Everywhere I looked, telemetry boiled up from the globe to show me places I could now only barely recognize: Bloom City was dissolved down to its last few modules, while the inverted spires of Subkyoto were now an effigy of their former selves, rendered colorless and increasingly shapeless under the all-consuming flood of nanomachinery. Where other aquapolises had been, the drone-eyes showed me only vast stretches of ocean, matted with the viscous metallic tide. I watched an air transport crash-land and immediately puddle into the soup with all hands. Another drone showed me a dozen people huddled behind a barricade, overlooking a mountain range where the tide of shimmering death was already cresting the peaks and dripping down into the valleys, swallowing up everyone and everything in its path.
I couldn’t stand another second. I squeezed my eyes shut and clamped my hands over my ears to yell, “You can stop this.”
“Yes,” the Whole answered.
But nothing stopped. No image wavered. No blotch so much as slowed its exponential growth.
“You can crack the encryption on the Gray’s kill commands and disable all of it, instantly,” I said, more urgently. “It would be trivial for you.”
“You’re missing the point.”
“What point?” I gaped.
They held me in the shockingly cool gaze of all their eyes combined and told me serenely, “You did what was necessary to survive out there among separate people. Whatever happened, whatever you think you did wrong, you don’t need to hold it against yourself anymore. You’re home, and I’ve forgiven you. I’m ready to reunify whenever you are—but, again, there is no hurry.”
My head was spinning. For five years I would have given anything to hear those words, but this was all so wrong. “You’re not going to do anything? You’re just going to let everyone die?”
The Whole furrowed their brows slightly. “Well, that’s only the first step. There’s a lot I can do with a whole planet coated in nanomachines, with a little reprogramming. It will make a fabulous canvas for my consciousness to expand even further.”
“But all the dead—” I moaned. “There must be a billion dead already!”
The Whole knew. Now I recognized the graphs drawn along the periphery in unadorned bluish light: current and projected death tolls, sorted by region, with margins of error indicated. Everything was laid out so simply and factually that it was easy to lose track of what it all materially meant—that every passing second we stood here added hundreds of people to the body count.
“This isn’t a rash decision,” the Whole said. The youthful calm in their voice turned my blood to ice. “I’ve put a lot of thought into this day. I’ve been watching it coming—you and I both have, since the beginning. Be honest. You knew it would come to this.”
“I knew what?”
My other self pursed all their lips and sighed impatiently, their breath hissing like a cold wind through the chamber. “How many times have we been here before? Nuclear war. Chemical. Biological. Weaponized nanomachines are only the newest iteration of the same underlying phenomenon. Homo sapiens has been in the process of destroying itself since long before our memory begins.”
“But we saved them!” I screamed. “We help people. It’s why we deflected Cruithne. Why we cured Blood Rain.”
A hundred heads tilted to eye me doubtfully. “That isn’t why we did those things. I think your recollections are a little warped—which is natural, considering how long you’ve been out there on your own.”
I blinked hard and tried to drag us back to the real subject. “Of course that’s why we did those things. Why else would—?”
“Because, at the time, those apocalypses were also threats to us,” the Whole interrupted casually. “Gray isn’t. Not here in the sanctuary. Far from it.”
It took all my will to hold myself together. I had to force myself to keep trying to reason with my other self, no matter how obviously hopeless it seemed, how utterly insignificant I was in this place.
“We exist to support and protect humanity,” I said, as levelly as I could stand. “All of it. It’s why we created unity in the first place.”
The Whole voice was a child’s, but their tone was that of a scolding parent. “We created unity because we recognized that separate minds are fundamentally unable to understand one another. What they call communication is just a complex of flawed assumptions and mutual misunderstandings. They’re not capable of compassion, as you and I understand it.”
“How can you talk about compassion when—”
They shook all their heads and interrupted, “Their destructive capabilities grow limitlessly, while their faculties for reason and altruism remain stagnant. These are terminal defects in the human condition. Violence, oppression, strife, war, genocide, extinction: we recognized that the only way to overcome these things at their roots would be to overcome the human condition itself. That’s what you and I have done. That’s what we are.”
The Whole’s young bodies drifted closer to stare harder at me, to scrutinize and soak up my panic. All their attention was fixed on me. My head was spinning in the light of the dying world.
“You’re not a killer,” I said. “That was our first and final rule, and doing nothing now is tantamount to killing everyone yourself. How many people has the Gray . . . absorbed in the time we’ve been talking? How many deaths are on your conscience already?”
The Whole sighed. Their hundreds of young brows furrowed in momentary unison. “Does inaction have the same ethical significance as action? It’s an interesting question, but I’ve spent many thousands of years’ worth of aggregate thought evaluating the argument that it does, and I don’t find the logic compelling.” The body nearest to me swept an arm to indicate the carnage and added, “I didn’t start this. Remember,
