Six months had passed since the sealing of Void Walker Prime. In that time, the human species had begun to understand what it meant to exist in two simultaneous states: the preserved physical humans and the transformed collective consciousness.
Sarah Chen had become the de facto leader of the preserved humans, not through any formal election but through the simple fact that she understood both sides of the divide better than anyone else. She was one of the few pure humans who had consistently maintained communication with the collective consciousness, working to build bridges between the two forms of human existence.
The situation was delicate. The transformed collective consciousness had been violated. It had discovered that it was not, as it had believed, the endpoint of evolution but
