“Get out of there, Fift!” Dobroc said. “The Peaceables are raiding—”

“Never mind that!” Fift said, jumping up from the couch. “Stop talking about that! I can see that for myself! What’s wrong with Shria? You’ve driven my agents to a collapse, I can’t ask them—!”

{Return to your stations}, someone broadcast to the reactants’ hall in a blistering override, {and restore them to the approved fabrication sequence. Deviations are not authorized by consensus. Return to your stations.}

Dobroc looked up at Fift, brown-brown-brown eyes wide. “I think it’s the polysomatic network. They’ve overridden it, cut . . . cut it off for that whole goopfield. Cut . . . everyone’s bodies . . . apart.”

“What?” Fift gathered zir robes, gripped them in zir hands, staring at Dobroc. “How can they do that? How could they get consensus to do that?”

Fift clutched zir robes over zir mouth and nose. The coughing came so hard and fast ze could barely stand. Ze felt Pip’s shoulder under zir arm, Pip’s arm around zir chest, pulling zir along; ze let Pip half-carry zir towards the exit.

Dobroc held zir gaze. “People are frightened, Fift. Since the global feed outage, there’s been a huge wave of cohort defaults . . . abandoned children, logistics breakdowns, evictions, closed routes. The Idylls are full, and the authorized temporary behavioral-variance emporia are overflowing . . .”

{It appears}, Pip sent, {that we must postpone the remainder of our interview.} Zir face was close to Fift’s in the swirling red smoke, eyes squeezed shut, jaw clenched.

Fift coughed, throat raw, eyes full of tears.

“. . . people might authorize . . . a lot of things.”

In the goopfield, the Vails and the Peaceable screamed again, a sharper, higher, wrenching scream torn from all their throats at once, and then collapsed as one and lay still, panting.

Dobroc exhaled. “May Trickster ignore us. They turned it back on. Shria’s going to be okay, Fift. The interruption only lasted a few hundred heartbeats. Ve’ll reintegrate fine—”

Orange stoppergoo billowed up from the goopfield all around the Peaceable. It caught the Vails’ bodies, lifting them, swamping them, and they disappeared in its thick, immobilizing flow.

“They could have used goo in the beginning!” Fift said. “They didn’t have to tear anyone apart!”

“Maybe they had to get it ready,” Dobroc said. “Or maybe . . . maybe they wanted to show what they can do. To make a point.”

Fift’s audience at the industrial hall, when ze and Pip burst through the door among the fleeing reactants, was five million.

Interlude

REACTANCY SYNTHESIS ARTICULATION: “The Current Crisis, a Near Historical Perspective”

Burum Apatox Merix, synthesist-articulator: The issue is not a few wayward Vails engaged in an unlicensed tussle . . . a few chastened Vail heads poking up through orange stoppergoo. We’ve seen that before. The issue is the Peaceables’ use of paralytic somatic interference! Not since the Age of War have . . .