Mii-Es stared at the projection, her feathers trembling under a torrent of emotion. Her fingers reached out toward it of their own accord, though there was nothing to grasp. What she was seeing was millions of miles away, far away from her and the System both.

  A score of Mesh-ia infants – her own race, the name they had before the System came – slept in pods of Cato’s technology, chests rising and falling very slowly. The different colors and beak shapes stirred memories from tens of thousands of years ago, things she’d thought long forgotten. People she had known, pulled forward through the mists of time.

  “They’re currently in effective stasis,” Cato said, while Yaniss had her own beak plastered against the glass of the tank that was visible in the display Cato was using. He was using some derivation of what he called warframes to show her the scry-view, but she almost didn’t see them as creatures anymore, just as mobile scry windows. It was better than trying to see things with her own ability to scry, as even for a deity the distances involved were jaw-droppingly enormous. “They won’t be growing up just yet.”

  “Why’s that?” Mii-Es didn’t take her eyes off the infants, studying Cato with her peripheral vision, though she knew he rarely showed anything he didn’t want to. The Ikent body wasn’t even really his, just something he inhabited like a puppet or summon Skill.

  “Mostly because I’m not qualified to raise them,” Cato told her. “I have various cultural matrices that might work, but you’re the only one who remembers the lessons they should be taught. Besides which, we’re still working on simulating the full lifecycle and environmental interactions. The changes that hormones make in a biological system are…” Cato trailed off and waved a hand vaguely. “Well, I can send you the reports if you really want them, but they’re awfully dense and I doubt you care. Suffice to say, the System takes shortcuts I can’t. Or rather, Leese can’t.”

  “If nothing else, we need to simulate a proper global magnetic field before we can do anything.” Leese was contributing through the display-creature, the Sydean somehow overlaid onto the window that displayed the avian children. Mii-Es preferred to deal with Cato, but she knew the value of giving proper respect to competent subordinates. “You have ferro-organic compounds layered into your skeletal structure which have to be properly aligned so the ionic components of your blood marrow catalyze cell formation properly under the gravity your species is evolved for. It’s a fascinating adaptation, actually.”

  Mii-Es clicked her beak at Leese, somewhat irked by the Sydean’s preoccupation. She cared little for the minutiae, which seemed to actually detract from the miracle that Cato had performed. The thought that he was faking it had crossed her mind more than once, but that was why Yaniss was there. Even if Yaniss wasn’t exactly hers, Mii-Es still believed her to be more objective than either Cato or his agents.

  “So they must wait until we leave the System?” Mii-Es asked.

  “Not necessarily,” Cato said, and then sighed. “I hate presenting options like this, because even though it’s not meant to be coercive, the knowledge itself can feel that way. So — you know that I have a way of taking gods out of the System. You know that there are many versions of me, and used to be many of Yaniss. Reconciling you with your other self – that is to say, merging the two of you back into one – might be a problem, as not everyone is capable of reconciliation and there is no way to know ahead of time. But it could allow you to also come out here, if you are willing to risk there being two of you forever.”

  “I could…” Mii-Es suppressed her reflexive response and took a moment to think about the offer. It was one thing to look upon Cato’s works from afar, and think to a future that had not yet arrived, and it was another to fully commit herself. And yet a third thing to know that fully committing herself was not fully committing herself. There would be one her watching over Ikent, and another her protecting the Mesh-ia, and someday those two would be one again. Perhaps.

  She wished that Cato’s offerings came with more assurance. They didn’t have the dependability of Skills, the concrete understanding of the System. That was something she would have liked to have, even if there were many things Cato could do that she devoutly wished for herself. But until now she hadn’t been faced with having to truly choose between them.

  “I will have to think about it,” she said, and Cato nodded equably.

  “You have time. I’ll leave the link open so you can talk to Yaniss if you want.” Mii-Es nodded distractedly, but it wasn’t a mortal’s insight she wanted. She dismissed the link with the world below and instead sprang from her throne, appearing outside her System Space and traversing to Uriva.

  Initik’s System Space opened at her touch, keyed to allow her entry in a display of trust that she found rather touching, actually. The entrance deposited her in the vestibule of a comfortable open-air dwelling, looking out on a broad, sun-dappled plain, and Initik himself appeared from another room almost immediately.

  “Mii-Es,” he greeted her, black eyes looking her up and down. “What crisis brings you by?”

  “Ha!” She snorted and waved her taloned hands, conceding the barb. “Nothing you truly need to worry about, darling. Merely a personal matter.”

  “Come on in, then,” Initik replied, leading her out of the vestibule into a comfortable, if sparsely-furnished study. Mii-Es had no idea how Initik could stand to live in such stark surroundings, but it wasn’t something she thought worth commenting on. She merely settled into the seat that had been designed for her proportions and regarded Initik before speaking.

  “Cato’s given me an offer I’m not sure I can refuse,” she said. Mii-Es hadn’t told anyone about Cato’s suggestion that he could bring back her race, not even Initik, because it would so obviously compromise her.

  “He gave me such an offer, too,” Initik rumbled. “It seems to be his most potent weapon.”

  “Oh?” Mii-Es peered at him closely, finding that she was not surprised by the admission. Obviously Initik had, like her, made some deal with Cato, but neither of them had confided details of their respective agreements.

  “There are certain issues my people faced before the System,” Initik responded after a moment. “Cato has not only demonstrated he can fix those, but also has agreed to provide to me a community that will aid my people in learning to live without the System — and there are some surprising things emerging. It has been so long, I had forgotten some of what life was like. When added together, it is a compelling argument for exiting the System, but I cannot forget that Cato is utterly alien to us.” His gripping claws shifted where they rested on his shoulders, chitin clicking against chitin. “I cannot shake the suspicion there will be some hidden cost that none of us have recognized yet.”

  “There may be,” Mii-Es conceded. “But what he has offered me is something that I would pay any price for. Cato has managed to somehow resurrect my race from whatever tiny fragments were left. I still do not understand exactly how, but even that is not what brings me here. It is that I could leave and go safeguard them now — while still remaining as I am at the same time. Two of me.”

  “I see.” Initik sounded surprised for perhaps the first time Mii-Es could remember. “Everything you want, if you can accept such a strange situation.”

  “He couldn’t guarantee that the we could become I again, either,” Mii-Es sighed. “But even if there’s two of me, would that be so bad? But I know I’m not thinking clearly, so I come to you.”

  “You flatter me,” Initik said, and she almost thought the normally dour deity might be making a joke. “But in this case, I think it would gnaw at you until you accepted. Even if you trust him, you would know that it was something that could be held against you, and that might sour your relations.” He shook his head slowly at her, though not in disapproval. “I believe you have to take it, just as I did. Which is likely what Cato intended when he offered it.”

  “He even admitted that the offer was, by its nature, coercive.” Mii-Es clicked her beak in frustration. “He seems to have far too much knowledge whereby simply knowing it, your choices are made for you.”

  “Which may explain his oddness, overall. What kind of person would having a head full of such information produce?” Initik’s claws clicked in the contemplative silence that followed, and Mii-Es rose again.

  “I do apologize for not staying, dear,” she told Initik. “But as you say, this will gnaw at me until it is done.”

  “It is of no moment,” Initik said, extending a hand and opening an exit portal in the middle of the room. Mii-Es inclined her head to him and stepped through, returning to her own space with but a thought. The communications device rested where she had left it, and without any hesitation she poured essence into it to contact the surface.

  “Mii-Es,” Cato said, not referencing the fact that she had been gone only minutes.

  “I’ll do it,” she told him. “How does this work?”

  “In an hour or so a new vessel will enter the System just outside Ikent,” Cato said, the display warframe altering to show a simple brick of artifice. “It shouldn’t set off any System quests, but it’s designed to scan gods and high-ranks both. I’ve learned from the other gods I’ve freed from the System that you’ll either have to bleed a lot of essence or keep your essence very still for it to work.” Cato dismissed the image, then regarded Mii-Es and sighed.

  “One of you will return to your System duties, and the other will be transmitted to Project Birdnest. I would like you to keep in mind that you should prepare yourself for both options, because you won’t know which one you are until afterward.” His Ikent form ruffled its feathers, looking pensive. “If you can handle reconciliation I can keep you partly synchronized, but it will take some time.”

  “Understood,” Mii-Es said, and dropped the connection. She felt as if she should make some preparations — but she wasn’t going anywhere. Trying to grapple with that strange bifurcation took up most of her thoughts as she flew quick circles around her eyrie, feeling too energetic for simple pacing. The minutes crawled along, as she cast her scries out to track the approach of Cato’s vessel, but eventually she found it, and watched as it coasted closer. Once it was near enough, she ripped open a hole between herself and the mortal realm, and stepped into the interior of the ship.

  Cato himself was present in his human form, and didn’t appear surprised at all by her appearance. Instead he just nodded to her and gestured to the center of the room, where a sizeable black slab was embedded in the floor, an alcove with grips for hands and feet and with a lid partly raised. It was only possible to know which was which by the handholds, as there was no down on Cato’s craft.

  “Just settle in there, and it should only take a few minutes,” Cato told her. “Remember, try to keep your essence as suppressed as possible or bleed it off.” He notably did not assure her of its safety, as they both knew that it was an irrelevant consideration. She was a god — until she wasn’t, at which point Cato was the deity, and she the mere mortal. Trust was the point, and risk, not safety.

  Mii-Es followed the instructions, flitting over to the slab and delicately grasping the handholds while she tried to control her essence. It was bleeding into the comparatively thin surroundings at a prodigious rate, but she managed keep it somewhat leashed as the two parts of the black slab came together. The strange and slightly-warm material conformed to her exactly, not even leaving room to breathe – not that she needed to – and odd images and sounds began to appear. Herself; birds chirping. Ikent itself; a series of rising tones. Stars and constellations; the same tones, descending.

  It went on for a few minutes, and Mii-Es felt oddly detached, as if she were on the verge of falling asleep. Then there was a jerk in her consciousness, as she woke up again, the darkness draining away to reveal a pure white room with nothing but Cato, once again in his human form. She blinked, and breathed, and moved, but she no longer felt like a Deity.

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  “Welcome,” Cato said, spreading his hands wide. “I figured I’d get you started as fully digital, since I don’t think you’d be satisfied with a normal organic frame like the one Yaniss settled on. But at the same time, I doubt you want to spend a few subjective months getting used to everything, so I’ve got a few frames prepared for you.” He made a gesture with one hand, and a very System-like window opened in her view.

  [The following frames have been assigned to you:

  Mii-Es Frame 1. Fully Synthetic. Biolab 1 Nursery. Note from Cato: you want this one.

  Mii-Es Frame 2. Fully Biological. Native Environment Reconstruction Habitat 1.

  Mii-Es Frame 3. Cybernetic Integration: Malakai V.2. Native Environment Reconstruction Habitat 1.

  Mii-Es Frame 4. Fully Synthetic. Biolab 2.

  Mii-Es Frame 5. Fully Synthetic. Biolab 3.]

  Trust was a choice, and she’d made hers. Selecting the first frame, the white surroundings vanished as she opened her eyes, finding herself standing upright in a small alcove, which opened for her before she could even worry about how to leave. Her body felt a little bit odd, but not unusually so — the body was clearly beyond the merely mortal, and many of her senses seemed quite nearly as good as they had been when she was a Deity.

  Two steps outside of the alcove, she could see the infants in their pods, being attended to by Cato’s servants. Raine and Leese, the Sydeans that he had picked up at some point. Not that Mii-Es could tell exactly what they were doing, as none of Cato’s so-called technology was transparent to her. Something she now planned to rectify.

  “Which one do you want us to decant?” Leese asked. “We’ll start with one for now, and we can expand that later. I assume you’ll want to send a message to your other self.”

  “Yes,” Mii-Es said, and reached out to touch the artifice that protected the infants. The pods were warm under her hands, like living things, and she looked at each of the children in turn before finally pointing at one that reminded her of someone from the very distant past, so long ago that the memories themselves were hazy feelings more than anything she could truly recall.

  Leese did something, and the cradle-pod retracted, exposing the baby Mesh-ia, which Mii-Es scooped up so very carefully. A tiny line of text at the corner of her vision notified her of various strength and tactile limiters being engaged, but that couldn’t distract from the miracle she held in her hands. The infant in her hands yawned and clicked a tiny beak, eyes slowly opening.

  “Hello, little one,” she cooed, the feathers on her head spreading wide in the biggest smile she could manage. “Your name will be Kuu-Sed,” she told him, not entirely certain where in the depths of her memory the name had come from, but remembering it had been important once upon a time.

  “Let me get a picture for your other self,” Leese said, intruding into Mii-Es’s world for a moment, but she nevertheless looked up as Leese held up a small device. There was a clicking sound, and while Mii-Es found the interruption annoying, she was not so far gone inside her own head to not understand the other her, the one who remained a World Deity, would want to know what was going on.

  “The habitat can come later, but we have a small environmental chamber here,” Cato’s other agent suggested. Raine waved a hand at the far wall and a door opened, revealing a portal to the outside. Or something that looked like the outside, as in the back of her mind she knew they were somewhere that was not a planet.

  “Excellent,” Mii-Es said, shifting little Kuu-Sed as she carried him through the door and into a place that smelled of deep wilds and running water. The plants, the colors, the scents all reminded her of her childhood; not exactly so, but so achingly close that it brought her back thousands of years. Even the faint tug in her bones felt right, a piece of a world long gone. One that she hadn’t realized she had missed.

  Kuu-Sed chirped softly as she carried him through the garden, little hands grabbing at the fabric of her clothing and eyes wide as he took in the vibrant colors of plants and trees and flitting birds and insects. Mii-Es felt the grass beneath her feet and the warmth of a sun, however false, upon her face, and breathed the air of a homeworld long forgotten.

  She couldn’t help but think that offering the stuff that dreams were made of was definitely Cato’s most potent weapon.

  ***

  Cato-Heimdall mulled over the most dangerous weapons he had in his arsenal.

  He had particle beams and antimatter bombs, but those were things that just did damage. They could be avoided, and knowing about them only warned the enemy how to avoid them. His more potent weapons were hazardous just to know about.

  “I don’t get it,” Raine Heimdall said as she looked over his shoulder, watching him scroll through the database entries and parameters. “We’ve been in simulations and aestivations before. Are these really that different?”

  “Yes and no,” Cato said, starting the construction of a few hundred high-powered servers. “If you popped in for a moment it’d be the same high-fidelity emulation you’re used to. The difference is, these aren’t just simulated worlds or locations. They’re Elysiums.” He flicked the particulars over to Raine and Leese who absorbed the entry in a few seconds.

  “Sounds interesting, but I don’t see why you’re cautious about them,” Leese said slowly, though Cato was pretty sure she was already working through the problems.

  “In a normal aestivation, the reality exists independent of what you do. Sure, you can control it, but you have to go in and manually tinker with things. No matter how much you tweak it, it’s still a totally separate thing,” Cato explained, waving around at the office space they inhabited.

  “In an Elysium, the entire simulation is bent around you,” he continued. “Every character, every rock and tree and leaf of grass is placed to maximize your enjoyment; you’re genuinely the main character. It can read your brain state, and knows if you’re too tired or getting bored. The algorithms that run it are just short of a true AI and have millions of years of storytelling to draw from.” Summer Civilizations couldn’t generate physical constructs, but weren’t so limited when it came to stories and art, and ultimately they had generated more of those than all of civilization that inhabited base reality.

  “I guess there could be worse prisons,” Raine muttered.

  “That’s the thing, it’s not a prison at all. It’s just for most people, there’s no reason to leave their H.O.L.E.” The somewhat euphemistically nicknamed Holistic Optimal Life Emulations weren’t held in high regard among most postbiologicals, but that was partly because it was very close to death. Anyone who lived long enough was very likely to wind up in one.

  In a way, Cato was actually underselling what the Elysiums could offer. Someone living in one was the center of an infinitely unrolling story constructed by a storyteller with direct access to the recipient’s mind. Every narrative thread was calculated to either intrigue the guest and be followed, or to provide a benchmark that the guest could measure themselves against. Context and comparison.

  Of course, there were challenges within an Elysium, and perhaps sometimes they seemed impossible — but they were, in fact, precisely calculated and constructed to be satisfying, where things that appeared unfair could be, and would be, bested by whoever inhabited it. Peaks of effort were balanced by downtime; long stretches of relaxation were balanced by the onset of new drivers. It wasn’t some na?ve place where every need was fulfilled, but an environment that could and did engage someone to their fullest. As a behavioral sink, their efficiency was not to be outdone, but there was nothing specifically malevolent about them.

  No small amount of Summer Civilizations used such Elysium frameworks as the basis for the simulated world, adapted to the larger number of individuals involved. They were even employed by some of the Winter Civilizations where they floated out in the Oort cloud. The strange, disaffected groups running at fractional time, each atomic-scale switch of their computronium only activating when near vacuum-ambient temperature, riding the line of the Landauer Limit. Waiting out the star-forming era of the universe.

  “But at the same time, I don’t have anything else I can offer these post-Bismuths,” Cato sighed. “Not everyone is going to be like Yaniss, and want to singlehandedly climb the tech tree. Plenty will just want to keep fighting or exploring, and Elysiums are how to provide that. Although, I’m hoping that those sims can move them away from just psychopathic monster-hunting. As I said, they’re not prisons, so they can always interact with everyone else.”

  “According to the Sydean Lineage, there’s some Alums who have been out on their own for thousands of years, or maybe even hundreds of thousands. Or millions?” Leese shuddered. “I can’t imagine what they’re like. How do you do the same thing for so long?”

  “There’s a reason the Bismuth transition is so disgusting,” Cato agreed. “Although that same transition and the anti-entropic nature of essence construction probably means that such people haven’t degenerated into savages. The stagnation works for us, in this instance. If I’m understanding the Bismuth drives right, it also pushes people right into the very behavioral sinks that Elysiums exploit.”

  “I suppose I can see that.” Leese exchanged a look with Raine, no doubt thinking about how easy it would have been for him to offer them an Elysial H.O.L.E., or maybe even wondering if they were already in one and didn’t realize it. Not that he would ever, but that sort of worry was always a possibility once the true scope of simulations and aestivations became obvious.

  “If anything, I’m more worried about the other humans. System Azoths and Alums won’t have all the propaganda trappings around the idea that Earth natives would. Earth itself didn’t really do digital life like the outer colonies, so nobody who got caught up would be personally familiar with what I have to offer.” He’d heard from the Sydean Lineage, regarding one of the humans they’d encountered, and she’d apparently had very odd ideas about digitization.

  It wasn’t necessarily even malicious propaganda from whatever Earth polity she had previously lived in. The differences in lifestyles, in goals and ideals, and even in just subjective time meant that there was a natural disconnect between postbiologicals in orbitals and outsystem societies, and those who lived fully embodied lives on various planets and habitats. Adding in the normal wash of rumors, lies, nonsense, and active mischief, it would be a miracle if an average Earth citizen actually did know how proper digital civilizations were set up.

  “If you want to convince other humans, or even Alums, you’re going to at least have to pretend they’re a good thing,” Raine pointed out.

  “Well, they are a good thing,” Cato protested. “So good that you’ll never want or need anything else, and that makes me nervous.” He wasn’t tempted to submerge himself in one yet, but in a way it was like looking at a coffin, a reminder of his own mortality in a way the destruction of his frames never could provide. A mortality measured in scores of centuries, millennia, or aeons, but he didn’t imagine he would want to go on until the very end of the universe, to a point where years could only be counted in scientific notation.

  Those were exactly the maudlin thoughts that made him dislike handling the Elysium infrastructure, though it wasn’t much different from normal aestivations and simulations. They didn’t need the extreme power of deep time Summer Civilization architecture, and in fact could support themselves on minimal solar panels or solid-state confinement fusion. An individual – or an entire community – could live on a server no larger than a human fist, safety protected from radiation and debris, with fractal transceivers and a tiny bit of manufactory just in case.

  Any Cato could – and had – set up such servers in their own systems, but Cato-Heimdall was sitting on one of the confluence points where the Inner Planets started. Specifically, Clan Hokar, which was the largest and most stable clan outside the Elns and the most likely to be able to resist whatever politics Misse and the rest of her Clan could bring to bear. Careful study and conversations with various gods had narrowed the options down to this one location — one location, despite being able to establish infrastructure almost anywhere, because he wanted to create an actual civilization and not just scattered, isolated outposts.

  The quirk of similar pronunciation to a piece of Earth mythology was just coincidence, but an amusing one that had inspired Cato to flavor his surroundings toward the Norse end of aesthetics. It also seemed appropriate as he was operating as the major bridge out of the System for the high-rankers, anyone Azoth or Alum who wanted out before the System came down.

  Or, if he was very lucky, any stray gods.

  Accordingly, he had more and higher-powered communications infrastructure than almost any other Cato, spread throughout a star system that had been chosen both for its location within the System and the resources it could offer. Heimdall was the only rocky planet orbiting that particular star, with all the rest being gas giants of various sizes and temperatures, along with the expected swarm of moons. The big planets had swept out the bulk of stray asteroids and comets sometime in the distant past, leaving an exceedingly clean system that nevertheless had a lot of easy-to-access resources.

  He was probably overbuilding, being far too optimistic, but nobody knew how many Alums were on the war-worlds, or whether there were entire hidden communities that he would need to import whole cloth. Nobody even knew exactly how old the System was, but millions of years was probably a reasonable conjecture, and that was a lot of time for even a few fractions of a percent of a population to accumulate when they were all immortal.

  “I’m still worried about high ranks coming out here,” Raine said, watching the sensor feeds as factories sprang to life, screens lighting up on the walls of the control room. Their command post was floated in the forward Lagrange Point of Heimdall itself, even if the bulk of the infrastructure was much further away. “Even with how far away the outer planets are.”

  “Well, you have my blessing to build more defenses,” Cato said, shaking his head at her. Raine already had more particle beams and single-shot fighters than he thought necessary, but they’d yet to actually encounter an Alum so it was entirely possible they were still underestimating the potential threat. Leese and Raine glanced at each other, then more factories started up.

  It seemed like they were getting prepared just in time, because only days later there was a flood of high-rank traffic pouring through the portal. Ever since the Fern War, they’d dialed up the sensitivity to anyone who might be of significant rank, although that determination had to be done indirectly. Orbital surveillance and spy-eye insects couldn’t exactly see rank directly, after all, but the way people reacted or the abilities individuals demonstrated could provide a rough guess.

  Alarms went off and the three of them scrambled to get all the orbital forces ready, various protocols and plans spinning out to prepare for cutting Heimdal off from the System, as inconvenient as that might be. As the minutes ticked by, however, it became clear that the traffic wasn’t aimed at Heimdall itself, but somewhere further out on the frontier.

  The observations got sent out across FungusNet with a high priority, alerting all the other Catos further out that something was happening. Hours later, the answer came back along the network, one that made Cato wince and Raine and Leese sigh.

  Another annexation had begun.

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