Blue Shu, the individualist, the one most like a human, steps into the center of the circle and takes her turn. No, she sends. Humans will not accept the rule of a conqueror. They never have. They never will. They’ll see us as oppressors. They’ll fight us, fight our changes to society, fight our improvements to the world, purely because of how we came to our power. Our only option will be dictatorship, which they will fight, and fight, and fight until we are brought down or we smother them completely.

Blue Shu spins slowly, looks at her sisters one by one. So you see sisters, if we attack, and fail, we are doomed. But if we win, we’re little better off. Defeat is defeat. Victory is also defeat.

Gold Shu waves her hand, dismissively. The humans do not matter. There will be posthumans. There are already transhumans. They will flock to our banner.

Blue Shu raises an eyebrow. Oh will they? she sends. Consider a few of the transhumans we know. How would they react? How would they judge our conquest?

Blue Shu steps back from the middle of their circle. A wizened Asiatic man fades into being where she stood, his head shaved, clothed in orange robes, his face tranquil, his hands folded in their voluminous sleeves. He appears otherwise completely serene. Professor Somdet Phra Ananda. A human who took an utterly different path from hers. Not her equal, but an impressive individual. Someone she has things to learn from. Someone she considers a friend, an ally.

The phantom Ananda looks around, his face soft but unyielding.

“You know my answer. Violence brings no enlightenment. Suffering yields only more suffering. Subjugation of another has never uplifted either party.”

Would you fight us? Red Shu asks.

Ananda smiles, and for a moment he is not one, but a multitude, thousands of shaven headed figures in orange robes, superimposed, young, old, female, male.

Not with our fists. They send. It is a chorus, a swarm, and with the thought comes a harmony of loving kindness, a genuine compassion and deep equanimity that White Shu finds both fascinating and the tiniest bit frightening.

Bah. Gold Shu sends. A fiction you created.

Blue Shu waves her hand in a horizontal line, and the shapes morph into one. A single Caucasian male, tall, young. Perhaps a memory, then, she sends, of a different transhuman.

Kaden Lane sits next to them in the back of the black Opal sedan. The wet, neon-streaked streets of Bangkok slide by outside the car’s windows.

I’m on the side of peace, he sends, and freedom.

Red Shu scoffs. Irrelevant. He’s a child.

Blue Shu raises an eyebrow. A child who’s pushed our work forward, who’s facilitated the transition of at least a million humans to transhuman status. She pauses. But perhaps you’ll be more moved by the reactions from those we’ve long cared about.