“I’ve never cared about any of that—I am a scientist. That’s all I ever wanted to be. An inventor, a trailblazer. The maker of our future. The rest of it never mattered. The money was nothing more than a tool. A means for furthering my own research. I left the finances to the experts—they would have been nothing more than a distraction to me. But now, with it all unraveling, I’m seeing parts of our empire that were built up by people I employ but have never even met. Products we’ve developed that I never even knew existed. Things we have had a hand in that I never would have dreamed of. It has been illuminating, in a way, learning how much we had grown, pushed our way into industries I was never interested in. Corporate expansion has its own logic—subsidiaries purchasing subsidiaries, cornering markets, expanding their interests. There were things going on I would never have sanctioned, had I known.”

Independent systems, exploring without a mind to guide them …

“How far has it gone?” Evrim asked.

Was Evrim company property as well? To be bought in a hostile takeover? Seized along with the assets of a subsidiary?

“They haven’t touched the main holdings yet, but … there are hundreds of subsidiaries, larger and smaller, that are already gone.”

“How far?”

“We’re half of what we were a year ago.”

Evrim stood up from the table with a jerk. Their chair clattered to the floor. “How could you let this happen to us?”

“Oh, Evrim,” Mínervudóttir-Chan said. “If I were as powerful as you’ve built me up to be, I would have been able to stop this. And to stop the sun from rising as well.”

“I never thought you were powerful,” Evrim said. “The only people who think you are powerful are the ones who watch you on the feedstreams or read your press releases. I know you better than that, Arnkatla. Remember who I am— I know you. I’ve always known you were weak. Powerful people know what they are doing, and why. All you know is how to do things. How to make minds. How to keep pushing at the boundaries. But you don’t know why you are doing it. So all you make are more accidents. More mistakes. And now it’s finally catching up with you. Now I see it. You can’t stop what is happening to DIANIMA. So you fled. You didn’t come here to help us: you have nothing to offer. You just came here to hide. No communication in or out—it’s perfect. You won’t have to watch your world fall apart.”