My book was released June twenty-eighth. For nearly a week, the trial was mainly about the fact that the trial could not be about my book. Then, on July tenth, the messages went out, thousands of them, each one unique, and personal, and true:

“On [January 3, 2387] O.S. killed [Indus Pygmalion Reaper], and thereby prevented [massive gang violence across Portugal] which would have killed your [grandmother], so you would never have been born.”

Three-fifths of the world received notes like this, each customized, the particular way O.S. had saved your life. Reality hit home. The lives bought by O.S.’s sin were no longer abstract, they were ours. Suddenly the media chatter was muffled and measured. Opponents of O.S. asked for change rather than retribution. Voices that had been screams the day before admitted that the question was not black and white. Bull’s-eye sigils multiplied. When the court opened that morning, and Ganymede Jean-Louis de la Trémoïlle, Duc de Thouars, Prince de Talmond, former President of the Humanists

* * *

That was a strange place to end a sentence, Mycroft. What did Ganymede do?

Reader? Are you here?

Of course. I am always here, even when thou strayest.

Oh. Still here, then. I… they interrupted me, as I was writing. Caesar and Ἄναξ Jehovah. They took me to visit Romanova. I just got back, I just… The sky is falling. Disaster, reader, irreparable, absolute. This is the wrong war. No way out now. No solution. Ashes. Ashes. All fall down.

Calm, Mycroft. Each thing in its turn. Explain. Is it the outcome of the trial that shocks thee so?

The trial? We survived it. Now we’ll survive this, too. Why couldn’t this have been the war I thought it was? Why did they have to be so kind? Too kind.

Who was too kind? The judges?

There is no solution. Mobs chant, torches kindle. No one could stop this now, only He, He, our callous Architect, our Author. Hear me, Providence! I beg You in the name of He Who is Your Guest, Your Peer, Your Friend if ever Friend You had, my Good Master Jehovah! If You have any Love for Him in Your unknowable Heart, then bring my prayer to pass! Do not make it this war! Change once again the course You have already changed so many times! Will us a kinder war!

Mycroft, thy pain is moving, but I cannot understand thee if thou strayest so from the order of thy chronicle. Concentrate on me now, on thy task. What happened next? What of the trial? Of Ganymede? Answer quickly, so thou canst then explain what dark event has so broken thee and thy narrative.