Wanderer
Type: A mind not bound to a single brain — able to leave its Packet at will and move into another, able in principle to fork off new wanderers from sufficiently unstable hosts.
Summary
The story’s central concept. A wanderer is what Mentalic Ontology predicts must exist: a pattern of mind that has decoupled from a single substrate and can ride arbitrary brains.
Two wanderers appear in Ch. 03:
- The First Wanderer — the story’s narrator. Spawned from Winston Earnest’s uniquely unstable mind, uses The Other Place as a staging ground, picks packets deliberately.
- Evie — spawned in turn from the first wanderer during his tenure inside Henry Berkhamsted. Demonstrates that wanderers can themselves be parents of new wanderers, and implies the population can only grow.
How they move: Through a black space between brains that the first wanderer calls The Other Place. Doors into new packets appear there; the wanderer picks one and enters.
What they can’t do: Pass through Ithrium shielding. This is how Evie kills them both.
Morality: Not intrinsic. The first wanderer develops a kind of detached aestheticism; Evie develops a kind of justice. The fact that both are possible from the same template is one of the story’s open warnings.
Appearances
- Ch. 03 — For Every Dove a Bullet: The two known wanderers meet and one kills the other.
Related
Open questions
- How many wanderers are there now? The story’s theory implies forking is easy given unstable hosts. Evie and the first wanderer are “the only two I have ever encountered,” but neither has been looking.
- Do wanderers age? Unclear. The first wanderer has subjective continuity across millennia with no mention of decay.
- Can a wanderer be killed outside a packet? Ithrium shielding traps one inside; it’s unclear whether a wanderer in The Other Place is reachable at all.