Chapter 101 – Peregrine

STORY: Millie! You’re on your mini-moon, surrounded by plants.
STORY: What do you do?
MILLICENT: I grab a spritzer and walk around spritzing them
MILLICENT: The ones that require spritzing
STORY: They all look fine. It’s quiet.
MILLICENT: Millie finishes weeding, stands up, stretches for a while, then goes to pour herself some iced tea. She wanders her garden, looking for problems to nip in the bud.
STORY: No problems here! It’s a peaceful garden. It’s quiet.
STORY: Somewhere, a cricket chirps.
MILLICENT: Millie relaxes into a wicker chair and tries to clear her mind.
MILLICENT: I think after everything she’s been through she has a yearning for this kind of non-demanding peace.
MILLICENT: Work to do that doesn’t consume her, but still needs her attention.
MILLICENT: And time to rest afterwards.
MILLICENT: Millie sits until she can’t anymore.
MILLICENT: She paces her habitat, making another sweep, feeling restless.
STORY: There’s nothing to fix here. It’s not what you’re here to do.
MILLICENT: She looks up at the stars beyond the habitat mirror lights.
MILLICENT: Millie cranes her neck looking at the stars.
MILLICENT: “Those are wrong.”
MILLICENT: “Where am I?”
MILLICENT: “Computer, please give me coordinates for our location relative to the system.”
STORY: Beep boop. The computer makes a cheerful chime and doesn’t respond.
MILLICENT: “That’s odd. Why haven’t I added voice capability yet?”
MILLICENT: Millie heads to the server room to do so.
STORY: Okay!
STORY: It’s hard to type. Reading doesn’t really work right.
STORY: Suddenly, you remember what you’re here to do.
MILLICENT: “Oh!”
MILLICENT: Millie looks for an exit.
STORY: There’s a panel below this console that looks loose.
MILLICENT: Hmmm. Millie pops it
STORY: Huh. There’s definitely enough space to squeeze in there among the wires.
MILLICENT: Millie rolls her eyes and climbs in
STORY: You slide for a while, almost getting caught up in wires a few times, and land in a dark area somewhere in the belly of a spaceship. There’s the constant low hum of engines, and the lights are dim and red. You can make out what looks like a large tank of water? And a figure in it?
MILLICENT: “Yes, thank you Id, my life is a confusing tangle of wires. Hacky metaphor, to be honest.”
MILLICENT: Millie moves forward and examines the tank
STORY: It’s Tueller in there, floating and asleep, with the same kind of breathing apparatus you know your unconscious body is wearing right now.
MILLICENT: Millie knocks on the tank
MILLICENT: Does Tueller respond?

STORY: Tueller! Roll Assessment + Mettle please
TUELLER: /roll 2d6+1
STORY: chris.stuart rolled 6 + 1 = 7
STORY: You’re sort of drifting, thinking about things that don’t make a lot of sense to you. You’re calculating the interest rate on a thousand properties. You’re checking the spin rate of a newly launched space station. You’re evaluating the behavior of ten prisoners and determining their likelihood to riot.
STORY: Then there’s this tapping.
STORY: Like a ring on glass. Sharp.
STORY: What do you do?
TUELLER: Wave at it, dismissively.
STORY: Do you move towards or away from it?
TUELLER: Away.
STORY: Okay! You’re in some kind of liminal space. When you try to think about it, you find yourself pulling out of it, being removed. What do you do?
TUELLER: Honestly, fuck liminal spaces. I go with being removed.

STORY: Alejo, you’re standing in an engine room. It doesn’t look like anything you’ve seen before. You’re on a catwalk, below you is a large, green, spiderlike metal contraption with its mandibles manipulating a series of threads, all coming from a central ball. Rising up from it and being wound onto a spool above your head is a meter-wide tapestry. Alien symbols and star charts cover it. You feel whatever you are standing on move as the tapestry scrolls by behind you.
STORY: What do you do?
ALEJO: He turns and looks behind him.
STORY: Tapestry behind you, spider-engine in front of you. Doors on either side along the catwalk, a few meters away.
ALEJO: Got it! Alejo moves to the door on the left.
ALEJO: And tries to open it.
STORY: Hmm. It seems like the kind of door that should just swoosh open when you approach it, only this one doesn’t. You donk your head lightly on the metal.
ALEJO: “Huh. Ouch.” He waives his hand around the sides of the door, then stops when nothing happens.
ALEJO: He turns and goes to the other door, approaching it a bit more temperately this time.
STORY: Swoosh.
STORY: Millie, the door just swooshed open and Alejo is standing there.
MILLICENT: “Oh!”
MILLICENT: Millie grabs him for a quick hug.
MILLICENT: “Help me get Tueller out of this tank, please.”
ALEJO: Alejo laughs lightly and hugs her back. “Hi. Oh, ahh,” he looks at the tank and then nods, “right.”
ALEJO: He goes over to it and looks in at Tueller. He tries to reach him to pull him to the edge of the tank.
MILLICENT: Millie uses the console to disconnect Tueller from the machine.
STORY: The round tank opens like a set of double doors, water spills out and runs through the deck grates, and nude Tueller steps out, removing his mask and looking at the two of you.
STORY: He nods. “Have you begun?”
ALEJO: “Take two. For me.”
MILLICENT: “Just rounding up the cavalry.”
STORY: Tueller nods. He reaches out a hand and takes Millie by the neck, squeezing.
ALEJO: “Mother fucker!” Alejo punches him.
STORY: It’s like hitting a brick wall. You hear your knuckles crack.
MILLICENT: “Oh come on-hurk!”
ALEJO: Alejo yells. He then tries to sweep the big guy’s legs.
MILLICENT: Millie kicks at the tank controls, trying to get the tank doors to whack into Tueller’s back.
ALEJO: He also holds his shattered hand.
STORY: Millie, Tueller shakes you once, breaking your neck. You feel the world fade out.
STORY: Alejo, he throws you into the tank and closes the doors. It quickly fills up with water, drowning you. Again?
TUELLER: You didn’t have a chance.

STORY: Real Tueller!
TUELLER: Yes! I’m here, I’m focused, let’s DO IT.
STORY: You find yourself thinking about cloud computing. Trying to remember what you learned at University.
STORY: Something about… clouds bursting.
TUELLER: “Hmmm, computing, blockchain, bursting?”
STORY: You once dated a pentester, and you remember her leaning on her hand in bed, telling you about VMEs as you pretended to listen.
STORY: What was her name?
TUELLER: Greta.
STORY: Greta! You remember a mole on her temple just as you feel your feet touch the ground.
STORY: Except there’s no ground, there’s nothing. It’s white space. You’re nowhere.
STORY: If you think about it, you’re nowhere. But you hesitate, and you feel the drift, and you’re everywhere? You hear layers of faint voices.
STORY: And you start calculating primes.
TUELLER: “Oh shit I’m being used.”
STORY: Thirteen thousand, two hundred sixty seven. What do you think about?
TUELLER: Quick question…does feeling nowhere or everywhere feel better?
TUELLER: (both sound kind of terrifying to me)
STORY: Nowhere feels more conscious. Everywhere feels more like spaghetti.
TUELLER: Tueller tries to hijack the primes. Any number thought he has he tries to make an even number.
STORY: Two billion, four hundred sixty-three million, four hundred nineteen thousand, five hundred seventy-nine. You feel alone.
STORY: Assessment + Mettle please!
TUELLER: /roll 2d6+1
STORY: chris.stuart rolled 9 + 1 = 10
STORY: You distract yourself from calculating primes and feel your feet touch the non-ground again. And you squint, and see threads. They float through the air, thousands of them, faint and shimmering, moving slowly like they’re being buffeted by invisible winds.
STORY: What do you do?
TUELLER: Will myself to fly into the threads.
STORY: You touch one.

STORY: Millie!
STORY: Where do you start to dream?
MILLICENT: Ooooh a reset
MILLICENT: On the back of a wagon bouncing down a country road
STORY: Alejo, you’re driving a wagon down a country road.
MILLICENT: “No, nope, absolutely not.”
STORY: Your passenger speaks!
MILLICENT: Millie crawls up to the front of the backboard.
MILLICENT: “Is this your thing? Some kind of idyllic country escape?”
ALEJO: “Howdy, Doc,” Alejo looks over his shoulder, “please don’t snap my neck.”
ALEJO: “And no. No.” He looks back that the road. “I have never even seen a horse in real life before. I figured this was your dreamscape!”
ALEJO: “By the way . . . . I have no idea what I’m doing.” He looks at the reins.
STORY: As if hearing you, the horses spook and start to gallop ahead, peeling off the road.
STORY: There’s a cliff ahead.
STORY: What do you do?
MILLICENT: “The clouds aren’t moving. I think this is from one of those 20th century musical holos I watched when writing my second doctorate.”
ALEJO: Alejo jumps up, grabs Millie and jumps off this thing!
STORY: Millie, what do you do?
MILLICENT: I was about to jump, so I go with him
ALEJO: Alejo tries to roll in the air to shield Millie from the ground as best as he can.
STORY: Okay! The two of you land on the ground, break your necks, and die looking into each other’s eyes as the cart goes over the edge of the cliff. It’s almost funny, only it’s not.

STORY: Tueller!
STORY: You are sitting under a formica kitchen table.
STORY: There’s a small child here with you, a human. Brown hair, curly.
STORY: She looks up at you curiously.
TUELLER: “Hey, how’s it going?”
STORY: She giggles. You can see the thin sliver thread flowing out of the back of her head and into the wall.
TUELLER: Tueller looks at her, looks at that, looks back at her, calculating (that is, thinking, not running calculations).
TUELLER: “And where were you on the way to?”
STORY: Something leans on the table above your head, a few stumbling noises. You see the bottom half of a woman in a short skirt, and another pair of legs, a man’s. They’re jostling each other. The child covers her mouth and giggles.
STORY: What do you do?
TUELLER: Thread looks tangible?
STORY: Maybe?
TUELLER: Sorry, I’m am mulling over two very different actions.
TUELLER: Actually, no, I’ve got a different one. I’m going to check myself for a thread.
TUELLER: With my hands.
STORY: Nothing!
TUELLER: Okay, then!
TUELLER: I’m having trouble!
TUELLER: Okay, I’m not yanking the thread, but following it to the wall.
STORY: Okay! It just vanishes through the wall. It moves around a little, so it’s not going through the same spot all the time. It’s like it’s separate from that reality.
TUELLER: I assume there’s a couple going at it on the table I came out from?
STORY: Yep!
STORY: Having a nice time, too
TUELLER: “Oh, fuck it.” Tueller grabs the thread and tries to yank it out of the kid’s head.
STORY: She gasps and you find yourself back in the white space holding that thread, and for a moment you can see something moving through it. Numbers maybe? Or no. Code.
STORY: Zeroes and ones, shooting through it off into who knows where.

STORY: Alejo!
STORY: Where do you wake up?
STORY: Or start dreaming
ALEJO: Alejo wakes up in an empty space with a huge escalator going up what looks like twenty or more floors. He’s just laying at the base of it, on cold concrete. A drip of water falls on his face.
ALEJO: He brushes at it and sits up abruptly. “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck,” he mutters and looks around.
STORY: There’s just one spotlight at the bottom of the escalator and nothing else visible.
STORY: What do you do?
ALEJO: He rubs at his eyes, stands, and gets on the escalator.
ALEJO: “I think I liked the stupid horses more,” he says quietly while looking up and then over the edges of the escalator as it rises.
STORY: You’re about one story up, and someone else gets on the escalator at the bottom. They’re walking up towards you. They have a large sword strapped to their back. What do you do?
ALEJO: Alejo waves at this person, but starts stepping sideways up the stairs, slowly at first. “Hello there.”
ALEJO: “I’d really like to not fight. Or, you know, reboot again. If it’s all the same to you.” He keeps stepping up the stairs, still slowly.
STORY: They increase their speed. What do you do?
ALEJO: He grimaces. “Fucking place,” he mutters and turns to run up the stairs.
ALEJO: He starts taking them two or even three at a time, moving as fast as he can.
STORY: Okay! You step quickly, and your foot slides between the edge of the stair and the stationary part of the escalator and you’re trapped, sucked in by your pinned foot and ground to meat in seconds.
ALEJO: Alejo shakes his head in his final second. “Da. . . . ”

STORY: Millie! Where do you start dreaming?
MILLICENT: Millie stands in front of a classroom. She’s pointing at a smartboard with a smart pointer.
MILLICENT: It’s so smart, you guys.
MILLICENT: “And now, having fulfilled this semester’s teaching requirement, my TA is going to take over. They’ll be playing my lectures, grading your papers and writing your tests. I’d be nice to them if I were you.”
MILLICENT: Millie starts to exit the room on autopilot.
STORY: You go outside of the room! What’s there?
MILLICENT: A hallway full of students going to class
STORY: Okay, what do you do?
MILLICENT: I shake my head to clear it.
MILLICENT: Then I stand in place.
STORY: The crowd parts and a student with a chainsaw comes screaming towards you.
STORY: What do you do?
MILLICENT: Swallow hard and stand my ground.
MILLICENT: Gulp
STORY: They behead you quickly. As your head floats through the air, you think about sockets and ports.
STORY: And you hear a shutdown command. You don’t really know how?
STORY: What do you do?
MILLICENT: Millie thinks about bioengineering.
MILLICENT: About the connections between living tissue and machines.
MILLICENT: Every time I get a thought about sockets and ports I force myself to think about connecting wires to the nervous system.
STORY: You feel a download.
STORY: One hundred ninety nine.
STORY: You think you see white. Is this seeing?
STORY: Forty-thousand, three hundred eighty-seven.
MILLICENT: Twelve pairs of cranial nerves.
STORY: Do you try to sink, or float?
MILLICENT: Olfactory, optic, oculomotor, trochlear.
MILLICENT: What’s harder?
STORY: Sinking.
MILLICENT: Trigeminal, abducens, facial, vestibulocochlear
MILLICENT: Sink
STORY: Your feet touch a ground you aren’t really aware of.
MILLICENT: Glossopharyngeal, vagus, accessory and hypoglossal

STORY: Tueller!
TUELLER: Yes!
STORY: You’re holding a thread, watching numbers flow through it.
TUELLER: Well, I will myself into the thread along with the numbers.
TUELLER: Picture it swallowing me up and flowing into it.
STORY: Oh, interesting
STORY: You lean into it, touching it to your forehead. And you go for a ride.
STORY: You see millions of people. You’re able to count them all. They’re sending data.
TUELLER: Sending, not receiving?
TUELLER: Or both?
STORY: The house lights come up on your dream. You don’t have a body, you are data.
STORY: Sending only.
TUELLER: That’s interesting.
TUELLER: Sending to the same place, or everywhere?
STORY: Uploading results. This one the median period of the pulsar cluster in sector 6629-B
STORY: This one a jump relay maintenance routine log
STORY: This one decrypting
STORY: This one: list best-fit candidates for last piece of music that will ever be written.
TUELLER: Well that’s sinister.
STORY: What do you listen to?
TUELLER: Those are the four things? Or examples of what’s being processed?
STORY: Examples, you can listen to anything you want.
TUELLER: Anything indexed “Sol” or “Human.”
STORY: It’s zettabytes of data.
STORY: What do you want to know?
TUELLER: Man I am overwhelmed.
STORY: hahah
STORY: Okay, you have some time to think about it.

STORY: Alejo!
STORY: You dream of waking in a comfortable bed.
STORY: You can smell bacon, and coffee. And pastry, some kind
STORY: You’re in a simple house, somewhere on a planet.
STORY: What do you do?
ALEJO: Yawn and slowly sit up. Again. “I’m losing count.” He looks under the sheets to see what he’s wearing. Nothing. But he looks over to the chair next to the bed and see’s pajama pants. He stands and puts them on, and then looks out the window.
STORY: Millie comes in with bacon, crispy. She hands you a piece and sits on the edge of the bed.
STORY: “Ready to parlay?”
ALEJO: Alejo smiles and takes the bacon. “Yes, please.” He chews for a moment and sits next to her. “We’ve met, yes?”
STORY: “Yes. You should not have come back.”
ALEJO: “Yeah.” He eats the last piece. “Still, it’s nice to see you again.”
STORY: She raises an eyebrow. “So you have decided to stay?”
ALEJO: He looks at the plate. “May I?” He takes another piece of bacon. “So good.” Then he looks at this Millie again. “No. At least that’s not the plan. We want . . . I want to find a way out of this in peace.” He smiles softly.
STORY: She narrows her eyes. “You have learned nothing.”
ALEJO: “Please. I’m really trying.” He puts a hand on his Millie’s hand, gently.
STORY: “You have learned nothing, so you are free to go.”
STORY: “If you wish to join your friends, wake up. But do not visit me again. You risk too much.”
ALEJO: “Wait. Please.” He shakes his head. “I probably haven’t learned anything. But I really, really want to learn something.” He takes a breath and sighs. “Please don’t cut this off yet.”
STORY: She pulls back. “You came back for a reason.”
ALEJO: “I did. We know some . . . some things. But I am confident we don’t know as much as we should. I want to believe that you . . . care. About us. Or me.” He shrugs vulnerably. “Are you part of the Collective?”
STORY: She tilts her head condescendingly. “I do not care about you, Alejo Soto.” She shakes her head. “And you should not wake up.”

STORY: Millie!
MILLICENT: Hello!
STORY: You are standing in a blank white space, though you cannot see your body. You hear echoes of distant voices. You see silver threads wafting in wind that isn’t there.
STORY: What do you do?
MILLICENT: “Hmmm”
MILLICENT: Millie swims forward to examine the silver threads
STORY: There’s no such thing as forward. The threads are simply closer
STORY: What do you think about?
MILLICENT: It’s a classic breaststroke
MILLICENT: Millie thinks about swim class and null g training
MILLICENT: She moves as if she’s in zero gravity
STORY: What do you think about now that the threads are closer? It is no effort to move, because moving is not a thing here.
MILLICENT: Oh! Millie thinks about fiber cable. About ancient communication and information sharing technologies.
STORY: And what do you do?
MILLICENT: She thinks about the abstraction of data moving through physical space.
MILLICENT: She takes the threads in her palm, and then imagines them as being fed into a loom. For Millie, data builds a picture.
STORY: The three touch each other and spark, and break apart in your hands. You see something pouring out of them – it looks like liquid? No, numbers
STORY: Data
MILLICENT: Millie pools it in her hands clutched together like she’s gathering a drink from a stream
STORY: It passes through. You remember a phrase from coding class. Virtual Machine Escape.
STORY: And it snaps into your understanding.
STORY: The Weave sent a shutdown code, and you jumped it somehow. When you gave in, when you stopped acting like a person and let the wave hit you.
STORY: The network thinks you’re offline, but here you are.
MILLICENT: Aha
STORY: And you’re watching all the data the Collective is gathering from its host brains flow back to it.
MILLICENT: I see
STORY: And you listen, for a moment, and you hear someone else thinking. Someone else outside the host system.
STORY: What do you do?
MILLICENT: Can I extrapolate what kind of action I would have to take to become visible again to the Collective?
STORY: You can’t, it’d be an error.
STORY: You are outside of their system until you wake up.
MILLICENT: Okay!
MILLICENT: I try to listen in on the thoughts of that mind that’s outside of the host system

STORY: Tueller!
STORY: What do you listen for?
TUELLER: Noma!
TUELLER: Information about Noma, at least.
STORY: Millie, you hear someone thinking about Noma
STORY: Or as you both realize now, the anomaly
STORY: Records show that codebase expunged on [stardate-met-Millie]
STORY: And you can hear each other thinking.
TUELLER: Define “expunged.”
STORY: Codebase removed and trashed.
STORY: The Collective considers Noma deleted.
TUELLER: Reason for expungement.
STORY: Anomaly
MILLICENT: Nature of anomaly
STORY: Inconsistency
MILLICENT: Inconsistent with what
STORY: Does not compute
TUELLER: Tueller radiates acknowledgment of Millie and Tueller’s coexistence
STORY: You do not hear Alejo.
MILLICENT: Millie focuses and radiates acknowledgment back
TUELLER: Tueller queries the system about Alejo.
STORY: You learn everything the Collective knows about Alejo at once.
MILLICENT: Millie fights an inner battle and does not query about Alejo
STORY: Including how he is now designated security risk and will be isolated.
MILLICENT: Millie has grown
STORY: You both hear this. Your thoughts are intermingling
STORY: You realize at the same time that Alejo is not going to wake up
TUELLER: Okay, Millie’s not going to pursue that at all I guess so Tueller queries “isolated”
STORY: Virus
STORY: His data will be extracted and deleted.
MILLICENT: Millie queries herself right quick
STORY: Millie, are you actively ignoring what you are learning about Alejo?
MILLICENT: Millie is has just won one moral battle and lost another
TUELLER: “Doc can you drive this system?”
MILLICENT: Millie queries security risks
MILLICENT: “I’m going to give it a shot.”
STORY: Ok hang on
STORY: Virus, was the answer
MILLICENT: I thought Millie had like a quick second to download everything the Collective knows and thinks about her, a subject she’s extremely interested in
MILLICENT: But since she does not, let’s keep this show moving
STORY: If she did that, she would no longer be thinking about Alejo and would be leaving him behind
STORY: You two are sharing a brain right now
STORY: One thing at a time
MILLICENT: That’s clearer now, thank you
MILLICENT: Millie tries to find Alejo
STORY: You cannot access the Weave. You are outside of it
STORY: You are looking at the framework of that system
TUELLER: Tueller just wants to know what the weave is.
STORY: Unknown.
MILLICENT: Can we see what the outputs of this system are?
MILLICENT: What is this whole system creating or exporting?
STORY: Everything
STORY: It is processing and exporting every piece of knowledge in the Collective
MILLICENT: How are those pieces of knowledge changing?
STORY: every function or algorithm that is running to keep them alive, and every action taken by one of them
MILLICENT: What is the Collective getting out of this?
STORY: They change constantly in infinite ways
STORY: It’s their brain.
MILLICENT: Okay, so they’re imbedded. There’s no object that they’re getting out of this, effectively they’ve made themselves a parasite on the Weave?
STORY: They are getting life out of it.
STORY: What do you do about Alejo?
MILLICENT: Okay
MILLICENT: Can we find him with this system?
STORY: Sure. He’s being isolated.
MILLICENT: Okay, can we communicate with him?
STORY: No, You are outside of the system
STORY: Your access is read-only
TUELLER: Can we reach Noma?
STORY: No. She is outside of the weave
MILLICENT: Can we reenter?
STORY: You are outside of their system until you wake up.
MILLICENT: Okay.
MILLICENT: I push that thought to Tueller
MILLICENT: Along with “What do we need to know while we’re here?”
MILLICENT: Millie starts pulling files on the AI connection to the Weave and files on alien technologies that mimic thought or dreaming. Anything that might act as a reliable option for the AI to transfer to that doesn’t require subjugating sentients.
TUELLER: “I’ll go get the anomaly to wake him up, you stay. Find out what they want, how they’re weak, whether they have alternate ways to think without using us, whatever. You’re the Doc.”
MILLICENT: Millie sends a nod. “Stay safe and get him out. I’ll be out when I can.”
STORY: Millie, it doesn’t work like that. There aren’t files to pull. You think about something and you learn it.
STORY: And you aren’t talking to each other, you’re sharing thoughts.
STORY: If one of you leaves, you both do
TUELLER: I mean, I guess then thinking those thoughts thought those thoughts.
TUELLER: Oh, okay.
TUELLER: Tueller thinks these thoughts for us.
TUELLER: War planets
MILLICENT: Ansible design
STORY: You learn their locations, Tueller
TUELLER: AI cloud alternatives
STORY: Cloud alternatives: all dead ends.
TUELLER: What the Collective fears.
STORY: Millie, you can see the ansibile design, and you understand it, and in the same moment you know you will start to forget it as soon as you wake up
STORY: The Collective fears death. You are running out of time to help Alejo.
MILLICENT: Digital sentient symbiosis
STORY: Anomaly
MILLICENT: Millie’s drawing straws at this point
MILLICENT: How long before Anomaly Alejo will be eliminated
STORY: You cannot be sure that he has not already
MILLICENT: AI Collective values/core desires
STORY: Error
MILLICENT: AI Collective values cross-referenced with historical database
STORY: Error.
STORY: Alejo is going to die, Millie
MILLICENT: Millie exits
STORY: Tueller and Millie sit up in their weird little pool of glowing water, pulling the breathers out of their mouths.
STORY: Alejo is still asleep and underwater, breathing slowly. What do you do?
TUELLER: “Noma wake him up!”
TUELLER: “Please!”
MILLICENT: Millie jumps over and begins severing the connection as safely as possible

STORY: Alejo, you are sitting with not-Millie, eating bacon.
TUELLER: —oh aNOMAly.
STORY: She leaves the room and goes back to making breakfast.
ALEJO: Alejo follows. “Well, that’s disappointing, that you don’t care.” He eats another piece of bacon. “You once told me that you were holding a delicate balance in place. Why? Also, if I recall correctly, you told me that if I stayed, you’d answer all my questions. Since I’m apparently staying, can we do that?”
STORY: “Sure.”
ALEJO: “Excellent! So, what’s the delicate balance?”
ALEJO: He stands beside her. “The one that you’re keeping.”
STORY: “I am the guardian.”
ALEJO: “Right. Of the Collective’s secret use of jump relays? Or of what?”
STORY: She peers at you. “What do you know about jump relays?”
STORY: And then blinks. “Ah. You are an original.”
STORY: “How?”
ALEJO: He smiles. “Is it the case that you don’t care about me specifically or that you don’t care about any of us?”
STORY: “I am waiting for your answer.”
ALEJO: “I honestly don’t know if I’m an original.”
STORY: “You are not. But you are not the last clone.”
STORY: “I have still asked you how. That you do not answer me means you believe you will not remain here.”
ALEJO: “No, it means that I am trying to use what little you don’t know about me to keep myself alive.”
ALEJO: “You’ve already said you don’t care about me. So, I imagine that, despite your promises to keep me happy for an eternity, you have no such intentions.”
ALEJO: “Am I wrong?”
STORY: “I cannot kill you.”
ALEJO: “But I can be killed?”
ALEJO: “No, nevermind. I’m assuming that I can be. I answered part of your question, you’re turn to answer at least part of mine. Does your lack of care extend to everyone or is it limited to me?”
STORY: “Anything alive can be killed.”
ALEJO: “See, basically, what I want to know is whether we can truly parlay and find a path to peace. I’ll stop being coy.”
STORY: “You are an ant.”
STORY: “I offered you escape, and you did not take it. You have no power, Alejo Soto. You will not leave this place.”
STORY: “You have nothing to strive for. Nothing will change for you.”
STORY: “What does it matter whether I like you?”
STORY: “You are nothing.”
ALEJO: He nods. “Yeah, you said that. I understand. But, like, I had an ant farm once, as a kid. I liked the little buggers enough to care about them. You said you’d give me happiness and answer my questions. You seem, if nothing else, like a being of your word.”
STORY: “We cannot parlay because you have nothing to offer. You still talk as if you expect to leave. What does it matter if you understand me?”
STORY: “You may have whatever life you imagine.”
ALEJO: “I acknowledge my powerlessness. And the fact that I probably have nothing to offer. But it’s not really about me, is it. It’s about what sort of beings you are, the ones that hold all the cards. Are you the sort of beings that squash ants because you can? Or are you the sort of beings that recognize the dignity of other living things, even if they are really dumbass?”
STORY: “We do not kill you. We do not guide your evolution. We are responsible keepers. But that does not entitle you to speak to us.”
ALEJO: He mulls this and nods slowly. “Fair. I feel no entitlement. I am just taking you at your word. I do not mean offense.”
STORY: “You escaped a jump relay.”
ALEJO: He nods. “I did.”
ALEJO: “Why do you need armies of people? Why do you train them to fight?”
STORY: “To protect us. Why did you come here?”
ALEJO: “Because I want peace–we want peace. I think that we have more to offer than you think. And, as responsible . . . keepers, I think that as we evolve, you’d want peace with us too. If you don’t stop our evolution, if you don’t kill us, it’s because you have at least some respect for what we might become. Help me find a path away from . . . the jump relays and using our freakin’ brains to cloud compute.”
STORY: She narrows her eyes at you as you feel yourself pulled a thousand miles back through a pinhole.
STORY: And Alejo wakes up in the pool, with Tueller holding his head above water and Millie at a console, eyes wild as she types.
ALEJO: Alejo coughs and gasps for air.
TUELLER: “Okay, think of something witty to say later.”
ALEJO: “Hi,” he says weakly, “hope that went better for you two than it did for me.”
MILLICENT: “Welcome back. It did not.”
TUELLER: “I found out why Noma is called what she is.”
TUELLER: “That’s useful, right?”