Infrared goggles don't do anything; they wouldn't, Elves can see infrared without goggles. 

Oh right. Sigh.

Cam doesn't even bother trying to pick his way through the landscape; keeping an eye on Maitimo he flaps his way to the dais.

When he reaches it there's someone there after all, sitting comfortably on the other side of the table. "Thank you for coming," he says. "I can make it prettier if the Elf will be distracted."

"I'll manage," Maitimo says, leaping up. 

Down plops Cam into a chair.

"All right," he says. "I won't waste time. Two offers. The first is for the Elves," he says to Maitimo. "The offer is that we swear to stop torturing uploads - stop torturing anyone - and never harm an Elf again. There are more minds running on Angband's computers than there are Elves alive in the universe, did you know that?"

"What a waste of computing resources," Maitimo says. "Do you just do it for leverage?"

"I just do it for fun. But, you know, as a show of good faith - " he snaps his fingers and something appears between then when they close. "My intelligence suggests Cam cannot create these; is that right?"

"Create sure, run no."

"You can build a body around this one, though?"

"...could do."

He tosses him the chip. "There you go. The Elves will have their King back and Maitimo can see how many of his friends forgive him."

"You haven't actually named a price," Maitimo says, "just an offer."

"Yes. We shut down all our uploads, hand you every mind we have since your demon cannot make them, and swear never to torture anyone again. And your father teaches us how to redirect backups from Mandos."

"...it will take me a while to bring him around on that."

"We think a thousand times faster than you. We have hardware you don't. It will never cross your father's mind that anyone could be as smart as him, but we'll figure it out eventually and if we do it without your help the offer expires and we have all your souls before you even die. I asked you to come because I thought you might be able to persuade him for me. I do still have a few thousand copies of his father, if that brings him around any faster."

Maitimo nods. "What do you want the backups for if you've sworn not to torture people?"

"Ah," he says. "Perhaps I should explain my offer to Cam.

You get a year to evacuate the planet uncontested. You drop a black hole on Valinor first."

"...am I supposed to imagine that the idea is that you just want to make this slightly more palatable by having backups of everybody living on it?"

"We promised the orcs we'd destroy the torture chambers of the Elf-god and figure out how to resurrect them ourselves. I am trying to do that."

"Well, if that's all you have in mind I could evacuate Valinor too, couldn't I."

"The Valar have the means to stop you if they're warned."

"Oh?"

"They could bar you from entering the system. There are other things they could do I am not specifying because we could also do them if you got it in your head to try to kill us that way."

"There are a lot of problems with this plan," Cam says, "but one of them is that if you get all the backups, then we're rather betting on you being an okay person to be had by for everybody whose backup comes to you, and my bribery is evac."

"I am not remotely an acceptable person to everyone who comes to me, but I will have sworn not to torture them, which puts me head and shoulders above the current setup. If you want a better deal you can name one."

"What's your game with the orcs, anyway?"

"Mandos is doing very wrong by them and I desire to see that ended."

"And your strategy is to oblige them to fling themselves into a miserably lethal war."

"Oh, do you want me to fight it without them? We can do that, as I think you must have realized. We could wipe all the Elven civilizations off the map tomorrow - but then, you see, my brethren would in fact pay attention and twitch their fingers to shatter Endore. They will never intervene in a fight where the sides look evenly matched. So I have to win slowly, and I will get them back."

"I did notice that. The prion disease was real fucking cute."

"Thank you. I have biological weapons that would leave you the only person breathing on this planet tomorrow. Isn't it lucky that I don't particularly desire to do that. You can end the war - well, not tomorrow, I think their current lightleapers still take some time to get up to speed, but in a week, and I'll give you a ceasefire until then if you don't try using it to evacuate."

"If that's where Mandos keeps all of his backups - and I can't imagine you'd settle for the one black hole if it wasn't - everybody who's only backed up there and either presently dead or presently living on Valinor is gone, correct me if I'm wrong."

"You are not."