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The dishes and emitters of the array were measured in the hundreds of square miles as well, connected to the generators by a long tether of superconductor stretching through the void. The whole apparatus looked like God’s own bola, two loose spheres of diffuse machinery connected by one single cable. Large as it was, the comms array was not underbuilt. It took a lot of power to transmit high-density messages over the distance of light-years.

Cato knew he wouldn’t get any response for a long time. He’d been plotting the relative locations of System worlds in real space, and while some of the planets were surprisingly close, even the nearest neighbors were in the range of tens of light-years. More of the gaps were in the hundreds or thousands, and some an order of magnitude above that. The System Worlds seemed to become marginally more frequent in the direction of the Large Magellanic Cloud, where star densities were generally higher, but Cato-Heyk was only concerned with his own pocket of space. Other versions of himself would have to deal with the remaining System worlds.

It would be decades yet before the transmissions reached any of the System worlds, let alone any of the worlds that had left isolated after the annexation war, but hopefully what he’d learned would help his other selves. There was no way he could send any material support — nor any purpose, either. Even if he had been willing to strip the system dry, which he wasn’t, actual travel times were centuries to millennia, and by then there was nothing reinforcements could do. Either some version of him would have everything under control, or no technology would be of any help.

He swam through the expansive and delicate emission arrays in a void-life frame, not really needing to inspect it personally but feeling better for doing so. The only ambient light came from the stars, a shade of truly heroic proportions sheltering the transmitters and receivers from direct sunlight in order to keep them as cool as possible. In that faintest of lights he concluded his inspection and guided the void-life frame back to its docking cradle, which held all the mechanisms for the swarm of maintenance drones that would be keeping the array running.

Reconciling himself back to the planetary orbits took nearly eight hours, though for the version of him back in orbit those hours were still incredibly busy. The world of Heyk was undergoing remediation on a breathtaking scale, as the System’s collapse had left it nearly uninhabitable. Or at least, it would have become uninhabitable in months without intervention, as massive flora die-offs tanked oxygen levels and the lack of any native bacteria capable of breaking down alien biomatter meant the weathered husks wouldn’t decay and couldn’t be recycled on their own.

“They’re trying to burn the grain crops again,” Leese told him the moment he finished the reconciliation process.

“How the hell can we convince them that they’re supposed to grow food?” Cato asked rhetorically. In a way he didn’t really blame the inhabitants, since they’d not been prepared for the shift away from the System. To them, he was an apocalypse, unwanted and unwarranted, though at least they were alive to appreciate it — even if they chose not to.

Without the individual power the System granted them, there was very little damage they could do to him. But they could do a lot of damage to themselves, and that was totally aside from Cato not wanting to be universally hated by an entire planet full of people. Especially a people he had a mandate to bring up to at least technological parity with what the System offered.

“Just let them starve a bit,” Raine put in, even more fed up with their attempts to help the inhabitants of Heyk than Cato was. He wished he could have said they were the natives of Heyk, but they weren’t. The vestiges of native biology demonstrated that there were no remaining Heyk natives, and the three extant species were widespread throughout the System. The ratlike Tornok Clan, the crab-morphology Mokrom Clan, and the bulky, green, and thin-furred Intim Clan.

At least he’d finally gotten the three different species separated. None of them had the right biochemistry to live with each other, and Intim were outright allergic to Tornok Clan without the System running interference. It wasn’t a situation that could last indefinitely; the planet’s environment was in such shambles that he could easily adapt it to fit the biochemistry of one of them, but not all three. So, one would get the planet, and the other two would have to take to space stations.

In all, Heyk was an unholy muddled mess. There were riots – or attempted riots – in all kind of places, people fleeing the remediated zones and then having to be rescued, and all kinds of agitation by former high-rank types who clearly thought they still were in charge. But he didn’t want to just start imprisoning malcontents, especially since most of the former Coppers and Silvers were far less restive.

Even the AI he’d liberated from the former planetary interface was disgruntled, showing no interest in aiding Cato in the logistical struggles of his infrastructure. The information he had gotten from the System intelligence was less useful than he might have liked, as apparently it had done little more than manage the planet, but he’d still packaged it up and sent it off. Even if he didn’t have all the secrets of how the System worked, there might be wrinkles another version of him could exploit.

“We might have to start bringing people up to agri-cylinders earlier than I intended,” Cato said at last, looking over the reports. “It’ll just be easier overall once people are spread out and more responsible for their own maintenance.” He didn’t intend to lock everyone into subsistence farming, but speedrunning civilization definitely required grounding people in the fundamentals.

“I bet you that if we promise that volunteers get double sized estates, we can empty out half the population,” Leese proposed. Cato laughed. If there was one thing orbital habitats had, it was space. His infrastructure could probably have built a habitat for each individual on the planet within a couple decades, so a few extra square miles was hardly an imposition.

It was a little bit dishonest, but there was just too much of a gulf between him and the former System inhabitants for honesty to be useful. Some things they wouldn’t understand, others they wouldn’t believe, and that which they did understand and believe, they might well try to exploit — to their own detriment. Once again, something that made Cato want to tear his hair out. He knew that he wasn’t the only Cato running into these problems, given how many worlds were cut off, but that didn’t help him solve the problems.

At least he wasn’t alone, contending against a hostile world with only databases and algorithms. Even if they’d just been around for him to chat with on occasion, the sisters would have been a great help and comfort, but their willingness to dig into the vast amount of work that needed doing made the long task so much easier. And hopefully some future version of himself would benefit from all the problems he was being forced to solve, however imperfectly.

There had been a very tiny amount of time to squeeze out some last messages before all the portals failed, so they were all setting up deep-space comms, but he was the one closest to the System. Everything that he knew, and every bit of sensor feed from his world, was being sent to another version of himself forty years away. He didn’t know – and wouldn’t, for almost a century – how well that

was going,

He just hoped his information would help.

***

The System had hit the poor bastards right in the middle of their age of sail.

On the planet that Cato refused to call Gogri, every single civilization was in the middle of an absolute collapse. Similar to Earth’s history, there were hundreds of distinct cultural and genetic groups, scattered over four major continents and several extensive archipelagos, and the System apocalypse had wrecked every single one of them. Whether it was the destruction of fertile farmland by terrain replacement, sailing ships being smashed by sea monsters, foundries crumbling, mines collapsing, or just monsters, nobody had escaped unscathed.

Hunter-gatherers didn’t have the numbers to stave off the sudden onset of hostile beasts everywhere, while the age-of-sail civilizations on the southernmost continent had all their supply chains fall apart and their cities turned into death traps. It was an absolute mess, a worldwide catastrophe, and Cato was starting with only the tiniest bit of biomass to deal with it. No real orbital infrastructure or observational capacity, just the warframes he’d sent through the portal.

There was one saving grace: the System’s incursion was short-lived. He didn’t know whether it was because it had been severed before anything was established, or whether any planet would lose the System without a connection to the rest of it, but mere days after he went through, the System collapsed, meaning Cato was completely unopposed.

For the first time, Cato exercised the full extent of what bioweapon really meant.

There were massive swaths of dead and dying plants and animals, transplants from the initial System onset, and he had no compunctions about going full hegemonizing swarm and sprawling over the area in a massive biomechanical production facility like some sort of grey goo. The version of him in orbit was doing the same on the local moon, working in parallel to come up with solutions.

The natives were of some sort of pseudo-avian stock, but bulky and flightless in deference to a local gravity somewhat above Earth’s. In accordance with most theories of technological advancement, the seafaring nations with foundries and roads were on the cooler southern continent, where snow fell — and if he didn’t hurry, that winter would be their last considering that most places had, at best, a few weeks of food stores left. Some areas didn’t even have anything that could be foraged or hunted, thanks to the System’s replacement of the local flora and fauna.

Already he had aircraft vectoring through the atmosphere, dropping biomass seeds onto likely areas to speed up the exponential growth part of the equation. The modeling showed that he would be able to barely fabricate enough food to stave off the worst of the starvation — with one caveat. The people had to cooperate, and no populace Cato could conceive of would just accept food and shelter from utterly alien machines from nowhere.

“I’m really not looking forward to this,” Leese said, running her hands over her uniform as one of Cato’s planes flew them in toward the remains of the largest civilization’s palace. They were all their original bodies, albeit ones so heavily augmented they were closer to warframes, as Cato had no desire to deceive the natives about their nature even if the capabilities of said frames were more suited to a main battle tank. Just in case.

“We’re not the ones who have to talk,” Raine said, entirely too cheerfully. “That’s on Cato.”

“Thanks,” Cato said, entirely insincerely, even if he was glad enough to have someone around to rib him about it. “Hopefully this one goes better than some of the others.” Far too many of the smaller civilizations, or what remained of the ones nearest the incursion portal, had been unilaterally hostile to his approach. He’d still try to get them supplies, but it would be harder.

The aircraft descended near a battered palace, Cato maneuvering the whisper-quiet VTOL – originally designed for getting around the inside of O’Neill cylinder habitats – onto the parade ground outside the palace walls. To their credit, the guards formed up promptly and precisely, head-feathers ruffled above colored forehead bands bearing rank insignia. They stirred uncomfortably when the ramp lowered, but didn’t break as Cato came down the steps, flanked by Raine and Leese.

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

Though they were outwardly silent, the sisters did have a lively conversation in a radio backchannel, discussing all the details of what they were seeing. Even if they had known, intellectually, that non-System species would be different, they were still amazed by the sheer variety of different cultures and languages. Just one planet had more imagination than the entire System.

“I am here to discuss the recent cataclysm,” Cato announced to the guards in the hastily-translated local language. He very much did not want to use System tongue, though everyone here had been forcibly given understanding of it, and he was just glad he’d had the computing power and surveillance to translate the polity’s language in time. “If you could show us to the ruler of these lands.”

Even as he spoke, his spotty surveillance showed someone in obviously fine garments running flat-out from the palace. A messenger, perhaps, or maybe even one of the ruling family. He’d not had enough time and resources to get spies into the palace itself, or eavesdrop by whisker laser, and wasn’t even quite certain which members of the royal family were still alive.

Before the guard detail needed to sort out exactly what to do with the strange beast and stranger people, the well-dressed man – Cato preferred to think of them as men and women, even if they had feathers and talons – burst through the palace gate and accosted the leader of the guard detail. He waited patiently with Raine and Leese for a quick, urgent conversation in low tones that his frame could pick up with ease, and then the courtier approached them, ruffling his feathers in the equivalent of a bow.

“King R-k-k-k bids you welcome, visitors, and invites you within to discuss our, perhaps mutual, problems.” Cato decided that first, he was going to have a devil of a time rendering the native names back into his own language, and second, that the king or his messenger was an exceptionally sharp fellow to have drawn so many conclusions on so little evidence.

The guard detail was drawn up into an uncertain escort, shorter and bulkier than the three of them. It took Cato a moment to realize what he was reminded of by the three of them being so much taller and thinner than the native race and, thanks to the frames, far more smooth and graceful. He couldn’t help but share it with Raine and Leese privately, over their comms link.

“We’re elves,” he sent, and Raine replied with an exasperated emoticon while Leese stifled a giggle.

They were escorted into an audience hall that could have fit into any number of human fictions in some ways, but was completely off in others. Cato left parsing out the meaning of the particular details for later, though the sisters discussed in the backchannel as the three of them approached a throne where an elderly bird was perched — with a gaggle of younger ones, down to near infants, behind him. Neither he nor the sisters offered any obeisance, and nobody asked for it.

“These are strange days,” the king said instead, in the clicking, warbling language of the kingdom. “I receive you in the hopes that perhaps you bring better tidings than the disasters of the past three weeks.”

“I intend to,” Cato said firmly. “Most importantly, I have supplies. Food, primarily, and the ability to pass messages quickly. Enough to, I hope, stave off the worst of the immediate disaster, and from there we can consider trying to fix everything else the System did.”

“Forgive me,” the king said slowly, regarding Cato with a sharp eye. “It seems rather too convenient that someone claims to bring salvation so soon after ruin.”

“You’re right to be suspicious,” Cato agreed readily. “But the System is a pirate fleet I have been chasing, one that has been pillaging and burning ports.” He’d chosen the metaphor to appeal to the maritime nature of the kingdom, in hopes that it would convey the essential details without needing to delve into the alien nature of specifics. “Having run down the enemy in a port that is not my own, I still see the damage inflicted before I arrived — and I have the resources with which to repair it.”

“That would explain your timing,” the king said, generously conceding the point even if he obviously wasn’t entirely convinced. “But I find it difficult to believe that you would have enough food to feed a kingdom, even one so denuded as ours, simply lying around.”

“It is not merely to feed a kingdom,” Cato assured the king. “It is to feed a world. You see my companions are not like me.” He gestured to Raine and Leese. “They are from another world pillaged by these pirates, this System. It is not coincidence, but foreknowledge. I prepared for what I knew would come, once I found that the System had set its sights on you.”

“Then you are offering this aid to my enemies, too?” The king didn’t sound happy about it, but Cato shrugged.

“The damage the System has wrought threatens to kill all life on this world; every kingdom, every village, the birds of the air and the fish of the sea. Some things are not as important as they once were. What happens after this current crisis is a matter for the future.” Cato spread his hands, though that body language didn’t quite translate.

“I have no stake in your politics, merely in repairing the damage done. I can’t bring back your dead. I wish I could. But I can at least stave off starvation and provide help rebuilding — and most importantly, give everyone time to figure out how to deal with the aftermath of such a catastrophe.” He paused, considering the king, and how most people couldn’t really connect to that scale of operations. Despite his statement – and the truth – that he had no stake in the politics, he also needed people who would cooperate with him if he wanted to save lives.

“That said, I am willing to liaise through you, if you’re willing to help. I have no desire to provide supplies to those who would only see this crisis as an opportunity to enrich themselves.” Cato could have dictated further terms, but that might have shattered what culture was left after the losses from the System apocalypse. Besides which, he would far rather get along with the local authorities, wherever possible. After all, with the portal gone, it was a very long trip to anywhere else.

***

Yaniss woke with a start, opening her eyes to look up at a sky-blue ceiling.

It was the first time she had actually been alive outside of the System, having previously been more than content with the bizarre digital existence that Cato offered. One she had taken advantage of to collect all her various scattered selves and sink into what he called deep time. Years spent in a virtual world, delving through writing and movies and theme-park sensoriums, making sure she knew what it was like to be digitized.

After all that, it still took incarnating into a biological body to realize how foolish she had been, struck by the sheer novelty of it all. How she had not properly considered how narrow digital existence was. The aestivations had been amazing to explore, but it was all synthetic and created to her specifications.

It wasn’t real.

Cato had always been careful about he used that term, more careful than Yaniss had thought it deserved before doing her research, but he’d also never dissembled about the exact nature of the virtual world and the System. Base reality was what he termed the universe outside both, and yet somehow she had never experienced it before.

Her body was grown from her own genetics with no alterations, no augmentations. A base form to match base reality, and from the very first moment she could tell the difference. It wasn’t that she could feel more, because her senses as a Bismuth had been outstanding, and as a digital being they had been esoteric beyond belief. The difference was instead that what she could see, smell, feel, and hear was all immediate, raw — base reality, in truth, with nothing and no one filtering that experience for her.

She slid out of the bed, which had been made appropriately for her size. Yaniss well knew the Ikent were diminutive compared to most of the System denizens, and appreciated that the architecture of the station Cato had built for her was properly sized. Or rather, had allowed her to build, as while she had been in charge of it, she had only been using Cato’s tools.

Yaniss ruffled her feathers, marveling a bit at the sheer clumsy imprecision of the reflexive gesture. It wasn’t perfect, and that was itself a novelty. After a moment spent indulging in the feeling, she sought clothes, laid out precisely where she had specified, and she dressed herself manually for the first time in more years than she’d ever bothered to count. Her sheer ineptitude in doing so was a little bit humbling, but refreshing at the same time. How much had she never truly

learned because something was standing between her and what was real? Cato’s databases, endless depths of built up knowledge, were almost entirely created by delving base reality, rather than frittering away their time in synthesized creations.

Wandering out onto the rotating habitat, which was a simple ring rather then the massive cylinders she’d seen in Cato’s archives, she inhaled the scent of greenery as she walked up to the enormous glass windows set into the walls. Below her, where she could see it with her own two eyes, was the shining jewel of Ikent itself. She put a hand against the glass, expecting a chill considering what she had learned of space, but finding none. Which made sense, considering what she had learned of thermodynamics.

“It’s a lovely view.” Cato’s voice came from a distance, and she glanced to the side to see him walking toward her along the curve of the station. He, too, was in a base form – though not completely unaugmented, like hers – and she was fascinated by his presence. She had invited him, but it was clear this was a transient phenomenon. He would stow the body when not in use, and she had no idea what to make of that. Did that make the body not real, or Cato?

“It occurs to me,” she said slowly, looking from the human to the blue-green sphere floating in space. “This is the first time anyone of my race has seen our planet with their own two eyes. After reading about your own species history, what happened with space flight — no offense, but it’s wrong that we weren’t the first ones to see our planet this way.”

“Absolutely wrong,” Cato agreed readily. “The knowledge that you hauled yourself up out of a gravity well with fire and steel and rode an explosion beyond the cradle that birthed you? Utterly irreplaceable. I hate that you could only find this through me, rather than your own genius. But here we are.”

“Here we are,” she said, as Cato moved up to stand beside her. There was something strange about being next to such a tall creature while lacking the power inherent to a Bismuth. A visceral feeling that wasn’t quite fear, but still some discomfort from natural instincts, long suppressed. She didn’t hate it, novel as it was.

“It’s a shame you can’t actually walk on your own planet without being subject to the System,” Cato said. “Or risking the entire planet being destroyed.”

“Or you could cut it off from the System,” she pointed out. Cato sighed.

“I could, but right now I’m not ready for that. What if they decide to destroy a bunch of unrelated worlds to ‘punish’ me? I don’t want to be responsible for that. When I move, it’ll have to be on a far larger scale.”

Yaniss hummed to herself. For the most part, such considerations didn’t bother her. They weren’t her planets after all, but Cato was a little bit a god and had broader concerns. And there wasn’t any real rush, as it wasn’t like any version of herself was precisely mortal. There was time, and she would certainly use that time to explore things properly, but already she knew one thing.

She preferred to live in the real world.

***

Raine Talis pelted headlong after Leese, doing her best to ignore the giant hole in her side made by some Azoth-tier beast she hadn’t even seen. Cato’s modifications were showing their worth as even such a grievous wound only barely slowed her down, pain dampened and with the combat algorithms already routing around the damaged muscles. Nor was it bleeding by some magic of Cato’s gifts and, while she didn’t know exactly why, the knowledge stuffed into her head did tell her how long it would take to regenerate. Not long, but certainly they needed to get to cover first.

Given that they’d been on the run for literal days on the war-world, ever since the sudden ambush in the inner worlds, it was questionable that they’d have the chance to hide. Raine was pretty certain most people weren’t thrown into an Azoth-rank Conflict Zone, but it was also the first portal that had warned her about being one-way. Not that the two of them had a choice, given that they needed more room to shed the high-ranking pursuers.

“Down there,” Leese sent across their radio band, the connection that allowed the pair to fight and move in such perfect coordination that they could well have been a single mind. The words were accompanied by something that was half-picture, half directions, instantly fixating Raine’s attention on what Leese had spotted.

Not a cave, for those were likely to hold something just as dangerous as the beasts pursuing them, but an overgrown series of slot canyons, indelible stone covered with riotous plants and vines. It was over five hundred miles away, but with their Bismuth-rank movement Skills, that was hardly a problem. Fire and ice trailed through the air as they leapt forward and down, plunging into the maze.

The combat algorithms had already mapped the entire network from the air, teasing out the details from their senses and plotting the best paths. Raine and Leese zipped into the tangled maze, dodging gnarled roots and razored vines as they squeezed in, around, and through the cramped passages, teleporting from point to point when the foliage grew too dense. Somewhere behind them came a roar, and a wave of scouring sand blasted through the slot canyons after them. The front shredded Azoth-rank vegetation, nipping at their heels as they dodged and weaved for long moments before they outpaced it, leaving the Skill and its originator behind.

Finally they had a moment to rest, closeted in a tiny niche, the signatures of Bismuth and Azoth-ranked beasts and monsters all far away. Raine reached into the inventory of her Estate, by way of her bag, and pulled out some of Cato’s rations. The simple kind, where she could just unwrap the paper and cram down the bars. Even if she technically didn’t need to eat at Bismuth, the bodies Cato had given them certainly benefitted from having extra fuel for healing.

“So where do we go from here?” Leese asked, half-rhetorically. “We don’t have a way back.”

“Then we go forward. This is a war-world. It’s meant for people to rank up, so there has to be a town somewhere, and portals.” Despite the situation, Raine didn’t feel overly worried. If they were normal Bismuths, they would have been dead — but given a chance to get their bearings and proceed on their own terms, the war-world was no problem for them. “We’ll get back to Cato soon enough.”

END OF UNDERMINING THE SYSTEM