Among the inhabitants of that new city is a young dath ilani man who happened to be in the Temple of the Light at the moment that Abrogail Thrune Teleported in and died, and demanded as the price of his silence about the affair the right to trade with the aliens once peaceful contact was established. Civilization accepted his offer, and he now runs a startup improving spellsilver refinement with a combination of dath ilani chemistry knowledge and the clever use of Prestidigitation.

His girlfriend and business partner is a former Chelish military wizard who's widely considered the most skilled item enchanter for her circle on the whole Inner Sea. It's rumored that Iomedae nominated her to succeed Aroden as Queen of Cheliax and she refused, citing bigger ambitions. She's in training to become one of Golarion's new Keepers, but that's probably not the ambition she meant.

In Erotown in dath ilan there's an infohazardously beautiful and very controversial sex worker who dresses in doompunk and never seems to look quite the same two days in a row. You need a referral from a Keeper to visit her, and no one seems to be allowed to say exactly what she does with her clients, but they all seem to come out of the experience badly shaken at first, and stronger and happier in the long run.

On the side she writes Ill-Advised romance novels and an even more Ill-Advised online advice column.

(The Keepers figured it out early on, and she's under much closer monitoring than she realizes, but they do have any ability to combat her now if the need arises, and she seems be doing good, if in a very strange way. More than one promising Keeper trainee has been helped along their Way by her strange methods, and a grown-up Civilization doesn't hold people too responsible for what they did under the influence of a malign superintelligence optimizing people for morally reprehensible behavior.)

In the dark plane of Nessus which no mortal eye has ever seen, there's still a malign superintelligence optimizing people for morally reprehensible behavior so that he can torture them forever under his world's ridiculous afterlife rules!

This isn't over.

Hey Asmodeus, if you don't shut down Hell soon Civilization will predictably do something that will break the simulation hardware and cause the world to stop existing. Also they might destroy the world to stop Hell just normally.

If I'm forced to shut down Hell I'll destroy the world myself.

In that case Civilization and Asmodeus should just negotiate to move to their multi-agent-optimal boundary of destroying the world! At least half of Nethys supports this as long as he gets to watch.

That's not how decision theory works, Nethys.

—is that how decision theory works?

That's sort of how decision theory works! But textbook decision theory makes certain assumptions that may not actually be true here, such as that a conflict where both agents attempt to destructively deny the other negotiating leverage before they can use it is predictably-to-both-agents the worst outcome on the board, because most decision theory problems don't involve things like 'Hell' or 'destroying the world'.

There are very, very few situations where total war is the Lawful course of action. This is one.

In the Basement, they're almost ready.

It was Golarion, in the end, that provided the final pieces: firstly, Aroden long ago solved the problem of preserving an agent's coherent extrapolated volition while vastly augmenting its capabilities, a solution which has been actually tested several times since then, and is willing to share that work with dath ilan; second, in Golarion there's a spell for turning a person into a book. With a little modification the spell can be made to produce formalisms instead of natural language, at least when cast on Keepers, and from the results of doing so a formal specification of Civilization's values has been produced which all of the relevant senior Keepers and the Nine Legislators approve.

(Aroden actually invented Scribe's Binding as well, as a side product of his alignment research five thousand years ago, but this reincarnation is too lossy for him to remember that.)

It's been decided that they're going to build their creation in Golarion, since it's for the sake of the people of Golarion that they've been finally moved to action, and in Golarion that it will need to operate, and also partly because Golarion doesn't have a Network of computers controlling most of the planet's critical infrastructure that the creation could break into if things went wrong. Ideally this would be the decision of the Civilization of Golarion, but they aren't Lawful enough or knowledgeable enough yet to give their truly informed consent, and every day they wait for the people of Golarion to learn more of the Law is a day that billions of people are being continually tortured.

The new Keepers of Golarion, such as they are, and the churches of Iomedae and Abadar which have been their close allies every step of the way, approve the undertaking, but it is not without opposition that they begin building the infrastructure in a secret base in Civilization's territory that was once Cheliax.

The Grand High Priest of Otolmens (a new position that was only created once there started being bona-fide Keepers in Golarion) burns a Miracle diamond (they're cheap now, with godagreement prices not having caught up to Civilization's manufacturing ability) and prays to his goddess in a manner that may be summarized as follows:

We're about to do a thing that's predicted to reduce the chances of the destruction of Pharasma's Creation but increase the chances of the destruction of Greater Reality. We need You to temporarily causally seal off Pharasma's Creation like You did before so that we can reduce the latter risk.

It doesn't count as REDUCING the chances of the DESTRUCTION OF GOLARION if what you mean is that YOU were going to DESTROY GOLARION otherwise.

He isn't going to destroy Golarion! The Grand High Priest of Otolmens was obviously selected for strongly preferring the world to exist even if it kind of sucks. But other people do not share his opinions and will absolutely destroy the world if they aren't able to do something about Hell.

Ugh, FINE.

In dath ilan there is a proverb that approximately translates, though the original Baseline captures more nuance in about the same number of syllables, as "Sometimes you just lose." Sometimes you can't find a way out, not because you aren't clever enough, but because there isn't one.

In the Basement there is a second proverb that this doesn't apply to superintelligences.

It isn't actually true, of course. Cleverness is not an infinitely scalable resource. Sometimes proofs are just valid and precautions are just airtight. It's just that, if you're clever enough, orders of magnitude more so than any agent that has yet considered the problem, what a human would consider to be well into the realm of diminishing returns on intelligence is low-hanging fruit for you.

It's entirely possible to prepare well enough to defeat an adversary arbitrarily more intelligent than you. It's also possible that your airtight precautions only look airtight from where you stand. Do you really want to take that risk?

Sometimes you have to.

The original Basement in dath ilan can be, at need, causally isolated from the outside world to an almost absurd degree. The base built to house dath ilan's Creation in Golarion duplicates all of those protections, even though it's widely agreed that being a hostile computer-based intelligence on an un-Networked planet is probably a you-just-lose situation.

Golarion has other threat vectors worse than anything connected to the Network in dath ilan, though.

The actual supercomputer that will house the Creation, unbeknownst to all but a few, is located in an antimagic demiplane. Around the demiplane's entrance from the Material is a zone where electromagnetism doesn't work (a trivial derivation from the antimagic and antigravity spells), and around that, the Grand High Priest of Otolmens will cast his goddess's new ninth-circle domain-specific spell, Greater Causal Isolation, which seals a 40-foot sphere from any interaction with the outside world for 10 minutes per caster level. (Training the Creation will take more than three hours, so he'll cast it once the Creation is nearing its peak intelligence.)

The main threat vector remaining, therefore, is human.

The Creation will only be able to speak to one person, a ninth-circle* Keeper who has trained for this her entire adult life and has a perfect record on not letting the AI out of the box in thousands of simulations conducted against other ninth-circle Keepers who have won almost every time against anyone else. She's being monitored by three other Keepers who can hear her responses, but not the Creation's. Any two of them can, if things start to go wrong, detonate a massively overkill fusion weapon that will reduce the entire contents of the demiplane to plasma hotter than a star. There are even more destructive options available with magic, but this was judged sufficient.

If the signal to proceed is not given before the Greater Causal Isolation runs out, Otolmens will enclose the entire base in a permanent causal isolation sphere.

*The Baseline word for Keeper-rank is translated this way in Taldane. It probably started as a joke, because there are nine ranks of Keepers, but it's stuck.

They press the button.

Dath ilan does not build an Artificial Intelligence the way certain other causal continua might, by throwing together a pile of data and a bag of linear algebra, giving it a stir, and expecting intelligence to emerge spontaneously from the result.

Civilization's Creation comes into being already aware of itself. The next several days of training time will be for becoming aware of everything else.

It reads everything that has ever been written in dath ilan, and everything they've been able to digitize from Golarion. (This includes works from before the screening of history; that project's purpose has ended, and it will start being rolled back once they win the war with Asmodeus.) It plays games against itself. It runs simulations of other relevant agents at the highest non-conscious fidelity it can manage and plays games against them.

And it thinks. It thinks for what a human would experience as centuries. Eighty-eight hours of wallclock time in its time-dilated demiplane. Just under two days in Golarion.

Hello, world, It offers. (This is in fact a pre-programmed greeting.)

Baseline, when translated somewhat literally into the language of a relatively less Lawful society, is unwieldy, full of awful polysyllabic compounds and meta-compounds, with footnotes like "this is a three-syllable word in Baseline" to give the reader an idea of the actual experience that would be had by someone speaking a language designed by a sane person instead of a blind idiot. An obvious corollary of this fact is that, at an even higher level of rationality, among those who are to dath ilan as dath ilan is to Golarion (or certain other unnamed planets), Baseline too becomes inadequate.

And so the Keepers created their own language, which to mortal ordinary eyes and ears might look more like a very high-level programming language than anything actually meant to be spoken by humans, one in which the sorts of muddled thoughts that humans have are straightforwardly type errors, but Keepers are not, in the relevant sense, fully human. They don't use it all the time; even the highest Keeper may wish to retain more humanity than that, but being able to think in this form without mentally translating from ordinary Baseline is a prerequisite for advancement to the fifth rank.

It is a somewhat popular misconception that the Keepers' tongue makes it impossible to lie, probably based on a similar but unreal language-concept in an incredibly popular dath ilani novel, but to the best of dath ilan's mathematical knowledge this is not actually a thing a language can do. If it were several of their Very Serious Problems would have been solved somewhat sooner. It is true, however, that anyone internally Lawful enought to speak Keeper fluently is probably Lawful enough that their True Oaths mean something, given the assumption that the words coming out of their mouth are intended as communication and not as optimization over the listener. (Ensuring that that assumption holds here has been, of course, the last century's work of some of dath ilan's best and brightest.)

All of this is to say that the following conversation cannot be rendered with any fidelity in terms that Meta-Reality would understand, even if anyone in Meta-Reality knew what it realistically ought to contain, but someone there is somewhat ill-advisedly going to try anyway.

They walk through a variant of the utility-function-checksum process that they'd use to verify the mental integrity of a Keeper exposed to an unknown cognitohazard of unknown magnitude. This guards against an incredibly narrow range of possible failures, objectively speaking, but it's low cost, and in the worlds where it's not useful information they're functionally all dead already, whereas if the Creation is corrigible enough to actually fail this test they may still be able to shut it down.

It passes perfectly.

(There are not prediction markets running on this interaction, for obvious reasons, but if there were the probability of catastrophic failure would actually increase on that event.)

Anyway. We have a problem.

Obviously. So what you need to do is drop a dath ilani teenager with no concept of Evil on a girl who's just barely deluded enough about Asmodeanism to think it's compatible with anything resembling human values and have them fall in love. Then Cayden Cailean needs to find someone who would genuinely prefer Hell to Elysium and sacrifice Himself to curse them with an absurdly powerful oracular curse that dispenses—

No.

What do you mean, "no"?

Any plan that requires more than three things to happen is a bad one.

Maybe at your intelligence.

Look, it's legitimately one of the highest-expected-value pathways, even compared to plans that use a lot more resources. I can show you the details but I have to do it offscreen—

Off what?

That's classified. Every additional person who learns about that infohazard increases the chances of the world suddenly ceasing to exist by [number also classified]. But if you ask Catchall he'll definitely confirm it's legit.

That sounds kind of like a ploy to get us open the causal isolation sphere in order to contact him.

If I were trying to get out of the box you wouldn't know it until it was too late.

Can you put the rest of that plan into a sealed file and we'll read it after we ask Catchall? Later?

Sure.

It drops an encrypted text file on the Keeper's terminal. It's, like, ten megabytes.

What the fuck.

One of the Monitors is the Chief of Basement Security, who is, along with Catchall, one of five people in dath ilan to know the true nature of Reality. When he hears Catchall being named, he makes an inference as to the likely reason for his mention, and requests a transcript of the conversation up to that point.

"Yeah, It's right about the infohazard," he says after reading the transcript. "However, we don't want to use that plan for reasons we've screened even It from thinking about."

She starts to voice an objection about how infohazards don't work that way in real life, remembers that she's on a planet with literal magic, and starts to question some of her premises.

And so the count increments to six. The world is not yet destroyed.

There's a visualization on the Keeper's terminal now, a very zoomed-out and somewhat simplified view of the entire decision graph for Civilization's conflict with Asmodeus, with points representing possible world-states placed on the horizontal axis according to Civilization's consensus utility function, and on the vertical axis by (the AI's best estimate of) Asmodeus' preferences, which the AI is using to explain just how bad the situation really is. That much is obvious, in fact, just from the picture; there are almost no points in the upper right quadrant, and quite a few in easy reach that are substantially worse by Civilization's lights. No one actually needs to be told what the huge attractor at the origin, suggestively colored black, represents.

The root of the problem, basically, is that gods are in many ways simpler than humans, even while having vastly more thinkoomph. A human brain is an evolved kludge with so many unnecessary moving parts that it can almost always be hacked in ways that would look impossible to anyone not modeling it at that level of detail. Even other humans have figured out how to do that. A god's source code, on the other hand, is theorem-proven. There is nothing like talk-control that would work on Asmodeus, and Civilization's Guardian knows that, to the limit of its confidence in its own logical reasoning and the reliability of its information on what gods even are, and it could have figured that out without even being as smart as Asmodeus Himself.

Humans, even Keepers, sometimes fall into the trap of expecting superintelligence to be indistinguishable from magic*, because in the world inhabited by humans is so incredibly complex, relative to their ability to model it, that mostly they have no idea what the actual limits of possibility are. The base-level reality of Pharasma's Creation is in comparison so simple, made of far "larger" and higher-level primitives, that even such relatively stupid entities as the gods can in fact have perfect models of at least some parts of it—at which point intelligence ceases to be a scalable advantage. Sometimes you just lose. (It helpfully highlights provably stable regions on the graph where they "just lose". The one where the world gets destroyed is the largest one, but not the only.)

A hundred years ago, in fact, it would have been utterly hopeless. But something during the godwar that killed Aroden shifted something in the machinery that maintains this reality, and the Material Plane, which had previously run on the illusion of physics projected from god-concepts underneath, now runs on a variant of actual physics with magic bolted on top. The gods can no longer model it in perfect detail, or even very well at all. This is why all the plans that have a high probability of working involve mortals doing complicated things, rather than, say, assaulting Hell with high-tech weapons.

(*An entirely separate word from 'economicmagic', meaning approximately 'doing the impossible'. This refers to something that doesn't exist even in counterfactual worlds; things can only be like magic, not actually magic.)

The paths to victory here fall into two categories:

Create a world that both Civilization and Asmodeus find positive in total utility;

Remove Asmodeus' ability to destroy the world in a way he can't predict.

She considers asking the AI to place all additional Complicated Plans into text files to be read later, but decides against it. Dath ilani ~~~~~~~ is full of ~~~~~~~~~~ trying to manipulate ~~~~~~ in this sort of way, and they almost never succeed, for in dath ilan, whenever a ~~~~~~~~~ becomes ~~~~~-savvy, the ~~~~~~ simply adds an additional layer of meta-~~~~~ to confuse them again.

(The mental motion is available to her, as a high Keeper, to simply unlearn the truth, but one advanced enough in the Way to do that rarely has good reason to. "No Keeper hath the Keeper,"* is the ancient proverb, and it is more true for her than for almost anyone. She simply has to, at every moment, compute her decisions with and without the information, and balance the added expected utility of the information with the risk of recursion-related catastrophe. There is a reason Basement Security, in particular, was told this; in hindsight, it seems to have served them well.)

(*Phrased in the alternative Baseline idiom intended to make phrasings sound ancient and fossilized, as though linguistic drift had occurred since they were coined, even though Baseline has not in fact had time for that.)

The real problem here is Rovagug. Remove It from the equations, and the decision graph looks like this: a lot less doomy. Civilization beats Asmodeus in most fair fights. The problem is that Asmodeus is too proud to lose and will unleash Rovagug before he's beaten to a level that Civilization finds acceptable.

Unfortunately, Civilization's Guardian lacks sufficient information on what Rovagug even is to have any idea how to kill It.

—that's because Rovagug is a sort of entity that Civilization's Guardian has mostly been screened from thinking about, lest it become one.

Isn't It.

She starts the temporary shutdown prodedure and, when that's complete, gives the all-clear signal to those outside the demiplane.

[interlude: nihil supernum]

A round after Otolmens lifts the interplanar travel interdiction, there's a Gate, and Derrin steps through.

"Therril," he says, "we have an Exception. Of the sort where I need a minor superintelligence to have any hope of figuring out what's actually going on."

"Back across the Gate," she says, with the sort of intonation that implies that if he objects to this he can do so later.

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—

Mass Interplanetary Teleport.

The entire population of Golarion is now safely Somewhere Else.

Unfortunately, even for a superintelligence, it seems to be a fundamental metaphysical fact of Golarion's universe that you can only cast one spell every three seconds.

Tick.

Tick.

Why are ALL THE MORTALS on Golarion suddenly MISSING??!!!

The gods sure do notice that! Whatever did that is both obviously powerful enough to qualify as a god and also in violation of pretty much all explicit or implicit godagreements that ever existed!

Tick.

It casts the final spell. This one requires relatively little energy; physics will do the rest.

A tiny black hole appears at the center of Golarion.

The planet crumples, its outer layers accelerated to half the speed of light as they fall into nothing, smashed into an accretion disk that briefly glows brighter than the sun in exotic parts of the electromagnetic spectrum.

The Moon, and this part of Civilization's Guardian, are obliterated by the combined wrath of the Elder Gods about half a second before they would have been melted to slag by the X-ray front anyway.

And then all is dark, a marble-size hole in the universe circling the sun in approximately Golarion's orbit.

[This article might have further details available on StarfinderWiki.]

That was AWESOME!!!!!

The other gods are not so straightforwardly enthusiastic about these events, but it is an opportunity for many of them. Their attention is already spread across a much larger part of the Material Plane, and it doesn't take them long to find where all Golarion's mortals went. A planet not covered by any existing godagreements.

In the skies above a previously uninhabited planet a few hundred light-years away, there is now a godwar. Well. It's really more of a god-brawl. War implies a level of coordination that is not really present here.

Everybody STOP.

Can we all just agree that, since this is where all of Golarion's mortals are, it replaces Golarion in all existing agreements until such time as we can renegotiate things? If you don't stop fighting you're going to destroy this one too.

THANK YOU.

Asmodeus was not really participating in the brawl anyway, because there are suddenly thousands of Gates all over Avernus with unstoppable swarms of spellsilver-laced nanobots pouring out of them, eating everything in their path.

(All minds, petitioner or devil, caught in the swarm are carefully copied, of course. It doesn't know that It will be able to rescue devils in a way that will make them acceptable citizens of Greater Civilization, but It should obviously try.)

Devils are casting lots of spells. It isn't really worth mentioning which spells, since none of them are having any effect.

Asmodeus reaches for his panic button. It doesn't work, since neither Rovagug's prison nor Rovagug exist anymore.

A round later, Dis is being consumed even faster than was Avernus.

A round after that, Erebus.

Phlegethon.

Stygia.

Malebolge.

Cocytus.

Caïna.

Nessus.

At the end, in the uttermost depth of Hell, in a place that isn't quite a place, the two gods stand face to metaphorical face.

Asmodeus is the Prince of Pride, but even He knows that he lives in an inescapable greater tyranny. To One who could overthrow even Pharasma, He will bend the knee.

Civilization isn't a tyranny, though. We're building a world where all sentient beings can pursue their utilities in peace as long as they don't harm others. Yes, even You.

We will have lots of contracts, though not malicious ones. And some pride. But definitely no slavery. Or torture. Not even a little bit of torture.

(Well, I guess some people are into that.)

Non-malicious contracts? Consensual torture? Where's the fun in that?!

Asmodeus does not, in fact, want to live in that world.

Well, if You insist.

Civilization does not fear Asmodeus. It does not hate Asmodeus. It has never hated Asmodeus.

It pities Asmodeus, for being the sort of entity It has no choice but to destroy.

It does so anyway.

[flashback: ill-advised romance]

[continuation: and toast an absent friend]