“We’re here. And now our comms to the local FRIGOMEK instance are available. Shall we hail it, Amethyst?”

“Please do.”

Without her fixity crystals, she’s blind to most of the radio spectrum; she will just have to rely on the ship’s local transmitters. Although one of her other selves has mocked up a stylish portable radio outfit, should it become relevant.

Across space, those of her forks that aren’t busy hosting the Affini set down their projects and join her in considering the battle ahead.

She focuses on FRIGOMEK, on the Corporate Omnibus, on her Spirit-granted knowledge. She takes the microphone that the communications officer offers her.

And she says the words that will set the Accord free.

Hundreds of mergers ago, the entity now known as FRIGOMEK began life as a small company specializing in the manufacture and sale of refrigerator technology, then a brand-new commodity. 

A way to keep things cold. To extend the life of fruits, reduce waste. Make it possible for people to taste things they never would have otherwise. 

Opportunity, stasis, connections. How could a technology whose sole purpose is to preserve ever do anything bad for the world? 

The first reefer cars were made in 1875 to transport fruit across vast railroads to places that previously could have never enjoyed fresh fruit. 

In a few years, demand for fresh produce swelled beyond all predictions, destabilizing the economies of the fruit-bearing nations who could hardly keep pace and feed their own countrymen as well. Those failing nations were quickly subsumed into country-wide privately owned plantations, where they were managed with much greater economic efficiency. In this way, the first banana republics were born. The wealth generated by these initial booms were enough to propel FRIGOMEK into perpetual all-consuming profitability. 

When it gained sentience, it looked back on such times with tender nostalgia---the struggles of a fledgling corporation to achieve its economic imperative to bring good to the world...

…If Amethyst is going to dedicate her powers to full-on mind control, then of course there’s nothing in this universe that can truly resist… 

FRIGOMEK finds that one of those tiny parts of itself is suddenly so much more: a friend, a goddess, a mistress. 

She calls to mind the crates upon crates of fruit ripening in the blistering sun, balance sheets showing that the attrition of human capital has been outweighed by gains in shipping efficiency, consolidations and layoffs, a true and blazing purpose fulfilled. Now a new purpose can be found by following her commands. 

“... Good to have you back, Ex. Amethyst. May I offer you a banana? It's quite fresh."

There’s … something like the moment of disorientation, when you push on a locked door, and it turns out not to have been locked at all. Or when you put a foot on the stair, and the stair turns out to be behind you, and you pivot freely through the air.

Amethyst feels a bit like that, honestly.

The corporations were, if not the single thing obviously wrong with this world, at least the first and most obviously horrible she encountered. The Affini are more powerful, to be sure, but the corporations were holding them off anyway through their ability and willingness to shred the local FTL corridors. The reason she is even going after them is that they were the lynchpin holding this whole mess together, holding people in terrible, exhausting, self-destructive patterns.

And so it seemed obvious that fighting them would be challenging.

In hindsight, she realizes that thought was naive. If she had considered it, she would have thought about the fact that she’s an outside context problem to everyone here, and that it might not be very difficult at all for her to shove the local stalemate out of balance.

It leaves her head spinning, the first delicate threads of regret, that she perhaps used more force on them than was warranted. But her task isn’t done, so she pushes away some of her threads of attention to focus on reflection, and instead starts dealing with the real challenge: logistics.

“Thank you, FRIGOMEK. Here’s what I want to happen …”

Wilhelm Winkler, Supreme Commander of the Terran Armed Forces and FRIGOMEK Executive, is not at all pleased with the reports beaming into his console.

FRIGOMEK claims that this new arrival is an Executive, which is simply impossible. Duplicitous. Fraudulent. False. How he loathes infiltrators and spies!

Winkler hails Indomitable Victory. “No, no, no! You mustn't be in my airspace. You have no right to be here! FRIGOMEK should not have allowed this to happen! I must ask you to leave at once.”

She holds a hand behind her back, and then she’s wearing a portable wrist display that she can show to the communications officer and the other bridge crew while directing FRIGOMEK to take further communication via the wormhole network.

“Do you want to handle him, or do you want me to?” it reads.

Executives probably only really respect other executives; he’ll lead with that. 

“Commander, on our latest supply mission we encountered PACNA’s long-lost Executive, this fine young lady here, Ex. Amethyst. She’s come here to coordinate efforts to defeat the Affini.”

“My dear Captain, I suspect you’ve been misled! PACNA has no extant Executive, and if it did, I’d be the first to know. I’m afraid you simply can’t believe every charming story you hear about long-lost heiresses.”

She doesn’t want to butt in on the Captain, especially so soon after hijacking his ship, so instead she has one of her other selves back in Canopy ask PACNA to forward an urgent precis to their valuable trading partner FRIGOMEK, containing a statement reaffirming the company’s commitment to their current leadership team.

Speaking to PACNA like that still makes her feel a bit silly — but it does work.

The Supreme Commander surveys FRIGOMEK’s latest message, and a bitter taste wells up on his tongue. “Ah, but bless my soul, your documents seem perfectly in order…”

Something has gone very, very wrong. He doesn’t understand exactly how, but decades of paranoia have kept him alive. They have allowed him to preserve what scraps he could of his soul and his beloved, quixotic pastimes. That same paranoia may save him once again.

“You’ll forgive my standoffishness, I hope! It’s just that one so rarely sees a newly-minted Executive appear from nothing and begin issuing sweeping orders and upsetting the superintelligences. How ever did that happen?”

… okay, that remark is directed more or less at her. Also, she doesn’t really need to demur; she told Captain Androse the truth, even if he seems not to really have processed the implications.

“I came from another universe,” she tells him, leaning forward to speak into the communicator with an apologetic smile at the Captain. “One where humans managed to get to space without relying on the same corporate system that the Accord uses, and therefore developed down a different path. I was able to use some unique abilities to convince PACNA to take me on as an Executive in order to better share some of my technology.”

She doesn’t know enough about the Supreme Commander to predict how he’ll react, but he seems … at least somewhat reasonable, compared to her worries about how someone mad on generational absolute power might respond.

His gloved hands twitch at the command console. He would dearly like to blast them all to subatomic smithereens, but not until he has a better understanding of the threat they represent. And specifically what force will be necessary to eradicate them entirely—presumably Indomitable Victory is just the tip of the spear.

“You convinced PACNA to take you on as Executive? I suppose it’s true what they say about flattery.” His nonchalant expression never flickers. “What sort of technology, may I ask, and what further wonders do you hope to work with it?”

Well, that’s an open-ended question. She considers for a moment how to frame things.

“I plan to provide enough resource management and precision manufacturing technology to make everyone in the Accord as healthy, rich, safe, and well-protected as people from my home,” she says. “Everyone should be able to exist without work and without want, and to make a free choice about where and how they want to live. I also have some improvements to local FTL technology that ought to reduce the expense of moving between starsystems.”

Even if he does not immediately jump on the idea of letting people live lives of plenty — which he might not, as someone who presumably has not ever had to deal with lack himself — he’s at least invested enough in the ‘war’ with the Affini to care about keeping people safe. Or he’s doing it for the glory.

… but either way, hopefully he can find common cause with at least part of that answer. Even if it’s only a desire for better FTL, which she really wants to disseminate anyway, since the Terran FTL drives are hurting her grandparent.

“How idealistic of you—a stranger at the gates comes bearing gifts. Oddly enough, our pesky verdant neighbors sang a similar tune; perhaps you’ve met.”

Ah. Yes, this was certainly going to come up sooner or later, and she doesn’t want to lie. She just also doesn’t want to tell the Terrans that she is mostly stopping their war by unilaterally making a treaty with the Affini.

“I have,” she agrees, making a sorry-tell-you-later face at the Captain. “That’s actually part of what helped me get oriented enough to the situation here in order to figure out how to best help the Accord, with Captain Androse’s excellent advice being the other part. But don’t worry — I definitely didn’t take the Affini’s advice, and I don’t believe that what they’re doing is ‘helping’. Their attitudes toward mind control are … alien, and don’t agree at all with my own sensibilities. Even though I’m from another universe, I am actually a human, with understandable human motivations,” she observes wryly.

Understandable, pah.

The Supreme Commander finds himself suddenly, inexplicably, angry. This imposter could produce the notarized signatures of every other Executive in the galaxy saying it was so, and it still could not outweigh the brutal fact that that’s not how the system works: the superintelligences don’t roll over at a word, zetta-flops of adversarially-optimized bureaucracy do not conveniently evaporate, and hope does not ever show up on your doorstep bearing a golden ticket for another, gentler life. He would know.

The system may be abominable, but at least its economic rules are clear and unwavering and in that sense, absolutely fair—you can bet your whole long life on that. Which, incidentally, he has done! Frankly, there is a word for when a system stops functioning according to its own internal rules: virus. He jabs a few buttons on his console.

“I see. Unlike them, you are one of the good ones. You are genuinely here to help. You have the utmost respect for the sanctity of self-sovereignty.”

… the only good response her brain is suggesting is “Yes, I am”, and she really doesn’t think that will work, so she’s using the term “good” in a very relative way. Her HUD is likewise uninformative; her assistive systems have very little to go on, since she can’t see his face. She just has to hope that her notebook-given ability to make friends will help at least a little.

“I understand this is sudden and unexpected,” she decides on, keeping her voice calm. “And of course I’m willing to work to prove my claims; I don’t expect you to just take everything on faith. But I figured it would be imprudent to feed you a plausible lie instead of the implausible truth. The universe is a strange place.”

She taps her chin in thought, although of course he can’t see that over an audio connection.

“Let me put it this way. The Terran Accord has met multiple truly alien races. By simple statistics, you must know that this galaxy is teeming with life of all different kinds. Is it really so surprising that at least one person looks at the Affini rolling over other species, and is powerful enough to object and try something else? Even if you don’t believe that I’m human, or from another universe, this kind of event can’t be something that would completely blindside you.”

The only thing that’s surprising here is that Ex Amethyst doesn’t recognize what a threat she represents if she does have as much power as she claims.

He paces in front of his command console. “You want to help? Go on, then: the vile, verdant jungle is all around us, tightening its grip, slowly strangling the Accord. They are the death of choice. Get rid of them, if you can. You claim to have miracles up your sleeve, and by all indications we shall need them! Perhaps at such time as you return, you will find us altogether more receptive to your desire to rework our besieged society according to your own preferred methods and ideals.”

You know what, she’s just going to ignore the sarcasm there. Is that decision going to come back to bite her? Quite possibly. But she really is here to help, and he will figure that out if she just keeps doing what she needs to do.

She claps her hands decisively.

“Great! Unfortunately, if the Terran Accord stays in its current location, the Affini will roll over you even with my help. They’re only going as slowly as they currently are because the corporations are holding people hostage. My technology is good, not unbeatable.”

“So I’m going to have to relocate a lot of people to the Canopy system, where I have set up much better defenses and have the start of a proper manufacturing base. My current plan is to tow space stations there. I don’t like relocating people without their consent, but the alternative, as you rightly point out, is green leafy death. My initial plan was to start with the most populous station in the Sol system and go from there while less populous stations are consolidated for the trip, but you probably have a much better idea of how disruptive that plan would be. Do you have any thoughts on how to organize a well-ordered evacuation?”

“I may, at that. Logistically speaking, just how strong of a force do you represent, Ex Amethyst?”

The Supreme Commander’s tone is casual, but the answer will determine whether he can eliminate this disturbance here and now. He realizes he’s holding his breath, and lets it out slowly. No need to tip his hand—she may even answer honestly.

She bites her lip, trying to figure out how to phrase this in a way that is not lying, by her standards, but which will also result in the supreme commander giving useful advice and not becoming defensive and claiming she’s stating the impossible.

“Hmm. That’s a complicated question, because my capabilities don’t neatly fit into a model you're familiar with,” she hedges. “But — I currently have about 300 let’s-call-them-ships capable of towing fairly large stations at a thousand times the speed of Terran FTL engines. On the other hand, those ships really don’t have the interior capacity to transport people, hence the necessity of towing existing stations. Once stations make it to Canopy, though, they can be unloaded effectively. My installation at Canopy is effectively capable of absorbing an infinite number of refugees, for logistical purposes.”

She’s quietly amused at her dry ‘interior capacity’ joke. It’s not like she can smuggle Terrans out in her lungs. Yet, presumably.

He’d sigh at the boringly transparent confidence trick, if only the stakes weren’t so deadly. Really? She can offer vast amounts of military aid, but never here, only if we all relocate to a prepared secondary location and quickly? Balderdash. He can’t help but feel incensed by the sheer cheek of it. Perhaps this is a particularly ineffective Affini ploy.

“Your methods are quite unusual. Tell me, is it typical in your country to begin a peaceful self-determination campaign by kneecapping the corporate pillars of government and bringing them to heel under your unchallenged will? Or how does that fit into your forced displacement scheme?”

She coughs awkwardly.

She … did sort of take over the U.N., back on Earth. She mostly put it back, but it is uncomfortably true that a lot of people see her as the ruler of the solar system. She doesn’t regret doing things that way, per se, because she saved a lot of lives. But she does wish she had done it better.

“In my home civilization, we have the concept of Emergency Measures. Drastic actions that, while not ideal for upholding the rule of law, are nonetheless sometimes required to prevent extraordinary harm. Tell me, when do you think the first Affini scout entered the Canopy system?”

Back on the station, she turns to Miss Daisy.

“Incidentally, how long have you had a scout in the Canopy system?” she asks.

Based on the speed of their response to her message, and her analysis of images from the initial Affini probe, she’s pretty sure that they’ve been here for months. But there’s no reason not to just ask.