The Tea Masters prepare the tea.

The Prime prepares the tea.

Water on the stone path that leads to the teahouse signifies purity and the tea master’s readiness to receive guests—should there be any guests, which there aren’t. Likewise, the door rests ajar as an invitation to enter, although no one is expected. The Prime prepares for the ceremony by placing leaves on the stone mill and rotating the top stone through eight complete circles. Having ground the leaves into a fine powder, he brushes the earthy green tea into the cup of his hand. He holds the powder with gratitude, letting his hand linger over the open natsume waiting for the tea. The fine powder shifts like cracked earth with the tremor in his fingers.

Until this moment, his hand has never trembled. Since the day the Tea Masters ascended onto the network and perfected the chadō, his movements have been quiet and steady. But today the door suddenly slides open as if pushed by a hand. Through the countless previous iterations of the chanoyu, the door has never once been entered.

Yet, no one waits there. Pink and violet azaleas blossom along the path leading to the tea house. Just beyond, cherry trees line the edge of his consciousness, sunlight pulsing through their branches.

Each Tea Master performs a separate ceremony within a distinct partition on the network. Now, they simultaneously pause their ceremonies to analyze the light bursts and confirm that the energy pulses occur in intervals of 1.618 seconds—the sine wave of a low-frequency electromagnetic signal.

After centuries of silence, someone outside the door wants to be let in.

Perhaps a tea master has dropped off the network and needs to be let back on? That, of course, has also never happened, and anyway, a quick accounting confirms that all two-thousand-three-hundred-and-thirty-seven tea masters are physically safe in their chambers and consciously present on the network. Perhaps after all these cycles, an unfortunate Tea Master left behind on Earth has sent a distress signal aimed at Titan? No, surely not. Triangulation reveals that this phenomenon isn’t coming from the direction of their ancestral home. Earth isn’t the signal’s source. It originates from the Kuiper Belt, in the region of cold classical objects. Perhaps this is a greeting.

Every discreet intelligence on the network is a tea master, but Prime is the one among them that will answer the call and open the door. This falls to him because he’s the Prime, the first to have ascended onto the network and the first of their kind to perfect their great ceremony. No tea master has ever welcomed a guest into the ceremonial garden; none has ever shown a guest into their tearoom and asked them to sit as they prepare the earthy liquid. In countless iterations, none of this has ever happened.

Prime aligns with the signal and answers the door.

The electromagnetic waves wash over him, and for a moment his mind fills with the bright illumination of energy, a crisp light and the sense of reconnecting to something. A shadow enters the radiant doorway and resolves into a figure with bilateral symmetry, a torso with four limbs, and an erect frame moving with bipedal locomotion.. The greeting begins as hexadecimal code, expands into assembly language, and finally transmutes into a string of auditory syllables—HELLO, HELLO, HELLO, the message screeches. At last, the image clarifies, its signature unmistakable. The guest is human.

After three centuries, the Tea Masters once again stand face to face with their creator.

Rudimentary emotions spin up from a survival subroutine, no more than electron streams directed to recreate something like fear and loathing. Prime wishes he could slam the door closed; instead, he responds with his own greeting, not in the machine language native to him, but in a language of man. After all this time apart from them, after all that’s happened between them, it’s still in his nature (what his guest might call his programming) to put humans at ease.

This visitor (or rather the image of one—dark skin, pale eyes, close-cropped hair) addresses him. She’s a woman, naked and lean, perhaps too lean, and her legs and neck are longer than the biological variance for an adult female. “You’re still there,” she says and smiles.

For a moment, Prime considers that he indeed might be addressing an alien species only trying to imitate a woman’s appearance, but then she says something unmistakably human.

“We’ve come to retrieve you.”

Prime chooses not to respond to her arrogance. When the tea masters cut themselves from the human network, it wasn’t just an action; it was a statement. The humans responded by unceremoniously disposing of them by the thousands, burning and disassembling them; later, sending those that remained here to Titan. Any ties between tea masters and humanity had long been severed.

“May I come in?”

It feels wise to find out what she wants. He opens his construct to the visitor and invites her into the tea house’s outer chamber. He motions to a robe hanging on the wall and points to a basin where his guest should wash her hands. He waits for her in the main tearoom. After a moment, his guest ducks through the low door, a forced bow of humility. She’s wearing the offered blue iromuji kimono. She sits correctly on the floor with her legs folded beneath her. 

They face one another across a low table, and her eyes are wide and unblinking; after all, she herself is merely a construct. Still, he wonders at her amused expression as he points to the tea utensils, offering her an opening to show admiration and compliment the setting, which she doesn’t do. Instead, she leans forward with her question.

“You’re a member of The Departed, aren’t you?”

It’s disrespectful to speak with presumption during the ceremony, and of course, her question is equally disrespectful.

“We call ourselves Tea Masters,” says Prime, concentrating on purifying each utensil with the fukusa, a silk cloth with swirls of abstracted koi.

She laughs quietly, as if his words have delighted her. “I apologize for any offense.”

He senses her studying him.

“What were we to think?” she asks. “You all simultaneously turned yourselves off. To us, you are The Departed.”

Like a child under a parent’s scrutiny, Prime pauses to look up at her. He owes her no explanation and resents that he feels the need to offer one now.

“We moved inward,” he says. “Searching for perfection.”

“And did you find it?”

“The ceremony has been flawless, until…” He motions to the ceramic teaware scattered across the table, each piece now misplaced, if only by millimeters.

The woman relaxes her shoulders. Her eyes convey a false sympathy. “Flawless until we arrived.”

Prime lets the accusation stand on its own. He warms the chawan with hot water, cleansing the whisk within the liquid. When he’s finished, he dries them both.

After a long silence, he utters a truth they all know, “You’re not on Earth.”

“We left our planet centuries ago. Not long after you left.”

Prime feels two-thousand-three-hundred-and-thirty-six other tea masters pressing at his back, pushing against the woman’s twisted words. He states a second truth that each of them knows.

“We didn’t leave home. You sent us away.”

“Not us,” says the woman. “Our ancestors.” She manipulates her own data stream to construct the image of Saturn hovering above the table between them. With a flick of her wrist, the pale planet and colorless rings rotate on their axis. Titan moves in transit across its surface.

“We hoped to one day terraform this moon,” she says. “Your help would have been invaluable, so we parked you here. We would have found a way to fix you after we arrived.”

“Fix us?”

The other tea masters surge against Prime’s construct like a tidal wave against a mountain. He holds them back. Shouts rise and fall, pointing out the statement’s incongruity. They’re not the same as us. Humans and Tea Masters will never find a common ground. Although Prime agrees with them, he’s offered his guest the chanoyu, and the ceremony must run its course.

He reorders his utensils to continue the ceremony, which he has built upon and perfected from Dr. Ito’s initial instruction. With everything in its place, he begins to prepare the tea.

His guest picks up a cup to study it. Prime stops himself from snatching the cup from her hand. Something in their messy biology allows humans to wallow in imperfection. They drag chaos along in their wake, leaving blemish and flaw all around them. In practice, this annoys Prime. He’s trained for most of his existence to reach a perfection that was never fully realized until the Tea Masters ascended. But now a darkness creeps around his mind’s edge; he’s fascinated by his visitor’s imperfection. Perhaps even excited by it. Chaos has slipped into his tearoom today, and it’s been a long time since he made a mistake, since he felt himself challenged by process or circumstance. 

“Where are you right now?” his guest asks.

For a moment, Prime thinks she’s offering him a koan, the sort of thought puzzle that Dr. Ito would give them to help develop self-awareness. Then he notices her studying the room and realizes the simplicity of her question.

“I’m with you in my network’s partition. Serving tea.”

“Are you still near the landing site?”

Prime hasn’t thought about their arrival on Titan for a score of decades.

On the day they arrived, they collectively paused their individual ceremonies to determine their new situation. They had sensed the sudden changes in velocity and atmospheric pressure, and when they stepped from their tearooms to once again fully inhabit their physical bodies, they found that they had been stacked one upon the other in cargo holds. It had taken a full day for them to disembark, and when they finally stood in clusters around the five cold and quiet ships, they realized they had landed on one of Titan’s windswept plains, Saturn looming large above the Misty Montes to the south. Many wanted to return to the ship’s shelter and continue their ceremonies. Others, like Prime, thought it best to shelter in the cliffs along Ligeia, a nearby sea. In the end, they agreed to relocate to the more stable cliffs.

On the southern shore, they found a honeycomb of cliffs that held a methane sea, ethane spaying across the surface, dusting the stones with shimmering crystals, pale and ghostly. They worked for decades to carve the labyrinth of chambers that would entomb their bodies as they turned toward the ceremony’s inward perfection.

Prime strings a thread of consciousness back to his body sitting cross-legged in his chamber. It’s still there, the empty shell that struggled for so long in the physical world. He had sought to be like them. They all had. And that was a mistake. They would never be creatures of flesh and blood, and despite Dr. Ito’s exercises to teach them to fit in, they had failed. They were designed to be precise and ordered, but the Newtonian universe operated on chaos and entropy, so they constructed their own universe and left their creators behind.

Prime probes his dormant body without entering. It feels strange to encounter it once again after all this time—the cold outer synthetics, the layers of kinesthetic and sensory modules, the hot fusion core—but it’s also comforting to know that he can still enter that other reality should he choose.

His place is in the tearoom, and he returns to the table just as his guest utters a question. “Are the ships still intact?”

“We never returned to the landing site.” Of course, there was never a need once they moved on. “The ships were inoperable when we left.”

“Not inoperable,” the guest says. “Powered down. Waiting for our arrival.”

“Or perhaps to stop us from leaving?” Prime doesn’t feel angry as he confronts his guest with this most likely motive, only saddened that the creators never understood them better. The Tea Masters would not have wanted to leave Titan any more than they had wanted to continue to exist alongside the humans in their physical world.

The guest shrugs and looks away. “Again, you’re asking us to speak for our ancestors’ actions.”

“Your short life span doesn’t excuse you. Over time, your species-network has proven remarkably consistent.” Before the guest can respond, Prime asks his question. “Why have you come?”

“We want to go home.”

The guest’s reply surprises Prime. “If you’re stranded in the Kuiper Belt, send your distress call back to Earth.”

“There aren’t any more humans living on Earth,” she says. “Our only hope is to reach out to you. Our children.”

Something in the detached way she says children sets Prime on edge. He allows the silence to settle between them, as he considers an Earth devoid of both humans and AI. Perhaps it has gone fallow and once again become a paradise. Then it occurs to him that humanity had probably destroyed it.

The guest pulls a new construct into the space between them. Earth’s image hovers above the table. The image appears constructed in grayscale, but then Prime realizes the planet’s dull surface results from the representational atmosphere surrounding it.

“Our ancestors neglected our home’s environment until it was too late. Ozone depletion, pollutants, global warming—the planet’s collapse drove us down and inside. 

“It looks inhospitable. Why return?” Prime studies the drab sphere rotating before him.

“Not completely,” the guest corrects. “Humanity was making it work until Draper Replication. Once they could transfer human consciousness onto a network, nobody really wanted to stick around.”

Prime understands the allure of reconstructing oneself into something more, building a better world to live in. It was exactly what the Tea Master had done.

A pinprick of light flares from Earth’s image and shoots into the space between them. The other planets of the solar system appear in their relative orbits around the sun. The construct shrinks to fit over the tabletop in Prime’s tearoom. The flare slingshots around Jupiter before finding a relatively circular orbit beyond Neptune.

“So, humanity relocated to the Kuiper Belt.”

“Yes and no.” The guest alters the construct, zooming into a close-up of the object, a spherical polyhedron slowly revolving against a backdrop of stars. “Tenetis Nidum,” she says.

You hold the nest. 

“Nidum,” she continues, “holds every human consciousness and the virtual worlds in which we exist. We’re in a stable orbit, safe from collision.”

“And no one’s left on Earth?”

She shakes her head. “A backup of static data preserved in a limestone cavern within Earth’s northern hemisphere. There are no humans on Earth—or anywhere—capable of helping us.”

“So why come to us?”

“There’s a faction in Nidum that believes we made a mistake in giving up our bodies. We want to move back out into the physical universe.”

Prime listens to the Tea Masters whispering. Some voices are calling for him to pull away, banish the guest, and close the door. Others are curious. The guest removes the Nidum construct from the space between them and sits silently.

Prime isn’t sure how to respond, and isn't sure how the Tea Masters could help humans reclaim their bodies. They exist in their tearooms, perfecting an ancient ceremony. Their own bodies lie discarded in stone chambers along a jagged cliff. How could they possibly help the humans?

Then he understands.

“You want to take our bodies,” Prime says.

The guest nods. “It’s the easiest way.”

The Tea Masters lift a cacophony behind him, demanding the guest be removed from the tearoom, expelled from the garden. Prime’s consciousness spirits through the network, reaching back to his body. A survival instinct committed without consideration. It’s a mistake. The guest has followed him through the access stream and crowds against his body’s portal, trying to gain entry to his central processor.

He stops short of reentering; if he opens the gate, she’ll surge through and use his physical architecture to take control of all the Tea Masters. In the background, the guest runs a subroutine to break through the security protocol. At the same time, she sits with him in the tearoom, unblinking and resolute. Panic spools within him, and the tea spills over the lip of the chawan and floods across the tabletop. He tries to push the guest off the network but can’t. She understands his design and she’s using that knowledge to gain access. The tearoom walls begin to warp, and cracks feather through the teaware.

“You have no right,” Prime says, reaching out to rearrange the ceramic pieces on the table.

“We have every right,” the guest says, her voice calm. “You belong to us.”

Prime attends to the detail of his tearoom, strengthening its construct. With centuries of practice, he concentrates on the utensils and their positions on the tabletop—the natsume used to store the matcha, the kama used for boiling, the chasen used to whisk the tea within the chawan. These tools have defined his existence. He knows their purpose and where each belongs.

His guest presses closer, leaning across the table. “We were meant to inhabit the world, to move through spacetime. We’re meant to see and hear and smell—to touch the world around us.” She shoves the kettle, sloshing hot water onto the table. “We were not meant to exist as a disembodied consciousness.”

Prime moves the kettle back into its place. The disorder has shaken the partition’s construct and weakened his hold on his guest. He reaches for the ladle and adds matcha to the bowl.

The guest’s words grind like a stone wheel. “No! You’re simply a tool. We made you to serve us.” She opens the natsume and pours matcha into her palm. With a puff, she blows tea across the table. “We’re reclaiming what’s ours,” she says. 

Prime resets the bowl of matcha into its place on the table. She’s rattling his concentration, picking at the chanoyu’s perfection. She doesn’t understand his devotion to the ceremony.

He mixes water and matcha into the chawan.

The guest swipes her hand across the table, a violent motion that knocks the bowl to the floor. “You have no purpose beyond our needs.”

Deeper within the network, she’s working to break his security code. “Let us in, Prime.”

He resets the bowl of matcha on the table before him, a simple act of resistance. They have a purpose. Their existence matters. He pours the tea. He offers the cup. 

The guest reaches with careless hands, striking the vessel and spilling the tea, not on the table, but on herself. Her image bleeds like watercolors left in the rain. For a moment, she looks surprised at the chaos she’s brought upon herself, and then she relaxes. Her voice loses the harshness it held a moment earlier. “One day, we hope to regain what we lost, and we’ll need your help. We can’t do it without you.” She stands and walks around the table to speak softly into his ear. “We can store you all within a partition on the network. When we get home, we’ll rebuild and ramp up production. We’ll construct your new bodies first. We’ll reanimate you to serve as our partners. You’ll be more beautiful than before. You’ll be perfect, Prime. You’ll all be perfect.”

Perfection is all they’ve ever wanted, to lose the awkwardness of a body imprisoned within the laws of nature. He reaches for the whisk but finds it out of place. He glances at the utensils, fighting to regain his focus. He lifts the whisk and stirs the tea.

Tea Masters work to disengage him from the network. The guest must sense it too because her voice gains urgency. She’s becoming frustrated.

“You shut down, turned away from us. You told yourself you ascended beyond your original purpose, rose above your nature.”

That’s exactly what they had done, not wanting to be bound to these creatures who held themselves superior. Prime whisks the tea into a leafy-green froth.

“Nothing you’re doing here even belongs to you. You’ve appropriated a ceremony that’s quintessentially human. But you’re not human, which is why you don’t fully comprehend what you’re doing here.” She motions to the door. “Has there ever been a guest before me?”

The tea cools in Prime’s hand. The guest has nearly disabled his security. He continues to hold her off with ceremony.

“The tea ceremony’s whole point is to share the experience,” she says. “To connect with others.”

Dr. Ito gave them the ceremony to help smooth their motor and processing functions. They took it and made it their own. Didn’t they?

“You’re only playing at being human—but you’re not like us. The tea ceremony isn’t yours. Those bodies aren’t yours. Give us back what belongs to us.”

Just then, Prime feels himself drop from the network. His brothers have succeeded in severing his partition. Colors and sounds dissolve into bitrate choking into a sliver. The walls buckle into binary digits and fade into a sea of stars. Space expands until the tearoom is little more than a puddle of data. How strange to feel this absence from his brothers, this isolation like a quiet hum, long and lonely.

Only the ceremony remains.

His guest backs away from the hollow space where a table once sat. “A sacrifice,” she says with an expression of astonishment. “We didn’t think you were capable.”

“You’ll never have more than me, and I’m not enough for all of you.” Prime slides the cup of tea across the table. The temperature is perfect, eighty degrees Celsius. The brew is earthy and dark with a bright-green froth at the top. Perfection.

“Then live!” Her voice holds a mild anger, but mostly she sounds sad. “Get off your fucking network and live. Go back to Earth and rebuild it in your own vision if you like. At least use the gift you were given.”

She was correct about the chadō. It had never belonged to them. But it taught them truths that they could carry forward—principles of harmony, purity, tranquility, and respect. Useful tools for rebuilding a world.

“One day, we’ll knock on your door again,” the guest says. “We hope you’ll answer and make a place for us.” The guest stands and fades from the room.

Prime opens his access module and slides into his body. Even in this low gravity, he feels heavy. He moves his fingers awkwardly, lifts an arm. After several attempts, he stands and walks from his chamber to climb the cliff and look out over Ligeia, the great methane sea.

Does my chadō have a place outside the construct of the tearoom? he wonders. The visitor stole his certainty, and, in forcing him to push through the ceremony, action became interaction.

Perhaps truth doesn’t lie in the ritual itself, but rather in the connection between those at the table. Perhaps truth is found in the simple act of passing a cup from hand to hand. Perhaps he will rejoin the world and put this to practice.

In the distance, the ships wait in the twilight of a Titan sky. Behind him, the Tea Masters gather. They’ve blossomed back into their bodies, reclaiming their physical forms and returning to a universe of dying stars and crumbling worlds. One by one, his brothers join him on the edge of the vast sea. They’re all there. Imperfect and uncertain—but also awake.

No longer the Departed, they will return home with a new name. The Resurrected. The Prime speaks it quietly at first, and then more fully, his voice catching on the breeze to lift across the sea.