And what about our students on their fear-hushed campuses, still facing their choice? The Cousins now feel much less unique. The Humanist refusal to reform feels like a heretic’s last refusal to recant before sentence is passed. The Mitsubishi too may evaporate, since there is no guarantee Romanova will accept their boggling and opaque proposal. Europe’s bulwark has been heritage, and the comfort of self-identity, which its nation-strats provide: “I am Irish,” “I am Canadian,” “I am Greek, and love the special sense of homecoming when I sit down to a meal with those who speak my tongue, and bake the bread my ba’pas baked. I want my nation-strat, my people, to have a voice in my Hive, and its laws which bind me.” Yet now the young Greek or Canadian hears that the European Council, and his Strat President within it, suddenly want to answer to the King of Spain? Uncomfortable. They are all uncomfortable now, these greater hives: the Cousins, Mitsubishi, Humanists, Europe, even the Masons with wrathful Death now at their helm. As for the minor Hives, Gordian, though safe and stable, is intimidating to those not raised Brillist. Utopia? One does not, when all paths seem steep, plunge lightly into thorny wilds. All Hives have oaths of allegiance, reader, but only one names such a frightening sacrifice:

I hereby renounce the right to complacency, and vow lifelong to take only what minimum of leisure is necessary to my productivity, viewing health, happiness, rest, and play as means, not ends, and that, while Utopia provides my needs, I will commit the full produce of my labors to our collective effort to redirect the path of human life away from death and toward the stars.

Even if Utopia defines its project so broadly that anything from a thrift shop to a life-affirming romance novel is considered a contribution to the human engine, and even if it recognizes the mind’s need for rest and play and lets its members carve out ample leisure hours, still, those who do not feel the true vocation wisely shy away from that yoke of self-directed servitude which follows the pledge: my days do not belong to me, but to the future. All seven, then, are fearsome paths. I tell you this, reader: across the Earth on a thousand campuses that day, the students learned at last why, at seventeen, raised in a bash’ that saw this crisis looming, I chose to face my rampage and my execution rather than choose a Hive.

* * *

May 18: Fourth trap. Moved Mycroft in a defective car which made a planned emergency landing in an isolated spot outside Esbjerg. Let Dominic’s Mitsubishi secretaries hear me discuss the emergency over my tracker. No sign of any attempt to kill or kidnap.