… 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 …”

3 minutes before they reach Terra

These speeds…. if the Affini could travel this fast, then Earth would have already been lost a year ago. Unless the primary bottleneck for the Affini is not travel time but rather some other operational objective, perhaps relating to processing the worlds they’ve taken in some way… 

2 minutes 55 seconds before they reach Terra

… He could order Luke to try and stop the ship. But if Amethyst is working with the Affini they don’t really need this ship specifically. It might only save another 5 minutes, if that. 

2 minutes 53 seconds…

He gives Amethyst his most charming smile and leans against the rusty nameplate displaying “Indomitable Victory” bolted against the wall. 

“Amethyst, if you’re hoping to negotiate with the Supreme Commander, you might make a better first impression by not showing up unexpectedly in a stolen ship.”

She laughs ruefully.

“You’re not wrong, captain. And if you’re willing to help me get to Terra as fast as possible, I’m content to ‘un-commandeer’ your ship. But it seemed … dishonest … to seize control over your FTL systems without actually saying anything,” she explained. “And — I now have a plan. For how to relocate the human population to a defensible position, and stop the Affini conflict, while still allowing Terrans to choose their own destiny. Every moment that plan is delayed, more people across the Accord suffer or fall under Affini dominion. So I really must insist on getting to Terra as quickly as possible, even if that requires manhandling your vessel.”

She doesn’t particularly think he’s going to like the fact that she’s been dealing with the Affini, which is going to come up any moment now, but she thinks he would like what they would do to his people without her intervention a lot less.

He reviews his hypotheses: 

Affini plant: it’s not the Affini typical MO, so this hypothesis is either not true or she’s part of some kind of “final wave”. But why does she seem to care so much about about talking with him? Why not just come in an Affini ship? The very fact that, even now, he could try and avert course, or try and convince her otherwise, means that she’s including him in the process, and really he’d expect an Affini to just gas them all the moment she had their ship. 

Corporate avatar: she’s the embodiment of PACNA come to interface with the other corporations and get them to finally properly defend their territory. This could be either good or bad depending on whether the corporations decide on downsizing their existing humans to deal with the threat. But Amethyst herself seems to care about her people… On balance this seems straightforwardly an improvement to the Accord’s situation. 

Some kind of rogue human with special technology for subverting corporations: What are the odds that she actually needs their ship for anything? She already has ships, courtesy of PACNA, so it would have to be a FRIGOMEK ship specifically. Perhaps she’s going to try her best, and then escape at extra-superluminal speeds if it fails? She has too many unrelated technologies at her command, is the thing. A lone human inventor might be able to hack a corporate AI but why would they also be able to develop new forms of FTL? And she didn’t steal this one from PACNA, the corporations do prevent people from accessing most of their more advanced tech but they do use it among themselves, everything would look different if the corporations could easily send material at these speeds. No, whatever’s going on here, it’s not this. 

Actually telling the truth: this seems more likely every second. She’s some kind of new alien lifeform and potentially on their side. 

He doesn’t yet trust her, per se. He’ll still be on guard for some kind of Affini reveal he can do something about. But the way they win is not by him impotently stalling an Affini invasion for an additional 3 minutes. Now is the time to live in the world where he can still be useful. And Amethyst seems earnest and frankly in a little over her head, to him. 

“To be honest, we’re losing this war. Now is the time to take risks, because if we’re going to survive, we need a miracle. Let’s see what we can do. How can we help? And I’ll take my ship back now; a captain has his pride after all.”

“Of course,” she agrees with a nod. “The main thing that I need to do is prevent the corporations from killing people or otherwise resisting their relocation to the more defensible area I’m building out in the Canopy system. To that end, I’m going to need high-bandwidth communication with them. Once we reach the Sol system, I’ll want to get as close as feasible to their wormhole terminus — within a light second or so, ideally. Then I’ll start the process of talking them around.”

Her fixity field still isn’t working out here, so she doesn’t make a set of diagrams to illustrate her explanation.

“In the meantime, I’m fabricating and distributing ships from Canopy across Terran space, but they’re going to take several minutes to get everywhere, and we have a head start. Even then, I’m not going to have the capacity to move everyone in one trip, because I’m just not generating mass fast enough. But they’ll begin pulling people back toward Canopy. Still, it’s important that we get in contact with the corporations before those ships arrive, so that they are prepared and cooperative by the time we can start picking people up.”

She thinks for a moment.

“And … I don’t want to give the impression that this is certain. I am fairly confident, but there is a possibility that I won’t be able to convince the corporations. And if I can’t pull people back to Canopy space, I won’t be able to deploy fixity fields defensively. I think I can still stop the war with the Affini —” because she was able to negotiate with them “— but things will be a lot more … complicated.”

1 minute till arrival…

“We’re nearing Earth now, hand over the FTL to NAV when we’re a minute out at normal speeds, and he’ll guide the rest of the way. We’ll come out in a standard approach, no need to worry everyone.”

“Then you’ll want to go to FRIGOMEK HQ, I suspect.”

“Thank you, captain, that sounds ideal.”

And behind them, her other selves begin the process of spreading out through Terran space. Because, as she realized — she doesn’t really need a spaceship to go faster than light. She just needs her newfound wormhole-being ancestry, and a suitable spacesuit. And she may not be able to fork herself on arrival, or use a fixity field to fabricate materials, but her notebook powers allow her to get a new copy of an outfit she has previously worn.

So new forks tumble across the local FTL corridors in their purple and silver armor, while behind them the rest of her frantically design useful shuttlecraft components, radio equipment, and other items that are sufficiently compact and fashionable to be worn.

He turns to face his crew. Despite all the bureaucracy, he’s proud of the collection of misfits he’s managed to protect in the tiny corner he’s carved out of the Accord. As long as there’s groups like these it can’t all be bad. 

“Friends, what we are about to do may be the pivotal moment in Accord history. I know you all will do your part. Amethyst, one of the things I always tell to new recruits is: ‘You can do it, only you can do it, and you can’t do it alone.’ The Accord is very good at breaking people down, but it’s not very good at building them back up again. That’s the job of people like you and me. I hope that, moving forward, you remember that all of Terra is with you, and that you don’t try and do it all alone.”

It’s an important sentiment. In one way — she is sort of single-handedly overpowering both their existing civilization and at least demonstrating she’s in the same weight class as the Affini. But in a more important way … she still thinks that the people are the most important thing. But she does prefer for the Terran Accord’s culture and history to remain intact, where that doesn’t cause more human suffering. It’s important to her to see Terrans involved in the process of determining what their society will become, and she shouldn’t forget that.

She nods solemnly.

“I think that one of the most … fundamental … rights is freedom. In my home civilization, that manifested as the freedom for people to travel to where they want to be. But I think the freedom for a group to shape its own future is also important. Which is to say: I know I’m going to need help from all of you — not just on this ship, but everyone across the Accord — because if I didn’t accept it? I wouldn’t be saving the Accord, only transforming it. I have no idea what the future will hold, except that we will discover it together.”

They reach near-Terra space, and she sends out another cloud of signalling vorticules to slow their travel.

“I’ve restored normal FTL. We’re there.”

And now comes the hard part.

She psyches herself up, tries to put herself in the right headspace. The notebook, and the Spirit she represented, promised Amethyst three things, about battle: that she would never be substantially injured (unless it was cool and dramatic), that she would have unerring knowledge of her opponent’s weaknesses, and that she would always be a match for her opponent, no matter how skilled.

But for any of that to apply, she must be fighting. So she takes a moment, and reminds herself of how it felt, to discover a new human civilization, and then to find that everyone in in was made to suffer, and not for any reason, but simply because there was no reason not to.

That is what she is fighting. She doesn’t want to hurt the corporations. She doesn’t want to hurt anyone.

But she wants to make them stop.

They enter core Terran space. Welcome to Earth, Amethyst.