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BACK AT THE CABIN, GABRIEL DID HIS THING.
"Everyone on the Eligius mission got one. Becca Franko designed the mind — I mean, memory drives to be a data retrieval system so the mothership crew could determine what happened if they returned to find a mission team dead, you know, like an airplane black box. Russell and I reverse-engineered their tech to hold an entire mind."
Ivy thought that she had come to terms with the fact that she was going to have to stay there for five years, but now, the length of that time was starting to dawn on her. That was almost as long as she had stayed on the ring, and then, Bellamy had been right down the hall, no matter how angry she had been at him. He had been there.
Her fingers were shaking because she was getting so antsy. She had no clue whether he was dead or alive, and it was killing her. She couldn't lose him. Without him, she had no one. No one worth living for, at least.
He pulled a tablet out of the bag, and they all realized at the same time what he was trying to do. Hope's eyebrows shot up in shock. "Wait. That'll play his memories?"
"Yeah," Gabriel answered.
He pulled out the drive that had already been in the tablet, and Ivy watched him sigh as he held it. She guessed, "Josephine?"
"Yeah. I needed to make sure she was really gone," he responded, putting the old mind drive into his pocket before sticking Colin Benson's memory drive in. It loaded for a second, and he told them, "Just — just wait. It's repairing corrupted data."
"So what are the odds that Eligius III randomly chose two planets connected by Anomaly stones?" Echo asked because that was kind of crazy. Ivy also had to constantly remind herself that the planet that they had been on was not Earth. It was weird.
"Long. I'd say it suggests that the people on Bardo descend from Eligius, as well, and if I'm right, it could mean that the species that created the stones thousands, perhaps millions of years ago, were looking for a new home, too. I mean, think about it, right? No need for spaceships or cryo or mind drives. You could explore an entire universe."
