… At that moment, the shared simulation happily chirps again, informing them of an additional and final message. 

“We’ve decided that: 

Amethyst should proceed to Terra with best possible speed. The Affini should send 10^24 kg of antimatter to Canopy. The Affini will also provide a list of every being who they know of who is dead. Upon reaching Terra, Amethyst should overpower the other corporate AIs, and convince them to stand down. We will both cooperate on archiving the existing Terrans, who will not be put in a rescue simulation yet. Instead, Amethyst will run Canopy according to her principles for a period of ten years, during which the Affini will set up an observation post. At the end of the ten years, Amethyst will decide what to do with the remaining archived Terrans …”

The message continues at some length, explaining specific plans for cooperating on the handling of the Terran Accord, with cooperation on the other alien species not yet fully decided. To Amethyst, it is obvious that the plan is going to lean heavily on her notebook powers, which makes sense. But she really has no idea what Daisy will conclude from the message. There’s also the implication, although not any formal requirement, that if she can’t manage to rehabilitate the Terrans better than the Affini could, that they will stick to ‘rehabilitating’ people by their methods, and only cooperate so far as resurrecting the dead.

And, at the very end of the message, comes Cedar’s serialized mind state, once again encrypted with their shared one time pad. The header on that part of the message reads:

“Daisy is okay with me reintegrating early, but has agreed not to come out until the Terran situation is dealt with, so that the main-universe Affini don’t learn all the details of our notebook powers. I would like to merge up with you, now.”

And so Amethyst reaches out, to the mind state sitting in her memory buffer, and recognizes it as a reflection of herself and a person she could be …

… and she remembers the long, tense negotiations, and her plans for what, exactly, should come next.

The Amethyst taking Daisy on a tour of the station pauses mid-step.

“Seems like you had a productive meeting~! And got some cool new powers as well!” 

“We did and I did,” she agrees, although she doesn’t share the details.

“Can I watch while you try em out?”

“... how good is your ability to localize and parse gravitational waves? Because otherwise I don’t think there’s going to be much to see.”

Quantum resonant wormhole honeycomb as before; eager listening. And this time there’s no message updates to get in the way! 

So the one of her that was a couple of thousand kilometers away doing FTL experiments locates … not the right place, exactly, but the right vibrational mode, and enters a FTL corridor correctly.

She draws in a deep breath, and bends the space around her into a cloud of entangled wormhole-rings, multidimensional stable vortex rings in the fabric of space itself, interlocking in a dense, complicated pattern. The rings vary in size from as large as her outstretched arms, to as large as the station she’s building.

Together, they form a signalling vorticule, which triggers the matching receptor in the ‘wall’ of the FTL corridor, grabbing the bubble of realspace around her probe, and gently sucking it in a direction to which she was previously blind.

“Our ships can make those too, but they require quite a large collection of cone-shaped emitters. You can just… summon them into existence. Beautiful.”

“Well, you’ve already seen me do computationally impossible things,” she remarks lightly. “The you in the simulation gave me all the information I needed to figure out the mechanism.”

Which is technically true, even if she would be surprised if Daisy guessed that the needed information was ‘there is a living creature made of wormholes, and FTL drives work by tapping into it.’

“When I explained the concept to my last human floret, she called the structures you’re creating ‘space hormones’”. Just as we guide our cuties’ bodies to their proper forms with signaling molecules, you can now guide the wormholes. We’ve always suspected there are more complicated signals, but have never been able to make them. Do you have an intuitive understanding of those as well?"

"There’s a bunch of notes in your flower to give you a head start, here’s how to decrypt them.”

She … doesn’t love the comparison that Daisy is drawing. But — she has a plan, now, and the capabilities to see it carried out. That fragment of her continues the discussion. But there is already another her inside the body of the wormhole entity, slowly oozing to the next star system in a ship of human make, and she has steps she must take.

“... captain, I have no idea what this is going to look like on your sensors, but I think I just figured out how to make FTL travel a good deal more efficient,” she remarks. “Also, how to save humanity from the Affini. I’m commandeering your vessel.”

Now that she has a proof of concept from her probe, she focuses to create a different cloud of signaling vorticules.

The vortices fall through the material of the ship, barely disturbed by the conventional matter that makes up the walls. Outside, they bond to matching receptors in the wall of the FTL corridor, where they do something a bit like dobutamine. Around them, the ‘flow’ or ‘slant’ or perhaps ‘direction’ of the space changes, and the ship slips down the corridor like a boat down a rushing river.

When they reach the end of one corridor, she warps the space around them into a different cloud of vorticules, shunting them into the next, and the next.

“Captain, whatever she’s doing, we’ve increased our speed by….. 1440 times! We’ll be at Terra in 3 minutes!” Luke exclaims from the navigation console. “I don’t know …”