Most of the ecumene celebrated a newfound security, unaware even of the existence of the Flood.

The second part of my deal with the Council, to preserve humans as a potentially renewable species, required a selection of intact and vital specimens. Thousands more were extracted from hiding in shattered redoubts around the conquered human territories and carried to Erde-Tyrene, which even today exhibits the fossil remains of humanity’s most ancient ancestors.

Yet while honoring my request, the Old Council insisted that the last surviving humans were to be devolved. Human epigenetics would be played backward, reversing their time-enriched evolutionary music. Individuals, the Council mandated, would be forced to consciously experience this reversal, as a reminder and balance for their arrogance and cruelty.

Each and every day, for months, my specimens felt their bodies lose memory, complexity, mass—and finally, intelligence.

The Council and the Builders then put another, even stranger twist on my hopes to preserve human cultural patterns. As the humans devolved, the Composer-gathered personalities and memories of their fellows at Charum Hakkor would be holographically stored within their changing flesh. Not active, but dormant—thus avoiding the consequences of Composer decay.

Each devolved human would in effect carry the memories of tens of thousands of their kind, preserved for future study and investigation—and passed along to their offspring.

Those same memories and personalities would also be transferred to machine storage and subjected to constant rote interrogation—creating a library of enslaved ghosts subjected to mechanized torment for thousands of years to come. Thus, the Council believed, the secret to human resistance to the Flood would eventually be found.

Our perverse nod to the Mantle exhibited cruelty far beyond simple extinction. The Builders had gained practically everything they wished for. But that did not stop another and very different war from breaking out—between my husband and the Master Builder.

Powerful forces within the Council and among Warrior-Servants still supported the Didact’s strategy for containing the Flood: hundreds of enormous Shield Worlds, placed at key locations around the galaxy to both survey for Flood incursions and conduct carefully chosen, system-wide operations. The Didact had worked with me to provide these huge constructs with a tremendous capacity to preserve imperiled species—on a localized basis.

Thus, he said, his defenses did not violate the Rule of the Mantle. Unlike the Master Builder’s proposed Halos, the Shield Worlds did not require a great extinction, and in fact they could be used as immense refuges in time of crisis.

In response, the Master Builder ordered that his Halos also be adapted to support and preserve species. Playing politics better than any of us, the Master Builder knew that this removed the Council’s last objection to his Halo strategy—the threat of violating the Mantle, of destroying the galaxy in order to save it.