“It’s the Saneer-Weeksbooth computers!” Papadelias arrived at last, charging on foot down from his office at the best sprint his century-old bones could muster. “Sniper must have set the program before fleeing the house. They’ve launched the whole reserve, a billion cars flying wild, blocking everything, emergency zones, Utopian airspace, everything. We don’t dare launch an ambulance, it would be hit in seconds. We tried calling a civilian car, but the network is rejecting new calls, not just here, everywhere. Cars already in flight won’t land, and new ones aren’t accepting passengers. The world’s shut down.”

Panic followed, cities not yet strangling but feeling the threat of strangulation, as when the heart has just failed and the body cramps by instinct knowing it will soon starve. That sky, streaked with heedless blurs, is now the most common nightmare image of our time. Everyone saw it, in the street, through windows, the last ignorant remnants startled from play or sleep by half reports: “The cars have stopped!” “They shot Tribune J.E.D.D. Mason on the Rostra!” “There’s chaos in Romanova!” Experts tell us it was not those first minutes’ freeze that did the real economic damage, but the panic as the whole world dropped its work, huddled in corners, jammed the network with calls to friends and bash’mates, as a population of ten billion all at once needed to find their loved ones safe. One billion had watched Tully on the Rostra—eight billion now found the channels that showed Sniper.

“I wish there had been another way to end this, but there wasn’t.” Sniper smiled as decades of training left it breath enough to preach, while its opponent panted. “As long as Jehovah Mason lived, the Hive leaders would have kept trying to make them their heir, and Joyce Faust’s army of client-spies would have kept trying to destroy any Hive that didn’t capitulate. Jehovah Mason would either inherit or destroy all seven, that was the plan. Tomorrow I’m sure leaders and experts will line up to question my evidence and motives, but don’t let anyone persuade you that the global coup I stopped today would have been anything less than the total destruction of the Hive system. They’ll say it’s not a coup if everyone was willing to give Jehovah Mason power. They’ll say Jehovah Mason was a good person, wise, competent, the best leader we could have had. They’ll say most of the Hives would still have existed, even flourished, even if they all had one leader. They’re wrong.” An angelic calm dawned on Sniper’s face. “The Hives are separate because they stand for separate things. I’m a Humanist. I’m not taking orders from any Mason, and I don’t think a Mason should take orders from a Humanist. Different Hives think differently, and need to be led by people who think differently. It doesn’t matter how wonderful or competent Jehovah Mason was, no one can think seven ways at once. The Hive system made monarchy popular again by eliminating the risk of tyranny, since if a bad Emperor came along, all the Masons would just switch Hives, but free choice requires options to choose from. Combining all Hives under a single ruler would leave this world no better than back when geographic nations gave people no choice. That’s why my bash’ has spent the last twelve generations killing people whose existence, whether they intended to or not, threatened to destroy the freest civilization—no, the only free civilization—that’s ever existed. That’s why Jehovah Mason had to die.”