“Please be careful,” he said, giving me a studying look. “The deeper the node embeds itself, the better the Coryphaeus knows you. On some level, it’s already negotiating with you. Sooner or later it will offer you something you want. And you might find it hard to say no.”

*   *   *

In the remaining hours I practiced operating Oscar’s Network toys, reassuring myself that I could get the appropriate response from them at least nine times out of ten. I could already interact fairly confidently with the ordinary Networked control surfaces (video feeds, temperature controls, etc.) in the suite. A military aircraft was a vastly more complicated device, but it didn’t need more from its pilot than a reliable communication of intent. I figured I was just about good enough to give it that.

I slept a few hours while Allison kept an eye on the video feeds. The murder of the Farmers had made her somber and deeply wary. Newsfeeds reported minor outbreaks of violence throughout Vox Core: A woman had committed suicide by leaping from the high wall of a housing tier. A man had stabbed his infant daughter with a kitchen knife. Waves of conflicting emotions were propagating almost too quickly for the Coryphaeus to identify and extinguish them. And there was worse news. Allison shook me awake: “You have to look at this,” she said.

I followed her out of the bedroom. What she wanted to show me was fresh video from an overflight of the Hypothetical machines. As the sequence began, the Hypothetical machines were crawling through a dry glacial valley toward the shore of the Ross Sea. No doubt they were closer to us than they had been the day before, but otherwise there seemed to be nothing unusual about the image. The angle of vision altered subtly as the drone continued to circle beyond the safe limit. I wondered what I ought to be looking for—and then it was obvious. Suddenly, simultaneously, all the Hypothetical structures began to deform and dissolve.

Almost at once, there was nothing on the ground where the machines had been but a dense gray fog. The camera zoomed in until fog filled the entire screen, not fog anymore but a granular swarm of small objects. I used my Network skills to overlay a scale gauge in metric units. It told me the objects were all uniformly sized, each one a little more than a centimeter on its longest axis.

Which only confirmed what I already knew: these were the same crystalline butterflies that had swarmed the vanguard expedition in the Wilkes Basin—now in vastly greater numbers. The Hypothetical machines must have converted their entire mass into this form.

The swarm moved like a nebulous arrowhead toward the sea.

“That’s how they’ll come for us,” Allison said. She gave me a look that meant, We need to leave NOW.

2.