Anna follows the ghost across the galaxy, curled up into a ball inside her pod. She spends an eternity like this—drifting past stars and planets and the deep, never-ending void in between. Drifting, just in general. She sleeps little, thinks even less.

If she died like this, she wouldn’t even notice. The nanobots who keep her clean and fed and physically functioning buzz around her like a swarm of insects—too small to perceive with anything other than a vague sense of familiarity. Perhaps they’d just keep doing their job. Cleaning away until there was nothing left of her. Just an empty pod on a trajectory to nowhere.

Nothingness is making her morose. Nonsensical, too. It’s not like the nanobots would ever let her die.

She can’t stay like this forever. A journey presupposes a destination. An ending. In here, she can pretend she’s not a body, not a person turned into something else. Just a flicker of a thought, that moment just before falling asleep. That all of her fits into a fraction of a second.

She knows what this is called. Dissolution of the self. Neda warned her about it before their nanobot integration. She’d made her read articles about the topic—her own as well as others’—filled with medical jargon. Anna’s eyes had skipped right over the text. The side effects weren’t common in the older models, but the ones Neda had crafted herself were still highly experimental. Like everything Neda touched, they were perfect. Little machines of wonder. It was only in the face of Anna’s own integration that the possibility of something unforeseen had given Neda pause—a ripple of uncertainty in her unwavering confidence. Now, in the midst of it, this dissolution doesn’t feel as bad as she or the articles made it out to be. And considering everything else, it seems like a small thing to worry about.

The ghost had changed course here, and Anna’s ship adjusts accordingly. She doesn’t feel the shift, but the pleasant voice of the autopilot lets her know. Anna stays in her pod, suspended in time and responsibility. She keeps drifting, imagining fingers ghosting over the ship’s controls. Steering, guiding. Fingers on her bare skin, her back, her thighs.

She stays like this for another minute or day or year. Then, emerging from the darkness and growing bigger and brighter, there is a star.

It’s ancient. Red and tired. Anna can relate.

There’s a planet, too. Even here, at the end of everything, still pulsing with life.  This is where the ghost had traveled. So, Anna follows.

The ship sets down, burning a circle of black into the tall grass. Anna’s pod opens like a flower, metal petals unfurling to release her. She’s naked for a moment before the nanobots cling to her skin, and cloud around her head like a halo. Her muscles should have shriveled and atrophied during the journey, but the bots are there as well, working away. She walks down the gangway, every step heavy in the unfamiliar gravity. This world is different from the last, bathed in an eternal twilight, with the ancient star big and daunting just above the horizon. Anna assumes this air would have been toxic to her if she had still been fully human.

The grass is familiar. Bushes and trees, of a kind. She clicks her visor into place and there it is, the ghost walking just ahead of her. Leftover particles of nanobots mimicking a silhouette that’s only vaguely humanoid. Still, Anna thinks she’d recognize Neda anywhere.

It’s easy to get wrapped up in it—the sight of the sparkling impression of her love on this alien landscape. The feeling of open space and moving muscles and wind on her skin. But the timer had started counting down as soon as her pod opened, and this isn’t what she’s here for. She just needs to get the map, the next set of instructions, and then leave as quickly as possible. The nanobots buzz faintly like wasps, angry and sharp and just beyond her reach.

Ahead of her, the ghost moves, silent as ever, and Anna follows.

There’s a village, nestled against the edge of what some might call a forest. Spindly trees twist themselves up into the sky, their leaves so dark that they are almost black. Anna counts two dozen houses—small, squat buildings partially reclaimed by nature. She knows they’re abandoned before she even reaches the first one. She stops, one hand on the fence surrounding the closest house. Both are built from pale wood, tinged a light pink in the sunlight. Climbing vines have swallowed up most of the building. Heart-shaped leaves cover almost every inch of the facade. Even through the dark green, Anna recognizes the familiar shape of the window and door frames that come with the Settlers’ Essential Kit. The people here have found a way to make them look almost cozy. Behind the window panes there’s only darkness. The front doors stay firmly closed. It’s eerily quiet. There are no birds nearby. No audibly noticeable lifeforms at all.

Anna lets her gaze wander. The houses are arranged in groups of four or five, with plenty of space in between. Everything according to code. Here and there, the remnants of gardens are still noticeable through the high grass. And throughout the village, visible only through Anna’s visor, are the paths of the ghost. The nanobots leave a faint glowing trace on whatever they touch. On whatever Neda has touched.

She’s spent time here, Anna realizes as she follows the nanobots. She didn’t just pass through. If Anna dialed up the sensitivity, the whole place would light up with Neda’s presence.

She turns her head, a little overwhelmed at the sight of it. The ghost is manifold here—Neda’s form walking back and forth between the houses. Paths she must have taken more than once. Perhaps multiple times a day. The frequency of it, the overlap, makes her look fuzzy. Too many nanobots are trying to occupy the same space, but enough time has passed for them to settle into an uneasy truce. Once Anna passes through the ghost’s path, they begin swirling anew—awoken from their slumber.

Dread settles in her chest, heavy as a stone. This is a tale she knows.

The schoolhouse is easy enough to spot, marked by the swing set out front. Anna has seen this swing on a hundred planets, orbiting a hundred stars. She hasn’t seen a child on one in decades.

Wildflowers grow high on the path in front of the school. Clouds of pollen lift into the air as Anna makes her way toward the entrance, leaving smears of pale yellow on her skin before the nanobots wipe them away.

There’s a single classroom. The large board at the front, the finest of Settlers Inc.’s technology, is dark and unresponsive. Desks and chairs are still standing in their orderly rows, covered in a thin layer of gray dust. Painted pictures line the walls. Anna has always liked classrooms like this—not just because they remind her of Neda.  They’re colorful. They have character. You cannot coop up a bunch of children for hours every day without them making the space their own. The windows are overgrown with something akin to ivy from the outside, but Anna can still make out the paper snowflakes stuck to the glass. Does it snow here? Or was that a dream they brought with them?

The ghost sits on the teacher’s desk, legs crossed and nanobots humming. Neda’s desk. Anna traces the edge of the white wooden tabletop, leaving a clean line in the dust. The ghost doesn’t look at her.

Neda has always loved teaching. She’s always been good at it, too.

Anna can see her here. Not the faint glow of a ghost’s impression, but her. The way her face lights up when she talks about the wonders of the universe. Her hands, her body language, as she breaks down biology, physics, and mathematics into something even Anna could understand. Her smile.

Anna closes her eyes. When she opens them again, she’s alone. Just her and the millions of microscopic bots repeating the patterns of the love of her life, over and over again.

This isn’t doing her any good.

This isn’t what she came here for.

She doesn’t find the map in Neda’s desk—only more arts and crafts, and a stack of photographs. They’re the real deal, glossy printed paper. Anna thumbs through them, curiosity getting the better of her. Children smile at her, bright-eyed and happy. They look human, or something genetically close to it. They have the round soft faces of prepubescence and the long-limbed gangliness of the spaceborn. In some of the shots Anna can see the spot on their necks where the gene patch sits underneath their skin, adapting their bodies to this planet. It’s a slow process. They must have spent years preparing during their journey here, and then probably a few more months in low orbit, just to be sure that the gene adaptation was accurate.

Neda’s face hits her like a punch to the stomach. It’s been so long since she’s seen her. The real her. In the picture, she’s smiling. Her dark hair falls over one shoulder. She has her arms around some of her students. They look thin and tall next to her, despite their obvious youth. She looks... proud. Happy.

It twists in Anna’s gut like a knife.

There’s another picture. Neda at her desk. Anna traces the familiar lines of her. Her nose, her brow. The camera didn’t capture the halo of nanobots that must have surrounded her. She looks just like Anna remembers her. Just like before.

Anna knows the nanobots are making the air of this planet breathable for her. Or, to be precise, they make her lungs capable of breathing this air. The bots were descended from the same technology in those kids’ gene patches, after all. But standing here, with these pictures in her hand, it doesn’t feel like that at all. Her chest is tight, too tight for breathing. The pictures fall onto the desk, scattering as they slip from her fingers. Her nanobots hum around her, trying to find the cause for the spike in her heart rate. Trying to find the fault, the mistake in their design.

She pushes away from the desk. The ghost still sits there, glowing and pulsing and not looking at her at all.

She has to get out of here.

Outside, the temperature has dropped a little as the red sun begins its achingly slow descent toward the horizon. Anna feels it just before the bots adjust to the difference, a split-second of near discomfort. She takes a deep breath, holding on to the door frame. She’s shaking a little, but her heart rate has normalized. The cloud of nanobots settles around her head once more, satisfied that her body isn’t failing or going into catastrophic shock. Their low hum is almost a comfort in this silent, evening air. Anna takes a few steps through the wildflowers just to hear the sound of her own footsteps and the soft rustling of the plants.

She tries to imagine this place full of life and people. How long has it been since she last heard another person’s laughter or voice? Since she talked to anyone? She opens her mouth. She expects to be hoarse, her vocal cords rusty after such a long time of disuse. But of course, the nanobots had taken care of that as well. When her wail rises into the air, clear and bright and unimaginably loud, it feels fake, somehow. The sound doesn’t echo. It leaves no mark, it elicits no answer. It just stops, as abruptly as it began.

She finds the ghost again, its form cross-legged on the ground in front of the schoolhouse. The grass grows tall here as well, and Anna presses it down to see all of her, the glittering nanobots following the shape of her. Anna recognizes this position, her back slightly hunched, her arms cradling the invisible instrument. She cannot hear the setar over the distance of time but she remembers its sound. Carefully, she sits down across from the ghost, watching its fingers move over strings long forgotten.

Neda must have sat here many times, for her nanobots to leave such a clear impression. Anna imagines her here, her skin glowing in the soft hues of a long twilight. Her dark hair falling like a curtain as she plays. She would have smiled, Anna thinks, and aches at the thought.

It’s not the same as the pictures.

It’s not the same as the real thing.

She’s almost close enough to touch, for her nanobots to mingle with the ghost’s. How often have they sat like this—Anna watching Neda play, waiting for the moment she’d look up and gift her with that smile? For the moment she’d reach out and touch her instead of the strings?

When the ghost’s fingers brush against her ankle, she doesn’t flinch. The touch is so familiar. Her nanobots mimic the movement, pressing against Anna’s skin. Across space and time, Neda’s fingers find her and Anna breaks apart at the seams—slowly at first, and then all at once. She hasn’t felt the touch of another person for years, for eons. She feels the last tone of the setar reverberate through her bones, settling somewhere deep inside her ribcage.

“Ah,” she says and the word is a sigh and a sob and the impossibility of language at the edge of the universe.

She thinks the forbidden thought, the one that digs and bites and burrows. Have I lost you and don’t even know it yet?

Her chest aches. Breathing hurts.

Slowly, the ghost pulls back its hand, the pressure leaving Anna with a familiar yearning. She watches, waiting for the clue that she knows will come. An arm outstretched, a pointing finger. How many times must Neda have repeated the gesture for the nanobots to leave a lasting trace? To leave these instructions?

Anna follows, as she always does.

The house at the edge of the village is small, almost swallowed up by the encroaching forest. When Anna pushes back the vines covering the front door, she knows she’s in the right place—even without the ghost’s guidance. The heart-shaped leaves are spotted with white, different from the ones she saw at the schoolhouse. Their veins have lost all color, like pale bones. Farther up, reaching for the sun’s red light, there are small white flowers, their petals odd and twisted. Anna adjusts her visor, carefully turning the dial at its side. There, the familiar shimmer. Nanobots swirl around the leaves and petals, following the stem up into the roots.  She hasn’t seen this level of corruption for many years. Neda must have liked it here, to risk staying for so long. Anna thinks of her smiling face in the pictures, her arms around her students.

How could Anna fault her for it? Can she say for certain that she wouldn’t do the same? Stay somewhere just because it felt a little bit like home?

She takes a deep breath and opens the door.

Inside, it doesn’t smell like Neda. It smells like dust and stale air and rot. As though the house has accepted its fate and given in to the embrace of the creeping forest. It’s dark, except where the thin fingers of fading sunlight shine through the gaps between the foliage that grows over the windows. Anna leaves the door ajar, her shadow stretching across the floorboards.

The room is sparsely furnished. If it weren’t for the nanobots clinging to every available surface, Anna never would’ve known that Neda had lived here. She takes a step into the dark.

There’s no ghost here, only Neda’s overwhelming presence. Weeks and months spent moving around this space. Jealousy pricks at Anna’s heart, sharp and petty. Neda built something for herself here. A life. Regardless of the consequences.

The kitchen window is broken. Green vines stretch out across the windowsill, up the wall to the ceiling. Their leaves are speckled with white.

How soon after Neda had left did the settlers notice the changes in the crops in their gardens? In the wood they cut down for their houses? In the water they drank and in the air they breathed? Anna wonders if they cursed Neda’s name as they left the planet they once called home.

There’s no organism that the nanobots won’t try to perfect. Nothing they won’t twist and change and optimize until it turns to poison. They stop short of changing the settlers themselves—full integration would be needed for that final step. But it’s enough to transform the world around them. To render the home for which they’d prepared themselves for years fully uninhabitable.

Anna thinks of the kids in the pictures. The gene patches on their necks. They’ll be old and gray before they adjust to another planet. Perhaps they’ll never set foot on solid ground ever again.

This is how it always goes.

Not for the first time in all the years following her across the universe, Anna wonders if Neda truly doesn’t know.

It’s easy to love, to follow her to the ends of all worlds. But to think her so callous, so selfish? So lonely that she would risk this?

How could Anna blame her?

How could she not?

She still remembers the look on Neda’s face when they realized what the nanobots did. When they realized there was no controlling them. She who was never lost for words or an explanation, rendered speechless—inconsolable in the face of what she had turned them into. The bots will twist and edit and overwrite, a never-ending loop until the organism is unrecognizable. A poison to everything they touch. The longer they stay in one place, the more they corrupt it.

Splitting up was Neda’s idea, attempting to minimize the impact of the nanobots on their surroundings. She set a path through the universe for Anna to follow, trying to find a place that would withstand them. A home they wouldn’t destroy.

It took a few dozen planets for Anna to realize the truth. Their whole plan had turned out to be pointless. Once a place is infected with the nanobots, it doesn’t recover. Once the process begins, it cannot be stopped. Neda leaves a planet when she fears the corruption becomes too much. She doesn’t see what Anna sees. The corruption doesn’t stop with her departure. It festers.

Anna has followed her path of destruction through countless systems. She’ll follow her through many more until she’ll catch up with her.

Until she finds a way to stop her.

Anna finds the map taped to the inside of the closet door. Several layers of star charts, stacked on top of each other in an intricate pattern, gleam in the last of the sunlight falling in through the open front door. Anna’s visor takes an initial recording. She’ll have to feed the route to her pod’s main computer manually later. Even at first glance, she can tell the ghost will lead her through at least one jump gate to another system. It will take years.

It will go as it always does. Neda will take the long way. Anna will follow, with the exception of select shortcuts. With a route this long, she’ll be able to close the distance between them by at least a decade. The fact that Neda had stayed here for so long helps, even though it pains Anna to admit it.

There’ll be more people on this path, more settlements. Some uninhabited planets in between as well—although Anna is loath to measure the damage done to an ecosystem by the effect the nanobots have on humans alone. It’s too easy to care first and foremost about the things that look like yourself.

Anna knows why Neda still seeks out these settlements. Why she doesn’t just jump from one empty rock to the next, in the hope of finding one the nanobots won’t drive to ruin. Perhaps she still tells herself it’s because she’s looking for help with her research. For someone to help her break this curse. But deep down, Anna knows better. She’s spent an eternity alone inside a pod flying through space, too.

She takes the star charts and tries not to think about Neda’s hands holding them, right here in the same spot, however many years ago. Sometimes she wonders if Neda can feel her closing in. If she can feel the breath on the back of her neck like Anna sometimes feels the presence of her, even without the impression her nanobots have left. It’s ridiculous, of course. It’s the isolation, the long-term space travel. Neda made her read all about those side effects as well.

She leaves the house, star charts in hand. Outside, the night sky is full of unfamiliar stars. The wind has picked up, rustling the leaves of the trees as Anna walks through the abandoned village back towards her pod. She pauses in front of the schoolhouse, one last time. The ghost sits in the tall grass, plucking at the strings of an invisible setar. From across time and space, Anna still thinks she can hear the music.

She wants to stay—the longing a physical ache in her chest. It’s not real. This place is damned, made worse with every second she lingers. The clock is ticking and she’s running out of time.

Somewhere out there, the ghost is already drawing a shimmering path to the next destination, beckoning her. And after another moment, just one more heartbeat, just one more breath, Anna follows.