Achilles: “What?”

Faust: “When I say never mind, I mean it.”

Achilles: “Do you have a sense of how and when the war will start?”

Faust: “All the others asked you that question, didn’t they? And now you’re asking me? No, I don’t know. I thought the Odessa mess might start it, or this Mitsubishi strike, but it might start when the Senate meets on Monday, or when the Cousins have their election, or when the Saneer-Weeksbooth trial starts, or when it ends, or if Spain refuses to let Europe make them an Emperor, or if someone says something stupid about Sniper in an interview, or if Mycroft here wanders outside and gets killed by an angry mob and MASON finally cracks. It could be anything. Normally I love suspense, but not this kind.”

Achilles: “What do you intend in all this, Faust?”

Faust: “In that particular sentence, the war, the prewar, or life in general?”

Achilles: “The war. Will you insist on vengeance for what O.S. has done against Gordian?”

Faust: “Vengeance isn’t useful. Participating in a political coalition, should one arise to address how to proceed, may be useful, depending. I take as yet no stand.”

Achilles: “Not even on set-sets?”

Faust: “Oh, one must take whatever opportunities one can regarding set-sets. That’s not even a question. Not to hurt the set-sets themselves, of course, they’re just clockwork tombstones testifying to past infanticide, no, it’s the abominable fools that make them that must be stopped. If convenient. If inconvenient, it can be postponed. The number of children unmade by set-set training is not large compared to the number who might be killed in riots if the issue is badly handled.”

Achilles: “Tell me, Faust, isn’t what your sister has done to Ganymede and Danaë and all her creatures brainwashing, just as much as making a set-set?”

Faust: “Yes. It’s a complex yes, but, in a nutshell, yes.”

Achilles: “Then I want to hear from you why a set-set is so much worse.”

Faust: “Because a set-set is murder where the corpse still walks. There are over two billion theoretically possible developmental sets in Brill’s scale. A few hundred are common and a further thousand reasonably common, but sets aren’t for life, we develop over time and our numbers go up, rapidly in childhood but also after that; my own sixth digit went up recently. But set-set trainers, to protect the inhuman powers that they want to sell, start engineering brain development long before the fetus has even lost its gills, shaping the brain’s growth stimulus by stimulus, light and touch rationed like prescriptions, and the chemicals, some extra glucose here or poison there to make each neural cluster swell or shrivel as the engineer requires. A Cartesian set-set like Eureka Weeksbooth is a 1-5-2-19-19-2-21-1 for life”—he spat the numbers, as one spits names of devils—“and, because the founders of these techniques have read their Brill enough to fear that nature might still triumph, just to make extra-sure the sets stay locked, they train the set-set not to let itself develop close relationships, no cross-stimulation, passion, friendship, nothing outside the script. Eureka’s fed and housed in a bash’ but no more part of it than a grandfather clock. I won’t deny that Heloïse and Dominic are brainwashed, as much as Martin Guildbreaker, or Spain, or myself, or anyone, all clumsily and semi-intentionally trained by bash’ and parents to become what we become, but Spain, Martin, myself, all of us can change, grow, love, not love, and variously expand the palette of what humankind can do, or be. Eureka may as well be dead.”