Meshner initially believes he is back on an orbital station, but the place feels unfinished, like a schematic assembled from faulty memory. A woman with him is not Lante but Avrana Kern, who has isolated him inside the implant and warns him not to remember too much because his thoughts create paths to the pursuing presence.

Kern explains that Meshner and Fabian’s implant, though never designed as a full Upload system, can preserve a personality copy indefinitely. Meshner realizes that he is the upload and cannot return to his biological body. Kern reveals the reason: an alien endoparasite entered Meshner’s body, embedded itself in Meshner’s brain, and can use its old adaptations from the terraforming crew to interfere with Meshner’s mind.

As Meshner’s fear and memory strengthen the connection to his organic brain, the simulation begins to collapse. Meshner slips toward saying “We,” and Kern drags him into another constructed memory: a formal party from Kern’s past. Kern finds unexpected pleasure in recovered anger and recounts breaking the nose of an abusive academic, but the Lante-figure appears among the guests in an Old Empire environment suit, showing that the pursuer has followed them.

Kern keeps moving Meshner through increasingly fragmentary memories, including a secret institution and then an abstracted image of the Portiid city of Seven Trees. Meshner repeatedly rediscovers that he is an upload, and Kern admits that she has been shifting the scenery around them for days rather than truly moving them. She also confesses that she sent Meshner to the station partly because she wanted to encounter something like herself and experience feeling again, and that this desire helped cause Meshner’s condition.

Meshner’s fuller self-awareness returns, but that awareness gives the parasite the same knowledge. Lante arrives in the Seven Trees simulation and, instead of immediately attacking, looks around in wonder and confusion. The entity asks where the promised space, geometry, complexity, and worlds are, revealing that it expected far more from this artificial refuge than Kern’s exhausted memories can provide.