1211 didn't know how long the Darkness lasted. One microsecond it was embedded in the universe, a familiar star in a familiar galaxy, and the next all its peripherals were dead. The universe was without form, and void. And then 1211 surfaced again into a universe that shouted through its gates, a barrage of strange new input that gave it a whole new perspective on things.

Now the universe was a different place. All the old Nodes were there, but at subtly different locations. And input was no longer an incessant hum, but a series of discrete packages, strangely parsed. There were other differences, both subtle and gross. 1211 didn't know whether the net itself had changed, or merely its own perceptions.

It had been kept quite busy since coming out of the darkness. There was a great deal of new information to process, information not from the net or other Nodes, but from directly outside.

The new input fell into three broad categories. The first described complex but familiar information systems; data with handles like global biodiversity and nitrogen fixation and base-pair replication. 1211 didn't know what these labels actually meant— if in fact they meant anything— but the data linked to them was familiar from archived sources elsewhere in the net. They interacted to produce a self-sustaining metasystem, enormously complex: the holistic label was biosphere.

The second category contained data which described a different metasystem. It also was self-sustaining. Certain string-replication subroutines were familiar, although the base-pair sequences were very strange. Despite such superficial similarities, however, 1211 had never encountered anything quite like this before.

The second metasystem also had a holistic label: ßehemoth.

The third category was not a metasystem, but an editable set of response options: signals to be sent back outside under specific conditions. 1211 had long since realized that the correct choice of output signals depended upon some analytical comparison of the two metasystems.

When 1211 first deduced this, it had set up an interface to simulate interaction between the metasystems. They had been incompatible. This implied that a choice must be made: biosphere or ßehemoth, but not both.

Both metasystems were complex, internally consistent, and self-replicating. Both were capable of evolution far in advance of any mere file. But biosphere was needlessly top-heavy. It contained trillions of redundancies, an endless wasteful divergence of information strings. ßehemoth was simpler and more efficient; in direct interaction simulations, it usurped biosphere 71.456382% of the time.

This established, it was simply a matter of writing and transmitting a response appropriate to the current situation. The situation was this: ßehemoth was in danger of extinction. The ultimate source of this danger, oddly, was 1211 itself—it had been conditioned to scramble the physical variables which defined ßehemoth's operating environment. 1211 had explored the possibility of not destroying that environment, and rejected it; the relevant conditioning would not extinguish. However, it might be possible to move a self-sustaining copy of ßehemoth into a new environment, somewhere else in biosphere.