He nods. "And you have proof, I assume?"

She makes a thumbdrive appear between her fingers.

"Footage of the whole operation. I also have their bodies in storage — except for Crawler, who I chose to completely disintegrate," she explains.

The camera angle is such that the floating brain regions are not visible. With how quickly she plows through people, it's plausible that the bodies are being teleported away.

He nods.

"I'm sure this will be sufficient, but it will take us a little while to verify," he explains. For one thing, PRT policy requires confirmation from the central office to release funds for this, to prevent a Master from just walking away with the cash.

"Do you know how you'd like the bounty payout?" he asks. "We can do cash, but we can also do a bank account in your name, if that's more convenient."

She slides a detailed list across the counter.

"I would like one dollar in a bank account in my name, please," she says. "And the rest donated to various charities and individuals, in the amounts listed here."

He quickly scans the list.

"This is mostly medical charities and short-term disaster relief," he summarizes. "You don't have to answer this, but ... why? Most people would not be so generous."

"As I told your compatriots at the Brockton branch — I am actually, genuinely here to help. I come from a world that is much, much richer and safer than Earth Bet, and I want to bring that here."

She leans forward.

"And I get that my capabilities are frightening. I get that most of the surprises that have happened since the appearance of Parahumans have been bad. But I'm not going to let that stop me. I will do my best to help everyone — by their standards."

She sits back.

"Unfortunately, just giving direct aid to people hasn't been working, because if there's not a paper trail, people get suspicious. Hence: directing some traceable money, from a known source, to the places where it will help the most."

"It's definitely an aim that I can appreciate," the Director agrees.

He taps his pen on the desk.

"Please don't take this as a criticism — I would have done the same thing in your shoes — but how can you claim to help everyone, and still have killed the Slaughterhouse Nine?"

Zebrawood snorts.

"Watch the section of the video where I talk to Crawler," she replies, tapping the thumbdrive. "And see if that answers your question."

She looks at her wrist, where a watch isn't.

"Well, that's about all I wanted to cover with you."

A stack of papers thumps onto the table.

"There are the other forms you were going to ask me to fill out. Do you have somewhere I can leave the bodies for confirmation?"

He blinks.

"Yes, certainly. Let me show you to our receiving area; you can leave them there."

With actual samples of the portals to probe, their research can go a lot faster.

'A lot faster' is not 'fast'. Fundamental physics research is still difficult, actually, even when you have dozens of trained world-class researchers with the best possible laboratories working on the problem. Plus, either their experiments or becoming disconnected from a human manage to destabilize two of the portals, which doesn't help.

Eventually, though, they can recreate the simplest part of what the modified brain regions do: keeping an existing portal stable against dimensional interference.

"I think it's time to reconsider Zebrawood's proposal," she proposes to her other selves in their daily strategy meeting. "We might not be able to keep a portal stable against manipulations from its creator, but on the other hand, we might, which would give us insight into what exactly is going on here."

Zebrawood sits up.

"Ooh! I've thought about this in some more detail — I think we should place a crystal through the portal, stabilize the other side, and then immediately make it look as though the portal destabilized violently, since we know what that looks like," she proposes.

"I ... still think that any kind of interference through the portals is going to provoke some kind of response. We would be better off waiting until our ranges increase enough to find an empty space on the other side that's not filled with crystal," Yellow Birch advances.

Zebrawood shakes her head.

"Our best guess is that it's some kind of hyperoptimized computronium, right? Since we still can't recover enough detail to simulate it effectively. If you were building a complex out of computronium, why would you limit it to any reasonable size? We could be waiting months before having a path to empty space."

"Anyone who could build crystal like that is going to notice when a portal 'destabilizes' unexpectedly," Hickory argues. Peach nods in agreement.

"Well, they haven't noticed that we disconnected the people on the other side of their portals," Zebrawood points out. "So they can't be monitoring things too closely."

"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.