With that, I was given to Utopia’s custody, thence to Achilles’s camp of Servicer recruits—Myrmidons, I should call them, for they were battle ready—who guarded me strictly as we waited for the coming act, of which they knew no more than I. My pleas for freedom fell on deaf ears, but the Myrmidons shared the newsfeed with me as soon as Earth’s cameras spotted He Who Now Does More Than Merely Visit. “There! The Forum!”

“Visiting the ruins on the way out?”

“Not Rome’s. Romanova’s.”

There He was, reader, breaking the police line as He stepped onto the Rostra where His Peer’s message had been received. There was the stain upon the stone, the dark of spattered gore, the clean patches where MASON, Martin, and myself had stood beside Him as His brains burst forth. Humanist President Vivien Ancelet followed Jehovah up the steps this time, wearing, not a presidential suit, but a bright Olympic training jacket. Four more members of the Olympic Committee joined them, two with Sniper’s bull’s-eye stark upon their breasts. These six together stood upon the bloodstain, and faced the Forum, empty, all crowds banished by precaution’s curfew. Only the stunned police remained, and here and there a clerk or secretary, frozen mid-errand by the Tribune’s unthinkable return. But there are always cameras.

“Since this war is Willed and must now be,” the Addressee began, “let the sides mean something. I would not have the longest age of peace in human history ended over land rights, or majority, or prejudice, or sex, or set-sets. Many of you are prepared to make war to destroy Me, because you fear what Sniper fears, that I will control all Hives, and merge them, and end this world and its version of Liberty. I did not intend to do these things, until today. No one should doubt what has been proved: that, for three hundred years, this civilization’s unprecedented peace has been enabled by assassinations. The current system cannot function without O.S. I believe that I am intended to replace it with a system that can. I believe that is My purpose on this Earth, here, now, though I know it is criminal for Me to voice this belief so publicly. Therefore I have decided. I shall use the power I have been given to seize control of all the Hives, and Romanova, by force if need be, just as My enemies prophesied. I shall destroy and remake whatever I must to create a conscionable world. This is henceforth My foremost Earthly goal. I do not yet have details; such a complex thing as a New World Order cannot be designed in haste. I cannot tell you, if you ask Me now, which of the institutions, rights, and laws you cherish will survive, and which I shall destroy. There may be seven Hives when I finish, or six, three, twenty, none, but whatever world I remake this world into will not include O.S. or the kind of moral compromise that birthed it. Humanity must outgrow such compromise. If you desire this change, My unknown new order, support Me. If you prefer the current bloodstained partial-paradise, support Sniper.” He paused. “There. Now both sides mean something.”