I hated the people of Vox for compounding my suffering by resurrecting me, but I wouldn’t have wished such a fate on them. In fact I did what I could to protect them—which was nothing.

I was lucky to be able to save myself.

*   *   *

Of course I was protected in the most basic sense. Like Turk, I had passed through the temporal Arch. For ten thousand years I had been a memory in the archival functions of the Hypotheticals, and they had re-created me in the Equatorian desert because that was the business of the temporal Arches: to faithfully reconstruct certain information-dense structures so that the data they contained could be used to correct errors that might have crept into local systems. It was a homeostatic mechanism, nothing more.

The disassemblers wouldn’t touch my body because I had been tagged as useful. But that protection would be worthless if Vox dissolved into its component molecules. I needed to be able to exercise conscious control over what the machines were doing.

My best opportunity lay with the Coryphaeus. The processors that constituted the Coryphaeus were heavily protected. Even the nuclear detonation that had brought down the Network had not destroyed these devices, only damaged their interface with the physical world. The disassemblers would surely devour them, but not until most of Vox Core had been pulled apart. Much of my consciousness was already embedded in these processors. The same inhibitions that prevented the disassemblers from dismantling my body might extend to the Coryphaeus’s hardware, or could be made to—or so I hoped.

The Network began to fail as the citizens of Vox died in significant numbers, and I exploited that terrible opportunity. I used dormant processors to analyze the signaling protocols of the Hypothetical machines. I linked those protocols and signaling mechanisms into the deeply nested feedback cycles of the Coryphaeus, allowing me some measure of control.

And as Vox was sterilized of human life, the Coryphaeus became a chorus of one. I became the Coryphaeus.

*   *   *

Once I had decoded the procedural logic of the disassemblers, it became possible to feed them false recognition signals. They promptly abandoned the deconstruction of Vox Core. I used subtler and more potent instructions to reduce them to dormancy. They lost all organizing cohesion and fell from the air like dust.

But it was too late for the inhabitants, and nearly too late for the upper levels of Vox Core, which had been eroded to a skeletal framework of girders and fractured cladding. I was able to reseal the inner portions of the city and repair the relatively minor damage to the engine decks, using a combination of robotic devices and co-opted disassembler flocks. I allowed the disassemblers to dispose of all human remains, leaving nothing half consumed.