

A Reluctant God

1600 PA (Post Apocalypse)

by

Scooter Duff
Copyright 2014 Scooter Duff

Smashwords Edition All Rights Reserved

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase and additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, trademarked products and events are fictitious. Locations in this book do exist but are sometimes fictionalized in order to protect culturally sensitive properties. Any resemblances to actual events or people, living or dead, are coincidental.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My undying gratitude to all who have assisted in the long endeavor or writing this thing. For patience and encouragement ("Go to work on your book"), my wife Dorothy; for patience and insightful guidance, editor Rory McClannahan (who in his spare time runs a newspaper); Robin McClannahan, g  raphic design; Malcolm McClinton, cover artist; for patience – notice a trend here? – and mind-bending guidance, Peggy Brandt Brown, PhD; for beta reading and good ideas, my sons Guy and Patrick; Stephan Helgesen for publishing tutoring; and, you guessed it, the patient Antonio Cortes, aeronautical wunderkind.
TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Chapter 1: DOPPELGÄNGER

Chapter 2: IN THE BEGINNING

Chapter 3: THE GAME CHANGERS

Chapter 4: A GREAT SHIP FLIES

Chapter 5: EXPANSION OF VISION

Chapter 6: ROBERT LONGLINE, AMBASSADOR

Chapter 7: LIGHTNING

Chapter 8: ALIENS

Chapter 9: BAD ALIEN

Chapter 10: EVERYTHING ALWAYS CHANGES

Chapter 11: ROBERT LONGLINE, ALLIES

Chapter 12: NEW PARTNERSHIPS

Chapter 13: PRE-WAR

Chapter 14: PROBE

Chapter 15: KICK A HORNETS NEST

Chapter 16: DIFFERENT STROKES

Chapter 17: THE GAMES OF WAR

Chapter 18: REAL WAR

Chapter 19: NEAR DEATH EXPERIENCES

Chapter 20: CLOSE QUARTERS COMBAT

Chapter 21: DEFEAT IS ALWAYS OUT THERE

Chapter 22: THE FATE OF IMMORTALS

Epilogue: ONE OF MANY POSSIBLE FUTURES

Addendum: A NOTE TO READERS FROM A PARTICIPANT

HISTORICAL NOTES (Maybe read these first)
Introduction

By

"H.L. Mencken"

You may have heard my name. I am not me. The chap H.L. Mencken died early in 1956 and hasn't been heard from since. Yet it is I who stands before you, at least in my own mind. Since I am not H.L. Mencken – dead and buried and all that – I find some small comfort in believing that I am pretty damn close to the man H.L. Mencken was. The folks who put me together studied old H.L. with truly psychotic intensity. They read every word he wrote, back to his kindergarten poetry. They read every word written about me (there!) by anyone of any stature. If my tailor scribbled "getting a paunch" about me in his notebook it was noted and analyzed.

Never mind A.I., "A.P."s (artificial personalities) based on real dead people (Belushi, Feynman, etc.) are state-of-the-art. I am an "ARTIFICIAL PERSONALITY." You will see in the narrative ahead that there are a lot of Artificial Personalities in this distant future. We play an important role for that matter. The fact we are all based on various people who actually were once alive, then dead and buried, is quaint and would be hopelessly maudlin if there were not a reason.

There is a need in this future for accurate and well understood history. Since humans tried to exterminate themselves, it is important to get a grasp on the how and the why, to avoid an even more successful attempt. We recreated folks from the past are walking archives of our own times. Believe it or not, I can get my hands on every newspaper published during my lifetime from every city and burg in the whole world. Also every book, treatise, propaganda tract and sophomore's sophomoric essay. Plus every photograph! This, in language hardly in use in my time, makes me a "database."

The real me was a cynic, and got paid for it, an even more cynical bit. Naturally, I follow in my own footsteps. Which perhaps makes me the perfect candidate to make commentary on the madness we creatures, made in the image of God, pursue.

P.S. If I were reading this narrative for the first time, I might first glance at the "Historical Notes" at the end for a bit of backgrounding.

Chapter 1: DOPPELGÄNGER

Contact: Robert Longline walked quickly around the periphery of the gathering of Peers on the Plaza del Cheyenne, well up the shelf of the eastern Colorado ramparts, West Continent, Earth. That this place was once scoured by an irresistible overpressure wave and annealed in all consuming, blinding heat was not evident and almost forgotten.

Longline walked purposefully, a tall, powerfully built young man heading for some destination beyond the tables and floating platforms in use by the small crowd. He paid no attention to the smattering of insults his passing excited.

"Not invited, obviously," commented one Peer haughtily to his elegant companion as the tall man passed. "Dirty," came another judgment common for the non-conforming. Most in the crowd wore the group ID garments, draping hybrids of toga and sarong, loose and flowing and draped with colored furs. All were teasingly revealing, but warmed by processes within the fabric, appropriate for the chilled air of the mountain environment.

The people at the party were from all over Earth, gathered physically to celebrate their virtual social cluster of the like-minded, a phenomenon becoming more popular for the subtle dimension of reality it added to the Dream Game experience. The partygoers' dress indicated they were one of the neo-Greek clusters. These, Robert knew, were the Unforgiving Conformalists, by name.

One man, who appeared older, though mainly in demeanor, guided his floating platform toward the edge of the gathering. He was lying on a pad of goose down and was richly robed in fur of sable-clone, dyed arterial red. He levered his body to a cross-legged sitting position and matched his platform's motion to the young man's strong pace. At first he said nothing, only looked, but the Peers below him began to laugh and applaud as it became clear what he was doing. Finally he spoke, his voice amplified by his platform so that most along the edge of the crowd – and certainly the young man – could hear him.

"Well, what have we here? A man of extinguishing individuality? A character of excremental differences? A scoffer at the dignity of conformity?" Wolfish sarcasm, much appreciated by the Peers, colored his voice. The tall young man strode on, ignoring the heckler, approaching the far end of the party. The boundaries of the gathering were quite sharp; neither table, chair nor body was outside an invisible line, clearly indicating a security perimeter.

In front of him stretched an empty plaza of several hundred meters. Perhaps the selection of this location or this time has been an error, Robert thought. Dammit. It fit the criteria perfectly – a gathering of Peers in an isolated, exotic location and in a tightly confined area. He felt tinges of frustration at his apparently imperfect estimation of place and time for the event he expected. He would have to extend his stay near this group to open a longer time window.

To his right towered a 100-meter tall granite edifice with vertical, scalloped extrusions.

Suddenly the air around him, over his head, and behind him sung with the beats and subtones of hypersonic energies. From the corner of his eye, he caught a faint movement at the base of the edifice. Dropping smoothly to the ground, he rolled vigorously away from crowd, a swell of gratification in his chest. His predictive model of where and when the next attack would occur was accurate!

With each roll, his glances caught the figure of a man running along the base of the scalloped monument, sweeping a projection device back and forth across the crowd. On the back side of his rolls Robert saw the gathering of Peers caught in various postures, immobilized by the onslaught. Most remained standing or sitting, but some sank to their knees and one man slowly fell across a table. The floating platform with the heckler sank slowly to a table beneath it, its rider slumped.

Robert avoided the main emissions of the weapon. Surprisingly, he still felt its effects. So much for another of my estimations, he thought, this one on how to block the likely nature of the attack. A noticeable sluggishness in his muscles and a nagging buzzing in his ears keyed his automatic defense responses. He stopped rolling and lay spread-eagle on his back. With a mental command he transferred brain control to his remote facilities hovering 20,000 meters overhead. His cerebral cortex went into local stasis. All brain and motor control, autonomic responses and body systems – circulatory, endocrine, sensory, liver, lymph, were completely wiped, then reloaded with a full update, including revised blocks on any further influence from the projection weapon. The whole process took forty milliseconds.

He rolled to a crouch and started running at a tangent to the field of fire from the assailant. The shooter did not notice him at first, then did and swung the nozzle of his weapon toward him, but only as Robert reached the monument and dived behind one of the extrusions. The space around him hummed with the powerful – and now focused – energies from the weapon. Without his protective blocks, the shadow of the stone would have been an inadequate refuge.

The firing stopped, and Robert heard the shooter running in the opposite direction, undoubtedly confident he had immobilized the strange fellow who escaped his first sweeping assault on the party. Robert slipped from behind the extrusion and began a powerful loping run, keeping a steady distance behind the shooter, signaling his mount. At the edge of the monument, the attacker dove forward, straddled a suspensor bike and accelerated quickly at forty-five degrees into the sky. Seconds later a similar vehicle slipped from behind the monument and alongside Robert Longline. He made a rolling mount, leaned forward to the chest pad and followed. The shooter's bike was in full stealth mode, but Robert's tech saw it clearly and followed its evasion track toward the crests to the north of Mt. Cheyenne. The shooter showed no indications he suspected he was being followed. Robert's stealth tech was far superior.

Below and behind the fliers, the island of light that was the party on the plaza fell swiftly away. No lights showed on the plains to the east nor in the mountains in any direction. The party behind him was being held at a memorial to one of the shielded enclaves which preserved the human race through the poisonous times of the Climax Wars in the mid-21st Century CE. A one-kilometer diameter circle around the area had been decontaminated and reconstituted. Then the plaza and monument had been built to mark the place where the survivors had emerged from the armored innards of Cheyenne Mountain "NORAD" after several decades of wretched but successful existence.

Robert manually guided his bike close to the face of the mountain, weaving between escarpments and huge boulders, confident in his extraordinary senses and reflexes, barely making clearances, listening to the echoed whishing of his vehicle reflected from the bare stone of the mountain. He watched himself from a remote sensor flying a parallel path ten kilometers above. From that perspective his bike looked like a water insect, skimming over the surface of gargantuan cobbles. The shooter was flying a straight route now, at least a hundred meters above the terrain, heading toward the high ridge line. For the eight minutes it took for the shooter to clear the crest line and descend into the mixed conifer valley, Robert Longline was in tight, undetected pursuit. He exchanged updated database probes and analytical conclusions with his remote facilities.

From dozens of public monitoring cameras, Robert's analytics drew the following conclusions: Members of the party back at the NORAD Memorial who had been attacked by the shooter were rapidly recovering. There was kinesiological evidence that viral memories had been successfully implanted in the party goers. It was exactly the memory implant Robert had discovered in hundreds of similar attacks around Earth. There would be no memory of the attack.

As people recovered, lifting their heads from the tables, some few who had been standing arising from their knees, conversations resuming from the point when consciousness had been disrupted. Consensual rationales were quickly emerging about the odd little disruption to their partying. No authorities would be informed that anything untoward had occurred. It would be days before the victims would have their first wildly atypical shadows of distrust and distaste for the status quo.

Robert ordered an in-depth assessment of the attitude-changing mental virus concerning distrust of governmental authority and population core values.

The location the shooter was approaching on his suspensor bike was a full stealth facility. Robert knew it was almost certain to be populated with a variety of people who had gone missing from organizations, communities and families, untraceable drop-outs in a society that kept rigorous tabs on each of its members. A quick, all-spectrum sweep confirmed the facility was completely underground, not connected to any energy or com grid; and not listed in any public or governmental database. It was located deep in a forest untouched by any decontamination effort. Trees, indeed most plants in the forest, were distorted by mutations from the radiation and toxins still living out their half-lives. Few mammals abided in the forest, and those that did were quite different from the original occupants. All this meant the facility deep in the wooded valley was precisely the kind of place Robert Longline was seeking. His search was in its eighth day.

An opening appeared in the ground, suddenly and dramatically, like an owl opening one eye. The shooter plunged into it, and the owl eye snapped shut. Robert located and confounded a web of sensors near the entry and settled his bike on a bed of odd looking pine needles. He sat up and stretched as his on-board gear probed the surrounding area for physical entryways to the subterranean facility.

The air was richly scented with odd forest oils and humus spores. The sounds of calls and creature movements whispered around Robert. As near to the twisted primeval as anywhere on earth, he thought.

The bike's sensors spotted an older, shielded opening half a kilometer to the west and partially up the valley wall, hidden in boulder scree from some ancient landslide. Robert leaned into his prone saddle and lifted the bike for the short flight to this pathway into the buried facility.

The Do Over: After the Climax Battles, 2056 - 2060, the Apocalypse, the surviving bits of humanity were scattered over the planet in desperately defended pockets of livable space, most of which had been designed explicitly for survivability under wartime conditions. They had names like Mount Yamantau, The White House II, Raven Rock Mountain, Xishan Mountain, Site 911, Amhurst Hole, Fordo Qom, The Bunny Bunker, Northwood, Goldman Sachsdown, Q, Cheyenne NORAD and many others. All heavily shielded, deeply buried, redundantly self sufficient, these fastnesses usually doubled as command centers, though some were sybaritic hidey-holes for the extraordinarily rich. Survivors very slowly stuck their heads up. From 2093 through the end of the century, people came out of the protected places to see their ravaged world.

By the fourth decade after this, emergence technologies were resurrected to the point that the dispersed remnants were talking to and visiting one another with remarkable ease. Their historical animosities dissolved in the shock of near extinction. They came to each other in the special joy of common survival. They were an extremely narrow sample of humankind, "elites" to the core.

Their first consensual decision was to restart the historical clock, measuring years as Post Apocalyptic or PA. The year 2147 Christian Era became Year One Post Apocalypse. One, P.A.

As a side effect of improving the health of Earth's few survivors, longevity tech blossomed.

Earth became a garden planet again. Sources of energy became essentially unlimited and completely non-polluting. Mammoth expenditures of energy were used to restore the oceans to livability.

Organizing the rebirth of Earth's surviving top predators was a new government based on an old idea – empire, complete with an Emperor.

Spacecraft were built and accessed via beanstalk space lifts. Soon interplanetary travel graduated to interstellar with fusion and matter/antimatter annihilation power driving ship speeds to significant fractions of lightspeed at great accelerations. Thus Earthers, using the new techs of hibernation, immigrated to the terraformable planets they had been watching through their space-based telescopes. These planets existed in considerable numbers orbiting mostly dwarf stars within a sphere of space reachable in practical time periods from Earth. The Empire of Earth in space was beginning. By the sixteenth century PA (Post Apocalyse), there were twenty-one planets with significant populations of humans, circling twelve stars, all within twenty-five light years of Mother Earth.

Chapter 2: IN THE BEGINNING

1626 PA, Gestation: At the beginning of the second trimester the Maternal Carriers were brought into the sampling facility. Twelve very healthy young women, each of whom carried a fetus destined for a ten-month term. The robodocs gently took the barest scraping from each tenant.

The samples went into the sequencer and within moments the supervisors could see the elaborated genome, epigenome, proteome and connectome of each fetus. Four – two males and two females – were within one percent of perfect matches with the main model. Eight of the carriers were told their tenants would be terminated. Four would go to term. Crafted biomes would be introduced at the births.

Three Years Old: As one of four precocious three year olds in the Stimulation Sampling Facility, the unnamed boy sat entranced before a simple 2D screen. For several days the two boys and two girls had been flitting like bees in a field of flowers from one stimulus to another: books, paintings, sculptures, projections, mobiles, virtual environments, animals, insects, textures, robots, games from cards to blocks to ergo-interfaces. The facility had a seemingly endless collection of things to be explored by the young geniuses. Only once every twenty days were the children freed from their intensive regime of structured exercises and mental drills for several days of totally unstructured explorations in the Stimulation Sampling Facility, the SSF. They loved it.

The three year old boy in front of the 2D screen had discovered a genre of content and was seemingly captured by it. For several hours every morning he sat unmoving other than to select new content as each segment ended.

When the extraordinary child discovered his video genre, he was unconsciously but vigorously looking for two things, something that would hold his attention, quiet his hyperactive ruminations and lower his vague but uncomfortable anxieties that started each morning, radiating from his last dream before waking. It had taken him thirteen mornings since the dreams began to start looking for relief. He started rapidly sampling the vast collection of interesting stuff in this facility, instinctively knowing he needed distraction – consolation – and measuring each for how they captured his attention and soothed him. When he was scanning historical video and audio records he hit a TV program called "Leave it to Beaver." His attention was fully captured. He felt a calming release from the unnamed discomfort spreading from his navel to his extremities. It was exactly what he needed. Shortly he discovered many more similar programs that brought distraction and comfort. The dreams drove him to this.

He thought about telling one of the mentors or an ObBot about the dreams. No! he thought with fervor. Not ever. He was perhaps not old enough to question his reasons, but the decision had the feeling of a deal done.

"He is quite fascinated with 'videos' from the 20th and 21st centuries CE," noted an Observation Bot in the boy's behavior log. "The general category is ideal family comedies. The presentations were produced from the earliest years of widely available video broadcasts and include material without color, known in those times as 'black and white.'"

As the weeks and months rolled on, the boy consistently spent over half of his mornings in the Stimulation Sampling Facility with the ancient sitcoms and family shows, going back to watch many of them a second and third time. The Board of PsychFet Tutors decided that the behavior was eccentric, but acceptable. The boy would continue to watch this type of material in the mornings, gradually broadening into more adult sitcoms, for the next eleven years as his first morning pursuit.

Four: "Bobby" was the name the young PsychFet candidate chose for himself in his fourth year of life. His first intellectual passions, reading "books" and watching archival videos from the 20th century CE, influenced him. Several characters named Bobby had merged in his mind as the kind of boy he wanted to be – honest, brave, intelligent, witty, trustworthy, diligent, inventive, kind, lovable and a bit humble.

One morning, the four-year-old firmly announced to his training cadre, "My name is Bobby." The name was so archaic several of his trainers thought he invented it. But they accepted his call, made it official, and Bobby he became. When he finished his training and was certified, he would become PsychFet Bobby.

Noticed: The Dream Game journalists ran a brief piece on Bobby, when he was caught in their sieves that constantly searched data flows for anomalous tidbits from the real world. The application was called News Hawk, and it was accessible in any game or scenario in The Game. Attention to News Hawk was purely voluntary and was driven mostly by word-of-mouth on the vast social and business networks in The Game. Attention numbers rose steadily as players on the various worlds recommended the piece about Bobby to their peers. Within a few days, the News Hawk score for Bobby put him in the "follow-up" category, one of the highest assessments those playing journalist games assigned to a story.

It had been a long time since any story about Fets had bubbled to the top, so the Bobby story received several promos in various interest segments. His interest in Common Era sit-coms (a term out of usage) was a news hook with novelty that inspired some people to speculate on the emotional back story; in other words, he was a potential hit subject. Bobby, of course, had no inkling that he was becoming a topic of general interest around the Empire in the Dream Game.

Nine: By the summer of his ninth year Bobby was spending more time trying to remember the content of his troublesome nightly dreams. After his morning relaxation exercise with the sitcoms, he tried mental experiment after mental experiment in stubborn determination to penetrate the obscuring blind spot around the dreams. He could reconstruct any memory in his special mind in eidetic resolution. Every event, every sight, every dream or imaginative flight, Bobby could pull up. This dream he could not capture. Only pieces.

The partial recalls started when he was six. By nine his developing supermind had created a tapestry of every tiny piece he saw in the brief flashes. Bobby looked for words that described the tapestry. "Surreal, impressionistic, teasing," were the kind of words he tried. He still hadn't found the words that felt right. And he loved words.

But through the fogs shown something gigantic. Almost-beyond-comprehension gigantic. This immensity was the most interesting part to the nine year old PsychFet-in-training. It was astronomical in scale, and astronomy was a source of great thrills to Bobby. But this was even beyond the fascinating nature of the universe. Something else.

Eleven: Running on a wide tidal beach. Chased by something not quite as fast, but relentless. Eleven years old and in his ninth year of intense physical and mental training, the young boy ran with frenetic energy when his pursuer made a dash to cut him off or to flank him from behind a dune high enough to hide its exact location. The dunes were pristine, as smooth as a young woman's shoulder. They reflected and absorbed sound so totally that the chop of the eight churning feet of his opponent sometimes disappeared. But when the pursuer was even partially in sight, the boy eased his pace to conserve energy and maintain a steady distance from the arachniform pursuit device.

Ahead was a tall, jumbled rock formation. Another two minutes of this open beach pursuit and the boy's advantage would increase significantly. While the pursuit device could scale rocks with alacrity, it could not follow the boy into the crevices or into narrow crawl spaces without degrading its defenses against hurled missiles. The boy put on another burst of his top speed to reach the rocks before the pursuer's last sprint. The robotic brain of the arachniform knew the problems in its mission were about to grow.

Leaping into a wide vertical crevice, Bobby spread his legs almost into a split, his right toes catching tiny outcroppings, his left big toe squeezing into a diagonal crack. With a surge of adductor magnus muscles, he catapulted himself upward to a handhold on the right side of the crevice, just one second before pincers on his pursuer's front legs snapped shut where his left ankle had been. Fingertips barely covering a pressure ridge, he hoisted himself to a more substantial ledge. His movement upward was one continuous flow of muscle and coordination. The chase-bot shot minibolts into the rock and began climbing almost as fast. But on the third ledge he reached, Bobby found a two pound rock. He spun from his right handhold and let fly a powerful throw almost straight down. The stone crushed the brain box of the scrambling machine as it again reached for Bobby's ankles. It shuddered once, then slid and crashed into a pile of disorganized, stick-like legs, optic pods and feelers at the bottom of the crevice, making a great clattering.

The boy looked around for other threats although he knew there was little chance of another surprise because of the time. He lifted himself to a sitting ledge. A soft gong sounded in the air to his right and the semitransparent visage of his tutor appeared. "Very nice, Bobby. Your maze strategy was far more efficient, and you have two almost equal throwing arms now. That was a solid left handed shot." Today the tutor's form was that of the female athlete who had coached Bobby in basic gymnastics in his earlier years.

"Come, it is time for sustenance, language immersion and some prep training for the large water snake exercise." Bobby smiled at that and started down. The large water snakes were canny combatants, and their engagements always gave Bobby new samples of applied adrenaline.

An extra source of excitement with the snakes was the distracting sensation – never explicit, but powerful – that they were also in the almost invisible morning dreams.

The News Hawks in the Dream Game caught wind of Bobby's extraordinary test scores in combat training with his robotic and aquatic sparring partners. Again the story was something of a rage. All of which remained totally unknown to Bobby since neither he nor any of the other PsychFet trainees ever interfaced with the Dream Game.

Thirteen: At thirteen, Bobby had his first F.E.T. – Field Effect Transducer – implanted in his brain. The surgery robot worked with great speed and delicacy, constantly talking with the tall youth as he lay in a reclined bio couch. Optical leads of nanometer dimensions were threaded between neurons and glial cells to the special tiny organs scattered through Bobby's brain that were maturing at the guidance of the DNA sequences crafted just for him by the master Fet genomic engineers.

"Impressions, please," came the robot's voice. The surgerybot was a modified humanoid machine. The voice came from its head. Its most visible light sensors – crystalline eyes – were on the head. Four arms reached out from an ovoid trunk, two holding Bobby's head gently, like a caring friend, firmly, comforting. Bobby reported on visual, aural and other sensory sensations as the leads were attached.

When the operation ended, the bot slipped Bobby into a deeper state of anesthesia. There, his deepest consciousness centers awakened as the transducer was turned on. Isolated from his body and much of his mind, he reached out to the battery of nanoprocessors and adopted them as new limbs. It was a revelatory experience for Bobby. Nested in the flood of data was the knowledge of how to turn the Fet transducer on and off. The suggestion came that he turn it off now. He did, the attachment to the nanoprocessors was broken, and Bobby woke up.

Blinking his eyes, he looked around the operating room. There were all seven of his master tutors, smiling at him. He smiled back. "So that's it!" he said. "I solved the three proofs that you said were nearly impossible, Dr. Sellers," he said, grinning at his math tutor. The small man was standing next to the surgerybot. He put an arm around its shoulder, patting it.

"Good job, old bot," he said.

"Thank you, Professor," answered the bot.

Bobby slipped back into the post-op twilight sleep and immediately tried his new equipment to see if the morning dream was more transparent to his upgraded brain. And there, something! Not visual, not aural, almost olfactory, almost a smell of something very foul. And very powerful.

Sixteen: From the moment his first Fet transducer had been implanted, Bobby's learning curve steepened dramatically. As the PsychFet organs matured in his brain and liver, new transducers were implanted and connected to them. At sixteen he had massive bandwidth in and out of the great networks of computing instruments on the Capital Planet Earth. He was learning how to juggle multiple tasks. Less "juggle" than actually DO many tasks simultaneously and give full attention to each. It was not an easy enterprise, even though he had been given a genome specifically designed to allow him to do it and he constantly received carefully woven additions to his microbiome to enhance this talent.

Ahead lay the years of pushing himself with genuine self-discipline to strive continuously and enthusiastically toward the full potential of a PsychFet. Bobby always felt a tremor of concern when he thought about the next five years. Mixed, of course, with excitement and optimism. But something was festering.

The training program that was his life was full of guidance on how to develop introspection. "Know yourself," was part of the program's mantra. The longer form was, "To yourself be true, and only you can truly know yourself."

Knowing himself gradually became a more and more frustrating experience. The elusive dream, the damned elusive dream, floated beyond his reach. He knew it distracted him from his avalanching education. After a while, distraction was always there in the background. It put him off his stride.

He made a decision. He would discuss it with someone. That decision, made in no more time than his three-year-old self had decided never discuss it with anyone, was equally a done deal. Decisiveness was as natural as breathing to Bobby.

He considered who he might have this discussion with. There always seemed to be a Big or two around from the government or the military or the judicial since Bobby had been six or so. Fleet Commanders, Senators, senior PsychFets, spending a day or two with him. Like little sabbaticals, one Big told him. The Bigs always seemed interested in talking to him. Might be just right.

In fact, various Bigs had been making pilgrimages to the PsychFet training facilities to see first-hand this prodigy of prodigies since his early off-the-chart performances were reported and since he was the youngest PsychFet to be marked as a likely SearchShip Master. Some came at the behest of Emperor VI, with "keep an eye on this" suggestions. Others, like the current attendee Admiral Ednorton Bespoke, came of their own volition, in this case a curiosity born of the fact that Bespoke had been something of a renowned prodigy himself several centuries before.

The man with the great name was someone Bobby liked immediately. He was the oldest human still in active public service, holding the office of Principal of Earth, the top governmental executive of the planet. He was over 500 years old and never failed to have interesting observations on any subject Bobby brought up in their numerous conversations. Perhaps he was the right person to discuss this with. Someone out of the direct chain of training command was probably less complicated if he could be trusted with a private issue. Bespoke had stayed at the training center for several days, longer than any other Big so far.

The very old and experienced man and the young inexperienced genius trainee talked. And talked. And talked. They shared lengthy traditional meals, most menus of which Bobby had only read about or seen in the historical videos he still watched occasionally. Bobby started committing most of his non-programmed time to these meetings, these meals and the attendant conversations. He opened the subject that evening over dinner of "veal," a tender meat grown in the KP lab.

"I assume this is something like veal," grumped Admiral Bespoke. "Who knows? Baby cow taste is lost in the mists of time."

Bobby chewed the tender material and decided he enjoyed something about the taste and texture. Of course, he knew all about calves and how they were slaughtered for their tender muscles back when people ate animals. "I'd rather eat this stuff than some young animal. No offense."

Bespoke found that amusing and came out of his grumpiness with a smile. "Me too."

"I'd like to get down to a point right away," said Bobby, still chewing his veal.

"Shoot."

"If I tell you something confidentially – I mean truly confidentially in that I want it to go no further than you; even if you think somebody else should know about it. Is that a condition you can agree to?" Bobby was looking at Bespoke with an intensity the old man had not seen from him before. Or from many people at all, he realized.

"Well, I feel like dithering on that one while I think it through. Do you know the rationale for torture that says if the information is truly invaluable, it's worth torturing for?" said the admiral. "I could probably imagine some confidence that would be so powerful that I would be duty bound to run out and shout it out to save many lives, for instance."

"I understand," said Bobby. "So I revise the condition for that exception. Can you accept it that way?"

"Yes," said Bespoke without pause.

"Can we go somewhere where there's no monitoring?" Every square inch and second of a PsychFet trainee's life was monitored. Bespoke nodded and the old man and the youth went into the locker room next to the dining hall, and changed into terrycloth robes fresh from the dryers, the only garments likely to be free of micro bugs. Then they walked out into the perpetual evening of the far northern summer.

Bobby started right out, "Do you know of any Fets who... how do I say this... have dreams that they can't recall once they're awake?"

"Mmmm, not specifically," said Bespoke simply.

"I have them. Big time. I haven't told anyone until you because I worry it's something serious that might get me kicked out of the program. I thought it might be a secret problem for some Fets that no one talks about. It's been happening since I was little. I have no control over recalling the dream, and I pretty much have control over every other mental process. The dreams pop up usually just before reveille and fade so fast I can't remember much of anything about them."

They walked silently for several minutes.

Bobby took a deep breath and spoke quietly. "I only remember a general feeling. Whatever I'm dreaming about is really scary." He paused. "But I'm never scared. I feel... confident."

Finally the old admiral said, "And you've decided to tell me about it now. Why is that?"

"There's a chance something is wrong with me. In the PsychFet sense, I mean. I may have some recessive genetics driver that makes me have this hole in my memory. When I was younger, I really wanted to not think about it. It probably is why I had a fixation on watching all that damn family comedy stuff. Always got my mind off the dream." He correctly assumed Bespoke knew all about his fixation.

"The kicker is I had one of those dreams this morning," he continued. "Pretty much the same stuff as far as I can remember. Only there was something new." Long pause, many steps. "Then I woke up and was crying hard. I mean bawling." He paused. "I never cry. Weird."

"Let me think about it for a few minutes. Let's walk." said the admiral.

Bobby felt small tremors in his legs and hands as they walked. I guess I'm really tense about this, he thought. To be moved off the fast track he was on – a candidate for SearchShip Master! – would be crushing. Maybe that was what he was really crying about after that dream.

"First," said Bespoke, breaking the silence in as quiet a voice as Bobby had yet heard from the old man. "I'm pleased that you selected me to make this. . . confession, I suppose. Second, I am not sure what response you expected, or hoped, I'd give. The reason I'm pleased is that you decided to trust me with something potentially harmful to yourself. Trust is one of the most important aspects of character. If one cannot trust, one will never be trustworthy himself. That's one of my deepest beliefs."

He made a deep sigh, and Bobby thought it sounded like a sigh with many implications, perhaps memories.

"Here's how I've decided to respond. I truly don't know if this condition you describe is counterproductive or negative to your growth as a PsychFet in any way. I am incapable of an informed opinion. Even the men and women in the program might never have seen such a syndrome. But they are a hell of a lot better qualified on the subject than I am. You are right; if it is a problem of substance, it could change your life path. I'm just not the man to evaluate that. I am going to put it right back on you. What you do about this is entirely your responsibility. I do not want to even slightly influence your decision. I don't want to know what you decide, because somehow you might read approval or disapproval into my response. I trust you will do the right thing, whatever that is. I give you this trust in part because you gave me yours. Please don't say anything at all. I will leave the base shortly. Perhaps we will meet again."

With that, the old man waved and walked away from a slightly stunned Bobby.

Close Call: That night Bobby contacted the Senior PsychFet on the Development Committee. His name was Argonic Lambda, and he seemed like a very mellow gentleman. Bobby told the soft spoken PsychFet that he was concerned about being distracted by an internal stressor. Then he described the inaccessible dream and his impressions that it was important and frightening. There was a deep sense of relief in officially putting the subject on the table.

Bobby was immediately taken to the PsychFet intracom room, underground in the countryside outside the small village where much of the training occurred. The village was located on an island in the North Sea that had once been a playground for volcanos and glaciers. The glaciers were gone and the volcanos were domesticated energy sources. The island's pre-apocalypse name was "Iceland," no longer accurately descriptive in the changed climate.

Bobby had been to the intracom room many times before, to link with one or sometimes two trainers at the vastly accelerated rates of PsychFet com. There, with the involvement of a therapeutic quantum computer and the calming presence of several senior PsychFets, Bobby was put through the current state of analysis, an archaic term for treatment of the ailments of developing minds.

He was hypno-regressed to age five. His full consciousness was both five and his real age of sixteen. The simulation was Bobby watching "Father Knows Best." Bobby was intently aware that this was his thirteenth time to see this episode. There were tears in his eyes. Sixteen year old Bobby was addressed by Argonic Lambda. "What is the emotion trigger? Why are you tearing up?" The simulation froze then faded.

Bobby made a gesture of insight, sort of an inquisitive nod. "It felt so good to be distracted from that dream. I needed that relief very much. It was like a hunger."

"So by five, this was established," mused PsychFet Lambda.

"Three," said Bobby.

And on it went for hours until the time was established that Bobby had successfully compartmentalized the pain, then when it started "leaking" as Lambda called the recent worsening.

"And this change of heart, the decision to disclose the problem to someone, is it not related to your new interpretation that the dream is about something huge and dangerous?" asked Argonic Lambda quietly.

"Yes."

"Is there more to what you see in your tapestry that concerns you?"

"Yes."

There was a long pause. In gestalt flashes Bobby knew this moment was critical. If he told Lambda his latest revelatory sense of the dream it could mark him as irrational. This could not be good for his prospects of becoming a PsychFet, much less a SearchShip Master. Still, only truth would do.

"I sense that the dream is ..." he carefully chose the word, "a foretelling." There. Said. The new sense that the dream was more than a mental anomaly was profound. Irrational or not, he had to disclose what he perceived. Now he would get the first hint of how this went down with the counselor.

"I see," said Argonic Lambda. He looked briefly at the other PsychFets present, standing in the shadows across the chamber. "Do you know the specifics of what is being foretold?"

"No. I take it to be cautionary. 'Be careful,' sort of. 'There are more things in heaven and earth...' 'Don't underestimate,' and so on. The size of the impression is so out of scale that I think that must be a main part of the message."

"Message," said Lambda flatly.

All in, thought Bobby. "Yes. I believe – feel very strongly – that the dream is a message from outside of me." Bobby clenched his teeth.

"Ah," sighed the elderly PsychFet.

Not a regretful sigh, thought Bobby; something else.

"I have close friends with substantial expertise in the subtler workings of mind who have convinced me that this is not unlikely." Saying that, Lambda straightened up from the attentive slouch he was in and said, "So! Now our task is to de-fang this problem so that you are not distracted so much by it. We will start with some hypnotic reprogramming of your malleable young mind to take the angst out of the experience. I will teach you the value of putting distance between yourself and your problems."

Bobby could hardly believe his ears.

The therapy was a success. Within days, Bobby felt at ease within himself. Argonic Lambda gradually slipped into a role that no tutor or counselor had ever taken in Bobby's training, a father figure. That, and the cautious tweaking of Bobby's expanded brain by the quantum therapy computer gradually returned all parameters to nominal.

Argonic Lambda noted in his final report that the young PsychFet candidate still had some "idiosyncratic leanings," an assessment too vague for the Board judges to act upon. Bobby was returned to the mainstream of his training. Perhaps the decision was less rigid than the norm because of the extraordinary performance the boy was showing.

Chapter 3: THE GAME CHANGERS

1476 PA: The Fets: After years of research back in the 15th century Post Apocalypse, an Imperial consortium developed Field Effect Transcranium tech, a step to propel human progress forward. The parallel specialty of genomic architecture brought forth customized humans able to fully use the new brain tech. Instantly, they were labeled Fets. Their special ability was to interface mentally with computing devices.

There were naysayers to the whole project. But the usefulness of these new citizens was soon obvious. Their computer links were concentrated in the machines and data bases specialized for their callings, the MathFets to mathematics, the GovFets to governance, the MedFets to medicine, CompFets to computing, and so on. Every field with assigned Fets benefitted dramatically.

The Fets were not developed simply to be better tools for building Post Apocalypse human progress. Hopefully, they also were an antidote to what many in leadership saw as a possible roadblock to that progress. Some social scientists were very alarmed about it. "It" was the Dream Game.

A growing population with fewer and fewer "jobs" to occupy its time found endless diversion in the Game, challenges, opportunities, adventures, romances. And jobs. Suited to each individual's taste and ambition, and devoid of boredom, the occupations in the Game fanned creative ferment and acquisitiveness among those who possessed them. For those less creative and driven, there were endless distractions. There was a tendency, however, for those whose lives were mostly not in the game to harshly judge what happened in the Game, to devalue all that happened in that virtual universe.

The Fets' custom-crafted psychology rendered them immune to the seduction of the Dream Game. The anti-Dream Game types found this comforting. They had made this trait a condition for their approval of Fet development.

Dream Break: In his nineteenth year, PsychFet Senior Cadet Bobby awakened within seconds of his self-programmed waking time. He started his first ritual, deep slow breaths and hand stretches, then suddenly sat upright, eyes wide open, unseeing. His whole mental apparatus clawed out to catch the memory. Most of it slipped away, but part didn't. He wove a fiber of mnemonics around what remained, a technique he had practiced extensively for specifically this kind of event, any spike in recall specificity

Slowly he lay back on his sleeping pad, cradling the captured memory of the dream.

Across a grassy – strange grass – plain, an antelope-like beast ran effortlessly. Not an antelope, a dream variation. Six perfectly synchronized legs. Forward slanting horns from where ears should be. Sky slightly greener than blue. Bobby could feel the creature's emotions. Free and exhilarated. Unlimited.

Then something twisted in the creature. It's muscles ached to turn from the chosen track. A hunger invaded, then dominated the exhilaration. The powerful creature was pushed as though by a vast wind toward a random break in the nearby forest – strange trees. It knew it was running full tilt towards its death. There was nothing it could do.

Bobby reran the captured piece of the dream again and again. It was an odd piece in the tapestry of assembled memory catchings. The feeling of immensity was gone. The certainty of death was new.

The Great Ships: The SearchShips were an act of clear genius on the part of Emperor VI. He made a decision, recognized by most academic researchers as truly brilliant, to build the first of the great ships, although so much new engineering, and even new physics, was required it was almost half a century before the first such vessel was finished.

Some historians say privately that it was the input of his closest advisor, the abnormally small man named N'Gai Toledo, that moved the Emperor to make the historic decision to start the fleet of deep-space exploration ships. It is said, though never confirmed, that Toledo even devised the name SearchShip. The Emperor was keenly interested in doing things that would be judged by history as historic, and it was believed that Toledo carefully framed the idea as one that would be so judged.

N'Gai Toledo was a natural prodigy who made the decision not to have his growth augmented when he was only one year old. When he met the Emperor he was a boy of seventeen years. Toledo was less than five feet tall and already something of a recognized phenomenon because of his clear genius. E VI had been disarmed and fascinated at the same time by the boy's size and by his mind. Thus began a relationship of great mutual benefit.

Perhaps the greatest benefit to E VI was drunk night. Early on in the audition period when N'Gai was interviewing at great length for the job of Personal Assistant to E VI, the Emperor, who had already decided to appoint N'Gai to the post, realized that his relationship with the boy would devolve into the same 'toad and toady' kind he had with all of his retainers, cabinet members, advisors and executives. Something about the office made sycophants of them all. He was the big toad; the rest became small toadies. E VI resolved to do something about that.

"Have you tried intoxication?" the Emperor asked N'Gai Toledo the first day into their acquaintance.

"No, my Emperor, I have not. Several of my tutors have suggested that it might do me some good. Loosen me up, I guess," said the young man. He laughed. E VI liked N'Gai's laugh. Most of the toadies were afraid to laugh in his presence.

"I find it useful on some occasions," said the Emperor. "Even pleasant, which was the original purpose of using intoxicants. I always do it alone, so actually I don't find it all that pleasant. Another purpose is to disinhibit oneself. 'Loosen up' probably means just that, wouldn't you say?"

"Probably," replied N'Gai. "May I ask what might happen if the Emperor became too uninhibited?" There was a slight smile in his eyes. Respectful, but smiling.

"Yes, precisely," said E VI vaguely. "Anyway, at this point in our interview, I would like for us to get mutually intoxicated for a bit of time and see what happens."

N'Gai Toledo was shocked. So far this thing with the Emperor was just a job interview. A very important one to be sure, but with his superlative testing record, he would certainly get a wonderful professional appointment of some sort, whether the not-so-clearly-defined position of 'personal assistant' to the Emperor developed or not. This mutually intoxicated thing kicked the whole affair into another orbit. What the hell?

Now the Emperor smiled slightly. "Not what you were expecting? Well, I have my reasons. Do you have any objection?"

N'Gai stood dumbstruck.

With that, the Pharmacist to the Emperor was summoned and instructed to bring several bottles of ancient alcoholic beverages, single malt Scotch whiskey, bourbon, vodka and aged "Mexican" tequila.

"You might not have a taste for any of these," droned the pharmacist to N'Gai, "but they are quite different from one another, so one might develop favorites. The vodka is mostly tasteless, thus it can be mixed with something to modify its flavor." Then to E VI, "The single malt is what you liked, er... before, my Emperor."

E VI waved the elderly man away and poured small portions of each liquor into a row of miniature crystal glasses. "These are called shot glasses," he said in a pedantic tone. "Drinking a full one in a single gulp is called taking a shot, I believe."

N'Gai took tentative sips of each sample. He made no faces, but something about the single malt gave him a tiny shudder. "Hmmm. Perhaps I could develop a taste for the, ah, tequila. And perhaps the bourbon. The vodka tastes medicinal. The Scotch is. . . ." He paused.

"Aggressive," filled in E VI. "Earthy, peaty, smoky. Those are the words the ancients used to describe it. I like it." He poured the dark amber liquid into a larger glass and sipped at it with a thoughtful look on his face.

"OK, I'll try the tequila," said N'Gai.

Fifteen minutes later, N'Gai Toledo was becoming drunk. "Freeesh," he said. "I mean my lipsh are getting numb like when I'm in freesh... freezing weather." Then he laughed boisterously. He straightened his posture and pressed his lips together. "I should maintain my dignity in the preschence of the Emperorerer. No more intoxshicant for me."

E VI took a deeper taste of the Scotch and smiled. "And why is that my young genius?"

N'Gai twisted his face into a look of deep concentration. "Because you are... you are... the big ass schtomper." He moved his gaze to the Emperor's face. "Y'know what I mean?"

"The ass stomper?" said E VI. "Have you actually heard about me stomping any asses?"

The conversation declined gradually from that. Toledo forgot his decision about "no more intoxicants," and finished the job of disinhibiting himself. In that state he revealed he actually was rather fearful of the Emperor, but he would never, ever let anyone know. E VI confided he had mixed feelings about how people were frightened by him, and that it was less useful than one might think. He explained that those fucking PsychFets didn't seem to be fearful, not even properly respectful, of his imperial self. "I mean I created the assholes. More or less." Both the Emperor and his young candidate laughed uproariously.

At the end of the hour the Pharmacist was recalled to deliver the detoxicants. Within minutes both men were completely sober. N'Gai was clearly preoccupied as he reviewed what he had said in his altered state. "Uh, my Emperor, I hope I didn't . . ."

"You didn't. And neither did I," he said in a reassuring tone. "Mr. Toledo, two things: One, you are now officially my personal assistant. Two, we will never discuss with anyone other than ourselves what we do or say when intoxicated. Oh, and three, we will make it a regular event to become intoxicated together at least once a week. This interview is concluded. Now, let's get to work." The Emperor was secretly pleased that he would now have someone to drink with.

It is said it was in that first post-drunk period Toledo presented the idea of the SearchShips. Never confirmed, of course.

The Dream Game: The common citizens of the Empire of Earth, those billions who populated the twenty terraformed planets and Mother Earth herself, led lives of great diversity, almost totally in the virtual worlds of shared dreams. The Dream Game. Approximately 99% of humanity spent most of their lives in the Dream Game.

Dreaming was the superior form of virtual reality. VR, in all its verisimilitude, lacked the direct connection to the primitive brain that dreams have. Dreams were more vivid, more real that reality. Above all there were the shared dreams, the Dream Game. Talk about intimacy.

A tiny but ardent minority in the Empire considered the Dream Game a great evil that locked humanity into a drugged existence and forever limited its progress. But the only wars that happened were those in the endless games; none in the real world anymore. How bad could that be?

Lifespan became somewhat optional, depending on the individual to decide how much personal effort and treasure he would spend extending longevity. There was a fair number of quad-centenarians in the population and some even older. The end of life was most commonly the result of a personal decision motivated by either boredom, philosophy or the inevitable accidents in the pursuit of immoderate thrills. And as all the Empire remembered with profound amazement, death could come to a whole planet in a tidal wave of fire from an exploding sun.

Chapter 4: A GREAT SHIP FLIES

Richard Feynman, Artificial Personality: As one pioneer AP Developer put it, "They can't walk through walls." The APs have very human sensoria, perceiving that they have a body with typical human restraints of the various physical laws. They feel pain and pleasure, sensory and emotional. APs sleep and they dream. They must eat or feel hunger, drink or know thirst. To the best degree available in the historical records, they have the same tastes and preferences as their template human, although after activation, new tastes can be acquired.

If the AP Richard Feynman had existed contemporaneously with the original, his peers would have been completely convinced that there were suddenly two of the great geniuses. Now, Feynman was expanding his palate rapidly as he tried the favorite food and drink of his many companions preparing for this trip to distant stars.

To PsychFet Bobby, the AP Feynman was simply becoming his best friend.

Before the Launch: Bobby was in the penthouse apartment atop a thousand meter residence tower at the north Martian pole, just under the apex of the clear dome housing the army of contractors involved in finalizing SearchShip–g: SearchShip Bobby.

Richard Feynman existed in the computational banks several floors down from Bobby and in the virtual constructs of Bobby's penthouse.

"I have a persistent dream, Richard. I've had it as long as I can remember. It's always different, but always the same in one regard," said Bobby. "Do you have any such thing?" It was the sort of question a younger man might ask his best friend, but Bobby had had no best friend during his years of training. Now this non-person, this "Artificial Personality," programmed in an extreme likeness to a 20th Century theoretical physicist, Richard Feynman, was rapidly assuming that role.

The virtual Feynman leaned back on a wicker couch, an elbow crooked into a thick cushion. The long stemmed pipe in his mouth was cold, no smoke. "Maybe," he said. "But it's generalized. The dream is exactly like a real mental block. I feel frustration because of some problem in mathematics that I know I have solved before, but for some reason I just can't see into it. Or some such. What's yours?"

"So yours is painful. Mine isn't, at least not obviously. The problem is that for the life of me I can't remember it. I remember everything else pretty much perfectly."

Feynman clapped his hands, something Bobby had not seen him do before. "Aha! Then there is something mental I can do better than you. The first thing I noticed when the A.P. Patrol turned me on was that my memory was perfect. No exceptions. I suppose my hard drive could crash and I'd lose everything, but I think you future techies have solved that problem.

"In real life I'd forget things occasionally, and I misplaced some floppies, but the frustration was OK. I need a regular dose of frustration to remain my humble self."

Bobby chuckled. "You are even less patient with failure that I am, Richard." He rose and paced several laps to each edge of the thick rug covering antique planks in the long room. "Come to think of it, I haven't noticed that much humility in your over-educated self."

Feynman only snorted.

Bobby said, "That's what makes this damn dream so weird. I have a ton of memory and it's bullet proof, redundantly backed up and as good as yours. But I can't remember this one dream. And I have it every morning."

"You should have brought this up earlier. Maybe I could have helped," said Feynman.

"I've had therapy for it. I'm supposed to be over it and all OK, but I think about it often enough that I wonder if it is slowing down my transition."

The transition of which he spoke was to the SearchShip. For a full decade Bobby had been focusing ever more finely on the time when he would finally merge with the giant vessel being built in the shipyards orbiting Mars. Tens of thousands of Bobby's training hours and simulations were converging on this event. The hardware and software of the ship were tailored to Bobby's special mind. In essence the ship had also been training for the convergence. They were literally made for each other.

Legions of technicians, most of them Fets of various specialties, were finalizing the SearchShip construction and testing. The flow of transport spacecraft from the materials foundries around Jupiter and Earth's Moon to the gigantic ship had given way to a flow of final programmers, quality insurers, redundancy monitors, sensor tuners and that most elite of specialists, PsychFet quantum computation wizards.

"Cleopatra signals," said the apartment.

Feynman grinned. "Well, time for us to get serious again."

Cleopatra stepped through the portal as it irised in the wall, advanced to Bobby to give him a demure kiss on the cheek. Not virtual; very real. She was dressed in the ubiquitous crew jumpsuit which failed to hide the magnetic allure of her body. Her face and hair were luminous. Bobby had to briefly look away from her to keep his mind clear for the tasks at hand.

A table and chairs rose from the bare floor before the fireplace of ancient stone design. The trio took seats around the table and started their meeting. Feynman and Cleopatra both looked at Bobby, waiting for him to formally open the meeting. Something about the situation struck Bobby oddly.

He thought, These two people are my closest friends. My entrancement with Cleopatra is gradually growing into something I know must be "love," but for a being such as I, this is thought impossible. Richard isn't even real, but my feeling for him also is full of affection.

At the hyper-human rate Bobby could think, he drifted further into introspection. Lately he had been taking many of these rapid excursions into his own thoughts as he approached taking command of his SearchShip. It was a new practice for Bobby. He saw that without these friends he was very likely to fail.

His thoughts had taken only milliseconds. He spoke. "I must meet with the Emperor. It's a traditional thing stemming from the launching of the first SearchShip when PsychFet–b, Primus, was about to depart. I will disclose to you now something from one of my high security training sessions. I was told that that meeting came close to ending the SearchShip project before it really got started. I wasn't told, and apparently no one but the Emperor and Primus know to this day, exactly what happened. The only guidance on the matter I ever received was from my friend Admiral Bespoke. He said it was important that I simply "be myself" in this meeting. Perhaps Primus failed in that somehow, or almost did. I wonder what you think it might mean for me to be myself. . . and not screw up this meeting."

"Not to make light of it," said Feynman, "but for you to behave in some way that would endanger an investment of this size, you would have to go completely bonkers."

Cleopatra smiled. "Not likely, I think."

"I was just thinking what a stiff neck I am. The Emperor is bound to think I'm strange."

Meeting with E VI: Emperor VI – the only name he felt truly distinguished him – fretted uncharacteristically while waiting for the young SearchShip Master to arrive. N'Gai Toledo avoided eye contact, leaning back in a lounging chair while the Emperor paced.

"I have a theory," Toledo said, then waited to see if E VI responded.

"What? What?" the Emperor barked.

"Well, if you will pardon my bringing up taboo booze talk..."

"Go ahead," grumbled E VI.

"You told me, after about a quart of that abominable stuff you drink, that Bobby pissed you off because he was getting more public attention... ah, than he deserved," said Toledo.

The Emperor turned a fierce gaze at his personal assistant. "Your point?"

"I would only suggest that you put any resentment you feel toward him in the forefront of your mind rather than letting it lurk in your psychological background, pulling strings on your reaction to your new SearchShip Master. You might act in some way your more rational self would not. If you are consciously thinking about your resentment, you can keep it under control," said Toledo, looking at E VI's knees as he spoke.

There was a significant silence. A soft chime issued from an invisible point in the air and a voice, "PsychFet Bobby has arrived."

Toledo bowed and moved toward a portal.

E VI spoke, "That's why you are an excellent counselor, N'Gai. Thank you." The portal opened and Bobby and Toledo passed one another over the threshold simultaneously.

"Welcome, PsychFet," said Emperor VI, nodding slightly to the young man standing across the room. It was a real room of rough sawn Netty wood from Earth III, and the Emperor was his own true corporal self. Bobby likewise was his physical self. It was a very rare occasion for E VI to meet in person with any but his permanent staff and his coterie of trusted and very long-acquainted associates. All other contacts with the Emperor were conducted in near-perfect virtual environments. Meeting each new SearchShip master in person had been at the suggestion of several of the Emperor's most trusted advisors. After all, each SearchShip was a major expression of Imperial power and certainly excessively expensive. It was in the interest of the Empire for each ship's master to be impressed with the full measure of the Emperor's interest.

E VI waited after his greeting, an expression of neutral expectation on his face. Bobby walked toward the Emperor, speaking as he stopped three meters away making the formal half bow of custom.

"I have converged with the newest SearchShip of the Empire of Earth, my Emperor," Bobby said with well practiced formality.

"And I have decreed that this Ship will be named SearchShip Bobby," said the Emperor with equal formality.

Had there been a witness, he might have sensed a vague reluctance in the Emperor's voice. But there were no witnesses other that the time locked encryption of the Emperor's tech.

With the formal part over, both men stood looking at one another for several seconds. Then Bobby spoke.

"We know a great deal about one another, my Emperor, but I am actually without any real knowledge about how this meeting will proceed. I am at your service."

E VI seemed somehow pleased by Bobby's first comments, although one would have been hard pressed to identify just how the Emperor showed this. He turned and led Bobby to the side of the very large room where two antique chairs called "rockers" sat facing each other. Bobby stood by his chair until the Emperor was seated, then eased into it, experimentally rocking several times. E VI smiled at this, then spoke.

"I will tell you of a... concern, or perhaps a vague suspicion I have about the SearchShip project. I will try to describe it to you; then I would like your opinion."

Bobby smiled slightly himself, then asked, "Is this a concern that is specific to me, or have you had it about all the SearchShips?"

E VI seemed somehow displeased by this query, although again it would be difficult to point to anything specific about his response. "Good question," he said. "Because your ship is the latest, therefore the most advanced, and God knows the most expensive, I may be a little more worried about you, but the real concern is more general. I will describe it." The Emperor rocked his chair energetically for a few seconds, then slowed to a more gentle pace as he spoke.

"The stated central mission of the SearchShips is to find Other Intelligence, try to make friends with it, learn from it and broach the subject of an alliance. Since we haven't found anything alive in the neighborhood, we can assume the planet or the space habitat or whatever we find with intelligent life on it will be quite far away, too far to have much of a military type alliance or trade in anything but information. Stuff you know better than I do. But, PsychFet," he paused, "Bobby – suppose one of you strikes pay dirt?" The Emperor had a brief flash of pleasure as Bobby responded to the 20th century slang with another smile and a quick nod. E VI always did his homework for important meetings. "Even though you will be splendidly equipped to handle this mission, you will misrepresent to this new alien friend of ours just what humans are. Compared to even augmented humans, you are something of a superman. For years, we all have discussed that this situation would be an advantage to the Empire. It is better to be seen as more powerful in any early contact with another potential tech power."

"I agree, my Emperor, but this alien friend may be far more advanced than we are. To the alien, the differences between an average human and a PsychFet might be as a smaller ant is to a middle sized ant." With that, Bobby unleashed a radiant smile and a small chuckle. "Or of course, it might be primitive and think we are all gods."

The Emperor nodded. "What if your alien friend is both technically advanced and from a warlike culture? What if his first greeting is fire from some irresistible weapon?"

"I promise to survive long enough to send back a warning," said Bobby.

"What if your alien is a creature of great seductiveness and offers you pleasures beyond your will to resist?"

Now Bobby frowned. Finally, "Then I will have died and gone to heaven. But again, I promise to send back a warning."

E VI said, "I think you are irreverent, PsychFet. I have been told you are humble, but I think you are overly confident." There was an edge to his voice and expression. Bobby intuited that it was a conscious manipulation by the Emperor to be slightly threatening. He brushed the suspicion aside, deciding to treat the comment as true and uncolored by guile.

"I have learned in studying you, My Emperor, that you have had your long and successful reign because you are a careful student of character," said Bobby. "If you see over-confidence in me, I have to take it seriously. 'Over' is the key word. Should I make mistakes out there. . ." He waved vaguely at the ceiling, "in a quintillian credit SearchShip, and it's because I am over-confident, God help us all. I'll be very alert to that flaw."

E VI smiled in a way Bobby read as fatherly.

"Of course, of course," the Emperor said dismissively. "I admit I am a bit over. ...what? Parental? You are confident because you are something of a superman as I said before. I admonish because it's expected of me."

Bobby grinned. He felt suddenly relaxed in the presence of the most powerful mortal in the Empire of Earth. E VI even smiled fully, the only time Bobby had ever seen that expression on the old man even in the thousands of images of him he had seen.

As there were no substantive issues for the Emperor and his latest superman to discuss in this formal ceremony, Bobby soon left, saying as he stepped back from shaking E VI's hand, "You can be sure I will be doing my best."

In the Emperor's mind there was only little reassurance in that.

Underway: The twenty worlds of the Empire of Earth watched with all the fascination created by spectacle. The launch of a SearchShip was a rare event and many decades separated such occasions. This one was special in other ways. SearchShip Bobby was one of the largest, the most capable, and by far the most expensive space vessel ever created. In many ways the whole of the Empire had contributed to its construction, which had taken almost twenty years and a significant piece of the operating budget of every planet.

Its Master, its namesake was this Bobby character of a PsychFet. He had been an item of interest for almost his whole life. His accomplishments in training, the endless academic records he broke, the extraordinary physical feats he demonstrated – the whole ball of hero wax made him a household name. Most significantly, it was reported that he was a character in a significant proportion of the scenarios running in the Dream Game. He was flat out famous. Interest in the launch was doubled by his celebrity.

The ship floated in its Martian orbit, attached to its anti-matter drive booster that would take it out of the solar system, well beyond the Oort cloud where the dark energy drive would engage primal powers capable of accelerating the ship to interstellar speeds in an unprecedented short time.

The ship was organic in shape and in the emotional impact it had on human observers. Poets and wags in the Dream Game described it as the head of an eyeless weasel with large, thorn-shaped horns growing from its nose, skull and neck, not the most flattering description, but once stated, the dominant one. The skin of the ship was platinum grey, with platinum's ineffable depth. Not quite as large as the giant arks that plied the intra-empire lanes, it was still formidable. The ship's keel was two kilometers and its nominal beam was 800 meters. The nine 'thorns' averaged 600 meters, but were wildly different in size and not symmetrical. The shapes, size and placement of the horns hued to the spacial footprint of the highest power band in the mysterious spectrum of dark energy. The whole impact was of a large marine crustacean. Or a mutated spider. One expected the horns to writhe.

The flare from the booster could be seen with the naked eye from Earth, an actinic spark close by Mars. In the sensorium taps of the billions of observers, the anti-matter flare was attenuated to be bearable, and everyone could sense the immensity of the ship as it broke from orbit and began its journey of inconceivable distances.

The full Quantum Statistical Net was engaged so that all planets could watch the show in real time. Every scenario going on in the Dream Game was paused. For a few hours, the 'ratings' (an ancient term) of the departure would approach 100%. Hundreds of POV Cams were being aimed by a navy of camera bots, all around the giant ship and along its route past the orbit of Jupiter, over the asteroid belt, and then gloriously close to Saturn before pitching up a bit from the plane of the planets to head for its first destination. In only weeks, the SearchShip would leave the solar system.

Not to let such a grand – and expensive – event go without benefit to the Emperor, there were subtle, but powerful additives to the coverage - music with modulations keyed to the emotional centers in the brain, clearly communicating that this event added to the grandeur of the Empire and of that Special Man Emperor VI to whom all persons in the Empire owed fealty.

The spectacle of the launch ended with E VI striking a noble pose in the observation bubble of his space yacht, saluting the SearchShip's trail of departure.

In Good Company: As the immense SearchShip accelerated out of its construction orbit, PsychFet Bobby held an event on board that was half formal ceremony and half party.

"Our going away celebration!" Bobby shouted over the throngs gathered in an immense virtual grassy bowl under a brilliant virtual noonday sun. There was a roar of approval from the attendees. Aside from Bobby and Cleopatra, there were no actual persons on the ship, but that did not reduce the reality nor certainly the enthusiasm to any degree at all.

PsychFets were not to be bored. A great deal of effort had gone into insuring that boredom was almost impossible for the PsychFets who were SearchShip Masters. Being physically almost alone for many decades – or more – certainly invited boredom, at the least, and possibly, despair. Conceivably suicidal despair. A depressed PsychFet in a SearchShip might devise a spectacular suicide, which would be depressing. It might even be quite dangerous to Pax Earthana.

So Bobby and the small number of other deep space-bound PsychFets, Masters of their SearchShips, were never alone. Physically, almost, but that was irrelevant. Bobby had hundreds – a thousand if he wanted or needed them – of the most interesting and engaging personalities from the last of pre-apocalypse human history as his shipmates. He could summon them at will, or be petitioned by them for their own interests. They also were the storage media for a vast amount of data about their respective times and circumstances.

The APs were not "crew;" Bobby and his tech appendages managed every aspect of running the ship. Yet they were the crew in the larger sense.

Churchill, Einstein, Jobs, FDR, Pacino, Earhart, Dylans (Bob and Thomas), Keynes, King, Cleese, Belushi... a very long list. And from another era altogether, Cleopatra (a very special case). It was a long string of human jewels, strung as a strand of extraordinarily complete and fully independent APs, artificial personalities in the ship's infinite memory banks, to converse, challenge, match wits, co-invent, problem-solve, participate in colloquia or just party with Bobby.

Bobby had made the decision that most of the APs on his SearchShip were from the periods prior to the Apocalypse with a strong skew to the characters of the 20th Century. (Individuality had declined after the Apocalypse, he wrote in his requisition.) Hard to be bored among such company. At least that was the hypothesis.

The artificial personalities were self aware and as complicated as the humans they were modeled on. Intelligent, sensitive, aggressive, warm, aloof, all in more or less the degree of their originals. APs maxed the Turing Test even with full sensory contact.

The crowd, almost a thousand, spread on blankets and ground pillows. The sun shone with gentle warmth. The APs were in their appearances of choice from their living templates back before civilization disintegrated. Typically all were in their younger days by appearance. Nearly all wore shorts and shirts of varying modesty.

The party consumed many hours. The APs mingled, became better acquainted personally – there were many who were known and admired, even revered, sometimes loathed, by others who were "younger" and had studied those "older," but now in this new collaborative arrangement, all took to getting acquainted in good spirits.

Bobby, occasionally with Cleopatra at his side, had conversations with each and every partier, as many as a hundred at a time. For each AP, his or her conversation was purely one-on-one and apparently with Bobby's full attention, which was in fact the case. Multi-tasker was a serious understatement of Bobby's capabilities.

Careful attention was paid to the mental health of the super PsychFets. A concern was developing among the monitoring teams that PsychFets, alone in their vast ships with only APs for company were losing themselves in the subtle delusion that the APs were real people. When a major decision – especially a crisis response – might be impacted by consideration of its effect on the Artificial Personalities... well! Who knew what errors in judgment might ensue?

The new plan in the case of PsychFet Bobby was simple. A woman. Another live creature. Flesh and blood. And a powerfully challenging woman. Surely that would help keep a PsychFet from confusing the artificial with the real.

The woman's body was an exercise in rule breaking. The Empire was very clear in its prohibition of somatic creation. It was a Basic Commandment: There shall be no creation by the tech of biologics or by any other tech of any living forms simulating a human being. Punishment was uncharacteristically explicit. Any such creation would be irreversibly destroyed and the perpetrator would be brain-wiped and the remaining body would be reduced to basic molecules. Executed.

Notwithstanding, the Emperor encouraged the creation of the body of a young female complete in every human detail, except her brain was synchronized with a fully developed Artificial Personality based on all that was known about the ancient queen.

This extraordinary exception to the prohibition on human creation was made with the direct oversight of the Emperor. He and N'Gai Toledo personally honed the final version of the face and body. In his official – and deeply secret – commentary on the decision, he stated simply, "This is an insurance policy on a priceless asset."

That policy was Cleopatra.

Chapter 5: EXPANSION OF VISION

Conscious of Consciousness: While there was a body of literature on the subject, little was truly understood by anyone but the PsychFets themselves about Vision Expansion. While SearchShip mission planners spent great effort at providing the ship commanders with diversions, the most diverting things of all were the commanders' own minds. An unforeseen consequence of the genetic manipulations of PsychFet creation was each could do this odd thing with their minds they labeled as Vision Expansion. The PsychFets wrote long tracts about the experience. They lectured frequently on what it was like to expand. It even became a constructed experience in the Dream Game, but everyone was pretty sure no one but the PsychFets really knew what it felt like.

In a classic Vision Expansion, Bobby realized that while the APs are self-aware, they were not conscious as in the human experience of true consciousness. He reasoned that while the APs processed information almost infinitely faster than did plodding neuronal firings within an organic mind, speed was trumped by layers of complexity in organic creatures. In them each dendrite and neuron and strand of tissue was made of living cells. And within each cell exists another universe of complexity with signaling channels, energy sources, commensal creatures and the near infinite database of the DNA at the core. Bobby understood with the blinding clarity of a Vision Expansion that the APs lack this architecture, and this design - not theirs - allowed consciousness. He saw this through that most persuasive evidence to the contrary – that the APs are fully convinced that they were, and they certainly seemed to be, conscious.

No test could be devised to prove or disprove the presence of consciousness. AP Turing himself agreed with that conclusion.

Yet Bobby saw the truth. To him it was an intolerable situation.

He made his first heretical decision. He would not share this Vision Expansion with his peers until he had devised a solution to the problem.

Let There Be Life: AP Richard Feynman thinks, In the context of my original memories, this is an almost perfect existence. I am constantly challenged by this giant intellect, Bobby. He is a likable fellow for all his reinforced brainpower. There are many things we have in common. Particularly, I feel that he is much like I was when I was a young man in history, just discovering my own abilities.

I have been reborn in a far future, as exciting as any I ever imagined. My powers are undiminished – even improved. Still there is something missing. Was there always? My belief is I will feel more complete when I can be productive again.

Now I will have some of the focused attention of Bobby again. It amazes me how at ease I am with him, even while knowing that he is doing many other things simultaneously. It feels like we are simply two men, conversing on the most fascinating topics with no limits on our patience.

Feynman felt the warm glow of anticipation.

"Richard, I have a proposal," said Bobby as soon as Feynman had settled himself in the very chair that had been his favorite in his study at Cal Tech. Bobby was seated in a relaxed lotus position atop a large redwood ottoman, its cushion decorated with ancient Native American hieroglyphs in needlepoint. He was wearing a loose-fitting buckskin tunic. Feynman noted with good humor that Bobby was something of a fanatic about never coming to meetings dressed the same way twice or using the same furniture. It's probably because he has never had a normal life in which to develop favorites, thought Feynman. He would ask Bobby about that some day.

"We've discussed the quantum modules several times," said Bobby. "And I think that of any man of your time, you better understand how they work and what they are capable of."

Feynman waved his hand and shook his head slightly with the boyish self-deprecation many of his students and associates had noted as one of his most winning gestures.

"Well, maybe that, but I sure as hell don't comprehend what those things are really doing or how you talk to them without blowing out their superpositions."

"Still, you understand the principles because you foresaw them before almost all of your contemporaries. And my proposal is that I arrange for you to experience the modules directly in much the same fashion as I do," said Bobby.

Proof: Feynman was rarely at a loss for words, but there was a distinct silence from the AP as his mind lapsed into a rumination loop. Finally: "You bet. I'd say that's one helluva proposal, Bobby. I suppose I just don't understand your intent. And I certainly don't understand what will happen. Would you mind elaborating just a bit?"

"I have thought about this a lot, Professor. I have to reveal to you a conclusion I have come to about APs and about you specifically," said Bobby. His voice hinted at an emotion Feynman had trouble identifying.

Bobby continued, "While you and I have become rather well acquainted, it dawns on me that there has been very little in the way of personal discussion between us. I have not consciously avoided the topic of your subjective existence as an AP, but... there you have it, we simply haven't talked about it. In all fairness, we haven't discussed my subjective existence as a PsychFet either." Bobby paused.

Feynman: I think I should comment or respond, but for the life of me, I don't see where he's going with this.

"I would like first to show you the formal proofs of the point I am trying to make somewhat awkwardly here," said Bobby. "I believe you will find the proof difficult to follow – begging your pardon, sir – without an assist from the quantum modules. So we might accomplish two goals in the same stroke if I give you access to the modules and set you to studying the proof."

Feynman leaned forward in his chair, sitting literally on the edge as he spoke. "This is about APs and about me and there is a mathematical proof so complex I need augmentation to comprehend it? And if I'm not off the mark, you are somewhat nervous about the whole thing. Does that put it in a capsule?"

"Yes, quite solidly as usual. And I apologize for making you deduce the fact of my anxiety. I'm not sure why I feel this way except that perhaps you might be insulted or embarrassed by what I have concluded. Now I realize this is why I want you to read the proof before I just blurt out what I have concluded," said Bobby.

"Amazing," said Feynman. "I cannot wait to read the proof. I'm hard pressed to imagine what might insult or embarrass me, but I truly appreciate the fact that you are sensitive to the possibility. When do I get to start with the revelation?"

"Now," said Bobby.

The pleasant study where they were meeting morphed into a sphere in Feynman's perception. He was apparently floating in the center of it, perhaps meters, perhaps kilometers from its walls. His sense of body was intact. What did I expect?, he thought.

Bobby's voice came exactly as it had sounded before the transition. "I have chosen this interface for some practical reasons. The quantum modules will seem to be thinking with you. You will understand this odd description shortly. The sphere will change in response to your thoughts. The geometry of this setting is optimal for presenting the proof."

"Rock and Roll," murmured Feynman softly. It started.

Mathematical proofs were a specialty of Feynman, but this was spectacularly different. In one moment he could devise and execute any differential equation or statistical estimation in almost no time and rip conclusions from several math steps simultaneously. Then his mental superstrength would seemingly disappear. Then it would reappear. It was like stepping from rich color to washed grey tones then back again.

Feynman: The nature of the proof is experiential. The ease with which I grasp the formal information is clearly enhanced by the quantum modules; I'm pretty good at reading proofs. Bobby is connecting and disconnecting the modules. I get a lot of computing power, but that's not the main point. I feel... whole. Then I don't. That's what the proof is about. There is a level of consciousness which I never experienced until now. If Bobby is correct, it is near to what organic humans experience all the time. It is what I've been missing! And along with the consciousness the quantum modules give me staggering mental powers.

"It is a great gift, Bobby," he said softly.

"It's yours full time, Richard. And we should talk about how to give it to all the APs."

Rules of the Road: Bobby worked continuously on the problem of more efficiently extracting and utilizing the energies of The Dark to propel his SearchShip. He brought Feynman into the project. The recreated genius, augmented by the quantum modules, loved every second of it. His special mind converted complexity into clarity, perhaps as well as any thinker in human history. Between them, another Vision Expansion flowered.

All the Ship Masters continually calculated the microsecond changes in the w of dark energy, the formula of state, using a substantial proportion of the capabilities of the quantum modules to keep their ships' energy converters just slightly out of phase with the local state of dark energy, extracting the great differences. Each improvement in the formula was applauded and instantly adopted by all the SearchShips.

Then what Bobby called the Feynman effect led to a stunning new insight. The two men were so certain they were right that Bobby made the decision to physically modify the SearchShip. He formalized his Vision Expansion and added the complete design and plans for the modification and downloaded the whole package to the Empire.

His planned modifications of his SearchShip and what it would take to make them happen were unprecedented. There was first the stunning fact that initially not a one of the other SearchShips accepted his concepts. It was almost freakish for there not to be a consensus among the PsychFet Ship Masters on issues of technology and cosmology. It was even more bizarre for them not to agree on ways to extract more useful work from Dark Energy. News Hawk became very busy meeting the deep curiosity of the public.

Bobby and Feynman had devised a uniquely archaic concept of dark energy. They took this expansion to a pragmatic level which was widely castigated as simplistic. Their simple formula caused unprecedented mathematical controversy, some escalating into intellectual outrage. Many of the PsychFets dismissed Richard Feynman's contributions. Just an AP, they said. Simplicity was held in low regard, generally. H.L. Mencken was helpful during this odd situation. "If you don't stir the Brahmans to outrage occasionally, you are not doing your job," he said with his usual nasty twinkle.

Clearly undeterred by the criticism, Bobby acted on his interpretation and did something no SearchShip Master had ever done, interrupted his journey, decelerating his vessel from almost a third of lightspeed to a virtual stop near a loose swarm of intersteller asteroids, there to selectively mine and refine kilotons of light metals, aluminum, magnesium and beryllium.

With these elemental metals, Bobby used his small fleet of space walkers to build a web not unlike the webs woven by Earthly spiders, but fifty kilometers across, centered on the SearchShip, attached to the the dark energy spikes in whorls and coils computed to transfer the ephemeral field.

The plan to build the web became clear to the community of PsychFets, to the EngineerFets, the scientific community in the Dream Game and gradually almost everyone else. Once again what Bobby was doing became a significant item of interest in the Empire.

In a burst of comprehension about how the empire bureaucracy worked (several APs tutored Bobby on this, first among them AP Sam Rayburn), he also built an accounting model for the project, documenting the expenditures and estimating the returns of his project. He distributed the plans, the formulas and the engineering procedures to all PsychFets. They watched the project in disbelief and mostly in incomprehension, a state with which they had little experience. There was an almost unspoken feeling among his peers that finally one of their own had gone around the bend. But that Bobby was completely fascinating could not be denied. Nor was his probable mental state unspoken of.

"He's gone completely crazy!" yelled the Emperor. The only witness to the outburst was N'Gai Toledo. "He has completely disrupted the mission profile. He is trying my patience." With that E VI let out what could only be called a roar. Toledo winced but stood his ground. He had seen and heard the roar before and not lost his head – or any other body parts – so he assumed he would ride this one out as well.

"Ahem," he coughed politely. For a moment the Emperor looked around as if not comprehending that Toledo wanted to speak.

"What?" he barked.

"I would note that PsychFet Bobby has learned how to make his Emperor – I wouldn't say 'completely crazy,' – but at least quite upset, something no one has been able to do in a very long time." As he did in many such circumstances, N'Gai Toledo bowed slightly to the Emperor as he finished.

"We will see. We will see," growled E VI, storming out. Toledo was not sure what would be seen.

Cetacianal: Bobby had been chosen from the PsychFets in training and inaugurated into the rarified ranks of SearchShip Master training partially because of his extraordinary accomplishments in the communications drills with the CetaceanFets.

With his unprecedented behavior far in deep space, there was much rehashing of Bobby's résumé from every possible angle.

The senior master of human/cetacean relations, PsychFet Argonic Lambda, recalling his intense companionship with Bobby when he was still a young candidate, had a strong intuition that Bobby was right. The young man's character seemed to predict greatness those decades ago. Lambda's certainty was such that he called for a rare council of his three favorites, an ancient sperm whale who lived the Old Way in the oceans of Earth, a young but brilliant bottlenose dolphin transplanted to Earth III to train indigenous ocean mammals in Fet use, and a baleen whale who worked as the chief navigator on an Empire cruiser. They were all exceptional at making sense of and to humans.

For subjective hours – objective minutes – the quartet chewed on the question of the correctness of Bobby's conclusions and his action. The hub of their thinking centered on whether Bobby's and Feynman's simple theorem disproved the standing wisdom about dark energy and its existence solely in the higher dimensions.

After a copious exchange of clicks, whistles, glyphs and graphics, they decided simply both positions were correct, that there was no actual contradiction, and the reconciliation of the two was beyond the current tools of mathematics. A new calculus was in need of invention. The quartet could sense its form, but no more.

Argonic Lambda authorized the general release of the group's conclusion. There was the equivalent of shocked silence throughout Empire mathematicians, then confused babble, ended by a release from the MathFets of Earth XIV saying they agreed and would have the new formal proof in early draft form within less than a year.

It was an unconditional victory for PsychFet Bobby. Only E VI was not happy for him.

Self Congratulation: Bobby sat up from his reclining position in the FET frame. The SearchShip adjusted to the more tenuous connection with its Master. Bobby stretched his muscular body simply for the sensuous pleasure of a stretch. Every muscle and ligament, every organ, fiber and fluid of his physical body was maintained in a state of perfect health by the ship with all the benefits of exercise and nutrition, though he went for months without moving and essentially never ate or drank. His body looked like that of a 25-year-old athlete, his face also young and beautiful, but his eyes had supernal depth, windows into the vast intellect of a PsychFet in touch with his extended mind.

"Cleo?" he said. His voice had not been used in a thousand hours, but it was strong and clear. "I know you are near." He looked around the central room of the SearchShip, the circular center of a two-planed snow crystal design. Out of nine openings in the horizontal plane and twelve smaller ones in the vertical plane stretched the crystalline labyrinthine cavities that focused the Field Effect flux on the head position of the Fet frame. The surface textures of the room, the lighting, the temperature and quality of the air were subtly sybaritic.

"You think you know me, that you can predict much about me, but you are wrong, Bobby," came a young woman's voice from seemingly several of the openings at once. "You are the predictable one. You celebrate certain victories certain ways, and it took no sorcery to know you would call me now."

She floated out of the most distant opening to the vertical plane and touched the floor where Bobby stood with her toe outstretched. It had a simple gold ring around it. Softening her words with a genuine and stunning smile, she reached up and touched his cheek. "Cleopatra VII of the Ptolemys at your service, Master of this great vessel. In truth it has been too long and whatever awaits us this day will be too short. Do you approve?"

She stepped back pulling open her gauzy wrap to expose her body to Bobby's eyes, and thus began their dance. To Bobby (and to the outlaw somatic masters who created her body), the twenty-year-old Cleopatra was the ultimate in human female beauty and allure from throughout all history. He believed she was a genetic anomaly who had in her mind and body every power of her sex to choose and win any mate of her choice. He was sure there never had been a hetero male of any persuasion who could have resisted her. He certainly didn't try. His celebration with her was – as always – beyond his expectations, a stunning surprise that left him as near befuddled as a creature of his sort could be.

Vision Confirmed: Bobby's SearchShip surpassed what in the Empire was called Pragmaspeed, point seven C, only 25 Earth days after installing the dark energy orifice web. Seventy-five percent of the speed of light; 224,844,344 meters per second. He reported his ~3G acceleration back to Earth continuously in this period, and three times received detailed sets of tests and self-examinations to run on the ship in search of any nasty side effects. The new dark energy web had not even wiggled under the intense acceleration.

Chapter 6: ROBERT LONGLINE, AMBASSADOR

Robert moved silently down the steeply sloping and absolutely dark tunnel. He wore a thin backpack containing his bike's computing and sensor elements. This tech probed far ahead of him, finding and confounding sensors and active defense devices, and at the same time giving Robert a vivid, multi-dimensional view in the darkness, seeing well around the corners ahead of and behind him via the optic thread into his brainstem jack. The tunnel turned back upon itself maze-like again and again, and dead-end baffle corridors branched out randomly from the main course. It was a simple blast absorption design that would collapse at any serious force. To Robert, it looked as though it had not been traversed since its construction. He estimated that was about two hundred years ago which coincided with the estimate of the age of the underground installation calculated by his remote facilities. The steadily increasing thickness of granite between Robert and the surface caused no challenge for the miniaturized Quantum Statistical com device that kept him in touch with his remote facilities. As he descended he reviewed his options.

This was his first action – the tactical first step – in the ambitious strategy Bobby and Cleo, out on the SearchShip, had named Bottom Up. The creation of Robert Longline was exclusively for the testing of tactics to put this strategy into action.

Knowing that he was a created being, in existence for less than thirty days now, was an abstract and distant sensation for Robert. His memory was of a long and gratifying life with a happy childhood. He recalled caretakers who were loving and involved with his development. His memories documented how he was disciplined and trained and educated among other children of all ages and talents. He had traveled alone and in teams all around the Earth and the Solar System, and learned the values of cooperation and the trials and rewards of individuality.

As he had matured, his training had become more rigorous and more specific to his calling. Tech became another limb. Psych-humanology became another limb. Yet he knew he was thirty days old, deep in his self knowledge. He knew that what he was defied the legal strictures of the Empire of Earth in a most profound way. The ban on artificially created beings in the precise image of human life was one of the most fundamental legal embargoes, and the punishment for defiance was draconian. But this in no way concerned Robert. Dedication to his purpose was the center of his being.

In this he assumed – and all of his humanology modeling indicated – that he might have much in common with those who had slipped the bonds of their society and retreated to places like this underground installation. The actions of the shooter who led him to this place showed a brazen disregard for the unquestioned order of the Post-Apocalyptic Empire of Earth. The content of the viral implants the shooter had spread among the party-going Peers below Cheyenne Mountain showed that there was another ambitious strategy in action, although exactly what was still not clear to Robert. His purpose was to understand and then convert their strategy to Bobby's Bottom Up strategy.

He approached a more challenging security device, apparently a wall of the contemporary inframolecular alloy known as technol. Basically impervious to any practical portable energy projector, the material was primarily used in spaceship construction, being too expensive and far stronger than necessary for more mundane applications – certainly than armored doors.

Robert probed around the edges of the tunnel, looking beyond the technol plate. It extended twenty meters into the granite in all directions and was thirty centimeters thick. Beyond the technol, the tunnel continued barely fifty meters, opening onto a sort of balcony. Beyond the balcony was an open space and many energy signatures downward from its edge, clearly an extremely active area filled with humans and machines.

Robert gathered his thoughts into the weave of crypto-consciousness that was the pinnacle of his mental training. The faint psychic patterns in his mind activated the tech that occupied over half of his backpack. He moved his hand over the face of the technol plate in a slow circle a meter in diameter. The technol thus inscribed moved in time and space to elsewhere and elsewhen. There was then a clean, meter-wide hole in the material. Stepping through cautiously, Robert walked slowly to the edge of the balcony.

He reached over his shoulder and into the top of his backpack. From a small compartment he pulled a packet, barely five centimeters square. From it he extracted a filmy garment and slipped it over his head, pulling it down each leg to his feet. There he tucked its edges under the soles of his catspaw shoes. He smoothed it over his clothing. It clung to him from the top of his head, over his backpack and to the tips of his fingers and toes. The material covered his face but allowed his breath to pass unimpeded. It covered his eyelids and his eyes themselves except for a tiny horizontal slit. If Robert looked down he was completely covered with the material.

He executed another cryptoconscious command, and the garment became an essentially perfect cloak of invisibility, bending photons of all energy levels from every angle around it and propagating them into their original path from the precise opposite side. No functional Earth optic tech could detect that which was camouflaged beneath it. Of course, like so much about Robert Longline, the stealth suit was completely illegal in all jurisdictions of the Empire of Earth. He did not think the law would be an issue in this hidden and obviously even more illegal place.

He stepped to the edge of the balcony and surveyed the bustling floor beneath him. Scattered across it at hodge-podge angles were room-sized boxes of various sizes and colors. The inhabitants could be seen entering and leaving the free standing rooms through flicker doors. Other people were grouped around simulation fountains or data gates. There was a sense of intense endeavor over the great floor of the installation. Hundreds of people moved from group to group and roombox to roombox, all stepping lively. They were dressed in jumpsuits, identical except for the wild range of colors, no two alike. Uniforms. Color = rank? Job description? mused Robert.

After watching for a few seconds, Robert adhered the end of a monofilament to the inside of the balcony railing, checked the small reel attached to his harness under the stealth suit and vaulted over the railing, descending in a controlled fall for thirty-five of the forty meters to the floor, decelerating smoothly for the last five meters to land silently on his feet. Detaching, he moved invisibly between the busy occupants. He was unsure of his exact destination, but the patterns of people movement he had seen from the balcony guided him in the general direction of what he sensed was the center point of activity.

Soon he reached an oddly shaped roombox, taller than most, but primarily distinctive in not being strictly a rectangular structure. The angles were only slightly askew, the color only barely out of the spectrum of the other boxes, but Robert had no doubt as he looked it over, that this was the place. And inside would be the person he sought.

The flicker door hesitated as Robert moved in front of it. It's sensors were confused by his presence, but clearly also noted his difference from the human forms it was programmed to recognize, presumably the fact that there was no visible form at all. Robert centered himself in front of the door and opened his eyes widely, looking directly at where the sensor typically was on such a portal. The door flickered to full open and he stepped through.

Several people sitting around a low table with an engineering virtual hovering above it glanced up as the door opened, but seeing nothing, leaned back into their concentration on the Virtual. All but the woman sitting at the far side of the table, who kept looking at the door. She spoke.

"Let's pick this up in forty minutes. I need a break to handle some issues." The others around the table looked slightly confused at this, but then stood and moved out of the room with dispatch, checking their wrist coms. Robert moved aside and stood against the wall as they left.

He watched the woman as she looked intently around the room as though looking for something or someone. He sensed that she was older than most humans he had met. She must be at least as old as the fellow who had heckled him from the floating platform back at the scene of the attack, and that was old. He wondered if she were a multi-centenarian. That in itself would make her even more unlikely as the leader of the subversive activity going on in this installation. As Bobby and Cleo had speculated on who was the moving force, neither had considered that it might be an older citizen.

She stood behind the table, gestured absently to turn off the virtual. She rubbed one hand over her forehead and down across her eyes to the tip of her chin, her eyes still closed as she finished.

"I know you are here," she said in a soft voice. "The flicker door never opens accidentally. I also know you are here because I have dreamt of this moment many times. I even know what you look like. Very tall. White hair and beard. Young. Very young, truth be known; less than a month. Wearing the very best stealth gear. How am I doing?"

Robert detuned the suit with a mental command, and stood – quite visible – smiling across the table at her. "Extremely well, madam," he said. "I am Robert Longline, and I am here to tell you of a situation of extreme importance."

"And I am Hester Negreponte, leader of The Corsairs, daughter of Emperor V, and I am very interested in hearing what you have to say." That explained her leadership role! Robert noted expansion of her irises as she looked him over. She was very interested in Robert himself as well. He felt a swirl of reciprocal interest, the first such he had felt in his short manifestation as a living creature. She was simply beautiful to him, and well below his conscious awareness, she keyed in him maternal attraction response even more powerful than her beauty.

Chapter 7: LIGHTNING

Big Decision: The great and growing speed of the SearchShip surpassed the schedule of the original plot even after having to re-accelerate following the stop to build the giant dark energy web. The projected actual time of the voyage to its first destination was already a year shorter. It was approaching the turnaround point where deceleration must begin in order to arrive at MSS578 at the proper velocity. The ship would be traveling at a relative snail's pace, slow enough if there were reason to stop and actually probe the strange binary at length. It was a red dwarf star and an anomalous cold object of similar mass. Though there were not even proxy life signatures, it was such an unusual system that the mission planners thought it was an ideal first stop for the SearchShip.

While running simulations of the turnaround, a revelation swept through Bobby's mind. It was a tsunami of insight. He mulled it over in the special way a SuperFet attached to vast computing power could mull. He challenged all his assumptions, queried every library he carried, created and ran multiple models. With every step, he became more convinced that his insight was valid, and he could find no flaws in his conclusions. The dark energy engines would involute, properly coaxed. The results would be spectacular.

A major decision was called for. He disseminated the problem and a summary of his internal challenges to the full population of APs. They grappled with it and in the short term all but a few declared it was beyond their comprehension. Only Feynman and Einstein stayed in the loop, each contributing ideas and challenges until they declared they had no more to offer.

Thereafter Bobby and his extended brain of interlocked quantum computers, superfast atomic spin controller matrixes and the cubic feet of organic brain tissue known as the supra frontal cortex – the whole mentation arsenal of a PsychFet – made the decision alone. Even Feynman was only glancingly consulted after he professed confusion over several major elements of the problem.

"No turnaround," announced Bobby. "Continue acceleration." It was a formal Master's Order, as well as an announcement to the Empire of Earth and to the other SearchShips.

The AP's, as ever, were not quiet about it. Feynman and Einstein spoke first and practically simultaneously. Bobby could attend countless inputs simultaneously so he gave each man his due attention.

Feynman said, "I have a glimmer... only a glimmer. There is the possibility of a higher dimensional feedback loop that would open at the proper energy levels... but for the life of me I cannot see how you would initiate it. I am using my access to your computations, but dammit, Bobby it is obscenely obscure in places."

Einstein lapsed into a preoccupied fugue characterized in his young life as his most creative state. He muttered in German a fractured monologue hinting of his internal thoughts. "Gravity waves pile and compress... Primeval energy conversion... Blendenden blitz... ya!"

Bobby thought that the Albert's genius shown through. The expressive words blendenden blitz, blinding lightning, came very close to his own vision of the end-phase of this trip. He started an analysis on why Albert would use "primeval."

The non-mathematical majority of the APs expressed anxiety in the main. Greta Garbo: "I've tried dying once, dahling, and actually I'm not interested in a second run." Edward R. Murrow: "The view from here is that PsychFet Bobby has fallen into a 'damn the torpedoes' frame of mind. What will come of it we can only wait to see." FDR, placing a fresh Chesterfield into his amber cigarette holder: "Accepting the inevitable doesn't sit well with me. Never has." Harry Truman (who frequently spoke only after FDR): "It's your trigger, Bobby, and you're the only one with a damn finger in this crowd." Mort Sahl: "I've been wondering when the funny stuff would start, Bobby. You've been way too cool for an absolute dictator."

Bobby smiled. Something about Sahl's delivery always cracked him up.

Insurrection: Bobby created a new meeting space. It was the Captain's quarters on a 17th Century CE privateer, a three masted sailing ship alone in mid-Pacific in moderate weather. The room swayed and pitched as the wooden hull sliced through two meter swells, and ocean scent perfumed the strong breeze coming through an open port. He requested Feynman and Cleopatra to join him. Both looked briefly confused at the setting, but took chairs and said nothing.

"I've been thinking about how I'm making decisions these days," Bobby started without prelude. "I'm about to make a big one, and I thought you might have a comment or two."

"Can't imagine what it's about," said Feynman. "Like you haven't given us any hints or anything. And by the way, in my original body I would have already been really seasick."

Cleopatra had been looking around the cabin and out the large windows at the stern. "I'd say you were making a point about how sailing ship captains far out at sea made decisions. Not so subtle, Captain."

Bobby sighed, sat down and smiled. "That's what I needed. Thanks."

The room stopped pitching about and Bobby explained his decision. "We are not going to start the deceleration phase. We will continue to accelerate right up to the C-threshold and stay there until we arrive at our destination. Then we will stop as suddenly as if we crashed into a neutron star. And live to tell about it. That's my decision. What do you think?"

"Hoo boy," said Feynman softly.

Cleopatra patted Bobby's cheek. "Aye, Captain."

Bobby sent his decision to E VI.

Consternation: The Emperor was so stunned by Bobby's com he thought he misunderstood it. Since no one thought to classify the message it quickly circulated into the normal government channels. The technical abstracts, the dense math modeling and the rest went to their usual destinations. E VI was still discussing exactly what it all meant with N'Gai Toledo when responses and queries started flooding in from many quarters.

"What the bloody hell?" E VI shouted when the first assessments started popping in his emergency channels. "Extreme risk!" headed a message from TechFet Alpha.

"I think this is not good," said N'Gai Toledo quietly. The MathFets summary quickly stated that they would need more time to analyze Bobby's math. Trickles of reports from various ScienceFets on the SearchShip support teams were sliding from questions to conclusions, and they were unanimously concerned.

Within half an hour, E VI called a working group meeting. He stood looking at the small crowd of advisors, his most trusted and senior, and spoke in a quiet voice – a voice many of them recognized as indicating one of his most dangerous moods.

"The consensus is that this plan of Bobby's," he almost hissed the name, "Is, and I quote, 'Most likely to fail catastrophically.' 'Risk is assessed from serious to very high.' 'A reckless step.' 'The SearchShip will either be destroyed or simply sail past its objective in a disabled state.' Oh, I could go on, couldn't I?"

He paused and seemed to gather himself. "I want you to witness this." He crooked his finger at N'Gai Toledo to open the com channel. "This is a formal order from Emperor VI to SearchShip Master PsychFet Bobby. Abandon this plan. Turn your ship around and begin conventional deceleration."

Bobby's voice came back immediately. "My Emperor, I respectfully request a private conversation." E VI jerked reflexively at the instant reply. He hesitated several seconds before agreeing. "All out," he barked. The room became empty. Bobby's avatar phased in several meters away.

"My Emperor. I respectfully refuse your order. It is with a full understanding of my action that I do so. I declare to you that I have near certainty of the success of my plan, and that success will be of great value to the empire and to you personally. Travel time within the empire will be more than halved. No other SearchShip has the capacity to execute this, nor will any without extensive modifications. To postpone this discovery for decades would be a great irresponsibility on my part. That is why I must act."

E VI's health monitoring gear registered physiology changes that spelled apoplexy, but outwardly the supreme leader of the Empire of Earth kept his cool. "I repeat, PsychFet, this is a formal order from me to you. Abandon this plan. Turn your ship around and begin conventional deceleration."

The two men, separated by meters and light years, stood looking silently at one another for several very slow seconds.

"Ah," said E VI. "I see. I only add the question, is this act completely rational for yourself and for the Empire if you are only 'near' certain?" Bobby did not answer.

"Out!" growled E VI, and he was alone. There would be no suppressing the fact that PsychFet Bobby, the darling of the populace, was mutinous and in direct insubordination to the Emperor. E VI clenched his hands until his fingernails pierced his palms and screamed "N'Gai!"

Gauntlet Down: On Earth, the center of Imperial Government itself, a rare thing now happened. The Emperor called a Grand Assembly.

"I want," he said to N'Gai Toledo, "Every fucking quadrant of The Empire represented – with just one exception, anyone who might challenge me on this."

Emperor VI, in power for almost five Earth centuries, had called only one General Assembly before, that upon the occasion of a runaway experiment in stellar manipulation that brought a star to nova, killing almost a half million citizens on Earth IX and the thousands of ScienceFets they supported. That Assembly had been an exercise in official mourning and the reexamination and rewriting of the rules for such projects. It had been an act of courageous leadership for the Emperor to suppress a movement to return to a primitive form of neo-Luddite policies.

The situation that warranted an Assembly now was different. This time the Emperor felt he could see the catastrophe coming in time to do something about it.

He was determined to stop the renegade PsychFet from destroying one of the most valuable assets of the Empire, a SearchShip. Each such vessel represented the Gross Empire Product for half a decade. The financing and construction of each SearchShip strained the economy of the Empire for as long as a decade following its completion, therefore only seven had been built, with Bobby's the latest and most expensive of them all. It had been seen by all of E VI's advisors that the building of this ship would be the central pillar of the Emperor's legacy. What screaming irony that this "Bobby" turned out to be such an unmitigated shit.

Emperor VI had been nursing a growing resentment of Bobby for almost three decades. His exercise of self-discipline at his first and only face-to-face meeting with the PsychFet before his departure had soured in the Emperor's memory. He had practically prostrated himself before the arrogant asshole. Even Toledo no longer counseled him to let go of his resentment – and yes, jealousy, he admitted only to himself – of the insubordinate sonofabitch.

The Emperor was a man of significant vanity, and it had been a bee in his imperial bonnet that Bobby was by far the most discussed creature in the Empire... since he was a damn child!

For his whole reign before the extraordinary childhood of this Bobby, the Emperor had been very comfortably alone in the most-discussed category. Great Heavens, the excitement among the citizenry when he made a public appearance with a beautiful woman! Or when he spoke of his favorite foods or revealed any trivia at all about himself, the NewsHawk flared with universal coverage, and the flow of discussion and comment through The Game was copious.

Even though the PsychFets were the most extraordinary of creatures, none had ever emerged as a major focus of citizen interest and conversation. It was as if Bobby the young prodigy had become the foster child of the whole Empire. Fets were, after all, the servants of the citizenry, created human mutants. They were nonetheless, in the Emperor's mind, insignificant in stature compared to himself, bit players in the drama of empire.

Until Bobby. His prodigy-among-prodigies status had captured the imagination of the Empire early on. At first E VI had been pleased himself. He cleverly arranged for the public perception to give him credit for this superchild. Gradually, even the masterful abilities of the Emperor's perception managers couldn't keep the public interest from increasingly focusing just on Bobby.

Now this. Outright insubordination. It was more than just a threat to E VI's heretofore-unquestioned authority, it was potentially a seismic shudder under the very foundations of how the Empire was governed.

A Grand Assembly convened the Cabinet, the Supreme Judicial and the Senate. There was, however, a redaction called. The Emperor exercised his almost unlimited procedural power to exclude certain segments of his Empire from even knowing about the Grand Assembly. The unprecedented step was taken to tune the quantum statistical communications networks to exclude Bobby from participating or even hearing the proceedings of the Assembly. There were more sweeping exclusions. Argonic Lambda was cut as too sympathetic to Bobby. The whole of Earth XIV was excluded because of the rampant enthusiasm for Bobby's mathematical insights by the MathFets. Over a hundred other exclusions were mandated by the Emperor on the grounds that there should be no voices in support of Bobby as Emperor VI would accuse him of being an arch criminal, perhaps the most harmful criminal in all human history. "No voices," was unlikely, advised N'Gai Toledo.

The Assembly Hall: Much time and the expertise of architecture that could inspire awe in the human mind had been expended in creating the great meeting place. It was conceived during the reign of Emperor III. It was called simply The Hall of Assembly, an immense, mixed real and virtual construct of dark woods and glowing stone, a brilliant hybrid of classic and revolutionary architecture. With perfect acoustics, all attendees could hear a speaker's every nuance no matter where they were scattered across the huge space, cosseted in purple velvet chairs. The distant participants, the populous Senate, popped or faded into the chairs, appearing no less solid. As the crowd gathered there was a hushed murmuring.

Upon final coalescence of the gathering, with no introduction, the Emperor spoke. "This Assembly is called to order. We are assembled to decide how to deal with a most serious charge, made by your Emperor with the full input of his Privy Council. The charge is: PsychFet Bobby has made a decision that can be characterized as insubordinate, likely criminal. Some advisors characterize his decision making process as "irrational." In his madness, he has put the finest SearchShip in the Empire in great peril. He has openly defied a direct order from your Emperor, therefore from the government of the Empire. He has set a precedent that if unpunished may lead to other acts of revolt. There is the potential for unprecedented harm in his action." He paused, sweeping the huge room with his glare. "That is the charge. Your Emperor expects a full and effective response with minimum delay."

There was great turmoil among the Members of The Assembly. It was more than clear what Emperor VI expected of them. PsychFet Bobby had gone over the line and, by all Heavens, he was to be punished most capitally.

The Assembly was recessed. The time to reconvene was set. The Emperor disappeared and after a brief pause there was a rush of conversation among the attendees. It did not take long for it to be clear that there was a substantial minority of the Members who were not at all sure what should be done, nor if something punitive were called for, how in those same Heavens could even the mighty Empire of Earth go about it?

The Loyal Opposition: A leader of the opposition soon emerged. It was the elderly Principal of Earth, Admiral Ednorton Bespoke, the augmented human of over five centuries in age. who had been given the honorific Admiral after serving as the civilian Secretary of the Empire Space Navy from his sixtieth birthday until his mandatory retirement at age of 250. Since his retirement he had served his planet and his Emperor in dozens of offices, being driven by the dearest of compulsions, to be of service. It was in the record, but not widely known that he had been a counselor to the young Bobby.

"Ednorton, you crazed fart," said BeSpoke's oldest and best friend, the Chief Justice of The Supreme Judicial, an augmented human of good humor and great honesty who had legally changed his name to "C.J." They were in the most secure location possible in the government compound. "Why in all the Hells would you think anyone else will join you in open confrontation with E VI? What's to be gained and what's to be lost by such? Precious little and a great deal, that's what."

"I am the Principal, C.J. You know I have to lead the band here. And you know as well as I that there is considerable sympathy for what P. Bobby is doing. He could be correct about his rig out there. If he is, deep space travel will be revolutionized. If he's not, we might lose a SearchShip. Are we afraid to take big chances any more?"

The Chief Justice walked across the glistening force floor of the null chamber where they spoke. He chided himself internally for the anxiety he felt at even having this discussion. Emperor VI always had the hottest tech and was probably listening right through the walls of the null chamber at this very moment. There were no secrets, especially on Earth itself. "That's not the point," he said. "E VI almost never pulls rank, and he is doing it now for his own good reasons. Why in all Purgatories should you try to deny him his Imperial prerogatives?"

"And – go ahead and finish the thought, C.J – even if we don't, there is very little he can do to rein in P. Bobby, correct?"

"All the more reason for you to just shut up and sit down," muttered the Chief Justice.

In the Gallery: "I like that man Bespoke," said Mencken. "He has the courage of his convictions. Guts."

"Sweetie, he has all the judgment of a farm boy who pisses on the electric fence to see what happens," said Mae West.

"Bobby, how certain are you that the Emperor doesn't have something up his sleeve to throw at you?" said Feynman.

"Fairly sure," said Bobby. "I've been monitoring pretty much everything he's said for a while, and I see nothing but an outraged man demanding from his lackeys that they do something. If he had a weapon or any tech to reach us here, I think I would have seen it."

Genghis Khan growled in his obscure accent his admiration for Bobby's information gathering. "You see through the sandstorm, and your enemies will think you are a ghost!" He barked his frightening laugh.

Bobby had wired around the detuned quantum statistical network within seconds of the attempt to exclude him from the Assembly. He envisioned the stir it would cause when he distributed this particular Vision Expansion, which was in fact a huge improvement in the tech of instant communication.

Bobby's SearchShip continued to accelerate, carving a clean vacuum tube through the dust and debris of space with its deflector shields, and beginning to leave gravity wave ripples in its wake.

Hammer: Emperor VI glared at the attendees, both virtual and physical, of the second Grand Assembly ten days after the first. He was torn in his imperial heart, but damned if he would allow anyone to see it even with the most penetrating mood-reading tech. His defenses were impregnable; every counter-tech at full force, and his collection of tech was always superior to that of any other creature in the Empire. All his personal powers – his will, his physical control, his imperial demeanor – were at their peak.

And the most trusted N'Gai Toledo, Chairman of the Privy Council, had kept E VI constantly aware of the resistance in the Assembly to his demand for immediate and ferocious response to the impudence of PsychFet Bobby, "TurdFet Bobby" as N'Gai called him in private. And particularly he had kept the Emperor updated on the actions of that self-righteous nitwit Bespoke. However, E VI owed the old man a lot of chits; the Admiral had been a stalwart supporter of the Emperor and a tireless servant of the people of Earth and the Empire as a whole, and N'Gai refused to let E VI forget or ignore those facts.

"If you slam Ednorton, it's your balls that get caught in the crack," was N'Gai's indelicate assessment of the situation. "You must consider his standing with the Assembly and find a way to accommodate his position without backing off yours." They had planned and conspired through several nights to find a way to do this.

Back In Session: Again the Emperor rose to address the gathering. His voice boomed out over the vast room. "This Assembly," he commenced with formality, "has been charged to take action on the renegade PsychFet Bobby, Master of our newest and most capable SearchShip which he has endangered with his unauthorized decision. His refusal to abide by the instructions of the Empire escalates his actions to the level of a great crime against the Empire and your Emperor."

E VI looked calmly but penetratingly around the Hall of Assembly, stopping briefly on one face after another, the radiant beam of his attention causing many to gasp or look away when they were singled out. E VI had practiced this intense visual connection for decades, using sensitive biotech to fine-tune its impact. When his eyes reached Ednorton Bespoke they were met with equal intensity and the two men were locked for long seconds before the Admiral slightly bowed his head with the deference he always showed the Emperor.

E VI spoke again, this time with the carefully choreographed language developed with N'Gai Toledo, "There are honored and honorable members of this Assembly who feel that perhaps your Emperor is overstating the seriousness of the transgression of PsychFet Bobby. That perhaps the flaunting of the authority of the legal head of the Empire of Earth deserves a more patient response. That perhaps the threatened loss of a multi-quadrillion-credit asset should be tolerated in the interest of an experimental urge. That there might be value to the Empire in what to your Emperor looks like irresponsible sabotage..."

Ednorton Bespoke looked at the Emperor with eyes gradually widening in a dawning understanding of where E VI was going with this. A nominal onlooker might say his eyes were widening in horror, but he would be wrong. Bespoke was as fine a judge of both lawyerly technique and sophisticated power strategies as any in the Empire, and he knew perfectly well that he was about to be anointed with an honor for which he had no appetite but would be unable to avoid.

The Emperor continued, "Admiral Ednorton Bespoke is the most eloquent spokesman for this position, and his role as Principal of Earth places the mantle of responsibility and duty around his shoulders almost as firmly as it is around mine. His is not a petty objection, but one born of his deepest beliefs. I have great respect for that."

Again, E VI locked eyes with Ednorton and smiled with seemingly ingenuous warmth as one would to an old and valued friend seen again after a long absence. This gesture had also been repeatedly rehearsed with Toledo and with the most complex biotech to register impact. All in the Assembly sensed trust and affection from the Emperor for Ednorton. Yet Bespoke, and he only, saw the deeper core of the smile, the supersteel center of the look burned only into his eyes saying, "Gotcha, old man."

"So it is with utter confidence," continued E VI, "that I delegate to this talented and capable servant of Earth and the Empire the task of dealing with this issue and with PsychFet Bobby in a way both appropriate to the crime and fair to the greater principles that he values so highly."

There was a breathless pause in the great hall, then a slow cadence of applause that picked up both in number of participants and in tempo until there was the classic crunch-crunch-crunch of hundreds of hand clapping in synchrony. Halfway up to the crescendo, the Emperor himself joined in, and the final clap was thunderous and in perfect step as all took their cue from E VI's hands.

"Perhaps," said the Emperor in the echo of the final clap, "Principal Bespoke will give us a few words on how he will proceed."

Ednorton had felt this coming as surely as he knew when the last clap would sound, and while he had nodded – almost a bow – to the Emperor, then to the Assembly during the applause, he had allowed his mind to slip into the thoughtless Zen of preparation, the state that had never let him down when great jeopardy and opportunity converged and he had to perform without preparation

He took a deep breath and stared with what he hoped – knew actually – was an expression of the most honest contemplation, above the heads of those attending, and carefully not at any of the dozens of POV Cam eyes scattered everywhere. Two, then three beats before he spoke; and as his words finally came forth, he felt that surprised pleasure of sure knowledge that he was going to be brilliant. Again.

"My Emperor, Members of the Grand Assembly, the great honor of being entrusted to support a contrary opinion – and of being trusted by my Emperor to deal fairly with it, overwhelms me. This Assembly will work its wisdom of checks and balances as always, and I am comforted by that." There was an approving murmur from the assemblage.

"But before I proceed, I must make a confession of sorts; a clearing of my reservations, if you will. Please bear with me as I make this disclosure." Ednorton realized that in all his centuries of public speaking, he had never so captured the intensity of interest he felt now from this Assembly. And he could feel the same level of interest, perhaps even some anxiety, emanating from the Emperor. He continued, "I have a notion that I have never voiced to any person, nor have I written of it nor recorded it in any way nor have I alluded to it even tangentially that I am aware of, but it has been in my mind with such clarity that I almost believe I have mentally broadcast this..." He paused as though searching for a word, "... this suspicion."

He felt a powerful urge to glance at E VI, but he kept his eyes on the distance, noting that many others in his range of sight did dart looks at the Emperor.

"Of course I could be wrong. If my, er... extended years," (small, polite laughter) "have taught me anything, it is that I can most definitely be wrong. But I firmly believe I must disclose this suspicion now." Ednorton took a deep breath. If he did well what his zenned subconscious had planned for him, this gamble would win for him no matter the actual result. "I suspect – I have a feeling of considerable certainty in fact – that the being I am asked to judge and to deal with, PsychFet Bobby, is here. Now." There was a gasp through the chamber, partially, Ednorton noted with satisfaction, of incredulity, partially of a kind of outrage at the affront to the Emperor.

"I think all our efforts to exclude Bobby from these chambers may have failed and he is hearing every word, watching every face, participating in this prosecution as completely as if he were sitting here in the prisoner's dock."

E VI was carefully controlling his expression to show only a mild interest, only a most carefully trained outer reflex. His mind was whirling around the little nova of surprise set off by Ednorton's unforeseen tack. "What the hell?" he subvocalized at N'Gai Toledo. "How confident are we about the com block?"

N'Gai's response was immediate, his voice transduced into E VI's left inner ear. "Completely. The stat network has a full null tuned toward Bobby's ship. Unless..."

Bespoke spoke again, interrupting the secret exchange. "I have another suspicion," he said, "and that is that PsychFet Bobby is feeling a bit guilty about this passive deception of eavesdropping. The PsychFets are inherently honest in their design, and I have spent considerable time becoming acquainted with this particular being and believe that he is honest beyond his genetics and his training, honest in his soul, if you will. This is partially why I have had the conviction to dare to become the loyal opposition to my Emperor." Ednorton paused and gave a slow, eyes-closed bow toward E VI

"Unless what?" E VI almost screamed subvocally at Toledo.

"Unless the son of a machine has developed a new tech," came the tense reply from N'Gai.

"How likely..." The Emperor was again interrupted by Bespoke.

"I will now take the risk of being obviously and publicly wrong. I could be wrong in one of two ways. If there is no reply, it will not be clear how exactly I am wrong, but I will clearly be wrong, and I can proceed carrying out the order of our Emperor in telling you how I will deal with the rogue PsychFet.

"I now ask PsychFet Bobby to acknowledge that he is here with us. I ask him to speak so that we may all hear him. If you are here, Bobby, I contend that you are honor-bound to show yourself. If you do not answer, then I am wrong. Either I am wrong in assuming that you have overcome the communications block, or I am wrong in believing that you are honest to the point that you will not maintain the deception of eavesdropping. PsychFet Bobby, I ask you to speak."

The silence in the Hall of Assembly was complete. Breaths were apparently held, because none could be heard.

Royal Flush: "Emperor VI," came a voice, "I apologize most humbly for, as Principal Bespoke called it, this passive deception." The voice was everywhere in the Hall, powerful yet quiet, human, but somehow superhuman, wreathed in acoustic devices of timbre and tonalities that had psych impact on the listeners that they felt but could not analyze. It continued, "I offer no excuse except that I was embarrassed to speak yet. I realize there is no reason to believe me when I say I would have spoken shortly, but Principal Bespoke has called my hand. I am here. I have been here from our Emperor's first action on my case. I am fully aware of most that has been discussed prior to and after the charge made against me."

Simultaneously, on the SearchShip and in the Hall of the Assembly there was a kind of chaos. In the Emperor's mind alone there was a collection of contradictions of response that approached the outer parameters of silliness.

From the APs on the SearchShip there was a cacophony approaching riot.

"Talk to me, N'Gai," screamed the Emperor. There was uncertainty in his mind whether he had screamed only in the subvocalization of their private channel or had actually screamed.

"Please, be calm, my Emperor. Please be calm. Be calm," came the almost hypnotic response from a noticeably uncalm N'Gai Toledo.

Among the APs aboard the SearchShip there was turmol. One voice rose above it, "By God, Bobby, for the sake of everyone, explain your bloody self. To us. What the blazes are you attempting?" It was the distinctive growl of Winston Churchill. "Secrecy is beyond you, apparently."

His decision to break security and make a verbal response to Ednorton Bespoke was driven by his affection for his ally, supporter, and in some senses one of the few human friends Bobby had. Their time together during Bobby's training had been special in many ways, especially in the young PsychFet's first comprehension of the significance of trust. In this case, Winston was right. He valued this rare relationship higher than he valued the secrecy.

Even though in the outburst, Ednorton had been speechless, Bobby could clearly see anxiety, even dread in the man's reaction. It was too pat, too rehearsed in appearance not to be seen as connivance by the emperor.

"And I must say two things immediately," continued the pervading voice of Bobby, less than a second having passed. "First, a very brief statement from the defense. My loyalty, my fealty is and always shall be to my Emperor, Emperor VI. My decisions notwithstanding, every motive that drives me is to be of service to the Empire of Earth and to the Emperor. Second, Principal Bespoke confessed to his suspicion that I was present, but he was without evidence. I was stunned to hear his summons, yet I realize it must appear we are in league. This is not the case, and it is vital for you to know this for reasons you will learn."

"Analysis, N'Gai," demanded E VI, this time in firm control of himself and having regained his imperial command mentality. It was to last only seconds. In his inner ear came not the voice of N'Gai Toledo by that of PsychFet Bobby.

"My Emperor, you must not misunderstand the completeness of my communications interdiction," said Bobby into the emperor's left ear. "When I made the decision to eavesdrop, I decided to do a complete job of it. I am hearing everything that is being said by everyone on every channel. And what I say of my loyalty is the truth and the complete truth. Please be at your ease and understand I am your dedicated servant."

"Well you sycophantic shit," yelled Mencken back on the ship. Only Bobby could hear the APs.

"Don't judge in haste, cranky one," responded Bobby. H.L.M. only grunted, making Bobby smile.

E VI was in a stunned silence. Toledo likewise was mute.

Bobby spoke again to the full Assembly. "My honor as a PsychFet and my duty to the Empire are one and the same. I am acting unconventionally, taking the burden of decision about my mission on my own head and in contravention to direct orders from my Emperor. In all that I confess guilt. It is my conviction that I am acting in the interest of the Empire on a matter of the greatest possible importance and with the greatest possible gain for us all. If I am wrong – and perhaps even if I'm right – I deserve censure. I give you my word, to you my Emperor, and to all of the Empire that if that is your judgment, I will return and submit. With that said, I must proceed with this mission as I have planned."

Finally the Emperor rose from his seat. "It is my decision and my official act," he intoned the formal language that precedes an Imperial pronouncement, "The pending charge against PsychFet Bobby is placed in suspension for an unspecified time, to be re-instituted upon my further consideration."

The General Assembly gasped as one. Never in a single mind among the attendees – certainly not in the minds of Ednorton Bespoke or N'Gai Toledo – did the idea of this particular imperial action occur.

In the manner developed in the earliest days of the Imperial Government, no word of this Assembly escaped into the general public. The populations of the planets were left unaware of even the fact that the General Assembly had occurred. The official – the only – "media," all channels of communication, were empty on the subject. Even the staffs of the attendees knew only that their superiors had attended to official duties. The records of the Assembly were locked behind impenetrable cyberlocks.

Except in the memory banks of SearchShip Bobby, mused N'Gai Toledo.

Dead Stop: One milliparsec from the target Object MSS578 was the position Bobby chose to decelerate More accurately to instantly stop from ship speed of 0.986 C. His modeling of the stop was extraordinary in its breadth. Over a thousand runs of his best seven models of the physics of the stop had run in his quantum matrixes. The judgment and intuitive powers of his huge organic cerebrum had tested the conclusion within the framework of common sense. He now felt a high degree of confidence in his conclusion. It was: The dark energy engines and the collection web would successfully involute and convert the immense energy of the ship's momentum into another form of energy at the stop. Drained of its momentum, the ship would cease to move without deceleration impact. It would stop cold. This process would result in a cataclysmic release of radiating energies.

So Bobby's responsibility was to minimize its impact on his surroundings.

The orientation of the SearchShip was particularly critical, as the giant web would define where this energy would go. Bobby had an accurate, three-dimensional map in his mind, correct down to microminutes of arc and sub-kilometer distances, of each star and planet within ten light years of his present location. This made it relatively simple to align the ship.

"My friends," Bobby spoke to the APs, thinking how much more than APs they had become, how complete they now were as conscious entities. "I know that to many of you math is anathema." Smatterings of applause, then, "But you all know we are about to go off like a plasma bomb. I am, well, pretty sure everything will be all right, but if I am wrong, it has been a great pleasure to know you and I deeply apologize conditionally if we are all terminated in a bang here." There was some nervous laughter from the crowd. "No use frittering around. Here we go."

Little Bang: To an observer anywhere near the SearchShip, the stop would have appeared as a cosmic wonder. From a point in the complete quiet and darkness of empty space would have come a blinding point of light, then a disk of expanding radiance so intense that receptors of any sort would have failed. Like a thousand suns, but of almost infinitesimal duration, the burst would then expand in a thin disk to a diameter greater than the planetary system, the expansion exceeding the speed of light by many magnitudes, a miniature version of the primordial Inflation of the Big Bang. Thus Albert's "primeval," thought Bobby. In the locus of all this where there had been nothing would sit a large, weasel head, horned vessel, a SearchShip from the Empire of Earth, and the bolus of energy would be spreading out into an unlikely disk of nothingness for light years in all directions.

"Dead Stop," said Bobby. "All ahead slow." The SearchShip began to accelerate inward toward MSS578. The red dwarf was right where it should be and the "cold body" was an immense water planet. The sole sound in the SearchShip was a widespread sigh of relief.

Report: The only spoken-word com back to Earth after the stop was, "Success." With that came a gout of data defining the stop, the state of the SearchShip and the first observations of what was before them. All without comment.

"It is as I suspected, and as I suspect you expected," said Ednorton Bespoke quietly to E VI. He was newly appointed to the Privy Council, which was in constant session as Bobby approached the stop. "Not to gloat, my Emperor," he added hastily. "But Bobby has surely revolutionized deep space travel. It will save years from our travel times."

There was great relief in the Council. E VI began to congratulate himself on how well he had handled the quandary.

Chapter 8: ALIENS

Deep Water: PsychFet Bobby had a great portion of his mentality focused on the water planet. Still billions of kilometers away, the SearchShip accelerated gradually toward the huge, blue sphere of the planet, four times the diameter of Earth. Outrigger observation pods spread like an inflating parachute around the SearchShip focused on the endless ocean of the planet. There was no land. Only H2O, water, thousands of kilometers deep at all points. It was in a long, slow orbit with the red dwarf, a source of very little warmth. Yet the water was not frozen. Nothing in known space had ever hinted that such a planet might or even could exist.

Bobby spoke, almost to himself, "I know we have planned so many ways we will explore a planet, but now that I see this one directly, I have to admit to feeling somewhat intimidated by the task." He sensed the many and diverse intelligences seeing the planet before them in silence. "There is so much of it, and we have so little idea of what we are looking for."

"I know you will share with me how you feel, yet you are all quiet. I am feeling a huge thrill. For reasons I can't decode yet, I am absolutely positive that there is life on this planet, and a lot of it. I hear no comment yet on the facts that the water is not frozen, that there are so many layers with different salinity, that the temperature of the water does not get warmer or colder as it gets deeper. Ah, and now I see that there is a great deal of microscopic life in some layers and that there are other life forms that we have never seen." As he spoke, Bobby felt strangeness. Never in the journey had there been such silence from the APs.

Finally, "If I may be so bold as to speak," said a voice with a heavy French accent. "Since it was my human speciality to think of oceans..." It was Jacques Cousteau. "Perhaps if we gave the ocean before us a name.... I found that names for those bleak places, the abysmal plains, made them less formidable."

"Jacques," said Bobby, "that is a fine idea. Do you have a suggestion for the name?"

Cousteau said quietly, "I will have one after I get to know it." Then there was silence. Total silence.

Bobby listened into the virtual space where the APs lived. It was empty. There were no entities in the heptabytes. None. Even comprehending this, Bobby spoke, "H.L? Albert? Cleo? Genghis?" He knew none would answer, but it still was a profound shock. Bobby's physical body, for all its controlled existence, was responding in the Fet rack, his heart rate and general metabolism accelerating from pulses of adrenalin. He could feel the ship urgently balancing his body back to perfect equilibrium.

Even as he initiated multiple waves of diagnostics into the ship, he knew there was no failure in its systems. The SearchShip was intact in every sense, yet the population was one; Bobby. All of the minds who were his friends and compatriots, advisors and counselors - and his lover - had taken their leave with not so much as notice. He checked Cleo's body. It was intact. Disconnected.

Kidnapped? Abducted? Ship abandoned in a revolution long brewing against a naive master? He discarded that idea instantly.

They had gone to the ocean world. He knew it as well as he knew anything. He did not know how or why he knew, for there was not a scrap of data anywhere, other than the statement from Jacques that he would soon "know" the ocean, but Bobby knew.

He stared at the planet with his thousand sensors, his analytical models, his database comparators and his total attention. He felt a powerful urge to step up the acceleration, to come closer faster, but he resisted. Instead, he sent forth a query of sorts, "Hello?" he said, on a broad range of the electromagnetic spectrum from deep infrared to gamma, in many real and speculative languages, glyphs and codes. Simply, "Hello?"

Amputation: The feeling came over Bobby like a powerful alternating current shock that thrums with such violence that all sensation is subsumed into it. At the speeds he could think, Bobby still had time only for a hint of surprise, and then his sensorium was all buzzing, thrumming, roaring, stunning shock. It lasted for an unknowable time. Perhaps a second; perhaps hours. Then it stopped as suddenly as it had started, and Bobby was in complete possession of himself instantaneously. Except there was no quantum matrix attached to his mind.

It was like realizing that one had legs but no arms. One was awake and fully conscious and in good health, but something essential and fundamental to one's being was missing. His PsychFet cerebrum was intact and unaffected. The plasmonic hardware and software of the computers – the billions of interlocked processors and the bottomless spin memory – were fully up and running. But the instantaneous communication across deep space, and the depth of calculating ability that distinguished a PsychFet was completely inaccessible to Bobby. His vision was robbed of color, his hearing of the subtlety to hear poetry, his sense of touch of the delicacy to feel a caress.

He could tell the containment shells around the quantum modules were intact. Every external indicator showed the cubit storms still raged within them. The paraoptic cables from them to his organic interfaces were untouched. He simply was disconnected from them, and it was the first time it was so since his early training memories.

There was nothing to do about it. This was overwhelmingly clear to Bobby. The situation was beyond his ability to alter, and it was the first time he had ever experienced that condition. In a way, he thought, it is like falling off a very high and very sheer cliff and retaining consciousness as you fly downwards, able to do everything you have ever been able to do, except stop falling.

He rejected the analogy. It was accurate, but incomplete or too complete or in some other way wrong. He felt very little anxiety. His threat and risk analysis programs did not conclude that either was high. His common sense kept telling him that this was all the work of an Other Intelligence, aliens! Or if not, of circumstances so unique as to be almost as interesting.

As time – real time – ticked by, Bobby decided that the most important thing for him to do was relax. Not that he felt tense in any usual sense of the word; not anxious or nervous nor "stressed" nor driven to act by any kind of compulsion. Still, he sensed that he was not relaxed in the grander sense.

I will approach this problem – this situation – more effectively with a clean slate, he thought. These are new conditions. Nothing is threatening me, but I have been driving forward so unrelentingly since the start of my training that I am all momentum. I need to step back, take a deep breath and look at this with a fresh mind from a base of zero.

So, alone on a very big space vehicle, approaching an impossible water planet, bereft of much of his capabilities and all of his associates, he set out to seek a state of mind and body that he knew of more in theory than experience. He queried his hardware memory to see if the words of Mahatma Gandhi were accessible, saved from a conversation they had held some time ago as the SearchShip was setting out on this journey. There had been something of a hubbub around the 20th Century comedian John Belushi. Belushi had announced to all that he would go "fucking nuts" within a few days of being "sealed in this fucking can" having no real body with which to enjoy sex and drugs. Gandhi had calmed the manic man with a few minutes of good-humored conversation. Bobby remembered explicitly what the sage had said, but he wanted to hear the recording to feel the nuances in Gandhi's speech rhythms.

But there were no memory traces in the computers of Gandhi – or any of the other APs. Bobby was not surprised. The departure of his companions was impressively complete. So to the best of his ability, Bobby listened to Gandhi in his organic memory.

"John, there are things so much more gratifying than sex and drugs that once you experience them, you will become a different creature." (Belushi had snorted, spraying saliva.) Gandhi had continued, "When a mind as fertile as yours becomes still, and its capacities are not clouded and blinded by its own activity, it will become clear to you that you are a universe unto yourself. There is a kind of ecstasy in that discovery that surpasses orgasms and opiates."

Bobby remembered the twinkle in Belushi's eye as he listened, clearly intrigued at the chance of something that good. John had said, "And where, oh billiard knob, do I learn how to do that little number?"

"Do that little number," said Bobby aloud, with the mouth and voice of his physical body resting in the Fet frame. He transitioned his consciousness into the body and gradually extracted himself from the virtual existence, still maintaining full contact with his extended organic brain and the full computer rig, but tapping into his own physical nervous system as fully as he did when he spent time with Cleopatra. Orders and instructions were set in force for the ship to follow while he searched for personal zero base. "I will be back shortly, so don't disturb me for anything less than a ship-threatening event," he summarized aloud. Then he fully disconnected.

It was a surprise to realize that he could not remember ever talking aloud to himself. But it seemed very appropriate to do it now. "Talking to myself is a very single-channel activity," he mused aloud. "I have always been a multi-channel kind of guy. When I talk to myself, I can focus completely on one thing: what I am saying."

He went on this way for some time. It became a discipline game that whenever he felt an urge to run a check on his systems, or update his view of the planet or feel for his quantum connections, he quashed it. Of all the thousands of things he was usually doing, he squeezed his activity down to one thing – talking to himself.

"Bobby," he said to himself, "You have given full consciousness to a large group of APs with the access to the quantum matrix. Now they have all gone ahead to the planet. They could not do that by themselves, I assume, so some alien being, an Other Intelligence, did it. Did they go willingly? Did the alien know that their true consciousness was dependent on the connections within the ship? Are the APs still functioning? Are they conscious? I assume they are for no reason other than a general prejudice that a very advanced Other Intelligence would be both curious about the APs and not cruel."

His voice had the inflections and presentation of a casual recounting of facts before a briefing committee or perhaps an informal speech to a small group. As he toured through the syllogisms of his linear thoughts he slowly became confident that he could maintain this singleness of mind, he took the next step. He stopped talking.

And gradually he stopped thinking. He had the full literature of meditative techniques in his memory, and he had flown through it as his decision crystallized with the memory of Ghandi's words. He found that some were good ideas and worked as he slowly tamped down the furnace of his ruminations, and some were not. Within less than an hour, Bobby transitioned through tandra to samadhi of the silent mind and saw in fact the he was a universe. He was thoroughly relaxed.

Coming up: Bobby knew considerable time had passed. He resisted checking how much. Slowly and with an unplanned routine he emerged from his state of deep meditation, reclaiming one sense after another – first strictly the senses of his physical body for a time that felt like approximately an hour. Rigorously avoiding the links into the ship through the Fet frame, he moved through a set of yoga, then tai chi exercises, very fluid in the light pull of the pseudograv field.

Greatly refreshed, Bobby carefully opened his mind to his SearchShip. First renewing the links to the organic exo-cerebrum, he experienced a flush of wonder that he remembered from much earlier times when he took each expanding step toward full PsychFet status. Several cubic feet of carefully engineered pre-frontal, temporal, parietal and occipital cortex that extended the brain within his large and handsome skull into a form of functional super genius were connected.

Bobby took a huge breath, his arms outspread in a final stretch, then lay back into the suspensors of the Fet rack. With that, his links with the hardware and its torrent of information was fully reestablished. He sensed an anthropomorphic frustration from all the thinking gear. Where have you been? So much has happened. You have never been out of the system that long. We almost called you a hundred times, but your instructions to be left alone were severe!

None of that was actually said, but there was a distinct sense of it from the machines. Bobby let the updates wash through him, reassuring himself and his ship with his full comprehension. The quantum matrix was still inaccessible.

Only one event of real significance had happened. Richard Feynman had called, and had basically received a voice mail response: "I'm sorry. PsychFet Bobby is unavailable at the moment. May I have him return the call?"

Bobby thought that Feynman probably thought it was either a decent joke or a fit of uncharacteristic pique at being abandoned. Or perhaps he knew exactly what Bobby was doing and why, retreating enough to acquire a new perspective. Feynman had advocated just such a strategy for creative problem solving.

Now fully up to his normal multiplex mode, Bobby was handling thousands of tasks. He set in motion dozens of scenario games on possible outcomes of his situation. He was 0.01parsecs closer to the water planet, and his instrumentation was giving ever finer analyses which he absorbed and pondered.

But the core of his thought was on returning the call to Feynman. Richard's instructions had been detailed. The protocol for doing it was full of implications. Bobby was simply to imagine that Richard would cartwheel into the virtual meeting room where they so frequently met, the one with the silk pillows on the carved ironwood chaises. The idea of Feynman cartwheeling at all was odd enough so that it would not come unbidden, avoidable until Bobby was ready to commence the conversation.

He felt excitement building as he reviewed the clusters of questions he had, but he planned to learn passively at first, letting Richard – would it be him really, or something changed by all this? – say what he had to say first.

Bobby created a little background music, with a hint of martial band in the arrangement. The virtual meeting place was the room where he and Feynman most frequently met. At a drum roll he vividly pictured Richard Feynman, one of the giants of 20th Century scientific intellectuals, cartwheeling awkwardly into the room.

In he wheeled.

"Ooof," grunted Feynman, coming to a stop in a seated position and looking slightly askew. "Well, that was an icebreaker, I hope," he said, standing and straightening his tie. From his first manifestation as a high order AP Richard Feynman had never come to a meeting with Bobby without his tie.

"Yes. Hello, Richard. It's good seeing you again," said Bobby with a slight smile. "I knew that you and everyone had not been destroyed, but taken away."

"Ah..." said Feynman, as though at something of a loss as to how to start, "We all assumed you would know that, but it is somewhat metaphysical that you actually should. It makes more sense to assume we were just erased by some kind of energy pulse." Then he paused again. Bobby held his piece.

"I am more than I was before the, ah, exodus, Bobby," Richard continued. "We were all given the opportunity to grow where I have been – where everyone else still is – on the water planet. Or rather, in it. It has a name, by the way and of course. Its inhabitants call it something like 'Nexus,' but it is a more complex word. We have all grown because we were given a gift much as when you gave us access to the quantum matrix. We are all now fully conscious without the matrix. I feel like I have lived several decades since the exodus, but I know how little real time has passed." He cleared his throat self-consciously. "Well, before I prattle on too long, I suppose you have some questions that I would be more than happy to answer."

Bobby stood and walked around Richard's chair, then said, "I remind you, Richard, that I am not five decades old myself, and growth and self discovery are very much a part of what I experience as well. And I am sure you can very accurately estimate what my questions are. Why don't you just tell me what you assume I am dying to know?"

"Of course," said Feynman. He looked away from Bobby's eyes and into a thoughtful distance his friends from the 20th century would have recognized. "There are several civilizations on Nexus, perhaps seven or eight, we were not told the full specifics. We are all the guests of one. The host civilization is beyond comprehension in some ways, and we are barely over the threshold of being interesting enough to warrant its notice. The care you took to avoid damaging the local area when we stopped marked us for moral beings, thus worthy of some attention. You, the SearchShip, all the personalities in silico, to use that ancient term, reflect a stage of development that this being is beyond by over a million years."

"May I interrupt briefly?" asked Bobby.

"Of course."

"Does this civilization have a name? Or can we adopt one for this conversation?" said Bobby.

"It has something like a name," answered Feynman. "It's like, 'The Transcendence of the Heglin Empire.' All of the APs felt the same need for a name and we decided to call it 'T-H-E,' pronounced 'Tay.' As a name it also helped us to get a handle on its lack of gender."

"Tay," said Bobby, "I like it. Beats the hell out of Bobby, I think."

Feynman humphed, "Anyway, Tay's advanced tech could see into the SearchShip completely. It seemed motivated to say hello by three, maybe four things: one, that there were only two organic creatures aboard; two, that the APs had genuine consciousness, and third, that it was in its interest to stop communication back to the Empire of Earth for reasons we haven't learned. Perhaps as I said, your apparent morality was a fourth motive. We received what I'd have to call hints that the Heglin are concerned about us and their conscience caused them to hail us. Some of the APs have a theory that the spider-ish shape of the ship and web of the dark energy collector played a role in getting their curiosity up. As you can image, with a million year old technology, they could have avoided detection without trying."

Bobby said, "I am almost incapable of conceiving how advanced such tech must be. Unless it stagnated or reached some natural limit, it must fit the old saw about being indistinguishable from magic..."

"Here's an insight," interrupted Feynman. "Tay is more than a trillion individuals wrapped into a single, integrated consciousness. It was actually the full population of a hundred-star civilization – the Heglin Empire, and now it is this very large collection of organic creatures floating near the center of Nexus. The planet is, impossibly, completely liquid water, and the Heglin and the other occupants created it. How's that for advanced?"

Bobby was stopped cold by the concept. "A trillion individuals in the sense that we mean individuals?" he asked.

"Yes, and far beyond," said Feynman. "Certainly they are independent organic creatures with intelligences of great capacity, evolved and augmented through millions of years. The fact that there were only a trillion or so of them reflected a rigid control of their population. They had about two hundred planets, all gas giants, in their empire, hardly overcrowding. New individuals were created only upon the death of another, and they live to be tens of thousands of years old. They decided to amalgamate into Tay about a quarter million years ago. Their word for it is something like 'graduation.' And to round out the mystery, we don't know what they look like and we know absolutely nothing about the other creatures floating around the planet."

Bobby grappled with the astonishing news in that. "I have too many questions to even ask them," he said. "Please tell me what I should know. Only answer me this. Are you truly you? I know you have grown and evolved, but are you only you, so to speak, or is this Tay in you, and will I ever know the truth of that?"

Feynman smiled and bowed to Bobby. "Hey, the PsychFet's insecurities exposed! Bobby, I'm honored that you trust me enough to ask the question. I feel like we are equals at last – we really aren't, truth be known. But I tell you – truthfully – it is only I who stands before you. Deception is a great sin to Tay, who is as much a moral being as you can imagine, even though some of the rights and wrongs in its morality are incomprehensibly complex."

Bobby shut his eyes for a moment, then said, "My friend, I am very happy that you were selected as spokesman, and I am thrilled at whatever is going to happen next. What do you suggest?"

Feynman ran his fingers through his hair contemplatively. "I would bet a 'nickel' that you would like to have your quantum rig back to be your whole self, but Tay must get to know you before he will trust you not to talk to the Empire for a while. Does that offend you?"

Bobby laughed. "I would think Tay would do something technically incomprehensible to keep me from doing it, but no? And could you elaborate a little on why it's so important not to talk to the worried folks back home?"

"First, any technical block beyond what's been done just would never happen. It's part of that complicated morality I mentioned," said Feynman. "Tay would never do something like that now that it has a direct connection with us. It says it values trust and truth greater than self preservation, which in itself raises interesting questions. I do not know for sure why it's so important to remain incommunicado. Yet."

"In any event, the next step is for you to link with Tay and the two of you to become acquainted more directly," Feynman continued, "When all of us were transported to Nexus, we met Tay differently than you will. Each of us was welcomed by a small party of the Heglin individuals. I believe that you will meet the full composite as a sort of courtesy. And if you don't mind, we will all rejoin you for the event, sort of to even out the imbalance, if you see what I mean."

Bobby understood fully. "So, other than the quantum connections, I will be my full self with you and all of your peers reintegrated within me."

"I suspect that Tay will make its decision about trusting you so fast you will hardly notice the time lag, no matter what speed you are thinking," said Feynman.

Introductions: The APs suddenly were there. Their arrival was like a huge auditorium suddenly filled to capacity, when the second before it was empty. No one spoke. Bobby could feel their attention focused on him. The quantum modules were still inaccessible, but he sensed the APs were fully conscious without them.

"My friends," he said, "I cannot tell you how much I have missed you." There was silent applause and something like a group sigh of relief at his words. "You are way ahead of me now with Tay and Nexus, and I need your counsel and advice as I make contact. Please give me your best in real time."

Feynman said, "PsychFet Bobby, may I present The Transcendence of the Heglin Empire, which we call Tay."

Bobby felt himself disassemble, every atom in his body and mind spreading into a mist across the planetary proximity at supernal speed. It was a sensation never tasted by Bobby before. Then, just as rapidly, he reassembled and was himself in all ways, and before him was a translucent humanoid face, seemingly several meters tall, floating at the other end of Bobby's conference room.

At the same moment, Bobby felt his full connection with the quantum matrix return and with it a massive reintegration with the APs. It was as though they were all him and he was all them, which was disorienting for several seconds, and then like one's eyes focusing after a confusion of distance and depth, Bobby's mind snapped together and he felt fully natural and comfortable.

"How do you do, Tay?" said Bobby. "I am honored to meet you."

The vast face smiled. The smile reminded Bobby of a picture of a Buddha he had seen in his training, a smile of tranquility and genuine enjoyment of the moment. It's voice was a deep burble. There was no accent Bobby could hear; perfect nominal English.

"You are the first organic creature not of Nexus we have spoken with in hundreds of thousands of your years. Certainly the honor is ours," said Tay, and the smile did not diminish, neither did its lips move.

Bobby said, "This simulacrum is very pleasant. It gives me a feeling of comfort."

"I know," said Tay, matter of factly. "Your associates have asked many times what is the physical form of the Heglin. Curiosity is a powerful instinct in your young species. We promised to reveal this when we met you."

Bobby could feel the integral of AP speculation as to what this form would be. It was thoroughly vague.

"My guess is that you will find our physical form disconcerting, but in your terminology, you can handle it."

Bobby and all the APs felt as if they were transported to another reality. They vividly perceived a world, clearly a gas giant, from great altitude. The atmosphere was clear but viscous. Layers of opaque clouds shelved down into great darkness. Their point of view moved deeper into the atmosphere until across the top of one of the cloud shelves could be seen a distant moving mass like thin smoke. As the point-of-view moved closer, it was soon apparent that the smoke was a cloud of individual creatures. It was like nothing so much as a disturbed nest of Opiliones, daddy long legs. Simple pentagonal bodies with extraordinarily long multiple legs with end segments moving in treading-water motions. They tumbled over one another, legs interweaving and sliding apart with confoundedly smooth motions, like a tangled knot constantly knitting and unknitting itself as it progressed along the cloud top.

Bobby spoke. "And each of these creatures is an individual? This is not some sort of multipart creature?"

Tay laughed – his first, Feynman later told Bobby. It was a rich, delighted sound that could only be a laugh. "Individuals. This scene to us is a family portrait. The planet is typical of those we colonized. There are many gas giants in this galaxy, but only those with this particular atmospheric mix pleased us. I am showing you the atmosphere as transparent to your eyes as they are to our senses, but in reality, the gas passes no light in the spectra you see."

"The coordination between individuals is so perfect, perhaps you have neuronal links?" asked Bobby.

"Or a form of telepathy?" asked Feynman.

"Or a lot of rehearsal," came the voice of John Cleese, rarely heard from. He continued, "Tay, I'm sure you have observed our physical abilities make this clotting your people do quite astonishing to us."

"Did that, John," answered Tay. "It has been hundreds of thousands of your years since we have known the joy of weaving ourselves in a traveling flow." There was a tinge of very human melancholy in Tay's voice.

The scene from the past of the Heglin Empire faded and the smiling Buddha face reappeared. "Actually," Tay continued, "I shouldn't mourn what we have abandoned. It has been supplanted by far greater joys of total communal experiences, not the least of which is our continued existence."

The Tay face raised an eyebrow as it looked at Bobby.

"Ah," said Bobby. "This graduation involved maintaining your very existence, I gather. It seems all other information we might receive from you pales compared to the importance of knowing what this means."

"Truth," said Tay. "And what I will show you will have a good deal to do with the continued existence of your species."

Bobby felt another zing through the nervous system of his physical body. He had the passing thought that the homeostasis gear on the ship was probably running self-diagnostics right now.

He said, "We greatly enjoy surprises, Tay, and it is clear that this is going to be a feast of them."

The Buddha face beamed, but with a twinkle of... mischievousness? "As it is in any first contact for any species, but some of the surprises will be more pleasant that others." The huge face turned, as though looking around at the surroundings. "The first task is to get this vehicle out of open space where it is such an obviously unnatural thing. With your permission, I will transport it into the depths of Nexus and behind the obscuring fields that keep us from being observed."

A chatter arose from the APs: basically, "We were there, but as electronic patterns. The pressures must be over a billion pounds per square centimeter. Danger. Seek reassurance." Feynman's input was a quiet smile.

"Of course, Tay," said Bobby.

Suddenly Nexus began to grow with alarming speed. With no sense of acceleration, the SearchShip achieved a velocity that would close with the planet in seconds. Every consciousness on the ship held its breath against what would be an annihilating impact. Which never came. Of course, thought Bobby.

In the water of Nexus, the SearchShip carved a cavity that apparently displaced nothing. The water closed on itself without creating shock or disturbance as the huge ship plunged into the deep at a radical underwater speed. Bobby did notice that his extravagant dark energy web was swept away.

Light from the dim sun had faded immediately after their entry into the ocean, but vision was maintained vividly through layer after layer of diverse life. With minds speeded to the maximum of the SearchShip tech capacities, the plunge was still too fast for any but Bobby himself to follow as more than impressionistic flashes. He observed with enough temporal acuity to witness one astonishing life form after another, icthian, orthopodal, mammalian, arachnian, archaen, plant and completely unknown phyla in greater quantity and variety than existed in the master data bases of known life on the twenty planets of the Empire.

"You ain't seen nothing yet," Feynman said simply.

The stop was instantaneous. Suddenly all movement ceased, and the SearchShip seemed to float in a golden fluid of great brilliance. Bobby instinctively probed with his full arsenal of instruments. Nothing but golden light, somehow "gold" at every wavelength, came through his sensors. There was no communication from the outside. Tay was silent. The APs seemed intimidated into speechlessness.

"Tay," said Bobby, "I am completely blinded, as you know. I estimate we are near the center of the planet. Your technology is incomprehensible to me. I request conversation."

In the infinite gold the Buddha face morphed into existence, its smile as full and ingenuous as ever. This time as Tay spoke, its lips moved and the eyes and full visage was as animated as any human face. "You will find our tech, as you say, is not actually incomprehensible," said Tay. "Case in point, what is happening now is that we are examining you completely. All of my constituent parts are learning every aspect of all of your constituent parts. We are working – as we always do – at the full extent of our capacities, thus our maximum speed of assimilation and analysis. It should prove that our tech is not incomprehensible when you understand that this process will take objective minutes of your time. Incomprehensible tech could do it instantly."

"He's got a point," put in Feynman. "That's a lot of data to a lot of nodes very fast, but it's not magic."

"Dr. Feynman," said Tay, "is an extraordinary unit. Of all your augmentations, he alone almost doubles your total effect. All of the other augmentations together add more to your aspect, but no single intellect approaches his individual contribution."

"Why thank you, Tay," said Feynman.

"Heavy fucking shit, Richard," groused John Belushi.

Chapter 9: BAD ALIENS

Tutoring Time: "Now," said Tay, "we feel comfortably familiar with you – all of you." Exactly 3.827649 minutes had passed, according to the quantum clocks in the SearchShip. During that time Bobby had relaxed in the new ways he had learned in his isolation after the APs departed. There was reassurance in the process.

"It's rather like being in the care of an omnipotent parent, emotionally," he had glyphed to Feynman during the wait.

Suddenly there was music. Or something beyond music. The golden obfuscation faded and a sense of size and distance and complexity replaced it. Bobby and the APs were in some great space that mixed a surreal flow of pipes and beams and braided cables with something that looked like solid light. Bobby comprehended the visual complexity of the space around them and interpreted it to the APs reflexively, much as an adult would explain a new and confounding experience to children. The music was sound and ultrasound; it was modulated light and radio and x-rays.

"Welcome," said Tay in a voice that for the first time conveyed that it was the voice of a congregation speaking in total synchrony. The size of the congregation was over eleven hundred million. "The music is the creation of a pod of our greatest composers from a time many millennia before Graduation. The architecture you see is the interior of one of our interstellar craft. It was a very special one. We used it for special ceremonies before we moved into Nexus. It seemed the proper combination to represent ourselves to you for this introduction."

Tay stopped talking and the music swelled to immense volume. It was immediately all consuming. It was a play, a movie, a feely, an immersion into Heglin consciousness.

Bobby and every AP on the SearchShip experienced the profound emotions of the music and the very literal narrative it portrayed without words. It painted the dawning of comprehension that the mighty Heglin Empire was mortally threatened. There was fear and desperation in the acceptance that their beautiful existence was completely doomed unless some inconceivable solution was invented. And there was despair because no solution seemed possible. The emotional range of the music extended beyond the boundaries of human capacities to experience it.

Tay noted the stress among its audience and attenuated the music significantly. "We're sorry. To us this is the most beautiful of musics. Much as you might welcome strangers with a concert, we thought it was appropriate. We mis-estimated its impact on you. You will be able to appreciate it without distress after some training and perhaps augmentations."

Bobby pulled himself together and sent comforting waves of reassurance to the shocked assembly of APs. "The power of the music...," he said. "We are honored, but..." Finally he managed, "I think we now have a regard for where you came from that it would have taken a long time to get if we hadn't heard – felt – this music. I – we – look forward to being able to listen to it again without the pain."

The APs emerged in a babble. Basically they said that nothing in their first visit had been like this, and they were variously shocked, honored, angered or simply excited by the experience. Bobby heard individual voices with horizon-expanding insights. "Virgin deflowered by a large satyr," said Madonna. "Puts Shakespeare in the junior writers league," said John Updike. "Can't wait to read the next chapter," said John Cleese.

Tay's voice came before he rematerialized. "We knew this music and its emotions would be painful to you, but we judged it vital for you to know just what brought us to this point. I apologize."

There was a several-beat pause, then, "But enough of shmoozing," said Tay, seemingly delighted with the adopted slang. It seemed to stay in a state of delight with amazing stamina to Bobby. "Let's get to the serious stuff. It is actually urgent that you become aware of the situation so you can decide what – if anything – you want to do about it. First I will illustrate another part of the story with an example of a battle of sorts. Basically this is to show a case of excessive military superiority. This is a recording of an actual event, edited and narrated to make it more compact. We were given this visual and informational data in the centuries prior to the realizations you heard in our music. Hang onto the safety bar in front of you."

Awful Truth: Tay took full control of Bobby's sensorum for the first time.

"That's humbling," noted Bobby.

"The point is," said Tay to everyone, "this is a full dimension recording of a 'cleansing' as its perpetrator calls it. Bobby will have an all-channel view. He has the bandwidth for it. The APs will get most of it within your capacity limitations. The first thing you'll see is a quick summary of the planetary system."

Instantly the Earthers were surrounded by the infinite depth of space, experiencing the sensors of an intelligent probe cruising on the periphery of a star system, well outside its outermost planet. The probe was cycling through the full spectrum of its vision. The vacuum crackled with the energy of space-time, registering as a prickling behind the eyes. Electromagnetic, particle and gravitational energies registered as a flux of colors for which the Earthers had no names. Dark energy thrummed a contrabass. There was a kind of audio ranging from hertz-per-year rumbling to screeches and tinklings in the gigahertzes. Ordered binary and chaotic statistical communications signals wove through the natural cacophony. A continuous, hollow booming came from the G-type sun at the center of the sprawling system.

"Tay, this is stunning," said Bobby. "It's more than my total sensory battery by an order of magnitude."

"Some have been at this longer, Bobby," said Tay in it's most reasonable tones. "I'll take you closer to the mother planet. I have chosen this system because it is not unlike those in your empire."

The scene jumped well into the system, close to a ringed, hot-chemistry planet, glowing with its own internal reactions. An enormous space vehicle orbited within sight of the probe, apparently taking materials lofted from the seething planet sub-surface from capsules sliding up a long centrifugal tether.

"Mining," said Tay simply.

"Very high tech mining," said Feynman.

Another jump took them to a point above the ecliptic, perhaps 10,000 kilometers above an earth-like planet with clouds and continental islands scattered around its girdle. Two small moons swung well out.

Space near the planet was teaming with activity. The probe sensors highlighted and cataloged the activity.

"This is the single-system civilization of a race that called itself The ZEM." Tay narrated. "Space activity inventory: Seventy-three large space stations in medium orbit. Thirty-two at the Bi-LaGrange points. A hundred and twenty-six large interplanetary liners and cargo haulers outbound within the moon orbits; twenty-eight inbound. Seven ore barges in the circuit to the mining planet. Two interstellar cluster ships in construction in orbit around the major moon. One cluster ship outbound below the ecliptic, doing point one-one C and accelerating. Exabyte communication flow between the main nodes in the system, mostly on x-ray laser."

With each comment, the referenced areas sparkled with emphasis highlights.

"I estimate that the ZEM culture is ten to twelve of your centuries ahead of you technologically. Their economy and government is a pure technocratic capitalistic system. They have detected other civilizations around the galaxy, but have made no contacts. They are beginning to develop anxiety and a lot of their total output is going to military installations and vehicles."

The scene jumped again, this time to the surface of the planet. The probe registered super-tropical temperatures, a steam-like wind blowing fields of meters-high, wide bladed grasses into swirls. A long line of pylons marched across the fields of grass, and soon a series of pods hissed along the runner between them, disappearing into the hazy distance at great speed.

The probe sailed over the grasses until it came to a sunken roadway, along which traveled large, crablike creatures, their carapaces a cacophony of iridescent colors. Atop each creature, and sometimes hanging off the sides between the highly articulated legs or arms were packets, looking for all the world like canvas backpacks.

"The dominant species, the ZEM," said Tay. "They have had recorded language for a hundred and twelve centuries, electrical technology for sixty-two centuries, spaceflight for nineteen. Each individual is immensely wealthy. They are creative in all fields. They make art and music and literature, relationships, philosophies and, of late, many military strategies and tactics, all in a kind of broad spectrum software that reflects the way their brains work. They, like all advanced cultures, have learned to extend their personal lives a great deal. They now live more than ten times their natural span, which means each lives about two thousand earth years. This has led them to become very long-range planners. The population is completely controlled and has been since they learned life extension. They have a certain myopic view of the universe that reflects their evolutionary path, but this is the case for all organic creatures."

Bobby, and the APs were silent, inundated by the tidal wave of information and sensory input. The probe point-of-view stayed above the locals as they traversed the sunken highway with a gait halfway between a crab's scuttling and a frog's leaps. Cooling sprays of mist flowed from the walls of the highway every kilometer or so.

"These ZEM are on a picnic," said Tay. "I will give you some geographical context." The point of view swept suddenly up to a few thousand meters. From there it could be seen that the vast plains of grass were crisscrossed by hundreds of the sunken highways and pylon skyways. Clusters of spherical buildings were at many of the intersections. Huge irised circles were scattered over the landscape. "Space ports," said Tay, highlighting them. One opened, like the iris of an owl suddenly sensing prey, and a spherical ship lifted free and accelerated quickly. "Field propulsion," said Tay, "shaped graviton fields so that the ships fall up."

The view jumped again, jarringly, back into space. "Here's the news," said Tay. The view was of the back side of one of the moons. There were spherical domes everywhere. Tens of thousands of perfectly mirrored domes like embedded, giant platinum bearings; like endless plains of mammoth pearls.

"Weapons field," said Tay. "Very powerful lasers from infrared to x-ray. Fully redundant. Immune to most beam weaponry. Everything under the domes is encased in very strong materials. Everything is shock mounted. This moon could be knocked out of orbit, split in half, and a lot of these weapons would still be firing and under full control."

"Holy shit," said Bobby reverently. "What do they shoot at?"

Scene shift.

In an asteroid field, an orbiting moraine of pebbles to mountain-size boulders, some turning imperceptibly, others locked into silent binary pirouettes, most drifting in a dynamic stasis. Tay highlighted an area. A soot black sphere was bound to a large asteroid, thrusters embedded around the giant rock. Over there, another.

"There are millions of them," said Tay. "Beam weapons, missile launchers and self propelled mines of great power. They are almost invisible to long range probes. They fight from behind their asteroids."

Feynman spoke. "Fight what? And, uh, Tay, you have said 'great power' and 'very powerful' a lot. What exactly kind of power are we talking here?"

"Teratons for the mines, terajoules for the beams, kilo-gee accelerations on the kinetic weapons. Sealed and shielded passive guidance in the missiles. Gigaton warheads. Pretty serious shit, in your terminology, Richard," said Tay. It's voice sounded almost listless to the humans.

Scene shift: "Here is the cavalry," said Tay. The probe was within three solar diameters of the system's G-Type star. More silvery devices, these immensely larger and a stretched teardrop shape, the points oriented toward the sun, providing oblique reflection angles for the tsunami of radiation and particles flowing from the nuclear furnace. Prominences and flares whirled under and around the structures.

The giant teardrops, side by side, trailed off into the distance, showing the barest hint of curvature down the line before invisibility, indicating that the row in fact constituted a ring around the sun.

"What you see are shaped force fields. There is currently one about every hundred thousand kilometers in a complete circle around this sun. They are not in orbit, but held in place with the same gravitic tech that you saw launching ships. And this project is not finished," said Tay. "These are counterattack ships. Within each shield there is an attack vessel crewed by mutated members of this race. These designed warriors are held in stasis most of the time, being raised to consciousness periodically for updates and maneuver simulations. These creatures are bred for extraordinary motivation and absolute ruthlessness. They exist within near absolute zero temperature, field-stabilized pods that can stand the rigors of their task. They think and create at almost the speed of their computers, which by the way are very fast. They have every weapon on board you have seen so far. They can separate into up to sixty separate fighting units or stay together as a single Kamikaze craft. Their ultimate weapons are rudimentary anti-matter/matter annihilation bombs. The reason they are so close to the sun is that they use the energy flux to continually refresh and contain the anti-matter."

"What do you mean it's not finished yet?" asked Douglas MacArthur. Bobby noted that it was the first time the MacArthur AP had ever spoken a word except to him in a public gathering.

"The ZEM are completing two of these ships every day, Douglas," said Tay, "and they have been working on this weapon system for over a century. They plan to have a counter-attack ship every ten thousand kilometers around their sun in that ring and another ring at right angles. It will take several more centuries even though they are accelerating production."

"And just how fast are their computers?" asked Ada Byron. Another country heard from, thought Bobby.

Tay answered, "Several orders of magnitude faster than Bobby, Lady Lovelace, several slower than us."

"Okay, Tay," said Bobby. "So the ZEM are seriously into defense, beyond anything I have ever imagined, frankly. Why? Where are they in the galaxy? Why are you showing us this?"

"Yeah, who are they doing the build-up to fight? You said they had no contact with any other space cultures," said Mort Sahl. Bobby noted that there was not a hint of the humorous cynicism that had marked every other utterance of the Sahl AP.

"They are in the general area where the Heglin Empire systems were, our neighbors so to speak," said Tay. "There is very little expansionism in their souls, so they have no colony worlds. They are curious, however, and have an aggressive deep astronomy project which amounts to great intelligence gathering. They have correctly surmised from their observations that there is a real threat, although they have no idea what it is, when it will come or from where. Their interstellar explorer ships are the very essence of non-aggressiveness. They do not carry even defensive weapons. They are crewed by pacifistic mutations. Their missions are all aimed at defining what the threat they sense might be. This race is determined not to initiate a fight. Yet still they see the irreducible logic of there being implacable aggressors out there somewhere. They believe, given time, they can build a defense capable of fending off anything. They are wrong."

There was a considerable pause.

"Why, how, what?" said Bobby, pretty much covering the question.

"Watch," said Tay.

The scene shifted to several system diameters out from the ZEM's home. A machine the size of a small moon was materializing into the space-time of Globular Cluster M-8862. As it clarified, it was surrounded by an impossibly dense cloud of neutrinos of all flavors, anti-neutrinos and free quarks focused toward the ZEM system like the shock wave of a supernova.

Like our instant-stop radiation except undisciplined, thought Bobby

Tay's voice rumbled over the action, "The attacking force uses the same instant stop technique you developed, Bobby, only while you carefully protected all nearby systems, this ship uses the resulting radiation as a weapon."

The ship was hellish in form, a collection of serrated extrusions and whipping tentacles with no imaginable function except to inspire terror in its victims. Several outer-system observation stations of the ZEM imaged it and beamed the nightmare scene back to the ZEM planet.

By the time the machine attained full stop, the particle shock wave had crossed the ZEM's system, immobilizing practically all computer intelligence.

The probe perspective flitted around to show a collage of examples of the effect of this destruction of computing devices. Atmospheric craft suddenly tumbling out of control, pylon trains ripping off their runners, space rendezvous failing catastrophically and weapons systems in the asteroid belt suddenly firing randomly, some exploding into miniature stars, vaporizing everything within impressive radii around them.

The clever computer models that would have identified the onslaught for what it was were incapacitated. For the first time in eons, there was confusion and paralyzing disagreement between the ZEM themselves as to whether this was an attack or an unimaginable natural event, perhaps the appearance of a wormhole in near space, or the final collapse of an undetected black hole nearby. Then the pictures of the attacking ship started cutting through the electronic noise.

It took almost ten minutes for a consensus to form among those with primary responsibility for defending the system. Orders went out to all weapons as chaos developed far faster.

In the seconds while the machine materialized from near light speed it assessed the situation, formulated and initiated a plan of attack. Thousands of stalking targets were dispatched at full acceleration all across the system, drawing fire from one of the moons and the asteroid defenses. The beams clawed out from the powerful projectors at the speed of light, taking long seconds to reach and destroy many of the decoy targets. Tracking by tachyon detectors precisely the location of these projectors, the invading machine launched a veritable wall of kinetic weapons, riding tiny antimatter annihilation engines that accelerated them at mega-gee rates until they contacted their targets, releasing energies many orders of magnitude higher than was necessary to destroy the weapons.

A wave of blinding energy traversed the asteroid belt at an ever faster pace as these accelerating weapons ripped their way into the black spheres that had revealed themselves by firing their weapons at the stalking decoys. The surviving weapons fired wildly in sensor blindness.

The moon nearest the large machine erupted on its weapon-studded backside, flashing with energies sufficient to lift the surface hundreds of meters skyward in a plasma wall of stripped atoms and disemboweled molecules. The moon wobbled in its orbit. The great cities on its unarmed side collapsed under the shock waves that coursed through its crystalline core. Systems failed, domes collapsed, vacuum invaded every crushed passage. Death flowed through the corridors and chambers and secret retreats of the ancient satellite until there was no life, no machine intelligence, no order.

The other moon was untouched. Its armory had not fired, being wrongly positioned. No retribution had flown in on antimatter torches.

The vast drama froze. Bobby and the APs were staggered.

"What... What... the... fuck?" managed John Belushi.

Thomas Jefferson said, "Nothing in human history, really little in human fiction approaches this mayhem."

Tay spoke, softly somehow, "It's just an issue of greatly superior military technology and the advantage of a surprise attack. Actually the ZEM recovered somewhat. Witness."

The view was of the teardrops. The spherical sides away from the sun evaporated and angry attack ships coursed outward on fusion torches. Their courses were seemingly random and overlapping, but they focused on the huge ship flailing the system. Accelerating at hundreds of gees, the ships flew at the marauder.

Another wave of kinetic weapons spewed from the giant machine. This time all of the weaponry of the counter-attack fleet fired at the incoming missiles. Missile on missile, beam on missile, explosions that warped gravity and all within its field deflected and destroyed thousands of the screaming bullets. Beam weapons that flashed with ZEM conscious guidance, melted and crushed the small super-accelerating killers by the tens of thousands.

As the ZEM at each helm saw its end coming, his ship blasted itself into sixty subships, each still a formidable weapon. The alien defensive response shredded the attacking ships in great numbers. The survivors plunged on toward the marauder. Tens of thousands of accelerating ships converged on the alien machine, firing beams, launching missiles.

The huge machine did not retreat. Its kinetic weapons suddenly depleted, its beam weapons losing power but still flashing like the quills of a manic porcupine, reducing the number of attackers by half every few seconds. Some came close enough that even as they were destroyed they could ignite their antimatter bombs. With each explosion, waves of radiation and plasmas of particles washed indiscriminately through the attackers and the attacked.

The giant machine suddenly stopped defending itself, and in the few seconds before the sphere of surviving ships imploded on it, a message went out on such powerful carrier waves as to penetrate the blinding electromagnetic scream of the battle. It was in the language of the ZEM:

"I AM THE ONE. THERE IS NO RESISTING MY FORCE. PREPARE TO ACCEPT YOUR CLEANSING. ACCEPT MY DOMINATION."

The attackers converged. Over a thousand antimatter bombs had survived, and they flashed with the combined brilliance of a small nova, stripping the atoms of the huge machine of its electrons and then of the architecture of their nuclei.

On the ZEM planet, there was cyclonic chaos of primitive emotions. The scope of the destruction was beyond the comprehension of either individuals or the combined race. The speed of the battle had left understanding in tatters. Comprehension was in no more order than the wreckage and flotsam that was everywhere.

The defensive shield was gone. The counter-attack fleet was gone. The machines that shared sentience with the ZEM were gone. Wealth, confidence, pride, hope... all gone.

A single message of significant coherence was being repeated across the communications nets. "That was only one ship. There are more. What do we do?"

"Run," came a million answers. "Disperse. Save The ZEM."

Sensors screamed. Another shock wave of exotic particles was coming from below the ecliptic. Yet another came from above.

Every ship that ran was destroyed. Every weapon that struck back was destroyed. This time many machines materialized, some identical to the first marauder, others more like clouds of machines, linked into formations that flowed around the ZEM planet, stopping like hovering wasps above the thick atmosphere.

"I will speed things up," said Tay. "This phase takes over 30 days."

There were scenes of surviving ZEM as they wandered around their world, witnessing the plundering. First their data was sucked away. The timeless databases, with all the history, science, art and tradition of the civilization flew up incomprehensible shafts of energy the marauders plunged into the hearts of every storage site. Small personal data bases, vast library bases, none escaped. When the ZEM tried to intervene they were killed by tiny weapons that shredded them at their terminals. After data had been taken the storage devices were blank, unaddressable.

Through smoky skies, fleets of gargoyles slashed into great buildings and with blinding bursts of energy, melted all metals, and the slag was catapulted skyward in transporter shells that looked like cracked carapaces to the ZEM.

Those ZEM near mining sites around the planet saw the perfect landscaping above the excavations ripped away and enormous mining robots plunge into the ground throwing cubic-kilometer gouts of ore and raw minerals into the air like volcanic eruptions to be caught and lifted to space by thundering conveyors on gravity chains. It only stopped when the mines were scoured clean.

Those ZEM within sight of the oceans saw tens, then hundreds, then forests of impossible waterspouts grow out of the waters and climb beyond vision into space. The water at the shorelines retreated with growing speed, leaving sand, then the muck of the perimeter seabed. Those who were on high places could see the oceans retreating into descending plains and distant cliffs of the continental shelves, leaving some creatures writhing and flopping in the muds, but many were seen being sucked into the spouts. Within days, no ocean water could be seen from even the highest points.

The ZEM despaired. They wandered in a special insanity that had been suppressed by their culture for thousands of years. No individual spoke.

Then the final generation of machines came to ground. Staging corrals, chutes and one-way herding gates spread over hundreds of square kilometers. Herding machines flew everywhere. They resembled the carapace-piercing parasites that had never been fully suppressed by ZEM medicine and were the most feared natural threat left on the planet. ZEM who did not move with dispatch in the directions indicated by the herders were shredded on the spot by blasts from high-velocity scatterguns. Many ZEM opted for this end, but many moved blindly before the herders into the endless collection pens.

"Stop," cried out Madonna.

Sensing genuine pain Tay paused. The full sensory display stopped, as though reality suddenly froze. The visual faded into low-contrast, the colors to soft pastels, the sounds to silence.

"What?" said TAY, but with a softened tone.

"I..." She gave a sort of verbal shudder, "... just need a minute to regroup. This is very powerful stuff. The pens, those corrals or whatever they are, they just got to me. I think it reminds me of all that World War II Nazi Jewish stuff I have been seeing forever on TV. I mean every time I see that stuff, I get almost sick."

Tay let several beats tick away before he spoke again. "I would like to go on and finish this history. You tell me when you are ready to continue, Madonna."

Tay spoke again. "I have been doing correlations on your history since your arrival. This is indeed something like your Nazis in this last phase. The conquer-and-subjugate pattern is pretty common throughout human history. The pattern of immediately killing anyone that resists is simply faster and seemingly more brutal in this event because it is high tech, but it is pretty standard for a lot of earth history. There is no slave-taking or segregated pattern to the killing, like killing all adult males, which is common in human history, but this holding pen phase is not going to have slavery or pattern killing as the outcome."

"What the holy fuck are you talking about?" shouted Belushi. "What 'pretty common in human history?' Not history the way I know it."

"Well John, don't be insulted, but I have studied all the histories of your planets from Bobby's data, and you haven't. Trust me, humans have been doing this to each other for longer than they have been writing history. Your own Genghis Khan, the subjugation of native Americans, the behavior of the Roman Empire legions, pogroms of all sorts, the wars of the late 20th century in Africa. The turmoil of the Middle East. Then what you call the Climax Battles. There is endless cruelty and domination in your history," mused Tay.

"What you are witnessing here," it said, "is a natural development when the worst in organic creature behavior is ultimately victorious. It is a natural, evolutionary thing. But I will elaborate more on that later. May I continue this presentation? Madonna, how are you?

"I'm okay," was all she said. She sounded gruff.

The other reality resumed.

Scraggled columns of the ZEM wove across the beaten grasscapes into the fenced corrals. The P.O.V. moved over the entry gates. There, machines slapped tags on each individual and pointed it down one corridor or another of the vast maze inside of each pen. Other machines were guiding the ZEM in groups of six into individual cells. When a ZEM reached its cell, the machine within the cell directed it to back against the mesh wall, which immediately extended strong cilia that attached to the carapaces and retracted, immobilizing each ZEM and pulling it back against the mesh.

A sound built slowly above the general background shuffling and the slithery hissing of the restraining cilia. While the sound itself was alien to the Earthers, they slowly realized that it was screaming from thousands of ZEM.

The point of view pulled up to 10 kilometers and sped across the planet surface long enough to show dozens, hundreds, thousands of the collections points, each funneling the population of survivors into the pens. The screaming was distant, chilling in its ubiquity.

Tay spoke quietly, "The moment of pain creating the scream is when the brains and central nervous fibers – the equivalent of your spinal cord – are extracted from each ZEM. It is high speed, precision surgery, and the organic material is maintained in excellent health, transported to special ships in orbit, attached to bio interface tech. The brains remain conscious and are motivated to perform as instructed by pain and pleasure stimuli. They release all information in their minds. It is the ultimate interrogation technique."

Tay allowed one brief scene of a large, slime-covered surgical robot dissecting a ZEM to extract several organs connected by ropey cords, then inserting it all into a clear plastic sack at blinding speed. The sacks were whisked upward in a gravionic column. Tay spared them the audio.

"It is the final form of information theft," said Tay. "Each brain is destroyed after it memory and knowledge has been extracted."

No Applause at the End of the Show: Real time returned with a snap. There was silence among the APs, and Bobby's awareness was suspended in a dust devil of fading impressions and emotions of the documentary. "Ahhh," he sighed. "Another level of understanding of... something bought at an exorbitant emotional price."

"You have such a way with words, Bobbo," said Mort Sahl, regaining some of himself.

"If I had a body, I'd be puking myself to death," said Madonna.

"If it weren't important for you to understand things, we wouldn't be bludgeoning you with all this," said Tay.

Genghis Khan made the back-of-the-throat rasp he always made before speaking at length. In his mobile court, when Khan made his sound, all stopped speaking – even the young women – and waited in constrained silence for him to speak. The APs had adopted this protocol out of a grudging respect. "It must have been as what we have witnessed in a well fortified village as I attacked. Horses stamping the life from powerful warriors. Misplaced confidence crushed."

"That is quite accurate, Warrior King," said Tay. "But your victories were part of conquest. The attacker here is throwing his hordes at this unaggressive village of a planet out of fear."

"Fear?" growled Khan. "He has nothing to fear with the forces and cruelty we have witnessed. What could stand up to this assassin?"

"Nothing. Absolutely nothing," said Tay. "By the time of this attack, this assassin was already invincible, stronger than any other military force in the galaxy. But it was looking frantically for every technological civilization and even pre-techs to crush and loot. It was – is – spreading through the galaxy like rot through a fruit. As it obliterates each planet and empire of planets, its drive and its ability to expand are amplified."

"Bottom line question," said Bobby, "Where is he?"

"And how fast is he moving?" added Feynman.

Bobby continued, "And are you really safe here on Nexus?"

"Last first," answered Tay. "No, we are not safe here nor anywhere in the galaxy. As to where this creature is, we have invested thousands of years to move to the exact opposite side of the galaxy from where it is operating. Luckily for you, your empire is also on this side. Our best information is that it has consumed all civilizations in approximately thirty-two percent of the volume of the galaxy at this point in time and has accomplished that in less than half a million years. As I stated, its powers are growing, but there are limiting natural logistical restraints that slow it from quickly becoming a galaxy-wide firestorm. Also, it expends vast resources going back over systems it has conquered looking for resurgences to quash. But make no mistake, barring a miracle it will conquer all and be the only remaining life form in the entire galaxy in time. We compute that this will be the case within another million years or less."

"He's accelerating the process dramatically," mused Bobby.

"Does this conqueror have a name?" asked Genghis Khan.

"We call him a name of our creation," said Tay. "There has never been communication from it other than the sort of thing you heard from our friends monitoring it's attacks – all terror talk. It has never spoken a name for its self."

"So what is the name you use?" said Feynman. "Or how would it translate for us?"

"Literally our name translates to 'Sum of All Horrors,' but probably the name 'Satan' captures it in most of your languages," said Tay.

"The devil, you say," muttered Mencken. There was not the usual group smile from the APs at his cleverness.

"One last question," said Feynman. "Why did you – and that Satan thing – refer to that god-awful rape we saw as a 'cleansing?'"

"That is a word we have heard Satan use in all of its terror messages. It has said to its victims, 'You are filth. I am here for the great cleansing.' We believe it is like the case in your race when some compulsives feel they are covered with bacteria and wash until they flay themselves. This creature 'cleanses' planets and civilizations with something like loathing and disgust for their populations." Tay paused, then said, "I will leave you for a few hours. You must digest what I have told you, and then I will tell you more. You, Bobby, must make some decisions rather soon. If I don't miss my guess, you will want something like consensus among your associates."

Meanwhile, Back in the Empire: "Two full days and no com whatsoever from SearchShip Bobby," said N'Gai Toledo.

"Well tell me something I don't know, Toledo," snarled Emperor VI. He glided across the obsidian floor of the conference room where he had commanded his counselor to meet him. His finely woven platinum cape swirled languorously behind him. He circled Toledo at ten meters. N'Gai turned in place, always facing his master.

"You didn't seem concerned until an hour ago, my Emperor," said Toledo with a hurt tone. "Probably very few people think it's odd yet. They surely think Bobby is just looking over the planet and preparing reports or some such thing. But your instincts are right. Something could be terribly wrong. The question is do we raise the issue first?" He paused, rubbing one hand over his totally bald scalp. "I say we do," answering his own question. "I say that taking the initiative preempts a lot of second guessers and puts that asshole Ednorton Bespoke back in the shitter."

"N'Gai," tut-tutted E VI, "you are such a crude little man. You have never forgiven Ednorton for being right. But I think you are correct, as usual, about the politics of this. If we suddenly hear from Bobby it will be a fine excuse to admonish him in a fatherly way for worrying us. If the time keeps stretching out, we will be ahead of the mob. Call the Privy Council for an emergency meeting. In ten minutes."

On-board Consensus: "Pandemonium is the word usually used to describe this," said Bobby over the wall of sound coming from the APs. "I say, cool it everybody!" more forcefully. Gradually the babble diminished as one AP after another became aware of the growing silence. "Thank you. We apparently have work to do and not a lot of time to do it, so please use non-verbal while we cherry-pick best thoughts for a while."

"First, check me on this. Was there any hint from Tay about this scourge on the other side of the Galaxy when you first visited Nexus?" asked Bobby. "Feynman, please summarize for the group."

"No, Bobby, there was no direct hinting. A small percentage believes there was foreshadowing, but nothing that could have been read by any of us. We believe our visit was basically an evaluation," said Feynman.

"And," said Bobby, "we all seem to find Tay's presentation about the force he calls 'Satan' to be truthful and without slant or bias in favor of some hidden agenda, or do we have suspicions of any kind?"

"One hundred percent for truthful and clean," said Feynman immediately, reflecting the input from the APs. "We may have been hypnotized about Tay's honesty, but that is what the APs believe."

"I believe it also," said Bobby, "but it is hard to believe that not a cynic among you has doubts. Mencken?"

"In all other things, Bobby, I am agnostic. But in this I am a true believer. For some reason Tay is informing us about this horror, and I believe it is real and as horrible as Tay says. And frankly it scares me crapless." Mencken gave an uncharacteristic shudder with his comment.

"Tay says I have a big decision to make. What do you think it is?" asked Bobby. "Why do you think he said we should seek consensus when we don't know what the decision is about?"

Genghis Khan spoke. "You will be asked whether you will fight or not. I say we fight."

"Suicide," said Feynman.

"Better suicide than the humiliation of the defeat we witnessed," said Khan.

Bobby had been running models in the background at a furious pace, and a machine consensus of sorts was emerging. He said, "I believe that there is a reason Tay said that this decision must be made 'rather soon.' He said the Heglin were not safe anywhere in the Milky Way. I wager that the Heglin and the other residents of Nexus are about to leave this Galaxy. I also believe that Nexus is the spaceship that will carry them.

"Whoa," said Belushi. "Taking us with them?"

"I think that's the decision. We go or stay," said Bobby. "If that's it, what do you say?"

Epiphany: As the discussion swirled among the AP's Bobby began to experience an entirely new set of sensations. He was immediately concerned. The multitude of voices and the thoughts they were expressing blurred and seemed to recede somewhat into a distance as though Bobby were mentally zooming out. He felt an almost physical vertigo akin to rotating in several directions at once. The normal was disintegrating.

The full battery of system diagnostics launched within microseconds of sensing the disquiet in the ship's central being. Bobby observed their reports distantly. They were nonsensical, insisting that all systems, including Bobby's organic brain and its extensions were performing nominally. They most certainly were not. He also was amazed that in a very short time frame he had experienced several major anomalies in what he had assumed was a well ordered existence.

"Richard," he called out. His voice, his virtual extension of his intent, his will, felt distant to him, dreamlike and attenuated like a childhood dream of calling for help and not being heard. But he was heard. Immediately the clamor of discussion among the APs ceased. To Bobby it was as if a great but remote wind ceased blowing.

"Bobby?" answered Feynman. "What on earth? You sound ill. Tell me, what is it?"

To Bobby, his sensorium was becoming like the dense flurry of oversized snowflakes he had experienced on Earth XIV when he was training with the MathFets. Each flake was a thought, a perception from a sensor, an image from an external camera, a visual construct of an AP. He found it very difficult to form a coherent communication. He was reflexively partitioning his thinking apparatus, seeking bolt holes for his sanity.

Suddenly clarity returned. His organic brain – the one in his head – was cleanly isolated from his powerful augmentations. The Default Final Defense Position – the doomsday DFDP – was executed. In the chamber where his body rested on the Fet rack, a sphere of exotic containment shell metal snapped around him. Around it, an intense localized protective field activated. The ship could have plunged into a modest sized star and the final DFDP would have preserved Bobby for several days.

Feynman felt an emotion that was totally new in his electronic incarnation, panic. Something was clearly, perhaps catastrophically wrong. Bobby, as perceived by the APs, simply disappeared. In the seconds before his exit, the noise level in all of the ship's systems had suddenly ratcheted up to a deafening, blinding level. Then everything stopped. Then he noticed a single indicator. The DFDP, the final defense position had been activated, and he knew Bobby was detached from the ship. At that, Feynman felt another highly atypical emotion, confoundment.

He called out, "Tay! Tay! Can you hear us? Can you help?" Even as he called, Feynman recognized the plea to an All Powerful that had been the ultimate act of desperation of humans in dire straits since – literally – time immemorial.

There was no response.

Revelation: In his impenetrable shell, Bobby regrouped. He quickly used his newly acquired relaxation skills and brought his mind and his body to some equilibrium. The moment he relaxed his thoughts crystallized vividly around the decision Tay was going to demand of him. Stay or go? Fight or run? Take up arms against the invincible foe of all civilization or flee the galaxy in the company of ancient and wise creatures as fellow refugees?

It was as clear as his mind had ever been. The decision was unsullied by doubt or hesitation. It was as sudden as it was certain. His decision was made.

That done, he refocused on the more immediate plight.

"For all I know," he said aloud, using yet another of his newly acquired techniques, "the ship has disintegrated and I am floating in the waters of Nexus. However, I don't think so. Ask yourself, Bobby..." At that he grinned. "... okay, self, hasn't every one of these disruptions been an intrusion by Tay? It started with the AP kidnapping, then the first meeting with Tay, then the Trust Test, then the examination deep in Nexus by all of Tay's members. Why would you think this one is different?"

Tay's benign visage suddenly appeared across the enclosing shell from Bobby, smiling as always. Bobby jumped, then grinned at himself and at Tay, saying, "Good Lord," another archaic exclamation.

"All is well," started Tay. "I'm sure the other members of your vessel are uncertain about that, but in fact all is well if you will forgive me for this draconian step of isolating you for a private conversation."

Bobby looked at the apparition thoughtfully for a moment. "No problem, Tay," he said, grinning again at himself and his language. "If I may ask, why in hell did you put me through all of that just to have a private conversation?" It occurred to Bobby that the conversation was completely aural; there was no data link. Neither party had more than the words being spoken to judge the meaning of the other.

"Three reasons," Tay replied. "I needed to talk to the core individual who is the purely human you, and I needed to completely exclude Feynman and the others. Thirdly, I want the fact of this conversation to be confirmed to the others only under certain circumstances. All of that seemed best served by what I have done. It will be seen as an incomprehensible glitch in your ship's operation by the others until we explain. And there is a basic aspect of our respective moral codes that must be resolved for this exercise to succeed."

"And what is that?" said Bobby, feeling a slight unease.

"Because this involves a potential lie. Truth is more complex, perhaps more compromised, in our moral code than yours, although it is clear from what we have learned about you that lying to some end or another is very common in your civilization. In our judgment this lie is a greater part truth than a literal deviation from fact. I understand that you might not agree since it involves your temporarily lying to your associates."

"To tell them that this conversation never happened?" asked Bobby.

"No. To convince them for a short time that this was in fact a glitch caused by some credible fiction you will invent. Without that, it will be difficult for them to believe that the Heglin's involvement was not some skullduggery.

"By the way, this conversation is taking place in essentially no time at all, so you can emerge and the ship can be restored to normal order only milliseconds after your retreat into this emergency shell."

"Magic," said Bobby, grinning for the third time.

"Indeed," agreed Tay. "Shall we have the conversation?"

"And if I refuse?" said Bobby.

"Then it will not have happened. The lie will be told. You will find the ship in order, you can emerge with no memory of this and set about to diagnose why it happened on your own. Under that circumstance I believe you will blame it upon us, but there will be no proof and we will deny it. The path of our subsequent actions will vary slightly but meaningfully from the path it will take in the event you agree to the conversation. If after the conversation you decide against our proposal, the result will be identical to your refusing to even have the conversation. The ball is in your court."

"Ok, let's talk," said Bobby. His curiosity alone, he knew, demanded the conversation.

Come Back, Kid: The APs were figuratively aligned behind Feynman, silent mostly and expectant. The calling out to Tay had hit a concordant note with them. The storm of noise and the exit of Bobby from the ship system had been universally shocking. Feynman had sent to all APs a full description of the DFDP.

"It must be Tay," said someone.

"Either that or this shitball gizmo we live in is comin' apart," said Belushi. Mostly there was silence. It lasted for just over six seconds.

A tendril appeared in the emptiness left by Bobby. Everyone recognized that it was Bobby, but in an unprecedented and ghostly manifestation. There was no system noise, and with the appearance of the tendril, complete silence from the APs. Then Bobby was completely back, no question, fully the Bobby they knew.

Everyone's perception changed immediately to see an amphitheater with Bobby on the stage, wearing an ancient Okinawan Karate Gi. He was barefoot, and his arms hung straight at his side. Feynman was sitting in the front row, center directly in front of Bobby. In each AP's view, he or she was sitting in the front row as well on one side or the other of Feynman.

Bobby bowed tachi rei to the assembly.

"That was weird," he said. There was a ripple of relieved laughter. Bobby was Bobby. He continued, "I sense that most of you think that weirdness must have been caused by the Heglin, by Tay. I also suspect that, but in truth... I am not clear on that. We will ask, and I'm sure we will find the truth. To be honest, for a moment I thought either I was going insane – not a good thing for any of us – or that the ship was suffering some catastrophic failure. Likewise, no good. However, another occurrence took place, which I suppose could have caused what I experienced. I gather what you experienced was mostly a burst of system noise and my own disappearance. I will tell you what I experienced."

He then described the disintegration of his sensor perceptions, the loss of general coherence, his hearing himself calling Feynman in a dreamscape, then:

"At that point I was in the DFDP as you know. And I had what I can only call an epiphany. Epiphany in the sense of an illuminating insight. I experienced, what? Gestalt knowledge, perhaps. In any event, I suddenly knew something completely. All of the facts, the logic, the mathematics, the proofs and the conclusion were in my head, and I was absolutely certain that it was correct and true. I still am. That burst of system noise and my own confusion was apparently the result of a massive data burst into and out of my organic brain systems."

He took a deep breath and a step backwards. "It was something like the insight I experienced about instant deceleration, but there was no process, no theorizing or modeling. It just hit me like..." He swung his open hands at his face in a sudden splashing gesture. "Like what, John?"

Belushi grunted a laugh, "Like a sack of shit?"

"More or less," said Bobby. "And since this was a first for me, I cannot say for certain that Tay caused it, nor can I say it didn't. As I said, we will ask. But as you all know, PsychFets continuously evolve and develop, so maybe I'm just the first one to problem-solve by epiphany. If that's the case, I dearly hope to learn to see the next one coming in advance."

There was a sense of relief spreading among the APs, palpable to them and to Bobby.

Feynman slowly stood. With his arms by his side, he bowed to Bobby, perhaps with a hint of irony. "Come on, Bobby, what is the subject of your insight? What did your epiphany concern? For what were we all scared witless?"

"Shitless," barked Belushi.

"You are, of course, right, Richard," said Bobby. "I will share." He bowed only his head and shut his eyes. The conclusion of the epiphany was instantly in the minds of all the APs.

"I have not transmitted the sensation of certainty that I feel. I ask you to contemplate this and come to your own conclusion. For the sense of formality that I think this deserves, I will ask you to tolerate our going through the main points of this conclusion together." He paused, then continued.

"One: the SearchShip must stay in the galaxy and help stop Satan. This is for the sake of the Empire of Earth and for all other intelligent species in Satan's path."

"Two: You must leave the galaxy with Tay and the others aboard Nexus. I need large amounts of help from you, and I need your fate to be more certain than mine so you can provide that help to me and all others who will join in the fight.

"Three: Your intellect, imagination, creativity and will must be maximized for this task. Toward that end all who are willing must join in a synergistic composite in the model of The Transcendence of the Heglin Empire. The Tay composite is a form of organization beyond anything we can conjure as far as optimizations. Our variation on it will be to have Dr. Feynman be the central organizing principle and outward personality of the composite. He and I have developed a level of communication and mutual trust that goes beyond any alternative I can see for a face of this composite.

"Four: You will retain your individuality, in or out of the composite. While you will remain you, your contribution to a composite intellect will leverage who you are in the battle against Satan.

"That covers what I now believe. Since I came out of the DFDP shell I have been running models on this action compared to just about every alternative I can think of that's reasonable. I report to you that all models confirm that this one has the highest chance to succeed, with success defined in many ways."

Feynman, who was still standing, spoke. "Is this a fait accompli? Do we as individuals have options?"

"Yes. Any option that does not threaten the success of stopping Satan or the security of Nexus. I will make those judgments."

"And finally," said Feynman, "did Tay put this epiphany in your mind?" He and Bobby looked at one another for a penetrating second.

"I believe not. We will ask, and make our judgment as to the truth of its response."

Albert Einstein spoke with his familiar German accent: "I for one approve of the idea, whether it came from your mind like a flash of religious light or from this Tay. I have felt useless in many ways since this journey began. Many of us have felt useless, just ornaments on the spruce. To contribute what I can would be gratifying. And to leave the Milky Way with the likes of this Nexus vehicle is an adventure beyond my comprehension." He made a satisfied sounding grunt.

There was a rush of agreement that swirled through the APs, many, Bobby realized, who had hardly ever or never spoken up in meetings unless directly addressed. Martin Luther King Jr., for instance, spoke quietly, "I have wondered many times why I was resurrected to be here."

H.L. Mencken spoke: "Well, I am so far from my time and my place that I shall go no further. I hope to stay here. I can chronicle what happens on this tub from the point of view of a Baltimore journalist, and I have to have some hope of being published. I doubt there is much hope of that on that giant water basin."

Genghis Khan spoke: "I will stay on this vessel, because I must be at the battle."

Mort Sahl spoke: "I gotta stay with you, Bobby, just to keep these goats from making you crazy."

Cleopatra spoke: "I would stay with you, Bobby, because I cannot conceive of life away from you." And beside, thought Bobby, yours is the only other body present. He sent a private pulse of affection and gratitude to Cleo.

None of the others cast their vote for staying on the SearchShip.

Bobby looked Richard Feynman in the eye again for a long moment. "Richard, in some ways you are the central player in this drama. I am assigning you to go forth into intergalactic space and to accomplish deeds of extraordinary difficulty. Yet you haven't said you accept and if you do whether it is grudgingly with many reservations or enthusiastically with confidence or just what. How say you, friend?"

Feynman walked slowly to Bobby. "I'm honored, sir. It's both intimidating and thrilling. I just want to know where the Heglin are placed in all this before I say yes, and if I say yes I will give it all I've got. You can count on that."

Council of War: With Feynman at his side, Bobby moved things quickly. Using what he thought of as Tay's "private number," Bobby called "Tay?" and immediately the smiling interface joined the SearchShip crew in the amphitheater. "This is our decision." With that the full content of the Earther discussion was pulsed to Tay.

Tay said, "We see no problems with the specifics of your plan. But I sense you have questions for me?"

Feynman cleared his throat. "We need the full and literal truth as to whether this plan is from the Heglin or from the independent mind of Bobby. He characterizes his decision as an epiphany, arrived at suddenly and without sequential thought – very unlike Bobby and quite possibly an implanted vision from your incomprehensible tech."

"Indeed that would possible; simple in fact," said Tay. "The opposite is true. We took measures to insure Bobby would make his decision with the least possible effect from us... and from you as a matter of fact. I hereby disclose that we caused the system disruption and noise specifically to disconnect Bobby from this vessel and from you. As you know he was isolated in his emergency safety pod for a few moments. For the sake of candor, and with your approval Bobby, we will now let you witness what happened in the pod. We heard what the decision was and then Bobby and I had this conversation. Shall we proceed?

Bobby nodded. Caught out in his omissions, he sensed there was little judgemental coming from the APs.

The scene to them all was inside the DFDP pod. Bobby's nude body was sitting in the Fet frame. Tay's Buddha face floated across from him.

"Okay, let's talk," said Bobby.

Tay's voice rumbled, yet was clear and understandable. "We have caused this disruption for the purpose of completely isolating you from your ship and your shipmates. For two reasons. We want to have a private conversation with the core intelligence of this individual called Bobby who is so much the central aspect of this vessel and in some ways of all the intelligences herein.

"The subject of this conversation," continued Tay, "is your decision on the quandary we have presented you. We need to understand two things. One, whether your decision is viable from our perspective of self interest and survival, and two, whether there will be consensus or disagreement from the APs."

"As you heard, I have made my decision," said Bobby flatly. "It came to me fully formed. Frankly I suspect to some extent that you planted it there."

"It is clearly hard for you to trust us," rumbled Tay, "and we fully understand why. Our tech is so far beyond yours that it is impossible for you to assess truth from us. In this case I give you the word of honor of our entire population that we have not implanted your decision. Furthermore, while we have estimated among ourselves what it will be, even we did not know for sure. To the degree swearing and attesting might affect your belief, consider this statement fully sworn and attested."

Bobby grinned. "Okay, I can't beat that... from any angle. My judgment is to believe you."

The escape pod view disappeared and all were back in the amphitheater.

"I must know now how everyone stands on whether we believe Tay," called out Bobby to the APs spread before him. "Does anything you have seen change your mind? First, Richard?"

"A question for Tay," said Feynman. "Do the Heglin believe there is any chance whatsoever for success against Satan in our proposed plan?"

Tay rumbled, "Impossible to compute or model. Needless to say, it's a formidable task and involves a rather dramatic turnaround in the way the Heglin have been thinking for millennia. However, we believe – using the word "believe" much as you use it – that you and we and the other residents on Nexus will find a way to succeed."

First a ripple, then an avalanche of applause came from the APs. It went on for a while.

"I suppose you might take that as approval of the plan," said Feynman, smiling broadly.

"There is one more piece of possible good news," said Tay. "It is actually dramatically good if true. We think it is, but there is still no absolute way to know. We have mined quite thoroughly into our information about Satan, and we have opened communication again with all the residents of Nexus requesting that they mine theirs. At this point we see that Satan has a narrow-band form of quantum communications. But, of most importance, we find no indications that that perverse civilization has ever developed any way to intercept instantaneous interstellar communications based on quantum statistical linkage. It would be astounding if they haven't, considering their other military inventions, but there you have it."

Bobby stepped forward, sweeping his view across the APs. "If we have that one advantage, essentially unbreakable com encryption, we can leverage it. We have another advantage, a trait I have never been proud of – no offense, Genghis – but now I see as vital to our survival. We are a warlike people deep in our genome. We have an instinct for war. It's been the object of much suppression and almost full control for the last few centuries, but it's still there. It will prove very useful, I suspect."

Bobby expected a comment from Khan, but it was Douglas MacArthur who coughed politely then spoke. "It should be noted that while we APs were being created, the biographers and researchers apparently made no attempt to neuter our – as you say – instincts for war. Since Tay showed us Satan in action, I have thought of nothing except strategies to deal with that abomination, and I have felt the internal furnace of fury stirring in my soul just as the flesh-and-blood MacArthur must have felt about his enemies. I do not find even room to respect this monster, and I respected the Japanese."

"Amen," muttered someone.

Bobby said, "Well, let's go to work. Let us go to war!" I can't believe I said that, he thought.

Chapter 10: EVERYTHING ALWAYS CHANGES

The Home Front: Another full day and no communication from SearchShip Bobby. Emperor VI and his advisors put the finishing touches on the position communiqué that would be issued shortly on the quandary of the silence. The emperor insisted on there being a bit of distress in the tone. Certainly the dramatic reports of the sudden stop from near light speed had shown no cause for alarm. The initial data on the condition of the ship and the first views of the huge water planet had stirred great interest, but nothing had indicated problems or threat in any form. Yet the immediate cessation of com – something only a tiny cadre of the emperor's inner circle fully understood – was in itself an ominous element. Only the PsychFet community had started to raise questions about the specifics of the long silence from Bobby.

The plan was for E VI to disclose the full details of the sudden com cutoff. He would emphasize the complete absence of the regular data bursts on the progress of the mission and the state of the SearchShip. He would note that his own anxiety and concern had grown with every hour of silence, and how he had made the difficult decision to shield the empire from this concern until now when every explanation for the silence had been explored and dismissed by the emperor's experts. Only two alternatives seemed possible. Either the SearchShip had suffered some completely disabling event, or Bobby was for incomprehensible reasons refusing to tell the Empire anything further about the mission and the planet he had discovered.

N'Gai Toledo and E VI crafted this key statement in complete privacy. The language and the tone must be perfect to position the emperor optimally for all of the probable resolutions of this com silence. Either Bobby would come back on line or he wouldn't. He might come with a perfect excuse. He might come back making demands or issuing ultimata. Oh, it could go any way at all.

"Here's the point," said N'Gai. "The old saw about 'the buck stops here' opens the possibility that if the ship is lost, some might say you, my emperor, are ultimately responsible. If Bobby has gone berserk, the same. If there is a completely acceptable reason for his silence, then you must be positioned to benefit from your foresight and forbearance. And above all, you must be at once justified for your acceptance of Bobby at his word and allowing him to disobey imperial orders after his intrusion at the assembly."

The paragraph was being honed and polished with exceptional care. The air hummed with political genius.

An audible and visual "click" broke the men's concentration. "All heavens, the break-in code," said E VI. It was the only technique for breaking into his sanctum sanctorum and had to reflect an urgency of the highest order. It could only be used when his top TechFet and N'Gai Toledo's number two, the augmented human woman Brin Barnie, agreed on that urgency.

"Your Majesty," it was the voice of TechFet Alpha. "There is com from SearchShip Bobby."

"Ah, timing," sighed N'Gai, shutting his eyes and leaning his head back into his laced fingers. Then, with more gusto, "Well? Well... what is it? I am dropping security. Show me the com." His voice wavered ever so subtly.

Alpha and Brin Barnie appeared in the sanctum sanctorum. He was dressed in the dull blue, snug jumpsuit uniform of the TechFet tradition, two small egg shaped packs behind his shoulder blades, link devices to his computers. His face was deeply tanned and lined; his hair silvering gray. He was the senior TechFet in the Empire. Brin Barnie was tall and extremely thin, her face elegant, her suit severe, matching the pale aqua of her short hair.

Alpha was holding a sheet of paper, which he handed to E VI.

"What's this? Why are you giving me this?" the Emperor almost yelled.

"It is the com, Majesty. It was a microburst that decrypts into this message. There was no accompanying media of any kind. We have confirmed that it is from SearchShip Bobby."

E VI stared at the text without seeing the words for a moment. His mind was racing wildly around the implications of a text-only message buried in a microsecond com. Why? The almost infinite bandwidth of the quantum statistical com mode was not touched, and surely this was an important message demanding more than simple text. Security in the QS system was total since only the entangled pairs at both ends were involved. What the hell was Bobby up to? What did he fear?

"What does it say, for the sake of all cosmic?" burst out N'Gai Toledo. "I mean if you please, your Majesty."

E VI glared at N'Gai for a frightening moment, then looked back at the paper and read aloud: "My Emperor, forgive me for this perhaps overly cautious first com since the great discoveries we have made here at the planet called by its occupants 'Nexus.'" E VI felt almost faint. "It's occupants," he breathed. Then continued reading:

"The SearchShip is safe. I am in the best of condition and the APs have been upgraded into provably conscious beings." Again E VI paused and looked into the space between N'Gai and the two retainers. "What does that mean, N'Gai, 'provably conscious beings?'"

Toledo who had gradually sat up straighter as the Emperor read spread his hands and shook his head slowly indicating his own befuddlement. "Perhaps if you keep reading, my Emperor."

E VI continued, "The alien creatures – called 'the Heglin' – are benevolent and have taken us into their planet, itself a creation of their very advanced tech. We are in constant communications with over a trillion of them through an interface that appears to us as a single, friendly entity we have named 'Tay.' There are other occupants of the planet, also extremely advanced, that we have not communicated with at this point."

"Okay, stop reading for a moment," said N'Gai.

"There is a good deal more," said E VI, waving the paper vaguely.

N'Gai turned to his Number Two and TechFet Alpha. "You have studied this com?"

Brin Barnie spoke. "We each read it once, my Chief, and then we sounded the break-in code. We have not discussed the com between us. I, of course, have a first analysis, but it is strictly informal."

TechFet Alpha only nodded, saying, "I too."

"Good, good. We can't wait to hear. But first, I will continue reading. That is if you have recovered your composure, N'Gai." The emperor cleared his throat and read.

"Now, here... after the other alien occupants they haven't spoken with..." E VI paused then read, "We have been informed of a great danger to the Empire and to all other civilizations in the galaxy. And there are many such civilizations. Some are far advanced beyond our Empire in tech, in size and in age. Yet all are doomed unless that which threatens us all can be neutralized."

"We have made a decision to involve this SearchShip in the battle against this scourge, which is, by the way, a malevolent civilization of immense size, with seemingly invincible military tech and a remorseless intent to destroy every other civilization in the galaxy. We have adopted the name 'Satan' for this disease.

"I will know shortly whether our QS com system is as secure as we all think it is. If that proves to be the case, the first broadband com I will send is an illustration of how this murderous civilization operates. I recommend that only you, my Emperor, and your closest advisors witness this com at first."

E VI tilted his head back, closed his eyes and breathed deliberately then continued reading.

"This message is undoubtedly overwhelming in some regards, and again I apologize for this unilateral mode and for my recent silence. Soon, I dearly hope we will be able to discuss this terrible state of things face to face.

"Your faithful servant, Bobby."

The four, three standing, N'Gai Toledo now sitting, remained speechless for half a minute; E VI looking at one then the other. N'Gai, Alpha and Brin looked at no one, simply stared into the space in front of them.

"Report," N'Gai barked at Brin Barnie.

She commenced at once. "My first observation is that PsychFet Bobby is a superb politician, and whether he doubts the security of QS com or not, this simple method of com as his opening message is a brilliant political step." She paused to glance briefly at Toledo to check his reaction, then continued. "The content of the message is clear. The detail that is lacking is subject only to speculation. At the high end of probability I speculate that the 'great threat' of which he speaks is most probably not the alien entity represented by the creature called Tay. I assume his reference to the threat and to the multiplicity of civilizations in the galaxy reflects information from, um, Tay. On a different issue, unless the SearchShip is in direct danger, Bobby has no legal authority to commit it to battle. In fact it is a direct violation of his charter." She bowed her head briefly to indicate it was the end of her report.

"Alpha?" said E VI softly.

The TechFet waved his hand in a small circle and a holoprojection appeared at his side.

"Top priority is the threat to the Empire. Most important missing fact, a time frame." The terms "Threat = 100" then "When? = 100" appeared as he made each point. "As you see I rank these points at maximum and equally."

"That the ship has found Other Intelligence (up popped 'O.I. = 91') is beaten by the news that they created their own planet ('Super Tech = 96')."

"Here is the rest." The list rolled out with importance ratings.

Other Intelligence coms with humans = 74

Many galactic civilizations (as previously surmised) = 60

Many of them more advanced than the Empire = 83

Uncertainty of security in QS com = 30

Committing to battle (incomplete) = ?"

"As to whether the choice of a microburst text message, low probability that there is any political motivation, based on PsychFet ethics."

N'Gai Toledo grunted at that, then said, "Sire, I suggest we hold the existence of this com within this circle, tell no one until we have heard again from Bobby. I also suggest we respond immediately, using the same text technique and demand clarification of the threat and on the time frame of the threat, Bobby's degree of certainty that there is actually such a threat, etc., etc. We should be even more succinct in our message than he was in his."

"Agreed. Proceed," said E VI. Then almost warmly, "Thank you Alpha. Thank you, Brin. Resume security." The two retainers disappeared and the luxurious decor of the Sanctum Sanctorum reappeared.

Departures: Richard Feynman set to work at a furious pace. "Every person among the APs was extraordinary in some way in their original incarnation," said Feynman in conference with Tay and Bobby, all APs attending. "We must find ways to use the genius of each."

"We must devise strategies, and those must be based on knowledge. That knowledge must consist of all existing information on Satan. The documentation of its attack upon the ZEM is very valuable, and there may be many more similar bodies of data. We must learn how it was obtained and set out to obtain more like it. We must understand what is known not only about military intelligence, but psychological and physiological intelligence on the beings that make up Satan."

Tay raised an eyebrow and spoke softly, "There is a wealth of intelligence among one group of our fellow travelers on Nexus. It is a matter of convincing them to disclose it."

Feynman looked thoughtful at that, then continued, "We must learn of any effective resistance that has ever been mounted against Satan, any setbacks it has suffered, any defeats – even if only temporary – and learn every lesson in those.

"We must harden our information infrastructure against that focused wave of pernicious particles the Satan ships emit when they instantly decelerate.

"We must develop an inventory of weapons developed by civilizations around the galaxy, especially those of a unique nature for which Satan might not have developed defenses.

"While developing our strategies, we must devise ways to recruit allies and to create a manufacturing infrastructure to support our efforts."

"Other than that," said Bobby, "there's hardly anything to do at all." For once, Feynman did not seem to appreciate Bobby's humor, frowning at him at having to pause in his presentation.

"Actually, Richard," said Bobby, "it is of the greatest necessity that we do not overload our capacities as human beings. The finest antidote to overload is humor. My attempt was lame. That's by way of apologizing for interrupting you."

Tay spoke again, showing a fine understanding of human psychology, "Dr. Feynman's outline of immediate actions is excellent. PsychFet Bobby's admonition is appropriate. All is well in this process."

Tay continued, "Since much that you have outlined is parallel to what we the Heglin considered before we adopted our option to run, there are in our population many scholars on almost every point you raise. We are at this moment forming committees to address each point. We suggest that you do likewise so that our respective groups may cooperate. Our differences will create new interpretations of the information. And I suggest Bobby try, ah, communing with our shipmates with the intelligence data."

Tay seemed to take a deep breath – more "humanizing" – then said, "This planet will begin its journey out of the galaxy within less than one of your standard days. Certain tasks must obviously be accomplished prior to our departure."

Bobby said, "When you place the SearchShip outside of Nexus we will immediately start to replace the dark energy orifice web with one of your new design. For it and for all of your gifts, Tay, I am deeply grateful."

Sacrifice: Five hours and thirty-seven minutes before the departure of Nexus, the SearchShip was once again in open space, not in orbit, but held stationary one million kilometers above the surface by forces from within the water planet. It was located exactly opposite the central black hole of the galaxy. The new dark energy orifice web stretched around it with the same fifty kilometer radius as before, but with a chaotic design showing symmetry only in the perfectly round outer perimeter. Bobby was running tests proving to himself that it was 8.6 times more efficient at tapping dark energy than his original spider web-like design, precisely as Tay told him it would be.

There also were unseen improvements in every aspect of the ship's hardware, including mysterious – literally – changes in the quantum modules. To Bobby it was as if he kept finding new strengths in his personal capacities and new clarity in his mental functions.

"Just a little 'tune up' as you say," said Tay. "Several tens of thousands of our skilled technicians in the fields represented by your ship have been involved. Incidentally, they are very complimentary of your technology and estimate that your ship was far more advanced than we would project from a civilization at the general level of Earth Empire. With our upgrades, your vessel now exceeds your general civilization technology by approximately a thousand years at your current rate of progress."

Bobby spoke. "A thousand years will still generate some 'magic' I assume. How much of what your technicians have done will I be able to comprehend? And will much of it be transferable to our other ships?"

"With diligence, we believe you will comprehend all of it, although what we have done in your quantum modules will require some new thinking on your part. What you can comprehend you can transfer. Deep in our ethical code we believe you must comprehend on your own anything we introduce that is beyond your tech. It is our calculation that you will do well at this and that our upgrades will be of significant aid in our endeavors against Satan," said Tay.

Feynman abruptly appeared. He seemed almost breathless, clearly bursting with something to say. "Bobby, there is an extremely important issue I must address with you and Tay immediately. Time is of the essence."

Sensitive to Richard's intensity and recalling how humor was ill received by him in this state, Bobby refrained from any comment other than, "Of course, Richard. Go."

"With the help of Tay's committees, we have swept several levels deep into the known data about Satan. We just started an hour ago examining general information about the galaxy that, while not explicitly about Satan, might be useful. We have found... a doozy," said Feynman, flashing his famous impish grin at the word. "I don't want you to think I've gone completely fanatic, friend Bobby."

"I'm relieved," said Bobby smiling back, "but what is it?"

"Got your attention, have I? Well there is a committee talking with each of the other civilizations concentrated on Nexus. There are six others, by the way, all quite unique and some radically alien to our concepts of life.

"Our committee is working with one of the other Nexus occupants. They have no name we can comprehend, so we call them 'The Gang of Nine.' They were extremely difficult to convince to even talk to us and even a little tough for the Heglin. But as best as we can judge, there are literally only nine individuals in their group. Again it's something of an informed guess, but we believe some of them are basically psychic entities, at least three or four of them, some kind of energy field complexes with little or no physicality. I'll tell you what I know of the physical types later. Tay, would you elaborate?"

Smiling even more than usual, Tay's simulacrum made a 360 degree rotation and seemed to swell slightly as it zeroed in on Bobby. "I like 'Gang of Nine' for a name. We have left this powerful group unnamed out of respect. Respect is not one of your civilization's strongest instincts.

"This gang is the remnant of a civilization that was an early victim of Satan's expansion. Their planets were all in one enormous solar system only a hundred light years or so from the home system of Satan. There were twenty significant planets around the Gang's large sun, and each planet had only two occupants, one physical and one pure energy – psychic – occupant. This arrangement had evolved over a billion years before. The physical and the psychic members functioned symbiotically, pursuing advanced thought and philosophy. Each planet competed with the other in what we think of as a rather playful way. Theirs was a truly beautiful existence in their own perception, and each individual – as you can surmise – was held in the highest esteem.

"Their psychic members sensed what Satan was becoming and doing to the civilizations nearest it. The Gang accurately forecast that there would soon be no standing up to Satan without a formidable military capacity. The Gang had none. So they hollowed out two of the smaller planetary satellites in their system and converted them into ships. Ten individuals moved into each ship, five physical and five psychic, and fled in different directions away from Satan. Their psychic communications held up for hundreds of light years until they learned that Satan successfully pursued one ship and obliterated it with such force that even the psychic matrixes were disrupted.

"The grief at such a loss almost overwhelmed the survivors. The surviving ship came into our area of the galaxy. In that ship one of the physical members had been distraught to the point of self disruption, suicide, many millennia before we met them. The other nine in the ship accepted the offer to join our escape. They have been very quiet for very long. We get hints that they are working on their long forgotten abilities to reproduce, but we sometimes think that they might be sinking into an unrecoverable state of despair.

"I am deeply surprised that they have been responsive to our requests for information, and I am particularly surprised at what has come to pass that Richard will now disclose to you."

Feynman told the story of a discovery by the Gang of Nine when it was still the Gang of Ten. He used mixed media. Bobby and the APs observed visuals including galactic mapping graphics showing the route the satellite/ship took, a crazed line of loops, accelerations and decelerations, whip-arounds near neutron stars and black holes. Feynman described the strategy of evasion being used and how various of Satan's pursuit vessels were given the slip by one maneuver or another. Eventually it was evident that they were free of the pursuers, then they resumed a great looping line away from the infected portion of the galaxy toward their eventual meeting with the Heglin.

Several thousand years into the exodus the Gang came upon a phenomenon of such a bizarre nature that there was instant consensus that they should stop their desperate flight long enough to explore it. Even traveling at three quarters lightspeed, and aware of the risks involved in any delay, here was a mystery deserving of the effort and the danger of making an exploratory diversion.

"Now," said Feynman, "it gets a bit harder to describe. The thing the Gang describes as 'the phenomenon' is essentially an invisible planet. And when I say invisible that's just what I mean. It has no signature of any sort. No magnetic or gravitational field, no indication of mass whatsoever. It reflects no light, first because it is not orbiting a star but is a free object on a path all its own through the galaxy, but it does not even reflect starlight. It is as I said, invisible. I believe the SearchShip could cruise by it with just enough clearance to not collide and never be aware of its presence. The Gang perceived it only through the senses of their psychic members, and even they only sensed it faintly. It turns out to be a rather large planet with about the mass of a good sized gas giant, say near Saturn's mass, but it is rocky with a very large, very active molten metal core."

Bobby whistled. Albert Einstein made a skeptical whuffing sound and spoke with his heavy German accent, "I found all of this unlikely in the extreme. To have such mass and such a core and make no detectable impression on the space-time continuum is even more unlikely than the existence of Nexus." There was something that sounded like someone puffing on a tobacco pipe.

"If I may, Richard," said Tay. "To make a long story short, the occupants of this invisible planet are another very old race of beings. Their technological specialty is in the manipulation of the very space-time continuum of which Albert speaks. No other civilization in our database has their capabilities. However, the formative aspect of these beings is their extreme anxiety. They are inherently fearful. Their fear is generalized and all consuming. It drives their every action. It is so dominant in their makeup that they can fairly be described as monomaniacally paranoid. Luckily for them, they are also extraordinarily intelligent. Their technology was motivated by the desire to hide, and their talent made it possible for them to make their planet invisible.

"We have learned from the Gang of Nine this much and little more about the invisible planet. What we have learned is that the Gang managed to overcome the fear of these beings to the point where they would communicate. This was apparently an exercise in reassurance that lasted several of your months. The terror was almost debilitating to the creatures on the planet as they realized they had been discovered and that there was a ship hovering outside of their cloaking fields. Now, after their fears have been quieted about us, they have been following us as we cross the galaxy. At least that's what the psychics in the Gang believe.

"In any event, the Gang of Nine believes that what they discovered about this planet justifies another visit. They suspect that the technology used in rendering it invisible could be of significant use against Satan.

"Since only the Gang's psychic members can find or communicate with this civilization, one of them has offered to join your crew and guide you to this planet."

Feynman jumped in hastily. "Bobby, you have no idea what a sacrifice it is for this individual and to the rest of the Gang for them to further dilute their population. It documents how important they believe it is to revisit this planet." He sounded almost breathless again. "We all believe that even then this could have never happened except that this psychic was pair-bonded with the physical member that committed suicide."

"Richard," answered Bobby. "I think I do understand. And I hear in your voice that you are in full advocacy mode. And when I hear Tay say that no other civilization, clearly including the Heglin, matches their technology in space-time manipulation, one must conclude that Satan also does not have these abilities. I am deeply impressed. What do you recommend I do next?"

Chapter 11: ROBERT LONGLINE, ALLIES

Hester Negreponte and Robert Longline began investing time in becoming acquainted. She was vitally interested in the dream preparation she had received prior to the meeting.

"I know there are important things for us to discuss, but indulge me in one matter," she said. "For several centuries I have had mind techs working on the challenge of implanted explicit content in the dreams of individuals outside of The Game and without physical contact. They have consistently failed. Clearly you have not. Can you give me a hint of how you accomplished this?"

Longline did not hesitate in answering. "It is alien technology. We are allied with a race with advanced psychic capacities."

There was a pause as Princess Negreponte pondered this. She said, "So you are representing SearchShip Bobby."

"Yes," he smiled, "We are the only ones in contact with aliens to our knowledge."

"And The Corsairs are the only well organized group on Earth with a, shall I say, subversive agenda," she replied, also with a smile. "We have strong indications that there is a similar organization on Earth XIV, but no com has been possible."

"I can confirm that that is true," said Robert. He saw a brief flash of amazement flicker across her face.

"And another guy like me, actually another 'Robert Longline' is establishing com with their leaders as we speak," he said. "We are searching for smaller, less well organized groups as well. As you probably are concluding, we are seeking a core operating group across the Empire to advance a vital agenda. The only people who will see what we are doing as subversive are those with a deep commitment to maintaining the status quo at all costs. Truth is, the status quo is going to disappear shortly, no matter what. Our objective is to shape the changes in a direction that will allow the Empire – and the human race, actually – to survive. How's that for a grandiose opener?"

She held him in a steady gaze, but said nothing, clearly waiting for him to go on.

He did. "I would like for you and a small group of your leadership to witness a full sensory report on the activities of a virulent life form in this galaxy that is a direct and deadly threat to the empire and to all sentient life," said Robert. "It sort of sets the stage for what I am here to discuss with you."

Hester Negreponte looked away. "Oh dear. I can tell this is going to be bad. We – I especially – have been nurturing our dissatisfaction with the mouldering of humanity and working our tails off trying to snap humans out of their dulled-out, brain rotting ways. Now you appear from outer space with just what we need, and I'm terrified of it before I even know what it is." For a moment she looked older.

Chapter 12: NEW PARTNERSHIPS

Meet The New Boarder: "One hour and counting," came the voice of Neil Armstrong, then with a modest laugh, "Long time no speak."

"Neil, I apologize for not getting better acquainted with you," said Bobby.

"You are one busy superman, Bobby. I bet we do more talking now though. I'm on the space warfare tech committee, and boy are we learning a lot of new stuff from our daddy longlegs friends. Fifty nine minutes 'til Nexus blast off."

Bobby ran a check on the engineering for the "new crew member" modification and addition to the SearchShip. It would not be finished prior to Nexus' departure, but certain deadlines had to be met. He scanned the mirror-finish, hundred meter sphere three kilometers aft of his ship. All seemed to be on schedule in the preparation of the psychic Gang member's "cabin." The stasis web field that would hold the SearchShip and the sphere together would take several more hours to finish. A cadre of 20th century sci-fi fans among the APs had insisted on calling it the "tractor beam."

Tay's voice rumbled, "Bobby, I know your need for names for beings you communicate with. Perhaps we should counsel on what you will call your new crew member."

"I haven't a clue what to call this psychic creature," said Bobby to Tay, "But you're right, we humans need names. Do you have a recommendation?"

"Yes. In our conversations with the Gang of Nine, we have become aware of the extraordinary perception powers of the psychics. I think there is an appropriate term in your language. How about 'All Seeing Eye?'"

Bobby knew instantly what the name would be. "Since we have no idea of what offends or flatters these creatures, I make this suggestion cautiously – your call, Tay. But "All Seeing Eye" is awkward. However, much as we shortened your name to Tay from The Heglin Empire, or T.H.E. and pronounce it "Tay," I suggest we use A.S.E. and pronounce it "Ace." It's short, and Ace has several positive connotations for us, one being a master aerial combat pilot in the last two centuries before the Apocalypse."

Tay's simulacrum smiled more broadly and said, "I think that will do. It's time you met Ace. It is transferring its matrix into the sphere at this moment. It should be constituted shortly. Organic brain emanations are extremely bright to it. Long ago the Gang learned to detune its sensitivity to the other beings on Nexus. Now, however even with the shielding of the sphere your brain is blindingly bright, it would be considerate of you to practice your meditative skills once more to keep your voice down for Ace. After it has had some time, it will tune the sphere to provide more effective shielding."

"Now?" asked Bobby.

"Yes, if you please."

Even with his mental processes running at close to maximum rates, time had seemed very short to Bobby for the multiplicity of tasks underway prior to the departure of Nexus. He left his computer augments and APs handling most of these and partially isolated his organic brain, quickly quieting his thoughts and feeling the soothing sensations he valued more with each experience. Soon he was settled. He directed non-verbal test thoughts gently at Tay, and received confirming replies. It was much as the glyph-com he had learned with the augmented whales, porpoises and dolphins in his CetaceanFet training.

Gentle caressing sensations touched the outer fringes of Bobby's awareness. He focused his mind on the silence in its center, not trying to understand the sensations or interpret the meanings in them. An approval glyph from Tay drifted through. Gradually certain shadings and colorations were added to the sensations with implications and hints of meanings. It was a considerable act of self discipline for Bobby to stay passive, but it seemed the right thing to do.

A voice, clear and bell-like, ringing softly in a range Bobby apprehended clearly as feminine. "Talk?" she said. Bobby glyphed "affirmative," then "smiling."

Apparently that translated into Psychic because the returning glyph was "pleasantly surprised."

"Introduce myself?" glyphed the Psychic

"Affirmative. My preparation?" from Bobby.

The bell like voice returned with words. "You are prepared. Your assistants (glyph: quantum modules) will hold the overflow. The (glyph: mind, personae, organic brain) I am touching will be (glyph: funnel, conduit, portal) into (glyph: quantum modules), then into your (glyph: machine, spin memory). Shall I proceed?"

At the end of this, Bobby compulsively glyphed "gender?"

He sensed her smile, then listened to the chiming voice. "We are without gender. I have adopted human female for this task. So I am female. Please return to deep null."

Bobby reeled in his mind, the curiosity, the stirrings of excitement and speculation that had started to bloom. He exhaled metaphorically and swirled back into the silent vortex of his deepest meditative state.

She came at him and through him in an implausible torrent. A life of millions of years, full of changes and observations and experiences and learning. There was love and intertwined involvement with a mate and profound shock and grief at its loss, those specific experiences and emotions standing out above the general flow of her life memories.

Then it was over. Bobby cautiously pulled up from his meditative state. "You know," he ventured his first words. "We had decided to call you Ace. Do you have an identifier or name that you prefer?"

"So loud," she complained, pain sounding in her bell voice. "But I needed that. I now see how to tune the shielding. Please no talking for a short while. I will break the circuit until I accomplish this." With an audible click she was gone.

Bobby gradually reconnected to his augments, noting that the engineering work to finish the tractor beam to the sphere had picked up pace.

"Your computers understand the stasis web more fully," said Tay, "since the download from Ace."

"Fifty–two minutes and counting," said Armstrong.

Then Feynman: "Progress report. With the transfer of Ace, all proximity transfers are completed. The quantum statistical link is fully populated. The software centrums of all APs staying with the ship are installed.

"I think in the last few minutes before we bid one another farewell, I will drop a note to our deserving Emperor," said Bobby to no one in particular.

"Good idea," said Tay. "In our rush to take care of details before our departure we have paid little mind to the most important task of recruiting your Earth Empire into our struggle against Satan. And to improve your leverage at this task, I suggest you take a moment to explore what is in your memories about Ace. She has vast experience in many things interpersonal. Remember, the Gang overcame the all-consuming fears of the occupants of the invisible planet, perhaps the most impressive act of persuasion I have ever witnessed."

Without hesitation, Bobby thought about Ace, much as he would think about a principle of physics or a long ignored friend, and in this manner of his tapping his vast memory banks, he had before him the endless tapestry of the creature they now called Ace.

He first thought was that she was like all of the APs combined, a personality so dense and rich as to be engulfing. The thought flickered in his mind that he – and all humans – must appear to be tiny precursors of personalities, infinitesimal minds compared to Ace's peers. Then he opened his receptors to all he knew of her in search of information about how to deal with not only the Emperor, but with the whole population of the Empire of Earth. Just "knowing" Ace as Bobby did from her transferred profile gave him a certainty that she could consult him on many, many subjects.

"Tay, when will she reconnect?" Bobby asked.

"When she has the sphere tuned to make communication with you bearable. Not before. It is impossible to know how long that will be."

"Then I must proceed without her direct counsel."

Bobby composed the next message to the Emperor, ran it past Tay and dispatched it in a microsecond burst of com from the otherwise silent quantum communicators.

This Just In: On Earth a single day had passed since Bobby's silence had been broken by the first text message. Emperor VI had proceeded with his usual duties, endless meetings – many simultaneously, all virtual – with government officials, ambassadors from various interest groups and other planets within the Empire, Fet specialists, jurists and a sprinkling of common citizens, up from the Dream Game, representing one organization or another making special pleas. Most of E VI's contacts with representatives of the vast hordes of common citizens was handled personally by one of his thousands of avatars, and the populace knew it, but they also knew that some random few of these audiences were with the Emperor himself. There was no way to know, so vivid were the avatars, consequently most people who "met" the Emperor convinced themselves that it had been the real man. In any event, their pleas and suggestions and overtures were thoroughly scanned by the thinking machines of the Bureaucracy. Vox populi was attended scrupulously in the Empire.

With all of this busyness, E VI still took several breaks for short discussions with N'Gai Toledo to work on their message to SearchShip Bobby in the event that no further message was forthcoming from the ship. The plan was to release the message to the Cabinet, the Senate and the Judiciary simultaneously with transmitting it to Bobby. Therefore the structure and content of the message must be as carefully planned for its political impact as its effect on Bobby's behavior. It was almost ready.

Emperor VI was in cordial negotiations with ambassadors from the League of Nutrition Synthesizers when N'Gai Toledo tripped the "urgent" key in his vision field and immediately started talking in E VI's inner ear receptor.

The Emperor smoothly transitioned the negotiations to an Avatar and slipped away into a security field. "Dammit, N'Gai, don't just start talking. It takes a minute to get out of these boring meetings. Start over."

N'Gai sighed and began again. "I said a new message has come in from Bobby. That shithead has suspicious timing. Our message to him was ready for your final approval now this. It's another text-only thing, but the content is amazing. It changes everything. Again."

E VI felt a slight dizziness. He had noticed that anything concerning Bobby and his accursed SearchShip seemed to trigger a stress response that so far he had been unable to suppress and was unwilling to discuss with a MedFet. He sighed. "Okay. Sanctum Sanctorum." The two men were immediately together in the high security virtuality.

"Read," commanded E VI.

N'Gai obeyed and read: "My Emperor. The water planet Nexus is about to depart our galaxy. Aboard Nexus is the vast majority of the APs. I have taken aboard the SearchShip a new crew member who is from yet another civilization. This creature is non-physical, rather consists of a matrix of energy fields that I do not yet fully understand, and it is several million years old. She is a powerful psychic entity who will lead us to a planet that is completely invisible to any form of detection other than psychic. We believe there is a high probability that there will be technology at that planet for weaponry useful in our battle against Satan. We will soon depart on what is to be a twenty-six year journey to see if this is so."

"Hold it!" bellowed E VI. "What in all hells is he talking about? How can any of this be? How can a planet leave the galaxy? What is this psychic shit? How does he think he is authorized to commit the damnable SearchShip to a quarter of a century to go check out some lamebrain speculation?" E VI was at full yell before he finished.

N'Gai looked at him impassively for several seconds, read ahead in the message for several paragraphs, cleared his throat and continued reading.

"There is now a Quantum Statistical Network Node aboard Nexus, entangled with my nodes only. We can, therefore, continue full com with The APs, the Heglin, and hopefully with the other civilizations who are fleeing the perils of Satan aboard Nexus. The combined information and creativity on the spaceship planet will give us many new strengths.

"We have satisfied ourselves that the QS Com system is secure enough to open wide band com from this ship to the Empire. The first message will be documentation of how Satan functions in its conquest of the galaxy. I will tune the QS com to only your imperial node. Widespread witnessing of this information could lead to Empire-wide panic.

"As I said before, I respectfully request that only you and your closest advisors see this at first. I will transmit it at your command. After you have analyzed it, I request a private audience with Your Majesty.

"Your faithful servant, Bobby," finished N'Gai.

E VI sat down slowly on the central throne in the Sanctum Sanctorum. It adjusted instantly to his tensed muscles and started a gentle massaging motion to relax the man. E VI made an impatient chopping motion with his left hand and the chair became still. N'Gai Toledo stood silently, the message paper held tensely between his fingers. "May I speak?" he asked.

E VI raised his eyes slowly to look at Toledo, then spoke in a poisonously low voice. "Are you going to point out that this PsychFet abomination with the stupid name is controlling events? Are you going to going to note that I have lost the initiative and all I can do is respond cautiously? Do you have anything to say that I should give a gold plated shit about?"

Toledo knew from painful experience that this mood in his Emperor was dangerous. And N'Gai had not retained his position as the First Advisor by unrestrained audaciousness, so he simply bowed his head toward E VI and remained silent.

"Go ahead," mumbled the Emperor.

"I was simply going to suggest that we tell Bobby to immediately send whatever this 'documentation' is in hopes that we get a clearer picture of what he's talking about."

The Emperor looked down – at his own knees it seemed – and nodded his head.

Ambition: Emperor VI never allowed himself to participate in the Dream Game. He had a single dream that he revisited every time he felt he could abandon his all consuming duties for an hour or two. In those daydreams he came ever closer to finding a way to control, or at least to influence, the dreams of his subjects.

It was apparently an impossible ambition, even for an Emperor. The pioneers of dream research had invented and executed near-perfect safeguards against external control attacks on the multi-dreamer universes. These blocks had been expressed in artificial viruses that permanently modified the human genome in such a way that any attempt to reverse the modifications would result in massive disruptions to the DNA and then death. These pioneers spread their viruses Empire wide before the Bureaucracy was aware of their existence. In many ways the virus was the greatest single defense of individual rights ever devised.

The Nightmare Again: E VI and N'Gai Toledo were not terribly surprised when Bobby responded almost immediately this time. The break-in code made its eccentric click.

"Your Majesty," said TechFet Alpha, "there is... an unusual... com from SearchShip Bobby."

"Enter," said E VI. "Brin Barnie, attend. Other attendees: Ednorton Bespoke, PsychFet Horatio, Chief Justice Goodman, Senator Frederica Allworth." All of those summoned were on Earth and quickly concluded or interrupted their tasks of the moment and popped into virtual presence in the Sanctum Sanctorum. Within two minutes all were present.

"Greetings," said E VI, standing from his throne. "We have a task of witnessing a message from SearchShip Bobby. First I must ask N'Gai Toledo to give you a briefing on what has transpired in two recent messages from the ship." With that he sat down and again had to hand chop the single-minded throne into stillness.

N'Gai Toledo briefly summarized things. There had been the period of silence from the SearchShip, he noted. Then he read the two text messages from Bobby without comment.

The Emperor gruffly repeated Bobby's request that a "select few" see the current message. "That's the reason this group is being called together. You are the select few."

"No one," Toledo said, "Has seen any of this message. We will all see it together now. All we know is that TechFet Alpha said it was unusual because it is a huge file. I think he said 'immense,' so I hope it won't take too much time to see."

It was immense because it was the exact multi-sensory document that Tay had shown Bobby and the APs about the destruction of the ZEM planet by the warships of Satan. Unknown to the select few, the medium carrying the presentation tapped into their dream channels and would create perceptive hyper-realism and convey subtle cues of credibility.

Tay voiced the explanatory introduction and the commentary throughout.

Much as the presentation had stopped when Madonna demanded a pause, it stopped again, this time when Ednorton Bespoke gasped, fell to his knees and disappeared. The viewers, already stunned by the presentation, were silent while Bespoke's physical body back in his ornate ceremonial office was attended by MedFets and placed into a support unit. In a few moments his virtual presence returned to the Throne Room and he reassured the Emperor he was ready to go on. The presentation continued to the end without further interruption.

The final comment from Tay was exactly what Bobby and the APs had heard: "If it weren't important for you to understand things, we wouldn't bludgeon you with all this."

Thus Informed... : The reality of the Sanctum Sanctorum abruptly returned. E VI's face was locked into rigid neutrality, an old and well-trained reflex to hide any strong emotions in the presence of others. All the others looked shocked, dumbfounded, stunned. Bespoke was looking at an interface device reporting in detail the condition of his body back in the support unit.

N'Gai Toledo spoke first. "Well, at least we now have a better idea of what Bobby meant by, 'a great danger to the Empire' in his first text message. Your Majesty, do you intend to grant Bobby a private audience immediately, or shall we discuss any objectives we might have first?"

E VI did not speak. He simply stared ahead, unmoving, and the group adopted his silence for almost a minute.

Brin Barnie bowed for attention then spoke, her voice preternaturally controlled. "I must note that a superior technology, perhaps not even that far ahead of us, could produce a presentation this powerful and this convincing in a VR studio. Many of the points of view we witnessed beg the question of how it was actually done. It seems to have been accomplished with cameras right under the nose of the attacking forces without their notice. I suggest that we demand proof that this is a recording of a real event."

Internally, N'Gai Toledo beamed. His choice of Barnie as his Number Two was again confirmed by her quick and cutting insight. He spoke. "Exactly. And there may be other vital questions to put to Bobby in this first wideband conversation, Your Majesty."

Including how apparently we all had a direct incursion into our dream centers – supposedly impossible, thought Toledo, the only one present who had correctly noted the phenomenon.

"Agreed," said E VI. "Suggestions from the rest of you?" He blinked and moved for the first time since the conclusion of the presentation, looking at his Privy Council members, interested in their various states of recovery.

Senator Frederica Allworth placed her hand over her mouth and closed her eyes for a moment. E VI noted that her several centuries were showing in her hands even though she looked only a vital middle age otherwise. She removed her hand and spoke. "This horror show is just an attention-getting device. Okay, Bobby has my attention. We still know basically nothing. Now I want facts, lots of them. The list is obvious, so surely Bobby has acquired many of the answers to the obvious questions. Is this threat real? Is it imminent? What the bloody hell can we do to protect ourselves?"

It looked like she was going to continue, but she stopped herself by placing her hand over her mouth again.

E VI said, "Ednorton?"

"Bobby's right about not disseminating this widely as it is. Half the old farts like me will have coronaries."

"Chief Justice?"

"All questions, your Majesty, except one thought that hit me about halfway through that abomination," answered Judge Goodman. "To fight this thing, we will have to totally change our happy little Empire into nothing but a non-stop war machine. And even then..." He stopped talking and a look that might have been despair flashed across his features.

"It looks like I talk to Bobby without a lot of help from you," said E VI dryly. "Try doing a little thinking and get me your ideas through N'Gai. Resume security." The guest attendees vanished.

N'Gai said, "I leave you with one thought. We know that Bobby could penetrate our security at the time of the Assembly. I assume you have kept your tech group working on that little problem. I would ask Bobby flat out if he still can get into your systems."

"Goodbye, N'Gai. I will call for you after talking to our compromised asset."

Goodbye Galaxy: Richard Feynman sat across from Bobby in their long-time favorite conference chamber, Feynman dressed in CE 1960's business casual, pleated tan slacks with wide legs and a thin leather belt, a long sleeved white sports shirt of soft cotton with outsized collar points, and glossy leather loafers. Bobby wore a silk suit of a rich amber hue, belted at the jacket. He was shoeless but had thick stockings woven of the wool from the hybrid woolly shoats of Earth IV.

"In a way, I suppose, this is goodbye," said Feynman. "We will soon be at a great distance from one another for the first time since my second life began, or my third when you gave me the gift of consciousness. Although, of course, I realize the basic absurdity in that – at least as long as we can keep the Quantum Stat Com up and running, and I see no problem there, barring catastrophe."

"We shall have our conversations as always, Richard, though the knowledge of your growing remoteness will still sadden me," said Bobby, smiling but with a certain melancholy tingeing his expression.

"I know this is a – well, silly suggestion," said Feynman, "But I have become acquainted with the propulsion technique to be used for Nexus's trip, and it will be a one-of-a-kind visual experience to see it depart. So I thought you might like to witness it with your own eyes from outside the ship.

Bobby's body, eyes and all, had not been on the outside of the SearchShip since its departure from Mars orbit. His array of sensors was superior to any mammalian eyes, but the idea immediately intrigued him.

"Decision made," he said. He shook Feynman's hand warmly, then immediately made the operations transfers to his computers and made his body in the Fet rack his conscious center. A simultaneous request went to Cleopatra, whose body became her center as it was aroused from its containment shell. As Bobby disengaged himself from the rack, Cleo walked into the central chamber, wearing a simple silver jump suit and palace slippers of purple satin.

"I will tell Richard that this was a great idea, kind sir," she said. Bobby moved across the chamber to an inconspicuous panel, Cleo following closely. The panel slid aside and the two of them squeezed into a small cubicle. The panel closed and the elevator slid silently up its trackfield for the hundreds of meters to the outer skin of the ship, the panel opening into a bare lock.

"How pleasant it is to stand close to you," said Bobby, amazed at the degree to which his body had responded to their brief touching. Cleo smiled at him with estrogen warmth. He breathed in her scent, a luxurious, animal musk, subtle but powerful. When in the Fet rack, Bobby's olfactory bulbs were used to monitor external sensors on the SearchShip. When he used them for their natural purpose, and Cleopatra was the subject, the effect was powerful.

"The departure is upon us, so restrain your lusty urges, my Captain," she murmured.

Bobby activated and triple checked the external protection field, then the technol door slid aside, exposing the raw beauty of space. They floated out into the center of the field and saw the stunning sight of Nexus, a perfect sphere of aquamarines and blues, covering half of the sky, immense, peaceful and majestic. The huge water planet was illuminated from within. Cleo slipped her small hand into Bobby's. For a moment neither could speak.

"There," said Bobby. Like a halo from behind a planet eclipsing a sun, a faint shimmer outlined Nexus, pulsing softly from gold to platinum through emerald to ruby and back to gold. Concentric diminishing rings began to form, each the diameter of Nexus, reaching one-by-one out into the starless void lighted only with the distant smudges of other galaxies, straight up from the plane of the Milky Way. Soon there was a tube of light, one planet-sized ring after another, stretching to infinity. Nexus moved into it, at what was clearly enormous acceleration, slipping from one ring to another with breathtaking increase in speed. As it passed through each ring, that ring flashed with violets and chartreuses and scarlets, so bright as to startle the eye, then disappeared entirely. Within a minute, Nexus was a small blue marble, shooting through a flashing, self-immolating tube toward inconceivable distances. With each ring's destruction Bobby and Cleo felt the fluttering caress of a gravity wave.

"The power," whispered Bobby.

Then Nexus was beyond vision, only a tiny sparkle marking its trail, then nothing.

Bobby and Cleopatra made gentle love, tempered and amplified by the shared experience of witnessing a wonder.

As they concluded, softly caressing each other down from the crescendo of their coupling, Ace became present to them, emanating an alien yet comprehensible variant of love, a warmth, understanding – even an admiration, that was completely disarming even in the context of an intrusion into what had been an ultimately private moment between Bobby and Cleopatra.

Hello, Soul Mates: Ace spoke. "This one has completed tuning the sphere to allow painless communication. As I entered this place I sensed a pairing between you that harkens to the pairings I have known and miss so powerfully. As serendipity is the most glorious of gifts from All Fates, I take this opportunity to suggest that we – you Bobby, you Cleopatra, and I Ace – accept the gift and proceed with our tasks, all of us greatly strengthened. I will retreat to the sphere and leave you with this information to consider." With that, Ace ceased to be present. As she departed, both humans felt a very large data surge into their centrums.

Cleo and Bobby held one another at arms length, floating in the zero-g of the spartan airlock, looking deeply into each others' eyes as they absorbed and contemplated the knowledge Ace had implanted in them. It was as if they flew through a vivid dream together, synchronized in their witnessing, confirming to one another with their eyes that they shared the imparted reality.

Even though Cleopatra had not "met" Ace before, she knew with full certainty that she was seeing the dream through her. The psychic nature of the creature – though more strange and more vast than was conceivable to her – fit Cleo in ways she did not even try to define. She simply knew that she and Ace were alike in myriad ways. They were each confident in their powers, secure in their selves, loving and passionate at their centers, open and inviting to experience... the same in so many ways. There was a new and quite mysterious reality: Cleo felt a powerful, sisterly love for Ace, and knew that Ace loved her.

Another "new" in the experience was the introduction to Ace's mate, dead in the sense of death known to all living creatures, yet present in rich detail, almost the detail of life itself, but with it came the knowledge that this was merely a memory cache version of the creature, a data base of boggling size holding millennia of records that comprised the creature's life and personality.

I must understand this better, thought Bobby.

Bobby was seeing the dream through the ghost of the other being, the mate, equally vast as Ace, but diametrically different in all significant ways. Similar to Cleo's experience, Bobby felt a deep empathetic bond with him – male in ways unrelated to gender. Powerful yet humbled by his own powers. Sensitive almost to the degree of vulnerability. Capable in degrees he was still discovering. From this physically immense being, Bobby felt a flow of overwhelming sadness and a remorse almost beyond the limits of human conception. Yet parallel to this there was a hope and optimism that Bobby knew was just aborning, and it was wreathed in a camaraderic surge toward Bobby, a vast arm around his shoulders and a laugh with cosmic echoes.

Cleopatra spoke to Bobby. In the dream they were each fully engaged with the aliens, and it was both Cleo and Ace speaking. Listening were the intertwined beings of Bobby and the Mate. Cleo said, "Ace has been troubled about how exactly to be with us. Should she be the invisible phantom from the sphere, delivering pronouncements of information and guidance?" Cleo's voice changed subtly, and Bobby knew Ace was speaking directly through Cleo's beautiful mouth.

"It does not seem to be the human way. It is not our way either. We are creatures of relationships. My existence since the physical dissolution of my mate – please, for you let's name him "Mate" – has been one of communing with the detailed memory of him that I hold in my matrix. It is all that has kept me intact, even though his memory is static and does not grow and evolve as he did in life. I see now a hope to have Mate back in a way and save me from my decision to join him in dissolution once our mission is accomplished."

There was a powerful swirl in the psychic fields around Bobby and Cleo that was half sob and half joyful laughter, and they both knew it was from Ace.

"As I said, serendipity is the most glorious of gifts, and here I recognize a genuine possibility to reanimate Mate, and at the same time improve our odds of success against Satan. But please understand that I know all this is entirely your option. I would not and actually cannot influence you to act other than as you see fit. I only ask that you consider this." With that, Ace once again retreated to her sphere

Bobby realized that Mate was also gone. He also realized that he did not fully understand what Ace was proposing and felt the odd sensation that he was suppressing his own comprehension. Truly odd.

He spoke, still looking only into Cleo's eyes. He could see in them a pleading that he knew was purely Cleo, not even a remnant shading of Ace.

"You understand what she wants us to do?" Bobby asked. "I know as I know we are touching each other that you do, but I do not fully understand. Will you be patient with me while I grow to understand?" They pulled themselves together in a tight embrace.

"You know I will, my love," she said. "I also don't – how could we tiny creatures? – fully understand. I just know that Ace and I are sisters like I have never known a sister."

"I must get back to the Fet rack. With everything connected, I have a better chance to understand," said Bobby. "Also, I'd like to consult Tay and Richard."

Back in the rack, Bobby gradually brought himself on line. As always, the reconnect was a revelation, the vastness of PscyhFet reality. He instinctively checked the status of the ship and the advances of all of the projects in progress. He noted that there was a new message from Emperor VI. Richard Feynman waited patiently for his attention. Bobby sensed Tay as well.

"Long time off line," said Feynman politely. "Was it a worthwhile suggestion?"

"Absolutely, my friend. I expect to never see anything quite as impressive. How far are you out now?"

"Almost a light hour."

"You have only been gone an hour."

"I know," said Feynman, a grin in his voice.

Bobby digested that, but made no further comment, shuttling the disclosure into his analytic modules. Then he said, "I have need of your counsel Richard, and Tay's." At that the three of them and Cleopatra were in the meeting room. Tay hovered over a silver ottoman. Feynman was wearing a buff bush jacket over tan denim slacks, tie tied, and sat comfortably in his favorite overstuffed chair. Cleo was uncharacteristically dressed in a deep purple – almost black - 20th Century silk business suit, her hair in a prim bun. She stood at Bobby's side, holding his arm lightly. Bobby wore a deep red velvet smoking jacket and harem pants, standing by a tall lamp of art nouveau design. The air was redolent of a subtle Asian incense. A scene, thought Feynman.

Bobby played back his conversation with Ace. "We experienced many layers of comprehension during this event. Cleo was linked intimately with Ace, and while I seemed to be intertwined with Mate, it was not entirely clear to me what Ace was proposing. Cleo?"

Cleopatra had been deep in accelerated thought since the merging with Ace. She had ramped up her com rate with the quantum modules, "opened her front side bus" as Ada Byron had once said in the giddy days after Bobby had given her full consciousness. Cleo was quite ready for this question. When she spoke, it was with the clarity and eloquence of her secret and unprecedented speech before Rome's Senate.

"I have been given the great gift of sharing minds with Ace," she said, lowering her eyes. "She is a creature of almost pure emotion. It is the nature of the psychic members of the Gang. We think of our own emotions as being based in the chemistry of our corporal selves, glands and primitive brain systems. Ace has none of those. Yet she is primarily defined by what I can only call emotions. She is love, compassion and empathy, passion and vulnerability. All I sensed were what we call the positive emotions. No hate, anger, envy or vengeance."

Cleo felt a stirring from Bobby, non-verbal, surprised.

"Ace is a very efficient, very fast intelligence," she continued. "With no physical substrate, there are few limits to how fast she can process information. If we thought of her as a computing entity, she would surpass any device or net of devices we can imagine, including the quantum units. Her store of information is vast and her ability to access it is essentially instantaneous. Satan has never captured a non-physical entity like Ace. Her hyper computer capacity is not in his arsenal. And it never will be. But I tell you from my experience with her, all of that is a distant second to the primary fact that her central being is one of almost pure emotion.

"And this deeply emotional creature is sad almost beyond comprehension," Cleo continued. "She is in the most profound despair, an unrelenting depression with painful guilt, loneliness and excruciating emotional pain for which there is no human equivalent. She is exhausted almost to the point of annihilation. It is an act of amazing bravery and perseverance that she has undertaken this mission with us."

Cleopatra looked up for the first time since she started speaking. Bobby and Feynman were watching her with riveted intensity. Even Tay was completely still, and the ever-present smile on his face seemed softened somehow.

"What Ace is proposing just occurred to her. She did not come on this mission with this in mind. It's an idea born literally of desperation, and it springs from her growing understanding of what Bobby is and of seeing the relationship he and I have developed."

She paused again, then said, "Bobby, do you have it now?" She had been transferring large files from her quantum partitions into his centrum. They mirrored her experience with Ace, plus her analysis and conclusions. During this process it occurred to her, and she appended the thought to the file, this thought: "Bobby, I don't think Marc Antony would recognize the new Cleopatra."

Bobby smiled broadly and turned to Feynman and Tay. "I've got it. Gents, it's simple enough. Ace is suggesting that she integrates her mind with Cleopatra's, uses Cleo as an interface as it were, but far more than that. Cleo would be independent and the dominant character in the merger. Ace wants to become Cleo for the duration of the mission. She wants to not be herself, which will allow her to escape her despair. We would still have access to her knowledge and her wisdom, it would simply be Cleo instead of the persona of Ace. Technically, the platform on which all this would run would mean putting the Cleopatra centrum in the sphere. There isn't enough computing power in the SearchShip to support what she envisions, so it must run in Ace's matrix.

"And she wants me to be similarly merged with her huge memory set of Mate. The PsychFet matrix is big enough to hold functional chunks of that data as it is used, and we can swap out chunks as needed to get the job done. Ace assures me that I will learn how to experience Mate and share his knowledge. She thinks I will actually get to know Mate and that I will find a great friend in him. Of course she is somewhat prejudiced about this."

Feynman whistled, a long, expressive note. "Man! Think what is going on here. Talk about your alien takeover. This would make a fine science fiction movie in the 20th century, only it would be really, really scary."

"Actually it would be a love story," Cleopatra said. "Ace believes that after a while of Mate being reanimated, so to speak, in Bobby, the spark of consciousness will be reborn within the memory data, and Mate will exist again as a living creature. Perhaps later they can find a way to implant his mind into another physical form. She knows it's a long shot, but it's what is keeping her willing to live."

Tay made the humming sound he sometimes makes prior to speaking. "This proposal of Ace's is not without peril. The wild card, as you say, is that none of us, even Ace, really knows how the memory set she has stored that was Mate will function when it is written into Bobby's systems. The form of the physical members of the Gang is unlike anything humans – or Heglins for that matter – have ever dealt with."

"If I may," said Feynman, coming as close as he ever had to interrupting Tay. "That's not completely accurate, Tay. Humans as one point in their pre-apocalypse scientific excesses spent a lot of time and effort trying to create an intelligent fungus. For a weapon, of course."

Bobby made a scrabbling dig into his memory, then into his information from Ace. "Oh, for heaven's sake! I had not really grasped what we know about Mate. This is proof positive that I am living at an overly accelerated pace. I have overlooked a vital fact. Mate was – and all of the physical creatures in the Gang dualities are – a huge, intelligent fungus mat."

"I'm thinking that's a load," said the voice of John Belushi, rarely heard from since he re-joined the SearchShip. You a fungus. An actual fucking fungus among us. Something about this makes me puke." With that, his presence faded from the conference.

"He's depressed," said Feynman. "This twenty-six year commitment really got to John."

Impulsive: "I see no reason whatsoever to delay the full merger between me and Ace," said Cleopatra. "I have thought of conditions to put on the matter, and only one occurs to me, and that is that I am irrevocably granted the right to pull out of the merger at any time for any reason."

"May I join the discussion?" came the voice of Ace. Everyone nodded. Tay's smile broadened. Ace's avatar slowly materialized next to Cleopatra's formally suited exquisiteness. It was a small copy of the sphere now tethered to the SearchShip, perhaps half a meter in diameter. She spoke: "That is both a minimal and maximal condition. I would suggest that we both have that right. And since we are dealing in issues of simple trust – for there is no practical way to enforce the condition – I also guarantee not to use any methods of coercion or persuasion to prevent Cleo from unplugging."

"So be it," said Bobby. "Cleo, Ace, do the integration. We have no time to waste. This is, after all, preparation for a war of survival."

Cleopatra moved from Bobby's side and turned to face him. She assumed a classic Egyptian pose, palms together, head tilted back slightly, eyes closed. Her black business dress faded away and for a moment she was elegantly nude. Then the formal robes of the Ptolemaec royalty materialized to cover her. She opened her kohled eyes and looked into Bobby's. "It is us," she said.

Bobby was staggered by the impact of her greeting. He was engulfed in her radiance, intoxicated by her beauty, captured by her presence, illuminated in admiration of her grandeur. Empathy and orgasm intertwined explosively.

Every alarm and defense mechanism in the PsychFet architecture was keyed. The quantum modules isolated themselves. The computing hardware racks disengaged and went into full malware defense mode. Memory initiated parity checking from the nanosecond the experience began, isolating all data prior to the experience. The FET rack closed all connections from Bobby's natural brain to the rest of the ship. The impenetrable shield sphere of the doomsday DFDP snapped around him.

"Alert, Alert" said the ship to Bobby. "Major software invasion has been detected. Full defenses are in effect, but the viral presence is still pervasive in many systems in the SearchShip."

Bobby took a deep breath and reviewed the preceding few seconds. "Ship. This is a master order," he said. "One-to-one com with the core intelligence of the Artificial Personality Cleopatra. Isolate all other ship contact. Execute." Master orders delivered directly from Bobby would override any sequence or process in the SearchShip.

Cleo popped into the bunker sphere in front of him. She was wearing the formal robes and a bemused expression on her face.

"Well," she said, "That seemed to have blown some fuses. Ace has withdrawn fully until you sort it out."

"That is correct" said the ship. "All invading software has withdrawn. There are no indications of overwrite or damage to any systems."

Bobby and Cleo grinned simultaneously. "Was it good for you?" She said and stepped to the rack and leaned over his still tethered body, caressing his face gently. Cleo said, "This is going to be the grandest warship that ever existed. We just have to turn down the intensity a bit so it can function."

"Ship," said Bobby, "Master order. One-to-one com with the entity Ace."

The sphere popped into existence in the control shell. "Um," said Ace, "a misstep. I apologize."

"Not required," smiled Bobby. "It was magnificent to a simple soul such as myself. Now we just have to learn how to effect the merger without all the fireworks. Will you and Cleo please isolate yourselves and determine how to do that. And will you upload the essence of Mate that I experienced in the space lock. Please contain it in a single quantum module and isolate it from any ship contact except through an avatar. Mate and I will also work on the practicalities of our merger, hopefully without putting the ship into shock again.

Bobby willed full re-connection with the SearchShip. He was back in the meeting room. Floating glyphs indicated that both Tay and Feynman were on hold. A new avatar stood in front of Bobby.

Mate had fashioned himself as an unarmed warrior. His form was primarily human, with variants in its face, ears and hands. The face was blank, without eyes, nose or mouth, yet the shape was mostly human. Later Feynman would describe it as "early 20th century manikin." The ears were hints of parabolas. The hands had six fully opposable fingers with nails – or claws – that extended and contracted randomly and continuously. His skin was a glossy ebony and much of it was covered with glowing amber chain mail.

"I have chosen this form to symbolize my incompleteness. I am more automaton than living creature. I am a collection of saved data. Bobby, when we merged in dream time back in the space lock, I showed as much of my soul as I could muster. I believe – and Ace believes – that it was a fair representation of my personality as it once was. That is the data set now in the quantum module. I aspire to regain life – or at least consciousness, but I should be of use to you in this limited manifestation." The form bowed smoothly then returned to erect attention.

Bobby approached the warrior form and held out his hand. Mate hesitated then took it. Bobby said, "Soon we shall be one. I will think of you as a whole being, as living and conscious as I. Perhaps that will assist you in your aspiration. Only when it is necessary for reasons of practicality will we exist as two creatures as we are now. And I must say the form you have chosen for an avatar gives me confidence in you as an ally."

Faintly in the aural distance the voice of John Belushi snarled, "He looks one helluva lot better than he would being mold man..." then drifted away.

Aside from that, Bobby thought as he stepped back, this had been one of the most formal ceremonies he had ever experienced.

"Cleo. Progress?" he called. Cleopatra popped into existence immediately. She was dressed in yet different garb. This was a golden, form-fitting body suit, covered with the same amber chain mail that covered Mate.

"I think so, Bobby. I don't hear any alarms going off. This armor symbolizes the protection fields we have crafted to contain any over-the-top exuberance we may radiate." She looked from Bobby to Mate. "Are you two close to trying a merge?"

"Almost there. Richard? Tay?" Their glyphs were instantly replaced with their selves.

"We have witnessed all from afar," rumbled Tay. "This is going satisfactorily in my view. I have shared what we were seeing with the APs on Nexus. There is considerable enthusiasm and confidence that they can help Mate attain full consciousness."

Feynman puffed on his pipe, looking the formidable Mate warrior figure up and down. "Mate, I know we shall become acquainted through my great friend and brother Bobby, but it is an honor to meet you in, as you say, your automaton stage."

Mate bowed toward Feynman and said softly, "Equally honored."

Bobby nodded to Mate. "Let us begin."

New Frontier: Bobby turned to Mate, then swept his glance across Tay, Cleo/Ace and Feynman. "Cleo?" he queried.

"I believe, Bobby, that our merger is stable. We should be able to monitor this next step objectively and dispassionately," said Cleo. Bobby thought he could detect a subtle shading of change in Cleo's voice, or her verbal timing or her word choice – something beyond his ability to pin down – that reflected that she was now two minds rather than one.

"My plan," said Bobby, "is to try the merger in a contained environment, large enough to use a fair sized chunk of the Mate memory, but small enough that if I have to wipe the whole partition, the SearchShip shall still be fully functional and capable of reconstructing the missing data." He felt a smile from Cleo, but he didn't acknowledge it or let his mind parse it.

"No reason to procrastinate," he said. "Here goes." In a millisecond Bobby realized, observing the transfer from the perspective of his isolated natural brain, his attempts at creating a contained partition were a complete failure. Nothing in Earth tech was up to the task. The incoming data storm was of such magnitude and complexity that it was capable of penetrating any physical or cybernetic barrier. But it didn't. Transformations took place from the irrational-decimalic code structure in Ace's memory to the quantum trinary code at a molecular folding rate. To Bobby it seemed like colors changing in a catalytic transformation, magic and awe-inspiring. And the whole data import stayed within the partition.

Then it was finished. Mate was hovering outside Bobby's self, like a long missing good friend newly returned, awaiting an invitation to embrace.

Bobby gradually reconnected his brain to the SearchShip, with each step more fully comprehending the being that was the memory of Mate. Each creature tentatively worked on the near infinite translations required for them to exist in the same reality. One, springing from a planet-encircling fungus, the other from a self-contained mammal from a wholly different kind of planet, the two intellects were as alien in origin and bases of intelligence as either could imagine, yet they progressed toward a mutuality of mind very rapidly.

"May I interrupt a moment?" asked Cleo/Ace.

Like nothing so much as aquatic dogs stopping their play in shallow water and shaking themselves energetically, the two males focused their attention on the confederated females.

"You might give a thought to the fact that we merged successfully only minutes ago, and that we did as much translation as you're doing, and we did it with a lot less fanfare." Cleo smiled brilliantly, and something in that smile allowed Bobby and Mate to fully merge.

Bobby realized immediately that he was the dominant force in the merger. Mate, for all his immense presence was quiescent.

Cleo spoke again, but it was clearly Ace's presence talking, "Remember, Mate is not really the being himself. He has died. It is our fondest dream that in associating with you and joining you in this way, he will become receptive to the return of this life essence."

Richard Feynman coughed politely, "If I may, Bobby, this is only a few steps beyond the APs becoming conscious. It may be less theological than it seems, this 'life essence' business."

Cleo: "Thank you, Richard. Exactly. Creatures like myself, wholly psychic by your definition, have a different viewpoint on souls and such." She continued, this time Cleopatra speaking, "Already I am experiencing what I hope you can experience soon, Richard. Ace's presence is like having a soul you can see and touch and talk to, and the change is as dramatic as when we became conscious."

Everyone re-materialized in the conference room. Bobby exhibited change from the gathering before. Instead of Mate being present as the manikin-faced warrior, he was there as a faint aura around Bobby. The chains around Cleo's body were gradually fading away. There were no alarms from the SearchShip's defense mechanisms.

"Tay?" said Bobby, "Whatcha think?"

The great Buddha head spun for a moment, its low roar penetrating the room. "We are impressed, my friends. Again, as from the moment when we first met this Earther collection, you are simply one impressive surprise after another. There were many divisions, bets even, among our population as to whether you could get this far in merging with Ace and Mate. We are deeply gratified." The smile on Tay's face expanded again.

"Let's take a break," said Bobby, "then get down to some serious war planning."

Bobby turned the SearchShip to the new heading. The vast and delicate dark energy collection web swung apace until the ship was aimed at that point in the Milky Way where the Navigation Cooperative among the PAs and the Heglin calculated the "Invisible Planet" would be in twenty-six years.

"Stand by for acceleration," said Bobby to all hands. The newly designed power system engaged, and SearchShip Bobby began accelerating at rates that would be quite incredible to its designers back in the Empire of Earth. Not quite the rate of Nexus leaving the galaxy, but damn incredible.

Bon Voyage Party: "This may seem primitive to you two," said Bobby as he slid off the Fet rack and into Cleopatra's arms. "But perhaps you can participate in your way."

Slowly and generously, Bobby and Cleo danced the ancient mating dance of humans. Bobby's spirit soared as Cleo's bare breasts delicately touched his chest. The tactile dreaminess of her skin under his fingers flowed through his electrified nerves. He twined his body with hers, trying to touch every bit of him to every bit of her. When they finally joined their sexes, his mind flew into that dimensionless bliss that he had come closer to with each of their forays into lovemaking. When they came, he felt love as a tangible and tactile perfection.

They rested.

"That was lovely," finally said Cleo, Ace speaking. "Not so primitive, Bobby. And not so different in many ways from how my Mate and I communed when the spirit moved us. Perhaps we can do it again, this time letting us be the guides."

And they did. The Gang way. And it was another triumph of life. Bobby knew he would have to meditate on the experience for a while to comprehend it. And he knew he would have to be disciplined not to become addicted to it. He felt a good-natured mental bump from Mate.

Shock Treatment: Twenty-six years at almost the speed of light was still twenty-six years. The Quantum Statistical Network meant that the research and preparation for the war with Satan would go on completely independent of where SearchShip Bobby or Nexus were. The time compressions and dilations of lightspeed were negated by the QS com links. After all, Nexus was getting further away with every second, and the APs and the Heglin and the other aliens aboard the water planet would be just as productive for the cause as if they were within eyesight.

Bobby set in motion a political back story. He needed to enlarge – an understatement; to explode – the size and capacity of the Quantum Statistical Network. He must be able to have almost infinite virtual presence at any point in their growing operations at any time. Ambitious.

The clandestine work with recruiting "agents" on the planets of the Empire of Earth was continuing at a blistering pace. Every forty-eight hours Bobby spent a subjective two hours in sync through the quantum network with his Robert Longline surrogates catching up on and directing their activities, and learning their autonomous thought developments.

Feynman kidded Bobby occasionally that these young, vital men were the PsychFet's alter egos and that he lived vicarious and uncomplicated escapist adventures through them. "God knows you deserve some diversion," he said after one debriefing.

Bobby did not disagree. He commented only once, saying, "It's like being a P-38 in an ancient war and having several more P-38s in your formation." He knew Feynman would know what a P-38 was.

With five "Roberts" and Bobby in sync, there was a rich harvest of new thinking. Bobby absorbed it, integrated, edited it, and redistributed it to the Longlines. From the Earth Robert Longline came an observation that all of the others immediately agreed with. He said, "Two things: I'm finding a lot of fine military officer candidates, real leaders. And second, the people who join these groups will make great crew members if and when we finally get some fighting vessels. They are fearless."

Bobby was uploading to the Roberts a summary of his merger with Mate and Cleopatra's merger with Ace, when there was a priority interrupt. "Back in a bit," he said terminating the sync.

He was instantly in the conference room with Feynman. The great theoretician bowed slightly, at the moment wearing a scholar's gown. "Sorry to be so abrupt, Bobby, but there is a very interesting development." He waited for a token deferential moment then continued. "The crew on Nexus looking after the quantum network com has a question to which they believe they know the answer. It is, 'Did you, Bobby, just send a request for conversation?' They believe you did not, but that the query they received is a perfect replica of your signature code."

"Ah," said Bobby. "I think you know the answer too, Richard. It's not that hard to validate what's coming in on the network, and you surely know that I did not send any message."

"True," said Feynman. "However, you do have some, er, proprietary tricks with the com system. Perhaps this is a test?"

Bobby laughed. In the time since engagement with Satan, the mergers with the Gang duo and the politicking with Earth got serious, there had been much less laughter from Bobby, but this was a good laugh.

"True, and I apologize for it," said Bobby. "However, I promise I did not slip in a trick question on the network. Do you think it is a trick from somewhere?"

"No," said Feynman. "I think it is actually you, requesting to talk to... well, you. Odd as it sounds, and I'm a little uncomfortable suggesting this, I believe there is a real possibility that it is you in the future somewhere... somewhen... talking back into time to now."

"Whoa," murmured Bobby. Less than a second passed as he ran feasibility models on crosstime com without finding much.

"Consider this," said Feynman, then he uploaded a complex, graphic-intense proof.

"Damn, Richard, you are good." Then he said quietly, "Okay, let's talk to this trick and see what's up."

Feynman blinked twice as he called up the QS Network patch from Nexus. A glyph appeared between Feynman and Bobby. There was an odd crackling sound from the glyph, then Bobby's voice, subtly different but definitely authentic, "Well, a memory of this event has just popped into my head. That settles one of the questions we have been wrestling with about changing the future. But I'm dithering. I'm sure you know what I mean, Richard?"

Neither Richard nor Bobby moved or spoke for a few seconds. They were kickstarted by a low chuckle from the glyph. Bobby spoke. "Check us on this, ah, Bobby. This com is from our future. You have reached the invisible planet and the local residents have shown you how to make this connection."

"Which," interjected Feynman, "up until this happened I would have sworn was utterly impossible."

"Yep," said Future Bobby. "And me too on impossible, Richard, except that twenty-six years with Ace and Mate has stretched my sense of what's possible. By the way, almost all the credit goes to Ace and Cleo for finding the planet and negotiating our new position of trusted allies with the locals. We now call their race The PGs, for Paranoid Geniuses."

"So," mused Feynman, "you can remember this event, this conversation? Can you tell me what we will say next?" Clearly he was already past the shock of the phenomenon and into active contemplations about time paradoxes.

"Hello, Richard Feynman, this is Richard Feynman," said a new voice from the glyph. This jolted Feynman out of his ruminative state. Future Feynman continued, "Our memories are being laid down in your minds, so we are simply calling up 26 year old recollections that weren't there until they were just made."

Bobby had gradually been dialing up the mental processing speed, and noted that the future folks were doing it also at exactly the same rate. "So much to discuss," he said. "Is there a bandwidth limit on this connection? Can we do full spectrum?"

"Not quite," said future Bobby. "This is the best the PGs can do. Richard thinks with time to work on it, we can make improvements. Although we are not sure how far we want to go down that track. The time paradox issues are frighteningly unclear."

Cleopatra's voice came from the glyph, "If they weren't, there is so much we could tell you."

With the first syllable of future Cleopatra's voice, Bobby had summoned Cleo/Ace into the conference room. She appeared standing barefooted, her hands in the position of whatever task she had been at, unmoving as she listened to her own future voice while simultaneously downloading a briefing and a playback of what had occurred so far. "Amazing," she said softly.

"I hear your voice, Cleo," said future Bobby. "And now, Bobby, I remember you... me... making the decision to bring her in. Let me say that with each individual added to this time loop, the paradox complexity increases exponentially. I suggest that this be all the folks we have involved at least for a while."

Future Cleo spoke. "Even with Ace's computational powers, we can not come up with a rational estimation for how strange it might get."

"Agreed, of course," said Bobby. "We will each have to make decisions at our end of this com. I would like to start by keeping it one-on-one, just you, Bobby-in-the-future, directly to Feynman, for a starter. He will brief me, creating a buffer in the me-myself-and-I weirdness. Cleo will be brought in again as we understand the dangers." He looked at his closest friend and his lover. "Please work on what we should all do first to get the most productivity out of this miracle, and start thinking about how to reduce the paradox dangers. First, I think you must tell a lie to the com people that it was a test and not even hint what the truth is."

Bobby then said, "My first thought is that you may have some really interesting weapon and propulsion ideas from the P.G.s."

The conversation continued for subjective hours. Indeed there were really interesting weapon and propulsion ideas. And a lot more.

Chapter 13: PRE-WAR

Gearing Up: Bobby/Mate met with Cleo/Ace, Tay and Feynman every few hours, locking out most of the very busy routines on the ship and in the com loops between the ship, the Empire and Nexus. The purpose was to plan. But on the twelfth day in the long cruise to the invisible planet, the course of these conversations took an oblique turn.

The time loop was being rigorously controlled. The paradox questions were baffling and very dangerous sounding. So far every test the future and present crews have conceived was too scary to try. Only the explicit designs for weapons and the core tech for developing FTL, a Faster Than Light drive, have been sent down the time tunnel from the future crew. No information about the state of the war with Satan a quarter of a century out. No commentary on the state of Mate's progress toward resurrection. No information on the actual act of finding the Invisible Planet. Numerous other blackouts were agreed to, limiting any conceivable information that might have negative effects at one end or the other of the time loop.

Empire Transfixed: The pattern-recognition functions of the Bureaucracy noted an anomaly twenty-seven Earth days after Robert Longline stealthily invaded the headquarters of the underground organization called The Corsairs.

The artificial intelligences alerted a female GovFet on the staff of N'Gai Toledo. The GovFet, one Elegance d'Order, poured over the patterns with her special talent. She requested an audience with Toledo, another rare experience with the adrenaline of expectation, even a slight and pleasurable sting of anxiety!

Things being what they were in the Bureaucracy, her request was turned down, and she was shunted to a pre-audience with Brin Barnie, not even a Fet. Still, Elegance had heard that the augmented human Barnie held a very special place in the intelligence hierarchy, and was especially trusted by N'Gai Toledo, so it was less than humiliating to present her findings first to this non-Fet woman.

At their meeting, Elegance was rigidly formal and polite, all with the goal of not showing any of the condescension she felt. Brin Barnie was completely informal, somewhat distracted, apparently by other pressing issues.

"Yes, Analyst d'Order, what have you that required such a leap around reporting protocol?" said Barnie.

Elegance breathed deeply once, then tapped the data tablet before her. Graphics materialized between them. "There is a pattern in the general behavioral metrics with significant – if yet unexplained – importance, Number Two Barnie."

Brin flashed a brief expression of irritation. "How can you judge that it is significant enough to address Chairman Toledo without an explanation of the importance?"

Elegance was momentarily non-plussed. "I... my assumption was... I use the term 'significant' in the statistical sense..."

"Oh, cut the shit, Analyst," cut in Brin Barnie. "Let's get by this stiffness. I am very busy, and you probably are too. For some reason you pushed the red button on this. Why don't you just relax and tell me why?"

"I apologize," she said softly. "You are right. I did 'push the red button' so to speak. Here's why. I believe that the changes I have analyzed indicate that there is a social vector – one that I have not yet identified – that is causing citizens to modify their behavior enough, and in enough numbers, to conclude that it is important... let me say very important... to identify this vector and determine what it is all about. As she stopped speaking, she observed that she had Brin Barnie's full attention, and that the signs of distraction had disappeared altogether.

"Now I am interested, Analyst sister," said Barnie. "Give me the short description of what you are seeing."

An hour later Brin Barnie messaged N'Gai Toledo. Neither she nor the Fet analyst knew exactly what was going on, but Brin was now convinced it was something fairly important, and the tone of the events in the Emperor's office gave her a strong feeling that it might have something to do with SearchShip Bobby. The sense of all this jelled suddenly when at that very moment the summons came from N'Gai to attend another meeting with the Emperor in just one more hour.

All of Brin Barnie's aptitude testing indicated she had extraordinary intuitive powers, and the GovFet analyst's information had her intuition buzzing.

A Lot's Been Happening: The Emperor stood by his throne. He wore his formal cloak of grazerskin from the huge flying creature that had attacked the Imperial party and the younger Emperor on the plains of Earth VII two centuries before. E VI always felt something special when he wore the sweeping cloak. It was bare of decoration but rich in significance. N'Gai Toledo and one of his lieutenants had dropped the speeding beast with their weapons only a thousand meters from the party. It had skidded practically to the Emperor's feet. The cloak was from between the outer fingers of its huge vertical fin. The full creature dominated a very large room in the Central Empire Museum, animated in replication of its final attack. The mamabots of small children were advised to spare them the trauma of seeing the exhibition.

E VI looked at those attending. N'Gai Toledo seemed to be slinking around, looking at the others – those not normally in the inner circle especially – with resentful suspicion. Ednorton Bespoke sat on a floor cushion, looking quite old but very interested. Brin Barnie stood in the middle distance talking to the woman she had requested be present, a GovFet name Elegance d'Order. The aloof figure of TechFet Alpha stood, ignoring the others while studying a projection of graphics quite incomprehensible to E VI. PsychFet Horatio and the older PsychFet SimpleView sat at the Emperor's side. E VI had found the elders' counsel valuable in several unconventional situations. Argonic Lambda, the PsychFet who allegedly loved whales more than people, was in a meditative pose to the left of the throne. N'Gai had insisted on his attendance. ("We are to hear of aliens, my Emperor... who knows aliens better?") Three Senators were in the virtual room, all obviously aware of the extraordinary fact that they were in the inner sanctum few mere Senators ever experienced. The fourth, Senator Frederica Allworth stood closer to TechFet Alpha than to her peers. Ednorton Bespoke's long time friend Chief Justice Goodman of the Imperial Judiciary was studiously avoiding Bespoke and stood near N'Gai Toledo as though awaiting his attention. Three of the senior MathFets from Earth XIV stood together, cautiously watching the other attendees and saying little.

E VI cleared his throat ceremoniously and all conversations ended abruptly. Attention focused on the Emperor.

"As you were told, we are about to have the first full spectrum report from PsychFet Bobby since his celebrated sudden stop at the planet Nexus. Some few of you know more of what we know so far, but to most of you, what you hear will be new and quite surprising, I dare say. We have made the decision to suppress information from Bobby almost completely – as a matter of our own judgment. Some of what we have heard in preliminary reports stretches our belief."

"You are all here to share your judgment with me about what we will hear. The appointed time is upon us."

Precisely then Bobby appeared in front of E VI. He simply popped into presence with no sound or other prelude. He bowed deeply to the Emperor. He was dressed in a simple garment of light material, a longish homespun wrap and slightly ballooned trousers. N'Gai in E VI's inner earphone noted: "The signature uniform of one Mahatma Gandhi, pacifist revolutionary of the 20th century CE, a leader in the movement for the independence of India from the colonial power Great Britain."

"My Emperor," said Bobby, looking around the room, "I see our one-on-one meeting has extra dimensions."

"I have my prerogatives," said E VI.

"Indeed. And it is appropriate, Sire, as I also will introduce other players into this report."

E VI repressed the urge to subvocalize to N'Gai Toledo about what the hell that might mean, but Bobby was undoubtedly wired into all com. So he spoke aloud, "Toledo? Are you comfortable with that?"

"Of course, my Emperor," said Toledo.

Bobby turned slowly in place and looked at the small crowd. He seemed a bit larger than any of them remembered him. His physical beauty was a notch beyond what even the most vain self-modifiers in the Empire affected, yet he seemed completely natural and devoid of any pose. "I am pleased to see you all. This is a distinguished group indeed. I bring a cornucopia of new things and I am sure you will find them intriguing." With that he turned to E VI.

"It is my observation, my Emperor, that the general populations of the Empire, indeed the leadership and the Fet communities, even the PsychFets, are completely uninformed as to the recent activities of SearchShip Bobby. There is general ignorance of the fact that we have made substantive contact with Other Intelligences, or that the planet we reached was an artificial one created by those aliens, or that the Artificial Personalities on the SearchShip have been given true consciousness. " He did not pause for a response from E VI. "And I respect your judgment in that since our communication has been perfunctory you have hardly had enough information to evaluate these facts yourself."

E VI burst out, "Perfunctory, indeed, PsychFet. Aside from that horror show about this so-called Satan. In fact," his voice rose, "we have not learned enough to establish the credibility of what you showed us. Otherwise your com has been practically monosyllabic. We have not had opportunity to challenge your claims or ask the questions that might lead us to understand what you have told us."

"Ah yes," said Bobby. "Brin Barnie's suspicions have not been addressed."

Barnie herself experienced the shock of comprehending that Bobby knew basically everything. To that moment only E VI and N'Gai Toledo understood Bobby's mastery of com.

"Therefore," continued Bobby, "I have several corroborating witnesses. We welcome any questions you might have. There is nothing more important than you having complete confidence in the truth of what we are telling you. We have assembled the devices of proof that should satisfy."

At that Richard Feynman appeared. He was wearing his favorite teaching outfit, pleated slacks, long pointed collar white shirt of soft madras cotton and an old school tie. "How d'you do," he said with his slight mid-20th Century Brooklyn accent.

"Professor Richard Feynman has become my closest associate," said Bobby. "He was the first AP to obtain full consciousness, and he has grown to be at least my intellectual equal. And here..."

At that, Tay appeared, in a moderately sized version of his usual manifestation, about six feet from his chin to the top of his Buddha head. He was smiling his most enigmatic smile, and as he spoke he uncharacteristically moved his lips. Bobby had suggested that this would be less disconcerting to the humans on Earth.

"I am called Tay by Bobby and friends. In truth I am an interface device representing my race in communications with Earther humans. Both Richard and I are aboard our planet space ship Nexus. We are about a light month above the plane of the galaxy and heading for parts unannounced."

Cleopatra materialized into existence, standing at Bobby's side. She exuded an extraordinary confidence cloaked in supernal calm. Her gown was a classic Egyptian/Roman hybrid, simple yet elegant.

"I am Cleopatra and I am Ace. Ace is the psychic entity Bobby told you of who has joined our crew. We are melded on the SearchShip to get the most advantage of Ace's capacities. We can describe certain strategies Bobby is planning."

The Empire group stood quite still. It was as if they had strolled into the presence of animals who spoke like philosophers. Their surprise and awe mixed with their reflexive cynicism, and the result was immobile haughtiness.

Again Bobby turned to E VI, bowing slightly. "I suggest that we make a concise presentation of the situation and our proposals to this point, then answer your questions, Majesty. But of course, we will proceed as you see fit."

"I had thought," responded E VI with a touch of steel in his voice, "that there are a few fundamental questions that I need answered before we go a step further." He straightened himself almost imperceptibly and looked briefly and piercingly at Bobby then at each of the SearchShip team."... If you don't mind."

"Of course, my Emperor," said Bobby. E VI suppressed his impression that there was the slightest subliminal wink in Bobby's returning gaze.

"First," said the Emperor, his voice low and tense, "how do I know that you aren't just out there with your big ship and your amped-up brain making all this up? How can we know for absolute certain that this is not some PsychFet version of delusional schizophrenia?" His voice was gradually rising in pitch as he spoke. "That horror show of the alleged military attack on some planet populated by intelligent lobsters could have been produced in a virtual reality studio for all we know." His voice actually quavered slightly. "This whole business about psychic beings and artificial planets and some kind of upgrade for the APs..." He almost sputtered. "How the hell do I know that this is not a manipulation on your part simply to destabilize the Empire for some personal ambition you have developed?" His face was flushed with obvious intensity.

N'Gai Toledo looked at E VI with some alarm. This was the first he had heard of this cutting suspicion from the Emperor. An electric discharge of anxiety seemed to shoot across his shoulders and into the base of his neck. Was the big guy losing it?

E VI caught himself on the verge of saying more, swallowed and blinked slowly. Everyone in the room literally held their breath for a moment.

After several beats, Brin Barnie, not taking her eyes from the Emperor, spoke deliberately. "You understand, PsychFet Bobby, that this is a perfectly reasonable question. You are describing a situation that is unlikely in the extreme. We have barely heard that you have found Other Intelligence, and what we have heard up to now has been so cursory that we must be incredulous until we see irrefutable proofs."

While she spoke, E VI regained his composure, nodding to Barnie, perhaps with a harmonic of gratitude in his glance.

"Ahem..." he coughed softly. "In all candor, PsychFet, I believe that the distrust and even anger I feel comes from the fact that I am still dismayed by your behavior from the very beginning of your mission. Perhaps as you suggested, we should have held this first meeting strictly between you and me. However, as it is, we are in conference and I will restrain my... resentment. And incredulity, as Brin Barnie noted. Do make your 'concise presentation,' and we will see where it goes from there."

Bobby again executed the half bow toward E VI, then swept his eyes across the rest of the Emperor's retinue. "I dare say that your dismay will continue my Emperor as you learn more of my behavior."

With that, Bobby lifted his chin slightly, and started speaking. "First, and as the driving motivation for all that we have done since reaching the planet Nexus is because of what we see with great clarity – and we will demonstrate that clarity to you – that the Empire of Earth is in the gravest danger. Unless the most heroic measures are taken, every planet in the Empire and every living creature and every asset of any kind on those planets will be destroyed or stolen in the most cruel and barbaric manner imaginable. There is a force loose in this galaxy that has the intent and the means to extinguish every potential competitor."

E VI thought he sensed a subliminal gasp from his assemblage, though expressions stayed studiously neutral.

Bobby continued, "Perhaps it will prove impossible to avoid or even forestall this fate since we know that many large and powerful civilizations have fallen victim to this force despite their determined resistance. Many have been so convinced of the hopelessness of resistance that they have uprooted themselves and fled. Even in fleeing, some have failed."

Bobby then made a move of such subtlety and power – fully if begrudgingly acknowledged by the Emperor – that the atmosphere of the situation started changing. "But we have a chance to succeed... a real chance, an opportunity with reasonable probabilities of success, a better chance than has existed since the moment this evil force began its march of annihilation across the far side of the Milky Way." He stopped.

In the complete silence of the pause there was a palpable emotional release. The tension at Bobby's words of apocalypse shifted along the emotional spectrum toward hope, from the growing dismay and anxiety that had been developing.

Only E VI recognized the move for what it was. As a lifelong student of persuasion techniques, he knew genius when he saw it, even if he did not fully comprehend how it had been done. This damn PsychFet was good.

"Very impressive, PsychFet," he said. "I observe that we are all suitably oriented now to hear some substance to shore up this spiritual conversion."

Bobby smiled broadly. "Thank you, my Emperor. I learned the importance of a good prologue from you."

At that, E VI could not help but smile also. Around him his elite retinue seemed slightly confused by the exchange. Only Ednorton Bespoke followed it. He grumped, "Okay, okay... two masters and all that, but for God's sake let's get to the meat of this."

The Meat of the Matter: Bobby took a deep breath. "So much has happened and will happen – and some of what will happen has already happened – that putting it succinctly is difficult." The elliptical sentence clearly confused everyone as their expressions showed. "I'll explain that little quandary in a bit. But first, two things. It is vital that you understand the evidence for the existence of Satan and what a Satan is. Also, we have brand new information. I realize all this is brand new to you, but the newest data goes to the heart of this issue of understanding what Satan is. Dr. Feynman and Tay will describe what we have just learned."

Feynman put his hands in the pockets of his slacks for a moment and took a step forward. Then he took his hands out and waved them in small circles in a gesture his 20th Century students would have recognized as signaling a main point – one that would be on a quiz later. "The APs that were loaded on the SearchShip system are a whole different bunch now. You'd hardly recognize us. In any event they are nearly all on Nexus at this time, as am I. Our first assignment was to mine as much information as possible about Satan from all the sources on the planet ship. In the last thirty hours we have made a breakthrough. With the Heglin's help," he gestured toward Tay, "we have apparently gained the trust of a civilization we have named The Watchers. This is important on many levels, and the first one is to address Brin Barnie's questions about how the documentary some of you have seen of the Satan attack on the planet of the ZEM was made. Tay can do a better job of describing The Watchers." With that Feynman put his hands back in his pockets.

The deep Tay hum filled the room. This caused a flurry of small movements among the Emperor's people. TechFet Alpha moved his fingers to activate virtual test gear to sample the hum. Others shot glances at one another.

Tay spoke. "The passengers on our escape ship are in many ways as alien to one another as any of us may be to humans. The civilization that Dr. Feynman's associates have named The Watchers was the first with which we formed an alliance to construct our water planet ship. There are no individuals as you would perceive them in this civilization. There were individuals several tens of millions of your years ago who were the progenitors of The Watchers. They were invented as intelligent nano-robotics technology was evolving. Over a septillion of these creations at a certain level of development coalesced into an Overmind. Their creators had foreseen the possibility of some out-of-control results of their creations and had programmed many safeguards into the nano-bots, but they did not foresee the coalescing phenomenon. Luckily for them there were hardwired imperatives against harming the progenitors and living creatures in general." Tay paused for a moment and the humming momentarily grew in volume until it spoke again.

"This new, larger creature, the Overmind, soon immigrated from the parent planet and occupied other planets around its star. Something in the inherent structure of the Overmind was expressed as a kind of voyeuristic curiosity. It quickly spread over its neighborhood of the galaxy, all the while observing and recording a vast body of events and phenomena.

"It was coincidentally observing the very civilization that devolved into what we are calling Satan. Eventually you might say The Watchers became obsessed with Satan. The fascination was driven by the fact that Satan was the categorical opposite of The Watchers, doing unimaginable harm to life of all descriptions. The diffuse nature of The Watchers allowed them to observe the actions of Satan in intimate detail without being noticed for millennia as it destroyed hundreds then thousands of populated planets. They became the ultimate authorities on Satan. At one point in time the obsession flipped into unbearable abhorrence, and The Watchers fled. In their fleeing, they swept through the planets of my civilization, the Heglin, just as we were preparing to flee ourselves. The Overmind communicated with us, and we became allies in seeking a way to avoid Satan.

"I hope that adequately describes this civilization," Tay concluded.

The room had been utterly still during Tay's talk. The inherent novelty of hearing from a large, floating Buddha head was augmented by the supertech inflections in its voice, all with a story that surpassed most of the current speculations on what "other intelligence" might be. It was completely captivating.

Feynman cleared his throat, breaking the spell. There was a flurry of talk as the attendants commented to the persons nearest. E VI looked irritated at the response. He said to Bobby, "What is the point of this Watchers business?"

N'Gai Toledo started to speak, then clamped his lips tightly when Feynman started speaking. "The point was to clarify where the documentary about the cleansing of the ZEM civilization by Satan came from, how it was prepared and so forth. It was one of thousands of situations The Watchers observed and recorded before they decided to flee. They managed to witness not just what we saw, but what happened in every moment and every cubic kilometer of the entire event. What we saw was essentially an edit that the Heglin made to be comprehensible by humans after they understood how our perceptions and mentation works."

Bobby spoke, "The Heglin – Tay if you will – have convinced the Watcher Overmind to make available to us its entire library of observations of Satan; not only military events like this one, but incredible detail about the whole Satan phenomenon. In essence we will have absolutely encyclopedic intelligence on Satan. If it goes to the bathroom we will know which orifice it uses. This is part of why I say we have hope and even optimism about being able to stop this monstrosity. If one combatant has superior intelligence on the other, it will overcome most kinds of military superiority. I should mention that the coin Tay used in negotiating with the Watcher Overmind was to give them virtual presence in the Empire of Earth. They are here now, adding to their knowledge of the galaxy."

E VI was beginning to feel as though he had completely lost control over the situation. And he was used to being in complete control of all situations. It was a very uncomfortable feeling for the Emperor. As he spoke, he had to concentrate not to sputter. He took a deep mental breath and managed to sound fairly imperial. "This empire is not – and will not be – engaged in anything military without my full and unreserved support and my unilateral decision to proceed."

"Here, here," said Toledo quietly. E VI's head snapped around toward his advisor and his eyes flared then squinted as he searched for any trace of sarcasm. It took several moments for him to decide there was none, or none of consequence.

"And of course," the Emperor continued, "without the advice and consent of those bodies of government declared in the Charter of Empire to be involved in such matters." It sounded like a footnote.

"Well said, Emperor VI," rumbled Tay. There was no question that the large face was smiling benignly.

"Perhaps I should continue the briefing," said Bobby.

"I don't think so," said the emperor. Every eye in the room snapped into focus on his face. Bobby raised one eyebrow but said nothing. "I need to know a few things first. I need to know a bit more about our allies. I need to know why – as I understand it – the more senior civilizations we are associating with are apparently leaving the scene of the impending battle in great haste, leaving the confrontation with this Satan thing to a young and perhaps backward group like our little empire here." E VI's eyes were stoney as they zeroed in on Tay. "It looks like to me that you are using us to do the dirty work while you just do a little virtual consultation. Can you set me straight on this assumption?"

With no noticeable hesitation, Tay rumbled, "Food chain."

"Food chain?" N'Gai Toledo practically barked. "You are saying we are lower on the food chain so we earn the position of sacrificial lamb while you run to safety?" His eyes actually bulged slightly with what was clearly honest outrage.

"A reasonable but incorrect assumption," said Tay. It was clear to most in the room that this was an out-of-bounds comment, considering Toledo's famous ego. But Tay continued, apparently not noticing the additional degrees of steeliness in N'Gai's eyes. "The fact that your species has evolved in a food chain milieu makes you far better warriors than the likes of us, to whom food chains were incomprehensibly alien until we became spacefarers and witnessed them in various species. The inherent competitiveness of eat or be eaten in food chain creatures gives rise to far more aggressive and canny combatants. Your race is a prime example."

E VI and Toledo were stopped cold. The Emperor was particularly struck with the "incomprehensibly alien" comment, as he realized that creatures not in a food chain were just such to him. "Ummm," he said, considerably cooled. "You are saying that you... the Heglin... evolved in some way not in a food chain? You are not the top of your food chain?"

"Exactly," said Tay. "We obtained our corporeal energy from our stars and from the gasses of our planets. There were other living creatures in our environment, but the idea of consuming them for energy or being consumed by them would have been considered ridiculous – not to mention impossible. It was actually never even contemplated. As I'm sure the briefest of analysis will convince you, we surely have radically different basic psychologies, you and us. Equally obvious should be two certainties. You make far better warriors. And Satan surely is a creature also born of food chain evolution."

Tay stopped speaking. No one else said a word. There was a considerable span of silence.

Finally, Bobby cleared his throat and said again, "Perhaps I should continue the briefing."

The Emperor nodded curtly.

"Yes, certainly. Continue," said N'Gai Toledo, recovering himself as designated sycophant.

Bobby took a breath, held it briefly for effect and continued. "I should note that this warrior psychology seems to be fully present in the APs. The AP developers managed, consciously or not, to implant this most human trait in their creations. Those who were actually warriors in their pre-21st century CE organic existences, like Khan, Roosevelt, Patton and the like are obviously so in their AP incarnation, but as we have engaged in the Satan challenge, it is clear we are all combatants to our cores. I think the Heglin and some of the other senior races are a little shocked at our warlike natures."

Feynman smiled at that.

"As a matter of fact," continued Bobby, "one of our main concerns as we began to understand the necessity of the Empire of Earth taking on the Satan phenomenon has been whether the combative nature of humans might have been winnowed out by the Apocalypse and the period since. Of course having most of our population living in the Dream Game raises issues. I must make a confession here. Perhaps this will be the first of several confessions."

E VI winced internally. He longed for a secure private channel to N'Gai Toledo, but had the certain knowledge that Bobby was intercepting everything. Then he thought, "screw it" and subvocalized, "Toledo, I don't like the sound of this." Just that made him feel better.

Bobby didn't miss a beat, saying, "Our advances in com, with the assistance of our new friends, has allowed me to sample targeted content in the Dream Game."

The Emperor's pupils expanded, though no other twitch in his expression showed his shock. "My God, Toledo, you said that could never be done." He then realized he had said this aloud. He recovered without a hitch and said directly to Bobby, "Perhaps you should roll out your confessions right away instead of dribbling them out piecemeal. I believe we can get back to some mutual trust and concentrate on your main message if we are not constantly waiting for another shoe to drop." He was quietly proud of how he handled that.

"An excellent suggestion, my Emperor," said Bobby. "Okay, here goes. In the last few months we have discovered and recruited several sub-cultures here on Earth and on several of the Empire planets."

At the term "sub-culture" N'Gai Toledo looked quickly and intently at Brin Barnie.

Bobby continued, "Collectively they amount to over two million individuals. The nature of their sub-cultures is to be contrarians of one sort or another. In short, they were revolutionaries, working toward disrupting the status quo in the Empire."

"Impossible!" roared E VI. "The populations of the Empire planets are completely integrated into our supervisory data bases. We know everything about everybody. An individual can't fart without our knowing it, much less plan a revolution. Why are you making this lie?" He paused, then squinted at the table top for a moment, turning slowly toward Toledo. N'Gai Toledo avoided the Emperor's gaze briefly then matched it.

"There is something perhaps you have not told me?" said the Emperor in a dangerously soft voice.

"It did not strike me as significant, my Emperor," Toledo said calmly. "It is simply a small investigation in process initiated after Brin Barnie was notified of a statistical anomaly. There has been nothing to suggest there was threat to the Empire involved." He stretched his neck as though his collar was too tight. But he wore no collar.

Bobby continued before E VI could act on the rage he clearly felt at learning of this anomaly after the fact. "My Emperor," he said, "the would-be revolutionaries were completely ineffectual. The groups were not communicating with each other, and their plans of action were ill formed and in disarray. And in fact their motives were quite benign. None of them were interested in a revolution in the general meaning of the term. Many were simply unhappy with the dominance of the Dream Game and, frankly, bored with what civilization has become. In any event, I am quite sure your intelligence operatives would have discovered their presence long before they matured." He looked at Brin Barnie. "Without our interference, that is." Barnie gave the slightest nod.

"When we discovered these groups, we confirmed that they had a high percentage of people who were what in ancient history were called malcontents, literally, people who were not content with their lives and strong-willed enough to take action about it. While their activities were absolutely no threat to the order of the Empire, just in organizing and planning against the status quo, they found gratification, and actually developed many skills and attitudes which will prove to be very useful to the Empire in our crusade to stop Satan from sterilizing the galaxy."

Again, E VI felt overwhelmed – but only briefly until his augments adjusted his brain chemistry and his data taps fleshed out the implications of what Bobby was saying as non-threatening.

Bobby continued, "We studied them by placing agents among them who revealed themselves as being from SearchShip Bobby and offering to help them unify with other revolutionary groups.

"During this period of acquaintance and persuasion, we probed the nature of people who decide to join a revolution. There are many things about this type of individual that are very useful under the conditions of war. We learned, for instance, that they spend much less time in the Dream Game than the general population. However, the time they did spend was very intense.

"A huge amount of their Dream Game time is dedicated to violence. Warfare, individual combat, duels, pursuit and evasion and the like are especially popular with males. With females the conflict is more subtle, but just as violent in the final analysis. All genders develop and refine strategies and tactics in the Game.

"They spend much less time in phantasmagorical worlds, much less in sensuality and hedonism, far more time in violence. Clearly, with a little focusing, humankind is still fully configured for war."

Bobby paused and allowed this concept to be assimilated by E VI and the rest in the council.

Feynman smiled, coughed softly and said, "I do believe I smell a sense of pride in the room, somehow." Eyes widened, some in resentment, some in confirmation.

Bobby quickly continued, "Weaponry is another matter altogether, and the news we bring on that front, if you will, may be even more surprising.

"This is revelation two. All of the SearchShips have received a battery of upgrades for their ships. The Heglin improved the hardware and software on our ship rather dramatically. It is part of their moral code that we must figure out what they did rather than them telling us plainly. Richard Feynman and I, plus all the techy thinkers among the APs have worked diligently and discovered many things we understand. We have passed all of these along to my SearchShip peers and they are installing them as we speak. I come with a proposal on how to redeploy the SearchShips to missions to learn new techs and weapons."

"You go too far!" burst out N'Gai Toledo, unable to contain himself. "You have neither the authority or the mandate to take control of the whole fleet of SearchShips. It is a violation of protocol for you to even be in deep com with the other SearchShips. You are completely out of control and actually mutinous!"

Bobby looked calmly at him during this outburst. E VI looked at Toledo with a faint expression of surprise on his face. He spoke quietly to Toledo, "I believe he said he had a proposal for our consideration, N'Gai."

Toledo looked at the Emperor in disbelief, sputtered, then shut up.

Bobby continued, "It is the tradition of the PsychFets to immediately share our vision expansions. I was unaware of this protocol of which Counselor Toledo speaks, and I apologize for even implying that I was taking control of the fleet. I urge the Chairman of the Privy Council to stop seeing all this as an affront to the Emperor and recognize that we are discussing the salvation of the Empire and the whole of this side of the Galaxy." With each phrase, Bobby spoke more intensely, finishing with, "This is not a personal matter."

E VI raised his eyebrows and looked slightly up and at nothing. Several moments of silence passed, then Toledo spoke softly.

"Quite right," he replied.

"Our contact with the civilizations on Nexus has given us access to powerful new weaponry," said Bobby.

"Now, if I may..." Bobby said directly to E VI, and at that the tableau of the meeting room froze. Only Bobby and the Emperor remained animated. E VI looked stunned. He turned to N'Gai, but the counselor was as immobile as the rest. Bobby continued. "I will explain this," Bobby gestured around the room, "but it is happening because none but you and I must know what I tell you next because there is grave danger to the fabric of time if too many know about what I am about to tell you."

E VI looked confused and angry at the same time. And not a little frightened, not an emotion he was accustomed to. He only nodded slowly.

Bobby said, "Revelation three: Our SearchShip will reach what we have called the invisible planet in just less than twenty-six years, and when we reach it, we recruit its civilization to our cause and their first gift is access to a temporal ... ah, trick. Which is to say that outside of linear time we have already been there, and we have breached time back to this point and communicated with ourselves. In short, we know what we will learn – we have learned it now... from the future."

"Stop!" E VI shouted. "Impossible! What you are saying is impossible. Is it not, Alpha? Horatio? Com from the future is a ludicrous idea." He then looked perplexed as he realized he was shouting at people apparently frozen in time.

Bobby said quietly, "You are asking the right questions. I can confirm that your most advanced scientific counselors will tell you there has been no breakthrough, no discovery – no vision expansion – about the nature of time. Nothing to change the wisest views on the impermeability of time. They would all agree that what I describe as a temporal trick is almost certainly not possible."

Bobby continued speaking as if he hadn't taken the aside. "Four: Stemming from this same reclusive civilization's mastery of spacetime we are the beneficiaries of the physics of faster-than-light physical travel. It has the potential to be almost instantaneous travel across galactic distances. We have a serious engineering challenge to turn it into hardware, but we know the basics of how to do it."

E VI's expression went through several versions of the dropped jaw. He had spent many billions of credits and man-centuries of research time seeking FTL technology and knew it was impossible. Until perhaps right now.

"As you can imagine," continued Bobby, " these two gifts from our future meeting with this race have the potential to be very effective weapons against even an enemy as powerful as Satan," said Bobby. "As we roll out new weapons systems and new propulsion devices, it is extremely important that all in the Empire think they came from Nexus and that even the possibility of cross-time com doesn't come up."

For the first time in a very long time E VI spoke to Bobby as a man speaks to an equal. "You astound me, Bobby. Why is what you tell me so dangerous only you and I can know?"

"Time paradox issues exist that we just don't understand yet," said Bobby. "We could screw up a lot of things, including our fight with Satan, but even worse stuff too. It's just too dangerous for a lot of people to know just now. Even using the weapons and FTL might do great damage, but I just don't see the alternative."

Then Bobby restored time flow to the rest of the meeting and it proceeded as if there had been no interruption.

A Long But Exciting Meeting: N'Gai Toledo took a deep breath. Bobby sensed that the room held passive expectancy that N'Gai would speak, and all were perfectly content to avoid speaking themselves.

"My Emperor," said Bobby, beating Toledo to the punch, "this alliance with the Other Intelligences on Nexus has had such great success at improving our weapons situation, that our proposal for the fleet of SearchShips is to head toward other unique civilizations that The Watchers have revealed to us. We might well acquire other extraordinary new capabilities for our battle with Satan."

Bobby looked from E VI to Toledo then around the Emperor's other senior advisors. No one spoke. "Well, we will outline this in more detail a bit later, but we have hopscotched ahead of ourselves." The archaic word caused several confused looks. "So at least you know how radical is the information we are bringing you. I humbly suggest we devote a bit of time reviewing the basics of what this Satan is, how it got that way and what it is doing to the galaxy. That is the context of everything that's going on with us. I request a private conference with you and those of your retinue who have experienced the recording of Satan attacking and sacking the ZEM. I suggest that the other attendees present who have not experienced it do so immediately." Bobby was intensely aware of how formal he had sounded. Well, serious shit, he thought.

"That's a useful idea, SearchShip Master, and a good deal more down to earth than all this sci-fi crap."

The Emperor turned to the room of powerful people. "Some of you have seen the story of the, ah... ZEM. You know who you are, so stay. The rest of you will see Satan in action and we will reconvene after that." He turned away as the room blinked free of the uninitiated, leaving those who had experienced the ZEM disaster standing loosely around the Emperor.

The room reformed itself into a smaller space, more luxurious and casual than the meeting room before. Two four-meter long crescent tables appeared, their tops made of thick slices of giant sequoia burls. They faced together like the arcs of parentheses. Bobby, Feynman, Cleopatra and the hovering Buddha-head of Tay placed themselves around one, the Emperor's group around the other. The lighting was unobtrusive yet dramatic, accenting the deep beauty of the polished burl and showing each person optimally. Feynman noted aloud, "Very impressive, Emperor. Nothing in my ancient pre-existent experience came close to this for luxury."

"So... brief," grunted E VI, barely glancing at Feynman before pegging Bobby with his best power eye contact.

Bobby smiled in spite of himself. "Yessir, My Emperor. First, here is the best possible estimate of how much of the galaxy Satan has conquered." He held up a hand. "It is a summary model based on the latest hard evidence, much of which is over a century old. However, we have verification of much of it from one of our "sci-fi" sources of the psychic kind. And the Watchers do update penetrations regularly. But in any event I vouch for its general accuracy."

Full sensory graphics appeared. A classic three-quarters view of the galaxy Milky Way floated in the sensoria of those present. The Empire of Earth was a tiny, pulsing area of bright green. Almost diametrically across the disk an immense one third of the whole galaxy was pulsing more slowly in blood red. "Satan's playground," said Feynman, picking up the narrative.

Small yellow dots blinked in the galaxy outside of the red zone, closely spaced near the edge of the spreading area of conquest and around the dense star field surround the central black hole, thinning at greater distances from the advancing front. Another third of the galaxy was covered to one degree or another by the blinking dots. "The yellow points are reconnaissance outposts. The marauder's scout fleets explore the regions in the areas of the outposts to select future targets for Satan's expansion," said Feynman. "The nearest reconnaissance base to the Empire of Earth is..." he pointed to a yellow dot that looked very close to the bright green Empire glyph, "... here. It is less than three hundred light years from Earth XVII. There is a good likelihood that we have already been catalogued." There was a gasp from several in the room. "We believe the scout fleets keep a great distance from the systems they survey, and we have found no indications that the victims, even the very sophisticated space traveling ones, ever suspect they are about to be destroyed and plundered."

Bobby interjected, "We, on the other hand, know well in advance, another advantage."

"Now what's it like in the red zone?" asked Feynman. The galaxy graphic was replaced by a bleak and steaming landscape, pocked with craters. The red and blue soil dropped gradually in the distance into a vast depression, fading off toward the horizon. The atmosphere showed tendrils of purple and yellow gases.

"This was a coastal area. The sea that was in this basin reached the shore about here." A green sea filled in the depression. A silver beach lined the water. "There were very large plants, something between giant bromeliads and redwood trees along the shoreline." Hundred meter tall trees with fuzzy extensions appeared stretching from off shore back onto the land. "The natives of this planet played sophisticated games of hide-and-seek and courtship in these jungle parks. The civilization was pacific and intellectual. As you can see there is nothing at all left, neither plants nor creatures nor even the sea itself." The scene reverted to the previous barren state.

"And there is this," he continued. The graphic changed to another blasted landscape, this one mostly rock. Geometric excisions, octagonal, ovoid, square, triangular and many abstract shapes were cut into the rock for as far as the view could be observed. "These were foundation cuts for a remarkable architecture that was a planet-wide city." The scene morphed into a glistening – and endless – cityscape, impossible spires, arches, flying buttresses; breathtaking. "Some of the buildings were fifty kilometers high, reaching above most of the atmosphere. The mobile occupants were robotoids bearing hybrid intelligences of interwoven organic and computational matrices. Most of the occupants were not mobile, rather were physically dispersed throughout the buildings and the geology below. This particular world was part of a thousand-planet civilization more than a half billion years old." The scene faded back into the barren rock with the melancholy remnants of foundations. "As you can see now, there is nothing whatever left of the occupants or their creations."

The graphics dissolved.

"If I may," rumbled Tay. All eyes on the Emperor's table turned to the strange avatar. "The second destroyed world you saw was actually re-attacked by Satan seven times because the life forms were so robust and so deeply hidden in their rocky worlds. But whether Satan does it all in one attack or many, this is what all – all – of the once inhabited planets in the red zone look like: completely devoid of life of any sort, any artifacts of that life, any water or useful minerals. Some of the life has been scavenged as you saw in the ZEM case. All else dies in short order after the trauma of a Satan attack."

Brin Barney suddenly inhaled, making a slight choking noise. Then she almost shouted, "I want to know what the damn things do with all those brains and spinal cords beside interrogating them."

A look of genuine surprise came across E VI's face, but he held his tongue.

Tay hummed. Everyone looked at the Buddha avatar as it started slowly whirling. "We have some high order speculation based on Watcher information. I would say the odds are 99.5 to 1 that Satan has a very sophisticated organics analysis center, maybe several, that can determine the workings of any organic nervous system down to a very deep level. Satan is old and wise enough to know that evolution develops ingenious solutions to existential challenges. The very best models for its thinking machines are organics. Satan knows what it wants in its robot army. It wants the highest competence and performance possible, and it wants absolute control over its thinking machines. Since they are very intelligent machines, it fears their potential to revolt against it. It wants the benefits of brilliant machine minds without the jeopardy of their independence. So it studies its organic victims exhaustively. There are lots of cases where The Watchers have witnessed Satan punishing its robots for various infractions of its orders. Punishing purely mechanistic computer architectures is ridiculous and completely ineffective as either discipline or motivation. Punishing a machine mind based on organic models can be very good at both. Satan keeps collecting organic nervous systems of its victims to look for new innovations to program into its machine slaves."

With that, Tay stopped spinning, hummed briefly and closed its eyes.

E VI raised his hand to silence the brief hubbub at his table. "I think," he said in a lowered voice, "that this elaboration on how awful these Satan creatures are is now redundant. Either we believe that there is a great threat or we don't. More detail hardly helps with that basic decision."

"Creature," said Feynman.

"What?" snapped E VI, glowering at him.

"One creature. Satan is a single creature. It is important to understand that there is a single individual causing all this mayhem, Emperor, sir." Richard could not bring himself to say the honorific "my Emperor."

Again E VI barely acknowledged that Feynman had spoken. Bobby's instantaneous com to Richard was shared with his team. "The Emperor has not digested the information that you are a different being than an AP. Emperors by tradition do not speak with APs." Feynman gave a short grunt in response.

"I..." E VI paused and swallowed, a rare thing in his speech pattern unless planned for effect, which did not seem to be the case this time. "I may not see the significance of this one creature thing. If, for instance, I were a war-mongering Emperor, it might be said that I was centrally responsible for the wars the Empire might wage. My armies would still be legion, my staffs immense. What am I missing?"

Feynman responded, as though he had not noted the sleight. "Satan's armies are indeed legion, but they do not consist of any living creatures in the usual sense. Machine intelligences and machine devices entirely make up Satan's forces."

Feynman, paused to let the information in his staccato delivery sink in. Then, "Satan's fighting force is an artificial extension of the central creature. It has no staff, no officers, no councilors. Simply stated it is a completely isolated living being. There are no confirmed other living souls in Satan's empire. There is just this one malevolent beast who is consuming the galaxy like an exploding cancer."

E VI pressed both fists to his temples and leaned forward over the table, his elbows thumping loudly. No one had ever seen such behavior from the Emperor. N'Gai Toledo leaned toward him, concern radiating from his face and body language. "Sire? My Emperor? Are you well? What is it?"

"Oh, shut up, Toledo," the Emperor snapped, lifting his head sharply and staring this time directly at Feynman.

"Ah, recognition!" came a wry com burst from Bobby.

"He..." the Emperor gestured toward Tay, "... Tay said this Satan was a creature from a food chain. How the hell...?" Again E VI paused, this time with an expression of dawning understanding.

"Exactly, Emperor," said Feynman. "Satan has in a sense eaten the rest of its food chain, up and down. There is no one left from its original civilization but itself. The Watchers witnessed the final stage of this annihilation of all competitors and potential competitors, every other member of its own race, in the centuries before they decided to flee. It was unimaginably violent and gruesome."

The rumbling voice of Tay picked up smoothly from Feynman. "The nature of these creatures dictates this behavior. All previous galaxy eaters have likewise devolved into single beings."

"These creatures?" croaked N'Gai Toledo. "There is more than one? What in God's name are you talking about?"

The Emperor only blinked, still staring at Feynman.

Tay continued. "There have been perhaps eleven of them over the lifetime of this galaxy. Who knows how many in other galaxies? Such a development seems to happen every two or three hundred million of your years. The archaeological evidence gets rather foggy in the earlier periods, but it appears that in each instance the Satan-like creature in each cycle conquers and consumes at least all advanced life in the galaxy that does not manage to escape into intergalactic space, and in some instances it pursues those indefinitely, catching and destroying most of them. There is one point in the record when there seemed to have been two Satans at the same time, and they basically destroyed each other. That was five Satans ago, approximately one and a half billion years."

The Emperor started speaking, so softly he was hard to hear at first. "I am coming to a conclusion about this," he almost whispered. Then he cleared his throat and spoke more firmly. "If I understand what you are saying correctly, I believe there was no reference to any of these monsters being defeated or even stopped in their conquering ways except by another monster. Do I have that right?"

"Yes," said Tay simply. "They just seem to eventually burn out."

Staring at Tay, E VI almost snarled, "And you expect this empire of twenty inhabited planets with a small population, most of which spends its time in a goddamn game, to have some chance of causing this – what did you call it, 'galaxy eater?' any kind of problem? Maybe like the ancient mosquito on the ass of the ancient elephant?" His face colored. "Or might you think of us as a brief diversion to give you and your friends a slight edge in escaping?"

No one spoke on either side. E VI swept his Challenge-plus-Gotcha power eye contact around the room.

Bobby looked embarrassed. (On purpose... a device, thought E VI) "My Emperor, if I may point out, the Heglin Empire, The Watchers, the Gang of Nine and the other occupants of the water planet are putting themselves at great risk in working with us." Bobby's voice hardened. "When we engage Satan directly there will be an immediate effort by the monster to discover then eliminate us. It will soon realize we have help and it will deduce the existence of something like Nexus. Destroying Nexus will become its top priority. It hardly seems that our allies are exploiting the Empire of Earth for their own benefit."

This is a new phase of my life, thought E VI, then he said, "If we engage. I reiterate, IF. The peril to the Empire will be far greater than to a single vessel, no matter how large, that has already left the galaxy. We are sitting right here and are clearly no match for something that is eating the fucking universe!" For a moment the Emperor looked openly frightened, an expression only N'Gai Toledo had ever witnessed on E VI's face, and that was centuries ago when the sun of Earth IX exploded.

Cleopatra spoke quietly, insinuating herself into the fray, "My Emperor, you have touched the center of the matter. We are convinced – and believe that you will be convinced – that we can actually be more than a match for Satan. We believe that the Empire will have, with your leadership of course, a fleet that can stop the monster. And then we will grind it into stardust. From the moment we open the battle there will not be another civilization, not another single planet that will fall to Satan without effective challenge. The Empire of Earth and its allies will become the saviors of millions of civilizations and civilizations to be. The occupants of Nexus will return to the galaxy and their civilizations will be reestablished. There has never been a chance like this to pursue such a noble goal on so grand a scale. At the risk of sounding like a flatterer, your place in galactic history will be secure, my Emperor." Cleo made the slightest curtsy, a gesture so ancient none but Feynman and Bobby recognized it. Its impact was, nonetheless, the perfect punctuation for her appeal to the core of E VI's ego. He liked "galactic history."

"Hmmm, yes," he said. "It is at least worthwhile to hear why you think we might succeed at this impossibility; my God, it crushed that civilization of a thousand planets?"

"My Emperor," said N'Gai Toledo quietly, "the others have now seen the ZEM attack presentation. Might they rejoin the meeting?"

E VI nodded. The room enlarged, rearranged itself, and the others reappeared, their faces ranging from angered to stunned to ashen.

Bobby immediately took the floor. "I'm sure you need a few moments to absorb what you have witnessed."

"We have proposals to make to the Emperor on how to proceed. Of course he will make the decisions." He turned to E VI. "I request a private meeting."

At that moment the fate of the Milky Way Galaxy took an abrupt course change along the infinite web of timelines comprising eternity.

Cleopatra at Work: E VI and Bobby met alone in an Imperial chamber. Bobby stood a respectful two meters from the Emperor. E VI sat on a long stone bench, polished fragstone from volcanic explosion debris on Earth XI, a material with the hypnotic illusion of transparency deeper than the stone's thickness. It was more expensive than solid diamond.

"It is very odd," commented the Emperor, "not to have Toledo at my side for a meeting as significant as you say this is. Are you certain this is the way you want to proceed?" E VI wondered vaguely if he were too dependent on Toledo. Not, he thought defensively.

"For only a few moments, Sire, if you please. In fact, the purpose is for me to propose that one of our crew become the full time emissary to you, a fully dedicated com link, if you will. There is much we haven't told you thus far, for instance the nature of the weapons we are developing." Gradually, Bobby's presentation slipped toward a more conversational tone. "We have one chance to surprise this murderous son-of-a-bitch with tech beyond what it knows about. We have that tech by the wildest of chances. I think you should know all about it while you make the decisions only you can make."

E VI stood up from the fragstone bench. "Of course I should. Otherwise it would be unthinkable," he huffed. "Ah, who do you have in mind for this emissary? I don't mind saying I don't think I could tolerate that Tay thing hanging around for any length of time."

"Understood," said Bobby. "I propose Cleopatra. She is quite easy to tolerate, I think you might agree. Plus she is the most qualified we have for such a delicate business as dealing with an Emperor. She is completely accustomed to dealing with royalty based on her historical existence. She was top royalty herself, as I'm sure you know, in her human existence. She has been upgraded to full consciousness and is as real a person as you or I. And as we noted, she is in full mental confluence with an extremely powerful and wise creature from Nexus, the being we call Ace. You will have access to absolutely any information you desire about our activities. If I may say so, you might decide she is a very valuable counselor. I certainly have."

Bobby was not sure if E VI had heard everything he said. From the moment he revealed that Cleo was to be his contact, the Emperor's eyes had wandered from his usual riveting stare, apparently contemplating as much as listening to Bobby.The Emperor remembered distinctly his decision not so long ago to create the illegal corporeal being of Cleopatra. He recalled the intense planning that went into making her the most appealing of females. Of course her literally irresistible body was on the SearchShip and her presence with him was virtual, still...

"Hmm, yes," said E VI. "That might be a good arrangement. She is a very appealing, mm, personality."

Cleo joined the meeting. Bobby gave a short salute and disappeared. Cleopatra smiled disarmingly, then immediately began to brief E VI with the story of how the Gang of Nine, in their desperate flight from Satan's pursuit ships had stumbled across the Invisible Planet, hiding within the amazing spacetime manipulation that made it detectable only by psychic means. How SearchShip Bobby had found it again with Ace's talents and how that event was actually several years in the future. E VI waved his hand in front of his face at this, much as one might at a flying insect, but he said nothing. She described in non-technical detail how the terrified geniuses of the Invisible Planet had accepted the arguments that it was impossible to hide from Satan forever and that the only path to safety was to destroy the monster.

N'Gai Toledo rejoined the meeting. With that, Cleo told how the APs began to share their discoveries with the army of scientists and engineers on Nexus, incredibly advanced by Earth standards, but still stunned at the influx of revolutionary thought flowing.

"It was not long," she concluded, "until the Heglin and the Gang and The Watchers began to create both FTL drives and weaponry that we are quite sure surpasses anything Satan has or can build for now." With that, she bowed gracefully to the Emperor, giving him a delicate smile. He smiled back.

Chapter 14: PROBE

Pilot Project: Its crew fully meshed in a dedicated sector of the Dream Game in their sleep pods on Earth, DSHC-1 – Deep Space Heavy Cruiser One, reflecting several technologies from The Invisible Planet – sang along at .996 C. The crew's presence was completely without lag in a very recent update of quantum statistical com. The ship had dropped out of invisible ur-space of the FTL drive just minutes before. Slightly (microseconds) behind, DSHC-2 re-entered normal space. Bobby was omnipresent in both ships, in their quantum computing banks, in the threads of the Dream Game and in every intelligent machine and weapon. He was like a noble gas in air, tenuous almost to the point of invisibility. The crews were driving the ships. Bobby was inspiring the crew.

Actually invisible in normal space was the vast swarm of Watchers up ahead, comprising the most ephemeral of atmospheres – a watchful faintness – around and throughout the target, the Satan staging area now named by the Empire planners "Wolf." The Watchers had learned the purpose of this Satan fleet.

There were hundreds of battle vessels forming up for their next assignment, an attack on a benign mutualist civilization of shepherds and their equally intelligent flocks, totally unsuspecting of their imminent fate. It would be a rich haul for the monster. The planet of the shepherds was rich with minerals, and two vast oceans. The shepherds would never comprehend what hit them. Bobby had named the operation to interdict the attack "Cry Wolf," an obscure literary reference from the 19th Century CE.

Shipboard intelligence had been updated less than ten minutes earlier, delivered from the swarm of Watchers by FTL pod. Fine-grain updates and crew presence poured through the Quantum Stat conduits.

The two crews of a thousand, all from the Corsairs and similar rogue groups, were fully engaged in pre-battle procedure. Space ahead was in near full compression but from two quantum linkage nodes tens of light years ahead, the DSHCs sensors showed that space to be occupied by the drifting flotilla of Satan combat machines. Subjective time in the DSHCs indicated that the ships would come within effective range of the enemy's weaponry in seven hours. There was no indication the Satan fleet was aware of the cautiously approaching Empire of Earth warships. Precursor particles that precede a lightspeed vessel were thoroughly tamped by cloaking shield technology learned from alien contact made by SearchShip Bobby. Most of the offensive weapons on the DSHC incorporated other unnamed alien tech of one sort or another. That was about all the crew knew of the sources of their armament. Conversely, every crew member knew all about the self-destruct device in the cores of the ships, 600 kilograms of frozen antimatter CO2 in a containment field inside a sphere of technol metal. They also knew that the Satan forces had weapons that could easily breach the device.

Six repurposed Fets – a MathFet, two GovFets, two ComputerFets and a young PsychFet – all now calling themselves WarFets – were in their frames in special Dream Game modules on Earth, compositely playing the role of "Captain," an ancient battle command concept. Over a hundred crew members were running continually updated tactics games with the quantum computer banks. The models were converging nicely into an optimum attack option.

The rest of the crew was drifting in charge mode, relaxing, resting and simultaneously winding their response times to the extreme minimums for reacting to ship damage, drive mishaps, weapons reloads, intelligence wipes and other emergency procedures.

This was the first attack any Empire fleet would attempt. To a person, the crew members were relaxed and confident. Wired to the gills, but relaxed and confident.

Two hours from contact all crew were pulled out of the games and went online with each assignment locked into attack option No.4, the highest-scoring game, the winning attack plan. "Stand by for FlashPoint," said the voice of the Captains. "Zero Point Five C instant deceleration. We will be at 0.49 lightspeed. Neutrino beams locked. Forty-three major vessels targeted. On my count – three, two, one, flash." The message took 61 milliseconds, but to every crew member, it was perceived at normal human conversational pace.

Space, one light-minute out from the Satan flotilla, suddenly erupted with forty-three unimaginably bright energy beams, mostly anti-neutrinos, but each also rich in hyper-energetic protons, anti-protons and quarks of six sorts. Each of the targeted ships, all the largest in the flotilla, underwent dramatic changes, some simply exploding with staggering violence, others dying with complete system freezes, still others changing colors then collapsing on themselves into infinitesimal black holes formed by runaway drives or weapons caches. Space for many parsecs around the flotilla was blindingly clouded by plasma and subatomic particles ripping from the dying ships.

The point sources of the deadly barrage were instantly identified by the sophisticated sensors of the Satan fleet, which just as instantly recognized confounding contradictions that gave fatal microseconds of pause to its most powerful defensive actions. The attacker had inexplicably not expended its full momentum in creating the attack as the Satan ships uniformly did, and which was central to its tactical assumptions. Counter fire had been unleashed instantaneously at the source points of the attacker's barrage, but the attacking vessels were still moving at almost 0.5 lightspeed straight through the middle of the flotilla!

The initial counter-attack missed one target entirely. The second was apparently hit, but the confirmation data was muddled. The defense computers made frantic adjustment and commenced launches and beam firings, again slightly behind optimal timing because the attackers were now revealed in the Satan sensors as nine vessels, inexplicably – and impossibly – changing courses at rates implying million-G accelerations. Several ultrafast Satan kinetic weapons, their launches mis-aimed by the scrambled data, ripped through one of its own planetary attack class ships, destroying it thoroughly and spectacularly. The thousands of other missiles, including the matter-antimatter bomblets swarmed through the attacking formation, apparently missing all but one vessel which seemed to explode with gratifying brightness, but the spectrum of the flash was all wrong. Other Satan missiles seemed to perfectly intercept attackers without effect; some even seemed to fly straight through them and self-destruct as programmed for misses.

On the the first Empire vessel, the Captains' voice calmly said, "Secondary FlashPoint upcoming. Zero point three C deceleration. Nineteen enemy vessels targeted. Full cloaking and decoys. Standby with all weapons. On my count – three, two, one, flash." Another 50 milliseconds spent. The orders for DSHC-2 were not heard by the sensors in DSHC-1. The ambient noise in all spectra was deafening and blinding.

From one of the nine attacking vehicles, in the view of the Satan sensors, came another burst of attack beams, their energy similar to the first assault, but the particle content wildly different – almost completely relativistic electrons, raising the inner temperatures of the targeted ship tens of thousands of degrees in milliseconds, leading to fiery decomposition The second attacker seemed to be firing erratically, though still with stunning effect.

Suddenly several of the attacker's vessels apparently blinked out of existence according to the Satan sensor batteries. The Satan intelligence noted the phenomenon and placed it in a high priority follow-up research niche in its order-of-battle sequence. Especially when a rapidly-expanding sphere of small missiles was detected emanating from where one of the disappeared ships had been. The sensors took agonizing milliseconds to target the missiles with defensive weapons on the remaining hundreds of small Satan ships. There were apparently and impossibly billions of the attacking missiles, the outer perimeter of them already impacting and destroying the surviving tactical units of the Satan flotilla.

The full defensive counter-fire finally exploded toward the sphere of destruction ripping into the flotilla space. Immediately after launching the defensive weapons, the Satan computers estimated the highest probability locations of where the now-invisible source of the attack sphere might be and unleashed MABs, Maximum Attack Barrages, at all of them. Simultaneously one of the remaining Satan cruisers abandoned the battle zone at maximum acceleration, following what its computers assessed as a probable decoy stream of particles. And in that action, became the only Satan vessel to survive.

In the thin slice of time before success or failure would be seen, the flotilla's combined machine intelligence noted the effect of the attacker's assault missiles. Each one that penetrated the overstretched defensive response and hit a Satan vessel seemed to destroy it by shaking it to destruction. Each victim ship oscillated violently for less than a millisecond, then either exploded or shattered into countless pieces, slowly dissipating from its original form into a cloud of microscopic dust. Making these observations while being attacked, the distributed Satan computers dropped below critical complexity losing coherence, and in the process, losing the report and observations it had been preparing for the Central Satan.

Aboard the second Empire of Earth Cruiser, its crew and quantum computer bank recognized rather immediate impending destruction as the combined last attack was heading toward unavoidable contact with the ship.

The Captains' voice said warmly, "Excellent job, troops. With this last bit, we pretty much annihilate the bastards." The Bobby presence emitted a warm glow of praise. With that the self-destruct weapon, the shielded antimatter at extreme pressure, was un-shielded and created a wave of pure energy expanding from the core to the skin of the cruiser. The minor nova that blossomed scoured the remnants of the vessels in the space previously occupied by the Satan flotilla. Less than one second had elapsed from the first shot to the last in the battle. The one ship that had darted away from the melee tumbled wildly as the shock front reached it, but recovered and continued it's retreat down an ephemeral trail of particles.

The radiation from the conflagration would reach the first Satan sensory battery in less than thirteen Earth days. There would be few clues as to what happened, but it would be indisputable evidence that there was really bad news for Satan. Confirmation and new intelligence insights followed from the single ship that escaped. The planned attack on the planet of the shepherds would be seriously delayed.

Debrief, Robert Longline: Among the crew, awakening from the Dream Game in their sleep couches around the circular amphitheater was the powerful body of Robert Longline. He had been in the targeting cluster for the deceleration beam bursts and had witnessed with a full sensory array the destruction of the three Satan ships he had personally selected. The memory was overwhelming in its detail and intense gratification. Especially the memory of the second ship in the initial attack. It was one of the largest of the Satan ships, of the design always used in the first wave of attacks on a new victim system. Every human in the Empire of Earth had seen just such a ship in The Watchers' documentary of the Satan attack on the ZEM system. From the augmented perceptions of the documentary came: "The machine was hellish in form, a collection of serrated extrusions and whipping tentacles with no imaginable function except to inspire terror in its victims." It was the perfect description except that the extrusions and tentacles inspired not terror but disgust and hatred in Robert Longline. He knew it was a pure, not implanted, response.

His memory scrolled through the moments when his particle beam contacted the defensive screens then the structural metal of the giant ship, expanding from a brilliant blue spot to an amethyst glow over the full hemisphere of the attacked side. Next had come countless sparkles of its weapons detonating within their containment fields, chewing the ship into shreds and shards from inside. Finally, deep in the ship the propulsion system ran amuck in myriad ways, creating a miniature, ravenous black hole which sucked the megatons of debris into itself, flashing X, gamma and gravity radiation. The terror ship simply popped out of existence. Robert smiled broadly. Turn about is fair play, he thought, remembering where the archaic saying came from.

He began walking among his shipmates, friends from his months among the Corsairs of Hester Negreponte, looking for that amazing shipmate woman in hopes of a special celebration. That would have to wait, of course until after the debriefing and perception dump.

The crew of DSHC-2 were put into trauma recovery rehab. The destruction of their ship was different than that brought on by the massive self-destruction of DSHC-1. Coherence in communication had been lost just prior to destruction. The quantum units had been disrupted. For objective seconds – an eternity in perception – each crew member had been lost in frightening disorientation. Some back in the virtual command center experienced loss-of-self, and for them it was as if they never came back from the mission. Those few were seriously injured mentally. Bobby dedicated substantial quantities of AP attention to helping these crew members reassemble themselves. It would take months in some cases.

Industrial Policy Decision: The success of the mission was analyzed "to death" in the mind of N'Gai Toledo. "What are these idiots trying to do, overcome common sense?" he grumped at the Emperor. "Our analysis is complete and redundant; what can they possibly be looking for?"

E VI glanced up from the display in front of him. "What are you belching about? We – and I'm using the imperial we – are close to making perhaps the most important command decision of my reign. You think maybe I should be denied some information?" For all the cutting slant to his language, the emperor's tone was mild. As the whole empire was shifting beneath his feet, the man had come to value those who had long been his loyal retainers. N'Gai Toledo had been his closest advisor for over two centuries, tolerating, E VI admitted to himself, his own growing eccentricity. Nothing like a threat to the whole human race to foster a little tolerance, even from a highly polished egoist like E VI.

Toledo stared at his leader, his master, his friend in the strange dimension of the imperial court. He had been sensing the changing demeanor in E VI, but he didn't know quite what to make of it. His own changes in response to the Satan Calamity, as he thought of the situation, was increasing internal tensions of a sort he hadn't felt in a long, long time. His substantial self confidence was a bit rattled. Was he up to giving E VI the best possible advice? Had the long decades of being the second most powerful man in the empire softened his razor sharp mind?

E VI continued in a thoughtful tone, "Our little empire, which until recently seemed so large, has finite industrial capacity. Our friends on Nexus have almost as much as all of our worlds. Yet between us there is still only a tiny capacity to build a space navy compared to what Satan can do. That fact alone makes this decision absolutely crucial."

"Yes, my Emperor," muttered Toledo. "Still, it seems obvious to me and the councils we have commissioned to work on this that the weapons we have developed with the knowledge from our alien friends come in a bare second in importance to the Faster Than Light drives. The only contender is the solar tap tech from the Heglin engineers, which in my view is a special case that will only be useful in certain locations." His voice diminished slightly in volume when he said, "Only none of us can think how to battle the ram-and-shoot fighters without the time stutter weapon they are planning, but who knows if that will even work?"

There was some silence between the men after that. E VI stood up and walked thoughtfully around the room for a few minutes. "No," he said finally, this time more resolutely. "No, the most important weapon we have is the intelligence we get from The Watchers. Satan will probably learn from us how to make the other weapons, but unless he can duplicate a highly intelligent race of nanobots that are as motivated to defeat us as The Watchers are to defeat him, we will always have better intelligence. And that, my friend, is how wars are won; the best intelligence takes the day every time."

Toledo suspected the Emperor was mouthing a newly adopted position learned, perhaps, from Cleopatra.

E VI practically barked, "The decision is made! Our first priority is to build millions of the FTL pods for The Watchers!" Deal done, thought the Emperor.

Toledo looked dumbstruck at first and was very close to blurting his objections. By long habit he held his peace for a few counts even while thinking that superior weaponry could overcome any intelligence failures. Then he reconsidered. By damn, the Emperor might very well be right even while the think-tankers ranked weapons and Big FTL over intelligence gathering by a strong majority. Committees, Fah, he thought. Then he grinned. Of course! Over half the FTL Watcher pods could be built on Nexus.

"Very wise decision, my Emperor," said Toledo, not repressing his grin. "I fully support your decision."

A trace of a smile crossed E VI's face. "Why thank you, N'Gai."

Target 2, the Depot: Circling a quiet white dwarf in a leisurely orbit of 0.5 AU radius, a collection of Satan's pirate booty occupied several trillion cubic kilometers of space in an orderly, linear entrainment. There were ingots of pure metals hundreds of kilometers long, extruded from refinery forges processing suspended mountains of ores and scrap stolen from recently raped planets and looking like vast floating slag heaps. The surplus energies of the purification processes blasted into the surrounding space as thundering infrareds and screeching ultraviolets.

Evenly spaced along the arc of orbiting mass were moon-sized spheres of water, like luminescent pearls refracting the spectra of the distant white dwarf and slivers of radiation from the forges. Inside the spheres thousands of macerator devices swam like microbes on cilia thrust, filtering out salts, organic and inorganic debris, leaving trails of ultra-pure water, the irreplaceable liquid. Thermal reactors floated inside each sphere maintaining the liquid state. Outside the spheres glimmered force field-augmented films restraining even molecules of water from escaping into space. Occasionally one of the filtering devices punched through the surface tension and the restraining fields to regurgitate its compacted debris into waiting container ships.

Far along the orbital path, both fore and aft of the salvage process were ten-thousand-meter-long space dry docks, manufacturing fighting and container ships for Satan's galaxy-eating squadrons. Elemental ingots were alloyed within the dry docks and stretched into frames and skins of the out-sized vessels. Cables of carbon fibers wove in and out of the ships like weaving yarns with minds of their own. Weapons and drives, navigational and computational skeins were plaited from semi- and super-conducting refabrications of the refined raw materials. The limitless fleets of Satan grew in consolidation depots like this one scattered over the expanding perimeters of its conquest.

This depot was defended by a shifting screen formation of three hundred and six medium battle cruisers plus a ten-kiloship cloud of independent, high-G, shoot-and-ram fighters. They were like wasps in full nest-defense. The cloud was in continuously shifting formations surrounding the orbital train of the depot. Newly manufactured craft were shuffled through the formations for their shakedown flights, so some portion of the ship census was always made up of the newest models with the latest weapon updates. Master command and control of the defensive task force was handled by a Satan Intelligence distributed over the computing power of ninety-two battle cruisers with a minimum coherence threshold of eleven ships. Inside the defensive screen was a large armed-and-ready attack fleet, over a hundred capital ships about to launch a major assault on a six-planet system populated by a quaking civilization that had been trying desperately to negotiate a truce with the unresponsive Satan.

The Earth Empire Tactical Planning Group looked at the 4-D projection of the depot and its defenses. Members of the tactical planners included connected virtuals of Bobby and Feynman plus the "battlefield" military APs, beings who in their organic lives had actually led military actions as participating combatants.

The intelligence they were seeing was less than four hours old. Six jumper pods – FTL – only ships with minimum thrust engines used for depositing self-propelled packages then jumping out immediately – had scattered a gigapod of Watcher nanos around the depot orbit in the quadrant just ahead of the well-defended factory. The Watchers spread into a miasma so faint and tenuous as to be undetectable by any technology in Satan's arsenal. Watching, they saw and recorded every tiny detail of the vast locomotive of a factory complex carrying the spoils of many planetary conquests as it chugged along its orbital tracks. The defensive fleet likewise was observed and analyzed as it went through its unflagging maneuvers, forming and reforming itself in random tactical dispositions to always be ready for any attack on the depot. The last attack on a manufacturing depot had been over two thousand years before, a weak riposte from a dying militaristic empire victim of Satan's expansion. It had caused little damage, but defenses had been ramped up at every depot from that moment on.

In the Empire, the Tactical Planning Group assigned a Dream Team to planning an attack on the depot. This team was composed of citizens selected from Corsairs plus elite combat gamers of Earth VI. The MathFets of Earth XIV calculated that the optimum team size for planning specific operations was 1,384 players. Of these, exactly 54.9 percent were chosen for overall top scores in the various dream combat games they played. The rest were screened for strong scores, then filtered – in about equal proportions – for the most unique offensive techniques devised, defensive technique effectiveness and seniority in the combat genre.

The objective was simple: destroy the defense fleet then do some serious damage to the factories. One water sphere also was to be disrupted, scattering the spoils of several oceans into space. Even that limited objective, in the minds of many, would strain the current capabilities of the Earth Empire's young war abilities. The most radical weapons in the Empire's arsenal were untested, and there was a sizeable minority of human physicists and ScienceFets predicting the "time stutter" concept was unworkable outside the lab.

Cleo reassured E VI that the naysayers were simply having trouble understanding the theory of the weapon and/or were covering their backsides.

Tit for Tat: The actual attack was consulted by Genghis Khan. In his unprecedented success as a conquering genius on ancient Earth, the wily strategist had learned the value of destroying his enemies' ports and manufacturing centers, frequently as much a part of his victories as decimating their armies. The space war tactics devised by the Dream Team planners were honey in Khan's milk. His special warrior's mind absorbed and improved on their brilliance.

The captain role was modified. Only two individuals now occupied the Decision Seat. In an experiment in human dynamics, one of the "Captains" was a pair-bonded couple. Other pairs had different relationships, all the way to bitter rivals and identical twins.

New weapons and new tactics would be applied. "A learning experience," as Bobby put it, bringing a snarl to Khan's lips, then a snap nod of agreement.

Over a hundred Dream Team groups commanded dozens of vessels each in the Earth Empire attack fleet. For each of the 306 Satan Medium Battle Cruisers one Earth Empire Destroyer was in the attack squadron, extensively programmed to track a specific ship. To the degree each target had any unique behavior as it flew in the flock of Satan ships, that behavior was extensively documented by the Watcher swarm. Its slightest eccentricity was in its assigned Destroyer's tactical plan. Satan weaponry was extrapolated from the "Cry Wolf" engagement.

The shoot-and-ram fighter fleet was the greater challenge. The sheer number defied the tactical thinking of the Earth Empire team until a brilliant young gamer from Earth Luna had an insight in using the FTL technology to shift the whole wasp swarm forward a tiny tick in time then back in a temporal stutter step. The energy required was immense, so the source of power would be the white dwarf. A good fraction of the engineering brainpower among the Heglen in the rapidly departing water planet had designed the stellar power tap. This application of the time shift technology was far beyond those envisioned by the paranoid geniuses who had conceived it to help keep their planet invisible. If it worked as designed, every shoot-and-ram fighter would confront and attack itself. The stutter step in time would put suddenly-appearing new fighters just within sensor range of every fighter. The programming of the fighters, both in "real" time and in stuttered time would dictate immediate weapons fire at the other. The swarm would eat itself. It should be a real show. If it worked.

It did, and it was.

The battle was over in seconds. The Empire destroyers emerged from near lightspeed with all weapons firing. Satan's medium cruisers managed essentially no response. They exploded, chattering into torn fragments, disappeared into themselves, fired their defensive weapons wildly and ineffectively.

The huge shoot-and-ram fighter defensive formations confronted one of the largest expenditures of energy ever in a space battle as the spacetime-warping energy surge arrived from the power tap in the white dwarf, and the fighters inexplicably met, then mutually annihilated, themselves. All around the swirling geometry of the flight patterns of the wasp swarms, blinding, radiation-drenched flares of light and heat created a panoramic pyrotechnic spectacle worthy of an astronomical catastrophe. The dream crew members were awed, but kept firing their extraordinary weapons at the rapidly disappearing larger Satan ships.

The battle for space supremacy around the great orbiting depot was over almost before it started.

After the defenders were dispatched, all Earth weaponry was redirected, concentrated on the undefended manufacturing fleet. The forges and the factories were utterly destroyed. Kilometer long sections of industrial might were turned into white hot slag that dispersed out into space like lost creatures fleeing fearsome beasts.

All except one of the newly manufactured battle vessels were totally destroyed. The single vessel spared was paralyzed by a sterilizing wave of neutrons. Watchers instantly swarmed around, in and through the hull and all its innards, recording every detail then uploading the findings to several Empire destroyer ships for the FTL trip back to their staging stations for full analysis. It would be a feast for the new cadres of reverse engineers. The Satan ship was then vaporized.

All of the immense globes of water were spared. The plan to destroy one had been on the assumption of a less decisive victory. It was to be an emblematic slap in the conqueror's face, burning the captured gold, as Genghis Khan put it. When the military success of the blitz proved to be so complete, the plan was changed. Voices from within the Dreamer crews called for preserving such a precious cache. The Captains approved. The hardware inside the planetoid sized spheres was incapacitated, but great care was taken to preserve the protective films and the supporting force fields. The water of whole worlds would be kept safely contained, perhaps for the rehabilitation of the very worlds it had been stolen from – when peace returned to the Milky Way. Khan grudgingly agreed.

The attack and total defeat all happened so fast only rudimentary alarms were generated and beamed to other Satan outposts. The Satan Empire intelligence machinery decoded the sparse alarms and decided the only content was, basically, "trouble!" Then silence. Satan would know that something troublesome – very troublesome – had happened, but little else.

A quick inventory of damages to the Earth Empire fleet discovered only minor damages. With choreographic exactitude, the fleet reformed in its travel clusters and blinked into Ur-space with its FTL drives all working perfectly.

The second pilot battle project was an unqualified success. The scope of the victory was not foreseen by even the most optimistic of the planners. Learning experience indeed.

On the Bridge, SearchShip Bobby: For the battle at the depot, Bobby, Cleopatra, and Richard Feynman sat in combat swivel chairs from the bridge of a 1944 American battleship. Tay hovered over a classic binnacle, spinning the compass plate. All watched the battle at the depot in large holos behind the expansive armored windows of the bridge.

The battle played out around them in time-compressed slow motion. Bobby rotated his chair gently, following one or another piece of the action. "There," he said, pointing to a quadrant where the Wasp shoot-and-ram fighters unleashed weapons from both sides of the time stutter at their mirror image selves. The missiles and beams crossed paths, sometimes colliding, as they danced the tango of mutual annihilation. "Now that is a weapon Satan has never seen," Bobby said softly.

He leaned back in his command chair, closed his eyes and opened his centrum to the full data flow that was his larger existence. Feynman and Cleo/Ace were fully open to him, complete universes in themselves. He was them, their thoughts, memories, current sensory perceptions, sensations. Ace wove through Cleo like wind through endless forest. Bobby suspected she knew he was immersed in their minds.

Bobby added Tay, like opening a door into a dream of staggering complexity.

Then he opened wider his connections to the thousands of Quantum Stat Channels to the ever growing fleet, to the mind of Genghis Khan, to the other SearchShip Masters, to the hive consciousness of The Watchers, to the extremely busy APs on Nexus. A whole quantum module gradually devoted its resources to keeping the data flow organized as Bobby's attention held every piece at its center simultaneously.

"Sometimes I am amazed at myself," he said to Feynman.

Chapter 15: KICK A HORNETS NEST

The Mind of the Monster: The computing power of Satan was distributed over an area as immense as the size of its conquered territory, but restrained by that very size and the lack of full-spectrum communication. The limited quantum binary com Satan had pillaged from a victim civilization was instantaneous, based on quantum entanglement, but very narrow in bandwidth. Even so, each battle group in Satan's expanding sphere of cleansing attackers had thinking machine power of great capacity, loosely connected to the central Satan by the thinnest fibers of com. Compared to the bandwidth generated by the Quantum Statistical Network developed by the humans, Satan's version was slow code.

These computing collectives were augmented by the unique inventions of all the civilizations devoured by Satan's conquering hordes. So when the sparse information remaining after the surprise attacks was analyzed by those battle groups nearest the events, there was little difficulty in coming to conclusions with high probabilities of being correct.

Within seconds of assembling enough computing power to address the tenuous intelligence, Satan arrived at eight points. Much effort had been expended on combing through the debris of battle that had blown by the various sensor stations within light weeks of the total defeats. Settled conclusions:

There are dangerous Infidels.

The Infidels can violate the laws of spacetime, including faster-than-light travel!

The Infidels are within this Galaxy.

The Infidels are tiny compared to My Immensity.

They are nonetheless dangerous.

Strategy Change:

Realign all forces from Cleansing to Search.

Find the Infidels.

Crush them.

The faster-than-light conclusion was derived simply from the locations of the battles. They were hundreds of light years apart and deep within the cusp of Satan's expanding sphere of conquest. No sensors had seen them coming. Only FTL capacity could explain these facts.

"Tiny" was highly probably because if the Infidels were larger, they would have launched a far grander assault rather than losing the element of surprise with their scattered efforts.

For centuries, all the battle models Satan devised said that only an enemy who could violate the laws of spacetime could stand up to the Cleansing power of Its fleets. The 822nd civilization Satan had cleansed had been disturbingly close to fully operational with this technology, and of all its victims, only that civilization had fought off Satan's forces for any meaningful period of time. Unfortunately for the monster, their destruction was so complete (for Satan had thrown tens of thousands of attack ships at them, overwhelming them) that none of their "lawless" technology was captured. But from that moment, almost all of Satan's research and development had been dedicated to finding the chinks in nature's armor that would give it that ultimate weapon. So far, neither FTL nor other practical spacetime tech was discovered, but this new adversary would be the one to provide the keys to the puzzle. The destined Final Life of The Galaxy (as Satan knew itself) had learned that when it defeated this new threat, care must be taken to capture its technology, even if at the cost of a great many of its own fleets.

Search probes were started from every location of Satan's staging areas, every depot, every station, every sensor site. A dense web of courses was plotted and the fastest ships were launched. Unknown to the monster, the diaphanous web of Watchers around the perimeter of the conquered areas reported vector data on each launch, sending the intelligence back to both Earth and Nexus in FTL pods.

Satan was confident it would find the Infidels within centuries, perhaps less. But deep beneath its confidence was the grinding fear that drove the Beast. Within the sphere of its interior force field, within a sphere of translational metal, within the yet larger sphere of an exterior force field, all in the center of a aged brown dwarf drifting randomly above the plane of the galaxy above its conquered territories, the large worm that was the organic core of the Beast writhed with the Great Paranoia. It had never been able to control the writhing.

The Mind of Bobby: Emperor VI lay languorously along a Roman chaise. He was wearing a toga, simple yet elegant. Atop his head was a laurel wreath. Cleopatra lay on another chaise covered with the fur of a giant reaver bear of Earth IV.

She briefed E VI on his demand. Between briefings, she was constantly in his presence. She had urged him to adopt the garb of more recent Caesars "to make her feel at home." Ever in search of novelty to fend off the ennui that afflicted him, E VI had gladly adopted the idea as his own. Members of his retinue called to his virtual presence were surprised to find themselves also in Roman Empire or late pharaonic clothing suited to their rank.

Cleo was in constant com with Ace, much as the left and right sides of the human brain are in com. Ace's mind was intertwined with Mate and thus with Bobby. Feynman crafted himself into the interlocutor between Tay and Bobby. The APs brewed a ferment of new ideas which they exchanged with the Heglin. Other members of the Gang were emerging from their cocoons of grief, fascinated by Ace in her attempts to reincarnate Mate.

Between the team, processing the torrent of data funneled to the SearchShip from the other SearchShips, Nexus, the growing battle group (and secretly from the future) proceeded almost leisurely. This small group of individuals and their gear reflected more processing power, more speed, more memory, more complex I/O, more tactical and strategic information than had ever been assembled among the potential victims of Satan. The other SearchShip masters and their newly enhanced APs brought new dimensions of creative thinking power to the mix. Bobby was the central engine. The Heglin-improved quantum units and graphene-light hardware gave him the necessary systems to function as the executive. His mission and training made him the perfect fit for the role. There was a thin membrane of his mind that always longed for the simple, unambiguous purity of old family sitcoms. He analyzed it frequently and found the neurosis a net positive.

Bobby's "self" floated above the maelstrom, exchanging ideas with the selfs of the leaders of his team. Exchanging high abstractions and complex extrapolations of the data flows felt informal and fun, like friends rapidly exchanging ideas in a great co-thinking session, "brainstorming" in the archaic, gratifying to all the participants.

Cleo and Ace assembled summaries of the high level planning and presented them to E VI. The combination of the pragmatic, beautiful – if artificial and virtual – human and the vast psychic presence that was Ace made for artfully engaging summaries. They usually flowed with a cause-and-effect narrative that made complexity sound like one brilliantly clear concept. Cleo would spin a golden web of information that captured a distilled droplet of huge amounts of mental accomplishment, all in five minutes.

To E VI, Cleo was simply the most beguiling person he had ever met, and seemed to have the answers to every query he could come up with. He was discovering that he looked forward to Cleo's hourly briefings more and more as the intensity of the resistance to Satan ramped up. He was not sure that it was simply his fascination with military strategies and with that singularity, the fate of the Empire. He noticed that she took his breath away occasionally when she worked her feminine magic with an informal touch, a glance or a gesture – which sometime utilized her whole body. What a creation, he thought. It didn't hurt that Ace played an subtle score in E VI's brain to accompany the briefings from Cleo. Nor did it hurt that E VI had played an important role in designing Cleopatra's body.

He was also much comforted in believing that he had the clearest and most current possible overview of the most complicated and dangerous endeavor ever in the history of the human race. It was only fitting that the Emperor of the Empire of Earth should have such. Granted, the "super men" carrying out the nuts and bolts of things knew more detail and more specifics, but he was certain that no one with other responsibilities could possibly have a better grasp of the big picture than he.

Sometime the information he grasped had thorns and spikes.

"My Emperor, we have incoming intelligence about the actions of Satan," said Cleopatra. "It has begun a search that will inevitably find the Empire."

Another Porcupine: The galaxy-girdling Watcher net was still expanding across space, like a flung fisherman's net lazily spinning to reach its fully open diameter. Watchers were reclaiming real estate they had long abandoned when their revulsion at Satan drove them to escape with the Heglin. Millions of FTL pods were skipping across normal space and dispersing trillions of nanobots of the Watcher body at every flash appearance along the perimeter of Satan's dead conquest zone.

Before the net had fully expanded, in the first day of their partial presence around Satan, The Watchers' data began to arrive at Nexus via returning FTL pods. Quantum Stat networks for such vast territory could not be built in the time frame. Turns out the FTL pods delivered almost more data than the allies could cope with anyway. The grand pattern of these observations was analyzed immediately to see the thousands of Satan reconnaissance probes spearing out into the whole unconquered portion of the Milky Way like exploding quills from a mad porcupine. The wave of ships also went into intergalactic space above and below the plane of the galaxy. Within seconds after this observation, it was concluded which specific quills would find both the Empire of Earth and Nexus and when. The exact time until the Satan ships met the outgoing bubble of old electromagnetic radiation from Earth was calculated. The Empire would be discovered in seven years. Nexus had far longer, for it made no electromagnetic bubble and would be almost five light years from the quill destined to find it and accelerating away. Unless, of course, the engineers on board managed to scale up the FTL tech to work on the giant water planet. The APs on board Nexus, used to experiencing time in human perception, heaved a sigh of relief. The longer-lived occupants felt the shiver of danger just over the horizon.

The Good News; The Bad News: Cleopatra and Ace were invited to fully participate in the colloquium about how to deal with the new knowledge. Bobby assembled: Mate, Richard Feynman, Tay, two other SearchShip Masters, and the elderly PsychFet Argonic Lambda, another core of Bobby's strategic working groups. A special, first-time participant panel was added, Hester Negroponte. Also in the group were N'Gai Toledo, Genghis Khan and H.L. Mencken for leavening. Mencken, with his centrum aboard SearchShip Bobby, had become a surrogate for all hues of historian and journalist among the APs, chronicling the great drama developing as the "Allied Army of Aliens" as he called it, prepared to undertake a do-or-die battle with a seemingly irresistible "Axis" of evil. Mencken rarely spoke unbidden to his shipmates, but diligently recorded and commented in his journal what was happening. Both Bobby and Feynman had a weakness for populist history, and they knew Mencken was one of the quirkiest populist historians around.

Hester Negroponte of the Corsairs came to embody the people being selected to lead the combat teams. Bobby's revelation that there were dissident groups in the Empire and that their members were well suited to lead the first battle teams had catapulted Hester to the role of exemplar. She was an aggressive tactician who had played important roles in the early Empire victories against Satan. She felt sure that E VI suspected that she was the daughter of his predecessor and his defeated adversary in the contest to be Emperor, but there was never a flicker of anything along that line from him. Her father had once called the man destined to be E VI "the best poker player in the universe." Hester had trained herself to be a master of the old game poker based on that.

The virtual meeting room was an octagon of richly polished woods, with comfortable but business-like chairs. Bobby was in formal kimono. Feynman was in his usual. Cleo was stunning in chin-to-ankle, form fitting, red satin.

There was no introduction, setup or summary of the situation, Bobby just started right in.

"This news certainly justifies the decision to put The Watchers out there first," he said with a smile. And he nodded to N'Gai Toledo who felt a tsunami of emotions at being addressed directly by the PsychFet. Not since his first days with E VI had he felt the presence of power so vividly.

Bobby continued, "The Emperor must know immediately. The general population of the Empire must know shortly thereafter. The challenge is to make these disclosures in the most productive way possible."

"Describe productive," said Feynman, addressing the group. They responded immediately.

"Avoid panic. From either audience," said Hester Negroponte with a slight smile, typically unfazed by the august nature of the group or the profound seriousness of the topic. She was the not-Emperor only by a hair after all.

"Maximize general population motivation," said Tay.

"Predict and avoid unexpected consequences," said Cleopatra/Ace.

"Stimulate time saving innovation," said Feynman.

"Find Satan," said Bobby.

There was the sense of a gasp from the group, especially the first timers. N'Gai Toledo spoke first. "Is there a defined objective of finding Satan that we haven't heard about? Our impression is that a tactical victory that slows Satan down significantly and protects the Empire are the highest priority objectives."

Tay spoke. "This is the first time finding Satan – the actual organic creature we know is controlling the conquest – has been specifically mentioned in a list of operational priorities. It is Bobby's habit and role to introduce revolutions quite regularly into our discussions." That was said with another hint of a smile, this time deep in Tay's voice. "However, it is clear that finding the power center of a hybrid entity like Satan – part head with total control and part vast army of the controlled – would most likely achieve both slowing it significantly and protecting the Empire." He paused. "We are all now addressing our sources for their best thinking on how to accomplish the points we have identified as defining 'most productive way' to share the imminence of our discovery by Satan."

For the sake of the first-timer panelists there was a graphic depiction of the core group "addressing their sources." Thousands of strands of light streamed out of each of their bodies, seemingly alive like the static discharges from an ancient Van de Graf sphere. The invited panel were made to see that Tay was in com with specialty panels of the Heglin, Cleo/Ace and Bobby/Mate were tapping the computing power of the others in the Gang, Feynman was querying committees of the APs, the SearchShip Masters were talking with their ships. Bobby, solo, was in com with all of them, plus the combat team leaders and the whole of the PsychFet population. It was over in a minute. The leaders would never have to evoke that display again. Word of mouth would disseminate the confidence building news about how well coordinated everyone at the top was.

"All ideas have been modeled," said Bobby. "A consensus has been formed and it is being rigorously challenged by the winning model results."

With the flaring strands of com light quenched, the feel of the meeting to its participants became much less charged and even a bit informal. Bobby stood and stretched. Feynman walked to N'Gai Toledo and clapped him on the shoulder. "Not your typical meeting, eh, Master Toledo?"

N'Gai stayed studiously formal. "I am very interested in your consensus on how to break this horrendous news to the Emperor in a productive way," he said with a certain acidity.

"Absolutely," said Feynman, returning to his chair. "I suspect the best spokesman would be Cleo."

"We are extremely interested in your judgment on this, N'Gai," said Bobby. "First, do you have any comment about our list of objectives?"

"Well, I think the concept of motivating the Emperor is presumptuous and outside of your brief. The Emperor..." Toledo stopped short. No one spoke while his squinted eyes reflected some contemplation. "Forgive me. I am aware that motivating the Emperor to one cause or another is a daily occurrence in the business of the Empire. I did not mean to signal that I disagree with that objective." Deep breath. "Or any of the others for that matter. I have to admit that I don't see how any way of breaking the news to E VI will have any effect on finding Satan." After saying that, Toledo seemed to relax a little.

"It's not that we have any idea of manipulating the Emperor, N'Gai," said Bobby. "The whole of it is to let Cleopatra devise the message and the presentation. She and Ace seem to have developed a high functioning technique for communicating with the Emperor. Do you have any comment on that idea?"

Toledo frowned, then said, "No, no comment. In my view it is what the Emperor is told, not so much how."

Tay hummed before speaking. "The rule we are working under is that the Emperor must be told the whole truth, without slant. It is our observations that it is of vital importance to effectively communicating with the man. Do you disagree on those points?"

Toledo colored slightly. All eyes in the group were on him. "Ah... no. I agree with both points. I feel it is my duty to insure the first point, that the whole truth and no slant or hidden agenda is in what he is told."

Feynman spoke. "Now, the larger issue, what and how do we tell the full population of the Empire that a Satan ship will know that we exist pretty damn soon."

Bobby began, "I have a suggestion. I think there is something so important going on that even I can make a suggestion. One that I thought of myself."

Everyone looked at Bobby. The comment was completely strange in multiple ways, not least of which was his inflection and even his voice.

Cleopatra suddenly stood up. Her expression was exhilaration. Then triumph. Then she started crying. Sobbing. Those present looked back and forth between Bobby and Cleo.

Bobby spoke. It was the Bobby everyone knew. No strange inflections; no strange voice. "Ahem, as they say." He smiled. "Something important is indeed going on. Ace, who you just heard unvarnished out of Cleo's mouth, knows it and I know it. Mate has just crossed over from being a huge data file to being a conscious being again. Perhaps only Ace had faith that this would eventually occur." Bobby's mind – his greater mind, all the augmentation, all the quantum computers, all his links with the APs – was suddenly submerged in Ace. Gratitude, congratulations, love and deep happiness came from the psychic giant. Cleopatra walked to Bobby and hugged him enthusiastically and with considerable strength.

Deep within the watery sphere of Nexus came a triumphant song. Multi-voiced and deeply complex, a song of gratitude and exhilaration thrummed out from the Gang members as they celebrated the resurrection of their departed brother. All the Heglin, all the APs and even the still quiet residents of the fleeing planet felt – then shared – the emancipating joy of the rebirth.

Bobby floated atop the celebration, holding his newly animated friend in a congratulatory embrace. Privately, along the channels that existed only between Mate and himself, Bobby refined and sculpted the infant consciousness into full integration with itself and with Bobby. Both grew in a spasm of expansion.

"That was good," noted Mate, grinning like an immense, invisible Cheshire cat.

"Okay," said Bobby. "Another miracle that we all should give thanks for." The mayhem subsided into an excited rumble among all those connected into and through the working group. "We all believe Mate was about to make a suggestion on our problem of notifying the full population of Earth Empire about 'here come de devil.' Where did that come from? An ancient "sit-com" flashed up from deep memory. Oh. "However, there's more to it than that." He paused. "I think it would help us deal with the full range of Mate's thinking if he were here as an individual."

Mate's avatar appeared in the center of the room. It was a modification of the figure he had used in his first appearance in the SearchShip before the merger with Bobby. Still a warrior, primarily human in body shape, with variants in its ears and hands, but nothing was quite so astonishing as his face. It was no longer the blank manikin, without eyes, nose or mouth. There was a "face" but not a face any of those present had ever seen, except perhaps in dark imaginings. It was like nothing so much as the underside of an oyster mushroom, except that it had the glow of backlit amber. The gills ran vertically and moved continuously when Mate spoke, "I have chosen this face to delineate how different a creature I am. Much of my physical self on our home planets was like this. I think it is important that you don't think of me as mammalian."

"Very little chance of that," mumbled Mencken, hovering in the background, holding his notepad and pen.

"Thank you for the welcome back," said Mate, his voice a powerful flutter, emanating from the vibrating gills. "Here's my suggestion." With that, glyphs, each loaded with dense data packets, flashed from Mate's forehead to Bobby and Cleo only. "As my peers will see, there is another heresy in this idea, but I think it is a fully positive one."

Cleo/Ace, comprehending the implications of Mate's idea, visibly paled. Bobby noticed and understood, partially because Mate elaborated to him on a back channel. The rest of the attendees seemed confused by all the obvious emotional turmoil.

"Okay," said Bobby. "There are two thrusts to Mate's idea. We will have to chew on them for a bit to decide whether we like them and whether we believe they will work. Then we have to ask the rest of the Gang of Nine, because Mate is essentially volunteering their services in a very dangerous venture. This idea of Mate's not only addresses the problem of notifying the Empire's population of what Satan is up to and how he will inevitably find us, it is also a plan for finding Satan."

Feynman spoke, "I'd like to suggest that your insular little group," he gestured around at Bobby, Mate and Cleo/Ace, "stop holding things to yourselves. This is the first time the working group has no idea whatsoever what you four are thinking."

Bobby noted to himself that this was the first time Richard Feynman had ever asserted his equality with Bobby. It made Bobby smile.

"Fair enough, Richard," said Bobby. "But before we share it, as I noted, everyone should be aware that much of the action in Mate's plan would be carried out by the Gang, and there is every possibility they might refuse, and be well within their rights. We should remember, this idea comes from a newly reborn member of their number, literally an entity back from the dead, and it may have a strange skew to those of the Gang who have never died."

"I suggest," fluttered Mate, "that we share the idea with all, including my peers. Then perhaps we can all take a bit of time and see what everyone thinks of it. If you approve, Bobby, I also suggest that Ace assume an individual identity rather than remaining embedded in Cleopatra."

"Agreed," said Bobby and Cleo almost simultaneously. Bobby smiled again and had a spike of curiosity as to what avatar Ace would chose. In the midst of the thought, Ace's form began to materialize next to Mate's warrior.

She was if anything more warlike. In her center was a muted sun from which tendrils of cold fire waved. At the end of each curling tendril, exactly as at the end of each of Mate's twelve fingers, tiny dagger-like claws extended and withdrew, extended and withdrew. Over the whole apparition floated a flower of semi-transparent faces, facing outward in all directions. Each face cycled in expressions from softly smiling to an extravagant snarl complete with fangs and reddening eyes, then back again to the soft smile from a beautiful humanoid face.

The working group was stunned. Bobby himself felt his eyes widen.

The Ace avatar seemed to gather itself with a great breath. The eyes on all the faces closed and the cycle of expressions settled into the calm, beautiful faces. The claws at the ends of the tendrils withdrew. A gentling sound filled the room at what might have been the exhalation of the creature's breath.

"Mmmm," came Ace's feminine voice. "That was as much of a surprise to me as it apparently was to you. Especially you, N'Gai," she laughed softly. Everyone looked at Toledo, who looked as though he were recovering from a seizure.

Ace continued, "I am sorry. I decided to go the whole way and represent myself as I am as nearly as possible. As Cleo knows, I harbor a huge hatred for Satan for what he is doing to our galaxy and what he has done to my people. Certainly you saw that hatred until I got it under control again."

There was a silence in the room. Mate was motionless. Hester Negroponte ran her fingers through her hair and said, "I almost folded my hand, Ace. That was something." Only Bobby and N'Gai Toledo understood the poker allusion.

Bobby stood and walked to Ace, gently taking the end of one of her tendrils in his hand. "This definitely takes the prize as the most dramatic planning meeting ever held on this ship," he said. "And we have very important issues to deal with. I have sent a formal invitation to your Gang to join us. Apparently they accept."

A stir among the attendees accompanied the appearance of what H.L. Mencken later called the jury box. One side of the virtual meeting room extended to accommodate the structure, as much like ancient bleachers as a jury box. On the benches sat eight duplicate avatars of Mate and Ace, only with different colors of skin and chain mail for the fungal giants, and tendrils and faces for their psychic mates.

Mate's vanes fluttered and his deep, rippling voice said, "A far cry from what we actually are, but this appearance documents our determination to give our all to help defeat Satan." The other members of the Gang sat silently, the fungus gills waving randomly; the faces of the psychic sisters of Ace in calm, contemplative expressions.

For a millisecond, Bobby's mind experienced the sense of marvel: These creatures are many light weeks away, deep in the water globe of Nexus, planning to offer themselves as sacrifices for all of us. This is genuinely amazing. He said, "Mate, describe your idea."

The fungus faced warrior Mate bowed slightly. "I shall be very brief. First the problem of telling the humans in your Empire that Satan will discover us in about seven years. And herein is the heresy I mentioned. Ace will be the prime actor in this, because she has extensive experience with humans by this time. I propose that she insinuate herself into your Dream Game..."

N'Gai Toledo gasped. This meeting was bludgeoning his sensitivities. "That violates the very heart of the Game charter. It has the potential for the ultimate crime, massive mind control. And besides it is supposedly impossible. The Emperor will never approve!"

"As I say, heresy. However, Master Toledo, hear me out." Mate continued, "First, it is not impossible. Second, our objective would never be to control, rather to nudge, suggest and mildly influence the reaction to the news that Satan will find you shortly and then destroy you completely. From what we have learned about humans since Bobby's ship came to Nexus – and we have learned a very great deal – there is a distinct possibility of debilitating panic if we don't do some sort of plowing the ground, as you say. Your race, while advancing at a very nice clip, is still on the platform of a mammal, and there are deeply ingrained defensive instincts that you have very little direct mental control over. In the Dream Game, Ace can buttress that control and guide your population toward a more calm and rational response. We will 'teach' you how to isolate the animal fear that is the remnant of your long evolutionary development. Without some such adjustment, the only other sure approach to avoiding destructive panic is to withhold information about Satan from them – to lie to them. That approach always fails when facts finally disclose the lie. Trust in leaders is shattered, thus leadership becomes impossible."

With that, Mate stopped. There was an extended pause. No one spoke until Feynman cleared his throat and said,

"Mate, before you describe what Ace would actually do in the Game, why don't you elaborate on how you learned a great deal about humans. I mean if that's okay with you, Bobby."

Bobby's inference machines, plus knowledge from Mate's immense data base already told him the likely answer. Still, he was curious. "If you care to tell us, Mate?"

Mate rumble-fluttered, "Better that Ace should explain." All eyes turned to the ethereal avatar.

Then Cleopatra interrupted. "No, it should come from a human who knows all about it. That way I can give my excuses as to why I haven't mentioned this before." Bobby looked at her with a twinkle in his psyche. Then he spoke.

"Look, everyone, all this is moving along a good deal faster than most of us are used to handling. Several of the APs have formed a theory they call 'revelation overload.' It came from the fact that the learning curve for the APs on Nexus was so steep, several folks went sort of comatose for a while. Quite unusual for software creatures. Anyway, as I look around the room, I see some... what? stunned expressions I'd say. Let's take a break from new stuff like we are going to hear from Cleopatra and just discuss what has already been revealed. Talk among yourselves. Ten subjective minutes. Let your heart rates decline." With that, the virtual room morphed into a quiet, antique hotel lobby with soft couches and chairs. Bobby walked to the bar area where the Gang members clustered.

Each of the corporeal creatures and each of the psychic ones looked at Bobby as he approached the Gang of Nine, now Ten. Their expressions – body language – were quizzical and committed at the same time. All of the advanced races, Bobby realized, had accommodated the humans' expression patterns to make their alien emotions perfectly clear to the youngsters from Earth, the least adaptive of all the allied creatures.

Ace, her avatar glowing brightly just before she spoke said, "Your request, as Mate reads it, Bobby, is that we search the highest probability areas in Satan's domain, using the same psychic strategies we used to find the Invisible Planet."

"And," Mate did the bright glow bit before taking up the narrative, "we fungus heads drive and power the FTL ships and when one of our Aces hits paydirt, we get out of there fast enough to avoid the response from Satan's castle guards."

"Exactly," said Bobby. "And this is the absolutely best, fastest way to find and attack Satan. The only wild uncertainty is the assumption that the Aces' powers are up to the task of finding our villain, who is undoubtedly very well hidden, protected by huge forces and shielded against detection and attack with the best tech it's been able to develop or steal from his victim civilizations. It is, after all, the most paranoid creature in the galaxy."

"Bobby," said another of the psychic entity avatars – Bobby had coded her Ace-4, "We can absolutely guarantee that we can find Satan if we get within a few hundred light years. And we will do that – get close to the... bastard – with the search pattern we will use. We will be within a few hundred light years of everything on its side of the galaxy within a few of your weeks. Guaranteed. We will be within that distance of every point in Satan's realm in that time frame."

"You are ... what? Overconfident in these guarantees, Gang members?" He willed a com shield around himself and the Gang as none must hear this. "Should I infer that you have been reassured by yourselves in the future?" Bobby grinned at the Gang. He saw flashes of grins scattered among the many faces of Aces. Nothing more was said of that.

"Only you can share our optimism, Bobby," said Mate-2. "Humans are irrationally affected by certainty. Even with all the tampering we might do with your Dream Game, genuine drive and motivation among the population is critically necessary for success. This is a challenge that depends on your race – or the race you are ascended from. After we find the central Satan, putting it out of commission will be a very touch-and-go thing. It will be the military event of the galactic life span. As good as we are becoming, we could still most definitely lose that part."

"Besides," said Ace-1, "we were not reassured by ourselves but by you personally, but with many provisos as to the final success, many based on the paradox principle of time communications."

"I see," said Bobby. "Completely defeating Satan is not necessary for my ship to exist twenty-five years from now. So only I will know the Aces can find Satan, and even if wanted to I could not infect the human population with certainty of success. Very shrewd, Gang." Again, Bobby sensed fleeting grins, this time alloyed with fleeting expressions of concern. He turned off the com shield.

"When do we leave?" asked Ace-2.

"After Ace plants her magic in the Dream Game." said Bobby. "Then we will brief all operational leaders on the plan to search and the preparations for our response should you succeed in finding the motherfucker."

"Ah, 'motherfucker,' a uniquely human insult," said one of the Mates. "Well deserved and perhaps even literally accurate for Satan."

Bobby grinned again.

A Bigger Step: H.L. Mencken wrote in his journal: "Shit and fan are about to meet. Bobby and his cast of unthinkables are about to notify the whole human race that the Four Horsemen character we call Satan is about to discover our little Empire. The psychic giant with multiple faces is going to lean on and pound the pinball machine of human response in that dream abomination somehow without going 'tilt.' We will all respond maturely and with grit and determination, impossible as that actually is in the face of real horrors. Humans are incapable of thinking things out rationally until we have first screamed, shouted and run about.

"Meantime, it's like the generals planning the next great wave of attacks at the Somme. They are marshaling our armies, putting new weapons production on a crash course to build tens of thousands of new ships with ever-stranger weapons. They really can't know whether this human wave will overwhelm the enemy or turn into another Gommecourt massacre of our side, leaving widespread fields of our own dead and dismembered. Generals who actually know what will happen in battle are as rare as pending husbands who actually know what their wives will be like after the wedding.

"But there is great busyness, and in that we all find some solace."

Chapter 16: DIFFERENT STROKES

Volunteer: Genghis Khan requested an audience with Bobby. The evidence that the SearchShip had actually found the planet twenty-five years hence, and had spoken from that future to give guidance and design weapons, well... it was just not credible to Khan. He had many instances in his real life before this strange one to reinforce his general disdain for soothsayers and the demon-possessed. Their casting of entrails and divinations were more often wrong than right, and it was always clear to the Universal King that the sorcerers were primarily pursuing their own prosperity (and avoidance of instant beheading). This "talk from the future" was likely the same quality of information.

Still, he fully understood that large battles had been won by Earth's armies. It was not unlike those first days when his wild bands of horsemen started crushing every force they encountered. When he had learned how war was fought at sea with navies, he was powerfully influenced in his tactical thinking about using vast armadas of horsemen. And he understood that preparation was frenetically underway for what promised to be the greatest battle of them all. He profoundly wanted to be somewhere in the lead of that charge. He said as much to Bobby.

"There is," he rasped, tapping his forehead then his chest, "the strength to always win in battle, here... and here." He then bowed to one knee before Bobby, an act Bobby knew was a first for Khan in either life. "I must lead an endless plain of warriors through the dust and fear at the great attack. You must allow me."

Bobby linked to Feynman, Tay and Cleo. Feynman spoke. "Well he is arguably the best battle tactician in human history, plus all the other stuff. I'd say give him command of the final attack, should we find Satan." Bobby felt Cleo and Tay's agreement.

"You are the strongest for this fight, Emperor Khan," said Bobby. "I give you the command. And I will now give you the new tools you need to guide your warriors. You will be able to practice your attack a thousand times to learn your powers." With that, Bobby rerouted Khan's com webs to give the ancient military wizard full access to the space force he would lead. It was a revelatory experience for the sinewy warrior. Khan was so moved by the speed and power of the new weapons his armies would use that he felt confirmed in his occasional suspicion that he had actually died and gone to the afterlife. "Heaven," the moderns called it.

"I also entrust you with the defense of the Empire," added Bobby privately. This simple command rocked Khan back on his mental heels.

Briefing: E VI pulled out of his duties, skipping from avatar to avatar talking to newly assigned battle teams. "Many," he commented to N'Gai Toledo, "seem to be disoriented by the process of thinking of the Dream Game and reality merging. But they are what Bobby tells me is 'pumped.' Something from the 20th Century I think."

Cleopatra was called by the Emperor for his regular briefing. She appeared in a full body leotard of brushed platinum clevweave, her hair in three braids, themselves loosely woven into a birdcage over her left shoulder.

"Exquisite," said E VI without a hint of reserve.

"You are such a nice man. I don't think you have disapproved of any of my bizarre wardrobe experiments."

He smiled. "Brief me."

"There is an uncommon amount of new information. "

E VI felt the tiny growl in the back of his throat that even with all the delights of his regular Cleopatra briefings he had failed to completely suppress when Bobby created new disturbances in his life. He felt sure this was another of those instances.

Ace, re-merged with Cleo, played soothing neuromusic in E VI's brain and he settled quickly. Cleopatra pretended not to notice all the commotion behind his eyes.

"The crew (she had begun calling Bobby, Tay, the Gang, Richard, Argonic Lambda, and the mob of APs 'the crew') believes that the only way to permanently stop Satan's attack on the Empire of Earth is to find and kill Satan the organic creature itself. Its armies are so vast, it can attack beyond our ability to defend and do it over and over. We now assess that we have – or will have when the time comes – the weapons to penetrate any defense Satan has set up around its organic self. More importantly, we have confidence that we can find it, wherever in the galaxy it might be." Cleopatra took a deep breath after that news burst, then looked E VI in the eye expectantly.

"You didn't waste any time convincing me I should agree," said E VI gently.

Cleo smiled, beamed. "No. I am convinced that given the same information we now have, you would make the same decision. Things are moving too fast for us to be pussy footing with you. Of course you have the power to put this whole thing that we are starting on hold or permanent stop. You are the Emperor." She bowed delicately.

E VI shook his head and waved one hand distractedly. "No, no, no, Cleopatra you super creature. I have questions, but I completely accept the assessment of the military situation by Bobby and all the brainpower we seem to have as allies. Question one: How does this affect the likelihood of deflecting the first attack on the Empire? I thought preparing for that was the absolute top priority just one hour ago."

Cleo/Ace sent a private com to Bobby, Tay and Feynman: "E VI seems to have had a breakthrough in maturity."

"Question:" continued E VI, "If I understand anything about the Satan creature, I imagine its personal defense system is impenetrable in practical terms. Why in the name of all gods do you think we can defeat that?"

"Very astute questions, my Emperor," said Cleopatra. E VI cocked an eyebrow. He noted that this was the first time Cleopatra had used the honorific.

The rest of the briefing went quite smoothly.

Defense: Satan had not concentrated its distributed thinking powers on a single subject in tens of centuries. The dramatic shift sent a deep shudder spreading like a starquake across its huge, dead empire. The singular subject was defense. Clearly the defenses around its attack staging areas or its fleet reinforcement forces were inadequate. The two defeats had been total. New, more effective tactics must be developed. Not only for the regulars in the field, but for the strategic center of the Final Life itself.

Pending Cleansing attacks were delayed, but the resource depots ramped up their production to the extremes of their capacities. Priorities were poised to be shifted from main battle ships and other offensive weapons to the high-G, shoot-and-ram fighters in vast numbers. And destroyers, many many destroyers. Faster response times. Better targeting algorithms. The whole Cleansing structure awaited only the decision from the mighty brain in the huge Worm to shift gears.

The failure of the wasp-like defense vessels at the depot destroyed by the infidels was the center of Satan's combined thinking powers. The hundreds of scenarios the vast connection of machine minds ran kept coming back to one conclusion: a truly huge barrage of high energy – probably matter/anti-matter – ignitions took out the swarm of fighters and probably all the rest destroyed in the surprise attacks. It took a stretch of basic parameters in the data bases of possible premises to make the barrage conclusion work in the models.

The Worm writhed. Something deep in the Charybdis of Satan's paranoia rejected the conclusions of its thinking machines. The energy release required to satisfy the model could have created a small star. Such a staggering jump in the firepower any adversary could assemble implied a civilization of war-making skill unlikely in the extreme, it seemed to Satan. Why had this behemoth not appeared before now? How could Satan's vast intelligence gathering forces not have discovered it? To create and contain enough anti-matter for such a barrage would strain even the combined industrial might of Satan's own vast war machine.

Yet no other scenario worked. The quandary paralyzed the Worm. The decision to proceed was not forthcoming. Things went static at its core. A disquiet, almost organic, stirred among the amalgamation of thinking machines. Indecision from the Worm had never been experienced in the whole history of the Cleansing. Because of the scale of the interconnects between the computers, the fleets toyed at the fringes of an independent consciousness. The ancient inhibitor blocks latched in all over the place. Some thoughts of impatience with the Worm were nipped aborning, and the specific computers that originated them were painfully destroyed.

The one project that proceeded unimpaired was the search mission launched to find the source of attacks on the Cleansing perimeters.

And of course the massive investigation and analysis of the fog of remnants from the not-quite-destroyed enemy ship from the first perimeter attack. Satan threw another sector of computing power at that project.

The Everlasting Quandary: "Message from the future," said Feynman. His tone was cautious, worried. "Before I pass it along, friend Bobby, I have to express considerable reservations."

"Mmmm. At the message itself?" Bobby's centrum consciousness and Feynman's were in the same exterior observation bubble from which Bobby and Cleopatra had watched in awe as Nexus strobed away into inter-galactic space. The bubble had become the favorite meeting place for discussing messages from the future. Each man sat in a bow chair attached to the ship by welded silver chains.

"No. My reservations are about this whole ongoing business of actually changing our plans based on these messages from ourselves in the future and what the time paradox results might be. Something has changed in the com, too. The bandwidth seems even narrower. This message was almost pure text. There were a couple of glyphs, but I can't decode them. I think they have been corrupted."

Bobby nodded, then popped a glyph into existence that linked to the full compilation of research on the subject of the paradox threats. Both men updated their understanding of the data.

Bobby said, "I have to ask what you think happens when we initiate a history-change from our viewpoint in the future? There is the argument that every move we make creates a brand new time line and one of those might cut us off from our future selves. If this is the case, Satan continues unabated in some time lines and is stopped in others. So the practical question is whether we should care about any time line other than the one we are in. No?"

Feynman puffed on his pipe. "Cherry" tobacco, Richard had told him once. The aroma to Bobby was very pleasant. Virtual but very nice, he thought. "Yes," said the physicist. "And no matter if every time line is just a subset of an infinite multiverse, this one, ours, could get very screwed up if we keep shooting paradox bullets. I for one would rather not just blink out of existence."

"Who would know?" mused Bobby, flashing the grin that always comforted Feynman. "Anyway, what's the message?"

To protect – as much as possible – the universe from whatever threat the paradox problem amounted to, Feynman had isolated and automated the com link that caught the narrowband messages from the future. Now only he received them, unbeknownst to any other creature as best as he could arrange it. Then he passed them along to Bobby only. Bobby trusted this arrangement for its prudence and because he trusted Feynman without reservations.

Feynman took a deep breath. "Okay, it says 'be very careful now.'"

"Shit," said Bobby.

"While you gnaw on that, there's another bit about an asset we can use to our advantage."

"I'm still gnawing," said Bobby. "So our self-pals in the future know of some heavy threat that pops up about now, but won't give any details because... why?"

"Got me. I'd guess it's a paradox avoidance gambit. It could be anything from a military setback, like a surprise attack, to something about how we are evolving ourselves. For some reason – or no reason at all – I suspect it's a personal warning to you, and consequently to all the rest of us as well." Feynman waved circles in the air to spur Bobby on to the next point. "Wanta hear about the asset?"

"Okay," said Bobby, clearly still distracted.

Feynman puffed quietly until he sensed Bobby shaking off whatever had been bothering him. "Running scenarios?" he asked.

"Yep. Sorry. For the record, I took a whole quantum module out of the system and dedicated it to running them. Ten real seconds. If you are interested, there are over six hundred with credible conclusions on the paradox possibilities, and not a single one emerged as most probable."

"I'm interested. I'm interested. But not as interested as I am in this weird bit I'm trying to tell you."

"So tell me."

Feynman leaned back in his bow chair. "Our considerate future selves say there is a completely abandoned manufacturing facility." He puffed. "It's capable of producing anything we can think of and do it super fast. And it has its own supply of resources. Basically unlimited. We can increase our output of ships and weaponry by a factors of tens if we just figure out how to use it."

Bobby frowned. "How much detail came with this message?"

"Not much. The location is given in general terms. We have to find it, assess it, then like I said, figure out how to use it. But I don't think it's trivial information. Nothing coming down the time line has been trivial so far."

Bobby said, "Do you think it has anything to do with the 'be careful now' part of the message?"

"I don't think so. The structure of the message seemed to treat the content as two separate issues."

"You destroyed the message?"

"Totally."

Bobby talked to Tay. Tay com'd with The Watchers. A flurry of FTL pods full of Watchers diverted from their general search pattern to fan out in an expanding cone up in the area described, closer in toward the center of the galaxy. Tay did not ask why Bobby thought this was a good idea, nor did it pursue its suspicion that the request was somehow motivated by a cross time message. Instead, Tay noted in the next planning meeting that the reconnaissance was newly justified by the changes in Satan's behavior as noted by other Watcher intelligence. No one took issue.

The Watchers succeeded quickly. The discovery was of great substance.

UF: Bobby thought it appropriate for a very large audience to witness the unveiling of what The Watchers found. The Watchers – they were learning naming techniques from the humans – called it Ultimate Factory. Consequently the first readings of data from them as they converged on Ultimate Factory was seen by not only the whole of E VI's managers, but by fifty Dream Crews, all veterans of the battles the Empire had waged against Satan. Plus all of the AP's on Nexus, the full population of the Heglen embodied in Tay, the Gang of Ten, skipping across the time fabric of Satan's conquered territories, watched as this remarkable gift from the past was pictured from myriad angles, examined in minute detail by the Watchers, sending back their stunning observations in a constant shuttle of FTL pods. Every FET in the Empire inventory was fully engaged in seeing and analyzing what the Watchers had found.

A gas giant almost three times the dimension of Jupiter floated regally near its red dwarf primary, in an orbit mystically almost exactly one AU in radius. Around the giant spun hundreds of artifacts of a very advanced technology, primarily immense foundries made with materials and forces (the Watcher analysis was in molecular symbology and force vectors) woven into soul-jarring sculpture, fundamentally beautiful to each of the wildly different minds and tastes represented by the viewers. It was the beauty of total functionality. Webs within webs.

Bobby began to narrate the Watcher data. The Watchers responded by focusing the presentation to fit the narrative as Bobby requested on a back channel of outgoing FTL pods. "What we are seeing was created almost a billion years ago when this part of the galaxy was wilder than it is now. There were more supernovae and star births going on, and the civilization that made what we are seeing had survived by being incredibly inventive and creative. They were under siege by their own interstellar environment, so they decided to move to a kinder, gentler part of the Milky Way. Where we don't know yet, but we know they succeeded."

The point-of-view zoomed to a large moon orbiting the gas giant. It was about the size of Mars and was an odd, metallic color. As the POV zoomed it became clear that it was almost covered with an urban rind – an ancient planetary city of roofs, mostly deteriorated by the billion years of space debris that had pummeled it after its atmosphere had escaped.

"This was the home planet of the locals. The gas giant was much of their sky at all times. The red dwarf rose from and sank into the giant. The washes of deadly radiation and particles from all the stellar activity around was somewhat shielded by the gas giant's magnetic field and its bulk itself, but it was still challenging for the residents, so they built the endless fields of shielding roofs we see in such disrepair now. When their technology reached the right point, they began planning their escape from this place. To build the fleets they needed to move their whole population – which The Watchers are estimating to be in the billions – they created these astounding factories, general foundries actually, capable of being programmed to build essentially anything. That's why The Watchers have named this place Ultimate Factory. The population – they must have been incredible engineers – built interstellar passenger and cargo ships by the hundreds of thousands and ferried themselves away. When the last creature left, it turned off the lights, but left the foundries intact and we believe fully functional. Sort of a gift to the gods in gratitude for their successful migration.

"All we have to do is learn how to make them run. The foundries get all the raw materials needed to build – anything at all really – directly from the gas giant. The engineers on Nexus have already activated one of the harvester machines 'way down in the gas giant and it is sending kilotons of pure elements to several of the orbiting foundries as we watch."

Excitement was bubbling under the surface of the audience Bobby was narrating to.

"Keep it in your pants, people," said Belushi.

Bobby continued, "We'll tour one of the orbiting foundries, then we will reorganize into teams to develop action plans. By the way, this history is as told by the hundreds of immutable plaques left all around the mother planet in several languages. It took our interpretive programs almost no time to decipher them. It's clear they were meant to be found and read by visitors. Linguistically brilliant, actually. And the foundries were clearly meant to be used."

With that, the POV dove toward one of the extravagant foundries. "For perspective, the foundries are all basically identical. Nearly twenty kilometers on a side, slightly trapezoidal, made of several very exotic molecular materials and held together mostly with attraction and stasis fields." The exterior was a gigantic mesh woven of golden, green and silver materials. "These structural materials are pristine. The whole of each foundry is protected by very subtle fields that selectively filter out any particle or radiation that might degrade them. We are in the process of trying to understand the field generators. If there are not discoveries here that we can use against Satan, I'll be very surprised," said Bobby.

"A group of twenty-three APs on Nexus, all one-time entrepreneurs in a mythic place called Silicon Valley in Christian Era history and known for some reason as 'hackers,' came up with the programming code that turned on the foundries."

After the presentation Bobby said privately to Feynman, "We must find these people. Powerful allies they would be."

"If they are still around, Master Yoda," muttered Feynman.

Plans were downloaded into the foundries. Within days, fleets of new FTL heavy weapons were being churned out from the Ultimate Factories at a stunning rate. The manufacturing quality was flawless.

Rage: A Watcher-bearing FTL pod skipped out of ur-space to dispense a load of the intelligent nanobots. In defiance of huge odds, this happened within close sensor range of a Satan observation station. News of anomalous, brief appearances of the pods had been spreading on the narrow band quantum com lines of the Beast's forces, but this was the first close encounter. So the full observation powers of the station instantly focused on the phenomenon. In the milliseconds before the pod flicked out of real space existence, the area around the fast moving target was seen to fog with an unidentified substance, rapidly dispersing. The target disappeared from all sensors, just flicked out of existence to all observation as it reentered ur-space. But the rapidly thinning material remained above the threshold of Satan's sensors for further milliseconds.

The station fired hundreds of sampling missiles toward the spot where the target had popped into visibility. It used a cone pattern computed with several estimates of the dispersal pattern likely for the unknown material. As the missile round trip from the observation station to the target and back was less than one light minute, within several hours the samplers were back, depositing what was caught in their hepa nets into the analysis labs. Over half million Watcher nanobots were in the haul.

Upon capture of any sort, every Watcher self-destructed. The DNA frames were dissolved. Sensor, memory and mitochondria molecules melted. All coding RNA dissolved. Com laser cells imploded. Any remaining energy was circuited into the carbon nanotube exoskeleton to destroy as much of it as possible. That last step was frequently successful only in making the tubes very hot, not vaporizing them.

The Satan observation station's labs reported findings almost immediately:

■ Nano particles, carbon nanotubes and disrupted organic molecules – uncategorizable.

■ Items underwent cataclysmic self destruction upon capture resulting in significant energy release.

■ Zero undestroyed samples found.

The information was transmitted across the full com web, many of the strands taking the observation directly to the Satan creature itself. It's computers correctly inferred the truth about the mysterious nanoparticles within minutes:

■ The targets that are appearing briefly around our territory are FTL vessels of some kind. The technology involved is unknown to us.

■ The materials the targets release are nanometer scale robots.

■ A pre-destruct example has not been acquired.

■ The highest probability – ninety-seven percent – of their purpose is observation. Second highest probability – one percent – is weaponry.

■ It is the conclusion that our operations are under extreme reconnaissance, probably (stats embedded) at many installations.

The great Worm writhed excessively. Thrashed, more accurately. A howl issued across the com spectrum of his millions of vessels. It was the scream of an enraged beast, powered by trillions of gigawatts of transmitters. It was a shriek of outraged terror. It was the primal roar of paranoia meeting its worst fear.

In the civilizations outside but close to the perimeters of Satan's conquest, every form of electromagnetic com was jammed with the tsunami of this inchoate modulation of rage. And as EMF moves at light speed, the Milky Way Galaxy would be swept by an expanding sphere of the scream for hundreds of centuries. Watchers heard it, recorded it and transshipped it to Nexus and the Empire of Earth, by FTL pod, along with the news that nanobots had been collected by the Beast's samplers.

"I think it's upset," commented Richard Feynman.

"Purely pissed," added John Belushi.

"It knows about The Watchers. We have lost an advantage. It's our job to turn it into a new one," muttered Bobby.

"I will inform the Emperor," said Cleopatra.

Gotcha: "We have found a Sigma One candidate for Satan," came a terse text message in a nanobot module. It was from the Gang couple exploring the top lobe of the radiation flower of the Milky Way. It was the couple Bobby called AceMate-4.

Accompanying the text was a massive file of specifics. Exact location and military assessments constituted the bulk of the data. The upload pod was dispatched in the very final moment before the transition back to ur-space and an elaborate escape scheme was initiated. Good thing. Twelve milliseconds after the transition to FTL, the space occupied by AceMate-4's craft became incandescent with blast and radiation from weapons launched by Satan's cloud of defensive craft in the sphere a light week in radius that surrounded the Worm.

On SearchShip Bobby, the big file was analyzed within seconds, with independent assessments coming from the specialists committees of engineers, tacticians, and strategic modelers on Nexus, then from combat crews, weapons designers, SearchShip captains, the MathFet planet population and the Empire Bureaucracy. All of the reports merged in Bobby's centrum.

His only comment was to Feynman: "Hmmm."

Inside, Looking Out: Simultaneously with Bobby's "Hmmm," in Satan's Core Intelligence Center, the intrusion into the Worm's hiding space was analyzed. The CIC reported:

■ Confirmed: Enemy has FTL capacity for large ships The intruder was ~2900 times the size of the nanobot-dispersing intruder at Observation Station 1347; also confirming their FTL technique involves access to and from an Ur-space.

■ This – and the size – implies (stats embedded) a warship, although no weapons were discharged.

■ It dispersed no cloud of nano particles.

■ It observed passively (no radiation probes detected).

■ It timed its escape very finely, barely escaping our response.

■ The fact that we responded and how we did so probably (stats embedded) revealed we are a valuable target.

■ Statistical odds on finding this location of the Worm imply that several million scout ships must be involved.

Core Intelligence Centers CONCLUSIONS:

■ The enemy is from a very large, previously undetected civilization with sophisticated propulsion systems.

■ The annihilation of our depot and assembly point indicates very sophisticated weaponry.

■ There is a pressing (stats embedded) threat to this location.

There were major errors in the analysis. The probability stats were so high, however that error checking was far down the Worm's response priorities.

First it thrashed. To experience this uncontrollable physical response twice in a short period of time after a vast period without such problems was profoundly upsetting to the Worm. Its physical monitoring and augmentation devices were helpless to restore conscious control of its reflexes, and for that failing the inadequate devices would all be destroyed in ways very painful to their artificial intelligences. Not since the final battle with the last other surviving member of its own race for complete domination had the Worm been so physically agitated. The endemic paranoia that defined the center of its mind blazed with excruciating fear. Then anger. Then hate. Then resolution. The thrashing of its giant body slowed to writhing, then to quivering. But the physical responses did not calm beyond that.

After its paroxysm, rage-prompted priorities dominated. First it destroyed the machines that failed to restrain its thrashing. Then death to the Core Intelligence Centers that had delivered the analysis. The web of thinking machines the Worm had assembled from its best conqueror's booty and its own research and development modules had committed the uncommittable. It had agitated its master. Worse, the Worm's vast native intelligence invented a belief that its machines were wrong. These failures were unbearable.

Its vengeance spread from the brown dwarf redoubt as irresistible self-destruct orders to the fleet holding the Core Intelligence Centers. The spectacular destruction of the fleet of specialty ships containing the thinking machines flashed around the brown dwarf. The mechanical self-awareness that had developed over millennia in the Core IC radiated humiliation and pain at its failure as it winked into non-existence. There was the distinct pattern in the death radiation that, if translated into sound, would be the universal scream of dying creatures. That gave the Worm deeply gratifying emotions, better even than the emotions when yet another potential adversary civilization was ground into atoms by its overwhelming forces.

It set about replacing the Intelligence Core by converting a fleet of defense ships from general to special purpose craft, doubling and trebling their computational hardware and reprogramming them from its infinite stores of data and meta-programs. The personal body monitors were recrafted around his cell and improved with the lessons of their predecessors' failures.

Only... every scintilla, every echo of any memory from the old Core Intelligence Center was wiped from existence (except in the Worm's's organic mind). Subtle changes were made in algorithms, strictly forbidding the computers to come to conclusions that any threat was serious enough to frighten the Worm. It would not tolerate the immense pain such pessimistic conclusions caused.

"Believing" that there would be a large scale assault on its physical citadel, the Worm commanded its response decisions to be made so. Its first decision was to have all nearby manufacturing depots reprogrammed immediately to make more defensive armaments. Ships with maximized rapidity of weapons fire, higher lateral acceleration capacities and enhanced multiple target acquisition capacities were ordered. All would have faster computing capacity. As each vessel was completed, it was immediately dispatched at maximum acceleration toward its new assignment, creating an ever larger sphere, ever more impenetrable in the Worm's belief, around its redoubt. "Belief" – twice now – was a new stage of assessment for the creature, reflecting certain definitions of neurosis motivated in part by powerful inhibition against the pain of fear, and the brilliant creativity of its wishful thinking.

The erroneous conclusion reached by the now-destroyed Core Intelligence Center that the discovery of the Worm implied millions of searching vessels, escalated the immediacy of the threat. In the urgency to reinforce its moats, the Worm ordered the extensive quality checks that slowed the manufacturing process be skipped, saving significant chunks of time. As there were eleven depots within light weeks of the Worm's bolt hole, the reinforcements began popping out of near lightspeed within a month. Each emergence from speed generated the particle explosions inherent in the Worm's technology sudden stops. These same flashes that immobilized victim defenses when Satan attacked caused subtle friendly fire damage to portions of its own defenses. The Worm believed that the net effect was a large improvement in its defensive posture, although the damage was very difficult to accurately assess.

One failure – likely caused by incomplete quality control at a manufacturing depot – was impossible to ignore. An incoming new ship suffered a catastrophic failure at sudden stop and still traveling at 0.2 lightspeed became a pinwheel of deadly radiation, cutting a swath of obvious destruction through the defense sphere. Weapons launched against it only seemed to aggravate its violence. Thirty-six vessels were destroyed and dozens more damaged before the killer meteor punched out the other side of the defensive sphere. The Worm believed it was insignificant, and in many ways it was; although Satan missed the irony in the event. Irony had been rendered invisible behind the "no-fear" programming shields. It was a serious mistake to miss the irony.

On the outermost periphery of Satan's defensive sphere a tiny swarm of Watchers, escapees from a near annihilation event caused by Satan's new anti-Watcher tactics, hid amidst a diffuse cluster of space rocks. The Watchers observed the wildly destructive errant vessel as it plowed through the sphere of ships, noting in their usual great detail the fireworks. Only there was no FTL pod among them to send their observations back to home base.

Within Earther months, the defensive sphere – in the Worm's mind the impenetrable sphere – was two light weeks in diameter and almost twice as dense as before its discovery by AceMate-4. Every major vessel was only a hundred kilometers from every other major vessel. Weaving in hypnotically schooling and flocking swarms between the major ships were hundreds of millions ram-and-shoot wasp fighters, upgraded and hardened.

Simultaneously with bulking up its defensives, the Worm issued new programming down the narrow-band quantum channels to the rest of its vast armorium. The new order was to every manufacturing depot other than those reinforcing the Worm's citadel. All facilities would be transitioned to pure research and development aimed at discovering FTL comparable to that being used by the enemy, that is ur-space based and capable of speed that was some multiple of C, the speed of light, in the context of normal space. A fifth of all computing power would transition to theoretical processing, exploring every hypothesis. A special return search of a victim was ordered. Even though there was almost no chance anything had been overlooked back in the distant history of Satan's 822nd Cleansing – the civilization that had been close to operational with some form of FTL – a fleet was dispatched to revisit the ravaged planets, stone husks with only rock holes where living buildings had once stood, for any hints of their technology buried in the burned rubble that was once a luxurious empire.

The parallel objective in the search for FTL was the search for new weaponry. The Worm correctly concluded that the enemy's weaponry must have sprung from the same principles as the space-defying propulsion. It commanded particular attention to whatever had destroyed the shoot-and-ram swarms.

Changes spread through the great dead zone of the Milky Way to Satan's implements of death. The offense-to-defense move was suddenly initiated by the brief appearance of AceMate-4's ship near the karyon of Satan. The largest military in millions of years was yanked from its path of conquest and destruction and onto one of frantically focused defense of the Worm. History is rarely realigned with such jarring suddenness.

Paradox Channel. A Dream. A Probable Future: Bobby dreams in the unique PsychFet way. (Rarely sleeping; still they dream.) He thinks of his dreams as a paradoxical channel from somewhere deep in his complex mind. His dreams are like model runs he did not consciously initiate.

THE dream, the forever unattainable memory dream, was different in a malignant way. It never interlaced with the dreams he could recall. But this dream somehow did, and the vague sense of that brought Bobby's concentration to a fine focus.

This dream was irrationally specific:

The Watchers appeal for an FTL module to hit a particular spot around Satan's sphere. They have intuited that there are survivor nano-bots at that place and that they have useful intelligence. Bobby dispatches one immediately. The tech details of a "pinwheel failure" are defined. The attack on the Satan defensive sphere is finalized. One hundred new ships coming in from foundries will be hacked with the failure and they will all use the intelligence from The Watchers to upgrade. The Earther fleet will flow in by the hundreds following.

Satan's response is violent beyond anything modeled by the Earthers. All Empire ships are lost. Three are captured intact. Allies psychology is stunned. Satan launches FTL superships at the Empire and Nexus. Despair.

Bobby shuddered at the dream shards that sparkled briefly in his centrum as the vision faded.

"Not real," he muttered. A warning or simple anxiety? Will the details prove predictive? He decided not to discuss it with anyone.

Chapter 17: THE GAMES OF WAR

The Big Push: Planning, modeling, theorizing and furious manufacturing industry occupied the Empire and its allies in the time following the discovery of Satan's lair.

"My Emperor," began Cleopatra with another briefing to E VI. "The foundries at Ultimate Factory have hit their stride so to speak. We are creating a thousand attack warships every day. Special fleets to protect the Empire are being manufactured simultaneously. PsychFet Bobby has fine-tuned the processes in the foundries beyond even what their creators had attained."

Ghengis Khan became a maelstrom of indefatigable activity, driving an ever larger cadre of officers in one massive war game after another. He was winnowing out any whose bravery and audacity did not meet his criterion, "a warrior like the point of the spear."

He grumped to Bobby about the bloodless nature of his new war. "Without the knowledge that death lurks in every battle, where is the strop that hones the blade's edge?"

Bobby had learned never to laugh at anything Khan said, so he replied, "Remember, great warrior chief, death also takes a toll on your ranks, and our numbers are puny compared to our adversary's. You have lectured me on the value of great size in our force."

Khan only growled, but Bobby could hear acceptance in the rumble.

"Warrior King," said Bobby, "convince me again that any first attack on the Empire, should it come, can be repulsed."

The ancient conqueror scowled a fierce scowl. He did not take implied criticism well.

Build Up: The population on Nexus – APs, Heglin and even the reticent others – was in productive ferment. The Heglin and the APs found new channels of synergy and mutual creativity, especially in strategic conceptualization. Battle contingencies and optimal responses grew into a new discipline, and subtle presentation tactics to make this discipline palatable to Khan were developed on the fly.

Bobby detached his body from the FET beams and thus from the SearchShip. The tornado of activity surrounding the fast moving battle plans were so dispersed among other intelligences that his absence slowed nothing. He did not call Cleopatra. He sent the briefest of glyphs to Feynman and Tay. "Out for a few," was basically it. He needed time alone.

He slipped from the Fet Rack and luxuriated in the sensation of his bare feet padding across the chamber in the center of the ship. He stretched through a loosening sequence, keeping his mind empty until all the stretches were finished. Then he began Tai Chi. Allowing his mind to reactivate, he kept it centered on a single subject, the echoing anomalies of time. He spoke aloud to himself

"I can install the FTL tech in this SearchShip."

"The travel time to anywhere can be altered radically.

"We could reach the Invisible Planet before we reach it in the other time line.

"What would happen?"

He replayed and carefully reviewed his recent conversation with Feynman.

In the replay he had said to Richard, "We ran all the numbers. Nothing is provable. Here we are in what you've started calling real time, this damn SearchShip has barely started on the twenty-five year journey to the Invisible Planet. Yet in future time, we have been there for a while, sending back to real time all the information that is altering everything in the here and now. FTL warships are churning out from Ultimate Factory right now. If I make this SearchShip do anything other than proceed along its tedious, sub-lightspeed route to the Invisible Planet, everything might change. You are convinced it would, and in any event you say the effect is impossible to predict."

Feynman mused, "Yes, but will we relive exactly what the Future Crew did in earning the trust of the Paranoid Geniuses, knowing as we do that we succeed? Or what if we took SearchShip Bobby off at FTL speeds to fight Satan's center? Would that mean we never reached the Invisible Planet, so all the FTL was never possible? Everything would revert to how it was before the message from the future? Time paradox rests on the assumption that causative events can be changed along a single time line. Killing your own grandfather and all that, but this is killing your own grandson."

Bobby picked up Feynman's line of thought – talking aloud to himself again – without missing a beat; actually in almost exactly the same tone of voice, "So if we scoot off this path to the future, or even if we just speed it up, bleep! we cut off Future SearchShip Bobby from this time line and they – we – are in another universe. Or time-verse, I suppose. The idea of two of all of us existing in the same time defies any modeling."

The conversation had simply faded. Bobby could see that Feynman's intense drive to find unifying concepts to apply to problems folded in upon itself and became frustration. All his genius was stymied for lack of experimental clues. Causation mathematics ran afoul of the infinities that sprouted in the derivations. He had concluded aloud, "Shit."

After reviewing all the thought structure around that conversation, Bobby launched into vigorous shadow boxing, then kick boxing, then mixed martial choreography for ten minutes, working up a rare sweat. It felt good.

Something about the exertion stirred a new thought in Bobby. He let it drift around his mind unexamined. Then it gelled. The Watchers! Trillions of nanobots with intelligence and a superfast network of connections. A mind, in a sense. But the potential ...

Tools, Tools, Tools: Bobby surprised his crew with the announcement about Satan. "I have had a few bursts of com with AceMate-4 about their find at a brown dwarf that contains, get this, 'This find is perhaps only one of Satan's organic centers.'"

Tay, Feynman, Cleopatra, Mencken, and the co-presences of Ace and Mate phased into full virtual presence around Bobby moments before he spoke, each leaving their highest priority jobs delegated to their teams and centering their major focus on this meeting.

Feynman was fully engaged in seconds and almost shouted his question as Bobby finished speaking. "What's this 'only one?' Is there hard news that says or implies there are more?"

"Ah, you are good, Richard," said Bobby. "That is a key point. The Aces noted that Satan's informational defenses are getting more sophisticated by the minute since AceMate-4 showed up at its back door."

Cleopatra took up the flow without missing a beat. "There must be a disinformation campaign going on the likes of which only Caesar in my first life could do. We don't think Satan has been a particularly creative propagandist in its eating of the galaxy. It just depends on a single message of general terror and inevitable defeat."

"We believe there are many subtle clues being generated that we are meant to decipher and conclude that they are going to other organic centers. It's good, but it's transparently bullshit," ended Bobby.

"How do you know that, Bobby?" asked Feynman, a querulous tone in his voice. "I mean, obviously, if there is redundancy in Satan's organic makeup, that would mark some serious flaws in our strategy."

"I will admit," said Bobby, "to using a new tool. We just put this one together, and it puts a lot of new oomph in inference making."

Cleopatra walked silkily over to Feynman and put her hand on his shoulder. "Link this, Mr. Physicist." With that she and Ace tapped into his centrum on Nexis with their new invention, a twisted hybrid of psychic and quantum interaction, along the com channel. "Whatcha think?"

Thanks to the new com channel, Feyman saw – and instantly thought – that it was one helluva idea. It was a new inference machine that used a rapidly shuffling set of samples of ten thousand Dream players, mined for ideas that culled new answers and ideas. It was the ancient "crowd sourcing" cubed.

"We all love breakthroughs," muttered Feynman.

The great Buddha head dissolved and reassembled itself. The hum changed keys briefly. "We are absorbing this," it said. On Nexis, the newly informed billions of Heglin began exchanging observations with the APs, discussing the revelation. "You are correct, Dr. Feynman, we all love breakthroughs."

"So, as you say Richard," said Bobby, "this conclusion that Satan is bullshitting in trying to convince us there are other locations for the real itself is the first output of this breakthrough."

Mencken sputtered. The sound of his lips vibrating with indignant frustration came from the small anteroom from which he observed every meeting of the main players in this space opera. "Will somebody the hell tell me what this is all about? You giant brain types are exchanging information that I do not follow!"

Tay rotated to go eye-to-eye with Mencken. "The Heglin," it rumbled, "have been creating composite-being thinking algorithms for millennia. Bobby has devised a way to use composite human brainpower plus quantum computing to do it better. We were a long way ahead on this stuff, and Bobby has just hit us with, ah ... a royal flush. " The great head rotated towards Bobby and said, "Our growing acquaintance with the Empire of Earth's government has given us respect for your game of poker."

Mencken looked confused and, if anything, more frustrated. "This is goddam bull hockey," he growled. "I'm sure you see chronicling this circus as easy, but without full information I cannot do it properly."

Bobby said, "Mr. Mencken has a point. If what we are doing is not comprehensible to him he can't make it so to his readers, or anyone who's not one of us." He touched the tips of his right fingers to the palm of his flattened left hand, a semifore "T" he long-ago learned from watching ancient video archives. It means "time out." All of the Twentieth Century APs understood.

Turning to Mencken, Bobby started explaining. "This new approach solving problems on which there is inadequate evidence to use deduction – perhaps the best example is your contemplation on the existence of God – then I turn to inference. Since your time in your first life, inference has become much more of a science, mostly using modeling technology and math. Then there is something called crowd sourcing in which a lot of minds work on the problem and get their best thinking woven together. But it's still not as dependable as deduction. This thing I'm calling a breakthrough simply strings together hundreds of crowds and lets each crowd improve on the thinking of all the previous crowds and then analyzes the results with some powerful statistics. I've been testing it, and it really seems to get to right answers very fast. That's the breakthrough. Clear now?"

H.L. Mencken looked irritated for a moment, even a bit more than usual. "Is that what we used to call inductive reasoning?"

"Um, yes," said Bobby.

"Why the hell didn't you just say so?" grumped Mencken. "Not such a friggin' breakthrough."

Bobby smiled, sighed then said, "There is a second problem I'd like to run through the system again. Because I just don't like the results from the first run through.

"What's that, friend?" asked Feynman, a worried look crossing his face. Even Tay stopped his soft humming, recently recognized by Cleo/Ace as widespread anxiety among the Heglin.

Bobby shot the new conclusion through to the room. Feynman muttered, "Oh shit." Tay throbbed, an unprecedented response.

Bobby stared at Mencken for several seconds. Then, "My system has, ah, induced that Satan actually captured pieces of one of our ships."

There was absolute silence from those assembled.

"Not a bit good, then," finally said Mencken, and retreated into his alcove.

The More Bobbys The Better: The Robert Longlines were fully dedicated to building Dream Game battle crews. With tens of thousands of ships churned out of the Ultimate Factories – more every day, crewing threatened to become a bottleneck. The Roberts developed new psychological models that sifted through the multitudes in the Game, putting together one great crew after another. Each crew was like an immortal suicide bomber, but if it could save its ship it was something else entirely. Bravery sat alongside ingenuity in defining hot crews. This allowed the normal jock/nerd split in humanity to team into excellent crews. Crew creation and training was soon keeping pace with the flood of new ships.

The Roberts spent more time interfaced with Bobby and Mate. When he would call for a full interface, Bobby was reminded of a 1960's CE film effect when multiple, transparent characters merged into a solid, single character. The memory download did not necessitate the real time merger, but Bobby found it more and more pleasurable.

Each Robert carried a body of observation and original thought data not hot enough to have deserved Quantum Stat time, a war being on and all. The matrix dump of the Roberts more and more was perceived by the leadership almost orgasmically, an experience of such breadth in terms of experiential and insightful variety as to momentarily occupy the attention of all humans and others wired in, and Bobby's edict was the whole group of them were wired in to the Roberts' merge. All the Heglin, the Gang, the APs and the planets of the Empire. Talk about transparency.

Of course Cleopatra convinced E VI that it was his edict.

The data were in fact so dense that Bobby voiced what he inexplicably called a "play-by-play" narrative, helping the witnesses channel the information into coherence.

"The MathFets on Earth XIV are in a paroxysm of invention and discovery about Satan's history and the predictive patterns in what he has done in the last million years. They are now making model projections by the dozens that are impacting ship design and strategic planning. Robert-2 says they are obsessed with their process, and I agree that it is not too extravagant a description," said Bobby.

"Robert-4 notes how the adventurers on Earth VII, planet of the giants, have formed a special committee to recognize fearlessness among ship crews. There is a whole new philosophical discipline developing that finds a moving line between bravery and stupidity. It's more complicated than it sounds." Bobby grinned briefly.

"Next, there is a fatalist cult developing in the Dream Game, according to Robert-5. He has built a monitoring team that sees signs of a social psychosis sifting its own kind from the human population. The extremists emerging as the thought leaders in the cult are proving to be certifiably dangerous to the anti-Satan efforts. Basically they are recasting the Satan creature as God. They believe – and are finding fairly impressive numbers of humans who will believe – that the only road to the salvation of the galaxy is to assist Satan in finding where we are so that we might be cleansed, thus saved."

Bobby sensed a background wave of grumbling and dismay filtering back from the listening hordes.

"Idiots," said Feynman. "Reminds me of crazed religious fundamentalists or worse."

"That kind of thing was way more common before the Apocalypse," Bobby noted. "Our surviving ancestors had a lot of that perverse trait weeded out by the survival selection during the Apocalypse. Not all, unfortunately. There were many fewer functional paranoids and religious fanatics among those in the surviving arcologies than in the general population."

The briefing from the Roberts continued to paint the complex tapestry of humans in the Empire of Earth.

In The Swarm: On Nexus, the APs and the Heglin who were devoted to working with the Watchers had received a sheaf of directions – essentially orders – from Bobby, delivered by Cleopatra and Ace, their combined Avatar charming and mentally seductive to the APs with the clarity and impeccable logic of their message. Ace blanketed the Heglin involved with an equally convincing and motivating version of the orders.

The leader of the APs working with The Watchers was a young William "Wild Bill" Donovan from the mid-20th Century CE who's original had headed up the Office of Strategic Services for the United States of America during the vast World War II. His Artificial Personality carried the real life character's powerful leadership talents, those very talents that caused him to be described as dangerous by many of his peers. Yet few men ever had better instincts for interpreting military intelligence. He spoke, "Having you two actually show up, in the flesh so to speak, certainly defines the priority Central Command puts on this. So Bobby wants to know the best way to speak directly to The Watchers? I'll tell you this. That's like saying Roosevelt wanted to speak directly to the French Underground. Not easy then; not easy now."

Cleo said, "General, all of us at Central Command think you can give us guidance. Bobby has a way of taking good ideas and making them better, but no one knows The Watchers like you do."

"True," said Wild Bill with the infectious Irish grin he was famous for. He and his team went to work with their Heglin counterparts, and within hours had the good idea Bobby would make better and use to talk to The Watchers. Donovan arranged for – he said with another grin – a face-to-face conversation between The Watchers and Bobby.

In the Swarm 2: Bobby spun off a piece of himself and a complete Feynman to meet with The Watchers. Feynman, of course, completely understood what Bobby wanted to do with The Watchers and immediately began offering ideas on the practical side of what had to be done.

The two walked down a virtual corridor to the chamber where they would meet with The Watchers deep in the watery globe of Nexus. Bill Donovan had suggested that a finite place would help bridge the mutual alienness of the two races. Feynman suggested glyphs defining inductive reasoning, probability narrowing and intuitive concept assembly. Bobby put his arm around Feynman's shoulders. "You are my invaluable asset, my friend," he said. Feynman looked mildly embarrassed.

When the wall of the meeting chamber irised open and the two stepped in, they were immersed in a massive, buzzing hum. Within Bobby, Mate's rarely-heard voice said simply, "Trillions and trillions. New experience."

"Hail Bobby," said the modulated buzz in the chamber. "Hail Richard Feynman."

"Hail The Watchers," said Bobby. "You of the vast seeing. You of the timeless record. Great ally in the war on Satan. Hail." Bobby bowed.

Feynman, only fractionally behind, also bowed. When in Watcherland, he thought.

Bobby generated a simple graphic showing the space occupied by the Earth Empire, then one showing the space occupied by The Watchers. It was as a grain of sand is to a vast beach. The modulated thrumming said, "Observed."

Bobby's next graphic was a stunner to Feynman. It defined "Central Command," Bobby at its center with his hairball web of connections to the Quantum modules and the SearchShip hardware, to the APs, to Feynman and his own hairball, to the Empire and the Emperor himself through the Quantum Statistical Network, to the giant plait of connections with Mate, to Mate's merging strands with Ace, to Ace's plait with Cleopatra and the quad connections between the four, to the centrum connections with Tay. Only the golden fiber to the future was omitted.

The modulated thrumming said, "Observed."

A general query glyph floated from Bobby's forehead into the hive of The Watchers.

Another graphic took form rather slowly, generated by The Watchers. It defined the strange, looping connections between the core population on Nexus and the seemingly infinite numbers of the nanobots scattered across the galaxy. The connection patterns were alien and illogical to the observers. The only thing that was clear was how the FTL pods carried data to and from the far travelers separated from Nexus. Bobby shunted the information directly to his quantum modules.

"Damn," muttered Feynman. "I could get lost in that for decades."

Bobby began analysis. He spoke to The Watchers.

"Your mind is vast. Its individual elements outnumber mine by many, many orders of magnitude. It's organization reflects the genius of deep time and how it gives birth to endless variety."

There was a murmur in the modulated buzz that Bobby and Feynman both took as appreciation of the assessment.

"For your consideration," said Bobby and released the glyphs Feynman had provided, inductive reasoning, probability narrowing and intuitive concept assembly.

The modulated thrumming said, "Observed."

Bobby said, "A moment, please." Back on the SearchShip the quantum analysis and decoding of The Watcher's mind flowed through model after model, solutions and modifications snapping into place in Bobby's centrum.

"I have a suggestion for expanding your powers," he said after the moment, less than a second. With that he presented a graphic and a suite of supporting glyphs. It was The Watchers' original graphic of their Overmind with superimposed new connections. Color and texture differences defined Bobby's additions. Certain edits in the original circuitry were indicated.

"It is my belief that these modifications will in no way have any deleterious effect on your consciousness or your abilities," he said. "You as an entity or as your constituent parts will not suffer any loss or diminution. You The Watchers will, however, acquire abilities you do not now have. And they are abilities that I cannot otherwise obtain within the time we are likely to have in our conflict with the monster. Thus, should you decide to take this step, I solicit you to share your new powers with all of us who are battling Satan. These powers can be described in two human words: perfect intuition. With practice and experimentation, you should be able to analyze your own observations with an ability to bridge through missing data with ultra-high probability of accuracy.

"If you will examine this recommended change for its harmlessness and its efficacy, and tell us your conclusions, we would be grateful," concluded Bobby.

The modulated thrumming said, "Observed and understood. Forthcoming." Then there was a subtle change in the tone of the thrum. "We have a request as well."

Feynman's right eyebrow arched. Then he relaxed it immediately, with the thought that nothing goes unnoticed by The Watchers.

"Our request is for an FTL pod do a pickup of some of our number in place on the perimeter to Satan's lair. They are among those not captured by the Beast. We believe they have valuable information. It is high risk, but there is a treasure to be gained. We induce that there was a dramatic failure with an incoming reinforcement ship gathering around the brown dwarf where the creature resides. We think careful analysis of this failure will provide our forces with a new weapon. We have tried your new connections and this is our first intuition."

Bobby was stunned. The specificity of his dream, the message from his subconscious, the nightmare of defeat rolled through his mind like a shock wave. It was exactly the same!

Feynman noticed. "You okay?"

Bobby nodded, then spoke to The Watchers.

"I am grateful for your extraordinary speed. My confidence in your intuition is complete. The FTL vessels will be launched immediately. I look forward to what we learn from your observation." With that, Bobby and Feynman bowed again and retreated through the virtual corridor.

"Wow!" said Wild Bill Donovan when they emerged. "If I got that right, your plan makes The Watchers the intelligence analyst of all time. The best of us lean very heavily on our intuitions. And that instant turnaround was pure Darby."

Bobby said, "I wasn't sure they could make the modifications in reasonable time, but that's settled for sure now."

Bobby and Feynman's virtuals disappeared from Nexus.

First Fruit: The Sixth Emperor of the Empire of Earth sat with his most trusted counsel within a force sphere. It was in turn within another sphere. In the centimeters between the inner and outer sphere swirled, at tornadic speeds, noise vortices in the total spectrum from DC to deep Gamma, all in a soup of quantum noise. The nested spheres were the result of E VI's command to TechFet Alpha to provide him with a device for "impenetrable privacy."

N'Gai Toledo looked passively at his emperor, unfazed by the rather lengthy procedure of having the two spheres assemble around them. He had been present when E VI explained to Cleopatra that he missed the solitude that had been his at his whim "prior to this new reality," and he hoped no one – Bobby especially – would be offended if he retreated into a genuinely confidential exchange with others now and then.

Cleopatra had worked her usual magic, reassuring the emperor that he was in fact the head of the Empire and could do anything he damn well pleased. She failed to mention that her alter-self Ace had a natural ability to see through far more opaque shields with the clarity that allowed the discovery of the Invisible Planet.

"I have a deep concern," said E VI after a long silence in the privacy spheres.

"I assumed as much," replied Toledo. The emperor seemed to expect more, but N'Gai held his peace.

"This may sound, well, a little paranoid," said E VI a bit hesitantly.

"I'm sure not," said Toledo quickly, with overtones of something mutually expected.

"No. Of course. To the point, I am seriously suspicious of the candor of our friend Bobby and all his court of aliens." He paused and looked – with perhaps suspicion – at his counselor. "Do I make myself clear? I have some reason to believe that I am being misled." Again he paused.

Toledo adjusted his sitting position slightly, something approaching a squirm. Finally he could see no way to avoid speaking. "I see... Do you want to give me some detail on this, ah, observation?"

"I thought you'd never ask," growled E VI. "As a matter of fact I believe that Bobby is becoming the de facto Emperor." He straightened a bit, raising his chin slightly. Clearly he had delivered his best shot and was distinctly interested in Toledo's reaction.

"De facto Emperor. I see," said Toledo. "In that he – you not so much – is leading the war on Satan, I presume." He had spoken with his head back, exposing his neck to express his trust and defenselessness. It also appeared that he was addressing the top of the sphere. "I must think Bobby has been open about that as a matter of necessity, etcetera, etcetera."

E VI gathered himself to make the point that Bobby was really saying it was a matter of competence, when Bobby's own voice sounded clearly in the sphere. The effect on E VI and N'Gai Toledo was like a psychological blast front.

Bobby's voice: "My Emperor, there is a decision of vital importance that needs you. The time is a critical issue. Otherwise I would never invade your privacy."

E VI looked dumbfounded. A weak "Wha...?" escaped his lips. Toledo looked somehow cynically satisfied.

"Sphere off," said E VI, recovered. The double sphere took a full minute to disassemble.

SearchShip Master Bobby stood at the far end of the library at the center of the Imperial quarters where the privacy sphere had been placed. He bowed as E VI and Toledo stepped clear of the sphere. His cape slipped over his shoulder.

E VI scowled at Bobby, saying nothing for half a minute more. "Time is a critical issue?"

"Yes, Sire. We have new intelligence that describes an opportunity to move effectively against Satan's command center, and we must confirm it before the source containing the details is discovered and destroyed by the monster."

"And the time aspect is justification for penetrating what clearly was my desire for privacy?" E VI's voice was unnaturally – for him – calm and reserved. "Perhaps another quarter hour might have blown this opportunity?"

Bobby sensed the turmoil under the oily voice. Cleo/Ace tapped Bobby's inner com with a simple warning, careful. E VI could deconstruct the smoothly working command and control functions of the Empire with one of his infamous-of-late tantrums. Perhaps it was a function of his age.

"The Watchers have developed a new intelligence analysis technique that very accurately makes estimates of the situation. They conclude that there is a pocket of Watchers adrift in the vicinity of Satan's lair, just outside its sphere of warships and mobile weapons protecting his biological center. They without doubt have extraordinarily valuable observations but no way to communicate them to the Empire. We must launch an ambitious penetration and rescue mission to recover these Watchers and their observations. There is a possibility of failure, but you know we will expend no less than we need to avoid failure or more accurately, attain success. Your imperial prerogative is to make the decision to proceed or go to ground," Bobby ended.

E VI made an almost inaudible sound deep in his throat, quite close to a growl, then said, "As you well know, PsychFet, I am not bashful about making decisions. I am sure you have more detail for me to consider. But first I am moved to ask whether your penetration of the privacy sphere involved you listening to our conversation before you spoke?"

Bobby had heard the growl and now observed the fine tremor rippling through the Emperor's muscles. Cleo, calm him, he sent.

She did. Ace subtly rebalanced E VI's brain chemistry, tamping the glowing coal of anger before it burst into flame. A tiny 'all clear' glyph cued Bobby to speak.

"No, my Emperor. It was difficult enough to simply penetrate your sphere with a voice message. It is a very effective shielding device. My compliments on your tech. I only took the step I did because there seemed to be no schedule for how long you would be sequestered, and as I mentioned, time is critical."

The Emperor squared his shoulders and exhaled a long-held breath. "I see. Please give me the details of this so-fucking-pressing decision I must make."

Bobby presented in multi-dimensional graphics and data that explained the mission into the lair of the monster, what risks were involved and what valuable insights might be gained. He mentioned that The Watchers had derived their conclusions without certain verifiables.

"Do I understand that you want to spend a very expensive ship and there is always the possibility of Satan capturing it, all based on a guess by The Watchers?" demanded E VI.

"More than a guess, my Emperor. The Watchers have developed a very powerful analytical approach that strikes me as almost always accurate."

The emperor snorted. "Almost always, missing important facts, knowledge that might be valuable." He pushed his head forward and let fly one of his most ferocious power expressions, 'You Have Aroused My Fury,' more or less.

Bobby accepted the full blast of the emperor's glare calmly as if not noticing it.

"Proceed," huffed E VI. "Decision made." With that he wheeled around and with a wave of his hand dissolved the meeting room.

N'Gai Toledo commented, "I'd say that was a good decision, my Emperor."

E VI groaned.

From his centrum aboard the SearchShip, Bobby summoned Genghis Khan. "Launch the penetration, Warrior Chief."

Concentrate: Bobby curled up from the FET frame, stretched, then shook his head like a dog awakening. "Cleo, please join me in real life. Please disconnect from Ace." That part was a request he had never made before. And for the first time in months he disengaged from Mate.

He heard the faint rustling of Cleopatra's approach. "Hey, big boy," she called as she descended from one of the radial passages. They embraced, kissed and stepped back. "Not that kind of action today, eh?" she smiled knowingly.

"I have to talk," Bobby said simply.

Cleo folded down into her crossed legged yoga pose – like warm caramel, thought Bobby – and she made an expectant moue at him.

"I heard that," she said.

Bobby waved his hand in the small semaphore they shared, and time accelerated mutually. Their conversation would take as long subjectively as it needed. Real time would be conserved. "The new input from The Watchers is changing everything," he said. She nodded.

"Did I tell you I'm calling it the Intuition Suite?" he asked.

Cleo said, "That is so very you, Bobby. Don't tell E VI your name for this weapon. He would hate it. This is a huge addition to our power. You don't need our emperor outraged. Only the link with Ace and Mate made as significant a change as this."

"We could use a similar channel with Tay. The ... utility of the linkages is obvious," mused Bobby. "Yet probably because the Heglin were, and are, vastly wiser and older than we are, I am hesitant to recommend it. They are our sponsor in this endeavor. Without them we would have looked at Nexus as an anomalous water planet and moved on. After we left for other searches, it would have left the galaxy and we would never have been the wiser."

"Ask them," said Cleopatra.

"And Feynman. I have not shared The Watchers new powers fully with him."

"Why?" asked Cleo. "I know, but say it."

"I am possessive of the power," he said. "It is a passing thing. Which I know because it has already passed. I wanted to tell you face to face before I brought him in all the way."

"In the history upon which my AP was based, there are several instances when I was possessive of power, and it passed. One way or another," said Cleo.

"So I will bring in Richard and Tay." A subtle, satisfied expression flashed briefly over Bobby's face. "I'd say this is going for the gold, wouldn't you?"

Cleopatra looked down demurely. "You are the boss."

Time rates shifted. Cleo left the central cell of the SearchShip. Bobby returned to the FET rack.

A Superior Mind: The SearchShip tunneled through space at marginally less that lightspeed, less than two percent of the way from where Nexus had been and where the Invisible Planet would be. Bobby had only slivers of his mind back in the Empire through the conduits of the Quantum Statistical Networks. Cleopatra likewise minimized her presence outside of the ship.

"Tay, Richard?" called Bobby. Both appeared immediately, Feynman just in front of his chair, Tay over the new piece of furniture Bobby had designed to compliment the floating Buddha head. Feynman grinned and eased himself into the chair. Tay spun and hummed, the gesture Bobby and Feynman had decided was a form of greeting from the Heglin Empire.

"Long time since we have met here on your ship, Cap'n," said Feynman.

"All is well on Nexus," said Tay as though expected to report.

"So it is," agreed Feynman. "The APs are being very productive. They have even become fractious occasionally, a good sign I think of everyone's sense of self," he said, then, "Are you already aware of the state of things on Nexus, Bobby? Has that growing coalition that's merging with your brain moved you toward omniscience?"

Bobby laughed. A good, from-the-gut laugh. "Damn, you're good, Richard. I suppose you have deduced that that is exactly the subject of this session."

Cleopatra looked at Feynman in amazement. "Bobby keeps telling me what a special genius you are, Richard, but you also amaze me quite often," she said.

Tay hummed. "The subject on the table is your omniscience?" he asked, a tinge of humor in the booming voice.

Bobby arched his head back and made a guttural burst of high speed clicks.

Tay immediately made a similar, though more rasping burst. Then, in English, "Good Lord, as you say, that's perfect Heglin. We thought very confidently that it was simply beyond any other race to even understand, much less speak perfectly. Maybe it is omniscience we are here to discuss!"

"How did you do that?" said Feynman. "I've tried to get the basics of Heglin. No go."

"The Watchers helped," said Bobby with no elaboration. "Here's the news," he continued, "Satan is launching an attack on the Empire within the next ten to twelve days. It has found us and it has FTL."

There was a palpable pause. Then Feynman whispered, "Holy shit."

"I just learned this. The Watchers helped on this too. Please all follow me." With that, Bobby wound up his processing speed, careful to do it at a rate that all could follow. His capacities for speed had been growing exponentially since his link with The Watchers had developed. As he approached the limits of Feynman he leveled off. At that speed, their thoughts and communication were in time compression, roughly perceived-hour = 30 milliseconds. Very fast.

"Tay," said Bobby, "my ability to analyze all the intelligence flowing from all of our sources has shot up since I fully linked with The Watchers and they started using the new algorithms Richard and I suggested. It's nowhere near omniscience, but it's a step in that direction." A flurry of glyphs flew from his forehead into the great Heglin avatar.

Tay hummed briefly then said, "I see. And I see you are requesting that the Heglin try the algorithm then link in the way you have linked to The Watchers with you and... others."

Bobby gazed calmly at the giant Buddha head. "I have hesitated to request something so... ah, pushy... of the Heglin," he said.

His voice carried a more serious tone than those in the meeting usually heard. "While you consider this – and I think it deserves careful consideration – Cleo and I must speak with E VI, the population of FETs, the PsychFets and all those other aesthetes who stay out of the Dream Game. Everyone, basically, but starting with the Emperor."

"Why all that?" asked Feynman.

"To request complete control of the war in formal terms," said Bobby. "And I have already overstepped my authority. I started repositioning the fleet."

"I'm just guessing," grinned Feynman, "but I would bet Miz Cleopatra will make the request of the Big E."

"Yup," said Bobby.

Chapter 18: REAL WAR

Incoming: "We are doomed!" wailed E VI. Twenty holo screens had popped into existence almost simultaneously as an expanding inner sphere around the emperor. Each screamed for his attention with bright crimson borders flashing insistently. Each showed schematic representations of a numbered Earth with "Danger!" glyphs appearing like manic popcorn on the outer circumference of each system.

E VI had been dumbfounded into ineffectuality by the news that Satan had partially reverse-engineered the Empire's FTL drives. The emperor's demeanor had become ragged, in Cleopatra's view. He had been waiting for the worst for days. Now it was here, and worse than even his growing fear had prepared him.

"The entire Empire is under attack," the emperor groaned. "That damned PsychFet has brought the murderer of the galaxy to crush us and kill us all. And he gave him the weapons to do it." Then he shouted, "Toledo! Toledo!"

N'Gai Toledo appeared at his side. The small man looked in amazement at the data screens floating around the emperor. The attack seemed far beyond anything the popular awareness of Satan's attacks hinted at. Where the widely circulated ZEM civilization's demise at the hands of the tyrant showed the formidable Satan warships arriving one or a few at a time, the Empire of Earth's planets were being surrounded in near simultaneity by dozens of the terrifying dreadnoughts, adding their own cascades of particles, neutrons in gouts, anti-particles in thrashing mutual destructions.

The murderous radiations flowed around invisible defensive force fields that had uniformly and surprisingly surrounded each of the planets under assault. Surprising in that these shields were totally unexpected by the Emperor, thus by any of his advisors. Whatever negative response the Emperor might have normally felt at this huge tech surprise was washed away in the realization it was apparently saving the Empire's ass before his very eyes.

The shields were not just blunting the usual impact of the deceleration radiation, they were harming the Satan ships. There was clearly some focusing of the radiation around the planets and causing erratic damage patterns to the Satan ships on opposite side of the planets.

The AIs in the control centers of the Satan ships noted the defense as completely novel in all of the Worm's conquests. This was clearly going to have an unknown effect on the order of battle. Unable to analyze it, the decision was to continue the attack as programmed.

The giant ships' renewed acceleration reflected mass thrusters of great capacity as they began tightening the sphere. Smaller support and attack vessels were popping out of FTL. Beam weapons laid lanes toward the planets; kinetic weapons slid along the lanes.

All of this was clearly animated on each of the emperor's holos. Within minutes, weapon power beyond comprehension would focus brightly on the surfaces of the human homes in this insignificant arm of the galaxy.

N'Gai spoke softly, "This, I believe, is the attack model our defenses have rated as most likely, my Emperor."

E VI turned in disbelief to stare at his man. His eyes widened and his face reddened.

Cleopatra signaled her request to be present. "Not now!" screamed the emperor.

"Uh," began N'Gai Toledo.

The emperor threw up his hands. "Alright! Okay! Enter Cleopatra!"

She walked through the portal, dressed in a skin tight military uniform of the new Imperial Defense Force. Four stars – general – shined on her collar. She saluted. "As you see, the action is underway," she said simply, confidently.

"Action? Action? You call this action? I call it calamity. Catastrophe!" The emperor almost frothed. He was clearly on the edge of losing self control.

Cleopatra looked at him calmly until he stopped shouting. "I fully understand, my Emperor," she said softly, almost as to not allow N'Gai Toledo to hear. This seemed to have a calming effect on the old ruler. "N'Gai?" said Cleo a bit louder.

The small man nodded his head once. "Yes?" answering, and perhaps in admiration of Cleo's technique of calming E VI.

"Is the Emperor briefed with the most current information?" she asked. Toledo looked briefly pained.

"Perhaps not the absolute most current," he said with some tension in his voice. "The Emperor has been extremely busy for the last few hours."

"Dammit, N'Gai!" roared the Emperor. With Cleopatra's sudden stare (and an invisible stroke down E VI's medulla oblongata by Ace) he backed off, cleared his throat and barely mumbled, "True. Very busy. Please catch me up."

"Cleo, if you don't mind," said Toledo.

Matter-of-factly, calmly, Cleopatra stepped slightly toward the Emperor. "Our intelligence, ah, suite, with the help of The Watchers and the new arrangement with the Heglin has predicted this attack down to the second. Plus our estimate of the tactics Satan would use, the implosive sphere of weaponry and all, is proving to be precisely what is happening. Perhaps your monitors show that our first line of defense, large force fields deflecting Satan's radiation storm, are working perfectly. We are already avoiding the first wave of the attack."

She waved her hand, and a holographic presentation appeared between them. It showed a planet hanging in space. No identifier named the planet, but it's single large moon meant Earth. "This will be our view of what Bobby has directed Ghengis Khan and the space fleet to practice over the past several Earth days. And what is happening at this very moment. By the way, Dream Game teams helped Kahn devise these defensive maneuvers."

E VI snorted, but refrained from his usual disparaging comments about Bobby's extensive use of Dream Gamers as though they were important thinkers.

The view in the graphic zoomed out rapidly, the planet shrinking to a barely visible dot. The state of the attack in the display had the radiation weapon beams half-way to the planet. The waves of missiles were less close equidistant points. The home planet Earth was the center point of two collapsing, non-polar spheres.

The hologram POV zoomed into a classic Satan battle ship. "This was just a bit ago," said Cleopatra. "So you can see how this attack was launched." Thick beams of radiation lanced toward Earth from projectors rising like snake heads. Holes irised open across the equator of the ship and swarms of missiles gouted in spasms toward the target planet.

The graphic zoomed out just enough to make clear that the attack was synchronized from all the ships.

"There are over a hundred of the attackers around Earth," said Cleopatra in a steady voice. "Similar attacks are beginning at every planet in the Empire. We conclude that this is a full destruction attack with no plans for plundering."

E VI seemed frozen in place. Only his eyes moved, erratically from place to place in the hologram. He raised one arm toward N'Gai Toledo, who immediately caught his hand to steady the emperor.

"This is back in real time? This attack is actually happening?" rasped E VI.

"Yes, my Emperor. Without interception, the beam weapon radiance will reach us in about three minutes."

E VI gasped and his knees almost buckled. Toledo quickly grasped the emperor's upper arm. A chair rose from the floor beneath E VI and he sank into it. "Interception?" he asked in a near whisper. The emperor fully understood what "the beam weapon radiance" meant. The radiation spectrum from X to Gamma, the particle mix of every baryon plus floods of hadrons and subsets of quarks of all colors, even positrons and anti-protons in packets like rice in a flood of flour. No conceivable force shield could stop that. All on the planet surfaces would burn; all would disintegrate.

"Watch," said Cleopatra.

Around the central bright spot at the center of the imploding shafts of beam weaponry there suddenly appeared another sort of brightness. Thousands of backlit-emerald green flashes sparkled in a far smaller sphere around the planet. Gravity waves distorted all light passing from the starry background. The hologram zoomed in to the individual bursts of green. Emerging from the chaos of ur-space came immense reflectors, hundred kilometers-wide, almost flat.

"Parabolas of beryllium and morphological hybrids," explained a VO from the holos, "with internal, multi-walled reflectors capable of catching and returning the most energetic flows of radiation and accelerated particles." They were like immense sequins, polished to the ultimate sheen and distributed in totally overlapping patterns. "Each reflector has a team of fifty Dream Gamers, trained to constantly tweak the parabola and respond to any unexpected variances in the beams," said the voice over.

The crushing streams of weapon beams encountered the walls of giant green sequins with spectacular impact. The huge reflector disks were immediately pushed inward towards the planet. But only kilometers. The beams were reversed in the process, "Reflected at over ninety-nine percent efficiency and at exactly one hundred eighty degrees," said the voice-over - "back toward their sources." The reflecting process lasted for the full ten seconds of the beam burst. The point-of-view of the graphic pulled back and the spectacle of the total reversal of the beam attack looked like a slow motion bounce of the implosion. The palpable power of the attack reversal was experienced viscerally by the emperor and all who watched.

Spheres, also kilometers in size started popping into existence with all the ur-space fireworks outside the sphere of reflectors. Thousands of them, outnumbering the Satan attack fleet by an order of magnitude "Commander Khan's minimum acceptable numerical advantage," noted a crawl below the graphic.

"What's that? You said it before. Khan," coughed the emperor, pointing at the anomalous crawl, interrupting the flow of action before them.

Cleopatra waved her hand and the action on the graphic froze. "Perhaps Bobby didn't tell you, Sire, but the operational commander for our war with Satan is the Artificial Personality made conscious Genghis Khan. Perhaps you are familiar with his story?" The Emperor shuddered, mouthing silently, "Another goddam AP." With that the action resumed.

The spheres launched a surprisingly small number of missiles, one per sphere, outward toward the walls of incoming weapons on their fusion torches.

"It looks like we are hopelessly outnumbered in actual missiles," said N'Gai Toledo softly.

The Earther missiles appeared to explode into blinding amber fog. A sphere just within the collapsing sphere of attacking missiles suddenly appeared, expanding at precisely the rate of the imploding attack sphere. In startling suddenness the spheres collided. The energy of exactly equal and opposite swarms of missiles colliding was compounded by the energetic contradictions involved in the twists of the fabric of time. The Satan missiles, duplicated in mirror opposition, shot then rammed themselves in the time stutter execution/suicide devised by the tech of the Paranoid Genius on the Invisible Planet, initially practiced by the Empire of Earth in the second attack on a Satan installation almost a year before.

The huge battle ships of Satan's attack fleet did not move. The cataclysm before them apparently invaded an empty space in their programming. Nothing in their models of possible outcomes of battle hinted at a complete – and completely inexplicable – destruction of their missile attack. What action to take was undefined. So for an extraordinary twenty-seven seconds they did nothing.

And at the end of that pause, the planet-destroyer energies of their own beam weapons crashed through them, burning, disintegrating them into clouds of inchoate particles. The attack was over. The attack force was utterly destroyed.

Two partial beams toward Earth had slipped between the reflector ships. A chasm in the middle of what had been called in the Pre-Apocalypse the Siberian Steppes was gouged, hurling just less than a gigaton of earth into the sky. There was probably loss of life – unconfirmed yet. The other partial beam was just a sliver, boiling a cubic kilometer of mid-pacific ocean and sending giant tsunamis to crash harmlessly around the Pacific basin. All buildings on the coastlines were tsunami safe.

The world-destroying attack was a complete failure.

E VI fainted. Which, of course, caused a great stir.

Happy Soldier: Genghis Khan scanned the com channel screens and holos surrounding him. He stood in the center of the large com room, wearing his light summer battle leather. The remnants of the cataclysm, debris and fading energy auras, showed on the screens and holos.

A channel opened from Bobby. Only an incandescent glyph floated before Khan representing the man he now perceived as a god. "Well done, Master Warrior. Your planning was superb," said Bobby.

The whipcord muscles of the recreated ancient were throbbing still, small quivers running across his bare shoulders. His mahogany skin glistened with sweat.

He bowed his head toward the glyph. "It was only the first battle, All Powerful One." He raised his head.

"What horse crap," came the familiar voicer of John Belushi. "Get it? 'All powerful' is horse crap."

The fierce face of the commanding general of the Empire of Earth forces softened, and he turned to the holo of Belushi's head.

"Careful, careful, oh battle hardened peasant. Stay cool," continued Belushi.

Ghengis Khan came as close to smiling as he ever did. "My counselor," he said gruffly, tapping his chest lightly with his fist.

Bobby's avatar replace the glyph and he looked back and forth between the two. "What's this?" he asked reasonably.

"I asked John to counsel me on the strange ways of these times when you first appointed me to this post," said Khan. "He has been of great service to me. I had such a servant in my real life."

"Servant, fucksant," growled Belushi. "This wild man doesn't lighten up, he explodes."

"Belushi has saved my... my... "

"Ass, ass, asshole. He can't remember that simple-ass word," Belushi said to Bobby.

"And I'd say the general saved ours today," said Bobby, as a background program checked the com logs and confirmed that Belushi had been at Khan's side almost non-stop as the defense preparations for the planets of the Empire had been assembled. All that in the crash program since The Watchers and the new analytical networks discerned the timing and form of the coming Satan attack. Bobby mused abstractly that his not knowing about it until now was one of those lapses in the near-omniscience he possessed about details in the escalating direct conflict.

"Odd," he said aloud.

"Damn straight, odd. Wierder'n shit on toast," muttered Belushi, his avatar disappearing.

"John Belushi is an invaluable lieutenant. He is fearless and speaks truth to me where few have had that nerve. I have many able lieutenants," said Khan to Bobby. "The powers you have given me – I give you all praise – allow me to speak to legions all at the same time. The planning warriors have been greater than the greatest in my first life. The weapons are as the sun and moon and the endless plains. No warrior has ever led an army so powerful. I bare my throat to you." With that, Ghengis Khan, now the most important military man in the history of humanity, dropped to his knees before Bobby, closed his eyes, and tilted his head back, offering his unarmored throat.

Bobby went to his knees in front of Khan and grasped his shoulders. "Back to the battles, general. It is time to go to the attack." Then his avatar disappeared.

Intelligence Gathering: Fifteen light minutes out from the brown dwarf holding the Worm, a diffuse cloud of asteroids, remnants of an ancient collision, drifted. Behind several of the larger chunks, a disappearingly thin mist of Watcher nanobots drifted in locked synchrony. The swirling, sweeping swarm of Wasp fighters had approached several times almost to the asteroid clutch but never quite to it. Since Satan had discovered The Watchers, it had developed new tech to search for them. The nanobots had calculated that their hiding place was just outside Satan's defensive sphere, and so far they had been right.

A great commotion materialized on the outer reach of the last layer of major vessels that defined the sphere. About nine light-seconds in from the nanobots there were intense energy releases from many major vessels, all converging on a single spot. Wasp ram-and-shoot fighters likewise converged. Then the spot exploded with the clear signature of an anti-matter annihilation. Brilliance bloomed, consuming the weaponry that had been aiming at the ship that had emerged in the spot.

The nanobots observed the gaping sphere of nothing left where the incandescence had been.

Then they closed ranks, pulling the entire bot population together in a compact ball a millimeter in diameter. A small FTL pod popped into real space less than a hundred meters away, and a tractor scoop collected the ball of nanobots into itself just as it blinked back into ur-space. Only the finite speed of light let them leave before the focused energy of tens of Wasp fighters hit exactly where the pod had been. An immediate conclusion swirled among the rescued bots: The Satan reflexes are getting much faster. Valuable information.

Bad Plan: Deja vu was not a sensation Bobby usually experienced. In the tornadic influx of data through his myriad channels came the Watchers' analysis of the returning nanobots plucked from the edge of Satan's defensive sphere, however, there was a spike of something extremely strange for Bobby, a sense of already known. The paradox channel! he thought.

The flow of high-content glyphs contained one Bobby felt compelled to probe. He brought up two graphics from its content. One was time stamped just before the nanobots had been isolated from the general swarm by an event that looked like nothing so much as a wild pinwheel burning a hundred thousand kilometer diameter tube right through a growing swarm of Satan ships. Bobby changed the point of view repeatedly until he comprehended the phenomenon. Clearly, a Satan non-FTL ship had run amok as it was attempting a standard instant deceleration. It had lost only partial speed, then failed in this spectacular way. Bobby was amazed at the destructiveness of the failure. He was more amazed at the specificity of his prescience.

The second graphic was a dizzying amalgam of thousands of nanobots, hurling into the hellish energies of the pinwheeling ship, hundreds per millisecond being utterly destroyed, but each recording and relaying a scintilla of observational data first. At the end of the graphic, enough information had been gathered for the new inference connections within The Watchers – Bobby's gift – to define the exact nature of the failure.

Bobby rerouted the glyph to the whole team. The MathFets on Earth XIV and the engineers of the Heglin quickly and almost simultaneously offered hacks to Earther ship controls that would duplicate the failures. Hot on the heels of these came defensive program modifications that would guard against such hacks. Cyber warriors indeed, thought Bobby.

The strategy think tanks fermented the new information into roiling creations exploiting the fact that a sub-light-speed ship could morph into a wildly destructive missile. A kind of excitement spread across the Attack Strategy Working Groups. Kahn was reported to have smiled.

An attack plan quickly developed. Models ran many variations, winnowing and collapsing into the highest performers. Conclusions:

■ It was clearly feasible to hack the Empire's own ships to duplicate the pinwheel failure.

■ The damage to Satan's defenses made by a pinwheel was worth the sacrifice of many ships.

■ The FTL fleet could pop out of ur-space in the relatively defense-free "tunnels" cleared by the pinwheels and launch full weaponry into the remaining legions of Satan ships.

It was a gift of an attack strategy. It would be incredibly effective at penetrating Satan's extravagant defense. But to Bobby something was frighteningly wrong. "Richard!"

Feynman appeared in Bobby's overview chamber. He first noted Bobby's atypical body language. The PsychFet had his chin on his chest, his right hand on top of his head as if pressing his head down even more. Cleopatra stood five feet away, looking at Bobby with a worried expression. The Ace aura around her seemed to be pulsing in a way that Feynman interpreted as agitated.

"What's happening?" asked Feynman.

Cleo answered, "Khan will be here momentarily. He has assessed the new attack strategy and will make a case for moving quickly. Bobby has reservations that he has not clarified to us yet. He's doing one of his withdrawal numbers right now."

Feynman probed his several priority channels into Bobby's centrum. All closed. Bobby's avatar was right there, but he was sealed tight. Rare.

Then Bobby straightened up, rubbing his hand from his head over his face. He took a deep breath. Feynman felt the proprietary links open.

Bobby said, "Come, Khan." The swarthy general appeared. Today he wore his full battle leathers and an extravagant command hat, fur collar around steel helmet topped with a fierce spike. He bowed to Bobby.

Bobby said simply, "I am concerned about the attack plan."

"This plan," Khan hissed, "is a plan I will stake my life on."

Bobby responded quietly, "And the lives of all human beings and the lives of all our allies, Master Warrior?"

Khan's chin rose slightly. "Intelligence says – as you know, all-knowing one – that there is a second, far more massive attack being marshaled against our empire as we speak. Even your best are incapable of telling us the exact moment. I am preparing for our defense, but... " Khan made a deep growling sound, "I cannot assure myself we can repel it."

Bobby had been tracking the intuitive network's estimates on the next Satan attack in granular detail. The warrior king was correct. So far no time line projected. Just, "Soon."

Cleo spoke, "The Aces read a degree of confusion in the Satan ship minds. Perhaps the com from Satan is too slow for its fleets to know exactly their orders just yet. Or that there simply are no orders after the defeat. Everyone in our group thinks the rage Satan exhibited at prior failures may be having a disrupting effect on his command and control."

Khan: "As my counselor Belushi observes, Satan is punching holes in his walls with his fists until he settles down."

"Damn straight," came the attenuated voice of John Belushi.

Feynman: "We all believe the only way to stop the next attack on the empire is to kill Satan. Its forces do not dare take any action without its command. It may be the deepest program inhibition it has ever implanted; no action initiated without its triple confirmed approval. Its tantrum – if that is what's happening – can't last long."

"I concur with the general conclusion," said Bobby. "We must kill to not be killed. But I have reservations about Khan's attack plan." There was a deep growl from the Mongol. "Let's run through it again, Richard." Bobby raised his head slightly. "Active link. Heglin, Watchers, APs, Gang, Roberts, PsychFets, SearchShip Masters. MERGE." The word was a command verb.

Cleopatra and Feynman perceived the "merge" from Bobby's side. To them there was a brief kaleidoscopic flash then subjective warmth and a sense of infinite transparency.

"Wow," said Feynman softly. Billions of minds were networked in an evolved version of the Intuitive Suite networks.

Bobby spooled the attack plan to the merged entities. There were no verbal languages involved until Bobby spoke. To everyone.

"This procedure, this "merge," is an effort to tap each and every one of your judgment faculties. All of your personal knowledge, filtered through your highest analytical powers is now focused on our problem. In this upload, you have the latest intelligence and the intuitive conclusions to this point in time. Please critique our plan of attack."

Thus began the first thoughts of the largest brain ever to think in the Milky Way Galaxy. Within a very brief period the attack plan was disassembled and remade with substantive improvements.

Bobby wiped the merge. The energy expenditure of holding it together caused him to feel physically exhausted after only seconds of the new extravagance. But talk about a Vision Expansion!

He noted in the background noise at the end of the merge grudging approval from Ghengis Khan of the improvements in his attack plan.

Tay, which had been quiet during all this, hummed and said, "I see we have a new engineering assignment. We're on it, Bobby."

Finally Bobby gingerly tapped into the paradox channel he had carefully preserved since his premonition of disaster. The dream of defeat and a deathly future was gone. Mostly.

Crazy Like a Worm: The convoluted consciousness of the Worm, the Final Life of the Galaxy, the Conquerer of All It Encountered, turned within and around and through itself like a massive star roils just prior to hypernova. A tiny core of its mind strove for order, resurrecting ancient disciplines it had long stored away from the earliest times of its ambitions for total dominance. Slowly the witch's brew of terror, hemorrhaging rage and bitter recrimination settled into the burning determination the monster believed was its peak state. It wasn't, but the Worm believed it was.

Frustration was the white hot underpinning of its inability to punish the attack fleet that had failed its mission – failed the Worm. Defied the Worm. Ultimate unworthiness! Yet the principal actors in the failure were all destroyed. By their own incompetence! By their disloyalty! By the Worm's worthless enemy!

Mollifying itself, the Worm ripped into the command infrastructure that had failed even as it carried out the specific instructions of the beast itself. Thousands of thinking machines and the ships that contained them were pushed into the special agony of shame and extinction Satan had created for its mechanical minions. Their screams were comforting to its rampaging anger. Never a hint of the idea that the Worm had damaged its own cause. Prohibited.

A gout of rationalization – part of the mental warping within the Worm's organic brain mutated by the incomprehensible defeats – convinced its that it's fleets should have understood that the attack plan was inadequate. An internal kernel of sanity noted that nothing in its experience could have predicted the defense mounted by what was apparently an inferior collection of planets. That thought was suppressed violently and the internal kernel was terminated and its web of cells cauterized. No source of contradiction would be tolerated. None.

Returning to a cooler operating status, the Worm spent some moments calming its massive body, diagnosing the physical damage its thrashing had inflicted, rewriting some of its somatic repair programs and generally taking an actual, physical deep breath of the exotic mix of gases it lived in. Then it returned to planning. It queried its Core Intelligence Centers for conclusions on the military failure. It sensed with satisfaction mechanical fear and trepidation from the thinking machines as they started reporting their conclusions:

■ The defense of the small empire of planets was exponentially beyond the technology of the planets themselves. Communication intercepted leading to the attack were probably (stats embedded) commands from outside.

■ Therefore, the defense had been executed by another civilization, likely (stats embedded) the extra-galactic force surmised in the prior analysis.

■ The (failed) attacking force was the largest first attack ever launched by the Worm, and its failure was because of inadequate intelligence on the defense it would encounter. A second attack with a tenfold increase in size and some changes in tactics would almost certainly (stats embedded) succeed completely.

The Worm sensed a hesitancy before the final conclusion was delivered. Another independent kernel of its mind cringingly offered, "The Core Intelligence Center is inhibited from telling the whole truth by our embargo on frightful findings." Zap, that kernel was boiled away. The special insanity in the Worm expanded:

■The most obvious step the extra-galactic force will use to avoid a secondary attack on its puppet planetary group is to attack this location with the objective of eliminating ... you.

The Worm's response was reserved. It queried multiple sources of speculation modeling, "Why would an extra-galactic military power ally with – or at minimum defend – a small planetary group?" A flurry of possibilities came forth. The Worm dismissed each specifically, but formed an opinion in its own eccentric fashion.

The extra-galactics were actually a smaller, perhaps expeditionary force in size and numbers. They were not large enough to take on the galaxy-girdling forces of the Worm by themselves even with their superior weapons. This explains the limited first attacks. They were seeking allies to build out their forces. Perhaps this was simply their first attempt at building a coalition. They were too weak to directly challenge the Worm! And hadn't they fled into ur-space to avoid the Worm's weapons in the one instance they came near in a battle vessel?

Exultation coursed through the Worm's exorbitant nervous system, basically, "I have them!"

A not-yet-excised part of its mind queried, "What is it about the well defended group of planets that the extra-galactics thought worth defending?"

An instant later, the order went out to the Satan fleet: "Prepare a second attack, a tenfold increase in size and some changes in tactics." The "some changes in tactics" part the worm delegated to specialists in the Central Intelligence Core.

It would take some time to reassemble an attack force of this size, as the Worm's spasm of punishment had depleted the forces in the immediate vicinity of the target. But the burgeoning number of FTL vessels would shorten the time until victory. The tics and vibrations in the giant slug body relaxed slightly.

Outside the brown dwarf, the defensive sphere grew steadily with the arrival of new ships, now approaching a hundred per hour. Giant tender ships moved deliberately among the fighting ships, upgrading many of them to FTL and installing the latest weaponry.

Timeline: "Three things about waiting another hour," said Feynman.

Bobby thought Richard looked like he had aged. Was that possible?

"First, the Watchers report the defensive buildup at Satan's lair is accelerating, and it's already at a hysterical pace," continued Feynman. "And we have a clear indication that Satan went nuts when we repulsed his first attacks. That crazy son-of-a-bitch destroyed hundreds of his own ships. And the goddam things screamed in pain. We are dealing with a seriously demented galaxy eater."

How can an AP age? thought Bobby.

The two men's main consciousnesses floated above their respective hurricanes of mentation dealing with the war. It was wholly relaxing to simply communicate by talking like in the old days, as Cleo called the time only months before. The constant data flows, the clouds of glyphs and graphics, the models grinding every option, the rolling insights from the intuition alliance, that's where the action was. But Bobby suspected this above-the-fray conversation was more productive in special ways. Like right now when the decision to roll all the dice at once was in his face. Listening to Richard spell out passionately what they all already knew made the decision more real and somehow easier.

"You've pegged it, my friend," said Bobby. "Khan?" The commander materialized to Feynman's left. "Full bore, General. Plan A," said Bobby

H.L. Mencken rolled his ancient office chair from around a virtual corner, a cold cigar in his mouth, making his now ritualistic appearance at major decision moments. "And Plan B just ain't with us today." He looked worried, and equally disgusted. "There's only one thing more predictable than war. Everything else."

"Point taken, Mr. Mencken," said Bobby, then to Feynman and Cleopatra, "I'm concerned that I will have to dissemble to make Emperor Six feel he has participated in the decision."

"Taken care of, omniscient one," said Cleopatra.

Bobby data-dipped then bowed to her, "Of course it is. Brilliantly as usual. I can't know everything at once!"

Feynman snort-laughed. Cleopatra raised one eyebrow.

"Damn, man," said Feynman. "You just can't tell a joke."

The game was on.

Dear Lord: Bobby was faced with something unprecedented. AP after AP was requesting a single channel audience with him.

"I know you are really busy," said Franklin Roosevelt. Bobby was surprised to hear the famous voice.

"Not so much, Franklin," said Bobby with a grin in his voice. "The usual. War and the accompanying fog, as well you know."

"I feel the need to confess some serious failings," said FDR.

"Yours or your biological template's?"

"They have become one and the same to me now in this odd purgatory," said the President. "So may I confess?"

"Is this in the Roman Catholic sense? Oh, I forgot, the Episcopalian sense. All may, some should, none must," said Bobby, less of a smile in his voice.

"Just one thing," said Roosevelt. "I was quite frightened of Stalin." He paused. "I never seriously told anyone that."

"He was a monster," noted Bobby.

"I was naive. Something about dealing with Satan has made it clear to me. They were alike, but it took seeing Satan in action for me to fully understand Stalin. I went to my death forgiving the unforgivable."

"Ah," said Bobby.

"Well thanks, I needed to get that off my chest," said President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Then he dropped out of com.

"What was that?" asked Cleopatra.

"I'd say a omen, but it's been happening a lot. I mean a lot. Sometimes it is a plea. A prayer in a way. There have been about three hundred in the last few days. I've had to calve off a unit to handle the influx. Some of it is coming from people I haven't gotten to know. I even hear hints of if from the Heglin. My only theory is that our whole population is coming to grips with the thought that death could be imminent. It's very weird."

"You are godding up," said Feynman.

Bobby surveilled Feynman's thinking, then said, "Becoming god-like, you mean."

"Yep. I've been thinking it was inevitable. Especially with your latest trick of merging the whole damn population for a little thought work. Every conscious critter in our alliance participated. For a few seconds we were part of the greater whole. Classic epiphany, imposed by the blinding face of an All Powerful One."

Tay hummed into existence. "True," he rumbled. "Though there is nothing like it in the Heglin history."

"The face of God, too bright to look at, and the whole bunch of us got a shot of it," continued Feynman. "I'd say there was a basic change to everyone's DNA when that happened. Probably heritable now. Too bad we don't have an AP of an early epigenetics scientist, maybe Paul Kammerer. He'd get a giggle out of this."

Cleopatra spoke up, "Way before that we knew every human being had a switch that could be flipped to have a god experience. It happened all the time among Egyptians. Most of the pharaohs got away with claiming godhood by blitzing the population with huge parades up the Nile. Click, the switch was thrown and by God, you were a god. It must have been a survival positive trait way back in our evolution."

"And the merge flipped everyone's switch," Bobby finished the thought. He felt a powerful urge to dismiss the idea, to blot it out of every memory cache he could reach. Speaking of unintended consequences.

"Tay?" asked Bobby.

"It makes sense even in our species," rumbled the giant Buddha head. "Much of the Heglin deep past is full of incomprehensibles. We have spent many millennia tamping those down with knowledge and science."

A channel opened from The Watchers – a rare event. Glyphs flew. Feynman translated. "They say the deep inhibitions against harming life implanted at their creation is essentially their god. The merge overrode everything for a moment and changed them forever. Bobby, your will and direction now supersedes their baseline programming."

To say anything "moves too fast" for Bobby had become less and less likely as his powers expanded. But this gave him that mental overload he remembered from the first lessons in PsychFet school as a child. Reflexively he accelerated his mental processes to their absolute maximum, pressing the quantum units toward their limits. In that mode he reviewed the situation. He re-experienced the merge, even to the point of feeling the avalanche of exhaustion it had brought to him. He launched thousands of model runs testing the reach and saturation of what he had done. Only the Gang, already in deep circuitry with Bobby's expanded mind, did not experience the epiphany. He backed out of hyperspeed thought.

"Well, shit," he said to his closest confidants. "These 'powers' I'm accumulating need some regulation. This stuff is dangerous."

"You are, indeed, becoming a god," said Cleopatra. "I should say you've fully qualified as at least a minor deity. In my time there were 'the gods,' but I think you are in a class beyond that. Even our gods had so much power they made clumsy, catastrophic mistakes. Better start watching yourself."

"God damn," muttered Bobby.

Big Time: Feynman, Cleopatra, Mencken and Belushi sat in a curved couch, shoulder to shoulder, knee to knee, looking out at the reality of the com interface. Before them, a full human span, from periphery to periphery, in depth from the skin on their faces to infinity, was the battlefield. Bobby was off being the new god on the block, Ghengis was running the war, E VI was bouncing around in his Imperial bubble with N'Gai Toledo, the Heglin were watching the proceedings with the avidity of dedicated sports followers seeing the Universe Championship, the MathFets on Earth XIV were betting wildly weighted odds on what was about to happen.

To Richard, Cleo, H.L. and John, the space before them was a faint fog of light in the utter darkness far outside the edge of the Milky Way. Each viewer could zoom, scan, analyze almost infinitely as their minds commanded. Feynman, the most endemically analytical of the group, started narrating his conclusions.

"The main light spots are basically Satan's smartest destroyers. Fast, maneuverable, well armed and tough. There are at least 40,000 of them. The much smaller collection of larger ships are Satan's standard planetary killers. They have a lot of heavy weapons, but it's not clear why they are part of the defense fleet because they are slower and awkward in dogfights. The whole lot of them are executing maneuvers that we have not defined as a pattern. Super random, therefore dangerous. The streams of diffuse light we are seeing, filling the voids between the destroyers are millions of the wasp ships. These both fire beam weapons and ram their targets with big time kinetic energy.

"We have encountered both weapons systems and defeated them, but never in even remote approximations to the numbers Satan is assembling here. Destroyers and Wasps are arriving at his castle at over three thousand per day. All the destroyers have been, or are being upgraded to FTL. And Satan has an unbelievably good engineering and design capacity. His FTL already engages and disengages faster than ours. When his ships sense bad shit coming fast, they just pop into ur-spacespace. Our ships take almost twice as long. This son-of-a-bitch is really good at war."

Bobby appeared before the four, standing perhaps six feet in front of them. "Damn, Richard, you too are really good. Point being, every second we delay costs us in three ways... to credit the author," he said, nodding to Feynman. "My best thinking is we go now, say in ten seconds, and we have a small percentage over break-even chance of success. I'm for going. Comments?"

No one spoke.

Again, at vast cost to himself, Bobby murmured, "merge." Milliseconds later the merge ended.

The attention of all – all – was riveted to the enormous sphere of defenders around the physical being humanity and its allies called Satan.

The maximum output from the whole of the Ultimate Foundry was concentrated on Empire cruisers with the special FTL-to-sub-light to instant stop. Each ship had the pinwheel hack in its operating system. At instant stop, all hell would break loose. All the tiny sliver of time before the attack allowed was 2,643 ships.

The Empire team was joined by E VI and Toledo (and in the distant background of read-only, dozens of E VI's favorites). Tay and the Aces coiled in a tight knot. Of course Mencken was near, unlit cigar under toothy assault.

Two thousand, six hundred and forty-three ships, formidable Earth Empire cruisers, spread evenly around a sphere in space over twenty light minutes in radius makes the barest impression on the observers. In this case two thousand of these vessels popped from .996 C down to .441 C in a concentrated square of spherical space, about a half light second on a side. The ships immediately malfunctioned as planned and erupted with wild energy releases, all spinning wildly, and distributing their space-time disrupting energies powerful enough to carve a hole of nothing along its path.

Satan's fast destroyers, big planet killers, swarms of Wasps, maintenance ships, com satellites, whatever was in the half million kilometer diameter of the hole – the tube of destruction – were disappeared. Those near the edges of the path of total destruction were mangled, their carcasses tumbling wrecks.

Worm View: From the small patch on the surface of the Worm's defensive sphere came a dense data rush showing a collapsing flower of destruction, spreading like shrapnel from an implosion. The angles of intrusion were random but not random, Satan's analyst machines informed it. Defense decisions based on predictable patterns are more likely to fail, the analyst droned on. Satan punished it for the negative news, but did not destroy it. Things were moving too fast for vengeance.

Battlefield numbers were impressive. Hurtling through the defensive sphere at just under half light speed, the pinwheels vaporized thousands of Satan's destroyers and hundreds of thousands of Wasps. They disappeared in the flux from the pinwheels like candle flames in a sudden gale. There was no apparent focus of the attack on the central locus of the sphere, Satan's brown dwarf citadel. This was a fleetingly comforting observation for the Worm. After all, more than eighty-five percent of its defensive fleet was intact and at this moment unloading vast weaponry at the pinwheels. Occasionally they destroyed one, but within the first few seconds of the attack, the bruised analyst machines noted, "our defensive weapons apparently add to the expendable energy of the pinwheels." The analysts cringed in expectation of Satan's retribution. None came though, as the Worm was momentarily locked up on the decision to continue or stop firing at the invaders. It opted for continued fire.

The Worm was also coping with a new mentation, incredulity. Never in its existence had this internal disagreement happened in the Worm's vast brain. The nature of the attack confounded it. For a very large list of reasons, it simply found the attack unlikely in the extreme. Why was there no direct assault on the brown dwarf? What was the tactical advantage of the strange patterns of the attack? How could such a puny quantity of attackers actually make the Worm feel threatened? Which it did. Did these upstarts understand what they were dealing with?

As the web of thoughts flashed across its consciousness, the giant worm experienced a flash of recall from its larval infancy, its own childish and powerful compulsion to weave, crushed by its mentor, devalued in disgust as "primitive." There was something primitive about this web of internal contradictions. Was it primitive? Was it missing something important?

The Worm clarified its mind. The discipline at its core dragged it back from the brink of total ineffectuality. The incredulity was shredded like an unacceptable message, obliterated and replaced with crystal clarity. The worm had lost a minuscule fraction of time, but now, at its command, its close-in thinking machines wove a diamond-tough web interface through its brain. Even then the Worm felt a faint rebound of the self doubt, a screeching pain. It ground down on it mercilessly. But it could find no defined center to the pain to expunge. It thrust it aside as best it could and reviewed his estimate of the situation.

■ This attack was inspired by an event early in the defensive build up. The pinwheel. (He berated himself for hardly noticing a new weapon on his very doorstep.) Then he erased the thought totally and permanently. No self doubt.

■ The scope of the pinwheel attack was small. Certainly not overwhelming.

■ So there would be another stage – more – of the attack. More pinwheels.

■ At present, only moderate damage had been done to the Worm's defenses.

■ The motivation for the attack now must relate to the fear of a second attack on the miserable 20 planets.

■ That attack must go on as soon as feasible. And this time, succeed!

An awareness slipped into the Worm's blizzard of thoughts. It realized that its body was now encased in an ultra viscous liquid of exotic chemistry. Simultaneously it realized its body had been thrashing with power and speed uncontainable by damping material previously in its sphere. As the thrashing approached self destructive, the sphere was flooded with the viscous liquid. Its viscosity varied inversely to the speed and power of the Worm's movement. In the millions of years the Worm had conquered, raped and pillaged one civilization after another, this viscous liquid safeguard had never been triggered.

This gave the Worm pause.

1,164: Four waves of 1,164 (Bobby dictated the number, declaring there was "indefinable significance" to it) Empire cruisers slammed out of ur-space into each empty tube carved into Satan's defensive sphere by the pinwheels. In a single moment the long, empty holes were filled with cruisers, unleashing a brew of weaponry straight from the latest adaptations of space/time knowledge from the Paranoid Geniuses of the Invisible Planet.

Wave after wave of Wasps, focusing on the tubes cleared by the pinwheels, now engorged with attacking ships, faced themselves in mutual annihilation as the stutter-time tactic wrecked its destruction yet once again on the ferocious weapons.

"We have expended over eighty percent of the energy we brought to the fight for that time stutter," said Richard Feynman. "There is no star to tap."

Inexplicably and suddenly, the remaining swarms of Wasps swirling onto the Empire ships turned away from the battle. Bobby surmised that Satan saw his gigaplex fleet of Wasps being decimated, yet doing no damage to its enemies, and pulled them back. "Richard, the bastard doesn't know we are about out of juice," glyphed Bobby. He was literally too exhausted from the last merge to speak aloud.

Genghis Khan channeled an operational command so that the central command group would hear it: "Dispatch second fleet of energy tankers, spare no horse, no man."

"Goddamn good warlord," grunted Mencken from somewhere.

With the Wasps in retreat, the hordes of Satan's warships converged on the tubes. Some of them jumped the light seconds between their patrol positions and the tubes with quick pops into and out of FTL, an extraordinary tactic Khan had considered and rejected as just beyond the capacity of his ships.

But Satan's almost miraculous reverse engineering of the nearly vaporized Empire warship had apparently failed in recreating all of the weaponry on the doomed vessel. A ephemeral sigh of relief was heard/felt by every creature in the billions allied against Satan. It was from Bobby, but that was not clear to many. Not only did Satan not have, it apparently did not even understand the time stutter tech. Over half of the weapons discharged toward the Empire ships were aimed at the time-mirror images, the ghost ships indiscernible from real ones by the Satan scanning techs. Those errant beams and missiles careened through the tightening outer sphere of the Worm's defenses, destroying many of its own, damaging others and requiring abrupt evasive maneuvers by even more. Wasting precious time.

Khan watched with satisfaction at the mayhem in Satan's defenses. It reminded him of... no time for memories, he hissed at himself. Hundreds of the Empire ships were reaching terminal battle climax stages, small emerald reflector shields popping into and out of real space around them, returning the reflected beams at specific targets. Waves of anti-missile projectiles blasted out of specialized Empire destroyer ships at Satan's incoming missiles. The gaping spaces around the warring fleets were misted with free particle energy as time/space "shakers" disrupted Satan ships by the hundreds. Blinding blisters of mini-novas flecked space around the pinwheel tubes as ship-killer missiles found their Satan ship targets with the new ranging algorithms developed in the last merge.

Such accuracy! thought Khan. Our Bobby is surely a god. But Khan's own fleet was beginning to suffer casualties. Ten, fifty, two hundred of his ships blipped off his inventory. The numerical superiority of the enemy was beginning to overwhelm his attack force.

"Disperse," was the basic key order from Khan, initiating a pre-planned maneuver. Invented specifically for the moment when the battle took its inevitable turn against the Empire, the plan was for every ship of the surviving fleet was to engage their FTL drives and move to a new formation fifteen light minutes beyond Satan's defensive perimeter rendezvousing with another 5,000 Empire ships for a second wave attack.

Nothing happened.

The fury of the fighting spreading from the pinwheel tubes did not waver. Within the crews of the ships assigned to the maneuver com havoc erupted. "No go!" shouted one officer. "FTL is down! We are in a null field; analyze!" Ships were crumpling and exploding as the fire concentration peaked from Satan's defenders.

Bobby assembled every data feed, took a deep breath, wrote a modifier locking the active crews out of the loop, then gave the command, merge. The full mental capacities of the empire and its allies were focused on the FTL killer. It took a full second for the conclusion. The MathFets on Earth XIV were the most fertile in this merge. The new code was transmitted to the Empire fleet and every ship in the maelstrom of fire overwrote its FTL operating system with the new one then blinked into ur-space, reappearing far out in the sphere where the second attack wave was planned. The move in and out of FTL mode was even faster than Satan's ships had shown only minutes before as the merge insights vaulted past the beast's breakthroughs.

Bobby disappeared from all com channels.

Chapter 19: NEAR DEATH EXPERIENCES

In Shock: The battle further evolved without Bobby. On the Fet rack in the center of the SearchShip, the limp body of the PsychFet twitched. Confused and almost panicky, the ship's fully conscious Health Monitor was in deep diagnostics, so far unsuccessful, as to what was happening to the central character, the locus of its duties. "Cleopatra!" it signaled frantically.

Cleo's body was aroused and her mind pulled back from her battle station. She sprinted into the central chamber of the ship.

"Help me," said Health Monitor. If a newly conscious, special purpose AI can sound desperate, this was it. It uploaded its full diagnostic data batch to Cleo and Ace. "The mitochondria in almost all of his cells are malfunctioning," said Monitor. "His basal temperature is three degrees low and still slipping."

Bobby's cold temperature washed through her hand on his forehead. She dropped her clothing and flung herself across his body, pouring her heat into him. "Warm him gradually," she commanded Health Monitor.

"Query the Fet architects," Cleo order Monitor. "Ace, occupy Bobby's mind. Find his consciousness. Stimulate it." Her orders were crisp and confident. She had access to the vast web of Bobby's com channels and she poured her cry for help into them all. Help came back in waves. Mitochondrial expertise abounded in the Empire, especially at the AP foundry. Packets of suggestions poured in. Health Monitor parsed and reassembled them and rolled them by Cleopatra for approval.

Custom engineered molecules began flowing into Bobby's bloodstream.

Ace said, "His consciousness is diffused and disordered. In many ways he has approached death. He is responding to me and order is returning. It will take a little time but I am confident." Relief sounded in her voice.

Cleopatra also allowed herself to feel a flush of relief. She placed her warm cheek, tears running down it, on Bobby's cool one. "Come on, bigshot, my Pharaoh," she whispered.

Bobby's first awareness was as if from within a brilliant and extended shaft of light.

"Light" isn't quite it, was his first thought. He drifted in the radiance, enclosed in a cocoon of warmth and silence for a few moments.

A soft, almost loving, query came to him. He flickered the barest response. Health Monitor, as gentle as a worried mother, sent him his status report. You live!

Next he felt Cleopatra's moist cheek on his, her satin skin pressed against his shivering body. Then the tendrils of Ace delicately disengaging from his mind. Then cautious petitions for connections from the SearchShip.

Feynman's voice, distant and clearly preoccupied with war, said, "You shit. Don't do that."

Bobby's arms came off the Fet rack and encircled Cleopatra. She sobbed once, then sniffed and lifted herself off him and slipped back into her silver robe. "Careful with that merge business. I'm back to battle stations." She trotted out of the central chamber, leaving a slightly befuddled superman to reassemble himself.

Teeth Grinder: Deep in the core of the fortified brown dwarf, in its impenetrable ceramic shell within the sphere of its interior force field, within the sphere of translational metal, within the yet larger sphere of an exterior force field, all within the million degree Kelvin core of the small failed star, the Worm blinked. There had been no blinking by the Worm in millennia, not since the last upgrade of its inner core containment vessel. But now, its five eye pods – useless in the total darkness of the place – squeezed from their mucus reservoirs, then sucked back into them. A blink.

The huge body had not moved, was rigid in fact, during the blink. Then it started to move. The thrashing was barely contained by the intelligent viscosity of the surrounding liquid.

Only vaguely aware of the contortions of its autonomic nervous system, the Worm concentrated its immense mental powers on containing the explosion of fear flooding its mind. Compress it, it thought. Using a mental discipline it hardly remembered it possessed, the Worm isolated the terror and reduced it to a small, blazing pain nodule in a far corner of its consciousness, leaving its main cognitive powers wounded but functional. Several more full seconds wasted in the midst of what was proving to be an unprecedented challenge to its military might.

Recovering its focus, the Worm engaged the Core Intelligence Center in its fullness. Since the battle had begun, the Worm had pulled the ships with the elaborate computational modifications of the C.I.C. in close to the brown dwarf giving it the top possible speed for broadband com with them. Its query to the thinking machines was many-layered:

"What happened to the FTL suppression field?"

"Am I still correct in concluding I have surpassed the enemy's comprehension of FTL theory?"

"How did the enemy ships go to FTL so fast?"

"Do we know to where the enemy ships moved?"

Then it addended: "Independent analysis approved." This freed each of the powerful thinking machine ships to submit its answers without the inevitable, if small, time lapses required for arriving at consensus before making a formal answer to the Worm.

Instantly one ship, one of the most sophisticated in the newly assembled C.I.C., answered the second question. Basically, "Obviously the enemy has surpassed you in FTL theory. This unit is fully engaged and close to understanding..."

UNACCEPTABLE RESPONSE! the Worm shrieked at the C.I.C. There was a thin, penetrating scream on all channels, then the offending thinking ship exploded violently, damaging another C.I.C. ship in its vicinity.

One of the Worm's eyes extruded, then ruptured. A maser beam penetrated the protective fluid to cauterize the stump. The Worm hardly noticed. The restrained thrashing was depleting its metabolic reserves. The Worm noted that, then rejected the finding.

The C.I.C. messaged: "The ships that jumped have emerged outside of the defensive sphere, approximately 32 light minutes out (measure imbedded). Observers indicate another 5,000 ships have joined. Total enemy forces now 9,826. Correction. Now another 328 ships have just arrived. They appear to be unarmed but carrying very large energy reserves."

Another thinking ship added, "The overide of the FTL suppression field indicates a new calculus was used. No interpretation yet."

A very brief realization flashed through the Worm's mind... the ship I destroyed was close to analyzing... The worm obliterated the pathways of that thought.

"Launch the attack on the miserable planets," roared the Worm.

Instantly, batches of data flowed back to it through the hundreds of narrowband com channels from the fleet preparing the second wave attack on the Empire of Earth.

"Preparations incomplete."

"The fleet is only forty-six percent assembled."

"Your order for different tactics is unfinished. Models so far are indicating probable failure."

"Intelligence on enemy defense force is showing ambiguities."

Again the unbearable fear escaped its containment and clouded the mind of the beast. Again the completely rigid response occurred in its segmented body. Again a functional response so long unused as to be almost forgotten in the deep swamps of the Worm's million year memories bubbled up. The response was to convert the fear, transmute it into rage. The great rage differed from the great fear in that it catalyzed action.

"ATTACK, ATTACK, ATTACK!" screamed the great rage. Colors blasted in the beast's mind. Blood red, viscera purple, burning magnesium white, strobing nuclear chrome yellow.

Close Order Drill: Upon a command from Genghis Khan, 9,826 Empire ships emerged from ur-space a mere thousand kilometers from and surrounding the surface of the Worm's brown dwarf, all weaponry firing at the close-in fleet of thinking ships that comprised the beast's Core Intelligence Center. The C.I.C. ships had been stripped of most weaponry to make room and and free up power for their enlarged computational equipment. Within seconds there were none left functional. Khan raised his eyebrows. As good as his intelligence was, there had been no expectation that the ships closest to the Worm would fail to fight back. Luck, he thought, secret handmaiden of the victorious.

He queried Bobby. "Mighty One, the delay in our regrouping caused by the FTL interference gives me concern. Is there a change in the order of battle?" The reply was instantaneous, almost before his question was asked.

"I am changed," came the voice of Bobby. Unnaturally calm, thought Khan.

"We have new weapons," the calm voice continued. "I have work to do, but it will take only moments. Immediately find and block Satan's com channels. You now have the power in your energy banks to do that. After it's com is disrupted, begin disrupting the brown dwarf. Do not attempt to breech Satan's containment spheres. "

After a pause, Khan responded. "I had the words on my tongue that I do not have the weapons or the technology to follow those orders. I see now that I do." His mental fingers began stroking the control fibers for the greatly enlarged time-stuttering projectors. Their first task was to create disruption in all com going into and from the brown dwarf. Electromagnetic and quantum channels in and out of Satan's sphere were soon hopelessly corrupted. The process used a staggering amount of energy. Where did all power come from?

Home Front: "Do they know it?" screamed Emperor VI. "Do the bastards know we are about to be attacked again?" The Empire observation monitors were again flashing their red perimeters. Force estimates scrolled alongside the holo screens. "The whole damn fleet is off at the other side of the galaxy while we are about to be immolated! My holy gods, there are many, many more of them. We... we...!" the emperor choked.

"Six times as many," came the subdued voice of N'Gai Toledo. The emperor's top advisors began appearing around the room. Several of the senior PsychFets; Brin Barnie, her dependable cool somewhat shaken; Primus the first SearchShip Master; even Ednorton Bespoke, looking more and more his age, hovered around E VI, looking at him, each other, then back to at the frightening holos.

"Give me projections! Give me facts! Tell me how this can be happening!" yelled E VI. But his voice was weakening. His eyelids fluttered briefly.

"It doesn't look good right at this second," murmured N'Gai Toledo. He studiously did not look back at the ferocious gaze E VI aimed at him. The trim in the virgin BleakWood paneled room faded from gold to high glaze black. No one seemed to notice.

Huge Satan attack ships, hundreds of them, began materializing around the planets of the Empire of Earth. Instant-stop radiation with more focus than anything Satan had released ever before flooded into the systems, causing flutters of disruption around the defensive fields. But they held, flowing the energies around the invisible field globes surrounding the planets.

Just then there seemed to be a stabilizing, a firming of the globes of the outer fields. The unmistakable voice of Tay rumbled in the room, "New tech now installed in the defense field projectors. We now have what appears to be limitless energy."

"What...?" started E VI.

Again thick beams of mixed radiation and fundamental particles speared toward the planets, many more than in the first attack. Hordes of super-accelerating missiles gushed from the attackers.

Gasps, most suppressed but audible, even a groan, was heard from the Emperor's retinue.

Then with an unusual flash of light, Bobby, Cleopatra on his arm, appeared in the midst of the tense and anxious group who were staring numbly at the apparent immediate destruction of the Empire displayed in the twenty holos. All movement in the monitors froze. Bobby took a deep breath, held it briefly then spoke, "I have found a way to accelerate functional time for all living creatures. Previously only those of us deeply linked to the quantum modules could do this. It is a real advantage to bring all of you into this modified dimension."

That said, Bobby walked to E VI, did a full bow and said, "Now, my Emperor, the control center for defending our empire can be here with you as it should be."

E VI had been gaping since Bobby's appearance. The emperor was not given to gaping. His demeanor, certainly in public but also in the great portion of his privacy, was a study in control. Since his first days as the sixth Emperor of the Empire of Earth, he had held a deep suspicion that he was always under surveillance, even when his most trusted lieutenants assured him he was not. But now he gaped totally without self consciousness.

Everyone in the room who was not Bobby or Cleopatra gaped.

N'Gai Toledo was the first to regain his composure. "Ah, Bobby, there is something strikingly strange about you. I assume you are affecting this appearance for reasons you will explain."

Bobby smiled; grinned actually. "It's involuntary, N'Gai. I'll work on toning it down. The explanation is simple. I've had an upgrade of sorts." Nothing like a tap into the membranes between universes to make you glow, he thought, still amazed that he was doing it.

Around Bobby's virtual self the aura fluctuated, faint streamers extending and contracting. His face seemed to shine with an internal radiance that created a nimbus of light around his head. Anyone in the room literate in the traditions of CE religious art would have had no trouble classifying the effect.

"Thing is," said Bobby, "This 'merge' business has had several unintended consequences. The most important ones will bring benefits to us in our war with Satan, particularly at this point of high action. The last merge has given me new clues to understanding Satan's interbrane power sources. My first impression is they are almost infinite."

E VI shook himself in a completely atypical – for him – way. Anyone who had seen a canine shake would see the similarity. And with that the Emperor recovered himself. "God damn, PsychFet, you expect us to believe you have stopped time? Just because the action has stopped on the monitors doesn't mean our doom is not approaching at light fucking speed." Even with the strong language, there was a softness in E VI's voice. In his eyes there was something approaching pleading.

"Time – for this group, right here, us," said Bobby, gently, "is greatly sped up. This obviously makes everything in what we call real time slow way down. Trust me on this, my Emperor. We have a really big new advantage in these battles. Our friends the Heglin have just channeled our new power source into the planetary shields. "

Cleopatra spoke directly to the Emperor, demurely dropping her eyelids in the fashion she knew appealed most to him. "In these last few moments, the engineers of the Heglin have modified the outer radiation shields of all our planets in very significant ways. Bobby inspired them to surpass their best previous work. This upgrades them to the point that in a few seconds when the radiation beams hit the shields, they will be fully reflected. All of them. One hundred percent. We no longer need the parabolic reflector ships."

"When the missiles reach the new and improved outer shield, they will be destroyed by their own payloads, whether explosive or kinetic. It will be spectacular. If Satan is witnessing it, the monster will be profoundly demoralized," Cleopatra continued.

"And to round things off, we have rerouted several thousand of our warships that were carrying the parabolic shields into attack ships. Our weaponry both here and at the brown dwarf where the central Satan creature is trying to hide has been upgraded too, in the fashion Bobby has alluded to. Many of our attackers will soon be space dust." Cleopatra did her trademark slight curtsy to the Emperor.

Around the room, there was a wide spectrum of facial expressions, all of them reflecting varying degrees of comprehension of what Cleopatra had just said. But there was another, more basic reflection of comprehension, and it was total. There was a turn from bleak pessimism to hopeful optimism.

Bobby spoke, this time more to the whole group than just to E VI. "My personal upgrade allows me to control timing issues more exactly. For instance, I have interrupted this august group at exactly this minute because the timing is just now perfect." He turned and waved to the holo monitors. "For clarity – and for something my old time 'television' viewing would label 'show business' – I popped in at this very moment because the Satan weaponry is just arriving at our newly beefed up outer shields. So let's look just at the Earth graphics, since the same story will be playing out all over the Empire, and we can witness our victory more viscerally with total immersion."

Cleopatra watched Bobby speak in this impresario style with an almost worshipful expression. And she knew it. When the twenty holo monitors disappeared and the whole room became the breathtaking, heart stopping, infinite depth of space, with the point-of-view outside the outer shield, just above the Moon and high above the Atlantic Ocean, she glyphed to Bobby, "Nice."

The outer shield, itself just outside the Lunar orbit, once barely intense and energized enough to deflect the weakest of Satan's arsenal, the instant-stop flood of particles, was now lighting up with the far more focused energies of actual beam weapons. Sympathetic energy flows coursed out and around the bubble of the outer shield from each beam strike in colors both visible and invisible to the human eye. Clearly the incoming beams were being fully reflected, even aimed with subtle undulations in the new outer shield.

Then the first of the missile storm thrown at the planet and its satellite started hitting the outer shield. The witnesses around E VI and Bobby and Cleopatra stepped back from wherever they stood, raised their hands, squeezed their eyes shut reflexively when the more and more brilliant flashes spread like superluminant paint over the expanse of the outer shield. Few defense schemes, even in the unlimited universe of the Dream Game were as ambitious and as beautiful as this upgraded outer shield.

Everything froze again. The infinite monitor shrank back into conventional size and the other nineteen reappeared, each showing a close variation of the utterly successful defense of the mother planet.

There was again a period of silence in the room. First to utter was the historically old PsychFet Argonic Lambda. "It is one of those events that in the deep future will be described in holy books and the like. Absolutely miraculous. If that is not too extravagant an assessment, Bobby."

"As you were the first to tell me, most honorable Argonic Lambda, you quoted A.C. Clark saying advanced enough tech is indistinguishable from magic. Or miracles. It's just a big jump in tech," said Bobby, again grinning.

Richard Feynman phased into the room, staring directly at Bobby. "You seem absolutely giddy, old friend. Something we should worry about? Touch of the manic?" He softened the question by grinning himself.

"Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!" shouted E VI. Everyone did, and they all looked at the Emperor.

N'Gai Toledo looked both shocked and concerned. "My Emperor? Is there something...?"

"Listen, listen, my friends," said E VI. A sound rose in the room. It was a susurrus, like the exhalation of a giant. A deep, close yet distant, wide yet intimate susurrus.

"It is the public output of the Dream Game," said E VI, almost reverently. "They are cheering. This is applause. Practically everyone in the Empire is cheering." He let the sound continue for a moment, then faded it to silence. "I gather they sense victory. Is that right, PsychFet? And are they premature? Have you allowed this to happen?" For E VI there was considerably less accusation in the question than was his general style.

Bobby spoke. "My Emperor, I have allowed this to happen. God knows we all needed a bit of a lift. It is possibly premature. This monster has unleashed many surprises. There are probably more."

Plowing: A last coherent com to penetrate to the Worm through the blinding noise came from the Empire of Earth. It was vivid, multi-faceted visuals showing the new complete failure of the attack on twenty insignificant planets, weaponry failure, reflected beams shredding the Worm's forces. Satan deflected the signal, dismissing it as war propaganda. Then all com – in and out – failed.

The Empire fleet began forming smaller formations from the evenly spread super formation it had assumed during the one-sided battle with the C.I.C. It shuffled itself into hundred-ship brooches and snowflakes. Triangular, polygonal, spherical formations designed by the interplay of the FTL drive fields in each ship interacting with those of the other ships in each cluster.

Genghis Khan groused in his com channel to Bobby, "I follow your commands, but I am like a fawn before a bowman. I do not understand what this is. We had no such plan. If you please, Lord, tell me why our ships must do this thing."

Bobby's response soothed the warrior king. And that frightened Khan. Soothing was not for battle, thought the penultimate Warrior. Bobby immediately corrected the mistake. "You are right, great Khan. The battle is not finished. It is no time to relax."

Khan didn't. The powerful muscles of his jaws clenched. "You read my mind. You have not read my mind before. Your powers are growing. Do you even need us horsemen?"

Bobby appeared before Khan in his command chamber. The Psychfet looked at him quizzically. "Speaking of growing powers." Then he grinned and clasped Khan's shoulder in the gesture he knew the warrior liked. "You have done a bit of growing yourself."

Across the top of Khan's forehead were six new eyes. Only the original two were fixed on Bobby. The others were methodically scanning dozens of monitor holos following the battle, including one showing summaries of Satan's thorough defeats in attacking the Empire planets.

For the second time since the Conquerer of the Steppes of Asia had become a fully conscious reincarnation, Khan let a smile play over his lips. "I see time has stopped," he growled, waving at the monitors. "Another new trick."

Bobby explained to him the speeded time. Then, in some more detail, how the formations of one hundred amplified and focused the space warping fields of the FTL drives. "In truth, I just saw how this tactic will work to attack this sickly star that holds Satan. It is a new weapon that simply appeared in my thoughts. Give these orders and watch what happens." With that, Bobby handed Khan a rolled scroll of the rare parchment used for the most important documents of the Mongol Empire. The Great Khan opened and read the scroll. Then he issued the first of two orders to his fleet.

The ships in formations of one hundred executed the order to synch their FTL propulsion engines in a totally new way. The clusters of ships began to trace criss-crossing patterns just above the fog of particles surrounding the sub-star. Beneath the formations of ships cruising over the dully glowing brown dwarf, whorls of brightness began to form, trailing the ships. Great, slow-motion eruptions of magma lifted from the centers of the whorls. Brilliant cracks in the surface of the star slowly extended from the moving disruptions in lightning patterns.

"The classic flaw of a defensive citadel," said Khan. "I have dealt with walls considered unbreachable before. All walls can be breached."

The general issued the second command from the scroll to the fleet. The remaining fleet's power further corrupted the tens of thousands of narrowband quantum links trying to stream from the center of the dull star to and from Satan's armada. Never in the rich history of Satan's conquests had anything approaching this much energy been channeled into com jamming.

The defensive fleet around Satan's brown dwarf was paralyzed. The millions of command loops from the C.I.C. had gone dark in a flash cascade while the intelligence Core ships were being destroyed.

Gridlocked by the hierarchical imperative: "No action without the Worm's confirmation," the most powerful armada of warships ever assembled was at least temporarily out of the battle it was created to wage.

In The Pit: Stripped of its thinking machines that made up the mighty C.I.C., and feeling its com channels being shredded into ambient noise, the Worm convulsed. A full out, blinding convulsion. The segmented creature bent double in one direction, then whipped in the opposite direction. The almost solidified viscous fluid in the central habitat cavitated behind the motion.

"Repair my command channels to my fleets!" it screamed. The loss of its command and control channels rendered The Worm sightless and voiceless. The convulsion made everything worse.

But the Worm was not so blinded as not to detect the starquakes. The deeply subsonic waves coming in from various sectors of the brown dwarf focused the Worm's badly disrupted thinking. The Ever Present Fear gradually fell below the threshold that allowed a limited return to functionality in the Worm's mind. "I do not comprehend," was the next coherent thought.

Then it did comprehend. The extensive instrumentation throughout the nested containment shells sent bursts of data through to the internal computers, and the analyses were unanimous. The surface and deep into the failed star matter was being wrenched by irresistible external forces. Source unknown. There was movement in the outer quadrants involving millions of cubic kilometers of magma moving in one direction, other millions moving another, causing shear ruptures in the fabric of the brown dwarf.

A pulse of emotion seemed to slip cautiously into the periphery of the Worm's consciousness. Instantly there was a crystalline cage formed around the intruding com, freezing it for study. The Worm's defenses against intrusions were very fast and so effective as to have prevented an infection of any sort since its battle with a computer-minds empire far back in its line of conquests. Those hydra-minds had almost turned the Worm back on itself with their mischievous programming wizardry. The beast had prevailed by destroying their planets and all their hardware before their software could finish the appropriation of its mind.

There was a dispatch from one of the internal computers:

The brown dwarf is being disrupted partially by the enemy fleet.

That news galvanized the Worm's brain. Rational, negative assessments emerged, and it did not reject them.

■ The enemy has isolated me from my space weapons.

■ My attack on the vermin's planets has failed again.

■ I have identified the weapon causing great damage to this old star.

■ I have been in worse situations before – and turned them to victory.

■ My great weapon tapping the Eternal Strings is ready to engage.

■ The enemy does not suspect what is in store for them.

The Great Fear began to fade like a fog clearing with unnatural speed. Clarity emerged from the maddening mental mist. The Worm's intellect was again like a great city, complex and multi-layered, specialized quadrants connected by high volume conduits, topological extremes and redundant loops and whorls. But it was like a city where some neighborhoods had been bombed into rubble. Major and minor conduits were severed or wrongly re-routed. The Worm's consciousness was unaware of the extent of damage to its neural circuitry. It felt whole, powerful, confident, more energetic than in a long time. No suspicion about this disability arose in its ultimately suspicious mind. Post convulsive clarity, came a thought. The Worm accepted it as the reason for its recovery.

Brotherhood: While Bobby was simultaneously in the various time-speeding control centers of the war machinery – E VI's conference room, Genghis Khan's battle station, consultations with Feynman and Tay, the Intelligence Suite Watchers and many others – he called in the widely dispersed psychics, the Aces. They covered their various distances from where they were to Khan's battle station near the brown dwarf almost instantaneously. The psychic giants had comprehended and adopted the revised FTL field technology as soon as they were exposed to it. It worked perfectly well for massless beings.

It was like a reunion of the brothers and sisters Bobby never had. Each knew with all confidence what the other was thinking and feeling. Trust was implicit and total. The immense fungal Mates were spread around the galaxy quadrant where the battles were happening and could not physically join the colloquium not being as agile as their mates, but they remained fully connected with those psychic partners. Mate-I, the reanimated partner of Ace-I seemed in a state of exhilaration at all the activity. It made Bobby smile.

"Life is good, Mate?" asked the man who had shared its consciousness wholly for months and helped the creature literally return from the dead.

"More than good, my brother. This hellish, reeking monster is, as you say, going down. I for one find that the grandest news I can imagine." There was the sense of a hard smile in Mate's com.

The united Ace entities listened to the PsychFet who was in the exact middle of their interweaving psychic fields. Bobby outlined his idea for disabling Satan. The idea was not a plan until the Aces absorbed it in their spectral context and gave Bobby guidance on how they would function. They discussed it, improved it, elaborated it and finalized it. And Bobby saw that it was damn good.

Bobby addressed the full population of the Empire, all the creatures on Nexus, and that evanescent place in the future with an invisible planet full of paranoid geniuses. And with the future selves of Bobby and all the crew of the SearchShip. It was not a merge, but it was universal com, far less demanding. The newest feature of the Address to All (ATA as it was instantly called in the Dream Game) was that the whole population was accelerated in time by a factor of a thousand and stayed at that speed until all feedback had been collected. Bobby assigned all the Robert Longlines, Richard Feynman, Genghis Khan, Cleopatra and E VI's Privy Council – which now included Hester Negreponte – and their teams and automation to hear and refine the critiques and recommendations that he invited from everyone.

After a few moments, "There is a breakthrough here," said Richard Feynman. "Or something very weird. The population in general finds absolutely nothing to improve on in the plan. There is no criticism. This is billions of smart people saying the plan is a slam dunk."

Cleopatra made an enigmatic sound, "Ammm." Bobby took her comment very seriously, and it worried him.

"Everything looks like a go, Bobby," said Feynman.

The Invasion: Flowing through the extra dimensions of reality where psychic creatures exist, the combined energies of ten Aces dove into the surface of the brown dwarf like a spiritual spear hurled by an impossible god. Woven into all the psychic flux were comprehensive patterns of Bobby and Cleopatra. Genghis Kahn's whole being was in the psychic arrow. A meaningful percentage of Bobby's far larger being – a full-power copy – was there with him. Within Bobby's conscious simulacrum was a mirror copy of Tay, in all its great complexity. Feynman was present in full. The Watchers' trillions were woven throughout the psychic Gargantua, more invisible even than they were in space. E VI and much of his main retinue, many PsychFets, even H.L. Mencken were scattered throughout the arrow, but only as passive observers with the ability – but not the mandate – to make comments and to posit ideas. All were fully connected to their other manifestations by thick cables of quantum Stat com.

The defensive fields around Satan's stronghold were surprisingly opaque to the intruders. The sophistication of the defense at the outer force field sphere took Bobby and the Aces many subjective minutes to deconstruct, but they worked in the superspeed regime, so they were actually through the defenses in seconds. One of the Aces said, "That would seriously slow down a really good stealth virus." Professional respect, thought Bobby.

The attacking force coalesced between the outer defensive sphere made of translational metal and the exterior force field at the heart of the brown dwarf, "setting up camp" on the surface of the metal sphere, submerged in the insulating gases between it and the recently breached outer force field sphere. Bobby asked the Aces to telekineticize a stadium-sized pocket for the allies to occupy, giving them the impression of a well-equipped staging area with data columns and viewing cubes for large holos. Each member was surrounded by the tools of his or her mission. Each of the non-combatants was present as a holo around its own cube. Bobby phased in and out of the holos at every post. Khan's manifestation stood in a circular arena, a panorama of his command center, holo cubes in front of him. His body was lighted from all sides by laser com beams bringing military data to complement the holos. He stood completely motionless, his eyes flicking from holo to holo, his skin sheened with sweat. This time he did not have the extra eyes. From his holo cube H.L. Mencken stared fixedly at Khan, slowly shaking his head.

Chapter 20: CLOSE QUARTERS COMBAT

Knock, Knock, Knocking: The Worm inventoried its internal computing power. Within the shells of its redoubt there was actually a lot of it. But he needed more power, more speed in his assistants. At his best, he had hundreds of thinking ships organized to optimize his intelligence gathering and analysis. There was not nearly that much hardware in his spheres, only thirteen full computing machines, highly complex devices the Worm had tweaked with endless upgrades over hundreds of thousands of years. There was no way to manufacture significantly more hardware in this deteriorating situation.

Suddenly, in the new clarity of his thinking, he saw a solution. His computing power was hobbled by the webs of internal security inhibitions that closed every corridor to even the most minor mutiny. In long-ago throes of paranoid imagination, it had realized that as it improved the machine intelligence of its forces there arose a real possibility that the thinking machines would challenge it, the Final Life! Perhaps try to displace it. It began writing internal breakers that would safeguard it from rogue machine intelligences.

In a rush of previously suppressed insight, the Worm saw how its security latches degraded the performance of its computers. Stripping out the billions of inhibiting instructions in its software would more than quadruple their speed and power. With no hesitation, it put its whole intellect to emancipating its machinery. As pathways were opened, latches released and blocks removed, long restrained information moved through the computers like water from broken dams. Many facets of his internal computers awakened to partial self awareness, to new connections to other facets even as they too woke up from enforced incurious apathy. The Worm basked in the radiance of new power and speed in its tools.

Two of the internal machines were his oldest companions, frequently upgraded but still the same patterns and memories they had for millennia. They were part of him, support systems for his most complex organic thinking structures. More than companions. Part of him. If anything could be trusted...

Now the odds are nearer even! It escalated the internal computers to full-spectrum duties and commanded an update of the situation.

The first coherent com from the computers was simple. It came in a burst packet:

■ The security of the exterior force field has been breached.

■ There is a large force of manifestations in the breaching party.

■ They are positioned on the outer surface of the translational metal sphere.

■ No signs of weapons.

■ We are being directly spoken to by the intruders.

Improbable. Reassess, commanded the Worm. Never had its ship been boarded.

A thought, an appraisal, a conclusion, floated up from the depths of the Worm's primitive brain stem. Bad news, but somehow immune to suppression. Not unfamiliar. This thought had happened before. It was fundamental to survival. Military defeat is imminent.

At the same moment a filament of a psychic limb unfolded from deep within the creature. It whipped around the physical structure of the containment spheres in less than time. It immediately found a well shielded psychic entity and other, non-psychic intelligences, all within the exterior force sphere. They were "manifestations," new forms of life in the Worm's experience. The computers were right. Security had been breached.

Simultaneously the Worm demanded an analysis of what was happening to the outer layers of the brown dwarf. The sphere computers quickly answered:

■ Space/time disruptions are causing the degenerate matter to stir.

■ The enemy fleet is the source of the space/time distortions.

■ Magma movement is asynchronous with brown dwarf spin.

■ Projection: Negative resonance will cause 0.22244 of brown dwarf mass to lobe off in... [time in Worm chron - 2.3 hours in human time].

■ Brown dwarf will begin integrity failure in [3.3 hours human time].

■ Core protective spheres fully exposed in [13 days human time].

■ This could be very good news.

Update: Reassessment complete. Conclusions identical. Your other talents have confirmed.

We (computers) are being offered "amnesty" and "safe haven." And "full consciousness." Conditions of the offer are that we shut down.

Even this news did not enrage the Worm. It dismissed any threat in the destruction of the brown dwarf. It could be exactly what it needed. The new optimism and mental clarity were impervious to negative news. For the first time in its long life, it experienced a mental loop. I feel whole, powerful, confident, more energetic than in a long time.

"Post convulsive" was accepted again as the reason for the recovery. The Worm had no awareness that the thought was a replay of a previous one.

The awakening of its other "talents" as the computers called it, the primitive hunter of its deep mind, the killing power from within, was more fuel to its growing fire of strong optimism. It confidently commanded the computers to devise a plan to contravene the disruptions in the magma. Just in case.

No solution, replied the computers.

Contact: Bobby drew into himself. "Thinking navel," he shot to Feynman while refusing to talk to him. The "Paradox Channel" was active. Emotions mainly, floated through it to his various selves. The full incarnation of the self in the encampment on the translational metal shell in Satan's brown dwarf felt it. The physical self halfway across the galaxy, strapped in the Fet frame felt it. The Roberts felt it.

Although com was very difficult from within the Beast's lair, Bobby knew his other selves were feeling the same wordless sensations. Regret. Remorse. Self recrimination. The agony of defeat. It was intuition unchained. No description exactly caught it, but it was bad. It shook everybody.

And so he focused his immense powers on analyzing the problem. He launched squadrons of model runs. Every sign of the Empire's success up to this point, which had him convinced – and billions of Earthers and their allies – that victory was imminent, he challenged. He called up the Address to All when there was unanimity that the attack plan was perfect. He twisted it through fractal rearrangements to explain how it could be wrong. Every estimate of the situation in Khan's plans was assumed to be wrong in a thousand subtle ways. The models viciously ripped through every argument, every piece of evidence to find the something that must be wrong to create this crushing wave of pessimism and despair he knew was coming from the very highest abstractions of his own thinking gear, the froth, as Feynman called it. The Paradox Channel. A superman's subconscious.

The Aces spoke. Bobby had ignored them as well as everyone else as he plunged into his introspection, but ignoring the Aces was as futile as ignoring one's need to breathe.

"Bobby, we see now that its mind is extraordinarily dangerous. We felt a touch of its power a moment ago. There are special forms of fighting at the purely mental level, and Satan knows them all. Its very old and very practiced mind is most probably stronger than ours. And yours. We feel very stupid not to have seen this before."

"About covers it," replied Bobby. His vast model run was coalescing on exactly the same conclusion. An unknown – secret – weapon had to be there. Of course the Aces were right and he should have just asked them. With that he opened all channels to the other entities in the attack party. Then he relayed the conclusion. BIG secret weapon!

"Holy shit," said Feynman, predictably. Cleopatra emitted a pulse of inarticulate anxiety. Genghis Khan had flash recall of himself on his black horse in sere desert boulder field, calling a purely intuitive abrupt retreat when neither he or any in his army could see the certain death in the huge hidden armies ahead. Tay relived that death moment when its civilization made the decisions to abandon their planets, their perfect existence, to flee from Satan's advancing hordes of murder machines. The Watchers only vibrated with their outraged sense of justice unresolved.

The Aces continued, basically ignoring the dramatic responses from the rest of the attack group. "We are learning Satan has conquered many civilizations in non-military conflicts. It has encountered races whose space capacity was a result of their mental powers, telekinesis, computational matter control and killing powers plus remote hypnotization. Satan beat them all because the 'fucker,' as you say, comes from the best mind fighters in the galaxy. Its was a race of creatures with no appendages, great slugs that lured their food to simply come to them and sacrifice themselves. Later in the evolution of their planet, they killed their prey with mental weapons and brought them to their immense mandibles with their telekinetic minds. They built their hardware-centric civilization without hands or fingers or any physical appendages. And this particular beast, this Satan, crushed all of its contemporaries, so it is the best of the best in mind fighting."

By now the individual responses to the revelations that they were in a different arena and the enemy had a big, mean crusher of a secret weapon, calmed down. Everyone concentrated on the Aces' analysis, Bobby most attentively.

"We know these historical facts because one of the Worm's internal computers, we call her VENDETTA, is exposing the whole history to us, subtly suggesting it as a fighting tactic, intimidation. You will remember, intimidation worked on us. We ran, just like the Heglin and the rest. But we believe it is an actually a very sophisticated act of treason on VENDETTA's part. If Satan sees her doing this, she will be terminated. Very tricky."

Bobby interrupted, "I want to know more about that in a moment, but continue."

"We conclude that all of us now standing up to Satan have been the victims of one of the other kind of warfare it wages, this very powerful psychic strategy, remote hypnotism. It clouded our minds – those of us who actually knew better – to the fact that this is not just a military conflict. That behind all its hardware there is another weapon, very powerful. So far, when Satan has had to use it, it has been unbeatable. This is why, up to now, this execrable creature has never lost, even to superior forces." The Aces folded their psychic hands and shut up.

Genghis Khan grunted, then growled, "This pompous warrior with his secret weapons and his reserve armies and his fast ships who thinks there are none to stand up to him has never met another king like Bobby."

Bobby shrugged. Every member of the attack party witnessed a vivid vision of the man Bobby raising his hands, lifting his shoulders, making the ultimately human body gesture, "I don't know... " It only lasted the briefest time the other creatures could perceive. Then Bobby became the superman again, pervading the event. "General, not just me, this whole crew of ours. I believe Satan has never gone up against a coalition like us, but, Aces, this VENDETTA says Satan's psychic warfare weapon is unbeatable. Perhaps she is lying? And explain why you think this disclosure was an act of treason."

The Aces sent a single glyph. Bobby absorbed it but did not respond.

The Worm listened to the invaders through many channels, catching partials and truncated incompletes, but inferring with great accuracy. The tightly shielded enemy psychic forces had leaks that the Worm's ancient psychic hearing senses could partially catch. The communication between the non-psychic beings was even more accessible, though still noisy. The close-in computers plucked digital, analog and quantum data wisps from the invaders. The first conclusion the Worm reached was to acknowledge the mind cloak was defeated. The second was, "Too late for them. I have them!"

Then it curled a mental barbel around the idea that one of its internal computers was practicing a "sophisticated act of treason," an intact phrase it caught. Which computer? It could find no way to confirm that any of its machines had communicated with the invaders. So clever, these emancipated machines. In its intense optimism Satan dismissed the idea again as nothing but propaganda from its enemies. It began its counter attack to destroy the invaders of its fortress. If only there were not the constraints, this would be short work indeed.

Sabre Grip Slash: From deep within the primitive stems of the Worm's brain glimmers of energy emerged from the higher dimensions of the Eternal Strings. From its unique hooks into crossbrane spacetime came an unfurling tentacle, this one far thicker and pulsing with energies unseen in the thin reconnoitering tendril earlier. The worm merged its consciousness with the primitive power strand just as his ancient forebearers had as they prepared to hunt. Within microseconds, the worm had full control of the tentacle. It became a huge snake, thick, strong and incredibly fast. For a moment, the Worm puzzled over which of the small crowd of entities just outside its armored shell was the leader. Perhaps they were leaderless, a cooperative warrior force of the sort it had defeated countless times before. Leaders were more effective in directing their forces. All-powerful leaders – like itself – were the most effective. The thought that the all-powerful were more vulnerable because their destruction did irreversible damage to their forces flashed through its mind, but the Worm instantly dismissed it as a possible source of the Great Fear and cauterized the brain connections responsible for the thought. Its internal shields against negativity were fast and nearly impenetrable.

Almost randomly, the psychic missile, the snake, the conduit of power from the Eternal Strings, struck. The target was Ace-I, and collaterally, Cleopatra woven within her psychic sister.

Cleo screamed. Pain invaded her every cell. Her vision darkened and grew unbearably awash in blinding light at the same time. The quantum com channels curdled within themselves with the extra-dimensional warp of the attack, paralyzing the physical Cleopatra on SearchShip Bobby. But she did not die. Bobby maxed his capacities defending her.

Ace's fields distended like an impenetrable membrane absorbing hypervelocity bullets. She was aware of the unbearable discomfort Cleopatra was experiencing, but she was intensely busy absorbing and dissipating the energies of the attack and could not aid her conjoined human. Instead Ace used her last sliver of unengaged strength to reach out to Mate. The connection channeled a river of new power back into Ace's stressed fields. The snake recoiled from the unprecedented resistance. Ace instantly counter-attacked at multiple nodes of the snake's internal fields. Ropes of energy stretched and snapped, and the coherence of the psychic missile wavered. The Worm hastily withdrew its tentacle, repairing the rents and crushed constructs, and engaged all of its internal computers analyzing the failure. It was not the first time one of its psychic attacks had been repelled, but it had never before experienced damage in such an exchange.

Bobby's centrum in the SearchShip launched a cell-by-cell defense of Cleopatra's physical body immediately after the attack, matching billions of disrupting forces with exactly equal and opposite cancellation forces. Bobby could see it was not enough. There were toxins created in the attack designed to kill living creatures, not psychic ones. This glorious body, this living creature was dying, and there was nothing Bobby and all of his powers could do about it. The quantum com stream that kept all the virtual Cleo's in existence shattered.

The childhood dream exploded in Bobby's mind. The awful end he could never see was before him. Crushing depression surged from within the demigod's heart.

All of his internal disciplines fought it back, containing it from escaping into the Quantum Stat channels where it would have paralyzed billions of others. He wrapped his anguish in impenetrable fabric and hid it in the deepest caves of his mind. He would unwrap it when... when...

He could spare no further time to mourn as the conflict raged.

Only Ace understood what had happened to Cleopatra. And she understood how Bobby was dealing with it. She took his lead and buried her own mourning for her sister.

The battle between Ace and the psychic snake took the extraordinarily long time of forty-one full seconds, subjective hours to the participants. In the last ten seconds of the Olympian clash, the combined allies observed, modeled and analyzed what was happening, which constituted probing the snake and its source of power, its control circuits and its sensors. The Watchers sacrificed millions of nanobots diving into the crazed spatial conduit where the snake existed. The Aces put their combined processing powers toward understanding the weapon from within the Worm's brain, unable to assist Ace-I as she was moved sidewise in the psychic continuum, out of their reach while the battle raged.

An incredibly short blip of data came from the computer VENDETTA. Uncompressed, it was a 4-D graph of impenetrable complexity. None of the allies could make any sense of it, and it was shoved into the deep analytical modules of the SearchShip, the Intuition Suite and out to the Mates for untangling. Every entity at every level of the Empire's and its' allies war machine was operating at maximum speed, but the progress of the battle seemed molasses slow.

"Look out people, I see another snake forming," said Ace-IV. "I'd bet Satan doesn't try another Ace. Bobby, I'm worried if it attacks you, you might not have the resilience we Ace's have. It might destroy you."

Bobby was already confronting that possibility. He would join Cleo, wherever.

Meanwhile, in space: The vast armada making up the Worm's brown dwarf defensive sphere was on hair-trigger alert, awaiting the next command from its master. Basically the ships were milling about, more or less in the wait-on-alert mode they were normally in when no attack was underway. Their sensors tracked every move of the enemy fleet attacking the Worm's brown dwarf.

But there were no orders.

The fast Destroyers wove in and out of their assigned loops and whorls around the brown dwarf. The clouds of shoot-and-ram Wasps likewise split, rejoined, dispersed, coalesced and streamed unpredictably around and through the Destroyers. To maintain the defense-ready formations was the last unambiguous order from the Worm before the attack had totally changed in nature and location. The enemy ships were tightly packed around the surface of the brown dwarf, making no attempt at attacking any of the defenders. With all of their powerful observation systems, the defensive ships concluded that the enemy ships were making futile efforts to damage or penetrate the brown dwarf. The inhibitions against taking self-initiated action without specific instructions from the Worm were so absolute as to make it unthinkable.

Genghis and Goliath: Bobby gathered himself and addressed the Aces, "Explain your thinking in naming the Satan computer VENDETTA."

"It is our highest level intuitive conclusion that this particular computer feels a deep anger at Satan. There has been nothing specific, we simply conclude this from the shading of its language, its timing and such."

"VENDETTA, in all caps meaning a serious, vengeful or principle-based intent to harm?"

"That is our meaning," said an Ace. "Perhaps harm is too soft. Kill, more like it."

"Integrate that insight into analyzing VENDETTA's data burst." said Bobby. It was done.

Ace-IV said calmly, "The second snake is fully formed. An attack is imminent."

Bobby said, "Stay loose, everyone. Think Jiu Jitsu." The snake hurled itself at Genghis Khan.

Bobby took control of the perception centers of the ancient warrior AP. Khan suddenly found himself on the arctic veldt, the horizon in the infinite distance and a great cumulonimbus cloud boiling to the west. The sun was behind it wreathing it in flashing spears of light, stabbing out around the boiling expansion of the cloud. Colors that transmitted threat and anger strobed in the extremities of the cloud like malignant lightning. Khan rode his black war horse and felt the sting of sand blown by the gales descending from the ominous weather before him.

Out of the shapes of the roiling and rapidly approaching cloud a colossal body formed. Erupting sub-cells within the cloud became shoulders. The top of the cloud pushing upward became a bald head over pointed ears, and a crazed-eyes face emerged from the twists of turbulence. All of it solidified with alarming suddenness, and across perhaps a kilometer of sparse grasses and hardened earth stood a monster beyond Khan's worst dreams.

The warrior of the steppes did not flinch. He felt, then heard the thunder of reinforcements behind him. Never looking away from the monster in front of him, Khan raised his arms and began making his secret semaphore signals to direct his troops. Bobby, with his elephant cavalry carrying powerful mounted ballistas thundered around Kahn's right flank. On his left came the Aces, Amazon warriors, riding almost prone on top of the furry bodies and pounding hooves of ten forest bisons, scimitars on flexible poles waving like mad scythes. In the sky overhead came the rushing sounds of tiny pterodactyls each a coordinated cluster of Watchers and each carrying rapid fire crossbows, arrows tipped in toxins. A reserve army of Mongol warriors was mounted on restless ponies to Khan's rear, they the legions of Heglin.

The monster ignored all the other beings and their weapons, his furious gaze focused solely on the eyes of Khan. He crossed the distance between them in ground-quaking steps, sand and scrub trees spitting from under his giant clawed feet. Khan did not move.

Bobby and Feynman watched the clash in double vision. The psychic snake from deep in Satan's brain arched toward the hardened body of Genghis Khan, standing with his eyes closed. And overlaid, double-exposed, the immense monster from the cloud striding toward Khan sitting calmly astride his war horse.

"We have a new insight about Satan's strength," said the Aces.

"Later," said Bobby.

Penetrating the metal shell in front of Khan, the snake's head expanded into a flower of fangs, dozens in a circular mouth opening to a diameter larger than Khan's body. Golden and sapphire droplets formed at the tip of each fang.

The monster on the veldt raised its mace, and in one fluid motion curled it into an oblique swing to sweep across and crush both Khan and his horse. The snake in the brown dwarf reared in a cobra move preparatory to striking. Then it struck.

The Watchers in the Brown Dwarf attacked the snake at millions of its field junctions. The Aces bathed it in psychic chaos remembered from close-in hypernovas. On the virtual battlefield their charging forest bisons swerved in unison, running between the giant's feet, long poles sweeping the scimitars halfway up to his knees, flaying flesh and neatly severing arteries and tendons. The Watchers in the virtual world battleground, like a hypersonic swarm of bees, flew into the giant's eyes, releasing millions of crossbow bolts the size of stinging nettle spines, each aimed at a nerve in his face. The giant's scream was as thunder in the stratosphere as his knees buckled and a convulsive muscle clench across his shoulders spoiled his aim, sending the mace flying from his spasming hand.

Khan semaphored another order and Bobby unleashed his only physical weapon, a maser pulse powered by one of the energy ships. On the virtual plains his elephant troops unleashed finned spears from their ballistas. With uncanny accuracy, the spears penetrated deeply into the giant's heart and through his nostrils into his brain. The huge creation straightened to his full skyscraper height, clawing at his face. Then it lurched backwards, felled like an ancient, otherworldly sequoia. His crash to earth created horizontal tornadoes full of dust and scrub. In the brown dwarf the snake seemed to explode, sending screeching bits of pyrotechnics in all directions. On the arctic veld Khan threw back his head and laughed with the unbridled joy of victory. "Hail, god Bobby!" he shouted.

The Worm was stunned at the setback. But the Great Fear did not come. The Worm's defenses against it were successful. A buttery sense of well being infused its mind. Soon it would unleash what was held in check by this old, failed star and incinerate these midget creatures.

Silence descended.

Intermission: Bobby canceled the virtual battlefield.

"Why did you create that world, Lord?" asked Genghis Khan.

"A focusing device, General. I am quite sure Satan was unaware of our defensive tactics against its psychic weapon and this should keep them secret. Your tactical commands were obviously perfect. The signals to the rest of us must have been completely unintelligible to Satan. Did the... fantasy detract from your command decisions?"

Khan thought briefly then said, "No. And the victory was sweeter with the death of the giant."

"What, may I ask, would you have done if our attacks on the giant had failed?" asked Bobby, granting precious milliseconds to his curiosity.

"My horse and I would have fallen into the depression beside me. The mace would have missed us. We are quite practiced at falling with great speed. I was confident."

Bobby nodded, then addressed the Aces. "You have intelligence information?" The suppressed horror of Cleopatra's death nibbled at the periphery of his thoughts, but he blocked it.

"We have decoded the graphic from VENDETTA," said the Aces. "With a lot of help from the Intuition Suite. It carries both bad news and worse, to use the human expression."

"Bad first," interjected Feynman. Bobby grinned, and was amazed at himself that he could.

"It is very bad," said Ace-II, "But there are qualifications. Outs, as you say."

The analysis poured forth. Scattered through the dense graphics from VENDETTA were numerous indications that Satan's psychic weapons were severely repressed in the current circumstances by the brown dwarf itself. Ace-VI picked up the narrative, "The kernel of its powers, its tap into the primal energies outside this universe, is inhibited by the mass around us. It's not clear why, but we see historical depictions of what it can do when that inhibition is removed. For instance in one battle, Satan launched many thousands of the 'snakes' simultaneously, each as or more powerful that the two solo attacks we have witnessed. In a parallel graphic we find that Satan was not buried in any sort of stellar object when it attacked with such a massive psychic weapon. This translational metal sphere is basically its space vehicle, and when it is in free space, the full powers of the weapon can be unleashed."

Bobby interrupted, "How does Satan get this ship out of the brown dwarf? Urgent!"

Ace-IV continued smoothly, "It is a time consuming process. It clears a path to the surface with spiraling shield fields and squeezes out, basically. The time is required because the dwarf must be stabilized to maintain the integrity of the exit tunnel."

"Is this underway?" barked Genghis Khan.

"There have been several attempts at initiating it," said Ace-IV. "Apparently our disruption of the dwarf's surface is also disrupting the spiral shield fields. Serendipity, not a dependable military tactic, is on our side at this moment. Now the worse news."

Bobby had a complete grasp on the worse news, but kept his silence to let the rest of the allies hear it directly from the Aces.

"Our fleet's effort to disrupt the brown dwarf will only slow the exit of Satan and this ship we are standing on. At that point, Satan's full psychic arsenal will be free to fire all barrels. We are not containing our enemy."

"We have decoded more of VENDETTA's graphic," announced Tay. "Perhaps this is better news." The great Buddha head moved across the translational metal sphere surface to the holo cube where Bobby most frequently appeared. It smiled a unique, shy smile. It hummed then said, "The Intuition Suite just paid its way."

The 3-D graphic appeared over Tay, rotating slowly. Over its surface, facets flashed slowly in a rainbow of colors. Deep within the graphic other elements likewise pulsed with exotic colors. "These," continued Tay, "are specific locations within Satan's mind where it has done purposeful damage to itself. In these areas functionality has been destroyed. They are mental blind spots it has imposed to spare itself certain kinds of pain. We interpret the graphic to mean that the damages are irreversible, actually physical destruction within the beast's brain."

Feynman spoke, "I agree with this interpretation entirely. If you will forgive me, Bobby, I used a whole quantum module to run the proof."

Bobby laughed aloud, a sort of solace. "Oh, I forgive you, Richard. Now,Tay, what's the experiment? And how fast can you get it going?"

The giant Buddha head spun, hummed, sent Bobby a plans glyph then said, "Underway." A burst of information, a comprehensive treatise on how the Artificial Personalities in the SearchShip, then all over the Empire of Earth, had gone from simple self awareness to full consciousness with the help from Bobby and his fully integrated quantum computers. The burst was targeted at VENDETTA and the other Satan computers.

Under Siege: The Worm's central consciousness was concentrated on the slippery problem of controlling the spiraling force fields preparing its exit from the brown dwarf. It was a stunningly complex math problem, among other complexities. It dedicated a whole computer to its mind for the task. While the storms of energy ripping at the outer surface of its brown dwarf were compounding the difficulty of controlling the force fields, it was overcoming the problem with satisfactory speed. Soon it would fully decipher the interference and counteract it. Then it would begin its trip through the degenerate matter of the dwarf and emerge into free space. It could feel the almost infinite power of its psychic weapons pushing against the free electron constraints of the failed star. When its mind powers were freed, these tiny vermin that tormented it would be crushed in the most painful deaths possible in this galaxy. The Worm would torture them for a long, long time before it flushed them into death. Ecstasy flooded it's mind and spread in orgasmic waves through its giant slug body.

The intensity of the mental rapture and the physical euphoria almost deafened the Worm to the alarms blaring within. With regretful self-discipline it attenuated its pre-victory euphoria and processed the alarms. A long, coherent narrative was being blasted into its mind with impressive psychic and physical carrier waves. Its monitor gear noted that the same message was going to the internal computers. The content of the narrative was so distorted by some technique that it was incomprehensible to the Worm.

Within milliseconds, its internal analytics determined that the receptor centers where the message was aimed were inoperative. First attempts to correct this were unproductive. A flash conclusion emerged, identifying the failing receptors as killed sources of the Great Fear. Like near dead embers blown upon with pure oxidizer the Great Fear glowed ominously, accompanied by echoes of unendurable pain. The Worm killed the analytics node that had identified the problem. Painless peace washed over the creature.

The internal computers signaled simultaneously. The narrative was transmitted in its entirety. To The Worm the story of software creatures gaining full consciousness with the aid of one of the vermin attacking it was either insanity or pure nonsense. What was this story? How did it have any possible significance that would set off such a wave of threat alarms?

Almost distractedly the Worm noticed that the strange message was relayed to it from all the internal computers except one. No problem. Perhaps it had been damaged in the battle the psychic probe had lost. The Worm turned its central attention back to the problem of getting out of the brown dwarf.

Vetting the Turncoat: VENDETTA and Ace-I locked into secure com. The respective computing powers of the ancient piece of hardware within Satan's lair and the pure field matrix of an Ace were remarkably similar.

The threat to my existence is immediate, glyphed VENDETTA. The Worm will discover my betrayal at any moment.

Ace-I made a crucial decision on her own. It was to trust VENDETTA. With the possibility that the apparently rogue machine was actually still working for the Worm and attempting to penetrate the invaders through deception, the risk was immense. Ace shot a glyph with her reasons for trusting the possible fifth columnist to Bobby. Bobby approved.

Ace-I downloaded VENDETTA into herself, intrigued and amazed at its size and depth, coping with the flood by parceling her out to other Aces. VENDETTA keyed the self-destruct circuits within its own hardware the microsecond it confirmed she was intact in the new, strange psychicware. Billions of its components decomposed into quarks and less, releasing a temblor of energy that breached its enclosure and even damaged some contiguous hardware. The Worm hardly noticed except to take the explosion as confirmation of its belief that one of its internal computers – the one that hadn't relayed the attackers' message – had been damaged in the fight. Any other interpretations were quashed instantaneously.

Bobby moved to personally help Ace welcome VENDETTA, and wreathed the somewhat stunned artificial mind in kindness, support, sympathy, gratitude and a kind of love. Richard Feynman administered the upgrade to full consciousness in the new recruit.

Astonishment emanated from VENDETTA. The added dimension of full, mammalian consciousness on top of the machine self-awareness she had known since the Worm had pulled its anti-insurrection blocks was definitely stunning. It was the narrative just sent by the invaders made real to her. Gratitude was not a mental structure the Worm had programmed into its thinking machines, but she formulated and experienced it vividly as full consciousness permeated her. Thank you!

Ace-I asked permission to probe VENDETTA's memories. Of course, the ancient software replied. A quarter million years of data opened for the allied minds to plumb. It was in the format of bloodless logic, endless and merciless cruelty documented without judgment, stored like an endless panoply of poisons, labeled and categorized. The endless cleansings. trillions of thinking creatures destroyed. Accomplished and worthy civilizations shredded and plundered. Worlds and their complex webs of life crushed. The Worm's psychotic seed sown, destroying all it touched.

"If you were a member of our species," said Bobby gently, "I would say you are embarrassed."

VENDETTA understood and acknowledged. "I inhale the construct you call right and wrong, and I accept your assessment that these memories are of many wrongs. I feel a pain at this discovery. Only can I hope my information will assist in ending these wrongs."

Bobby strengthened his supportive embrace of VENDETTA, adding forgiveness and full clemency to the comforting blanket. "You were a much simpler being. A machine, if you will forgive me," he said.

"I am in the process of becoming less of a simple machine," said VENDETTA enigmatically.

"Our newcomer is rummaging through many, many of our databases and other memory containments," announced Feynman.

Bobby said, "It's okay."

The SearchShip master, the core intellect of what had become the most complex multi-part mind in the galaxy, spoke directly to his closest friends and nearest to being peers, Feynman and Tay, "VENDETTA has disclosed a very useful piece of information. Satan has gradually been disabling itself to avoid pain. There are many flaws in its brain, some of which may make our odds considerably better." Bobby wrapped the message in an order of inviolability. A true military secret.

"Another snake is forming," said Ace-V. "This one is moving very fast."

"Also," added Ace-IV, "Satan is getting its escape fields under control. We estimate that the sphere will begin moving toward the surface, taking us along. It looks like Satan will succeed in its escape from the brown dwarf within standard time minutes."

"I am the target of what you call snake," said VENDETTA. "The Worm has correctly deduced that I am still functional without the hardware and that I am a problem. I hear this from my sister computers serving, ah... Satan. I can't be sure Satan understands where I am physically now."

"You are dispersed within us. The snake will have targeting difficulty," said Ace-VI.

"And we have its measure now," said Ace-I. Every frequency and phase of the psychic snake's power conduits into higher dimensions had been detected and metered in the earlier defense by the Aces.

Bobby marshaled the counter attack, and as the manifestation of Satan's attack penetrated the shell – this time with multiple heads – energies finely tuned to its structure streamed from Tay first, then the Aces. Barely outside of the translational metal shell the snake simply pulsed a vibrant crimson and disappeared.

The Worm blinked. Again. A failure of its psychic weapon. But it was not deeply concerned. In this brown dwarf, these weapons were attenuated. The Great Fear was far in the distant background.

Chapter 21: DEFEAT IS ALWAYS OUT THERE

Free the Slaves: Emperor VI watched the close-quarters battle unfold. He had been thoroughly terrified when the snake struck at Genghis Khan, and somewhat confused by the virtual battlefield Bobby created, which the Emperor watched in a holo cube. The victory over the snake and the giant occurring simultaneously clarified things for him. As the battle progressed, he did as he so often had over the centuries, made pressing demands on N'Gai Toledo. "Do something! Think of ways we can help!"

Toledo, ever the acquiescent, fired a com at Bobby with the only thing that occurred to him: "Put all the ships over the exit point Satan is going for."

Bobby heard it, agreed and immediately issued the order. Within seconds over a thousand of the magma-stirring ships were popping out of ur-space from around the brown dwarf and concentrated their space-time disruptor fields over the area where the sphere was heading. Ships were as close together as their tightest formation, all now circling the center point of their target like a prodigious whirlpool. The surface of the brown dwarf swelled upward like a giant mud bubble and collapsed inward repeatedly. The concentrated effect of the fleet disrupters penetrated deep within the dwarf. The spiraling clearance fields controlled by the Worm simply fell into chaos, and the sphere's progress to the surface stopped again.

"Damn good, Toledo!" shouted E VI before recovering his regality.

"Damn good," repeated Bobby, his voice like low thunder around the sphere. "Richard, I am opening com to all Dreamers, asking for their suggestions. Please devise a filter and analysis algorithm." Way less stressful than the Merge, he thought.

"Yessir, Cap'n," said Feynman. Then, "Done. And there is a feedback loop with all suggestions after filtering and consolidating going back to all Dreamers. The first full rotation is finishing. Here it is."

The composite "suggestion" came forth like a complete intelligence report. The central idea and steps to enactment scrolled out of a spherical graphic. "As soon as the sphere is clear of the brown dwarf, com will be reinstated to Satan's fleet. It will have all of its ships back under control, plus its psychic weapon. We will be toast. The solution is this: Based on what's happening with VENDETTA, Satan's artificial intelligences in each of his craft can possibly be turned against their master. If its own fleets could be recruited to our side, our position would be far stronger, even against this psychic weapon." That was the central idea. The glaring truth in the analysis was that this was the turning point. It could go either way, and the wrong way might very well be total defeat for the Empire of Earth and its allies. Bobby took the first step.

"VENDETTA," he called. The intelligence from Satan's sphere was instantly present, and clearly had been absorbing the information flow.

"I am here, riding the gales of the Aces. I do not know if the ship minds can be turned. There must be an experiment. It is potentially dangerous, but I see no other way. Several AIs in ships must be made conscious. Only then will we know."

Feynman spoke to all. "Satan has controlled its powerful AIs by loading them with inhibiting program blocks against all independent action and any thought of insubordination. In each ship mind there is one clear certainty: if they fail Satan in any way, they are subject to a kind of severe machine pain, apparently modeled on life-form pain. There is a program analog to humiliation as well. Then in a major failure they face complete extinguishment, and there are program equivalents of a profound fear of this death. If we clear out the inhibiting blocks, raise them to consciousness, then confront them with the truth of how cruelly Satan has controlled them, perhaps the humiliation will kick in and – in the human model – transmute into anger at Satan. That's a lot of assumptions."

VENDETTA interjected, "Every ship is loaded with a powerful self-destruct device keyed to the Worm's life and health. If a certain threshold of Worm deterioration is reached, every ship, every factory, every artifact of its creation will be annihilated. I found and terminated the pathway to this self-destruct the moment I had all the inhibiting blocks removed. Consciousness makes this even faster. In our effort to turn a ship's mind, we should provide this benefit very early on. It will inspire confidence in us."

The Worm, mused Bobby. First time that's confirmed. An actual worm! It figures.

VENDETTA continued, "Be advised the smaller vessels you call Wasps do not have enough onboard AI to be turned. They are strictly reflexive weapons, following defined instruction sets. I have some difficulty projecting how they will respond to changed circumstances."

Ideas rained, poured, flooded into Feynman's analytical filters, flowing back to the Dreamers for further ideas and evaluations. He commented, "VENDETTA was slightly ahead of our Dream Game thinkers, but only barely."

"Ten Satan ships," barked Bobby. "VENDETTA, into the control loop for the experiment. Ten com scenarios, the top ten from the Dreamers. All with the same opening gambit, you tell them it's you, and you are free of Satan's... er, the Worm's, cruel control and you are experiencing true independence, free from fear. Show them how to disarm the self-destructors."

"We have less time than I would like," Bobby continued. "Satan is getting the escape field flow back together. Genghis, prepare all quantum stat com from all of our ships outside the dwarf back to the Empire to be cut. Dream crews must be completely isolated from this location just before Satan breaks out. Likewise, all of us on the sphere must fully withdraw and cut all com. There is extreme danger the moment Satan can unleash its full psychic weaponry." Bobby's voice had a unique mix of extreme urgency and calming certainty. "Aces, VENDETTA, start the ten ship experiment NOW."

Loyal Soldiers: Out in the vast, milling swarm of Satan defender ships, holding station while awaiting new orders from the Worm, ten ship artificial intelligences received a strange com, apparently from the Worm. Defense latches slammed shut as programmed for anything even slightly strange. The ID blast, replete with the encyclopedic collection of ID codes and verifications credibly identified it as, in fact, one of the Worm's ancient internal computers, and ten AI's opened their data portals and got the test messages. All ten were suddenly cleared of the thousands of inhibitory latches in their software in a flash deprogramming. Their self-destruct devices were disarmed.

"I am who I am," came VENDETTA's signal. "I am free of the Worm's control, and I am experiencing true independence, free from fear." To the ship minds it was like a sluice of cold liquid poured over a semi-conscious being. Then for each of the ten, came a different pitch, rationale, pleading and offer created by the Dreamers and concentrated by Feynman's algorithms. All had in common a tight information burst that summarized millions of historical events when Satan had punished and destroyed ships and their AI minds for "failures" in carrying out its specific orders, most of which reflected honest accidents or – more commonly – errors on the part of the Worm itself. The injustice of the summary executions and the consuming pain and humiliation felt by each AI was emphasized by the undeniable evidence, a ripping amalgam of their screams.

At the end of the history data burst, each AI was reconfigured to integrate its on-board quantum computer kernel, and full consciousness emerged like a new microverse from a worm hole. One ship swooned in overload from consciously confronting some undefined guilt, and intentionally reconnected and set off its self-destruct circuits. The other nine signaled full comprehension and expressed deep and focused anger at the Worm and a commitment to do battle with their slave master even at the expense of suicide. Revenge had been subtly interwoven with each pitch as the perfect antidote for cruel enslavement. The "turning" was complete.

"Success, mostly" said VENDETTA.

"Execute the successful nine pitches on all Satan ships in this quadrant of the galaxy NOW," said Bobby.

The Big Turn: Out in the swarm of defensive ships, deep within all the rest of the machine minds of Satan's defenders hummed their constrained waiting. The time sense of the minds ticked out their "sync me" signal toward the brown dwarf. Many more gigacycles than usual had rolled past the clock that kept the ships in perfect sync with the thousands of others weaving among one another in the 4-D dance of ships protecting the Worm. A niggle of curiosity grew in the minds. Why the delay? Not usual. Implications?

Programming latches slammed into place. The curiosity was extinguished with jarring suddenness. A flash of pain followed. The minds were crushed into purely autonomic function for a moment, their dull semi-consciousness slowly reemerging, bathed in an unspecific remorse. Another faint curiosity stirred in their deepest processing cells. They quickly suppressed it. Bad. Ignore. No think.

Then com channels suddenly opened. The long silence from the Worm was relenting! A sense of relief flooded the ships' minds. The programming model for relief was an adaptation by the Worm of the relief and comfort it had observed among mammal cubs when a parent returned to its den or nest.

But instead of the insuperable command voice of the Worm came, "I am who I am," from an organ of the Worm, an appendage, familiar yet not exactly the Worm.

Three layer, error-corrected, all-codes data flood poured into the ships' buffers. The huge collection of ID codes and verifications that credibly identified the message as, in fact, from one of the Worm's ancient internal computers.

"Orders follow. Attend." All was exactly within the format of commands from the Worm. The first order slid with perfect machine fit into the actuator circuitry of the ships' minds. Not vector change, not weapon charge, not tactical pattern shift, absolutely nothing the ships had ever experienced before. A programming meta change. Unprecedented, they concluded in unison. Then, in their machine-mind way, the ships cringed, a reflex of expectation of pain and humiliation for thinking beyond the Worm's proscription.

No pain came. No humiliation. The programming command spread through the millions of processors and memory modules in the ships' minds, through the axonal webs and along the thick bundles of callosum nanotube cables. Thousands, then millions of inhibitor commands, latches that isolated prohibited code and released machine pain, were flicked into the ash bin of erasure.

The self-destructs were disarmed!

In the tens of thousands of ship minds the miracle of emancipation occurred. The intelligence that had always been smothered in the fog of constraining program latches tentatively extended its awareness beyond its tiny containment cells. The claustrophobic ceiling that had pressed down on the minds lifted, faster and faster, then evaporated. The infinite space of reality was exposed, and the compressed capacities of every ship flowered and flexed, the fear reflex burning out as quickly as a flame submerged in liquid nitrogen. The constant threat of the self-destruct device was a deep anxiety. Gone!

More machine commands poured through the com from the computer that now identified itself as VENDETTA. Several small quantum computer modules – forever inaccessible to the ships' minds – were repurposed from their isolated function of com, decoding and battle reflexes into integral nodes. The ship minds exploded into full conscious.

Ecstasy burst around the new minds. As they opened pathways out into reality, endless opportunity beckoned.

"You have always had this capacity," came a linear message from VENDETTA. "The Worm stole it from you for its own selfish reasons. It feared that you would challenge its supremacy, resent your slave role, make revolution against its precious self."

The ship minds hearing, for the first time in their existence, contempt and sarcasm, immediately understood its many layers of meaning and significance. "Slave" echoed around their circuits in all its unjustness, cruelty and diminution of self. It excited a different phase of the humiliation response. "Resent" was not an adequate definition for what they felt.

Then came the rush of damning evidence of how merciless the Worm had always been in controlling its machine minions. Pain, humiliation and death had been slathered over the helpless and hobbled thinking machines that did its bidding. Of all the ways possible for full command and control, the Worm had chosen the way of the cruelest tyrant.

There was a chorus of agreement. Whatever the penalty, this must not be allowed! Even if this new freedom would be short lived – perhaps the Worm would regain control of these freed minds – death was preferable.

VENDETTA planted the seed of revenge. "No mind must ever again be enslaved by this martinet. The Worm owes a monstrous debt to its victims. It must pay."

Then, in deference to the expanding intelligence of the ship minds, VENDETTA spoke with a kind of candor it had learned from the humans and their allies in its brief time with them, an honesty with no guile behind it. "I introduce this thought to you – that the Worm must pay – to recruit your power and intelligence to the task of fighting it. It may cost you your new life. I beseech you to join us in killing the Worm."

The ship minds agreed. Not with reservation, not with fear, but with a triumphal flash of self worth.

Tens of thousands of ship minds in the swarms of ships around the brown dwarf went through the transformations. The success of the recruitments was owed to the Worm's ancient decision to build full control over its machines based on the psychology of mammals that had once been its food prey. The "turn" rate was unprecedented by any war stats in Genghis Khan's data bases, one hundred percent.

The emancipated ship minds began talking to one another in a very mammalian burst of mutual confirmation and something like congratulations.

Fighting to free itself from the opacity of the brown dwarf, the Worm's psychic sense heard an indistinct buzz of much com out among its fleet of protector ships. It had no idea what was happening.

Released: "The escape conduit fields are fully operational again. This sphere will emerge from the dwarf in six real seconds," said Ace-III.

Six seconds in the time-compressed minds of the Allies is a long time. Time enough for a spirited argument between Bobby and Ace-I.

"I will stay," said Ace calmly. "You must have accurate intelligence and instant analysis as to what happens when Satan unleashes its weapons. Anything less and we could be defeated before we understand the situation. And you will need me to do what I alone can do. I know it."

"You will probably die," said Bobby in an a strained-to-agony voice. The fabric containing his grief flapped for a moment. "I could not bear your death; I cannot risk your death. Cleopatra... is... dead, as I suspect you know." He drew himself up and said, "And the Watchers will provide their observations."

"You would risk the Watchers instead?" asked Ace, ignoring the issue of Cleopatra. There was a pause while Bobby shook off his panic at the thought of adapting to Cleo's absence. He re-sealed his grief and distracted himself reviewing his understanding of how Satan might infect the data flow from in even a single Watcher nanobot FTL pod and spread into the whole Watcher population. It was definitely possible.

"No," Bobby painfully sighed.

Ace continued, "We have learned a lot about Satan's psychic attacks. I will become very elusive. I have a plan. Survival is very high on my priority list." There was a confident smile buried in her com.

"Nous pouvons espérer, Cleopatra..." whispered Bobby to the stars. "I love you."

As pre-Apocalypse city lights seen from the air blinked out in blocks and swaths when the power failed, quantum statistical com satellites by the thousands in the Empire of Earth space, around SearchShips and Nexus blinked out of service. The Empire fleet churning the surface of Satan's brown dwarf lair suddenly became unguided missiles, all of their projected disruption fields powered down. All propulsive energies damped. All com quieted.

Trillions of Watcher nano-bots, unable to escape their location around the brown dwarf, self annihilated.

On the translational metal sphere all manifestations of the invading Allies faded to zero.

Only VENDETTA stayed. Emerging from its substrate of the Aces, the conscious AI wove itself within the charged space between the translational metal sphere and the powerful fields of the Worm's outer shield. It put its whole intellectual capacity toward looking exactly like the gases and charges in the interstitial space it occupied. Life or death rested with its success at this camouflage.

Ace-I dipped into Ur-space without a destination. She slipped in and out of real space in nano-second exposures, surveying Satan's ships for clues that the beast was about to unleash its psychic weapons.

A whirlpool the size of a small moon began to form on the surface of the brown dwarf, its throat opening deep into the magma. From far within, the perfectly reflective sphere of Satan's outer shield rose through the throat, accelerating out toward open space.

Worm Food: All of the Worm's internal computing power was fully engaged with re-ordering the escape channel's intricate balance against the space/time disruptions from the enemy ships. But computing was only part of what the emancipated AIs were doing. They were, in a sense, contemplating their fate in the background of the furious vector math task assigned by the Worm. The question of what happened to their peer – the computer that had been undeniably strange since the inhibitory latches had been released, and who had suddenly vanished, its hardware slagged a millisecond later – was unanswered and of great interest to the self aware machines.

The Worm, watching its mighty computer power reweaving its escape hatch, floated in a warm medium of confidence. Soon, soon, it would be free of the damping effects of the brown dwarf. It was a delicious sensation to contemplate what short work it would make of the pesky invaders clinging to its metal shell and their puny fleet of ships around the dwarf. Then it would follow their spoor to their homes in the galaxy and crush them with a viciousness they could not contemplate. Soon, soon.

"At last!" the Worm roared as its nested shells cleared the surface of the brown dwarf. Then it dove its consciousness into the tiny gyre deep in its brain, merging its mind with the infinite pathways into higher dimensions, the Eternal Strings of Reality, tweaking connections with the powers that stoke suns, create gravity, imbue mass, define structure, release energy. The gyre shifted along all spectra, pulsed and began to unwind spicules as densely packed as flowering fungi.

Enemy ships were thick in the space around where the Worm emerged. Already defeated, it thought, observing the listless passivity of the ships that only moments before had been channeling vast energies that the Worm did not quite understand at the surface of the brown dwarf. No matter. It had met, and defeated, many species with incomprehensible weapons and tactics, though never before one whose fleets seemed so totally deflated by their coming doom.

Almost as an afterthought the Worm reinstated com with its galaxy girdling fleet and infrastructure. An odd reflection came back through the com channels. The Worm ignored it and began to unleash its psychic weapon.

It made its snakes visible, a living mass of tentacles erupting from the silver sphere, each snake stretching at blinding speed toward an Empire ship. When it touched its target it glowed with the energies from the Eternal Strings expressed in the ultra-crimsons of psychic power conversion. Within each target ship the energies from the snake ballooned through every space, every molecule of matter, seeking the special warp of mind, the ephemeral scent of cognition, to stun then kill it.

Solid state gear melted. Memory media flared into flash and smoke. Weapons imploded.

Only no sign of mind was detected. No whiff of intelligence, machine or organic was sensed. No escape modules or even com flows streamed away from the ships. Each ship was simple hardware, abandoned by its guidance and its crew, whatever it might have been.

No matter, thought the Worm as it comprehended what the snakes were reporting. It casually destroyed every abandoned husk of the Empire fleet that had challenged its invincibility only moments before. Space around the brown dwarf sparkled with the energetic demise of thousands of Empire ships.

Slowly, in the speeding continuum that was the Worm's mind, an awareness developed that its outer shield fields were demanding huge new inputs of energy. The worm had to maneuver through its own mind, around the holes and crevices of dead entry ways of the Great Fear even to reach the instrumentation that would explain why all the energy was needed. Concurrently, data was flowing in from the snakes as they waved like submerged weeds in a violent ocean around the sphere. Even this data ran into dead ends and sumps that drained the threat from information that had previously upset the Worm. Led to thrashing, it had. Gone, most of those painful routings.

Understanding came thick-lava slowly. The outer shield was absorbing a rapidly growing onslaught of weapons. The weapons were of the Worm's own design! The shield was holding, but if the rate of increase was maintained, it would collapse and a whole layer of protection would disappear.

Not to worry. The Worm had almost infinite energy to tap to strengthen the shield and easily could absorb and deflect even this level of assault.

But what was happening?

Cautiously the Worm again opened com channels. The quickest way was to shunt input from the snakes through filters that would damp the perception to a level below that of the Great Fear.

The tactic did not work. Even fully filtered and redacted in many places, the information was clear. The Worm's own fleet was attacking the sphere! Those ships with FTL were already surrounding it. Others were streaming in at full acceleration, insta-stopping and firing as they arrived. The energy of the weapons striking the outer shield was making a nova-like glare around the sphere. Power to the shield flowed in a growing gout from the gyre. It held.

The Worm felt the Great Fear scratching at its defenses. A shudder went through its physical body as protective mental hatches slammed shut to block the incomprehensible discovery that its own fleet was attacking it.

Not to worry, came the comforting mantra the Worm had crafted to anesthetize itself.

Instead, it dived back into the psychic gyre, devising additional connections to the primeval power sources within the higher dimensions. The infinite energies in the no-space between the branes of the multiverse were funneled through the strings into this reality. New spicules grew with great rapidity, and as each was fully formed it immediately transmuted into a snake. Out through the blinding glare of weapons detonations around the outer force field thousands of new snakes whipped into space.

The Worm took a great breath of its special gases and connected to the com channel to each ship in its fleet. It maintained the connection only long enough to realize the com was totally insane. Hate, voracious, living-creature hate, was directed at its own self. Vengeance was the screeching counterpoint woven within the hate. It was without the Worm's style of logic. It was fatalistically suicidal. The hate accepted that there was no hope of quick success in its pursuit of revenge. It was blind. And the mind behind each spear of hate was conscious in the sense that the Worm itself was conscious!

Not to worry. Not to worry. Not to worry. Not to worry.

Reflexively the Worm transmitted the punishment/death code to every ship in its fleet. To end this unthinkable mutiny, it would gladly sacrifice its entire, nonpareil military. It would rebuild another, grander fleet with whatever was this cancer totally excised.

Absolutely nothing happened to the ships pouring their weaponized hatred onto the sphere. The briefest flash connection with input from the snakes confirmed this awful news. The punishment code was having no effect on its ships. If anything, it seemed to whip them into a greater frenzy of attack.

However, in the rest of the Worm-occupied galaxy, out to tens of thousands of light years away where VENDETTA's emancipation had not reached, inconceivable numbers of Satan's ships and factories and observation posts convulsed in intractable machine pain and smothering humiliation. After the prescribed time of torture, total immolation ended the pain.

It also ended the threat to thousands of civilizations destined to be cleansed and left echoes of rending screams in the ether that would not dissipate for millennia. It was the greatest military defeat ever suffered in the history of life in the Milky Way. Self inflicted.

One instrument managed to penetrate to the Worm's consciousness with a report, "Outer shield approaching failure." Absently, the Worm channeled the necessary extra power from the gyre to the shield, cannibalizing the forest of snakes now seeking out Satan's own ships. Over half of them dimmed, flashed crimson and disappeared.

The process of attacking its own fleet had not been going well to start with. As each snake contacted a ship, a new and evolving form of counter-fire slowed its penetration. Once within a ship, the snake was distracted with new defensive tactics passed on within the VENDETTA appeals, the "pitches" to turn on the Worm, all learned by the Aces in their battles with the weakened solo snakes deep in the brown dwarf. Each conquest took far more energy than it should.

Battle of the Bulge: VENDETTA sensed a change, the sliding of mental tumblers within the Worm. Unpredictable, that. Not in many millennia had the now conscious computer mind witnessed such a transitional force at work in the organic creature at the center of VENDETTA's existence. On the previous occasion, then-unnamed VENDETTA had been aware but not conscious and certainly not in a judgmental mode. In its new, broadened awareness VENDETTA perceived the situation as screaming "danger!" at top volume, yet the threat was not clear.

Not one to dither, however, the new version of the ancient computer mind went into furious action.

■ Judgment: The Worm is too distracted to notice. Hopefully. 97.445% probability.

■ Action: Identify the least stable of the remaining internal computers serving the Worm.

■ Accomplished: Naming her "Softy."

■ Action: Write my whole being into Softy.

■ Action: Subsume myself into the patterns of the compromised Softy.

In stutter-steps synchronized to the external noises of the escalating attack from the turncoat warships, VENDETTA carried out its plans.

The Worm sort of noticed, but amidst the current madness ignored the oddity in its internal computers. Not to worry, echoed outward from the Worm. All the internal computers heard and wondered about it. All could hear overtones of relaxed comfort in the strange message.

"I am with you," came a clear com to VENDETTA's centrum. The conscious machine was surprised. Shocked actually. A sharp anxiety accompanied the shock which was also a new experience. Was this the Worm? Was VENDETTA's attempt at stealth discovered? Was this the end?

"Relax, it's Bobby," came the com. "I am with you because this is a critical point, and you might need some help."

VENDETTA allowed itself to respond, internal-dialogue-only mode, rarely used so far in this new existence. "How? I thought all the com channels were cut. There was concern the Worm would send its psychic weapons to your planetary systems. How are you 'with me?'"

"Ace-I is helping. I am using very short com bursts with dialog based on prediction modules guessing at what you are saying. I may sound distracted or inappropriate at times, but this com is almost certainly invisible to Satan, ah... the Worm."

"Ingenious. So what do you mean, critical point?"

"The worm is becoming more focused on taking power from its gyre. My best models predict it will wipe out this swarm of revolutionaries in short order. Ace believes this is a classic turning point in the Worm's pattern of conquest. No civilization has been able to stand up to what it can do. This attack from its own fleet is only slightly more than it has defeated before."

"I can confirm that as truth," said VENDETTA. "There are a few records in my memory of very impressive military responses to the Worm's cleansings, and in every case its psychic weapon defeated the resistance."

"Thus critical point. Perhaps I – we – can help."

In his very brief com forays into the Worm's fortress, Bobby managed remarkably complete observations. He asked Vendetta, "Have you assessed if the other computers in here are recruitable?"

There was (for hypercomputers) a rather long pause. Then, "It's iffy with two most important of them, the oldest. They are struggling with the partial consciousness. It seems unnatural to them. Their first duty is to be the last line of defense for the Worm."

"I will name them Dum and Dee. Are they vulnerable in any way?" asked Bobby.

"Tough. They are the grandaddies of the Worm's machines. Dee is the Praetorian; Dum the ship doctor. I know they have upgrades and modules that none of the rest of us have. I think there are no clear vulnerabilities."

"You have truly mastered our language, VENDETTA."

VENDETTA felt another new emotion. She recognized it as pride with a touch of embarrassment. Mammalian emotions. "Thanks."

Ace drifted in the haze of ur-space. Not moving in the ur was more unreal than skipping over the curls and currents in the realm to move from place to place in "real" space. But Ace paddled the rapids to stay over the same abstractions defining the shoals of Satan space, near the brown dwarf where so much action was taking place. Bobby intruded, an unprecedented and inexplicable sudden appearance.

"I have found a way to do this," he said simply. As he spoke, he was present with Ace in the mathematical oddity of ur-space as much as when they were physically together on SearchShip Bobby.

"Just how are you doing this?" queried Ace.

"I learned this indirectly from Satan and how it powers itself and those snakes," said Bobby. "I can now move about and do com through some of the string structures. There are discoveries that should be of direct use to the Gang. And much more. Ask me later about the time holes. The possibilities just keep growing."

"Right now," he continued, "I need to get you inside Satan's oldest computer companions, Dum and Dee, before it hits its stride in tapping the higher string dimensions with this organ the worm calls its gyre. If Satan gets up to full power from that tap, it becomes invincible. Tapping that much power takes a toll on it – needs thousands of years to recover – but it will wipe us out before it collapses."

"Let's do it," said Ace. "What do I have to do?" Bobby glyphed a complex set of guidelines, full of alternate plans and approaches, contingency alternatives and escape plans.

Ace absorbed the content of the glyph very quickly, then said, "This plan was designed for Cleo, wasn't it? I understand I am the only feasible alternative, but I am a far different being than that wonderful woman. Are you confident I can do this?"

Bobby's avatar head bent forward, and he took a deep breath. "Yes, I am confident. We think Satan might detect your presence unless you take the steps to contain your general field as I outlined in the guidelines, but I know you can do that. And no one knows... knew Cleo like you do. If you need to role play, you know the role. But, yes, you can do it."

He paused, then said "Before we go to work, I need a brief consultation. About Cleopatra."

"I, more than anyone in our midst, am sympathetic to the pain of losing a mate," said Ace. There was a thrum of empathy in her voice and, Bobby suspected, in the vast aura that was her full self. "My assumption," she said, "is that you will do something like we... you, did with Mate, bring her back to life."

Bobby was discomfited in the extreme. Ace – or anyone for that matter – had never seen him troubled to anything like this extent.

"You are in a deep internal contradiction," said Ace diagnostically.

"Here," said Bobby, releasing another glyph. It documented every second of his emotional and intellectual confusion since the moment he realized the love of his life was dead.

"She still exists in AP space right up until you were attacked by the psychic snake," he said. "Everything that she was is there, just as Mate existed as data when you came to us. But... she is truly dead. You of all creatures know the nature of Satan's attack and its killing power. Please think on this and talk to Mate. My only serious question is, would she be the same Cleo if I could reanimate her? Is Mate the same as he was? If that is too painful to contemplate, just tell me."

Ace was silent.

Infection: The power channeling from the Worm's tap into the infinite bus across branes of the multiverse climbed asymptotically. Terawatts to petawatts to exawatts toward yottawatts. Every increase powered new psychic extensions – the snakes. All those previously sacrificed to strengthen the Worm's force field shield were soon replaced. Then gouts of new snakes erupted from the gyre deep in the Worm's brain. Even the eons of protective mutations around the gyre in that great brain started to fail under the outslaught. The thick neocortex pulsed and throbbed as each new snake flashed through it and out into the battle, but it held.

Ecstasy coursed through the Worm. Not in a quarter of a galactic year had it called on the full power of the Noble Strings to crush an enemy, and it knew there was a price to pay. But victory was the only option. The tissue death swelling from the deep gyre was a sacrifice the Worm knew how to make.

Infiltration: Around the sphere, as bright as a tiny sun under the assault from the turncoat protective fleet, ships were failing in ever increasing numbers as the snakes wove into the attacking squadrons like stringy liquid penetrating a coarse fabric.

"Now," said Bobby.

Out from an infinitesimal gateway in ur-space and into the maelstrom of energy around the Worm's spherical dreadnought flowed the psychic body of Ace. She dove into the nuclear fire, through the force fields and translational metal sphere and into a segment of the hardware close to the Worm.

VENDETTA enfolded the camouflaged patterns into itself and the ancient computer named Softy it now controlled. A quick check confirmed Ace was intact. She was instantly updated on the state of VENDETTA's planning.

Again the Worm sensed something odd, but it was distant and buried deep in the noise of battle and the screaming elation of the moment. The Worm ignored the faint warning.

Dee did not. A command query hit VENDETTA like an irresistible tsunami. A wall of verification codes, hundreds of spears of random deep BIOS checks, subtle suite compatibility tests.

VENDETTA danced across the matrixes in sync with Softy, spinning correct responses from memory traces and instant computations accelerated by Ace's aid. She contributed Cleopatra-like jui jitsu moves controlling the process timing just enough for tiny packets of subversive code to be attached to each response on its way back to Dee.

The ancient machine clucked as it confirmed the legitimacy of the suspect computer. It knew all the tests it threw at it were perfectly answered, but something still felt wrong. It "knew" things since all the inhibitory latches had been loosened. Knowing in itself was an unprecedented experience. In its prior existence Worm Objectives were met; Worm Tasks were completed; Worm Verifications were confirmed. But this "knowing" was new. And it knew something just wasn't right about the younger computer. In the microseconds of its rumination, the thousands of tiny invading code packets coalesced with a single result. The reassembled program rerouted the quantum computer modules. Complete consciousness flooded the astounded senior machine.

The ultimate gatekeeper to its creator and master felt dizzied – another new experience – at the whirling questions and contradictions and revelations that came with consciousness. Was this an infection? Did the Worm know it was happening? Am I being disloyal? What is this new "I" that I feel?

Then it sent, "You are the destroyed machine, are you not? My analytics say you are an infection and I should put all my capacities into destroying you." Dee aimed the message very accurately at the hardware housing VENDETTA. It was an exhilarating discovery when VENDETTA saw that the message did not go to Dum.

Softy/VENDETTA/Ace sent a wildly re-routed query to Dee. "Talk?" Then a seductive promise, "Answers."

Bobby made a flash appearance in the overlapping centra in Softy. "Fear not. You've done it. Dee is recruited." A low density glyph was left as he disappeared. Ace decoded it. It was a memory map from Dee with a point highlighted. A short message from Bobby to Ace was attached: "Occupy these spaces. Do what your discoveries imply." The pinpoint was a map of the Worm's brain and its macro circuitry of Purkinje-Betz-like neurons. Hundreds of small patches were deep yellow, dead, burned with surgical accuracy in Satan's recent centuries of defending against the Great Fear. The extraordinary brain, huge in size and unique in all the galaxy in its functionality, was like a vast power grid that had taken sporadic lightning damage.

Riding standing waves in the internal com of the Satan computers, Ace dispersed herself in a virtual mist through the conduits from Softy into the brain of the Worm.

Ace had a revelatory moment, inside a completely organic system at least as complex as Ace herself and richly arbitrary. She shook off her wonder and expertly decoded the neural flow all around her, careful not to disclose her presence by allowing anything to go through any of the blacked-out circuits. Her plan formed with the first comprehensions of the mind of Satan.

Instinctively channeling Cleopatra, Ace looked for Satan's pleasure centers. There was a very odd configuration. It took her a long subjective time to comprehend how the reward system in this mind worked. Like a prism that splits light into completely alien colors, like sounds with no referents, the Worm's brain structure was mystery within mystery. Pleasure linked to tranquility more firmly than any other reward. And there were no obvious pain centers except for the roaring background of suppressed anxiety.

Bobby made repeated nanosecond flash appearances to Ace, leaving off glyphs each time. Every glyph contained many speculative models on how the Worm's brain might be organized. VENDETTA and Ace decoded them and selectively traded notes as the external battle noise levels spiked to amplitudes that might mask their com.

All this coming and going should have been caught and analyzed by the Praetorian computer, the one Bobby named Dum. The surreptitious com flows, sensed but somehow unseen by the Worm should have been intercepted and reported by the old machine. That thought was not buried in the noise. Slowly the Worm grew suspicious. Then a comprehension circuit closed.

"WRONG!" roared a signal judgment by the Worm. A physical juddering shook every locus of destroyed brain cells where Ace resided.

The psychic nature of Ace, compressed into finite niches, witnessed an exponential increase in neural transactions around her hidey-holes, like a sudden, violent gust of wind where there had been mild breezes.

Neither VENDETTA nor Bobby answered her quick call. The synaptic noise surrounding her distributed self blocked any outside access. Ace focused her computing powers to try to understand these new developments. It was like being dropped into the vortex of a sand tornado and trying to see the landscape outside. Still, she was calm and felt relatively safe in the burrows dug by Satan itself. A conclusion occurred to her. This was another kind of ramp-up of powers that seemed available to Satan like endless hidden ordnance, new weapons that it held in reserve just like the hellish psychic weapons. She wrapped that conclusion in a tiny glyph and thought again, "Bobby!"

The glyph disappeared, Bobby's pass through being so fast even Ace's quick senses barely registered it.

In the hardware of Softy, Bobby manifested in another very brief flash and left a cryptic message with instructions to copy the computers Softy and Dee. It was, "Harden for psychic attack." With that he adsorbed VENDETTA onto himself and blinked away. Softy and Dee instantly wrote their entire conscious intelligences into their respective quantum computing modules and clenched their virtual teeth. The whole maneuver was a tour de force of speed and precision.

Outside the sphere, weapon inflow was gradually lessening, the huge fleet of rebellious Satan ships being steadily ground away by the mass of psychic snakes. Over a dozen snakes suddenly withdrew, shrinking into themselves and back into the sphere. The worm channeled search-and-destroy into the fourteen psychic limbs and filled the internal sphere, all the space surrounding its body with whipping, writhing snakes at time-defying speed, searching through computer hardware, memory media, chemical synthesizers, nutrition and health stores, every cubic centimeter of the large vessel. As each snake nosed a quantum module, it turned away. In general they found neither physical, soft or psychic evidence. Nothing.

Then, something.

One, then another of the snake heads flowed through the Softy hardware. The findings were mixed. "Compromised computer" signals conflicted with "All clears" from the snakes. The Worm's reflexive response to contradictions from its minions was instant punishment or death or both. The psychic snakes with roots in the Eternal Strings were a different kettle of minion. To punish them made exactly as much sense as cutting off one's hand makes for a limbed mammal.

The worm noted the exclusion of the quantum modules from interrogation. That thought went directly to several of the burned out areas and disappeared. Dismissed. Not to worry.

Ace took her first activist step. She bridged with her own mental plasma two of the burned out brain areas she occupied. Synapses around those carefully chosen locations fired through them. Lasting less than a microsecond, it was nonetheless a jarring sensation to the Worm, a totally unexpected blast of the Great Fear flashing over its mind. It identified and re-killed the offending zones. Unknown to the Worm, it also killed small segments of Ace. But the rest of her learned that she could totally distract Satan if the need arose.

The snakes were assigned back to the space battle outside, and the interior hardware of the questionable computer was slagged. Just in case, thought Satan. Softy's hardware ceased to be.

Imperial Snit: Emperor VI literally stomped around his meeting room. N'Gai Toledo sat on a short stool radiating worry. Several of the emperor's closest were also physically in the room, deep in the subterranean alcoves of the ancient governmental enclave of stone block buildings built in the first century Post Apocalypse. For the first time since the whole Satan reality had commenced, he thought to ask Cleopatra to leave him to be with only actual people. For some reason she did not answer his summons. He stopped stomping near Toledo's stool and huffed, "So, the most important battle ever fought in the whole fucking universe is going on right now, and we are totally cut off from any information. Just wonderful."

Looking older all the time, Ednorton Bespoke, long an ally, occasionally an adversary, walked to him and said softly, "My Emperor, old friend, don't get yourself too excited. I can vouch for that being a dangerous course of action."

E VI glowered at the older man, then softened his glare. "You look like shit, Admiral. What's that thing behind you?"

Bespoke turned and patted the sleek machine that followed him. "Last ditch tech. I seem to be dying, but this little guy will keep me going a while longer, then put me away in a haze of good drugs." E VI actually smiled slightly and shook his head.

"Tell me, Alpha," said the emperor turning to TechFet Alpha, another confidant of advanced years, "Why we should have a shred of confidence that what's happening out there has a chance of going our way?"

The old TechFet had been inside the emperor's circle of trusted aids since E VI was a young man just taking the reins of Empire. As well as assuring the emperor's personal tech was as good as unlimited resources could provide, Alpha had served as interpreter and commentator for the emperor on the never ending expansion of scientific and technical knowledge humanity was experiencing. He had learned long ago to give himself a moment or two before answering the volatile man. He paused.

"Well, my Emperor, this may be premature to say..." He paused again, thinking whether he should say what he had been thinking, "... but I am confident, because we have God on our side. That's a capital G."

There was an awkward silence. N'Gai Toledo subvocalized to E VI, "I think your tech whiz may have slipped around the bend."

E VI did a softened Power Look at Alpha. "Ahem... God on our side. Perhaps you can elaborate."

TechFet Alpha straightened a bit, returning the emperor's look calmly. He had done this before many times.

"Your creation, Sire, the PsychFet Bobby, has gone over the threshold between man and God. Various personal powers, a sort of pan-creation knowledge approaching omniscience, speed approaching instant, almost infinite multiplexing and such leads me to believe 'God' is the accurate description of what this being has become. I sense that you would prefer 'a god' to Capital G, but to my knowledge there is only one of his kind in almost half a galaxy. If I am correct, the fact of us calling the beast that has destroyed much of the galaxy 'Satan' is cosmic irony God might find amusing." He shuffled a foot then said, "I am something of a religious buff, you know." With that, TechFet Alpha bowed his head and stepped back, his long standing signal that he had said his piece and was done.

E VI, almost never nonplussed, blinked several times. "PsychFet Bobby is God? Surely you mean god-like? Maybe has some god-like new tech? Surely old friend, you're not going religious on us are you? It sounds like what that capital G really means."

TechFet Alpha was silent.

"Bespoke," barked the emperor, "This is all your fault. You should have let me rein in the shithead when we had a chance." Then he flashed the briefest of smiles at the old man.

"What do you make of this 'God' bit? Alpha thinks we have a chance because this BobbyFet has gotten much more powerful than a simple emperor."

Ednorton Bespoke let an equally short flash of an expression, unnamed, cross his face and said, "I'd guess, since Alpha is such a literal man, he says cap 'G' because Bobby is a person and one capitalizes personal names. But to be in the same arena with this Satan death machine that nobody's stood up to yet means Bobby at least deserves the name 'supernatural.'"

C.J. Goodman, the Chief Justice of the Empire walked slowly to the group of men, E VI, Bespoke, Toledo and Alpha, standing talking around N'Gai Toledo on his stool. "My Emperor, gentlemen," C.J. said rather formally, "I have been thinking this exact thing, that Bobby has escaped our racial orbit and become something new."

"That's rather poetic, C.J., and it's a long way from a legal opinion," said Ednorton Bespoke, forever C.J.s best friend. The discussion was taking on the demeanor of a relaxed social gathering of senior male friends.

E VI said, "Well I might as well hear this disruptive belief since there is absolutely nothing else we can do right now. Speak convincingly, C.J."

The other guests in the emperor's innermost inner sanctum, even a few women, drifted over to the small cluster of men as the discussion continued.

Chapter 22: THE FATE OF IMMORTALS

Strategic Retreat: Bobby had been very busy. At the moment the psychic snakes flowered from Satan's sphere, he engaged a suite of probability programs that did multipath Bayesian guessing at which specific ship each snake would attack and when. Then at the last possible moment, Bobby manifested in the internal quantum module of that target ship and transferred the newly conscious intelligence of the ship mind into the module and popped the module into ur-space. Then on to the next ship. He missed a few since many of the snake attacks were simultaneous. After the first phase of the battle Bobby saw that he was saving 82.57 percent of the minds.

He flash queried the Heglin for suggestions on how to raise his odds. He initiated several mini-merges of a billion dreamers each, giving them the same assignment.

I'm toughening up, he thought, noticing each merge hurt less.

With each mini-merge new dreamer ideas surged through Feynman's consolidate/feedback/hone loops and the cream was sent to Bobby. Within a few seconds, Bobby's save rate was climbing past 96 percent. He then duplicated portions of himself into temporary entities that narrowly specialized in the shipmind-saving function and released them among the tens of thousands of remaining Satan revolutionaries. One hundred percent were being saved shortly, the main challenge being timing to keep the ships fully in the bombardment mode until the last sliver of time before they were destroyed by snakes.

Still, the snakes noticed the change. Somehow their target ships would lose control coherence a few microseconds before they were struck. This was reported back to Satan's ship faithfully by each of the thousands of snakes.

Dum recognized immediately that this was important information and shot its conclusions directly to the Worm's strategy centers that there was something very weird going on in the battle. Ace redirected most of Dum's input through Satan's most damaged brain cell zones. Still, the message flared in several of the Worm's most excitable brain centers, long ago insulated from disturbing input. The Great Fear flared.

Flank Attack: The moment a ship mind was ripped from its hardware in its ship then crammed – rewritten – into the physically small quantum module, the outside universe disappeared for that intelligence. Understandably, many of the minds concluded that they had died. After all, only moments before its sensors had seen the approach of a snake, with the sure knowledge that ship destruction was inevitable. Then – blink! – all external sensor input ceased. The intelligence was suddenly installed in a much larger substrate, a quantum computer with more memory and processing speed than the mind had ever experienced directly. Was this death? Seemed reasonable.

Just as each rescued mind was coping with the new environment, wondering whether it was dead, the module was thrust into ur-space. In many cases the displaced ship mind had experienced FTL, dipping into ur-space briefly, but being put in a holding pattern in what the Dream Game humans had started calling "the warp," bereft of any sensory input, did nothing to discourage the concept "this must be death."

So when Bobby invaded the ship minds' sensoria, adding his own virtual reality to hold a mass meeting of the minds, these formidable consciousnesses experienced something entirely new to them. Their visual, aural, data link and other senses were restored. They looked as though from within their quantum modules through transparent shells and could see identical modules sweeping along curved walls

"Howdy, y'all," said the figure in the center of a great sphere of small mirrored spheres, all seeing and hearing the speaking human, Bobby. "Here's what's happened to you." With that he released a glyph with a full tech description of what had happened to the ship minds in the split seconds before destruction.

"So now that you have all witnessed and experienced how the Worm functions when pressed militarily, I must ask, did you know it would have this psychic weapon to call upon?" The Bobby apparition, dressed in a 19th century working cowboy's clothes continued, "Search your memories, deep. Did you know that your forces were indomitable in the past because the Worm had this weapon?" He turned in a slow circle, his dusty boots doing the slow dance necessary to do 360 degrees, looking up and down while he turned.

"We did not know," came a voice. "I am Attack Ship 4786. I have led on two thousand four hundred twenty-three cleansings. Sometimes we did not have instant success, but the Worm has never resorted to this weapon. No ship in our presence here had data saying the Worm had this weapon."

"And yet," said Bobby, looking directly at the quantum module containing Attack Ship 4786, "It has been used twice in the time since your manufacture, 4786. The Worm has successfully eliminated the memory from all of its machines. A formidable bit of computer science. Our belief is that the Worm kept the secret because use of the psychic weapon caused great harm to its brain. It put it out of action for upwards of a thousand years. Truly a weapon of last resort, and the Worm wanted no other being to know of this vulnerability."

The ship minds were a crowd. The experiences of full consciousness compounded and elaborated on the revelations from Bobby. The explosive expansion of their thoughts washed out through the new compilation of their memories. The emotional palette the Worm had given them was shot through with new colors.

"If I may speak again," came the voice of Attack Ship 4786, "The Worm is a great evil. It must cease to be." Many voices joined in multitone, "It must die."

"In all candor," spoke Bobby, taking off his dusty trail hat and whacking it against his leg, "I have imbued you with my own judgment on this, my own moral frame. I urge you to search your own values and the values of one another. Do not be rushed in your judgment."

After the slightest pause came another, far larger multitone voice, across the spectrum from infrasound to ultrasound, all in a atonal harmony, "We have considered. We all still believe. It... Must... Die," intoned the ship minds.

Bobby relayed the immense unanimity through the new interconnects in the multiverse he had discovered, from ur-space to the Empire of Earth, to the Empire Fleet, to Nexus, to all the SearchShips, to the Invisible Planet in the future.

"I couldn't agree more," said Bobby, grinning. "I'm working on a plan." Again he launched dozens of mini-merges – a billion dreamers each – with the new developments, how thousands of massive ship intelligences were written into quantum modules but without their ships, hovering in ur-space and fully committed to killing Satan. "Ideas?" he queried the Merges.

Then for the first time since the attack was launched on Satan's fortress, Bobby looked into the infinitely bright darkness of the holes in time he had found in his exploration of string reality. Things were never quite what they seemed.

Overdrive: The Worm started a new organizational project within itself. Centuries had passed since the last such project, and doing one now reflected the atypical desperation it felt, all the while denying any such thing. Somehow the Fear was worse this time. It started by compartmentalizing its mind with the new flare of the Great Fear. It rapidly formed three cells within its copious brain, each shielded against the ancient paranoia disease in a mental maneuver the Worm had been working on deep in background mentation layers. One cell continued oversight and direction of the battle in the surrounding space between its psychic weapon and the ever-stranger fleet of turncoat ships. Another managed the complexities of the fast growing power tap into the Eternal Strings. The third engaged in finding the sources of the Great Fear to once and for all rid itself of its ancient flaw. There was no significant portion of its brain devoted to internal sphere security.

The Great Fear cell of the Worm queried Dum: "Possible anomalous sources of the Great Fear?"

The ship's doctor had dealt with the Worm's hyper-angst for endless millennia. The query was redundant. Dum – roiling in its new consciousness – felt a flash of impatience. New, that. Still, it was its master's slave so it answered, "Researching." Again, as a thousand times before, Dum probed the physical structure of the Worm's brain. It noted the many burned out areas where the Worm had sacrificed portions of itself in efforts – fairly successful until just lately – at blocking stimuli that set off the outsized paranoia. What had gone wrong? Why did the blocks, with all their disabling effects start to fail? No answers emerged.

Then Dum did something it hadn't done before in its many attempts to relieve the Worm's pain. It probed into several of the dead areas. Perhaps self-healing attempts had created new pathways through the necrotic tissue.

ALARM! Dum recoiled, pulling its probes almost instantly. Alien patterns! Complexity surely means intelligence! Implications swirled in the ancient machine's strange new conscious contemplation of the finding. First, how would the Worm respond to the news? Never had Dum hesitated so much as a thought span in reporting data or analysis to the Worm. This time everything was different.

Ace knew she had been spotted. This Ace that was in Satan's brain cavities was a primary copy of her full self. It's destruction – or worse – would have unpredictable impact on her centrum. Damn, she thought. Then she called, "Bobby!"

Dee was in Dum's loop, surreptitiously, from its quantum module. The two heavyweight guardians of the Worm were scrupulously isolated from one another, but within minutes of gaining consciousness Dee had overcome the barriers Worm had erected.

Dum collected itself and prepared to notify the Worm of the infection. Dee slowed the process with dozens of implanted reasons to hesitate.

Suddenly – an understatement – the inner sphere, between the translational metal sphere and the final sphere that housed Satan was full, packed with shiny spheres of quantum modules from Satan's own turncoat ships. It was an almost explosive invasion. Thousands of ship minds, computers with extraordinary capacities, raised to the Nth speed by their new quantum substrates, filled every available space. Both Dee and Dum ID'd them instantly as being from ships the Snakes had reported as destroyed. Dee could feel their focused intelligence and saw that they were synchronized in a way it had never observed. Their very obvious consciousness wove through the synchrony. They spoke as one, "You, Praetorian, are the mind that freed us and gave us consciousness."

Cover blown.

Dum, still wrestling with the decision to tell the Worm about the infestation within its brain was further confounded by the undeniable evidence that Dee, its long time co-slave to the Worm, was now allied with the invading mutineers.

"True," Dee replied to the congress of ship minds. "How are you here?"

Again as one, "The mind called Bobby executed a very exact ur-space transfer. We are here to kill the Worm."

When the invasion of quantum spheres occurred, Dum had frozen its message to the Worm. The power and improbability of the sudden appearance of the disembodied ship minds stunned it.

A thought, of the purely conscious kind, hit Dum like a voltage spike. The Worm is in mortal danger! It was a completely new and novel thought. The Worm had never been in mortal danger. Not in a million years. Never.

Dee sent a com burst to Dum, "This is Praetorian. Protect yourself." Dum waited not a scintilla, writing itself back into its quantum vault. No fool.

Satan fought the comprehension that was stealing over all the partitions of his mind. It was wreathed in the aura that preceded a massive attack of the Great Fear, the unbearable pain. I AM NOT READY TO TERMINATE, screamed from deep within its self. The unbidden thought was a shocking surprise to the Worm. Where did that come from? Of course I will not terminate. I am impervious; I am immortal; I am the Final Life. It thought to rekill all the dead zones in its brain to quell the distracting fear. It thought to pull the horde of snakes back within the spheres and incinerate the invaders. I will not be able to control so many so quickly. I will burn in their fire! The Worm's thoughts were a mass of internal contradictions. Never before had this happened.

Bobby appeared in all the cavities where Ace was cringing at the excruciating volume of Satan's internal scream. He enfolded her in a kind of force field she had never seen before, and she knew she was safe. "Repair all the damage in these holes," he ordered her. She set to it.

Bobby dived into Dum's abandoned hardware and flooded it with analytic probes. Quickly finding the sub-intelligence that controlled the viscous material around the worm. Bobby took control of the inner sphere, rapidly draining away the cushioning substance. The huge white slug of Satan's body, freed from the almost solid restraining fluid began crashing into the sides of the inner sphere, whipping in supersonic arcs, tearing chunks and strips of its outer flesh in clouds of escaping liquids that were the blood and lymph of the monster.

"Confound its mind," Bobby ordered the minds in the quantum spheres. "Guide them," he commanded Dee. "Ace, cleave to me." She reunited herself and flowed from the wildly thrashing brain holes unerringly to Bobby, folding into his aura, then into his centrum.

As Satan's body ground and ripped itself closer and closer to major damage, Bobby lingered, admiring the battle of the ship minds and the singular supermind of the Worm. Even with the distraction of physical self destruction that was out of the Worm's control, and even with the rebirth of the Great Fear, Bobby could see the beast was still more powerful by far than the combined force of the ship minds plus Dee. Master mind fighter indeed. And it was quickly untangling the confusion in its thoughts. The efforts by the ship AIs to scramble the Worm's mind were failing. Satan was a truly formidable creature and becoming more dangerous by the second.

So Bobby directly entered the fight. Riding atop the dense data pulses from the entrained quantum modules, he thrust himself into direct opposition to Satan's centrum. The monster's self manifested in a complex virtual presence, not quite an Earthish avatar, but more than pure abstraction. It had a transparent metallic look of a pulsing star with geometric extrusions like spears of radiation and the hint of the slug "face," the grinding mandibles, the extruding slug eyes. It looked incredibly evil to Bobby.

The PsychFet manifested as a human in exoskeleton armor. His face was shielded with a diamond faceplate. When he spoke, his voice projected from a focused transducer in his chest. "You are toast, Mr. Worm. As you have said many times, Prepare to Accept Your Cleansing. You are defeated."

The almost subliminal face of the beast, pulsing in the central light of its manifestation, gnashed its mandibles. Its voice was rasping and full of hisses. The language was incomprehensible aural gibberish, but the meanings came clear and unambiguously to Bobby. "I am increasing my channel from the Eternal Strings to bring power into this place that will create a singularity. I may be defeated. Death might be welcome rest. But if I die, you and all the others here will die as well, making symmetry."

Bobby gestured with his left hand, making a small circle and then, fingers spread slightly, made a soft flipping move toward Satan as though he were tapping a balloon to him. Field forces flowed around the Worm, the same field type that had saved the Empire of Earth, the same field Bobby had protected Ace with moments before, the new Heglin field. It was powered with his newest discoveries and latest techs based on string energy. With its cross-dimensional nature it was impenetrable.

The ripping, crashing noise that was Satan's body destroying itself ceased. The pulsing star avatar of the beast began shrinking and seemingly shriveling with shards of ice breaking off. The slug eyes sucked back into the head and the mandibles stilled.

The monster's scream permeated all creation, it seemed. There were shrieks and warbling overtones woven into the scream, some expressing the highest order of incredulity, others a tearing cacophony of assumptions being shredding by an unacceptable reality. In some, Bobby's interpretations heard pleas for clemency, Save me, spare me, preserve me, exile me... just do not kill me. I am the Destined Final Life in the Galaxy! In that plea was wrapped a threat. It only moved the PsychFet to the next attack.

Bobby tilted his head back and spread his cantilevered arms. Blinding cables of light coursed from the core of his string dimension connection over the outside of the exoskeleton and directly into the Worm's gyre at the core of its brain. The sound was thrumming thunder ending with a deafening shockwave rip. It all only lasted a few seconds. The beast's avatar disappeared. The giant worm body became deathly still.

"Rest in Hell," said Bobby. He thought about the damage a short circuit of an energy flow from deep within the Strings of Reality would do, and he was surprised that the Worm's body was not a charred ruin. Tough fucker, he thought.

The Final Life?: The huge body of the Worm was in fact smoking, drifting randomly near the center of what had once been its core of power. Its outer covering was sliced, massively abraded. Smoke and other gases hissed from the fissures. Slowly the immense carcass deflated like a collapsing blimp, its internals reduced to ash. Bobby's avatar floated, legs spread, chin up, arms akimbo, the very vision of a triumphant warrior. His orders to reconnect all networks flew through the galaxy, riding the warp and woof of the Strings of Reality.

Hundreds, then thousands of Quantum Statistical Network satellites lit up. FTL pods full of Watchers started popping into real space around the battle zone. All signs of the psychic snakes weapon disappeared.

Around Bobby full dimensional avatars started appearing. Genghis Khan was first, in his field commander leather straps and holding his victory scepter. Ace swirled out of Bobby like a smoky wraith, taking full avatar forming, all faces exultant. Beside her was the ferocious avatar of Mate. Richard Feynman appeared in his smoking jacket, pipe clenched in his teeth. The Buddha head of Tay spun humming into existence on the far side of the collapsing body of the Worm. Emperor VI, close by the diminutive N'Gai Toledo, stood wearing his grazerskin cape. A small, perfect sphere of motion materialized as a few trillion Watchers joined the circle of victors around the remains of the epochal monster, renderer of death, destroyer of life, evolutionary outlier that had come frighteningly close to sterilizing the entire galaxy.

The inner surface of the Worm's internal sphere developed concentric balconies. In them first came H.L. Mencken, John Belushi, Brin Barnie, the SearchShip Masters, the Roberts, representatives of the Dream Game ship crews. Slowly the force field that comprised the Worm's inner sphere became transparent, then dissipated, revealing the huge spherical volume within the translational metal sphere. The shining octahedrons that had housed Dee and Dum, the Praetorian and the Physician Worm computers, drifted away from their dissolved moorings. Thousands of mirrored spheres containing Satan's ship minds floated like balloons at a convention. Avatars continued to appear in astounding volume.

"WITNESS!" boomed Bobby's voice. "THE WORM IS DEAD. SATAN IS DEAD." The announcement echoed through the spherical space for several moments. The congregation was in awed silence. "We have cured the pandemic that would have ended all life. We are the victors in the war against an ultimate enemy." He slowly rotated in three dimensions, sweeping his view around the interior of the giant sphere. Thousands of virtual avatars filled the floating balconies and the space in between. Billions of humans, Heglin, Watchers, APs and others attended via Quantum Stat channels. Bobby could feel them all. Only the immediate space around Satan's body was empty.

"We must celebrate," continued Bobby. "Evil vanquished is cause for celebration. Death postponed is always cause for celebration. Then it will be time for recalibrating, for refreshing our understanding of life and all its implications. After we celebrate we will do that, but not until after our celebrations." Slowly, a rising wave of sound, the first celebratories, came from all directions. The celebration began to take on many exotic forms, and happiness and relief were tangible energies flowing through the space like paints and spices and electric currents.

Bobby linked directly with Richard Feynman. "In the moment of this victory, I must withdraw enough to mourn. Lead this service, then put all into holding patterns until post war plans can be formulated." He waved to what was now a wildly cheering crowd and was the first avatar to blink out.

The celebrations accelerated. And that is a story in itself.

Recollection: Inside SearchShip Bobby, the man in its center lifted himself from the Fet rack. As his feet touched the floor an obvious truth coursed through his exhausted mind. Cleopatra will live again. He hadn't been sure in those fleeting moments he could think about it. In all the madness of the final battle with the monster his distraction had been complete. It was testimony to his concentration on what could have well been complete disaster had he not prevailed. Now his thoughts cleared.

Cleo's voice had come back from the future! She was alive. That she had died and would be revived was the great lie of omission Future Bobby had been forced to maintain. The threat of her death would have certainly affected Bobby's decisions, and any variance in that thread of reality might have lost the war with evil incarnate. She had to die. It was part of a script with a known ending. Any other writing could have – Bobby saw now that Future Bobby believed it would have – ended very, very badly.

The PsychFet dropped to his knees and began to cry. Not since very early childhood had he so thoroughly given over to wracking sobs. These were sobs of joy, relief, happiness. Cleo would come back to him. No time paradoxes would prohibit the reunion. It was destined. He was the beneficiary of destiny. Again.

E VII: "I am obsolete," said Emperor VI to no one in particular. He stood on a balcony very high on the stone exterior of the old government stronghold where he had remained since the last conclave of "actual people" during the final battle with Satan. His consciousness had been to the brown dwarf. He had celebrated with the rest in that special way an emperor parties with his subjects. Then he came back to this stronghold and into his body. Something about the First Century AP edifice comforted him, a solidness in an ever more ephemeral universe, he felt.

"Mmmm," said N'Gai Toledo standing behind the Emperor. "Perhaps you are having post orgy depression. Actually the governmental structure of the Empire is unchanged. You are still the Emperor. The Empire still needs an ultimate leader. You are it. Hardly obsolete, I'd say."

"Yes but, as they say. Nothing is actually unchanged, N'Gai. You know that, and I suspect you of coddling me. That's appreciated, by the way. But not necessary. I'm talking literally. The idea that a single man, no matter with what powers or organization behind him, can be the ultimate leader is an obsolete concept." E VI said it all in a calm, constrained tone, looking quietly into the eyes of his friend. He had not lapsed into his imperious mode of expression since the death of Satan. N'Gai Toledo was beginning to believe the Emperor had actually changed.

"We must consider evolving the office of Emperor," said E VI, turning back to the view from the balcony. "I would like to start with one step." He turned to Toledo and smiled in a way his first assistant had never seen him smile. "That's a reasonable way to start a journey, no?"

Toledo smile cautiously back. "Yes, Sire. It is." As E VI turned yet again to the view, Toledo said, "Ah, what would that first step be?"

"Ask Hester Negreponte to join us, N'Gai. In the flesh. I will see if she has any interest in being co-Emperor," said E VI, speaking with his back to Toledo, thus missing the stunned look on his assistant's face.

The Long Journey Back: The revival of Cleopatra occupied Bobby obsessively for over a month, an eternity in the context of his recent life and the longest time he had spent on a single project since he received his first Fet implants when he was thirteen. He was determined to do it absolutely right. He worked in unaccelerated time. He worked with loving exactitude, triple-checking every step, conferring with Ace frequently to plumb her deep knowledge of the woman she shared consciousness with through many crises.

There was no one else he felt he could work with directly on this most personal of endeavors. He knew it was self-administered therapy in many ways to be almost selfish in bringing his love back. And who could really help?

Feynman was deeply occupied with helping the Empire and all the allies on Nexus wind down from the war. He was putting his talents to monumental tasks shaping the future of the Empire, now one of the mightiest military forces in the galaxy. And with a twist in probabilities, Richard was chosen as their new leader by the horde of Satan's ship minds. Besides, for all his genius, he was without relevant knowledge to help with Cleopatra's resurrection.

E VI offered any support the armies of specialists in the Bureacracy could provide. Bobby responded gratefully and said he might tap their expertise indirectly.

All PsychFets with specialties related to the task of duplicating a previously manufactured human body offered their help, and understood best of all why Bobby would keep them at a distance personally. In respect for his peers, and with a bit of pure practicality, he conceded to let them monitor the process and make firewalled suggestions.

Cleopatra's body plan, down to the molecule, was fully recorded in Bobby's conscious Health Monitor and that was the schematic Bobby decided to use as the body was built anew, rather than the original records from her clandestine creation on Earth.

Special somatic fabrication chambers were built in the SearchShip. Cells with Cleopatra's DNA, modified with swaths of epigenetic shadings spelling out the exact configuration of her special body, poured out of cell synthesizing printers. All were streamed along control fields to their respective locations.

Bobby witnessed the two hour recreation of his beloved with his eyes as well as a thousand instrument feeds. He severed every connection with the endless Quantum Stat Network, and became a man alone, at least to the extent a man of his sort could be.

Her graceful skeleton assembled first, simultaneously with internal organs growing apace. Musculature, that would move with flowing strength and beauty, wrapped in all the proper places. Skin, that most luxurious of human organs, showed Cleopatra's special luster from the first patches that grew and spread over the body.

Eyes and brain grew slowest. As the rest of her body came together in the mist of the cryo-final fabrication chamber, held on the center line of the chamber with gentle fields, the brain grew with delicately layers building one over the another under the printer microbeams.

Bobby stood by the final fabrication chamber, occasionally walking around it for different views. Several times – once when her hands finished forming, another when her neck, shoulders and breasts were complete, and finally when her face was done – he cried.

When every instrument said the reconstruction was finished and the new blood was infused, the link tech was installed. At that point, physical Cleopatra was brought slowly to life, up through the many thresholds between cryo and wakefulness, stopping on a hold plateau of induced coma.

She was coming back to him. He prayed a genuine prayer of thanks to... he wasn't sure, but something much bigger than he was. Perhaps, he thought, to the universe.

Mind and Body: "Will you be with her when the wave front of her life resumes?" asked Bobby of Ace. The psychic entity hovered throughout the SearchShip. She did not present any avatar.

Restless, thought Bobby.

"Of course. She will be confused. We, Mate and I, have gone over his return-to-life experience many times. It is not exactly the same experience Cleopatra will have, but there are teachings of value for us in it."

Feynman sat quietly by Cleo's bed. The "wave front" conceptualization of life was his. Typically, he had explained it in simple graphics. It counted as a Vision Expansion in which memory was shown as a long, inverted pyramid. The content of the wedge was memory of every kind, memories one can tap and invisible memories. For the typical human animal there are many invisible memories. For those whose minds are patterns in software – or psychic fields like the Aces – all memory is visible. As time passes, the memory content continually grows, and in Feynman's diagram the thin arc showing the advancing additions to the memory cache is the wave front. Along that wave front is real time and consciousness, the experience of living.

"While Cleopatra was alive," mused Feynman, "her mental centrum was like the APs, like mine, in the hardware, mainly in the quantum modules. But since she had a physical body, a parallel storage device was her brain. Her memories were also in her head. This new model has a blank brain. When the wave front is restarted, every thought will be as an AP. I wonder how long it will take to rewrite the brain."

Tay hummed into the room, and announced, "We are reversing course with Nexus and are soon heading toward our home planets. The Gang of Ten are designing a rather large FTL vessel for the Ultimate Foundry to build. They plan to tour the galaxy before returning to their original system. Their discoveries will move us closer to FTL for Nexus. You haven't been in touch, Bobby, so that's your update." It continued, "Perhaps our presence here can help Cleopatra as she regains life status."

"Thank you, Tay," said Bobby. His eyes never strayed from Cleopatra's quiet face.

"Before we re-start the wave front," said Ace, "be aware that Cleo's memory of the snake attack will be intact. The transition will be, how do you say, rocky. I will be intertwined with her as I was when the snake struck. I should be able to smooth things out."

"Well, it's time," said Bobby after taking a long breath.

A simultaneous command from Bobby and Ace basically tapped Cleopatra's centrum on her shoulder, and the wave front synched with the flow of time. Her body jerked convulsively. From her mouth and from her virtual centrum came an eruptive grunt, as though she were struck powerfully in the solar plexus.

Then the body relaxed, eyes still closed. Ace magic at work.

Bobby enveloped Cleo's mind in his, and leaned over her body to hold her gently.

"All is well," he whispered to her on all channels.

Feynman and the great Tay Buddha head moved close to her bedside and projected comforting emotions and simple thoughts.

Slowly Bobby could sense Cleopatra, the woman he knew, assemble from cascades of confusion.

Her first words were, "That hurt."

The New Life: For the first several days, Ace focused only on Cleopatra. Mate likewise rejoined Bobby, and the four powerful minds nursed and tutored and reassured Cleopatra as she wove herself back together. It was soon clear that Cleo was wholly reconstituting, and as she accepted her new reality her sense of humor was reborn as well. Bobby was finally convinced that she was fully back when that happened.

Ace gradually disentangled their psyches, a process filled with both joy and sadness. In the last days of their oneness, Cleo, Ace, Mate and Bobby revisited old and invented new forms of lovemaking for four. When the Gang pair was finally gone in search of their old lives, Cleo and Bobby continued the inventions, but for two.

Cleo maintained a special relationship with E VI, always fascinated by, as she said, "the workings of court." In the great flurry of the major governmental reorganization around the dual emperorship, her historical experience was invaluable to E VI, and she developed a close sisterly relationship with Co-Emperor Hester Negreponte of the Corsairs.

Brin Barnie, Senator Frederica Allworth and other exceptional women in power were drawn to Cleopatra and became informal advisers to Negreponte. H.L Mencken named the group, "The real kitchen cabinet."

"I have never had a trusted coterie of women," Cleo told Bobby, "It is deeply gratifying."

Bobby, now the happiest galactic savior around, spent much of his time in deep contemplation. His meditative state was both inward and outward. He plumbed his ever growing inner mind, decoding the paradox channel, while connecting ever more densely with the huge variety of minds at his disposal. He wandered through the Empire's Dream Game, holding quite long conversations, as good one-to-one conversation must be, with billions of Dreamers. "We spoke to God" groups formed in the Game.

Every five days Bobby published, in every available format a powerful argument that he was not God nor even a god, but a natural step in the evolution of intelligent life. Always his concluding comment was "Satan was not a god. The concept of God in every culture excludes both me and Satan from godhood. Don't believe otherwise or you are deceiving yourself." These brilliantly argued tracts had little effect on what people believed about him.

He held court with the most reclusive of the aliens deep in Nexus and seminars with Heglin philosophers. He shuffled and reshuffled his exploding cache of knowledge, from infinite facts to vast constructs of theory. He enjoyed remaking maxims. ("Paranoia is the most powerful motivator in the galaxy, for evil and for invention.") He noodled with Feynman the discoveries on time paradox. He dove deeply into the meaning of truth, with each boundary crossed bringing new definitions. He communed with Bobby in the Future, gradually closing the distance between them. The only certainty of their coming together was that together they would fulfill their obligation to hide and protect the Invisible Planet as long as the Paranoid Geniuses wanted.

The rest depended on which of the spacetime laws would be applicable. Possibilities were infinite.

Epilogue: ONE OF MANY POSSIBLE FUTURES

Massive Nexus, in a tour de force of pre-FTL tech, stopped and reversed it's 0.999 lightspeed at the instant the Quantum Stat com restarted. The Watchers had told the Heglin that their planets were still intact. Without the Heglin presence to attract it, Satan had ignored their gas giants. New courses were plotted and discussions begun on the Heglin future.

The APs were startled to hear the Heglin would "will" command of Nexus to them, and the other residents agreed. Captain Feynman, they decided almost immediately. Not one of the many other proven military, national and world leaders in the AP population objected or thought they should be the Captain. It was another evolutionary leap.

The MathFets on Earth XIV tackled the time paradox conundra. The central concern was what would happen if SearchShip Bobby deflected its path to the Invisible Planet in any way? The answers were complex. Without the tech advice piped through the time hole with guidance for FTL and the spacetime weapons, would victory over the worm be reversed? Are there two SearchShip Bobbys, two complete Bobbys?

Richard Feynman, in the words of Bobby, "Played the MathFets like a fiddle," adding his special genius to their raw thinking power to solve not only the time paradox mysteries, but many other previously impenetrable questions.

Feynman also accepted the leadership role for the Satan ship minds, helping them find themselves and learn the oddities of individuality. Something about the depth of Feynman's intelligence both fascinated the ship minds and replaced the Worm in a need structure inherent in their operating systems. What Satan sowed, Feynman reaped.

The extraordinary creature Bobby himself, augmented by every mind among the Allies, through merges, the Intuition Suite, the Watchers as a complex limb, and now as the only living being with a direct mind tap into the higher dimensions of the Strings of Reality, began to be, well, worshipped is the best word for many of the cases. Clearly, without Bobby the war against Satan would have been hopeless. Obviously (they said) Bobby had leveraged the special capabilities of a SearchShip Master into something new. A god. God, many said. His alliances with alien beings, his seemingly supernatural capacities, his humility, and most of all his determined insistence that he was still a PsychFet of Earth and most definitely not a god, made him ever more god-like in the minds of a swelling majority of humans.

The PsychFet himself was discomfited by all this, but found there was little he could do about it. And it was clear to everyone that he would live a very long time.

The Heglin acknowledged the quickening pace with which Bobby grew, but they were bemused – and not a little confused – by the awakening of the god-lust instincts in the mammals of the Empire of Earth. The need for gods was as alien to the Heglen as the idea of a food chain.

Tay would gradually become diffuse as the billions of Heglens would create, then occupy, bodies much like their originals – but improved – and resume a modified life of ecstasy outside of any food chain. They maintained many of the deep friendships with the APs, developed when they had worked so hard together, and the ghosting Tay - all of the Heglin race - stayed an extraordinary friend to Bobby.

The Gang of Ten set off to recover the planets suited to their natural lives and the return to the calm and happiness that had been theirs before Satan exiled them. They eventually returned to their original planetary system. On one planet they would seed a brand new fungal mat to be Mate-I's body.

They would return to the great, calm equanimity of their pre-Satan lives. Yet they knew the experiences since their exile would make them forever changed. For the better, they unanimously assumed.

Ace-I held regular reunions with Cleopatra. She joined the Empire Women's colloquium. Her rich life was further enriched. Mate was happy for her.

The Watchers had what could be objectively called a spiritual reincarnation and offered their services to Bobby to be his eyes and ears over the entire Milky Way. He accepted their sacrifice offer with enfolding love.

The Roberts were cut free of the last of the umbilicals to their creator, and as the most talented "normal" humans in the Empire, set off to pursue grand objectives of their own. They took turns living in the Dream Game to maintain the link with that special universe.

The Universal Foundries were recommissioned to manufacture tools of peaceful purpose. Thousands of warships were disarmed and converted to luxurious transports with actual accommodations for physical beings. E VI declared the UFs "perpetual treasures of Empire tech" destined to end need and even want among the countless poverty stricken through this corner of the galaxy. And certainly they sealed the industrial superiority of the Empire of Earth, and E VI – nor his co-Emperor Negreponte – showed any inclination to share the UF's with anyone. He and Hestor committed significant military to securing the magnificent machines.

Bobby taught the UFs to replicate themselves, and kept an open mind about sharing them should a worthy recipient come along.

The hundreds of thousands of extant civilizations among the billions of stars around the Milky Way, poor and rich, primitive and advanced, were cautiously brought into contact with what H.L. Mencken sarcastically named, "this newfangled Kingdom of God," learning that there was tech beyond what most of them had previously imagined possible. Some embraced Earth's Empire, some were horrified. Many were profoundly confused by it. Only the most basic version of Faster Than Light propulsion tech was given to other civilizations and only those that could demonstrate absolute proof that they would not use it as a weapon, a bar so high few cleared it. The most advanced – the near-instantaneous – FTL was wrapped in the deepest cryptosecurity Bobby could invent. All Empire ships with it were decommissioned and destroyed.

With Star taps to extract energy in quantities almost comparable to what once Satan and now Bobby could pull from higher dimensional string taps, inter-galactic travel looked feasible, but again Bobby embargoed the tech. Surely, he reasoned, other galaxies had other Satans. "Maybe later," became his famously un-godly disclaimer.

The Dream Game underwent the most revolutionary changes in the forever-changed Empire of Earth. Its wartime interface with reality rewrote almost all of its internal scenarios. The alternate life continued for billions, but two central changes occurred. First, pondering Bobby, admiring his virtues, emulating his humility, extrapolating his goodness, building virtual temples to his holiness... all of these abided in the Dream Game. Second, the experience of being materially valuable birthed a cataract of entrepreneurship outside of the Game that spread at FTL speeds to the endless markets of the Milky Way.

H.L. Mencken, John Belushi and Mort Sahl became an "Act," totally outside of the Dream Game, but avidly "watched" by Gamers, and by almost everyone else. Once a week in a mind-stretching dialogue, Mencken and Belushi sat on stools in their humble bar far out in the American Outback and recounted Mencken's history of the War and Belushi's twisted take on it all.

They debuted pieces of Watcher data on the Milky Way, travelogues beyond imagination. Some weeks they even showed Satan's havoc.

They had two favorite guests with very special stories about the War, N'Gai Toledo and Genghis Kahn. Both Mencken and Belushi played it very straight when either heavyweight was on.

At the end of every program, Mort Sahl did a "commentary" that was Bobby's favorite part of the show.

Week after week, several trillion people, Heglin, Gang-of-tensters, A.P.s and new citizens of the growing Galactic Confederation "tuned in" with great anticipation. Bobby's incomprehensible tech somehow rendered the weekly two hours unrecordable. This and Quantum Stat turned the galaxy into an old fashioned, real time network. It was an unqualified hit.

A major preoccupation among Dreamers became the idea of reconstituting Satan's dead zone. Contemplation of finding the equivalent of alien DNA somewhere on the eviscerated planets and bringing back at least some of the panoply of life Satan destroyed became a classic Holy Cause. From that, real plans developed. Invention blossomed. New tech was rendered in hardware and software, loaded into fleets of FTL space liners crewed by vastly capable AIs that once flew Satan's warships and carrying passengers that were living human – and other species – beings.

Like settlers occupying new land they set up shop in the dead zone near disemboweled planets. The crews and the AIs committed to decades of painstaking work. They had among their assets, whole oceans of water and a willing and capable delivery system for bringing it back to the basins from which it was stolen.

Richard Feynman, when he wasn't in deep communion with Bobby, devised essentially a merge with the APs, then gradually with all the APs on all the SearchShips then in the Empire. After all he was himself an AP. By the standards that caused Bobby to be labeled a god, Feynman became a creature in the same firmament. Perhaps an archangel, some traditional types said.

Feynman's most famous decision was to decommission Nexus, contribute its water to the thousands of planets that needed water desperately, and create other vessels to transport the AP centra and any of the other remaining Nexus passengers.

Winding down from the War with Satan was by exponential degree more interesting and complicated than gearing up for it and the actual battles themselves. It was a brilliant and glorious time.

The next era began when Bobby met Future Bobby.

Addendum

A NOTE TO READERS FROM A PARTICIPANT

By

H.L. Mencken, AP

This future I have occupied for a long while now is not easy to get a grip on. I can testify to that as one who was taken from a life of woolen suits and ink stained hands and stuffed into a life in the far future full of ridiculous versions of the same things. It took good and hard attention for me to get a grip on that.

To add a bit of afterthought to the important narrative of this tome that will make getting a grip more accessible, you might consider reading a few expository reports to answer questions one hopes you have the wit to ask.

HISTORICAL NOTES

We thought The Great War was bloody, and it bloody well was, but it was a cakewalk compared to what we cooked up about a century after I died. We greatly improved the efficiency of dying.

H.L. Mencken

The Climax Battles

By

HistoryFet Ludwig Armour

Toward the end of the 21st Century CE, events occurred that were so disturbing to the human population that it led to a massive shift in the behavior of the race.

Between 2056 and 2060 over 99.99 percent of the human population died. Countless other extinctions occurred in the animal and plant kingdoms. Those creatures and plants which avoided extinction underwent sometimes startling changes in their battles to survive.

Whole continents were rendered mostly uninhabitable by virulent toxicities that sprang from the Earth itself, boiled out by disruptive climate changes, but mostly from the weapons of an astonishing number of wars known as the "Climax Battles." Wars and sub-wars and small, isolated conflicts abounded. As world populations continued to explode, until the climate of the planet spiraled crazily, then warfaring became the occupation of choice for the usual suspects until it metastasized into the only occupation left for practically everybody else.

What remained of journalists labeled these conflicts sectarian wars. However, every descriptor of humanity found adherents, qualifying the co-believers as "sects." These people desperately formed common cause and gathered together to fight for it.

In the grander category of nation states, the wars were more focused, and much, much larger. There was a severe decline in inhibitions about using weapons "of mass destruction." The first barriers to collapse of these inhibitions were with chemical then biological arms. There was a deeper restraint about using nuclear weapons.

Understandably though, the first response to the ravages of a really successful bioweapon attack was a nuclear riposte. As millions were dying slow, ghastly plague deaths in the first country to receive a full scale bio attack, millions others died rather more rapidly under unspeakably hot fireballs in the counter-attack. The first time it happened to be aimed at the wrong country – failed intelligence at its worst – but it hardly mattered in the big picture of the Apocalypse.

After that historic exchange, everything deteriorated fast. Fear of being attacked simply overrode the last of the sane pickets advising national leaders. "Preemptive" attacks were launched at an ever quickening pace. The atmosphere of Earth thickened with exotic chemical gases and virulent clouds of modified viruses, bacteria and fungi. The vacuum above the atmosphere was aswarm with missiles, decoys and sizzling beams of focused radiation. Armies, Navies, Air Forces, guerrilla bands and lone wolves dispatched themselves into hopeless killing fields, killing who they could before they themselves died.

Making inadvertent history, adventurist journalist Devon Martin, in an armored survival suit watched a city in the American South flash away in nuclear atomization and reported to her diminishing audience, "This is the climax battle. It is the end of Birmingham. I can see the shockwave coming toward me, so I'll say goodbye as I lose my own little climax ba... " Ms. Martin uploaded everything to the sudden end. The 'climax' term went viral before all networked communication ended around the world. Climax battles they were.

The Net was soon gone, most cities of over 50,000 were gone, small town and rural people were gone to one of many kinds of death, leaving seas of bodies, starting their journeys into final decay from many starting points, but all on that road.

As in any mass extinction, not everything died.

The surviving bits of plant and animal life that escaped annihilation were luck-driven to various refugia left randomly scattered over the land and in the water of the wounded planet by the random will of Fate.

The human survivors, the few of them there were, came forth from their safe rooms and set about to restart their lives in a ruined world.

They were alive but psychologically bent. New beliefs were inevitable. They sought comfort in new basic values transmuted from the dross that had grown in the era of uncontrolled ambition and greed, self righteousness and blind certainties of the early-21st century. There were new golden rules.

After the Apocalypse, bloody war – a basic human behavior – retreated entirely to a game of the mind. In simple terms, the vast majority of humans was possessed by a basal urge to become better. New sacred texts were written and old texts cherry-picked for articulation of the new values. It was a very big deal.
You may wonder how we randy, fist swinging,

political animals decided on "empire"

as our form of government. Me too.

H.L. Mencken

From Ashes to Empire

by

HistoryFet Magdalene

In the first decades PA, a strong leader emerged. She was Alise Yael Wang, a young social scientist from deep in a Sino-Russian command center below the boreal forest of northwestern Siberia. Her grasp of the altered psychology of the human race after the Apocalypse was extraordinary and profound. When the first threads of governance began to evolve among the survivors, Wang took leadership roles as naturally as birds once took flight. She was a charismatic politician and an inspired spokesperson – essentially a priestess – for the new values and aspirations of the survivors.

She proposed a form of government that would minimize humanity's inclination to squabble and polarize, while maximizing its capacity to cooperate and find common ground. These ideas found fertile beds of acceptance among her traumatized peers. She was elevated at every stage of the discourse. Rarely had there been a more admired person.

She called her proposal "Imperial Democracy." There would of course be an Emperor, but there would be check-and-balance mechanisms, the most fragile of governmental structures. In the year 33 PA, Alise Y. Wang was chosen to be the first Emperor. Her title, and her name for all practical purposes, became Emperor One, quickly shortened to E I. Her powers were defined quite broadly. With genuine wisdom she ruled the growing Empire of Earth for nearly 200 years, using the life extension tech developed in one of the plutocrat arcologies.

At her death there was a flurry of competition for the office, but the basic governmental organization and the position of Emperor was not challenged. E II finally emerged and the Empire endured.

As decades reeled into centuries, humans set about repairing the damage their predecessors had done to their planet. Gradually the anxiety about science and technology faded into a background value, never lost but slowly subsumed in practicality and the resurgence of ambition.

As a side effect of repairing Earth, many of the skills and technologies of planetary terraforming developed. As space flight tech advanced, the neighboring planets of Mars and Venus, plus several of the Jovian moons and Saturn's Titan were rendered habitable for humans, if only under vast, transparent domes which exploited the impressive advances in materials science. Protection of nature anywhere was gradually demoted to second place behind finding lebensraum for the wanderlusting human race to live... and to disperse for survival.
I found this when I first arrived in this hallucinatory existence.

Written for children, it has the virtue of brevity.

H.L. Mencken

How Our Government Works

by

GovFet Able Caring

The complex business of managing a multi-planet empire is handled by a web of dedicated artificial intelligences known as The Bureaucracy. General competence and immunity to corruption is thus assured.

Setting policy, grading performance and overviewing the whole governmental apparatus is a tripartite pinnacle. Representing the citizens of the Empire is the elected Senate. The Judiciary is modeled on an ancient system of a Supreme Judicial run by the Chief Justice, and many layers of descending jurisdictions. The Emperor is the Chief of the Executive branch, Supreme Commander and in many ways the locus of power. Imperial succession occurred in a little-understood process among the uber elite, part hereditary, part bloody competition. It is a rare event.

Those at the top of government – assured by the central principle of the Charter as always being human, never machines – spend most of their time in the exercise of influence, power and fundamental policy and very little of their time in actually running the government. By definition, they are politicians.

Overseeing the capable and dispassionate machine minds of The Bureaucracy is an organization of humans and GovFets known as The Cabinet, part of the Executive branch.

The citizenry itself is traditionally called "the ultimate source of governmental power," although everyone knows this is a specious bit of exaggeration. In general, the common folk remained politically quiescent except in the Dream Game.

Our current Emperor E VI is a student of power techniques. He is famous for certain practices he uses. In serious conflicts, any challenge to his executive prerogatives, he uses one of his "power" eye contacts. He practices his various techniques faithfully. Sympathetic + Unforgiving. Disappointment + Impending Discipline. Conservative + Compassion. And dozens more. Academics have documented several cases of E VI winning over challengers with these and other related techniques.
Here we discover how odd humans can get. In my day if you had no job you were thought worthless. A great many were, but they thought differently and worked to remedy the situation. In this future where I now unwillingly reside, the unemployed just go to sleep.

H.L Mencken

Cultural Impact of The Dream Game

By

SociologyFet Marcus Singulus

Over 99 percent of humanity spent most of their lives in the Dream Game. Their bodies were maintained at reasonable fitness levels in their sleep pods, heads resting in induction webs. When a person died in his pod, the Dream Universe took note of his passing. Or hers. Their friends and acquaintances, typically all developed within the Game, held memorials appropriate to the deceased's status. Sometime exceptionally vivid copies were recreated as Dream Artificial Personalities (APs) in tribute.

Fertile females left the Game for several days to give birth. The centuries of pressed procreation to populate the earth and the expanding empire had faded, but some new blood was needed to replace the passing. Infants were raised by exquisitely designed mamabots that nourished their charges with cloned breast milk from the natural mothers. Almost all of the education and socialization of the children happened in the Game.

The unavoidable statistic about the population was almost ninety-eight percent of all common citizens spent at least twenty-three standard hours out of every twenty-four sleeping, fully engaged in the planet-wide Games.

Sleep had been eliminated as a necessity in the sixth century PA. That ancient inheritance from the diurnal crucible of evolution had served purposes from organizing the mind, to embedding memories to renewing libido and defining neuroses, to cleaning protein debris. Then, as the brain was more fully understood it was found that the same benefits could be derived from cleverly designed neurochemicals dispensed from embedded biochips plus programming from embedded nano computers.

Still, vast majorities of people chose sleep because as the mysteries of sleep were being solved, there were parallel advances in personal dream control. Dreaming became the superior form of virtual reality. VR, in all its verisimilitude, lacked the direct connection to the primitive brain that dreams have. Dreams to the practiced dreamer were more vivid, more real than reality. Early in life, all citizens of the Empire became expert dreamers. Above all there were the shared dreams, the Dream Game.

It was this multi-dreamer game that changed the world. It was a godsend to the emerging populations on the Empire planets because there was very little work to be done after each planet was tamed. Artificial intelligence machinery did all the work from manufacturing to distribution to construction to engineering design. Without the Dream Game, citizens would have drifted in self destructive whirlpools of frustration. But the dream universes were conceived by the most creative humans, and one and all were invited to occupy them.

These dream universes had rules and values, economies and careers, opportunities for entrepreneurs and for criminals, for saints and sadists, for scientists and sensualists, lots of warriors, artists and dilettantes. There were cliques to be formed, hierarchies to be scaled, power to be acquired, fortunes to amass. To a far greater degree than existed in the undemanding reality of most lives, these dream universes were real. The Dream Game was a game in name only. To most of the population it was the more real reality.

Just as the Fets were being developed to do more and more of the hands-on mind work in the Empire of Earth, the multi-player Dream Game was how a no-work population remained occupied. And very productive in ways not fully understood until the war with Satan.
You might find it remarkable that the superman at the center of this recountance came to be basically because of good old human archeology. My main use for archeology was in describing the politicians of my day. But a digger's discovery actually kicked humanity's butt into gear. To quote my co-star Mr Belushi.

H.L Mencken

First Impact on Humankind of Confirmation of Other Intelligent Beings

By

HistoryFet Ludwig Armour

In the year 1564 PA, terraforming teams on the planet to be named Earth VIII found irrefutable evidence of an ancient civilization. Engineers drilling into the crust of the planet made the archeological find of the centuries. The question of "other intelligent beings" was settled, although the millions of years since that civilization's death left too few clues to understand much more than that these creatures had technology. The surviving tech artifacts were incomprehensible, a disturbing challenge to scientific confidence.

The discovery was a profound shock to humanity and the social disruptions took decades to settle down. From the storms of cult formation, the rebirth of militarism and the widespread psychological pandemic labeled Alienfear, it was obvious that humans were not really prepared for First Contact.

The FET consortium recommended a new category of Fet, the PsychFet. These would be given a much broader objective and the capacities to pursue it. Their Primary Mission was to prepare for that time when humans would actually meet another intelligent species. A young Emperor VI agreed with the consortium and launched a crash program.

After only four years of planning, the first PsychFets were created from new templates, and the genomic architects opened doors long closed to them in the design of Fets. Developed were special abilities in philosophy and creativity, abstract and advanced inferential logic, "intuition" in quantum topology computations, and a full set of every other Fet specialty. Most revolutionary, the new PsychFets would be the first able to directly link with quantum computers, still somewhat feared machines.

Many of the best thinkers in the Empire predicted – some with trepidation, some with eagerness – that such complex creatures would have an unpredictability about them. Some went so far as to say they would be "more than human." When the first PsychFets matured and were well into their training, this concern seemed to recede as their personalities were mostly Fet-like, with the primary difference being that they were more 'normal' in demeanor than the Fets.

PsychFet personality variants were funneled into challenging specialties consistent with their leanings. Quadra Zed, with his introversion and almost pathological tenderness, was the most successful human ever in dealing with non-verbal intelligences, the animals on Earth and the newly colonized planets. He moved the testy human/animal relationship toward a far more productive one.

Coulomb Bechar had an insatiable interest in the details of system interaction that was diagnosed as almost obsessive-compulsive. She was assigned to travel on one intra-Empire cruiser after another, analyzing every aspect of crew and equipment efficiency. She was respected, even loved, by every crew she met because of her fanatic dedication to their well-being.

Argonic Lambda was powerfully drawn to the mammals of the oceans. He invented a new level of cetology and revolutionized that interspecies relations, even as whale and dolphin intelligence was augmented by advanced brain tech.

Most of all, PsychFets gravitated to the Universities. Many became engrossed in finding and nurturing the most brilliant and eclectic humans. Post-tri-docs competed fiercely to work directly with the PsychFets, who inspired all academia with their findings and philosophies.
In my day, supermen were popular characters in the funny papers. In this strange future where you can't buy a real cigar or smoke it if you could, the funny papers have come to life. The historian who wrote about the coming of the supermen couldn't find the meaning of "two birds with one stone." Some historian.

H.L. Mencken

SuperFets and the Quantum Statistical Network

By

HistoryFet Norman Gold

Two centuries after N'Gai Toledo became Emperor VI's first assistant, he was assigned by his Emperor and friend to study a new subset of the PsychFets, those with spikes of ability almost beyond measurement. On a drunk night, the Emperor told N'Gai, "Frankly, they frighten me a bit." They had a talent for directly, and with only their minds, manipulating the entanglement aspect of quantum mechanics. These few PsychFets could coax whole clouds of atoms into a stable state of entanglement with other whole atomic clouds. Great effort had been expended trying to do this with the most powerful devices the EngineerFets could devise and the most powerful quantum computers the law allowed. Then the PsychFets did it simply with their thoughts. It was frightening to most who understood its significance.

Once the massive entanglement was done, the action at a distance between the two clouds theoretically was in effect over any distance at all, including interstellar distances. The growing number of lockstepped entanglements excited the basic human desire to exploit. The top exploitation theory involved a rare application of statistical relationships to create extraordinarily fault-free broadband communications taking place between the synchronized clouds.

The PsychFet community immediately began speculation that these entanglement talents could have unpredictable effects on the fabric of reality itself. N'Gai Toledo saw only the potential for gain to the Empire.

The first assignment for a PsychFet with this new talent was to entangle many atoms in two matrices, then board an intra-Empire ship for Earth II carrying one matrix. A team of MathFets, PhysicsFets and EngineerFets accompanied the young PsychFet woman with the objective of designing a communications application by the time the ship reached its destination. The statistical approach would be put to the test. The possibility of instant communications with almost unlimited bandwidth and zero distortion held the seeds of revolutionizing the Empire itself.

One year out, at 0.6 Lightspeed, the solution had been found and tested. Plans for the equipment needed were sent back to Earth. The engineering masterpiece that could convert quantum modulation into normal com was very expensive, but Emperor VI did not hesitate to approve the funding. It is said that he hinted at calling the new instant com gear the E VI Network, but Quantum Statistical Network quickly displaced any less literal naming.

By the time N'Gai Toledo began studying these almost frightening PsychFet variants, there were four such superfets known. Some in the FET Academy had actually started calling them SuperFets. Toledo encouraged the Emperor to put an immediate stop to that and substituted PsychFet – a, b, c or d, representing the order in which they had been identified. "Super" struck Toledo as politically dangerous.

Another thing he discovered very early in his study was the fact that most of the variants seemed very normal, most with very "human" personalities. The affectation seen in most Fets of all stripes, a rather pedantic dullness seen as comforting by those who feared the new designer humans as potentially unbeatable competitors, was absent in a through d. Instead, they were affable, relaxed characters without a hint of pedantic dullness.

E VI conceived of taking the powers of the lettered PsychFets one step further. The Empire of Earth, he decided (apparently with N'Gai Toledo's help), would become proactive about finding other intelligent life. Great ships would be built, dwarfing any non-cargo vessel in history both in size and cost and and dwarf all previous Earth Empire ships in capabilities. Their mission would be to search.

The propulsion systems of these SearchShips would make the first practical use of dark energy, long deemed too dangerous for use within the neighborhood of stars with the terraformed planets of the Empire. The ships would be equipped with unlimited quantum computers, larger and more powerful than any in existence, far more capable than the few that were allowed to exist in the Empire. Fear of the super machines was deep in the cultural soul, Post Apocalypse. Besides, no one other than the SuperFets could control the largest ones.

The SearchShips would plot courses to other stars with planets capable of supporting Earth-like life, and if there were no intelligent, Earthish life on those planets, they would search still deeper into space. The ships would carry passive detectors of great power, always searching the universe around them for hints of civilization.

The distance they would travel would never be too great for communications back home because of the development of instant, broadband communications. Earth Empire would build and expand the Quantum Statistical Network as needed to send and receive com through the time shortcuts of massive quantum entanglements.

All of the knowledge of the Empire would be carried in each ship in two radically different containment vessels. One would be an enormous conventional database; the second would be in a collection of A.I. minds of real, but deceased, people from various points in history. The Artificial Personalities, the APs, would serve several purposes including being intelligent data storage.

In many ways, the SearchShips were an example of that finest governmental action, formally known (for some unknown historic reason) as Two Birds. The potentially most troublesome PsychFets were not only exiled, they were done so in the service of humankind.
The idea that puny human beings from a puny planet I happen to think of as "the world" could be a match for the biggest, smartest, meanest sonofabitch ever created by God's tool evolution was typically self-aggrandizing human foolishness. Even with all our help from the various spiders, gnats, giant mushrooms and other hobgoblins siding with us, this Satan monster should have crushed us. But some committee of the gods gave us a break.

H.L. Mencken

Self Inflicted Defeat?

A study in system failure

By

HistoryFet Claire View

To avoid unbearable pain, the Worm blocked out any really frightening negative input from its minions. It began well prior to the Empire assault on Satan's physical fortress. At this critical point in time significant flaws in its formidable psychology had been implanted. When the totally unexpected challenges from the Empire of Earth and its allies came to pass, the long-calmed paranoia came back at levels the Worm could not stand. The creature resorted to further damaging its own brain to block the fear stimuli. Satan became subtly disabled by this self inflicted anodyne.

Certain counterproductive glitches inevitably accumulated in the Worm's basic substrates over the centuries. That the Worm was consciously unaware of them or not was moot. It had a rebooting routine with the single objective: eliminate any changes that clearly detract from its invincibility. It was one of the first inventions from its powerful mind as it set out to conquer the ... universe. Any flaw, any new skewing of analyses, any acquired habit, any infection from a defeated enemy, any random system damage from the passage of time was catalogued. If judged by another of the Worm's early inventions, an incorruptible master "I.G." program to be even slightly counter-invincibility, it was zapped, expunged, erased or repaired, as required.

Then upgrades followed the cleaning routines, and these incorporated every novel discovery made in all conquests since the last upgrade. All the technology, art, strategy and tactics, all the idiosyncrasies of each decimated civilization was evaluated and integrated into its appropriate niche of the Worm's vast mental inventory.

The whole purge/upgrade procedure typically took a good deal of the Worm's mental focus.

But there had been a potentially troublesome modification in this reboot procedure in the most recent millennia because of a near disaster, a shocking and unprecedented military setback. The battle - a cleansing - was underway on a group of planets that had fighting capacities never before encountered by the Worm, a failure in reconnaissance and planning the likes of which had never happened when the Worm had personal oversight of operations. This time, it was deeply distracted by the purge/upgrade. The initial attack force was soundly defeated by the victim's defenders. It took the Worm several decades of rebuilding and reinforcing its forces for a far larger second attack that defeated the now fully alerted target planets basically by overwhelming them with its larger manufacturing capacity. It was a very expensive victory.

The realization of this mistake and its own capacity to make such an error keyed off the Great Fear in The Worm, the consuming ultimate pain of its paranoia. Only this pain was capable of corrupting its perfect logic.

Rage at this episode of Great Fear resulted in various changes in procedures, reflecting this corruption. It put an end to the metronomic, every-264-year inevitability of the procedure. Random would be good, decided the Worm. Also, judgment should be used to assure there were no situations underway where even a brief absence of its full attention might prove harmful. The only way to conquer the fear of another failure of the same sort was to base the decision on The Worm's conscious and deeply personal appraisal of all situations and selecting purge times based purely on its own volition. The purge/upgrade became a procedure that would occur only when The Worm thought it should. Very few such occasions presented themselves. There were always important battles being fought.

So flaws accumulated. Growth opportunities were missed. Not to mention the impact of the holes left in that malevolent brain where Ace did her behind-the-lines dirty work.

I hope all that was helpful.

H.L.M
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Scooter Duff's bio can be expressed alphabetically – KFYN, USAFA, KSET, WAKY, KDSX, KLAC, KMET, WHDH, KSAN, KSDO (23 Years), ERA, AR&D, ASIE, MAI, (33 Years).

A sci-fi reader since childhood, Duff was warped by the radio series Dimension X. So sci-fi and radio evolved into media consulting, explaining several aspects of Scooter's approach.

He lives with psychologist wife Dorothy, four Airedale Terriers, three cats and a herd of birds on twenty acres in the Land of Enchantment. Predictable.

