"I have two plans in my head, one labeled A, one labeled B."

A pause to get her thoughts in order, forking the road as cleanly as possible.

"Chance that more than ninety-five percent of the current population of this Earth dies within thirty years if I execute Plan A."

A long pause.

"Three point eight two."

She sounds unsurprised. Vaguely appeased, even.

"Chance that more than ninety-five percent of the current population of this Earth dies within thirty years if I execute the Plan B."

"Eighty-two point five two."

Alcott is working the end-of-the-world situation from her own angle. It's the major reason they haven't arranged to draw her in yet.

"I'm inferring that you noticed a swing in the odds before I called you. I want to pay you one hundred thousand dollars to tell me when."

"Deal. Sunday afternoon, between two o'clock and six o'clock Eastern Time."

She sends the money.

"That's all. Thank you."

Dinah hangs up.

Rebecca calls in some favors and clears her schedule for tomorrow. She sends word ahead to the Department. She heads in to work. The rest of the day goes past in a blur of slideshows and restructuring meetings. When the clock strikes midnight, she ushers the last idiot out her office, locks the door, and takes an hour to lie back in her chair and close her eyes.

01:18 AM, she takes the elevator down to the lower containment level. The night guard checks her documents and the automated security gate buzzes her in. She declines the offer of an escort. Ten minutes later, she's walking through the doors of the storage vault.

The notebook is sitting open on a desk, a printout of some Shakespeare sonnets stacked loosely next to it. The only words visible on the open pages are a cheerful Thank you!, way down at the bottom on the right.

The doors close behind her. Rebecca takes a seat.

She brought her own pen. It's the same one she used on the notebook the day it appeared. She didn't do it particularly on purpose—she always gets the same model of black 0.9-mm as Director Costa-Brown, and she runs one dry before she starts the next—but she didn't do it not on purpose either.

She rests a finger on the rim of the book first, in case the notebook is the kind of thing which can be startled by an unexpected visitor in the middle of the night. Then she turns over to a fresh page and writes.

Hello. I'm not sure if they told you in advance. I'm the person who first wrote in you the day you appeared.

Oh! It's really good to hear from you again! Are you okay? They said you were okay but I wasn't sure.

I'm okay.

A pause, weighing how much to give away.

More okay than I have been in a long time, possibly. I'm told you're very good news.

I'm really glad about that. I like being good news!

Do you want me to explain what I'm here for? I've been trying not to say too much about it to other people because the reasons why you were chosen are a thing I know some people feel private about.

It would be quite appreciated—and I do appreciate your commitment to discretion, too, though I don't know yet if it was needed here. It's a good policy regardless.

In light of the numbers, it's very plausible that what it has to say warrants the tight lips.

I was sent by the Spirit of Femininity Unleashed to offer you its power.

The Spirit is very big and very far away, and its favourite thing is when people who want to be beautiful and powerful and special in a feminine way get to do that and be happy and live their best lives as their best selves. So when it sees someone who calls to it in the right way, it sends someone like me to talk to them and offer them a little bit of its power, enough to help them be beautiful and powerful and special the way they want. My job is to show you the list of powers the Spirit can offer, and help you pick the powers that are right for you, by explaining them and answering your questions and even altering the powers or making new ones if there's something you need that isn't on the list. The list is still a good starting point, though.

She feels fifteen years old again.

Not the same sort of thing as a person, the notebook said in the early transcripts.

Perhaps this is an envoy from another Earth. The Spirit may be an artificial intelligence, or something sideways of an Endbringer gone right, or a Case 91 run all the way past singularity, or even just a game from a stupendously powerful natural parahuman gone a little wrong in the head. Those are all possible. There's a world where this is just a wildcard on their last draw that makes the winning hand.

But they knew, from what Contessa dreamt at the start of everything, from the bits and pieces Doctor Mother painstakingly scraped together from the aftershocks of their patients' visions: Scion isn't the only one out there. What they've seen is but a mote, in the grand scheme of the universe. There are existences roaming the black expanse more great and more terrible than this crippled godling on their doorstep. Cauldron doesn't understand what drives these beings. They feed and spread and war, and that is one thing—but why denigrate themselves to this game of toy soldiers? What about this costumed farce compels them so, that these entities will pass out pieces of themselves like candy to empower those whom they will only destroy?

They only have hypotheses. With no real evidence, they have remained hypotheses for twenty-five years.

Eidolon likes the idea that it's all meaningless, nothing but boredom and sadism. It speaks to him, she thinks: the notion that there's so little worth doing at the top that all the gods have left to do is play and meddle with those profoundly lesser. Number Man raised a theory of more nuance: simple evolutionary psychology, he named it, of which so-called sadism is only one limited manifestation. The beings breed; ergo, they are subject to evolutionary forces. War is the basest instinct of resource competitors, and where true war is too costly to bear, creatures turn to playacting it in microcosm.

Rebecca never gave that one much credence.

Hero had a more elegant idea: meaningless, yes, but only in the sense that any set of values one samples is meaningless. He theorized that beings naturally polarize themselves, in the same way of the hedonic treadmill Brickman and Campbell spoke of. He claimed that the thinking mind is naturally unstable, that any local basin of apparent convergence is only a momentary stop on an endless runaway slope; he proposed that anything that can live for eons upon eons comes out the other end—strange.

"Scion and his Other play their war games," he said, "simply because they want to. Nothing more and nothing less." And who knows what another of their cousins might seek?

I would like to learn more about what the Spirit is, and what it means by "beautiful and powerful and special in a feminine way". I don't think it's inaccurate to describe me as wanting those things, but a lot of people do, and it's not clear what makes me more qualified in that sense than the other people in this world. It sounds like you're saying "live their best lives as their best selves" in a specific meaning, since I noticed you used that exact phrase talking to the others before, and maybe that's relevant? What does that cash out to, in material examples?

Each person has different things they want from their life and a different idea of what kind of life is a good one. Someone who loves spending time around people and having lots of friends will have a different best life from someone who loves spending time around books and wants just a few friends. Someone who dreams of wild magical adventures will have a different best self from someone who dreams of being the person all their friends turn to for help with emotional problems.

When the things that someone dreams of, the things they would want to do and be if they could do or be anything, are close enough to the way the Spirit is shaped—when they're the sort of person who hears about being beautiful and powerful and special in a feminine way, and thinks that all the parts of that are good, that power is good and beauty is good and being special is good and being feminine is good, and they would rather have all those things than only some of them—then the Spirit can see them, and sends someone like me to talk to them.

It's possible that other people in your world have already been chosen by the Spirit. If you haven't noticed anyone being especially powerful and beautiful and feminine in a way that's different from everyone else who is some of those things, it might be that all the other people touched by the Spirit's power in your world decided to leave, and either haven't come back yet or didn't want to come back at all. Or maybe you're the first person in your world the Spirit saw. The question of why it chooses one person and not another, or how it sees one world and not another, is complicated and hard to explain, but one way you could look at it might be that the Spirit is so far from any specific time or place that it's seeing bits and pieces of worlds effectively at random, and even if there are other people in the same world who could be qualified, it won't decide not to send me to talk to one of them just because there might be others nearby. That's not exactly right, though, it's just a way of looking at it that explains some of why things are the way they are.