"Was there a point where you were like, gee, at my current level of caring-about-people I don't want to kill them by the billions, but if I keep at this, I'll eventually want to kill them by the billions, and then I'll do it, and that's as much my problem as any other looming threat that'll eventually kill billions of people -"

"I did not think I'd ever do it right up until the moment when I did it. I guess at some point I got inured to having smaller numbers of people killed because it was necessary to take over their planets which I was doing to protect the larger populations. But when I noticed that I was glad of it, because it hurt all the time, minding, and I did not predict it'd make me want to kill people without a reason denominated in people."

" - huh. In hindsight could you have predicted you'd do it?"

"Yes. If you'd asked me, any time in the thousand years before it happened, what I'd do if it happened, I'd have told you I might kill them all. I just didn't consider the possibility in advance because it was - such an unlikely combination of things, that happened."

"What made it unlikely?"

"I didn't send the people I needed - the ships I needed, but they were people - out into battles, because I knew it'd be bad for me, bad for the empire, if I lost them. Garsedd surrendered. I sent the ships to start logistics operations. Then they fired on them. Killed them all, which also shouldn't have been possible, but the Presger gave them the technology to do it, as an object lesson for me of some kind. It took me a long time to have reasonable guesses about what the Presger had intended and in the interim I thought that they might've meant to kick off a rebellion across the whole galaxy, that they might've intended the weapons to leave that planet and be turned against everyone everywhere. So I couldn't have anyone leaving Garsedd, and I didn't know what they were capable of since they'd just done several impossible things, and everyone I trusted was dead.

If you had described those circumstances to me I might've predicted what I'd do but when I imagined things going wrong for me I usually didn't imagine that much, in that fashion."

"Huh. But if it'd happened when you still cared about people -"

"Could've probably figured out how to quarantine it while I figured out what the Presger wanted."

"And if your friends hadn't happened to all be dead -"

"Then they would've told me not to."

"And you'd have listened?"

"They had the guns, kid."

"You think they'd have refused?"

"Some did."

"What happened to them."

"They died for it. Can't have an army that tolerates mutinies."

"It'd be challenging."

"I have tried a lot more things in this arena than you."

 - nod. 

Meanwhile: "You know what we should try, since scrying apparently exists, is finding those people I sent to random universes."

" - oh, you're right, we should."

"I don't remember them very well but I bet you do."

"Everything's blurrier than it should be but I have the names."

"Blurrier?"

"You're supposed to be able to revisit your life, in Mandos. Lirnith says she did, over and over and over. I - I don't really remember anything after you stopped writing, but I'm pretty sure I didn't, and I don't recall it very well, sometimes."