"Charming thought," sighs Cam. "Here's him right before he died."

And he starts reading it. "Not the body from then, hopefully, since it had the bioweapon."

"I could actually make it without the virus in but yes, before then."

He hands him a chip. "Thank you."

"You're welcome."

And: Maitimo.

He blinks, looks around at the two of them, stands quite steadily.

"It's been five months," Findekano says, "I have a summary of them for you, if you want."

"Yes."

"It's on this computer - demons can now do minds, might be better to keep that confidential. Cam is there a secure way to give it to him?"

"You can show it to him without dechiplocking it, you just have to scroll through the files and such."

So he does. They stand stiffly beside each other while Maitimo reads.

Thank you.

Didn't do it for you. I need someone to make this known to your father in a way that doesn't cause a tantrum.

Mmmhmm.

Destroying every single backup copy'll be for you but this wasn't.

If I'm understanding this right, you know, you can just ask Cam for a version of me you like better.

I did try to get you out from under the oath.

If we need a non-Oathed version of me that's fine, it might in fact be best to do things like have all risky operations carried out by versions of someone the Enemy already has -

We should say this aloud for Cam.

"Cam," Maitimo says, "I am coming up with all kinds of horrifying ways to exploit this if we decide we don't mind the Enemy knowing we can do this. How confident are you that we can keep it from him?"

"Not. The possibility was derivable from information he almost certainly has, and deriving the actuality would just require suspecting you were around."

"Then in that case we could start conducting military operations with only clones of people whose chips he already has, and set a dozen of my father to solving lightspeed and so forth faster."

"...I guess you could do that. - Alternately. This removes the major barrier to destroying Valinor."

"To what?" says Findekano.

"...yes," Maitimo says. "Let's do that."

"There are still the Maiar, I am not super thrilled about the Maiar."

"And the dinosaurs," Findekano says. "And every single other living thing smarter than a snail."

"The Enemy offered to stop the torture simulations," Maitimo says.

"And we can't warn them -"

"Can't warn them. They would apparently need a nanosecond to react and mustn't have it," Cam says. "The dinosaurs et al can be recovered as species albeit not individuals if anyone was attached, I can do eggs, demonic mammals can usually carry to term, there's animals in Hell."

"Hold out for a better deal," Maitimo says. "You kill the Valar and destroy Valinor for them and they never again harm another being, harm tightly defined."

"Oh yeah. I only get to do this once and it has to be fucking perfect."

"Should I stay dead, then? I don't know how good his spying is."

"I don't know either. - and since I can't swear oaths the black hole comes before the evacuation and I imagine it will be complicated to evac everybody if, say, Melian knows what happened and is screaming bloody murder about it -"

"...probably a safe bet that she'd know. They can swear to stop harming people conditional on you destroying Valinor according to the agreement, then you wouldn't even necessarily need to evacuate Endore..."

"What about the contingency where the Valar notice while the black hole's in progress and stop me, or if one of them is offplanet for some reason and survives?"

"Or Eru turns out to exist and object? You fulfill your end by dropping a hole and not warning them, I think? That seems fair."

"We're talking about helping the Enemy and irretrievably murdering a million people," Findekano says.

"I don't expect you to agree."

"I don't."

"I don't like it either," Cam says. "Do you have a better idea."

"Petition the Valar, hope some of Sauron's recent stunts cross the line? Figure out how to upload Men and Dwarves, then blow apart this planet -"

"Dwarves wouldn't consent," Maitimo says. 

"I suppose not. Hold tight and hope someone here or in Hell invents something targeted that can destroy the Enemy?"

"He's been avoiding the Dwarves and Men - specifically to keep leverage over me - but that still might take more than a million deaths' worth of time."