By the time I restored the city’s lights, the corridors and tiers and plains of the city were as empty as if they had never been inhabited. The air-circulation system eventually seined away any remaining dust.

*   *   *

But that wasn’t all I could do, I discovered.

As I waited for Turk and Allison to return—as I hoped they would—I began to explore the newly porous borderland between the Coryphaeus and the Hypotheticals. Before long I was tapping into systems larger than the Earth itself. All Hypothetical devices were interconnected, in nested hierarchies that reached from tiny disassemblers to archival machine flocks in translunar orbit, energy-mining mechanisms in the heliosphere of the sun, signal transducers in the outer solar system, transducers circling nearby stars. All these I could now perceive and influence.

I devised filters to compress this flood of information into intelligible packets, making the secrets of the Hypotheticals small enough that I could contain them. And making myself larger in the process.

My physical body began to seem redundant, and I thought about allowing it to die. But I would need it, I thought, to interact with Turk and Allison, if and when they came back. What they found here would be difficult for them to accept, and what I planned to do next would be difficult to explain.

*   *   *

Over the course of their multibillion-year evolution the Hypotheticals had learned to exploit a capability they had never acquired for themselves: agency.

Agency—that is, volitional action aimed at achieving conscious ends—had arisen only sporadically in the galaxy, mostly in the climax ecologies of biologically active planets orbiting hospitable stars. Species capable of agency seldom lasted longer than it took them to overload and overwhelm their planetary ecologies. They were, as the stars measure time, an unstable and ephemeral phenomenon.

But it was just such a species that had created the self-reproducing machines that were the first progenitors of the Hypotheticals. And these blooms of organic sentience were unfailingly useful: they generated unusual information; they concentrated valuable resources in their ruins; often they launched new waves of replicators, which could be harvested or absorbed into larger networks.

In time the Hypotheticals began to actively cultivate organic civilizations.