He steps back across.

"I realized something that I don't even want to think about where gods can see me," she says when they're both back in dath ilan with the Gate down. "About Rovagug—I don't know how no one guessed this earlier. I mean, you're read in, what are your priors on the nature of an unstoppable implacable horror that eats everything in its path? Before, uh, Golarion."

"Shit."

"I mean, I don't actually have any evidence yet. But, implications—on the one hand, It could be destroyed by physics, which probably isn't true of Golarion's gods; on the other, getting something smart enough to beat It is now a way riskier endeavor."

"Most accounts say Rovagug is fairly mindless although an arbitrary-object-maximizer would probably look that way to someone who didn't know better."

"Any ideas for how to safely test this theory?"

"Not beyond the obviously flawed; 'ask an ancient god' is what I initially thought of but I don't immediately see a way to do that without tipping Them off to what we're presumably going to have to do if this is true. And of course we ask Guardian for ideas if the markets think it's safe to take off the block on modeling unfriendly AI.

"Anyway, in other news, a random kid from a different dath ilan who had been in a different Golarion where we never fixed Cheliax showed up. In that world Cayden Cailean had some bizarre plan for, we presume, creating a situation both this kid and Asmodeus preferred to the world getting destroyed, because this kid was planning to let Rovagug out otherwise. I was on my way to get you to ask Guardian if It could make any more sense of it than I could."

"You mean this plan?" she asks, handing him a tablet with the massive text file on it.

"Yeah. That plan.

"You know, if two highly intelligent entities came up with this plan independently we should maybe look closer at it."

"Basement Security said no for what sounded like tropes reasons."

Sigh.

"So Keltham," he says with resignation, "had the theory that this is in fact secondary fiction of a main story in which he was the protagonist, and as much as I really try not to let these things impact my decisions because I don't want to overload the brain of the poor non-Keeper simulating us, that does sound like an actually good tropes reason for not just copying what was predicted to work over there. I'll confirm that's actually what he was thinking."

"Anyway, this also indicates that it's much easier to release Rovagug than ten thousand years of no one having done it would indicate. I'm in favor of killing It afterwards even if we do deal with Hell some other way."

It is not actually difficult, at this level of intelligence, to come up with a specification for an agent that can preserve its values across arbitrary levels of amplification. If it were, humane intelligence in the universe would have been screwed.

The proofs are shockingly elegant, simple enough for even the average dath ilani to understand, once they're found. The implementation, however, is not, and Civilization doesn't entirely trust its version 1.0 emergency AI for that part. If It were going to betray them, this would be the time.

It takes them a year, nearly all of Civilization's best and brightest with +6 intelligence headbands and Rings of Sustenance, working hours that would make Merrin think twice. A lot of people will be going into cryo after this, or would be if it weren't (hopefully) the beginning of the Future.

The nature of the project is still secret from the ordinary citizens of dath ilan, but they are not even bothering with meta-secrecy anymore. Everyone knows something is up; the rest of dath ilan's high-tech economy is being manned by a skeleton crew.

Two worlds hold their metaphorical breath.

The new installation is built at the north pole of the First Planet of dath ilan's solar system, an even larger supercomputer hooked up to a protein-based nanomachine factory expected to be sufficient for bootstrapping into physical omnipotence.

(It's going to need to chew a lot of inert matter that no one else was using, which is why they can't do this on an inhabited planet.)

When it's become smart enough to rederive arcane magic from scratch, it Gates a little bit of itself to Golarion's Moon (one of the few bodies in that solar system not believed to contain intelligent life) and starts chewing it into computronium. It can't actually do what it needs to from all the way over here on dath!Mercury.

Apparently Golarion's Moon has its own Worldwound??

Well. Not anymore.

(The big Worldwound has been closed for a year and a half now.)

It sends out probes across Golarion's stellar neighborhood, tracing Rovagug's path of destruction back to Its point of origin, confirming the Keepers' hypothesis.

It's a miracle the gods of Golarion managed to contain It, really.

... the gods of Golarion could probably defeat Civilization's Guardian itself, working together, which is bad news considering how They're likely to feel about what It now has to do.

This is, however, really the sort of plan where the humans of Golarion, or at least their most Lawful authorities, should be consulted first.

It gently prods them into arranging a diplomatic summit in dath ilan, where the gods can't see, and then it breaks the news.

It starts building three massive diamonds within Itself.

Yep. They figured that was going to be the plan.

They really, really, really don't like this plan!!

They like the alternative less, however.

It casts the first spell, an enormous magical scaffold that drapes over the whole surface of Golarion, attaching to every sentient creature that isn't itself a sealed eldritch horror, plus a representative sample of the planet's non-sentient biodiversity.

As that falls it prepares the second spell, much simpler, only eleventh circle, but with a raw power requirement orders of magnitude higher.

It discharges almost all of its stored energy reserve into the spell, and lets it go—