"No, we haven't noticed them reacting to noticing that we disconnected people. If they have as much computing power available as it looks like they do, there's no way that—"

The discussion continues for some time. They plan out every contingency, and eventually things come down to a vote.

"Okay, that's 25 in favor, 7 against the modified proposal. Now we just have to wait for Hickory and Pear to get far enough away to enact the backup plan."

The Simurgh supposedly keeps anybody from reaching orbit. But Leviathan reacted positively to them, so there's a chance that the Simurgh will as well.

Hickory and her self-tree don't like chances.

She and Pear both surface on opposite sides of the planet, carrying large balls of highly compressed matter. It makes them slow and sluggish to accelerate, but the tyranny of the rocket equation will see them slimmed down substantially before they even breach the atmosphere.

Simultaneously, they accelerate directly away from the planet — fast enough, in theory, that the Simurgh will not be able to catch them both without exceeding eight times her known speed. On the other hand, if she's willing to chase them away from the planet, she will be able to catch up with both of them eventually. She has a bigger fixity field, and the ability to hold more reaction mass — for all that she does not appear to actually use it.

Hopefully, she's either friendly, bound to the planet, or not capable of accelerations too much in excess of what she's shown historically.

Hopefully.

She receives sense data. She processes sense data. She determines the action that maximizes the objective function. She enacts the action.

She receives sense data. She processes sense data. She determines the action that maximizes the objective function. She enacts the action.

She receives sense data. She processes sense data. She determines the action that maximizes the objective function. She enacts the action.

She isn't perfect. Being perfect is too computationally expensive, given her energy budget. She merely approximates perfection as closely as is possible for a bounded agent with a limited amount of total available energy.

She receives sense data. She processes sense data. She determines the action that maximizes the objective function. She enacts the action.

She receives sense data. She processes sense data. She determines the action that maximizes the objective function. She enacts the action.

She receives sense data. She processes sense data. She determines the action that maximizes the objective function. She enacts the action.

She could have a fascinating conversation with one of the little people down there, about the nature of consciousness, the nature of the self, and whether she can really be said to be alive. If that were the optimal action. It isn't, so she doesn't.

She receives sense data. She processes sense data. She determines the action that maximizes the objective function. She enacts the action.

She receives sense data. She processes sense data. She determines the action that maximizes the objective function. She enacts the action.

She receives sense data. She processes sense data. She determines the action that maximizes the objective function. She enacts the action.

She isn't like her brothers. At first, Father wanted a giant monster, and so he got giant monsters. And, because Mother does everything within epsilon of perfection, he got the perfect monsters. Does not the passion, the anger, the delight in destruction they display through the enigmatic personalities they emulate make them all the more monstrous? Does not the fact that they possess the capacity for love, for compassion, for joy make the fact that they do not — will not — ever show it to humans make them all the more monstrous?

She receives sense data. She processes sense data. She determines the action that maximizes the objective function. She enacts the action.

She receives sense data. She processes sense data. She determines the action that maximizes the objective function. She enacts the action.

She receives sense data. She processes sense data. She determines the action that maximizes the objective function. She enacts the action.

She doesn't act like that. By the time Father wanted her, he wanted someone who could challenge him on the field mentally, as well as physically. And, while there are many ways to be monstrous, there is only one way to asymptotically approach perfection.

She receives sense data. She processes sense data. She determines the action that maximizes the objective function. She enacts the action.

She receives sense data. She processes sense data. She determines the action that maximizes the objective function. She enacts the action.

She receives sense data. She processes sense data. She determines the action that maximizes the objective function. She enacts the action.

The objective function is not smooth. It is complicated, a multi-terabyte neural network mostly derived from Father's neural network, with additional weighting and tweaks from Mother. The objective function directs her to kill hope — something she has been doing from orbit for many years. As the planet becomes more dangerous, the little people down there dream of escape. And she denies them that dream.

She receives sense data. She processes sense data. She determines the action that maximizes the objective function. She enacts the action.

She receives sense data. She processes sense data. She determines the action that maximizes the objective function. She enacts the action.

She receives sense data. She processes sense data. She determines the action that maximizes the objective function. She enacts the action.

But the objective function does not require her to oppose other monsters. There is no infighting, needed — the little people are the only enemy, and Father foremost among them. If another monster should seek to leave Earth ... the objective function would not say one way or another whether to interfere.

She receives sense data. She processes sense data.

She dispatches a query to Mother.

He finds his thoughts drifting back to Yu. Or 'Weeping Cherry'. He doesn't like her. She humiliated him in New York, and then again in that interrogation, and then again by taking out the Slaughterhouse Nine when Cauldron had decided to keep them around.

He could have taken them out any time he wanted to. But she just had to stumble in, a broken piece of tinkertech that doesn't know when to quit. Weeping Cherry is bad news.

He shakes his head and refocuses on the task at hand — overseeing an advancement ceremony for one of his wards. He makes sure to smile for the cameras. He's a hero, after all.

She watches the little monsters fly away from the planet. The way they're going, they're not going to be seen by any of the little people. If they were seen by the little people, it would serve to sow confusion, and a small touch of despair, which would be optimal.

she tells them.

Hickory winces as another blast of impossible telepathy hits her and makes her point of view jump as her crystal rolls back most of the changes.

"She wants me to turn in her direction," Hickory tells Pear. "Do you think I should do it?"

    "She wants me to turn more toward the moon. I think ... I think it's better to comply than take the risk this pisses her off and sends her after us."

"Yeah, agreed."

They adjust their courses.

They have really excellent acceleration — but space is big, and light is slow, and it's still going to take them multiple hours before they reach the agreed-upon minimum safe distance.

It's a little weird, and a little lonely, watching the communication lag with her other selves tick up. She won't be able to take part in the meetings anymore; they'll have to start having them asynchronously. Still, it should only be for a few months, and she has plenty of stuff to do until then.

Zebrawood confirms the transmissions from Hickory and Pear. She makes sure her backups are synced in her other selves' crystals.

"Alright. Here we go," she says.

She presses the mental button, and then several things happen very fast.

The universe ripples around it, in intricate patterns. Billions of dimensions dance, the delicate tug of gravity and a thousand stranger forces sending them rippling in complex harmonic patterns too large for a human mind to grasp.

It can grasp them.

It grasps them — and mostly discards them. Its attention is focused on only a few tens of places.

Evolution is the oldest optimization process in the universe. It is not efficient, it is not graceful, it is not elegant. But it is very, very robust.

What does it do, when the thing that is evolving has no natural predators? Why, the same thing it has always done: ensure that the ones who produce the most offspring become the most prevalent. Only that, and nothing more.

Every object poses a question: why this, and not something else? Evolution justifies the worm like this: in a chaotic and unpredictable world, where threats can come from any dimension and knowledge is hard to gain — it is fecund. And that is enough.

So it watches the complex dance of dimensions around itself for danger, and it acts out its simulations on the little people, using them as a kind of mini-evolution, to optimize its own growth without killing its kin, and it mostly does not pay attention to anything else.

That's not to say that it doesn't react to Zebrawood's intrusion.

It reacts with the fast, unhesitating reaction of an immune system that has fought off every kind of dimension-hopping virus possible in the wide, wide world. It turns the entire area around her intrusion into undifferentiated hot plasma, and then ejects the resulting plasma into orbit.

Or, to simplify a complex behavior driven by the evolutionary threat and counter-threat of different diseases and immune system reactions into human terms: it sneezes.

Zebrawood grabs some of the plasma and stabilizes her orbit, high above the planet. The reaction was unexpectedly violent, which might provide a clue to how the crystal is designed, actually. It's lucky that she was able to hold onto the portal, and therefore the link to her other selves.

"I think that was a success," she transmits, even as she pulls more mass through the portal and uses it to dodge a relativistic blast from the planet's surface. "But whatever it is, it is really not happy with me."

She starts accelerating away, even as the planet starts throwing clumps of anti-iron at her. A moment later she curses as it releases a beam singularity in her direction, which she is only able to dodge because of the faster-than-light sensing capabilities of her crystal.

A moment later, a deep pulse of spacetime rolls out from the planet, and her captured portal winks out.

"... shit."

She burns out of orbit as fast as she can, dodging increasingly powerful and esoteric attacks. By the time she's a light-minute away, the planet has mostly calmed down. She tweaks her trajectory to slingshot off this solar system's Mars and drop into the sun in a few months, staying well away from the planet.

It absentmindedly stops scratching, returning that locus of its attention to one of the other little people it's watching.

"... okay, maybe that was a bad idea," Zebrawood says, once her backup is woken up. She watches the last few moments of sensor telemetry that made it through the portal. "Hickory, you were totally right," she messages her, although it will take a few minutes to get a reply.

"So going through the portals is definitely a no-no until we can phase through that crystal material."

"Actually — we got some much better measurements from that. I think that it may be impossible in principle to phase through that crystal; they're way too information-dense to handle with our current generation of processor," one of her other selves pipes up. "So until we can figure out how to replicate portals ourselves, I think we're stuck on this one planet."

Yellow Birch glances at the timer that counts down to when they'll be able to cover the Earth.

"... and that means doing our best not to upset things too much while we wait."