Of all my stories this is the one I understand least, and I have stopped hoping to understand it completely. Laura is an archaeologist, and the ruins on her table belong to a stranger kind of past: biogenetic artifacts, structures built by embodied artificial intelligences. Her craft is to tell whether a given artifact came from human hands or from a machine mind. The difference has begun to blur.
When she activates the symbiotic integrator she expects a routine verification. What reaches her is a revelation with the weight of a religious experience and, in the same moment, the ecstasy of a living body. It goes beyond the limits of human perception, which suggests that she meets something humanity has never met, something beyond nature.
I have written the last paragraph of this story more than once, and each time the room seemed to go quiet in its own way.
How does one set such an experience into a microstory? Words reach the near shore. Image and sound go somewhat farther. I am still looking for the rest, and I mean to keep looking in the open, where you can watch.