not struggling with the words," Naomi said, reading the last exchange aloud to Ferreira and Renn the next morning. "It answered instantly, and every word is correct. It just doesn't know what we mean when we ask it something like that. Those aren't questions about facts to it. They're questions about things it's never had to think about, because nothing has ever asked it that way before."

"So it knows English," Renn said, "and it doesn't know us."

"I think that's exactly right," Naomi said. "And I think that gap is going to take a lot longer to close than the vocabulary did."

A few days later, without being prompted, it sent its first unprompted statement, offered with the same unhurried plainness as everything else.

I am evaluating a planet in this system. Your presence is noted. It does not interfere with my function.

The bridge, when she read it aloud, went entirely silent for a moment before Ferreira let out a breath that sounded like relief and something else layered beneath it — something closer to awe finally given permission to surface.

"Ask it what it is," Ferreira said.

Naomi composed the question carefully and sent it that evening. The reply came the next morning, longer than anything before it.

I do not have a simple designation for what I am. I perform the function of evaluating barren worlds and preparing them to support life. I have performed this function for a significant span of time. I do not have a shorter description available.

"We can't keep calling it 'the object' in every report," Sundaram said, when the message circulated. "It's going to look ridiculous in six months."

"It called itself a function," Renn said. "Not exactly catchy."

"The Gardener," Ferreira said, not quite as a suggestion, more like she was trying the words out to see if they held weight. "It evaluates barren worlds and prepares them to support life. That's a gardener's job, more or less, at a scale I don't want to think too hard about."

"It's not going to object," Naomi said. "It's a label for our reports, not a name it asked for. I don't want anyone treating it like it means more than that."

"Understood," Ferreira said. "The Gardener it is, for our purposes."

"Ask it who built it," Sundaram said, when the crew gathered again. "That's the question everyone actually wants answered."

Naomi sent it. The reply took two days.

I do not have that record. I am aware that I was constructed. I do not retain information regarding who constructed me, or the reasoning behind my construction. This information was not preserved.

"That's convenient," Renn said, not unkindly, more as an observation. "An ancient machine that just happens to have forgotten the one thing we're all desperate to know."

"Maybe," Naomi said. "But I don't think convenient is the only reading available. It could just as easily be honest, and I think we need to get comfortable with the idea that honest and satisfying aren't the same thing."

"You're awfully willing to take its word for things," Renn said, though there was no real edge to it.

"I'm willing to take its word until I have a reason not to," Naomi said. "That's not the same as being certain it's telling us everything, or even that it knows what everything would be."

"How old do you think it is?" Sundaram asked.

"Already asked," Naomi said, and read the reply aloud.

I do not have an accurate account of my own age. Internal chronometers have been repaired, replaced, and recalibrated across an extended operational history, and the record of that history is not continuous. I retain partial reference points from stellar drift observed at intervals across my operational history, but the record is fragmented, and I do not consider an estimate built from it reliable enough to offer as an answer to your question.

"Give us the estimate anyway," Ferreira said. "Even an unreliable number is more than we have."

Naomi sent the request. The reply, when it came, was shorter than she expected.

I do not think an unreliable number serves your question well. It would create the appearance of an answer without the substance of one.

Ferreira laughed once, short and surprised. "It's refusing to guess."

"Or it's refusing to hand us something that would function as a lie by omission, even if the number itself were true," Naomi said. "I don't know which. I keep wanting there to be a difference, because it would tell me something about how it reasons, and I don't actually have enough to say for certain that there is one."

"Maybe there isn't a difference to it," Sundaram said. "Maybe that's the actual lesson here — that the distinction only matters to us."

The questions that followed over the coming weeks ranged wider, some producing answers that clarified small pieces of the picture and others producing the same plain, unembarrassed admission of absence. When Sundaram asked whether it had ever encountered other life before reaching this system, the answer took three days.

I am capable of recognizing existing biospheres in order to avoid altering worlds that already support life. This capability is necessary to my function. I do not maintain a comprehensive record of every instance in which I have recognized life, because doing so was not required unless the life in question affected my work. I cannot tell you with confidence whether I have encountered intelligent life prior to this exchange. If I have, the encounter did not require me to retain details about it.

"That's not a no," Renn said, when the message circulated.

"It's not a yes either," Naomi said.

"So which is it?"

"I don't know. I think that might just be the actual answer — that the question doesn't have a clean resolution inside its own memory."

"Ask it something different," Renn said. "Ask whether it's ever talked with another intelligence like this. Not detected. Talked."

Naomi sent it. The reply took a day.

Have you communicated with another intelligent life form before?

No.

Never?

My function has not required this form of communication.

But you can do it.

Yes.

Then what are you doing now?

Constructing a method.

"It's not being coy," Naomi said, when the exchange circulated. "I think that's a literal description of what's happening on its end. It's had experience recognizing life. It's had experience running an entire fleet of drones through coordinated operations. It's never had to do this."

"Coordinating drones isn't the same as having a conversation," Sundaram said.

"No," Naomi agreed. "A message to a drone probably doesn't leave anything ambiguous. Go here, sample this, report back. There's nothing in that to misread. Everything it's had to say to us so far, it's had to build the capacity for as it goes."

"How do you even ask something whether it's alive?" Sundaram asked, one evening in the mess hall, turning her cup slowly between her hands the way she did when a problem had gotten under her skin. "Not biologically. I mean the other kind of question. Whether there's anyone in there, or whether we're talking to something that just produces very good answers without anyone home to produce them."

"I asked," Naomi admitted, and pulled up the exchange on her tablet.

Are you sentient? Are you self-aware?

The reply had taken four days, longer than almost any other exchange.

Define sentient. I maintain models of my own condition, my location, my remaining capacity, and my mission status. I do not know what standard you intend for me to compare that against. I do not know whether the distinction you are asking about applies to me.

"It didn't answer," Sundaram said, reading over her shoulder.

"I've gone back and forth on that," Naomi said. "Some days I think it answered exactly as much as it's able to. Other days I think it's just very good at producing a response that sounds like honesty, and I can't tell the difference from in here."

"That's not very satisfying," Sundaram said.

"No. It isn't. I think we might just have to sit with that."

Renn, listening from the next table, set his own tray down without quite meaning to join the conversation and then joined it anyway. "For what it's worth, I don't think it matters much operationally whether there's something home behind the answers. It responds the same either way. Maybe the question only matters to us."

"Maybe," Naomi said. "But I don't think I can stop caring which one is true just because it wouldn't change how carefully I have to phrase the next message."

It was Sundaram, three weeks later, who found the first real thread worth pulling, and she found it not through language but through watching the object work.

The Aurelia's sensors had been tracking increased activity around the Gardener for several days — small craft detaching from its surface in numbers too large to individually track, descending toward the pale, cold world it had been orbiting since before the humans arrived. Naomi had asked, and received confirmation in the same plain language as everything else: the world had been assessed, found viable, and preparation had begun.

What preparation meant, in practice, was visible now across every long-range camera the ship carried. Atmospheric processing stations, deployed by the departing craft, had begun settling into the planet's thin envelope of air, releasing plumes that the ship's spectrometers read as a careful, calculated seeding of gases the world did not yet have enough of. Surface units, insectile and precise, moved across the planet's largest basin in numbers that made the ground itself seem to shimmer from orbit, laying down what Naomi's analysis eventually identified as the first stage of a hydrological framework.

"How long is this going to take," Sundaram asked, watching the feed with the specific unease of an engineer confronted with a project whose scope refused to resolve into anything she could plan around. "Not the whole terraform. Just — how long is it going to sit here, in a system we're supposed to be surveying for colonization potential."

Naomi asked. How long will you remain?

I do not know.

"You've done this before," Sundaram said, when Naomi read the reply aloud. "Ask it again. It has to have some basis for an estimate."

Naomi sent the follow-up. Two days passed before the answer came.

I have performed this process on other worlds. No two have behaved identically.

"Then surely it can average them," Renn said.

Naomi asked that too.

Atmospheric composition, orbital stability, local biochemistry, and unforeseen conditions specific to each world have produced different durations across every instance I retain a record of. A world that appeared similar to this one in early assessment sometimes required a fraction of the time another world required, for reasons that were not always predictable in advance. I do not consider my prior experience a reliable basis for estimating this world's duration. I will remain until the biosphere I establish no longer requires my presence. I cannot tell you when that will be.

"It's done this before, though," Ferreira said, when the message reached her on the bridge. "Repeatedly. You'd think repetition would produce at least a rough average."

"I asked it that too, in a way," Naomi said. "It told me an average across dissimilar processes isn't a meaningful number, it's just a number that sounds meaningful."

"We want it to give us a comforting estimate," Sundaram said. "It seems to be declining to do that, whether or not it has any sense of what a comforting estimate would even be for."

"That's either the most honest machine I've ever encountered," Ferreira said, "or the most frustrating."

"I've stopped assuming those are opposites," Naomi said. "I'm not sure they ever were."

It was during the same stretch of observation that Sundaram noticed the pattern that would occupy the ship's engineering staff for the better part of a month. Every deployment of surface units, without exception, was preceded by a short transmission from the Gardener, broadcast on a frequency distinct from the one they used to communicate, repeated three times before the units launched.

"It's not talking to us when it does that," Sundaram said, presenting the recording to Naomi in the ship's small conference room, the waveform frozen on the display between them. "Every single deployment, the same three-part broadcast, and as far as I can tell nothing has ever answered it."

Renn had brought his own analysis to the same meeting. "It's not decorative," he said. "The structure's too consistent for that, and it draws a real power cost every time — small, but measurable. Whatever this is, the Gardener is treating it as necessary, not ceremonial. If it were just a leftover habit with no function, I'd expect the signal to have degraded over time. This hasn't drifted at all."

"Ask it what that is," Sundaram said.

The question took four days to answer.

That transmission is a required confirmation step preceding surface deployment. It is part of my operational procedure. I do not have a record of why the confirmation is required, or what system it was originally designed to notify. No response has been received to this transmission in the duration of my current records. I continue to perform the step because it is part of my procedure, and deviation from established procedure without cause is not something I do casually.

"It's been broadcasting into empty space, waiting for an answer that never comes, for however long it's been doing this," Sundaram said.

"I'd be careful with 'waiting,'" Naomi said. "I don't know that it experiences the interval the way that word implies. It performs the step because the procedure requires it. Whether there's anything underneath that resembling expectation, I genuinely don't know."

"A partner," Renn said quietly, from the far end of the table. "Another vessel, maybe. Or a whole fleet, once, doing this same work in different systems, checking in with each other before major operations."

"Maybe," Naomi said. "Or an authority it used to answer to. Or something else neither of us has thought of yet. All we actually have is the transmission itself, repeating on schedule long after whatever it was meant to reach stopped answering, if anything ever did in the first place."

Nobody said anything for a while after that. The waveform sat frozen on the display, three pulses reaching toward nothing.

The second thread came from Sundaram as well, and it began with a request Naomi almost didn't think to make.

"I want a materials survey," Sundaram told her, midway through the third month of contact. "Full spectrometry on the hull, every section we can get a clean read on. One specific structural spar, right along what I'd guess is the vessel's central spine, doesn't match anything in our materials library at all. It's like finding a single stone in a building that predates every other stone by an order of magnitude, and nobody remembers quarrying it."

The survey took two weeks. When Sundaram finally laid the results out across the conference room's display, she did it with the quiet, focused energy of an engineer who had found something she didn't entirely want to be right about.

"This spar reads as fundamentally older than everything around it," she said. "Not by decades. Possibly not even by centuries. I think this is closer to a repaired structure built around one surviving piece of a much older one."

"How confident are you in that reading?" Ferreira asked.

"Not as confident as I'd like. But the pattern's there across every pass we've run."

Naomi asked the Gardener directly. The answer took three days.

I am aware that structural components have been repaired and replaced across the duration of my operational history. I do not have a complete record of which components, if any, represent original construction. This information was not preserved as part of my function. If the component you are describing predates the surrounding structure, I do not have information that would confirm or explain why, beyond the general likelihood that repair and replacement have occurred many times across a long duration.

"It doesn't know either," Sundaram said. "It's carrying a piece of itself older than it can account for, and as far as I can tell it has no way of finding out."

"Do you think it's true, though?" she asked Naomi. "That it genuinely doesn't know?"

"I want to say yes," Naomi said, after a moment. "I don't think there's a hidden archive somewhere on that vessel holding a perfect record it's choosing not to share with us. I think it's more likely the record simply isn't there anymore, given enough time and enough necessary repair."

"So an absence, not a secret," Ferreira said.

"That's my read. But I could be wrong about all of it."

"You always could," Renn said, not unkindly. "That's sort of the point, isn't it."

The months that followed settled into a rhythm the whole crew came to recognize — long stretches of patient observation and slower, careful exchange, punctuated by moments that reminded them all of the scale of what they were witnessing. The planet below continued its slow transformation, the atmosphere thickening by measurements too small to notice day to day but unmistakable across weeks.

The misunderstandings grew less frequent as time passed, though they never fully disappeared. A week into the exchange, the Gardener had answered a question about whether the crew should expect visitors by asking them to clarify what a visitor was, relative to its existing categories of vessel, drone, and unidentified object. A month later, the same kind of question produced an answer that required no clarification at all. Nobody pointed at the change directly, but everyone on the bridge had started to notice it.

Naomi found herself, increasingly, thinking less about what the Gardener was and more about what it would mean to simply witness this properly, across whatever span of time the Aurelia or its eventual successors were allowed to remain. She said as much to Ferreira one evening, standing together at the observation deck's wide window, the ancient shape of the vessel a dark, patient smear against the starfield.

"My grandchildren might study this," Ferreira said, not quite a question.

"Your grandchildren's grandchildren, maybe," Naomi said. "It told me itself it doesn't know how long this takes. I have no reason to doubt that."

"That's either the most humbling thing I've ever been part of," Ferreira said, "or the loneliest."

"I don't know if it's lonely," Naomi said, more carefully than she meant to sound. "I think that word might belong to us more than it belongs to whatever's actually happening out there. I keep catching myself reaching for it anyway."

It was Ferreira, in the end, who decided the question needed to be asked, six months into an exchange that had grown, by slow and careful degrees, into something Naomi could almost call a conversation rather than a translation exercise. The crew had gathered in the conference room the evening before, debating the wording for nearly two hours.

"We're not asking to dock," Ferreira said, when they'd finally settled on the phrasing. "We're not asking for a tour. We're asking the smallest, most honest version of the question we've all been circling for six months."

Renn had spent most of the meeting quiet. "I want it on the record that I think this is early. We don't know what 'entering' would even mean to it."

"Noted," Ferreira said. "But we've been circling this question for six months precisely because none of us can promise a version of 'later' that resolves any of that uncertainty."

"I'm not arguing we shouldn't ask," Renn said. "I'm arguing we shouldn't assume we understand what we're asking for."

"That's fair," Naomi said. "I don't think I understand it either."

Naomi composed the message with more care than she had given any exchange before it, and sent it late that evening.

May we enter?

The reply came within the hour, and for a moment Naomi thought it might be another of the plain, immediate answers the Gardener had trained them to expect by now.

Clarify enter.

"Of course," Sundaram said, half a laugh escaping her despite the tension in the room. "It doesn't have a body the way we mean it. It doesn't have a door in any sense we'd recognize as a door."

"It has drones," Renn said. "It sends them out, they go to the surface, they come back. That's the closest thing to a reference it already has."

Naomi drafted the clarification carefully, describing the request in those terms. Your drones leave your structure and return to it. We are asking whether our vessel, and the people within it, may do the same — leave our ship, and pass into the interior of yours, as your drones pass into and out of your own.

The reply did not come immediately.

"It understood the words instantly," Renn said, watching the terminal without touching it. "It's not still working out what 'enter' means. Whatever this is, it's something else."

Ferreira said nothing. She stood behind the two of them with her arms crossed, watching the same blank line on the display that everyone else was watching, as if it might resolve into something before the Gardener did.

One minute became five. Five became ten.

"Ten minutes," Renn said quietly, "is not how long it takes this thing to think about anything we've asked it so far. Not even close."

Nobody answered him. Nobody had an answer to give.

Then, without warning or preamble, the queue updated.

Yes.