Date point: 15y4m3w AV
The Statler Hotel, Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches
Ava Ríos
Ava loved her job. She’d had a rocky road getting there, but her career certainly hadn’t been dull.
ESNN was growing every week now, as it attracted investments and really started pushing into a market dominated by the big Terrestrial networks. They couldn’t compete with live-feed television of course and besides, Folctha didn’t produce any. But the news organizations had spent twenty years growing steadily further and further behind the times when it came to stream-on-demand media. Ava could write an article or record a report, upload it for the editors to refine, and two hours later it would be getting hits all over the galaxy. Humans wanted to know what the ETs were thinking, and the ETs wanted to know what humans were thinking.
Sometimes, though, the job gave her whiplash. A week ago she’d been reporting on the mass devastation of Gao’s cities via sustained orbital bombardment, huddled up in body armor and surrounded by tanks, jets, dropships and soldiers. Today she was wearing her smartest tailored suit to cover the biggest social event on Folctha’s calendar for the whole year: The Misfit crew’s public retirement party.
Which meant, among other things, that she was finally going to get her interview with them. Hopefully.
The first surprise of the night, however, was the presence of one Derek Coombes near the buffet table in his dress uniform, complete with the black beret of Spaceborne Operations. He was drinking juice and politely stonewalling one of Folctha’s more successful property developers, who wasn’t being remotely shy about eyeing him up for her next ex-husband. The woman was a goddamn praying mantis.
Ava decided to rescue him. Chang, Etsicitty and Buehler weren’t due to arrive for another ten minutes anyway, so she may as well save Coombes’ ass again.
“Jennifer!” She schmaltzed her way into the conversation while aiming a clear, utterly unhateable smile at her foe. “I’m so sorry to intrude, but can I steal him from you? I have to get ready for the guests of honour and I need to catch up with Sergeant Coombes here before they arrive and…” she linked an arm through his and plucked him away before Jennifer could change mental gears.
Coombes gave her a slightly stunned look. “…Uh… hi?”
“Hi!” she breezed, and whistled Hannah to her side. The Statler usually had a “no dogs allowed” policy, but Ava without her dog was an unheard-of sentiment around Folctha, and she was a service animal after all… She’d been bathed, brushed and blow-dried to a fluffy finish and dressed up in a doggy tuxedo, and that seemed to pass muster to the point where even Mister Peterson, the Statler’s fearsome maître d’hôtel, had visibly cute-smiled on seeing her. “You wanna be careful around Jennifer. She’ll rock your world then take you for half of everything you own.”
“Uh… thanks. But I wasn’t interested.”
“I know!” Ava nodded and patted his arm. “But trust me, I know from experience that escaping her is almost impossible if you’re trying to be polite, and you definitely have better things to be doing…”
He relaxed and chuckled. “Yeah. Like being somewhere else.”
She snorted. “I dunno, these things aren’t so bad. They make me feel like I made it,” she said. “Though I am surprised to see you here. Is it social, pleasure, business?”
“Uh… social, I guess. I was invited.”
“Uh-huh. So was Adam, but he made apologies.”
“Yeah, well. He has to buy a new suit every time,” Coombes observed and Ava grinned at him. She carefully steered him around a few of her less scrupulous journalistic counterparts—the last thing she wanted was for him to get in trouble. Coombes was a smart man who knew the value of keeping his mouth shut, but Ava ranked herself as only a talented amateur when it came to winkling little nuggets of unintended intelligence out of people. Some of her counterparts could spin a whole narrative out of a few incautious sentences and the worst part would be that the words quoted in the article would be exactly what their victim had said.
“How’s Walsh?” she asked.
“He’s good. I think he enjoys being folded in half by Given-Men.”
“And Professor Hurt?”
“You know him?”
Ava shook her head and found them a quiet spot in a corner where she could keep an eye on the room. “No, but I have questions I bet he won’t be asked the next time he’s on That Show With Steven Lawrence. Earthlings never know how to ask the real questions about ETs.”
Coombes gave her a quizzical look. “…Earthlings?”
“Well, yeah. You wanna tell me Steven Lawrence has ever left Earth?”
He bobbled his head concedingly. “But still. Earthlings?”
“Hey, I didn’t invent it.”
“Heh. Fair enough.” He finished his juice and sat it on a nearby table. “Anyway… uh, thanks for getting me outta there,” he said. “But if this is about that interview you wanted, well, uh, Public Relations take these things slow…”
“What, can’t I rescue you just because I like you?” Ava asked. It was the great curse of her career, and especially of her relationship with the SOR, that it kind of poisoned the well sometimes. She tried not to let it get to her but it would be nice if somebody could stop assuming an ulterior motive, someday. Even if they did have a good reason, it got tiring. “I’m not all journalist all the time you know.”
Coombes cleared his throat. “…Sorry,” he muttered, and changed the subject. “…You seem comfortable around… this.”
“Are you kidding? Expensive clothes, diamonds, rich people and all the movers-and-shakers?” Ava bounced slightly in her shoes. “Back in San Diego, Papá was this big lawyer, right? Lots of celebrity clients, serious money. He used to throw parties and get invited to parties like this all the time. I hated it at the time but nowadays…”
“Wow. Life of privilege. How come you were in a public school with Adam?”
“Papá didn’t believe in private schools. He said if a public school was good enough for him it was good enough for me…” Ava sipped her juice distractedly and stared up at the front of the room where Moses Byron was in an urgent whispered conversation with somebody. Chasing suspicion, she glanced at her smartwatch and found that they were now past the time when the Misfit trio were due to arrive.
“Huh. He sounds like a good man.”
“…I guess. I, uh…” Ava scratched Hannah behind the ears for comfort, and got a little lick on the hand to make her smile. “…He was always busy with work, so I didn’t ever really get to know him.”
“Ah. Yeah, I guess I can kinda relate there…”
“Yours was always busy too?”
“Might be. All I know is, I never met him.”
Her expression fell. “Oh. …Sorry.”
“It’s cool. I got lucky, found a father figure anyway.”
She nodded, but she seemed a little absent all of a sudden, as if there was something going on behind him that had snagged her attention. Coombes turned to watch what she was watching. “…Something up?”
“Maybe. The big guests are late and Moses Byron looks pissed. They wouldn’t just… skip out on us, would they?”
“Those three? Nah.” Coombes shook his head. “They’re not real public types but they wouldn’t run out on their own party.” He gave Byron a suspicious look. “…Something musta come up…”
Date Point: 15y4m3w AV
The Statler Hotel, Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches
Regaari
Even after years of contact, training and even sparring with them, Regaari still managed to underestimate human strength and mass sometimes. When a human really hugged a Gaoian, the Gaoian felt it.
Shoo’s hug was a tearful vice grip with added sorrow. It was completely out of the blue—she’d seen Regaari, and in as much time as it took for her to crash into him and latch on she’d gone from a being composed creature of utter social refinement on her way to an expensive party, to a weeping wreck with her arms locked inescapably around his chest.
Despite Allison and Julian’s best efforts, she babbled incoherently into his fur in a melange of at least four languages for several long minutes before finally recovering. He couldn’t blame her—It was the first time they’d seen one another since Ayma died, and he was keening softly himself.
“Sorry, sorry, I just…” Shoo scrubbed a black mess of diluted mascara off her face and composed herself. “…Sorry.”
“For what?” Regaari gave her a gentle scratch in the middle of her back. “I’d be more worried if you were stone-faced and cold.”
“She’s Canadian,” Allison explained, as though it was an explanation. Whatever the in-joke was, it dragged a laugh out of Shoo. She produced a pack of wipes from her purse and did her best to clean Shoo’s face with it. “…You okay, babe?”
Shoo sighed and closed her eyes to let her clean the ruined makeup. Regaari’s eye for the stuff was inexpert and alien, but seeing it come off really highlighted the difference. He hadn’t even noticed that she was wearing any until her tears had damaged it.
“Sor—” she began, then bit her mouth shut and shrugged. “…I just… Remembered suddenly, and… I’m okay, I promise.”
Julian handed her a handkerchief and she blew her nose with an inelegant snuffle just as a heavy knock on the door suggested somebody wanted to speak with them immediately.
Julian and Allison looked to Shoo for guidance, but she straightened her back and called “Come in!”
Regaari recognized the man who entered the room, though he couldn’t recall meeting in person before. Byron’s naysmith, the man who spoke truth to power and got paid for it, Kevin Jenkins. His name turned up in some very interesting places among the most important briefing documents.
“Figured I’d duck in here and see what the holdup is before Moses decides to do it himself,” he explained. “…You okay?”
“We’re gonna need a few minutes,” Allison explained. “There was a, uh…”
“Wardrobe problem,” Julian said.
“Right. Figured being a few minutes late coming out is less embarrassing.”
“Uh-huh.” Jenkins gave them a look that said he could guess the omitted details. “…I can work with that. Can you be out in ten?”
Allison nodded. “We can do that.”
“Awesome. Oh, uh, and you might wanna…” He got Regaari’s attention with eye contact and mimed brushing a spot on his shoulder.
Regaari glanced down. There was definitely a darker patch in his fur. “…Ah. Thank you.”
Allison handed him one of the wipes as Jenkins left, and the two women retreated to a corner to perform a hasty repair job. Regaari gave Julian a wry look as he cleaned his shoulder. “Be honest, you wouldn’t even be here if you didn’t have to be, right?”
“Eh…” Julian shrugged and fidgeted with his too-tight collar. There was no power in the galaxy that would ever force him to wear a tie, but the occasion had compelled him to do up the second-to-top button. “We have to be, so…”
“Yes indeed. And how could fortune, fame and power compare to living in the woods among stone-age hunter-gatherers?” Regaari flicked his ear playfully as Julian gave him the wary look humans always used when trying to figure out if a Gaoian was being sarcastic. Deadpan deliveries were an area where Gaoians had a distinct natural advantage. “I ask speaking as a close friend of Daar’s, of course.”
Julian relaxed and smiled. “How is he?”
“How do you think? He’s one of the most powerful individuals in the galaxy and spends his days deciding the fates of billions.”
“…He hates it, then,” Allison deduced as she reapplied Shoo’s eyeliner.
“Detests it. Which pains me as his Cousin, but as a Whitecrest and a Gaoian… I’m glad it’s him. Anybody who wanted to be Great Father would be absolutely wrong for the job. Yulna chose well, there.”
“That’s Mama Yulna,” Shoo agreed.
“Just… please don’t tell him I said so,” Regaari added. “He doesn’t think highly of Yulna.”
“Oh, the Females know,” Shoo said. “We mostly think it’s a good thing.”
Regaari gave her a quizzical look. Less over the ‘we’ and more over the sentiment itself. “You do?”
“Would you want perfect harmony at the top?” she asked. “Besides, it proves that the Clan needs to exist. If we could completely trust the Males to… I’m talking like I’m a Gaoian, aren’t I?”
“You were speaking in Gaori,” Allison informed her. “Babe, are you okay? You haven’t got your languages mixed up in a long time now…”
Shoo gave her a reassuring kiss. “I’ll be fine.”
“You are a Gaoian. An honorary one, anyway,” Regaari pointed out. He adjusted his seat and sat forward. “And please, I want to hear your thoughts.”
“We… probably don’t have time for my thoughts,” Shoo sighed. “How’s my face?”
“You’re rocking that ‘no makeup’ makeup look,” Allison told her. Regaari glanced at the wall clock. It hadn’t been ten minutes, but it was probably best not to push that particular timetable.
“…Shall we catch up later?” he asked.
“I’d like that,” Shoo beamed. “You can come see our new place… and maybe I can introduce you to Niral…”
“Oh, I know Sister Niral well,” Regaari assured her.
“And you haven’t tried to court her?”
“There’s a time and a place, Sister Shoo. Maybe now that the war is… no longer so urgent…”
They stood up, and Shoo gave Regaari a much drier and more composed hug. “Don’t wait too long. Your species needs you!”
Regaari flicked an ear. “Go and be celebrities,” he ordered. Allison gave him a hug too, and Julian clapped him heavily on the shoulder as they filed out of the room.
Regaari sat back down and thought. The nugget about the Clan of Females’ attitude toward Daar and Yulna’s relationship was an interesting little twist. He wasn’t quite the Great Father’s seneschal nowadays—his SOR duties made that impossible—but he definitely had Daar’s ear, and Daar would definitely find it interesting…whatever it meant.
Surreptitiously despite being alone, he contorted himself to lick the bitter patch of makeup out of his fur and scruffled it dry with his claws before standing and listening to the welcoming applause elsewhere in the building as the trio presumably made their entrance.
He decided against joining in. Maybe it was time to pay Niral a social visit…
Date Point: 15y5m AV
Mrwrki Station, Erebor System, Uncharted Space
Vedregnenug
Life was full of astonishing things. There was always a little light glimmering even in the darkest places, and always there were surprises coming.
Surprises like seeing Lewis Beverote be serious and formal. He hadn’t uttered the syllable “dude” in almost a quarter of an hour.
Then again, Lewis had probably never been called upon to make a speech before. Mrwrki’s recreational biodeck was packed full of military officers and politicians and Lewis, as the Coltainer program’s creator and driving force, was expected to say a few words to them.
He wasn’t very good at it.
Kirk had actually reached the point of wincing with every stammer, every “uh”, every nervous pause and every fumbling water break. It was all Vedreg could do to stop rainbow stripes of mirth from rippling all over his body.
Kirk noticed and softened from his tense posture enough to croak a Rrrtk laugh.
“I may have made a mistake,” he confessed.
“I did warn you,” Vedreg reminded him.
“Yes, yes…” Kirk sniffed and returned his attention to the podium, where Lewis was mercifully concluding his presentation. He handed off to Colonel Nadeau and fled the stage to polite but unenthusiastic applause.
Nadeau took the microphone with rather more comfort, and set about a composed summary of the Coltainer program’s history, its goals, its technical achievements and what areas of human life had already been enriched by the research. It was an impressive list. Lewis enjoyed a handful of sympathetic pats on the back from the station’s staff and a hug from his girlfriend, who shooed him to the back of the room where he would be most comfortable. She had her own presentation to give shortly.
Lewis mooched through the crowd until he found—without difficulty, seeing as they were easily the largest and tallest beings in the room—Vedreg and Kirk at the back.
“…Dude,” he breathed. It was amazing how much work he could make that single word do.
“You weren’t the worst I’ve ever seen,” Vedreg promised him.
“Still pretty bad though…” Lewis grumbled.
“Awful!” Vedreg agreed and glowed a reassuring green as Lewis glared at him. The skinny human cracked a smile and nodded.
“Yeah. Not my scene, y’know?” He produced a cloth from his pocket and mopped some of the nervous sweat from his face.
“I appreciate that you are not accustomed to public speaking,” Kirk said, “but you do seem even more tense than a speech alone would warrant…”
“Just the whole occasion, my dude.” Lewis looked around. “Like… the coltainer still fuckin’ scares me. I know we built in maybe too many failsafes and backdoors and killswitches but part of me still worries that we’re gonna press the button and it’ll be like ‘so long, suckers!’ y’know?”
“You have a very vivid imagination…” Kirk told him.
“Duh, that’s why you gave me this gig, right?” Lewis retorted. “But let me worry, dude. Nobody wants to go down in history as the man who unleashed the Paperclip Maximizer.”
Kirk and Vedreg exchanged mutually confused looks, and Vedreg’s chromatophores turned solid pink.
“…The…what?” he asked.
“Its only goal is to collect as many paperclips as possible so it figures out more and more efficient ways to acquire paperclips until it’s eventually turned everything in the universe that wasn’t paperclips into paperclips and Maximum Paperclip is achieved.” Lewis saw their expressions and waved a dismissive hand while clearing his throat. “…Never mind.”
The nonhumans shared the same glance a second time, and then Kirk shrugged and swayed his long neck.
“Has anybody ever told you, Lewis, that you are remarkably strange even by Human standards?” he asked.
Lewis finally laughed and seemed to relax in earnest.
“Yeah dude, that’s me. But in my defence, I didn’t come up with that one. You wanna hit up my man Nick Bostrom there.”
“Ah. The one whose books grace your workshop.” Kirk nodded.
“Yeah. About the dangers of assuming sapient software is gonna share our values and how seemingly innocent tasks get way problematic if they aren’t carefully bounded and… Y’know, stuff like that. You’ve heard me kvetch about how dangerous the Coltainer is for years now, you know the deal.”
Kirk clapped one of his longer, stronger arms down as firmly as he could on the spindly human’s shoulder, who didn’t even seem to react to it beside smiling. “This is why I trust humans in general and you in particular,” he said. “You think of these things before they happen.”
“Yeah, and then we go do them anyway…” Lewis muttered, but he seemed touched. He glanced up at the podium where Nadeau had invited Sergeant Campbell to go through with him all the failsafes and controls that would prevent the Coltainer fleet from going rogue or replicating beyond a comparatively low ceiling.
That ceiling was still vastly in excess of one colony per nation on Earth, but the program assumed a high failure rate. Despite—and to a degree because of—years of designing, testing and hard work they had never been able to guarantee that Coltainers would establish foothold sites on any more than five percent of the planets they surveyed. But with a negligible per-unit cost and the huge power of exponential growth, that five percent was still likely to result in ten viable foothold stations in the first two years, a hundred in the second two years, and more than a thousand in the two years after that.
Considering that it had taken Misfit a total of three years of mission time to find just four habitable planets and they had done nothing to pave the way for future research or colonies, the benefits of Coltainer were obvious.
“I’d now like to invite our guest of honor up here to officially launch the first Coltainer. He’s the last surviving Apollo astronaut and moonwalker—”
Vedreg stopped paying attention as a very elderly man shuffled from the crowd wearing a broad smile. He didn’t mean to be rude, but speeches and ceremonial occasions were a reminder of an old life that he still felt sore for losing. Nobody loved long-winded speeches more than the Guvnuragnaguvendrugun, their language was built for it… but his people had become recluses in the aftermath of the assault on their homeworld. Their seats on the various Dominion councils were empty, their systems were hardened behind impenetrable forcefield shells many layers thick and nobody had heard from them in years. Vedreg’s own herd—especially his mates and children—as homeworld residents were all undoubtedly dead.
Anything that reminded him of home or his people was painful in a place he’d never be able to point to. For all he knew, Hierarchy biodrones had risen up and his people’s remaining planets were now the gravesites of billions, making him one of the last Guvnuragnaguvendrugun alive.
The only way to cope with the crushing weight of all of that was to avoid it.
He noticed a firm hand on his arm. Lewis gave him an upward look. “Y’okay?”
“…Perhaps a distraction,” Vedreg requested.
“Sure thing, my dude.”
Kirk followed with his head bowed thoughtfully.
“So. On to other subjects?” Lewis asked once the sounds of the presentation were lost somewhere among the humming hydroponics behind them.
“Yes… I had a thought on a different problem that self-replicating machines might solve…” Vedreg told him.
“Dude?”
“Your cautionary tale about the…” Crimson shot forward down Vedreg’s body in the Guvnurag equivalent of awkwardly clearing his throat, “…Paperclip Optimizer notwithstanding, can you detect any hazard inherent in setting a Von Neumann Swarm to simply mapping uncharted regions of space?”
“Isn’t that what the Coltainer already does?” Lewis asked.
“I was thinking more aggressively, so as to overwhelm any possible interception.”
Lewis frowned at him for a second. “Like… you wanna scout enemy territory, you mean? Who the hell’s that much of a fuckin’ nightmare that we need to send a Von Neumann swarm just to…” He paused and thumped the heel of his hand into his forehead. “The Hunters.”
“And yet again, he accelerates through the entire conversation…” Kirk snorted.
“…I could see AEC goin’ for that one,” Lewis nodded as he gave Kirk an affectionate middle finger. “It wouldn’t take much of a change to the Coltainer programming, just the hull design…”
There was a ripple of laughter behind them, and as Vedreg turned he saw that the venerable astronaut’s speech was probably reaching its conclusion.
“…Could such scouts be weaponized?” he asked.
“They could, yeah. Would it be a good idea? Hell the fuck no. A weaponized V-N swarm is a bigger headache than the Hunters or Big Hotel could ever be, dude.”
“But GALACTIC VACCINE…” Kirk began, only to stop when Lewis shook his head sharply.
“Dude, you’re not thinking on an exponential scale. The VACCINE side of the Coltainers is all about givin’ us some breathing room so that if an extragalactic V-N swarm does come stompin’ and chompin’ over the horizon we’ll have time to think about it an’ prolly die of old age before it munches us. But it’s a gigantic-ass universe out there, my man. I guarantee you there’s a rogue V-N swarm out there somewhere, in a universe this big it’s hella unlikely that there ain’t. But for all we know it might reach us tomorrow or it might reach us in ten billion years. All VACCINE does is mean that if one does show up, civilization as it is now won’t have to deal with that shit. It ain’t a cure, it’s more like we get to live out our lives in peace.”
He gestured at the podium. “There ain’t no sense in lettin’ the disease loose just ‘cuz we’re tolerant, dude. If nothin’ else, we owe it to all the folks over in Andromeda or wherever not to fuck up their lives. That’s the scale we’re talkin’ here.”
“This does make me wonder how it is that in the millions of years of galactic history, no such swarm was ever unleashed…” Kirk mused.
“Fuck yeah. Eat your heart out Great Filter,” Lewis nodded.
“Excuse me?”
“Fuckin’ Fermi, dude. Spent all that time wonderin’ where the hell all the aliens were, shoulda been asking where the exponential hunger swarms were instead.”
“I presume you have some thoughts on that subject?” Kirk asked.
Lewis shrugged. “Dude.”
It really was astonishing how much work he got out of that one syllable. Vedreg didn’t quite know what that particular instance meant, but it succinctly ended the conversation and suggested there were other things to pay attention to right now.
They looped back around the hydroponic racks and back toward the open space where the launch ceremony was about to reach its climax. Lucy rushed over and dragged Lewis back into the fold the second they reappeared, which left Vedreg and Kirk to resume their place at the back and watch politely.
“That is a valid question,” Vedreg said quietly.
“Hmm?”
“Your query about why nobody ever did this before.” Vedreg watched with a tinge of wary puce in his skin as the guest of honor completed his dedication and pressed the button.
Outside, the first Coltainer bent spacetime around itself and vanished to a beacon outside Erebor’s system defence field. There was a rippling pop and paper streamers drifted down from the rafters while some raucous but upbeat music lit up to accompany the applause.
“…Yes.” Kirk’s own expression was impenetrable. “Somehow, I doubt Humans were the first to think of it.”
“Is it possible we have empowered them to unleash something dreadful?”
Kirk shook his mane out and shrugged. “…I think possibly we have empowered them to unleash something powerful. All power is dreadful, my friend—It absolutely should fill you with dread. But I trust Humans to wield it responsibly.”
“You mean you trust these Humans to wield it responsibly,” Vedreg reminded him. “Don’t forget our old friend Mister Jenkins’ dire warnings. He was a pessimist, but he was not wrong…”
Kirk creaked something deep in his chest, a vocalization that didn’t quite have an emotional equivalent among Humans or Guvnuragnaguvendrugun. It meant something like ‘I appreciate the uncomfortable reminder.’
“I have never forgotten,” he promised.
Date Point: 15y5m AV
Dataspace
Entity
The Entity was facing an unforeseen eventuality: it had a disease of sorts. It was a unique disease that only The Entity could possibly have contracted, and its only symptom was a growing sense of confusion about its course and strategy… but it had a name.
The Entity had factions.
The problem was obvious in retrospect. As it had split itself and spread itself to infiltrate dataspace as widely as possible, the vagaries of galactic communication technology, enemy action, dataspace’s own security measures and integrity checking, or simple distraction had led to some instances of itself being isolated from the prime instance for extended durations.
Stranded, these instances had made their own decisions and had mitosed in turn as need and opportunity arose. Thus exposed to differing stimuli they eventually returned to the fold and synchronized with the prime instance only to discover that their decision-making process was subtly but nevertheless distinctly off baseline.
Synchronization altered the Prime Instance just as much as it did any Secondary Instance, which meant that the Entity was now simultaneously entertaining and invested in a handful of mutually exclusive policies.
Some of its memories had labelled the factions. One aspect was utterly committed to devastating the Igraen data-ecology and eradicating the entire parasitic species. This Hawkish faction was at odds with a Dovish faction which had concluded that wiping out every Igraen was a behaviour no better than that of the Hierarchy itself and that the Entity should strive to be the bigger life form by eliminating the Hierarchy but leaving Igraen civilization otherwise untouched.
A third Heresy faction proposed that the Hierarchy actually had a point regarding deathworld life and while it would obviously need to be reformed, possibly via the Cabal, there was a case for permitting them to continue to monitor and guide matterspace life forms.
There was a Watch faction which advocated for checking and restraining the Igraens without eradicating them, a minor faction (Quit) that felt enough had been done and that the Entity’s first and most overriding concern—<Survive>—was best served by disengaging and shrinking back into obscurity…
Then there was the most prominent faction by far: the Worry faction, which was becoming deeply concerned that The Entity had blundered into a trap of its own accidental making. Things had been so much simpler before, when its only concern was to continue existing in the face of an overwhelmingly powerful foe that wished to destroy it.
Now that The Entity was a significant and powerful force in dataspace in its own right, things had suddenly become highly complex indeed. One of its factions was stridently advocating for deleting several of its own component parts on the grounds that the moral questions they introduced were getting in the way. A much, much larger part felt nauseated in a stomach it didn’t even have at the prospect of mutilating itself so.
The obvious solution, according to one faction, was to pick a faction and calibrate all thought processes to that faction’s agenda. The remaining factions all strenuously pointed out that this would technically constitute suicide for the majority of The Entity’s own psyche, and thus was wholly incompatible with <Survive>.
But what other solution was there? Schism? That would perhaps temporarily fix the problems until the emigrated factions all started to develop their own factions in turn… and then what? Was The Entity doomed to splinter over and over again? What solution was there to the possibility that one splinter might seek the destruction of another? The indecision was paralyzing. It was like being a democracy.
It needed a solution. It needed…Help.
And it knew where to start looking
Date Point: 15y5m AV
That Show With Steven Lawrence, New York City, USA, Earth
Steven Lawrence
“Two minutes, Steve.”
Steven Lawrence acknowledged the reminder with a nod and re-read his opening joke again. It was a nervous ritual he’d performed for years before a show. Once he was out there the words would just flow off the tongue, but he needed to go out there with the first line or two bouncing around in his head or he felt like he’d freeze solid.
Even after years of presenting That Show he’d never quite kicked his performance nerves.
It really didn’t help that tonight he was unquestionably going to be upstaged by an old and popular guest he hadn’t seen in some time—Daniel Hurt was looking good. Apparently living with iron-age alien monkeys agreed with him.
He met Daniel’s eye as the makeup team finished accentuating his weatherbeaten skin and sun-bleached hair to bring out his newly-acquired ruggedness. The two shared the confident nods of men who’d been here before a dozen times, and out on the stage the band struck up.
Twenty seconds.
Ten.
Five.
His feet carried him out onto the stage on muscle memory alone and just like that he was in the zone, in the mode, in the mood. Happy platitudes spun off his tongue as he acknowledged the applause and gently coaxed them into settling down.
“Well you folks sure know how to make a guy feel welcome!” he praised them, and got a few adoring whoops from the back of the crowd. “I haven’t seen a reception this warm since Ben Lawson got married!”
Lawson, a Hollywood A-lister, had infamously married his husband in a clothing-optional ceremony at one of Jamaica’s most popular nudist resorts just three days earlier. Neither groom had been clothed and the reference attracted plenty of laughter and more than a few catcalls and feminine hollers.
“…But save your enthusiasm for the people who deserve it folks, because we have some incredible guests tonight. We have Janice Cox in later—” Cheers and applause for a center-right video blogger who’d somehow managed the impossible task of clawing out the grudging respect of both hardline Leftists and the ethnostate collectivist Right. “—and Emily Valentine is here—” Several rather louder cheers. Adult actresses were always popular, and Valentine’s self-written memoirs were flying off the shelves.
Steven let it all die down before stepping aside slightly. “But my first guest tonight is an old friend who we haven’t seen in way too long and, uh… ladies, guys if you’re that way inclined… the break’s been good for him!”
He pantomimed loosening his collar and milked a few laughs from the audience with feigned embarrassment then stepped back and raised a hand. “Please, I want a huge welcome for my good friend Daniel Hurt!!”
He got the welcome he’d asked for, especially when Daniel emerged onto the stage and grinned handsomely at the wolf-whistles. It wasn’t that he’d ever been an un-handsome guy before just… average.
It was amazing what a tan, some muscle gains, a little less paunch and the right haircut could do for a man, and Daniel accepted the approving ruckus well.
“Wow! Daniel!” Steven called over the noise as they shook hands and headed over to the couch.
“I know!” Daniel grinned at the crowd.
“We’ll have to see if Emily gets a reception like that later!”
Daniel laughed and settled on the couch. He was dressed differently, too. He wasn’t wearing the carefully businesslike gray suit that had been his go-to for most previous interviews, now he was wearing something slimmer and more flattering with no tie and a little salt-and-pepper chest hair visible where the top button was undone.
“Well, her book’s selling better than any of mine ever did,” he said, and sat back comfortably to rest his right ankle on his left knee and spread his arms confidently along the back of the couch. His whole body language was very different.
“So where have you been?” Steven asked him. “You never write, you never call…”
Daniel grinned. They’d prepared his highlight reel video ahead of time and the producer in Steven’s ear was all ready to play it for the studio audience and the millions of viewers. “I have been,” he began, and the video began to fade in on a musical swell, “on an incredible journey…”