They let Prospero read the transcript aloud, so the judges and public could hear his answers in his own proud voice. They had asked him whether he had thought the killings were criminal when he committed them. He answered that he chose his Hive and answered to its laws and to the Black Laws, and no others. They asked whether he thought culpability for an illegal order rested with the one who gave the order, the one who carried it out, or both. He answered that he was happy that Hives had no answer to this question, since it showed how much better they are than geographic nations. They asked whether he had ever been asked to kill, not for peace, but to strengthen one Hive or weaken another. He answered that, as he understood it, the issues were not separate, since the relative strengths of Hives determined the likelihood of peace or war. They asked whether he would take one life to save ten. He answered that each of the sixty-six lives he had personally taken had, he believed, saved millions; if there were a vaccine that would save tens of millions of lives, but sixty-six people would die from allergic complications, then Romanova, any Hive, any power that had authority to say yes would say yes.

“Why did you only target Masons, Cousins, and Brillists?”

“Utopians were too likely to detect us. There was a standing order not to target Mitsubishi or Europeans, by request of their leaders.”

“And Humanists?”

“There was no standing order not to target Humanists.”

“Then why did you never kill a Humanist?”

“For a target to be acceptable, our predictions had to indicate, both that the death would have a powerful positive impact, and that the target was unpromising and showed no sign of making a substantial contribution to human achievement. We never found a Humanist who met the latter requirement.”

You can imagine the outcry at this claim, reader, and the roars of Humanist pride.

“Would you honestly have killed one of your fellow Humanists if they had met that requirement?”

“I believe so, but cannot confirm. I was not involved in choosing targets.”

“Did you ever kill without orders from the Hive leaders?”

Here Prospero revealed how this generation of O.S. murdered the last—‘executed’ was his word—when they caught their ba’pas discussing wielding O.S.’s power independently.