"Yes," Akon said. He looked away from the Conference Table. He didn't want to see the reactions.
"The Superhappies wouldn't be able to get to us. And they couldn't get to the Babyeaters either.
Neither could we. So the Babyeaters would go on eating their own children indefinitely. And the
children would go on dying over days in their parents' stomachs. Indefinitely. Is the human race worth that?"
Akon looked back at the Table, just once. The Xenopsychologist looked sick, tears were running down the Master's face, and the Lord Pilot looked like he were being slowly torn in half. The Lord
Programmer looked abstracted, the Lady Sensory was covering her face with her hands. (And the
Confessor's face still lay in shadow, beneath the silver hood.)
Akon closed his eyes. "The Superhappies will transform us into something not human," Akon said.
"No, let's be frank. Something less than human. But not all that much less than human. We'll still have art, and stories, and love. I've gone entire hours without being in pain, and on the whole, it wasn't that bad an experience -" The words were sticking in his throat, along with a terrible fear. "Well.
Anyway. If remaining whole is that important to us - we have the option. It's just a question of whether we're willing to pay the price. Sacrifice the Babyeater children -"
They're a lot like human children, really.
"- to save humanity."
Someone in the darkness was screaming, a thin choked wail that sounded like nothing Akon had ever
heard or wanted to hear. Akon thought it might be the Lord Pilot, or the Master of Fandom, or maybe the Ship's Engineer. He didn't open his eyes to find out.
There was a chime.
"In-c-c-coming c-call from the Super Happy," the Lady Sensory spit out the words like acid, "ship, my lord."
Akon opened his eyes, and felt, somehow, that he was still in darkness.
"Receive," Akon said.
The Lady 3rd Kiritsugu appeared before him. Her eyes widened once, as she took in his appearance, but she said nothing.
That's right, my lady, I don't look super happy.
"Humankind, we must have your answer," she said simply.
The Lord Administrator pinched the bridge of his nose, and rubbed his eyes. Absurd, that one human being should have to answer a question like that. He wanted to foist off the decision on a committee, a majority vote of the ship, a market - something that wouldn't demand that anyone accept full
responsibility. But a ship run that way didn't work well under ordinary circumstances, and there was no reason to think that things would change under extraordinary circumstances. He was an
Administrator; he had to accept all the advice, integrate it, and decide. Experiment had shown that no organizational structure of non-Administrators could match what he was trained to do, and motivated to do; anything that worked was simply absorbed into the Administrative weighting of advice.
Sole decision. Sole responsibility if he got it wrong. Absolute power and absolute accountability, and never forget the second half, my lord, or you'll be fired the moment you get home. Screw up
indefensibly, my lord, and all your hundred and twenty years of accumulated salary in escrow, producing that lovely steady income, will vanish before you draw another breath.
Oh - and this time the whole human species will pay for it, too.
"I can't speak for all humankind," said the Lord Administrator. "I can decide, but others may decide differently. Do you understand?"
The Lady 3rd made a light gesture, as if it were of no consequence. "Are you an exceptional case of a human decision-maker?"
Akon tilted his head. "Not... particularly..."
"Then your decision is strongly indicative of what other human decisionmakers will decide," she said.
"I find it hard to imagine that the options exactly balance in your decision mechanism, whatever your inability to admit your own preferences."
Akon slowly nodded. "Then..."
He drew a breath.
Surely, any species that reached the stars would understand the Prisoner's Dilemma. If you couldn't cooperate, you'd just destroy your own stars. A very easy thing to do, as it had turned out. By that standard, humanity might be something of an impostor next to the Babyeaters and the Superhappies.
Humanity had kept it a secret from itself. The other two races - just managed not to do the stupid thing. You wouldn't meet anyone out among the stars, otherwise.
The Superhappies had done their very best to press C. Cooperated as fairly as they could.
Humanity could only do the same.
"For myself, I am inclined to accept your offer."
He didn't look around to see how anyone had reacted to that.
"There may be other things," Akon added, "that humanity would like to ask of your kind, when our representatives meet. Your technology is advanced beyond ours."
The Lady 3rd smiled. "We will, of course, be quite positively inclined toward any such requests. As I believe our first message to you said - 'we love you and we want you to be super happy'. Your joy will be shared by us, and we will be pleasured together."
Akon couldn't bring himself to smile. "Is that all?"
"This Babyeater ship," said the Lady 3rd, "the one that did not fire on you, even though they saw you first. Are you therefore allied with them?"
"What?" Akon said without thinking. "No -"
" My lord! " shouted the Ship's Confessor. Too late.
"My lord," the Lady Sensory said, her voice breaking, "the Superhappy ship has fired on the Babyeater vessel and destroyed it."
Akon stared at the Lady 3rd in horror.
"I'm sorry," the Lady 3rd Kiritsugu said. "But our negotiations with them failed, as predicted. Our own ship owed them nothing and promised them nothing. This will make it considerably easier to
sweep through their starline network when we return. Their children would be the ones to suffer from any delay. You understand, my lord?"
"Yes," Akon said, his voice trembling. "I understand, my lady kiritsugu." He wanted to protest, to scream out. But the war was only beginning, and this - would admittedly save -
"Will you warn them?" the Lady 3rd asked.
"No," Akon said. It was the truth.
"Transforming the Babyeaters will take precedence over transforming your own species. We estimate the Babyeater operation may take several weeks of your time to conclude. We hope you do not mind
waiting. That is all," the Lady 3rd said.
And the holo faded.
"The Superhappy ship is moving out," the Lady Sensory said. She was crying, silently, as she steadily performed her duty of reporting. "They're heading back toward their starline origin."
"All right," Akon said. "Take us home. We need to report on the negotiations -"
There was an inarticulate scream, like that throat was trying to burst the walls of the Conference chamber, as the Lord Pilot burst out of his chair, burst all restraints he had placed on himself, and lunged forward.
But standing behind his target, unnoticed, the Ship's Confessor had produced from his sleeve the tiny stunner - the weapon which he alone on the ship was authorized to use, if he made a determination of outright mental breakdown. With a sudden motion, the Confessor's arm swept out...
1. ...and anesthetized the Lord Pilot [Ch. 6, Last Tears]
2. ...and anesthetized the Lord Akon [Ch. 7, Sacrificial Fire]
(6/8) Normal Ending: Last Tears
Today was the day.
The streets of ancient Earth were crowded to overbursting with people looking up at the sky, faces crowded up against windows. Waiting for their sorrows to end.
Akon was looking down at their faces, from the balcony of a room in a well-guarded hotel. There were many who wished to initiate violence against him, which was understandable. Fear showed on most of the faces in the crowd, rage in some; a very few were smiling, and Akon suspected they might have
simply give
n up on holding themselves together. Akon wondered what his own face looked like, right now.
The streets were less crowded than they might have been, only a few weeks earlier.
No one had told the Superhappies about that part. They'd sent an ambassadorial ship "in case you have any urgent requests we can help with", arriving hard on the heels of the Impossible. That ship had not been given any of the encryption keys to the human Net, nor allowed to land. It had made the
Superhappies extremely suspicious, and the ambassadorial ship had disgorged a horde of tiny daughters to observe the rest of the human starline network -
But if the Superhappies knew, they would have tried to stop it. Somehow.
That was a price that no one was willing to include into the bargain, no matter what. There had to be that - alternative.
A quarter of the Impossible Possible World's crew had committed suicide, when the pact and its price became known. Others, Akon thought, had waited only to be with their families. The percentage on Earth... would probably be larger. The government, what was left of it, had refused to publish
statistics. All you saw was the bodies being carried out of the apartments - in plain, unmarked boxes, in case the Superhappy ship was using optical surveillance.
Akon swallowed. The fear was already drying his own throat, the fear of changing, of becoming
something else that wasn't quite him. He understood the urge to end that fear, at any price. And yet at the same time, he didn't, couldn't understand the suicides. Was being dead a smaller change? To die was not to leave the world, not to escape somewhere else; it was the simultaneous change of every piece of yourself into nothing.
Many parents had made that choice for their children. The government had tried to stop it. The Superhappies weren't going to like it, when they found out. And it wasn't right, when the children themselves wouldn't be so afraid of a world without pain. It wasn't as if the parents and children were going somewhere together. The government had done its best, issued orders, threatened confiscations -
but there was only so much you could do to coerce someone who was going to die anyway.
So more often than not, they carried away the mother's body with her daughter's, the father with the son.
The survivors, Akon knew, would regret that far more vehemently, once they were closer to the Superhappy point of view.
Just as they would regret not eating the tiny bodies of the infants.
A hiss went up from the crowd, the intake of a thousand breaths. Akon looked up, and he saw in the sky the cloud of ships, dispersing from the direction of the Sun and the Huygens starline. Even at this distance they twinkled faintly. Akon guessed - and as one ship grew closer, he knew that he was right -
that the Superhappy ships were no longer things of pulsating ugliness, but gently shifting iridescent crystal, designs that both a human and a Babyeater would find beautiful. The Superhappies had been swift to follow through on their own part of the bargain. Their new aesthetic senses would already be an intersection of three worlds' tastes.
The ship drew closer, overhead. It was quieter in the air than even the most efficient human ships, twinkling brightly and silently; the way that someone might imagine a star in the night sky would look close up, if they had no idea of the truth.
The ship stopped, hovering above the roads, between the buildings.
Other bright ships, still searching for their destinations, slid by overhead like shooting stars.
Long, graceful iridescent tendrils extended from the ship, down toward the crowd. One of them came toward his own balcony, and Akon saw that it was marked with the curves of a door.
The crowd didn't break, didn't run, didn't panic. The screams failed to spread, as the strong hugged the weak and comforted them. That was something to be proud of, in the last moments of the old
humanity.
The tendril reaching for Akon halted just before him. The door marked at its end dilated open.
And wasn't it strange, now, the crowd was looking up at him.
Akon took a deep breath. He was afraid, but -
There wasn't much point in standing here, going on being afraid, experiencing futile disutility.
He stepped through the door, into a neat and well-lighted transparent capsule.
The door slid shut again. Without a lurch, without a sound, the capsule moved up toward the alien ship.
One last time, Akon thought of all his fear, of the sick feeling in his stomach and the burning that was becoming a pain in his throat. He pinched himself on the arm, hard, very hard, and felt the warning signal telling him to stop.
Goodbye, Akon thought; and the tears began falling down his cheek, as though that one silent word had, for the very last time, broken his heart.
END
(7/8) True Ending: Sacrificial Fire
Standing behind his target, unnoticed, the Ship's Confessor had produced from his sleeve the tiny
stunner - the weapon which he alone on the ship was authorized to use, if he made a determination of outright mental breakdown. With a sudden motion, his arm swept outward -
- and anesthetized the Lord Akon.
Akon crumpled almost instantly, as though most of his strings had already been cut, and only a few last strands had been holding his limbs in place.
Fear, shock, dismay, sheer outright surprise: that was the Command Conference staring aghast at the Confessor.
From the hood came words absolutely forbidden to originate from that shadow: the voice of command.
"Lord Pilot, take us through the starline back to the Huygens system. Get us moving now, you are on the critical path. Lady Sensory, I need you to enforce an absolute lockdown on all of this ship's communication systems except for a single channel under your direct control. Master of Fandom, get me proxies on the assets of every being on this ship. We are going to need capital."
For a moment, the Command Conference was frozen, voiceless and motionless, as everyone waited for
someone else do to something.
And then -
"Moving the Impossible now, my lord," said the Lord Pilot. His face was sane once again. "What's your plan?"
"He is not your lord!" cried the Master of Fandom. Then his voice dropped. "Excuse me. Confessor -
it did not appear to me that our Lord Administrator was insane. And you, of all people, cannot just seize power -"
"True," said the one, "Akon was sane. But he was also an honest man who would keep his word once he gave it, and that I could not allow. As for me - I have betrayed my calling three times over, and am no longer a Confessor." With that same response, the once-Confessor swept back the hood -
At any other time, the words and the move and the revealed face would have provoked shock to the
point of fainting. On this day, with the whole human species at stake, it seemed merely interesting.
Chaos had already run loose, madness was already unleashed into the world, and a little more seemed of little consequence.
"Ancestor," said the Master, "you are twice prohibited from exercising any power here."
The former Confessor smiled dryly. "Rules like that only exist within our own minds, you know.
Besides," he added, "I am not steering the future of humanity in any real sense, just stepping in front of a bullet. That is not even advice, let alone an order. And it is... appropriate... that I, and not any of you, be the one who orders this thing done -"
"Fuck that up the ass with a hedge trimmer," said the Lord Pilot. "Are we going to save the human species or not?"
There was a pause while the others figured out the correct answer.
Then the Master sighed, and inclined his head in assent to the once-Confessor. "I shall follow your orders... kiritsugu."
Even the Kiritsugu flinched at that, but there was work to be done, and not much time in which to do it.
In the Huygens system, the Impossible Possible World was observed to return from its much-heralded expedi
tion, appearing on the starline that had shown the unprecedented anomaly. Instantly, without a clock tick's delay, the Impossible broadcast a market order.
That was already a dozen ways illegal. If the Impossible had made a scientific discovery, it should have broadcast the experimental results openly before attempting to trade on them. Otherwise the
result was not profit but chaos, as traders throughout the market refused to deal with you; just
conditioning on the fact that you wanted to sell or buy from them, was reason enough for them not to.
The whole market seized up as hedgers tried to guess what the hidden experimental results could have been, and which of their counterparties had private information.
The Impossible ignored the rules. It broadcast the specification of a new prediction contract, signed with EMERGENCY OVERRIDE and IMMINENT HARM and CONFESSOR FLAG - signatures that
carried extreme penalties, up to total confiscation, for misuse; but any one of which ensured that the contract would appear on the prediction markets at almost the speed of the raw signal.
The Impossible placed an initial order on the contract backed by nearly the entire asset base of its crew.
The prediction's plaintext read:
In three hours and forty-one minutes, the starline between Huygens and Earth will become
impassable.
Within thirty minutes after, every human being remaining in this solar system will die.
All passage through this solar system will be permanently denied to humans thereafter.
(The following plaintext is not intended to describe the contract's terms, but justifies why a probability estimate on the underlying proposition is of great social utility:
ALIENS. ANYONE WITH A STARSHIP, FILL IT WITH CHILDREN AND GO! GET OUT OF
HUYGENS, NOW!)
In the Huygens system, there was almost enough time to draw a single breath.
And then the markets went mad, as every single trader tried to calculate the odds, and every married trader abandoned their positions and tried to get their children to a starport.
"Six," murmured the Master of Fandom, "seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven -"
A holo appeared within the Command Conference, a signal from the President of the Huygens Central
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