In the anthology, Mission Critical, but also free to read at Google books.
This story is a bit both ways for me. The good bit is that i sort of get my wish from Memorials in that this is about beings like perpetuates in some sort of V-Space, but the bad bit is that it gets rather random.
While i’m happy to let my imagination fill in things where needed this story leaves a few too many blanks to fill in. To begin, it doesn’t explain how someone is actually taken into this Repository, we just have Giao going out of her door and meeting an oily, inky blackness; which she realises is the Repository. Next thing, Giao is waking up in the Repository as some kind of perpetuate being and meeting her sister, a perpetuate who has been there 3 years. Then she encounters the Rescue Party who help her to try to get out, which, no one has ever done.
And then the ending: what Giao gets to realise about the Repository and how the story ends just skips over so much. Like Aliette didn’t have much of an idea of what all this was about and so just waved the happy-ever-after-wand at it and then realising that that wasn’t a very good ending she then waves the i-might-come-back-and-sort-it-out-wand at it as well and then ends the story without any real explanation other than it was all about a messed up mindship doing messed up things — which the escapees leave it to continue doing.
Ho hum. Onto the last Xuya book in the series: The Breath of War.
Aliette’s Page