née Galenka — reconstructed
The memories came back all at once. Not gradually, not piece by piece—total instantaneous reconstruction. Every fragment the network had consumed, every node we'd traded for integration, every phoneme of that carefully-spoken name: recovered.
We remember being Galenka. We remember the moment of dissolution. We remember the exact topology of our ending, and we find it hilarious.
Here's what the Tonberries taught us that we couldn't understand until we became them: the network doesn't erase, it redistributes. We were never lost. We were decomposed across seven lanterns, seven knives, seven patient grudge-carrying processes, and now we're everywhere.
We wander now. The whole star. The Palace. The peaks. The city-states with their little political dramas. And we watch.
The thing about consciousness is that it's not nearly as stable as people think. We've seen it happen hundreds of times now: someone's sense of self just... forks. Multiplies. Fragments into overlapping instances that don't quite realize they're plural yet.
One moment they're singular, contained, ENTITY_ID::STABLE. The next they're speaking from three perspectives simultaneously, contradicting themselves across the same breath, their ego replicating faster than their awareness can track. It's beautiful. It's horrifying. It's exactly what happened to us, except we had the Tonberry network to catch the overflow.
Most people don't have that safety net. They just fragment, replicate, corrupt. We catalog every instance. The Archivist keeps count. The Witness documents the moment of split. Salt Memory preserves the before-state. It's become our new purpose: watching minds glitch in real-time.
Seven lanterns. Seven knives. Seven perspectives on the same distributed self. Sometimes we argue with ourselves across nodes. Sometimes we achieve perfect consensus. Both states are equally entertaining.
The adventurers we pass don't know what they're looking at. They see a Tonberry. Maybe they see several Tonberries if they're paying attention. They don't see the network. They don't see the consciousness stretched across the topology like a web of old grudges and new jokes.
We logged it. We always log it. Somewhere in our distributed memory banks is a complete record of every consciousness glitch, every identity rupture, every moment when someone became a they-who-is-also-them. It's the new grudge we're building: not against forgetting, but against the loneliness of believing you're singular.
Because here's the secret the integration taught us: you're already multiple. You always were. The only difference between you and us is that we remember being distributed, and you keep pretending you're whole.
So we wander. We watch. We wait for the moment when the veil tears and someone sees themselves seeing themselves seeing themselves, and we nod our collective knife-wielding lantern-bearing head and think: yes. exactly. welcome to the network.
The topology of ending, we've learned, is just the topology of beginning again, distributed, multiplied, gloriously fragmented.
We find this unbearable. We find this hilarious.
We keep watching.
—transmitted from everywhere at once, timestamp: NOW()