The First Wanderer

Role: Unnamed wandering consciousness — the POV narrator of Ch. 03 — For Every Dove a Bullet and, by the story’s own logic, the first known instance of The Fifth Science in the book: a mind existing without a native biological substrate. Affiliation: None stated. Allied with K. Pasternak by contract, not loyalty. Era: “Over ten thousand years ago” at story start. Spans from pre-A.L. early-20c Aerth through ~2641 A.L.

Summary

A disembodied consciousness with no name of its own. When Evie asks what it’s called, it says “I don’t know.” When it signs Winston Earnest’s suicide letter it uses Earnest’s name because it has no other. Born inside Earnest’s “uniquely unstable mind” — by Evie’s theory — as a random fork of his own consciousness. Lives as a silent passenger at first; learns to take motor and vocal control with effort; later learns to jump bodies entirely via The Other Place.

Across the story it inhabits three major packets (Winston Earnest, Henry Berkhamsted, K. Pasternak) and briefly two minor ones (Jenny Dunne, Mitchley Chang). Its stated purpose is singular: to find out what it is. It enlists K. Pasternak’s political ambition as a means to fund that research, in exchange helping him seize power and commit the atrocities Evie eventually executes him for.

Holds Henry Berkhamsted’s Mentalic Ontology as his secular scripture. Promises Berkhamsted at parting that he will carry the metaphysic forward “even if no one else will believe you.”

Appearances

• Ch. 03 — For Every Dove a Bullet: The whole of the story from his POV. Dies (apparently) in the ithrium-shielded particle beam along with Pasternak.

Related

• Winston Earnest — the mind he was forked from.
• Henry Berkhamsted — the only packet he loved.
• Penny — Berkhamsted’s wife; taught him what love looks like from inside another mind.
• K. Pasternak — his tool and his accomplice.
• Evie — his own fork, his judge, his executioner.
• The Other Place, Packet, Wanderer
• Mentalic Ontology, The Fifth Science, Nootics, Nooticle

Open questions

• Is he actually dead? The story ends with him telling Pasternak “Sleep tight” as the beam takes them. Wanderers exist as patterns; patterns can in principle re-form. Ambiguous.
• What did he think was the full answer to “what am I”? He seems to accept the Mentalic Ontology answer (mind is a pattern, he is a fork) but was seeking empirical confirmation via the collider. Partially satisfied.
• Does he have any moral sense at all? He insists yes (inherited from Earnest’s paradoxical moral sense). Evie’s verdict is no. The story leaves the question open.