She is slower than the mirror-faced snake, and for some reason it is choosing to chase her, and she is not in dense enough forest to lose it by going up a tree or between a couple too narrowly spaced for it. So it catches her before emergency services can turn up.
And then she is somewhere else, in a not particularly attractive room next to a person who looks sort of off somehow.
"Excuse me," she says, taking a step out of his personal space.
"I have confidence she's powerless, in this body. It's just that there are several million of the bodies, directing operations across the empire. She says she's cut off from the rest of them. Travelled too far."
"You can kill this one, if you like. There's an afterlife where evil souls are punished, it sounds kind of interesting."
"We will kill you if that seems indicated by the strategic situation. Liking doesn't really enter into it. What do you mean you - lost your temper -"
"I still had some friends, back then. Not humans, humans die like flies. Ships, which live like we do. The people of that star system waged war on us, killed my friends. I was angry. I ordered it sterilized."
"Yes. They're computers but computers can be people. More people than humans, even."
"I know, I'm arguably a computer. Why weren't your friends backed up?"
"Twenty five billion - that's two dozen times the prewar population of my planet -"
"I get the sense none of you except Mirelótë here are from a society that's invented computing? Well, with it come a lot of inventions that make it easier for planets to have lots more people, and then there are moons that get colonized, and other planets in the same system, and space stations."
"Starting fewer wars. Negotiating a treaty with some aliens we ran into. Consolidating. Developing the Radch."
"Nothing like that. Some people die when we conquer places. Do your advisors tell you that the work of your country is otherwise?"
"Yes. I mean, if we disagreed we'd talk about it and if I had a really good argument maybe I'd convince him. But under most circumstances, yes."
"Anaander, were you ever the kind of human who had a mother and a father and siblings and so on."
"Did your father - or maybe it was your mother - really, obsessively, enjoy linguistics? Should've been a politician but couldn't even really pretend to care, not when there was anything actually interesting in the room, and the most interesting thing in the world -"
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