“CEO Yevshensky had it added to the Web,” said Gladstone. She waved, and the farcaster door vanished. “He felt that the Chief Executive needed someplace where Core listening devices were unlikely.”

Morpurgo looked uneasily toward a wall of clouds near the horizon where ball lightning played. “No place is totally safe from the Core,” he said. “I’ve been telling Admiral Singh about our suspicions.”

“Not suspicions,” said Gladstone. “Facts. And I know where the Core is.”

Both FORCE officers reacted as if the ball lightning had struck them.

“Where?” they said almost in unison.

Gladstone paced back and forth. Her short gray hair seemed to glow in the charged air. “In the farcaster web,” she said. “Between the portals. The AIs live in the singularity pseudo-world there like spiders in a dark web. And we wove it for them.”

Morpurgo was the first of the two able to speak. “My God,” he said. “What do we do now? We have less than three hours before the torchship with the Core device translates to Hyperion space.”

Gladstone told them exactly what they were going to do.

“Impossible,” said Singh. He was unconsciously tugging at his short beard. “Simply impossible.”

“No,” said Morpurgo. “It will work. There is enough time. And as frantic and random as the fleet movements have been during the past two days…”

The Admiral shook his head. “Logistically it might be possible. Rationally and ethically it is not. No, it is impossible.”

Meina Gladstone stepped closer. “Kushwant,” she said, addressing the Admiral by his first name for the first time since she had been a young senator and he an even younger FORCE:space commander, “Don’t you remember when Senator Lamia put us in touch with the Stables? The AI named Ummon? His prediction of the two futures—one holding chaos and the other certain extinction for humankind?”

Singh turned away. “My duty is to FORCE and the Hegemony.”

“Your duty is the same as mine,” snapped Gladstone. “To the human race.”

Singh’s fists came up as if he were ready to fight an invisible but powerful opponent. “We don’t know for sure! Where did you get your information?”

“Severn,” said Gladstone. “The cybrid.”

“Cybrid?” snorted the General. “You mean that artist. Or at least that miserable excuse for one.”

“Cybrid,” repeated the CEO. She explained.

“Severn as a retrieval persona?” Morpurgo looked dubious. “And now you’ve found him?”

“He found me. In a dream. Somehow he managed to communicate from wherever he is. That was his role, Arthur, Kushwant. That’s why Ummon sent him to the Web.”

“A dream,” sneered Admiral Singh. “This… cybrid… told you that the Core was hidden in the farcaster web… in a dream.”

“Yes,” said Gladstone, “and we have very little time in which to act.”

“But,” said Morpurgo, “to do what you suggested—”

“Would doom millions,” finished Singh. “Possibly billions. The economy would collapse. Worlds like TC², Renaissance Vector, New Earth, the Denebs, New Mecca—Lusus, Arthur—scores more depend upon other worlds for their food. Urban planets cannot survive alone.”

“Not as urban planets,” said Gladstone. “But they can learn to farm until interstellar trade is reborn.”

“Bah!” snarled Singh. “After plague, after the breakdown of authority, after the millions of deaths from lack of proper equipment, medicine, and datasphere support.”

“I’ve thought of all that,” said Gladstone, her voice firmer than Morpurgo had ever heard it. “I’ll be the greatest mass murderer in history—greater than Hitler or Tze Hu or Horace Glennon-Height. The only thing worse is to continue as we are. In which case, I—and you, gentlemen—will be the ultimate betrayers of humankind.”

“We can’t know that,” grunted Kushwant Singh, as if the words were driven from him by blows to the belly.

“We do know that,” said Gladstone. “The Core has no more use for the Web. From now on, the Volatiles and Ultimates will keep a few million slaves penned underground on the nine labyrinthine worlds while they use human synapses for what computing needs remain.”

“Nonsense,” said Singh. “Those humans would die out.”

Meina Gladstone sighed and shook her head. “The Core has devised a parasitic, organic device called the cruciform,” she said. “It… brings back… the dead. After a few generations, the humans will be retarded, listless, and without a future, but their neurons will still serve Core purposes.”

Singh turned his back on them again. His small form was silhouetted against a wall of lightning as the storm approached in a riot of boiling bronze clouds. “Your dream told you this, Meina?”

“Yes.”

“And what else does your dream say?” snapped the Admiral.

“That the Core has no more need for the Web,” said Gladstone. “Not for the human Web. They’ll continue to reside there, rats in the walls, but the original occupants are no longer needed. The AI Ultimate Intelligence will take over the major computing duties.”

Singh turned to look at her. “You are mad, Meina. Quite mad.”

Gladstone moved quickly to grab the Admiral’s arm before he could activate the farcaster. “Kushwant, please listen to—”

Singh pulled a ceremonial flechette pistol from his tunic and set it against the woman’s breast. “I am sorry, M. Executive. But I serve the Hegemony and…”

Gladstone stepped back with her hand to her mouth as Admiral Kushwant Singh stopped speaking, stared sightlessly for a second, and fell to the grass. The flechette pistol tumbled into the weeds.

Morpurgo stepped forward to retrieve it, tucking it into his belt before he put away the deathwand in his hand.

“You killed him,” said the CEO. “If he wouldn’t cooperate, I’d planned to leave him here. Maroon him on Kastrop-Rauxel.”

“We couldn’t take the chance,” said the General, pulling the body farther from the farcaster. “Everything depends upon the next few hours.”

Gladstone looked at her old friend. “You’re willing to go through with it?”

“We have to,” said Morpurgo. “It will be our last chance to get rid of this yoke of oppression. I’ll give the deployment orders at once and hand over sealed orders in person. It will take most of the fleet…”

“My God,” whispered Meina Gladstone, looking down at the body of Admiral Singh. “I’m doing all of this on the strength of a dream.”

“Sometimes,” said General Morpurgo, taking her hand, “dreams are all that separate us from the machines.”

Death is not, I discovered, a pleasant experience. Leaving the familiar rooms on the Piazza di Spagna and the rapidly cooling body there is similar to being thrust out in the night by fire or flood from the familiar warmth of one’s home. The rush of shock and displacement is severe. Thrown headlong into the metasphere, I experience the same sense of shame and sudden, awkward revelation which we have all had in our dreams when we realize that we have forgotten to get dressed and have come naked to some public place or social gathering.

Naked is the correct word now, as I struggle to keep some shape to my tattered analog persona. I manage to concentrate sufficiently to form this almost random electron cloud of memories and associations into a reasonable simulacrum of the human I had been—or at least the human whose memories I had shared.

Mister John Keats, five feet high.

The metasphere is no less a frightening place than before—worse now that I have no mortal shelter to flee to. Vast shapes move beyond dark horizons, sounds echo in the Void Which Binds like footsteps on tiles in an abandoned castle. Under and behind everything there is a constant and unnerving nimble like carriage wheels on a highway made of slate.

Poor Hunt. I am tempted to return to him, pop in like Marley’s ghost to assure him that I am better off than I look, but Old Earth is a dangerous place for me right now: the Shrike’s presence burns on the metasphere datumplane there like flame on black velvet.