The Final Frontier: Stories of Exploring Space, Colonizing the Universe, and First Contact

THREE BODIES AT MITANNI ^{SETH DICKINSON}

^{Seth Dickinson is the author of The Traitor Baru Cormorant and its forthcoming sequel, The Monster Baru Cormorant. He studied racial bias in police shootings, wrote much of the lore for Bungie Studios’ Destiny, and helped write and design the open-source space opera Blue Planet. If he were an animal, he would be a cockatoo.}

We were prepared to end the worlds we found. We were prepared to hurt each other to do it.

I thought Jotunheim would be the nadir, the worst of all possible worlds, the closest we ever came to giving the kill order. I thought that Anyahera’s plea, and her silent solitary pain when we voted against her, two to one, would be the closest we ever came to losing her—a zero-sum choice between her conviction and the rules of our mission:

Locate the seedship colonies, the frozen progeny scattered by a younger and more desperate Earth. Study these new humanities. And in the most extreme situations: remove existential threats to mankind.

Jotunheim was a horror written in silicon and plasmid, a doomed atrocity. But it would never survive to be an existential threat to humanity. I’m sorry, I told Anyahera. It would be a mercy. I know. I want to end it too. But it is not our place—

She turned away from me, and I remember thinking: it will never be worse than this. We will never come closer.

And then we found Mitanni.

Lachesis woke us from stable storage as we fell toward periapsis. The ship had a mind of her own, architecturally human but synthetic in derivation, wise and compassionate and beautiful but, in the end, limited to merely operational thoughts.

She had not come so far (five worlds, five separate stars) so very fast (four hundred years of flight) by wasting mass on the organic. We left our flesh at home and rode Lachesis’s doped metallic hydrogen mainframe starward. She dreamed the three of us, Anyahera and Thienne and I, nested in the ranges of her mind. And in containing us, I think she knew us, as much as her architecture permitted.

When she pulled me up from storage, I thought she was Anyahera, a wraith of motion and appetite, flame and butter, and I reached for her, thinking she had asked to rouse me, as conciliation.

“We’re here, Shinobu,” Lachesis said, taking my hand. “The last seedship colony. Mitanni.”

The pang of hurt and disappointment I felt was not an omen. “The ship?” I asked, by ritual. If we had a captain, it was me. “Any trouble during the flight?”

“I’m fine,” Lachesis said. She filled the empty metaphor around me with bamboo panels and rice paper, the whispered suggestion of warm spring rain. Reached down to help me out of my hammock. “But something’s wrong with this one.”

I found my slippers. “Wrong how?”

“Not like Jotunheim. Not like anything we’ve seen on the previous colonies.” She offered me a robe, bowing fractionally. “The other two are waiting.”

We gathered in a common space to review what we knew. Thienne smiled up from her couch, her skin and face and build all dark and precise as I remembered them from Lagos and the flesh. No volatility to Thienne; no care for the wild or theatrical. Just careful, purposeful action, like the machines and technologies she specialized in.

And a glint of something in her smile, in the speed with which she looked back to her work. She’d found some new gristle to work at, some enigma that rewarded obsession.

She’d voted against Anyahera’s kill request back at Jotunheim, but of course Anyahera had forgiven her. They had always been opposites, always known and loved the certainty of the space between them. It kept them safe from each other, gave room to retreat and advance.

In the vote at Jotunheim, I’d been the contested ground between them. I’d voted with Thienne: no kill.

“Welcome back, Shinobu,” Anyahera said. She wore a severely cut suit, double-breasted, fit for cold and business. It might have been something from her mother’s Moscow wardrobe. Her mother had hated me.

Subjectively, I’d seen her less than an hour ago, but the power of her presence struck me with the charge of decades. I lifted a hand, suddenly unsure what to say. I’d known and loved her for years. At Jotunheim I had seen parts of her I had never loved or known at all.

She considered me, eyes distant, icy. Her father was Maori, her mother Russian. She was only herself, but she had her mother’s eyes and her mother’s way of using them in anger. “You look… indecisive.”

I wondered if she meant my robe or my body, as severe and androgynous as the cut of her suit. It was an angry thing to say, an ugly thing, beneath her. It carried the suggestion that I was unfinished. She knew how much that hurt.

I’d wounded her at Jotunheim. Now she reached for the weapons she had left.

“I’ve decided on this,” I said, meaning my body, hoping to disengage. But the pain of it made me offer something, conciliatory: “Would you like me some other way?”

“Whatever you prefer. Take your time about it.” She made a notation on some invisible piece of work, a violent slash. “Wouldn’t want to do anything hasty.”

I almost lashed out.

Thienne glanced at me, then back to her work: an instant of apology, or warning, or reproach. “Let’s start,” she said. “We have a lot to cover.”

I took my couch, the third point of the triangle. Anyahera looked up again. Her eyes didn’t go to Thienne, and so I knew, even before she spoke, that this was something they had already argued over.

“The colony on Mitanni is a Duong-Watts malignant,” she said. “We have to destroy it.”

I knew what a Duong-Watts malignant was because “Duong-Watts malignant” was a punch line, a joke, a class of human civilization that we had all gamed out in training. An edge case so theoretically improbable it might as well be irrelevant. Duong Phireak’s predictions of a universe overrun by his namesake had not, so far, panned out.

Jotunheim was not far enough behind us, and I was not strong enough a person, to do anything but push back. “I don’t think you can know that yet,” I said. “I don’t think we have enough—”

“Ship,” Anyahera said. “Show them.”

Lachesis told me everything she knew, all she’d gleaned from her decades-long fall toward Mitanni, eavesdropping on the telemetry of the seedship that had brought humanity here, the radio buzz of the growing civilization, the reports of the probes she’d fired ahead.

I saw the seedship’s arrival on what should have been a garden world, a nursery for the progeny of her vat wombs. I saw catastrophe: a barren, radioactive hell, climate erratic, oceans poisoned, atmosphere boiling into space. I watched the ship struggle and fail to make a safe place for its children, until, in the end, it gambled on an act of cruel, desperate hope: fertilizing its crew, raising them to adolescence, releasing them on the world to build something out of its own cannibalized body.

I saw them succeed.

Habitation domes blistering the weathered volcanic flats. Webs of tidal power stations. Thermal boreholes like suppurating wounds in the crust. Thousands of fission reactors, beating hearts of uranium and molten salt—

Too well. Too fast. In seven hundred years of struggle on a hostile, barren world, their womb-bred population exploded up toward the billions. Their civilization webbed the globe.

It was a boom unmatched in human history, unmatched on the other seed-ship colonies we had discovered. No Eden world had grown so fast.

“Interesting,” I said, watching Mitanni’s projected population, industrial output, estimated technological self-catalysis, all exploding toward some undreamt-of ceiling. “I agree that this could be suggestive of a Duong-Watts scenario.”

It wasn’t enough, of course. Duong-Watts malignancy was a disease of civilizations, but the statistics could offer only symptoms. That was the terror of it: the depth of the cause. The simplicity.

“Look at what Lachesis has found.” Anyahera rose, took an insistent step forward. “Look at the way they live.”

I spoke more wearily than I should have. “This is going to be another Jotunheim, isn’t it?”

Her face hardened. “No. It isn’t.”

I didn’t let her see that I understood, that the words Duong-Watts malignancy had already made me think of the relativistic weapons Lachesis carried, and the vote we would need to use them. I didn’t want her to know how angry it made me that we had to go through this again.

One more time before we could go home. One more hard decision.

Thienne kept her personal space too cold for me: frosted glass and carbon composite, glazed constellations of data and analysis, a transparent wall opened onto false-color nebulae and barred galactic jets. At the low end of hearing, distant voices whispered in clipped aerospace phrasing. She had come from Haiti and from New Delhi, but no trace of that twin childhood, so rich with history, had survived her journey here.

It took me years to understand that she didn’t mean it as insulation. The cold distances were the things that moved her, clenched her throat, pimpled her skin with awe. Anyahera teased her for it, because Anyahera was a historian and a master of the human, and what awed Thienne was to glimpse her own human insignificance.

“Is it a Duong-Watts malignant?” I asked her. “Do you think Anyahera’s right?”

“Forget that,” she said, shaking her head. “No prejudgment. Just look at what they’ve built.”

She walked me through what had happened to humanity on Mitanni.

At Lagos U, before the launch, we’d gamed out scenarios for what we called socially impoverished worlds—places where a resource crisis had limited the physical and mental capital available for art and culture. Thienne had expected demand for culture to collapse along with supply as people focused on the necessities of existence. Anyahera had argued for an inelastic model, a fundamental need embedded in human consciousness.

There was no culture on Mitanni. No art. No social behavior beyond functional interaction in the service of industry or science.

It was an incredible divergence. Every seedship had carried Earth’s cultural norms—the consensus ideology of a liberal democratic state. Mitanni’s colonists should have inherited those norms.

Mitanni’s colonists expressed no interest in those norms. There was no oppression. No sign of unrest or discontent. No government or judicial system at all, no corporations or markets. Just an array of specialized functions to which workers assigned themselves, their numbers fed by batteries of synthetic wombs.

There was no entertainment, no play, no sex. No social performance of gender. No family units. Biological sex had been flattened into a population of sterile females, slender and lightly muscled. “No sense wasting calories on physical strength with exoskeletons available,” Thienne explained. “It’s a resource conservation strategy.”

“You can’t build a society like this using ordinary humans,” I said. “It wouldn’t be stable. Free riders would play havoc.”

Thienne nodded. “They’ve been rewired. I think it started with the first generation out of the seedship. They made themselves selfless so that they could survive.”

It struck me that when the civilization on Mitanni built their own seed-ships they would be able to do this again. If they could endure Mitanni, they could endure anything.

They could have the galaxy.

I was not someone who rushed to judgment. They’d told me that, during the final round of crew selection. Deliberative. Centered. Disconnected from internal affect. High emotional latency. Suited for tiebreaker role… .

I swept the imagery shut between my hands, compressing it into a point of light. Looked up at Thienne with a face that must have signaled loathing or revulsion, because she lifted her chin in warning. “Don’t,” she said. “Don’t leap to conclusions.”

“I’m not.”

“You’re thinking about ant hives. I can see it.”

“Is that a bad analogy?”

“Yes!” Passion, surfacing and subsiding. “Ant hives only function because each individual derives a fitness benefit, even if they sacrifice themselves. It’s kin-selective eusociality. This is—”

“Total, selfless devotion to the state?”

“To survival.” She lifted a mosaic of images from the air: a smiling woman driving a needle into her thigh. A gang of laborers running into a fire, heedless of their own safety, to rescue vital equipment. “They’re born. They learn. They specialize, they work, sleep, eat, and eventually they volunteer to die. It’s the opposite of an insect hive. They don’t cooperate for their own individual benefit—they don’t seem to care about themselves at all. It’s pure altruism. Cognitive, not instinctive. They’re brilliant, and they all come to the same conclusion: cooperation and sacrifice.”

The image of the smiling woman with the needle did not leave me when the shifting mosaic carried her away. “Do you admire that?”

“It’s a society that could never evolve on its own. It has to be designed.” She stared into the passing images with an intensity I’d rarely seen outside of deep study or moments of love, a ferocious need to master some vexing, elusive truth. “I want to know how they did it. How do they disable social behavior without losing theory of mind? How can they remove all culture and sex and still motivate?”

“We saw plenty of ways to motivate on Jotunheim,” I said.

Maybe I was thinking of Anyahera, taking her stance by some guilty reflex, because there was nothing about my tone disconnected from internal affect.

I expected anger. Thienne surprised me. She swept the air clear of her work, came to the couch and sat beside me. Her eyes were gentle.

“I’m sorry we have to do this again,” she said. “Anyahera will forgive you.”

“Twice in a row? She thought Jotunheim was the greatest atrocity in human history. ‘A crime beyond forgiveness or repair,’ remember? And I let it stand. I walked away.”

I took Thienne’s shoulder, gripped the swell of her deltoid, the strength that had caught Anyahera’s eye two decades ago. Two decades for us—on Earth, centuries now.

Thienne stroked my cheek. “You only had two options. Walk away, or burn it all. You knew you weren’t qualified to judge an entire world.”

“But that’s why we’re here. To judge. To find out whether the price of survival ever became too high—whether what survived wasn’t human.”

She leaned in and kissed me softly. “Mankind changes,” she said. “This—what you are—” Her hands touched my face, my chest. “People used to think this was wrong. There were men and women, and nothing else, nothing more or different.”

I caught her wrists. “That’s not the same, Thienne.”

“I’m just saying: technology changes things. We change ourselves. If everyone had judged what you are as harshly as Anyahera judged Jotunheim—”

I tightened my grip. She took a breath, perhaps reading my anger as play, and that made it worse. “Jotunheim’s people are slaves,” I said. “I can be what I want. It’s not the same at all.”

“No. Of course not.” She lowered her eyes. “You’re right. That was an awful example. I’m sorry.”

“Why would you say that?” I pressed. Thienne closed herself, keeping her pains and fears within. Sometimes it took a knife to get them out. “Technology doesn’t always enable the right things. If some people had their way I would be impossible. They would have found everything but man and woman and wiped it out.”

She looked past me, to the window and the virtual starscape beyond. “We’ve come so far out,” she said. I felt her shoulders tense, bracing an invisible weight. “And there’s nothing out here. Nobody to meet us except our own seedship children. We thought we’d find someone else—at least some machine or memorial, some sign of other life. But after all this time the galaxy is still a desert. If we screw up, if we die out… what if there’s no one else to try?

“If whatever happened on Mitanni is what it takes to survive in the long run, isn’t that better than a dead cosmos?”

I didn’t know what to say to that. It made me feel suddenly and terribly alone. The way Anyahera might have felt, when we voted against her.

I kissed her. She took the distraction, answered it, turned us both away from the window and down onto the couch. “Tell me what to be,” I said, wanting to offer her something, to make a part of the Universe warm for her. This was my choice: to choose.

“Just you—” she began.

But I silenced her. “Tell me. I want to.”

“A woman,” she said, when she had breath. “A woman this time, please…”

Afterward, she spoke into the silence and the warmth, her voice absent, wondering: “They trusted the three of us to last. They thought we were the best crew for the job.” She made absent knots with my hair. “Does that ever make you wonder?”

“The two-body problem has been completely solved,” I said. “But for n=3, solutions exist for special cases.”

She laughed and pulled me closer. “You’ve got to go talk to Anyahera,” she said. “She never stays mad at me. But you…”

She trailed off, into contentment, or back into contemplation of distant, massive things.

Duong-Watts malignant, I thought to myself. I couldn’t help it: my mind went back to the world ahead of us, closing at relativistic speeds.

Mitanni’s explosive growth matched the theory of a Duong-Watts malignant. But that was just correlation. The malignancy went deeper than social trends, down to the individual, into the mechanisms of the mind.

And that was Anyahera’s domain.

“We can’t destroy them,” Thienne murmured. “We might need them.”

Even in simulation we had to sleep. Lachesis’s topological braid computer could run the human being in full-body cellular resolution, clock us up to two subjective days a minute in an emergency, pause us for centuries—but not obviate the need for rest.

It didn’t take more than an overclocked instant. But it was enough for me to dream.

Or maybe it wasn’t my dream—just Duong Phireak’s nightmare reappropriated. I’d seen him lecture at Lagos, an instance of his self transmitted over for the night. But this time he spoke in Anyahera’s voice as she walked before me, down a blood-spattered street beneath a sky filled with alien stars.

“Cognition enables an arsenal of survival strategies inaccessible to simple evolutionary selection,” she said, the words of Duong Phireak. “Foresight, planning, abstract reasoning, technological development—we can confidently say that these strategies are strictly superior, on a computational level, at maximizing individual fitness. Cognition enables the cognitive to pursue global, rather than local, goals. A population of flatworms can’t cooperate to build a rocket unless the ‘build a rocket’ allele promotes individual fitness in each generation—an unlikely outcome, given the state of flatworm engineering.”

Memory of laughter, compressed by the bandwidth of the hippocampus. I reached out for Anyahera, and she looked up and only then, following her gaze, did I recognize the sky, the aurora of Jotunheim.

“But with cognition came consciousness—an exaptative accident, the byproduct of circuits in the brain that powered social reasoning, sensory integration, simulation theaters, and a host of other global functions. So much of our civilization derived in turn from consciousness, from the ability not just to enjoy an experience but to know that we enjoy it. Consciousness fostered a suite of behaviors without clear adaptive function, but with subjective, experiential value.”

I touched Anyahera’s shoulder. She turned toward me. On the slope of her bald brow glittered the circuitry of a Jotunheim slave shunt, bridging her pleasure centers into her social program.

Of course she was smiling.

“Consciousness is expensive,” she said. “This is a problem for totalitarian states. A human being with interest in leisure, art, agency—a human being who is aware of her own self-interest—cannot be worked to maximum potential. I speak of more than simple slave labor. I am sure that many of your professors wish you could devote yourselves more completely to your studies.”

Overhead, the aurora laughed in the voices of Lagos undergraduates, and when I looked up, the sky split open along a dozen fiery fractures, relativistic warheads moving in ludicrous slow-motion, burning their skins away as they made their last descent. Lachesis’s judgment. The end I’d withheld.

“Consciousness creates inefficient behavior,” Anyahera said, her smile broad, her golden-brown skin aflame with the light of the falling apocalypse. “A techno-tyranny might take the crude step of creating slave castes who derive conscious pleasure from their functions, but this system is fundamentally inadequate, unstable. The slave still expends caloric and behavioral resources on being conscious; the slave seeks to maximize its own pleasure, not its social utility. A clever state will go one step further and eliminate the cause of these inefficiencies at the root. They will sever thought from awareness.

“This is what I call the Duong-Watts malignancy. The most efficient, survivable form of human civilization is a civilization of philosophical zombies. A nation of the unconscious, those who think without knowing they exist, who work with the brilliance of our finest without ever needing to ask why. Their cognitive abilities are unimpaired—enhanced, if anything—without constant interference. I see your skepticism; I ask you to consider the ano-sognosia literature, the disturbing information we have assembled on the architecture of the sociopathic mind, the vast body of evidence behind the deflationary position on the Hard Problem.

“We are already passengers on the ship of self. It is only a matter of time until some designer, pressed for time and resources, decides to jettison the hitchhiker. And the rewards will be enormous—in a strictly Darwinian sense.”

When I reached for her, I think I wanted to shield her, somehow, to put myself between her and the weapons. It was reflex, and I knew it was meaningless, but still… .

Usually in dreams you wake when you die. But I felt myself come apart.

Ten light-hours out from Mitanni’s star, falling through empty realms of ice and hydrogen, we slammed into a wall of light—the strobe of a lighthouse beacon orbiting Mitanni. “Pulse-compressed burst maser,” Lachesis told me, her voice clipped as she dissected the signal. “A fusion-pumped flashbulb.”

Lachesis’s forward shield reflected light like a wall of diamond—back toward the star, toward Mitanni. In ten hours they would see us.

We argued over what to do. Anyahera wanted to launch our relativistic kill vehicles now, so they’d strike Mitanni just minutes after the light of our approach, before the colonists could prepare any response. Thienne, of course, dissented. “Those weapons were meant to be used when we were certain! Only then!”

I voted with Thienne. I knew the capabilities of our doomsday payload with the surety of reflex. We had the safety of immense speed, and nothing the Mitanni could do, no matter how sophisticated, could stop our weapons—or us. We could afford to wait, and mull over our strategy.

After the vote, Anyahera brushed invisible lint from the arm of her couch. “Nervous?” I asked, probing where I probably shouldn’t have. We still hadn’t spoken in private.

She quirked her lips sardonically. “Procrastination,” she said, “makes me anxious.”

“You’re leaping to conclusions,” Thienne insisted, pacing the perimeter of the command commons. Her eyes were cast outward, into the blue-shifted stars off our bow. “We can’t know it’s a Duong-Watts malignant. Statistical correlation isn’t enough. We have to be sure. We have to understand the exact mechanism.”

It wasn’t the same argument she’d made to me.

“We don’t need to be sure.” Anyahera had finished with the invisible lint. “If there’s any reasonable chance this is a Duong-Watts, we are morally and strategically obligated to wipe them out. This is why we are here. It doesn’t matter how they did it—if they did it, they have to go.”

“Maybe we need to talk to them,” I said.

They both stared at me. I was the first one to laugh. We all felt the absurdity there, in the idea that we could, in a single conversation, achieve what millennia of philosophy had never managed—find some way to pin down the spark of consciousness by mere dialogue. Qualia existed in the first person.

But twenty hours later—nearly three days at the pace of Lachesis’s racing simulation clock—that was suddenly no longer an abstract problem. Mitanni’s light found us again: not a blind, questing pulse, but a microwave needle, a long clattering encryption of something at once unimaginably intricate and completely familiar.

They didn’t waste time with prime numbers or queries of intent and origin. Mitanni sent us an uploaded mind, a digital ambassador.

Even Thienne agreed it would be hopelessly naïve to accept the gift at face value, but after Lachesis dissected the upload, ran its copies in a million solipsistic sandboxes, tested it for every conceivable virulence—we voted unanimously to speak with it, and see what it had to say.

Voting with Anyahera felt good. And after we voted, she started from her chair, arms upraised, eyes alight. “They’ve given us the proof,” she said. “We can—Thienne, Shinobu, do you see?”

Thienne lifted a hand to spider her fingers against an invisible pane. “You’re right,” she said, lips pursed. “We can.”

With access to an uploaded personality, the digital fact of a Mitanni brain, we could compare their minds to ours. It would be far from a simple arithmetic hunt for subtraction or addition, but it would give us an empirical angle on the Duong-Watts problem.

Anyahera took me aside, in a space as old as our friendship, the khaya mahogany panels and airy glass of our undergraduate dorm. “Shinobu,” she said. She fidgeted as she spoke, I think to jam her own desire to reach for me. “Have you seen what they’re building in orbit?”

This memory she’d raised around us predated Thienne by a decade. That didn’t escape me.

“I’ve seen them,” I said. I’d gone through Mitanni’s starflight capabilities datum by datum. “Orbital foundries. For their own seedships. They’re getting ready to colonize other stars.”

Neither of us had to unpack the implications there. It was the beginning of a boom cycle—exponential growth.

“Ten million years,” she said. “I’ve run a hundred simulations out that far. If Mitanni is a Duong-Watts, in ten million years the galaxy is full of them. Now and forever. No conscious human variant can compete. Not even digitized baseline humans—you know what it took just to make Lachesis. Nothing human compares.”

I nodded in silent acknowledgment. Is that so terrible? I wanted to ask—Thienne’s question, in this memory so empty of her. Is consciousness what we have to sacrifice to survive in the long run?

She didn’t even need me to ask the question. “I can envision nothing more monstrous,” she said, “than mankind made clockwork. Nothing is worth that price.”

And I wanted to nod, just to show her that we were not enemies. But I couldn’t. It felt like giving in.

Sometimes I wondered at the hubris of our mission. Would Mitanni live and die not by the judgment of a jurisprudent mind but the troubled whims of a disintegrating family? We had left Earth as a harmonized unit, best-in-class product of a post-military, post-national edifice that understood the pressures of long-duration, high-stress starflight. No one and nothing could judge better. But was that enough? Was the human maximum adequate for this task?

Something in that thought chilled me more than the rest, and I wished I could know precisely what.

We met the Mitanni upload in a chameleon world: a sandboxed pocket of Lachesis’s mind, programmed to cycle from ocean to desert to crowd to solitary wasteland, so that we could watch the Mitanni’s reactions, and, perhaps, come to know her.

She came among us without image or analogy, injected between one tick of simulation and the next. We stood around her on a pane of glass high above a grey-green sea.

“Hello,” she said. She smiled, and it was not at all inhuman. She had Thienne’s color and a round, guileless face that with her slight build made me think of Jizo statues from my childhood. “I’m the ambassador for Mitanni.”

Whatever language she spoke, Lachesis had no trouble with it. Thienne and Anyahera looked to me, and I spoke as we’d agreed.

“Hello. My name is Shinobu. This is the starship Lachesis, scout element of the Second Fleet.”

If she saw through the bluff of scouts and fleets, she gave no sign. “We expected you,” she said, calm at the axis of our triplicate regard. “We detected the weapons you carry. Because you haven’t fired yet, we know you’re still debating whether to use them. I am here to plead for our survival.”

She’s rationally defensive, Thienne wrote in our collective awareness. Attacking the scenario of maximal threat.

At the edge of awareness, Lachesis’s telemetry whispered telltales of cognition and feedback, a map of the Mitanni’s thoughts. Profiling.

My eyes went to Anyahera. We’d agreed she would handle this contingency. “We believe your world may be a Duong-Watts malignant,” she said. “If you’ve adapted yourselves to survive by eliminating consciousness, we’re deeply concerned about the competitive edge you’ve gained over baseline humanity. We believe consciousness is an essential part of human existence.”

In a negotiation between humans, I think we would have taken hours to reach this point, and hours more to work through the layers of bluff and counter-bluff required to hit the next point. The Mitanni ambassador leapt all that in an instant. “I’m an accurate map of the Mitanni mind,” she said. “You have the information you need to judge the Duong-Watts case.”

I see significant mental reprofiling, Lachesis printed. Systemic alteration of networks in the thalamic intralaminar nuclei and the prefrontal-parietal associative loop. Hyperactivation in the neural correlates of rationalization—

Anyahera snapped her fingers. The simulation froze, the Mitanni ambassador caught in the closing phoneme of her final word. “That’s it,” Anyahera said, looking between the two of us. “Duong-Watts. That’s your smoking gun.”

Even Thienne looked shocked. I saw her mouth the words: hyperactivation in the neural—

The Mitanni hadn’t stripped their minds of consciousness. They’d just locked it away in a back room, where it could watch the rest of the brain make its decisions, and cheerfully, blithely, blindly consider itself responsible.

—correlates of rationalization—

Some part of the Mitanni mind knew of its own existence. And that tiny segment watched the programming that really ran the show iterate itself, feeling every stab of pain, suffering through every grueling shift, every solitary instant of a life absent joy or reward. Thinking: This is all right. This is for a reason. This is what I want. Everything is fine. When hurt, or sick, or halfway through unanaesthetized field surgery, or when she drove the euthanasia needle into her thigh: this is what I want.

Because they’d tweaked some circuit to say: You’re in charge. You are choosing this. They’d wired in the perfect lie. Convinced the last domino that it was the first.

And with consciousness out of the way, happy to comply with any sacrifice, any agony, the program of pure survival could optimize itself.

“It’s parsimonious,” Thienne said at last. “Easier than stripping out all the circuitry of consciousness, disentangling it from cognition…”

“This is Duong-Watts,” Anyahera said. I flinched at her tone: familiar only from memories of real hurt and pain. “This is humanity enslaved at the most fundamental level.”

I avoided Thienne’s glance. I didn’t want her to see my visceral agreement with Anyahera. Imagining that solitary bubble of consciousness, lashed, parasitic, to the bottom of the brain, powerless and babbling.

To think that you could change yourself. To be wrong, and never know it. That was a special horror.

Of course Thienne saw anyway, and leapt in, trying to preempt Anyahera, or my own thoughts. “This is not the place to wash your hands of Jotunheim. There’s no suffering here. No crime to erase. All they want to do is survive—”

“Survival is the question,” Anyahera said, turned half-away, pretending disregard for me, for my choice, and in that disregard signaling more fear than she had begging on her knees at Jotunheim, because Anyahera would only ever disregard that which she thought she had no hope of persuading. “The survival of consciousness in the galaxy. The future of cognition. We decide it right here. We fire or we don’t.”

Between us the Mitanni stood frozen placidly, mid-gesture.

“Kill the Mitanni,” Thienne said, “and you risk the survival of anything at all.”

It hurt so much to see both sides. It always had.

Three-player variants are the hardest to design.

Chess. Shogi. Nuclear detente. War. Love. Galactic survival. Three-player variants are unstable. It was written in my first game theory text: Inevitably, two players gang up against a third, creating an irrecoverable tactical asymmetry.

“You’re right, Thienne,” I said. “The Mitanni aren’t an immediate threat to human survival. We’re going home.”

We fell home to Earth, to the empty teak house, and when I felt Anyahera’s eyes upon me I knew myself measured a monster, an accomplice to extinction. Anyahera left, and with her gone, Thienne whirled away into distant dry places far from me. The Mitanni bloomed down the Orion Arm and leapt the darkness between stars.

“Anyahera’s right,” I said. “The Mitanni will overrun the galaxy. We need to take a stand for—for what we are. Fire the weapons.”

We fell home to Earth and peach tea under the Lagos sun, and Thienne looked up into that sun and saw an empty universe. Looked down and saw the two people who had, against her will, snuffed out the spark that could have kindled all that void, filled it with metal and diligent labor: life, and nothing less or more.

I took a breath and pushed the contingencies away. “This isn’t a zero-sum game,” I said. “I think that other solutions exist. Joint outcomes we can’t ignore.”

They looked at me, their pivot, their battleground. I presented my case.

This was the only way I knew how to make it work. I don’t know what I would have done if they hadn’t agreed.

They chose us for this mission, us three, because we could work past the simple solutions.

The Mitanni ambassador stood between us as we fell down the thread of our own orbit, toward the moment of weapons release, the point of no return.

“We know that Mitanni society is built on the Duong-Watts malignancy,” Anyahera said.

The Mitanni woman lifted her chin. “The term malignancy implies a moral judgment,” she said. “We’re prepared to argue on moral grounds. As long as you subscribe to a system of liberal ethics, we believe that we can claim the right to exist.”

“We have strategic concerns,” Thienne said, from the other side of her. “If we grant you moral permit, we project you’ll colonize most of the galaxy’s habitable stars. Our own seedships or digitized human colonists can’t compete. That outcome is strategically unacceptable.”

We’d agreed on that.

“Insects outnumber humans in the terrestrial biosphere,” the Mitanni said. I think she frowned, perhaps to signal displeasure at the entomological metaphor. I wondered how carefully she had been tuned to appeal to us. “An equilibrium exists. Coexistence that harms neither form of life.”

“Insects don’t occupy the same niche as humans,” I said, giving voice to Anyahera’s fears. “You do. And we both know that we’re the largest threat to your survival. Sooner or later, your core imperative would force you to act.”

The ambassador inclined her head. “If the survival payoff for war outstrips the survival payoff for peace, we will seek war. And we recognize that our strategic position becomes unassailable once we have launched our first colony ships. If it forestalls your attack, we are willing to disassemble our own colonization program and submit to a blockade—”

“No.”Thienne again. I felt real pride. She’d argued for the blockade solution and now she’d coolly dissect it. “We don’t have the strength to enforce a blockade before you can launch your ships. It won’t work.”

“We are at your mercy, then.” The ambassador bowed her chin. “Consider the moral ramifications of this attack. Human history is full of attempted genocide, unilateral attempts to control change and confine diversity, or to remake the species in a narrow image. Full, in the end, of profound regret.”

The barb struck home. I don’t know by what pathways pain becomes empathy, but just then I wondered what her tiny slivered consciousness was thinking, while the rest of her mind thrashed away at the problem of survival: The end of the world is coming, and it’s all right; I won’t worry, everything’s under control—

Anyahera took my shoulder in silence.

“Here are our terms,” I said. “We will annihilate the Mitanni colony in order to prevent the explosive colonization of the Milky Way by post-conscious human variants. This point is non-negotiable.”

The Mitanni ambassador waited in silence. Behind her, Thienne blinked, just once, an indecipherable punctuation. I felt Anyahera’s grip tighten in gratitude or tension.

“You will remain in storage aboard the Lachesis,” I said. “As a comprehensive upload of a Mitanni personality, you contain the neuroengineering necessary to recreate your species. We will return to Earth and submit the future of the Mitanni species to public review. You may be given a new seedship and a fresh start, perhaps under the supervision of a preestablished blockade. You may be consigned to archival study, or allowed to flourish in a simulated environment. But we can offer a near-guarantee that you will not be killed.”

It was a solution that bought time, delaying the Duong-Watts explosion for centuries, perhaps forever. It would allow us to study the Duong-Watts individual, to game out their survivability with confidence and the backing of a comprehensive social dialogue. If she agreed.

It never occurred to me that she would hesitate for even one instant. The core Mitanni imperative had to be survive, and total annihilation weighed against setback and judgment and possible renaissance would be no choice at all.

“I accept,” the Mitanni ambassador said. “On behalf of my world and my people, I am grateful for your jurisprudence.”

We all bowed our heads in unrehearsed mimicry of her gesture. I wondered if we were aping a synthetic mannerism, something they had gamed out to be palatable.

“Lachesis,” Anyahera said. “Execute RKV strike on Mitanni.”

“I need a vote,” the ship said.

I think that the Mitanni must have been the only one who did not feel a frisson: the judgment of history, cast back upon us.

We would commit genocide here. The largest in human history. The three of us, who we were, what we were, would be chained to this forever.

“Go,” I said. “Execute RKV strike.”

Thienne looked between the two of us. I don’t know what she wanted to see but I met her eyes and held them and hoped.

Anyahera took her shoulder. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“Go,” Thienne said. “Go.”

We fell away from the ruin, into the void, the world that had been called Mitanni burning away the last tatters of its own atmosphere behind us. Lachesis clawed at the galaxy’s magnetic field, turning for home.

“I wonder if they’ll think we failed,” Anyahera said drowsily. We sat together in a pavilion, the curtains drawn.

I considered the bottom of my glass. “Because we didn’t choose? Because we compromised?”

She nodded, her hands cupped in her lap. “We couldn’t go all the way. We brought our problems home.” Her knuckles whitened. “We made accommodations with something that—”

She looked to her left, where Thienne had been, before she went to be alone. After a moment she shrugged. “Sometimes I think this is what they wanted all along, you know. That we played into their hands.”

I poured myself another drink: cask strength, unwatered. “It’s an old idea,” I said.

She arched an eyebrow.

“That we can’t all go home winners.” I thought of the pierced bleeding crust of that doomed world and almost choked on the word winners—but I knew that for the Mitanni, who considered only outcomes, only pragmatism, this was victory. “That the only real solutions lie at the extremes. That we can’t figure out something wise if we play the long game, think it out, work every angle.”

For n=3, solutions exist for special cases.

“Nobody won on Jotunheim,” Anyahera said softly.

“No,” I said. Remembered people drowning in acid, screaming their final ecstasy because they had been bred and built for pain. “But we did our jobs, when it was hardest. We did our jobs.”

“I still can’t sleep.”

“I know.” I drank.

“Do you? Really?”

“What?”

“I know the role they selected you for. I know you. Sometimes I think—” She pursed her lips. “I think you change yourself so well that there’s nothing left to carry scars.”

I swallowed. Waited a moment, to push away my anger, before I met her gaze. “Yeah,” I said. “It hurt me too. We’re all hurt.”

A moment passed in silence. Anyahera stared down into her glass, turning it a little, so that her reflected face changed and bent.

“To new ideas,” she said, a little toast that said with great economy everything I had hoped for, especially the apologies.

“To new ideas.”

“Should we go and—?” She made a worried face and pointed to the ceiling, the sky, where Thienne would be racing the causality of her own hurt, exploring some distant angle of the microwave background, as far from home as she could make the simulation take her.

“Not just yet,” I said. “In a little while. Not just yet.”