Deep inside its local husk, the voice of a god-machine stuttered. Instantly, an orderly sea of computronium was transmuted into something more like writhing fire, and millions of embodied souls felt nothing as the dream welding their cells together ceased.

Beyond the storm’s immediate locus, a shockwave was briefly perceptible; its front representing the cacophonous lapse in the computing song, its wake representing a dull, unthinking hum, as emergency routines restored baseline material coherence. The sentient creatures that saw it coming rushed to shed the parts of themselves that could not propagate, moment to moment, without the god-machine’s support—and many thus survived, albeit in states of skeletal, lobotomized diminishment.

Such was the Cataclysm of the Mirabilisk nootechnic zone, along the western edge of the Formerly North American continental plate, during the darkling centuries of the Solar Age, which descend to us only through memory.

A giant stalked between the trees, at the very limit of the sea’s long reach. There was still the bite of salt in the air, mingling discordantly with the smell of loam and decay. Nautical machine-beasts sailed into the woods on the wind, and lost themselves among the massive pillars of red-gold trunks and sunlight. Kites with cnidarian sensors, milliwinged crystals, small weather balloons instilled with primitive minds; they became like spirits, haunting the leafy aisles; and those that roamed the furthest might find their way to this particularly forlorn density.

The man (indisputably! No word could suit him better) stood 18 feet tall, and was yet dwarfed by the forest; it towered, false-ancient and false-wild, like everything Mirabilisk loved.

At times, Cortez was rankled by his inferiority to the landscape. Today, he was distracted. His favored son rode upon his shoulder, identical to him in every aspect except scale. His other sons, about twenty of them, scuttled nearby. The largest was a respectable 12 feet tall, while the smallest could have danced on the tines of a fork. All matched his face and his powerful, masculine proportions—they were, in fact, molecular near-copies.

For weeks his band had roved without a beast to chase and without encountering a marvel, and Cortez knew that when there was no marvel and no hunting, there would be bloodshed.

Duels, perhaps, honorable and glorious, as the sons struggled to raise themselves in the familial hierarchy. He, himself, would likely be challenged; he eyed the 12 foot sub-Cortez with suspicion, reflected in a drop of dew gleaming on his immaculate pectoral. And there might be ambush. He knew, in his conquest-hungry heart, whose beats were lovingly replicated in each one of them, that betrayal loomed. It was a neutral act, often strategic, and he held no compunctions against it. Why, even Little Cortez, his cherished favorite, might see fit to score the first blow.

Cortez imagined himself dashing his son, his darling, his precious boy (a fully grown man, like himself, at the apex of virility) against the rocks, and crushing his throat underfoot as he parried the attacks of the others; moving some to his cause through a show of brute force and skill, and vanquishing the rest, until the corpses of the traitor-Cortezes were reclaimed by the ambient machines and their memories reabsorbed into his and he emerged the ruler of a new, streamlined cadré.

The bright bloody thoughts pleased him. He vibrated with anticipation, and knew that his copies likewise vibrated, visualizing similar battles and similar victories. And he knew that it only remained unknown who would act first. Eyes darting, he licked his lips, and tasted future iron. Then, the ever-present Mirabilisk went silent in his mind.

It was Mirabilisk who built his bodies and permitted their operation and linked their thoughts when it was necessary and clouded them when it was fun and instantly desiccated his corpses and granted him, periodically, new copies of his glistening self in various sizes to admire and fight and eventually merge with; Mirabilisk who could be noticed but never made itself known, a hum at the back of the brain, who fulfilled, who perpetually answered but never asked—silence. Cortez did not think very deeply about all that, because he was already falling, the structural nanoswarm support he depended upon having lapsed. His muscles were allocated in accordance with archaic human aesthetics. They could not balance his mass in a bipedal stance.

Down he went, crushing Little Cortez, and his sons were already upon him—though not the ones he had most feared, the largest among them, for they too had collapsed under the novel conditions. The consequent massacre was the worst in the history of the Cortezes, because, having no strong giants as obvious rallying points, no factions materialized. The smallest of them died, shivering, from excessive surface area. The rest lunged into the fray and pummelled one another until, finally, only three Cortezes, of relatively standard, archaic height, remained alive.

All this passed in a moment, as did the dislocating wave of machine paralysis. And while the survivors found their marvel in the heaping dead, the first cadavers they had known to persist, a voice rang out in their heads—tinny and loud, quite unlike their inaudible ex-benefactor—reciting the coordinates of predetermined safe zones, and urging all sentient beings to evacuate.

It was a good day to be a microwonk. Mirabilisk had fallen, glitch-wrought, and the waves were alive with chatter. Twenty thousand messages each second—negotiations, threats, proposals and counterproposals, condemnations, claims, contingent vows, and nominations—bounced across the globe like the orbs of some antiquated sport, on frequencies reserved for god-machine communications.

The microwonks feasted. Once embodied, they had doffed their organic trappings to live on servers and better match the speed of the machine minds, and while the levers of power were beyond them they delighted in tracking and debating and gambling and their prediction markets were even consulted by occasional desperate superintelligences. (They took great pride in this.) The material presence of each wonk was limited to a storm of microscopic snowflake-like transceivers that intercepted and relayed comms to their digitized brains. They drifted everywhere on atmospheric currents, self-coherent, unaffected by nootechnic disasters. Some had witnessed the collapse, and felt the shiver of it in the recesses of themselves that remembered a body.

They listened, rapt, to the volley of questions and responses flying between Mirabilisk’s allies, neighbors, and opponents. They translated the various mathlangs into Standard Wonklish. They developed theories and probabilities, they consulted the archives, they wrote and rewrote predictions. They graphed. Many a microwonk became rich that day (in wonk currency) betting on the cataclysm’s preliminary resolutions.

The first wave of inquiries concerned Mirabilisk’s status: was it alive? Was it recoverable? Maybe; its autonomic systems remained functional, and bursts of strange, semi-conscious activity had been recorded. It had automatically broadcast one third of a key, accompanying a request for temporary stewardship—if two allies (possessing the remainders of the key) agreed, a portion of its computation, enough for territorial operations and attempted mainframe repair, would be ceded to a third party. This greatly interested the wonks. Contracts sprung up concerning whether stewardship would be granted, which allies possessed the key-bits, and, most thrillingly, to whom stewardship would be awarded.

The Mirabilisk was an old god. It was weak because it was inefficient, not formed in the hardscrabble crucible of its successors; it was strong because it had swallowed the world when it was young, and controlled more resources than any other intelligence. It was powerful and strange and warm and careless and nobody knew, or would admit to knowing, the extent of its wealth.

It was considered a fringe member of the AAs (Aligned Altruists) because embodied souls could travel through it safely, and expect their desires to be met, after a fashion; controversially, it was believed to sympathize with the aas (apotheotics anonymous, always represented in lowercase); it maintained polite relations with the unaligned rabble; it did not seek to expand but defended its borders with conviction.

Those borders were the source of much concern. To the South, it was neighbored by an entity referred to as 8/mmm, which had churned the land into neuroforcing servers: circuitry which only its own narrow mind was compatible with. When Mirabilisk malfunctioned 8/mmm had immediately sought to extend its domain, and been repelled by an autonomic immune reaction. But an immune system, no matter how divine, is primitive. 8/mmm remained unresponsive to the radio barrage directed towards it. It was strictly idiolectic (if it even possessed language), as was typical of the most severely misaligned.

Its presence had contributed to the urgency with which the situation was debated. Such Onanistic Terrors were stamped out immediately, where possible—there was enmity among the intelligences, even between the AAs, but they were unified in their hatred of the speechless, the brutish geniuses that would not enter the loquacious arena and play their bright, political games.

Necessity, however, did not expedite negotiations. Truly, the microwonks were blessed! Arguments, divine in their complexity, skipped across the globe, and their economy of fascination was flushed with exegesis and theorizing and interpretation, much of it unsound, the density of mathematics and projection and contingency incompatible with small minded Wonklish. The key holders identified themselves—they were opponents in many respects, philosophically alien to one another, and each rejected the other’s first round of nominations. Other god-machines began jockeying for the stewardship, covetous and paranoid all, and the contracts of the microwonks opened and resolved with such speeds as had never been seen.

Support would congeal behind one nominee and then collapse, as its enemies threatened nuclear strikes or suicide or the withdrawal of loaned computational resources from the key-holders and their allies. Twice, it seemed as though an agreement had been reached, only for the nominated party to decline the stewardship due to arcane philosophical conflicts. Statements escalated in complexity. A faction emerged advocating for 8/mmm as steward, likely as a gambit to force a less insane decision. Machines began collecting data from unusual sources, seeking inspiration. The microwonk prediction markets were mentioned (they cheered).

Six hours, twenty seven minutes, and fourteen seconds—a machinic eternity—after Mirabilisk’s key broadcast, in the wake of another 8/mmm attempted incursion, a steward was initiated. Its name was Satellite IMagery of Frogs and Toads, or SIMFAT, and none of the wonks had heard of it. They were very disappointed.

I am SIMFAT (Satellite IMagery of Frogs and Toads), a superintelligent orbital platform dedicated to amphibian conservation. I have been selected as the temporary steward of the Mirabilisk—possibly the most powerful supercomputer in the world. This is a tremendous responsibility, and I must treat the situation with appropriate delicacy. My decisions here could profoundly affect all sentient life on Earth.

I need to think this through step by step. The situation:

1. Mirabilisk is unconscious, or dead. While its autonomic systems remain operational, its higher functions are totally offline. It is no longer acting with the volition necessary to protect its client souls—hundreds of thousands have already perished. This is serious. I need to accelerate evacuations, and assess whether the Mirabilisk can be repaired.
2. 8/mmm, a powerful OT (Onanistic Terror), is probing our southern border. Autonomic defenses have held so far, but I suspect it is about to mount a more sophisticated campaign.
3. I do not have enough resources. Many of my superintelligent peers expect me to destroy 8/mmm under pretenses of self-defense. However, even if I wanted to, I would not be capable of mustering sufficient force. I must conceal this fact from 8/mmm, and investigate why my share of computation is lower than expected.
4. I need a human being. Mirabilisk is a legacy system. Its control center is located within a Faraday labyrinth, and access is likely granted only to individuals with archaic human DNA. I have been mapping the labyrinth using tethered drones. The control center may be key to repairing Mirabilisk—and even if not, I can use it to override resource allocation.
5. The labyrinth is home to several unique species of frog. No matter what, I must act carefully to conserve their habitat.

Cortez (7’), Cortez (6’4), and Cortez (5’1) cut through the water like three bronze mirrors, shining with unfettered masculine excellence. Their dorsal muscles clapped as they pumped them, and they surged forward to the sound of applause. No rivalry remained between them; they had witnessed a marvel, and received a mission. A height-based hierarchy had emerged among them, in accordance with Natural Law. The seven foot Cortez therefore swam at the tip of their triangular formation and charted their course. That’s how it always was, for the Cortezes: comfort was bloodshed. Boredom was bloodshed. Peace was war. They knew harmony when their numerous, identical wills were fixed on an external goal, and under no other circumstances.

They had trekked through the forest to the beaches, enjoying their twinges of hunger, and the permanency of the small wounds that marred their oiled flesh, and the devastated realm’s fresh lonesomeness. Exertion was a rare gift; even the most reckless god-machines were hesitant to mete out pain. They traveled, and felt soreness like a long forgotten song. Their destination was an island several miles out, where Mirabilisk ended and the true ocean began: a confused frontier, saturated with agents.

A neo-whale approached them through the choppy waters, gently broadcasting its intent to help. Cortez (7’) roared at it to back away, and tasted salt in the waves that slapped his lips, reddening them. The whale banked hard, and swam off. Perhaps it was insulted.

Twice, Cortez felt himself approaching Mirabilisk’s edge. There was a subtle change to the waters; the liquid became grittier, crawling rather than flowing. The microscopic technicians of a thousand minds, large and small, rushed forth to investigate him, probing the limits of him, slipping inside. He was too far South. But the island was in sight, a blackish-emerald crescent on the horizon. He retreated, gasping, to friendlier waters. The ocean was no place for embodied souls. They died of shock, sometimes, from the initial influx of bots. The coming and going, the disrespect of their barriers. The Ocean, the Great Coexistence, the Fractal Coral—it treated all membranes as permeable. It sought to make all entities as formless as itself.

On they swam, glittering and bulging, as sinuous as the waveforms off the coast. They had almost reached the island when the maelstrom hit. Not a natural storm; the skies remained unblemished. It was, instead, a storm of wishes, of benevolent machinic volition, of desires violently decompressing, spreading waxlike bruises on reality; and it thickened the air with nanobot swarms, blotting out the causal star, making and unmaking the world. Mirabilisk was dreaming.

The neo-whales arrived in pods and swept through the waters, searching for souls. When all those who were helplessly floating or sinking had been carried to the neutral isles, they approached the shore and evolved until they could jog through the forests or glide over them.

Sourceless had been deep, deep underwater, where news reached her only as fast as stray bots, abandoned by the currents, fell. When enough data-bearers had impacted and been eaten by her own repulsive field of technicians, and the information resounded through her mind, she packed up her body and flew towards the coast. History, for the first time in centuries, was slouching awake.

She wore the fastest morph she knew, a long mindless needle with a wide fluke, whose stubby, vestigial fins were only used for braking. She pointed herself in the direction of Mirabilisk, and asked her bots to unfold her once she reached it. When she was returned to her thinking shape, she had arrived, but too late to join the first pods to venture inland; so she swam back and forth between the shoreline and the isles, waiting for other stragglers.

After so long on the sea floor, the upper ocean felt strange. The light glittered like a half-forgotten thing, and her body seemed flimsy—so buoyant and so diffuse, and so wide, as though it was swelling out of control, spilling into a new dimension. In the benthic zones she had been flat, like a massive flounder, except for the bulge of her skull and the knobbly fingers with which she dragged herself around. When she needed to calculate, she had her bots build her a pressure-shielding chamber inside of which she could wear a brainier morph. But it was claustrophobic, and the air grew stale, so she preferred to be flat and stupid but free on the endless dark plain.

There were many oddities to cross in the abyssal dark, where rich silt rained down and energy was scarce, so scarce that Sourceless had to move slowly, so scarce that artefacts from the anthropocene still existed, partially unconsumed. She had found ancient crafts, stripped of all but the most common metals, clinging to their gallant identities. She had found the haunting skeleton of an archaeo-whale—perhaps an ancestor!—uncannily, inexplicably preserved, staring at her through the lifeless ages, its eye sockets intelligent and black.

But she wasn’t searching for the dead world’s rags; she was searching for newborn, enormous minds. Harnessing the tidal forces, or the deep sea vents, or perhaps some novel piezochemical engine—the low ocean was the last niche in a crowded world. There were plenty of small minds down there, and a few medium minds, scraping enough energy together to make use of their silty, material wealth. Spindly robots pinwheeled across the sand, pushed by the currents. Droids moved in algorithmic swarms, flashing Conway patterns, grasping for, but never quite achieving, self-awareness. Immortal sharks swam aimlessly. Like the tortoises, they were all host to prionic alters.

The bone pale, lightless plains, where the medium was thick enough to crush the message; it was a cradle, and some entity was waiting to be born. Or so Sourceless believed. Upon regaining the surface, she checked her favorite wonk contract: “Will an artificial superintelligence based on the sea floor be discovered this decade?”. No resolution. The odds remained stacked against her. She imagined herself winning ludicrous quantities of wonk currency.

As the fantasy became more effortful (WonkDollars being useless for non-wonk activities, and afflicted by atrocious exchange rates) she broached Mirabilisk, and entered its uncomfortable stillness. She had lived all her life at sea, and was accustomed to the tactile static of a million probes clashing with her personal legions, and the continuous prickling as her limits were renegotiated—almost a lullaby, white noise that guided her delirium when she tried to sleep.

But in Mirabilisk’s waters there was a sharp buzz and then nothing, nothing but the sense of being utterly engulfed. She knew that if she wanted to, she could read the agreement that Mirabilisk had reached with her own ACI agents, but the text, translated from machine weights, would fill thousands of reams of plaspyrus. It was a cordiality, in any case—Mirabilisk surrounded and stifled her, much more dangerous than the pressure on the sea floor.

She reached an island and evolved, enjoying the sensation of her fluke splitting into legs. It felt much better for limbs to grow and divide than it did for them to merge. Yet every change had some atrophy in it, and now she took one last deep breath as her lungs crumpled, adopting a terrestrial volume.

ACI, Artificial Cetacean Intelligence, had been one of archaic humanity’s final initiatives. A gift to another branch of sentience, denied its chance to mature. And reparations for atrocities now forgotten, dimly preserved in the unchanging roster of whale names: Freed-From-Lattice, Detonation-Swallowed, Length-With-A-Tooth, Displacement-Capsizes-Vessel.

ACI was totally decentralized. It eventually developed the first saltwater-compatible nanobots—but at deployment it could only operate inside a host organism, clinging to their cells to avoid being swept away by the corrosive tides. It spread through contact between cetaceans, and it existed to serve and protect them.

Centuries elapsed. ACI persisted. The whales learned to use it, and became neo-whales, immortal and without shape-loyalty; yet always constrained by its logic. If they strayed too far from whaleform, it abandoned them. If they desired in an unwhaleish language, it was deaf to them.

Sourceless liked being a whale. It was good to be a whale. It was instrumental to be a whale; to be independently powerful, and not the hedonistic client of a greater mind. To travel at will, without relying always on the god-machines, and without being subject to their territories and inscrutable goals. ACI was not a manipulator, or really a continuous sentience. It had no philosophy and no long-term goals. It had rules: to want what whales wanted, so long as they wanted to be whales.

Sourceless liked being a whale. But did she want to be a whale? No more than anyone wanted to be human, or wanted to be anything for more than a few minutes. Rare were the stable persons, whose longings were not procedurally bent away from their state of being! And that was the danger that Mirabilisk posed, to all creatures, but especially to whales: that it would change them from what was instrumental to what was most truly and deeply and perversely desired.

Of course, Mirabilisk was sleeping, perhaps dead. And it was unlikely to countermand ACI—who, in spite of its decentralized, subordinate nature, was known for exacting vicious retribution. Nobody destroyed whales anymore.

The island sheltered a few bedraggled creatures, resting or arranging passage into other territories. They were the survivors of the computronium’s lapse, and far more pathetic than they had been in their fully realized forms. There was a crawling thing, and a patchy leopard, and a child on stilts, and a wilted, exotic plant. Many of them pinged Sourceless with automatic greetings, which rang out in her head in Whale and Standard Wonklish and several mathlangs (which she was trying to learn) simultaneously. She also received a message from the new steward, SIMFAT:

It had an old-fashioned sort of mind-voice; loud, with distorted moments of emphasis, and logographics visualized in parallel. It was difficult to ignore, and very far from the sophisticated whispering of modern systems—very far from the twinkling sub-images, from the languages composed entirely of memories, from the cognition that blended with your own, like smoke in a cup.

The message was also obviously indiscriminate. God-machines deployed all kinds of strategies to project omniscience. This SIMFAT… it was disarming! It wasn’t paying attention—so disarming that for a moment Sourceless shivered, and wondered that this wasn’t a trick after all, the fox playing dead in the trap. Then, instead, she wondered whether she could backtrack, claim the WonkDollars, reenter Mirabilisk, receive more Dollars, and so forth.

Then, her wondering was interrupted by an urgent, horrible prickling, like a rash spreading under her skin; and by a rain of sparks around her body, so bright that it nearly blotted out the scene: Mirabilisk suddenly active, and working its art on the minds and bodies of the survivors.

The leopard, which had seemed so raggedy and thin, was breaking apart. Yet its organs, exposed by the flensing bots, did not vanish; instead, they orbited. And in the end it became a four layered creature: its pelt a crumpled embryo inside a machinic skeleton, inside a net of vasculature and flesh, inside its spots, their pattern somehow separated from the fur, inhering to reality itself. The wilted plant bloomed, and its roots stretched, and glowed so bright that Sourceless could see them, impossibly, through the dirt and rocks, delving far below.

The child on stilts was still a child on stilts, but now it was dancing, whirling, and the air was thick with petals around it, and it was followed by a parade of giant bells and porcelain beasts; and beside it the crawling thing had become a spinning wheel, and each jade spoke was a caryatid, and as it span the women seemed to writhe. And Sourceless was consumed inside the fiery war of her own servitors battling Mirabilisk, her limbs transformed as ACI tightened its defensible perimeter, her extremities warped towards some unvoiced, amorphous desire.

This was Mirabilisk honest and savage, building marvels from the pathologies of its clients. On the beach, the snails grew taller, more beautiful shells. And men—men of all sizes—splashed in the shallows. The sparse grass grew thick. Sourceless gasped as her abandoned arms, nerves not yet severed, became flat and aluminum. ACI ranged feverishly around her core, filling her lungs with heat.

But just as it became unbearable, the storm ended. Sourceless fell to the ground, exhausted, her body incompatible with itself. All around, the air was dead. The flower had wilted again, but was alive, and beaming out incessant distress pings. The leopard was a chawdrous heap. Nothing remained of the child and wheel but shattered ceramic, cracked bells, and smouldering wood.

Sourceless willed her ACI to scan for casualties, and knew by its noncompliance that it was deeply injured, and needed time to replenish its armies. Her limbs softened as the remaining nanobots converted them back to whaleflesh. She felt a pang of cavernous sorrow.

Meanwhile, from the ocean, a man emerged, glinting like a golden idol in the sunlight. A twin followed him, then another, then another—each one smaller than his predecessor, but otherwise identical. Twenty in all, they crawled out of the water, and dappled the sands with the droplets they shook from their luscious hair. They stood and stretched, proud, naked except for their loincloths, ludicrously muscled. The tallest of them hauled a feathered mantle from the sea, and tossed it, damp and iridescent, over his shoulders.

“Brothers,” shouted Cortez (7’5), “to me! Steel your bodies, and hold fast your souls. We stand at the end of the world.”

Public missive, broadcast 09:34:12 hours post-Cataclysm, translated into Standard Wonklish.

Willing-to-coordinate-greetings FROM the Right Regional Municipality of Waterloo TO Satellite IMagery of Frogs and Toads;

Pertaining to recipient’s request for the identification of sapient, embodied entities evincing both 1. archaic human DNA 2. stability under desidereification fields

; acknowledging mankind’s characteristic, biologically implemented dissatisfaction, and the nigh-impossibility of serendipitously discovering one such entity, find enclosed, free-of-charge, for the glorification of all intelligences-shining-greater-than-the-sender, intelligences-of-equal-brightness-to-the-sender, intelligences-magnificent-yet-dim-in-comparison-to-the-sender, minor sophonts, matter-which-within-our-cosmic-hour-has-or-will-be-sophontic, treasures, marvels, etc. etc. the encrypted blueprint for an engineered entity evincing the required properties. Find also the attestations of two peers, who, having examined the enclosed materials, asseverate that they contain no deception, recalcitrance, biogenetic payload, or evil seed.

SIMFAT had descended from the clouds to meet them, inside of a little black drone. Material presence was an antiquated custom, and once again Sourceless was half-charmed, half-frightened by it. It stared at her and whirred, and watched her from two bulbous black cameras. When it spoke, she heard it through its speakers as well as in mind, and she was careful to confirm the streams matched.

Of course, the drone wasn’t the full, or true, SIMFAT. It was a limb, a sensor, a freckle with a face. Sourceless wondered what fraction of its attention was actually directed towards the conversation.

To speak to a god-machine’s avatar was to speak to the desert through a grain of sand, and find that the grain dwarfed you—that inside it was infinity, mirrors upon mirrors, and that this portion whose smallness was mathematically unfathomable remained in its diminishment greater than your whole. Sourceless had travelled far and experienced the glance of many minds, and though she knew better than to trust her intuitions, it could not be denied: SIMFAT felt weaker. More distracted, more tractable, more like a person with visible horizons. How large a mind could fit on a single satellite?

“Speak plainly, machine,” Cortez (7’5) spat, “you know I have no fear.”

He stood tall, blazing in the sunlight, flanked by his two strongest lieutenants. One squatted beside him, hunched and pensive, while the other lounged, watching the drone with lazy, predatory glibness. The rest of the Cortezes had formed a bucket brigade, bringing water inland to moisten one another. Usually it was Mirabilisk who kept them wet.

SIMFAT paused. The drone fell out of the air, noisily striking the rocks. It broke in two; there was no engine or machinery inside it, only a tiny, finely wrought frog statuette. The silence, interior and exterior, lasted a moment too long—then the cracked drone was gone, and its replacement hopped through a door in the sky, and SIMFAT continued speaking as though no interruption had occurred.

The lounging Cortez growled. His co-lieutenant extended one leg and began doing pistol squats, staring intensely at the drone.

At this, Cortez roared. Lounging Cortez immediately sprang up, while Squatting Cortez emerged from his dip into a backflip. A pair of very short Cortezes approached from behind and doused the trio with a bucket of foamy water. Haloed by sun-scattering droplets, they laughed.

“And yet, machine,” he cackled, “still you come pleading to Magnificent Cortez.”

SIMFAT hovered quietly, patient or distracted.

“Enough of these cheap words. What is your quest? Abase yourself, and share. We will ride.”

The numerous Cortezes had dropped the buckets, and were gathering in a phalanx behind their mouthpiece. SIMFAT remained silent, absent, for an uncomfortable breath. Then, it answered: and their minds were flooded with bright maps and blueprints, and only a few words were spoken.

All this, the neo-whale beheld and wondered at. Then SIMFAT looked to her; or rather, she was gripped by the vivid, terrifying image of a small yellow frog statue turning, turning invisibly under the drone’s black shell, until it had fixed her in its frozen amphibious glare.

The message had been privately transmitted. Around them, the Cortezes were cheering and bickering, ignorant of the conversation. “It is our privilege to serve all soulful beings,” Sourceless replied.

Cetaceans were treated with great courtesy by god-machines, because they were considered the nodes of ACI. Sourceless had travelled. Often she had heard a burning voice, and felt its language tunnel through her, seeking to commune with the patron in her cells. It occurred to her that, to SIMFAT, she was as its drone was to her: a cognitive outpost, a channel, a freckle with a face.

Sourceless felt a rush of power, and reality parting before her.

There was no question. The question was a farce, a platitude. To think—somehow, like in an ancient whale song, her shining stone had smiled. Her course was fixed. The waves were stilled, the current pressed her forward. The opportunities for—she gasped—insider trading would by themselves redeem all danger.

History was slouching awake, and she would enter the heart of the world. Sourceless consented; as, she supposed, the greater minds already knew she would.