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Tayna can’t smile, because she’s sealed up her face against the wind. But Lillian’s only real inside her head, so she can probably feel the sentiment.

I’m afraid, she says.

She wants Lillian to hold her. This is sort of emotionally onanistic, since Lillian is part of her, built of old memory and bootstrapped simulation. (A special guilt she’s grappled with—when you have the ability to regulate and modify every aspect of yourself, to snuff or satiate every need, do you have a
right
to want anything?)

So what does it mean that Lillian frowns, draws back, and, exhaling lovingly rendered frost, says:

Oh. I can see why you’re scared. Things are going wrong.

Connor and Lillian know everything she knows. The Haldane network that ate her brain has room for the sweep of Tayna, and a few merely human minds too.

But they don’t usually agree on anything.

Ten years ago, in the days of post-civilizational convulsion and the rise of tentative new paradigms, Tayna visited with a little mountaineering collective near Kremmling, Colorado. They kept to themselves, eschewing the headnets coalescing around Colorado Springs. But like everyone they still used Haldane, still gave their bodies and brains over to the new power.

In theory, everyone had a choice. Tayna and Lillian’s subterfuge shattered Connor’s dream of monolithic engineered transcendence (
Teilhard,
her dreams still whisper, when she lets herself dream:
Teilhard was the other way . . . )
and set the Haldane nanomech infrastructure loose, open-source, freely transmissible. Conversion was voluntary.

But, in retrospect, the choice was so one-sided it might as well have been coercion. The new breed didn’t need the systems that made baseline life possible, the states, the economies—and so those systems collapsed. Old shackles broken. A new world enabled.

Maybe, Connor and Lillian seem to think, just a chrysalis for something worse.

Tayna heads back towards Kremmling. She follows the old California Zephyr railway southwest through canyons cut in banded gneiss. The train doesn’t run now. The winter thaws into an early spring.

Do you miss trains? Connor asks. Governments? Civil society? Organized human achievement? I expect not, since you ruined them.

I made them unnecessary.

You balkanized the species.

I liberated them.

Tauntingly:
Them?

Get new material, Connor.

One apocalypse isn’t enough for you, is it? You’re not going to be satisfied until you get the God job full-time.

In Gore Canyon, where the kayakers used to play, she finds people from Kremmling gathered in a rowdy knot up on the cliffs. They leap from the canyon walls on wings of paramuscle grown wrist to ankle and ride the rapids down through rock and hole until the chaos spits them out into calm water and they come up whooping.

Tayna sits down to watch for a while. They’ve diverged farther from the baseline, but that’s all right. That was really the whole idea. Ensure diversity. Avert Connor’s singularity—the monolithic future exploding out of a single stifled point.

They’re playing a computation game, for the joy of it. Watch the rapids, plot a course, and leap. Whitewater turbulence is a tough problem. Ten years ago nobody in Kremmling could’ve managed
that.

The very first people you meet are going to prove me right.

She gets up from her roost and lights her antenelles to send a greeting.

Warmth comes back her way: welcome to a stranger. And the photon caresses of a millimeter-wave scan as a bunch of them team up to search her for guns or combat organs.

“Is Mariam here?” she calls. “I’m looking for my friend Mariam, if she’s still around—”

“Tayna!” Mariam calls, and sends a little pulse of happiness. “I thought you weren’t coming back.”

You never told me about her, Lillian’s geist says. Old friend?

The truth is that there are ten thousand Mariams in ten thousand communities Tayna’s visited, people who cherish Tayna as a dear friend, because Tayna’s incredible cognitive firepower lets her look on them and understand them and make herself someone they can trust with a fluency that can’t in all honesty be distinguished from manipulation. And that makes her guilty, like the friendships are just instrumental, like she’s just a water-bug on the surface of the human experience. Too smart to swim.

You’re lying, Connor says. That’s not the truth.

Fuck you.

But Lillian’s brow furrows and she says: He’s right. Fuck him, still! But . . .

The truth is that Tayna’s been gone so long, deep in the self-catalysis trance, that she’s not sure she can relate to anyone else on Earth as more than a child. It’s the wizard syndrome, the weight of age and power, and it’s coming on hard.

She has the ability, via the Haldane backdoor, to do nearly anything she wants to anyone she meets. And if she
does
find something deeply wrong out here, some fundamental inequity rising . . . she already knows she’ll use that power.

But she smiles, and waves, and sends her own happiness back, a stutter of brain activity jacketed in peer-to-peer protocols, scrubbed of any complication.

The Kremmling cliff-divers rest a while in the sun. Mariam spreads her wings to catch the light and waits, smiling, for Tayna to say something.

She hasn’t aged, of course. Tayna inhales one of Mariam’s dead skin cells from the mountain wind, sequences it, and compares it to a decade-old reference. Finds CAS9 touchups all over Mariam’s genome: gentle rewrites where Haldane has repaired oncogenes, extended telomeres, laid the metabolic groundwork for her beautiful new wings. And, engraved in the chromatin, little signatures and signs—developers who wrote some of the packages Mariam has adopted. There will be others, elsewhere in the body and brain. The power of Haldane’s programmable tissue goes far beyond the genetic.

A cluster of strangers pop up on Tayna’s inferentials, coming in from the west. She checks them out, decides they’re not important, and goes back to Mariam.

Hey—look here. A sequence that pops up again and again:
trust certificate by the Lillian Banning Cabal. Execution-safe.

Looks like you remain a going concern, Young Miss Banning, she tells Lillian’s geist. Still camped out in Chicago, screening the ecosystem for pathologies.

Happy to hear it. Shouldn’t you talk to your friend? She looks so happy to see you.

Tayna’s just putting it off, Connor interjects. She already knows.

Knows what?

That the moment she starts asking questions, she’ll see the disintegration of this anarchic world-wide interregnum on the horizon. The rise of the new and final class of power structure.

Lillian kneels to marvel at Mariam’s wings. I don’t know, she says. Is anything inevitable, now? They can change so much . . .

Connor makes a mockingbird sound, an ostrich sound. You two enabled a dire new kind of inevitability, he says. And it’s right here. I’ll bet my simulated life on it.

“Mariam,” Tayna says. “I need to ask you for something. It’s personal, and it’s big.”

The newcomers are closing in, opening into a loose perimeter. But none of the Kremmling cliff-divers seem concerned. Tayna’s sure they’re unimportant.

“Anything,” Mariam says, brow furrowed. “Why even ask, Tayna? I know how much you’ve done for us. I know—”

The awe and reverence and fear coming through say: I know you can have whatever you want.

Tayna hesitates. She
doesn’t
want to know yet. Once she has the data, the engines of her intellect will render it down to a conclusion and that will be that, irrevocable. “Do you ever want things to . . . go back?” she asks.

“To the old world?” Whisper of emotion, voluntarily disclosed: an absence of doubt, a pre-emptive certainty.

“Yeah.”

“There’s nothing important we had then,” Mariam says, “that we don’t have now. And now I’m happy.”

“Because you can tweak your brain chemistry.” Tayna smiles wryly, to take the edge off. “Hardly objective.”

Mariam leans back on her hands. The new arrivals have circled them, dark, angular, closing. Not urgent. “You think that’s not important? Choosing when to be happy, why? What higher freedom could you ask?”

Connor makes an impatient gesture.

“I need performance profiles,” Tayna says. Is it really asking, when you know you’re going to get it, one way or another? “I need to know everything you’re thinking about, and how hard, and what it’s for. And who. Who it’s for, too.”

Something like the crack of a cable stunner sounds from somewhere close, but Tayna knows it can wait. Especially because—

 Mariam’s facial muscles slam into self-paralysis. Sweat glands shut down. Armoring herself against analysis of her microexpressions. It’s a conditioned defensive response, a trigger to guard a secret.

Every
this-is-critical
heuristic wakes up and shrieks.

Mariam’s consciousness catches up to the reflex an instant later. “I don’t know,” she says, clearly torn. “If it were just about me, of course, of course, but—Tayna, there’s trouble in Kremmling. Headnets out of Colorado Springs keep trying to compromise us. We had to start a planning committee . . . they asked us to keep some things private . . . ”

Go on, Connor says. Go get it. One way or another she’s going to tell you. Don’t waste time pretending you have ethics.

Lillian holds up her hands in caution. Tayna, don’t—she has a right—

But Tayna, high wizard of the new world, opens the Haldane backdoor and steps into Mariam’s head.

It’s always been there. Tayna was lead architect, so of course she knew the risks of leaving an intentional vulnerability in the ecosystem, but she guarded it so cleverly—with an agnosia, a shield against awareness. Elegant, right? You have to be Haldane-smart to figure out the backdoor, and if you’re running Haldane, you’re vulnerable to the agnosia that guards it. You can see the backdoor but you’ll never be able to integrate the information into awareness.

Tayna alone has this power: access to any and every transhuman mind on Earth. Unilateral. Devastating. But she knows herself like no other system on the planet. Trusts herself, mostly. She’ll exercise her power, just this once, in the name of proving Connor wrong.

She grabs the information she needs from Mariam’s metafaculties and steps back out.

And on her way out, glimpsing the gray angular strangers and their weapons through Mariam’s innocent eyes, something inside Tayna un-breaks. Repairs a crucial disconnect.

Agnosia. You process the information, but you can’t assemble it into awareness.

You see them coming. Hear the cableguns fire. But you don’t think it’s important.

Mother
fucker.

Tayna rises. Aegisware floods her mind, venom in every synapse and soma, burning out the intruder: the agnosia they slipped in to hide their approach. The wool they pulled over eyes as old and keen as hers.

Her antennelles light up at full warload. Mariam stares up at her in awe and terror.

Tayna addresses the faceless gray commando-morphs all around them, their brain-stealth stripped away. “One chance. Surrender.”

“Tayna Booker.” The voice comes out of them in one collective radio susurrus. “Simulate the situation. You will find no viable options. Open your mind to our control, or we will use force.”

The problem with being the oldest smartest Haldane user on the planet is this: you’re still not bulletproof. So—the nuclear option.

For the second time in as many seconds, Tayna broadcasts the Haldane backdoor key, knowing, even as she does, that it’s exactly what Connor wants.

When she’s done pithing and resocializing the warmorphs she gives them to Mariam. “It wasn’t about you,” she promises. “I’m sorry. I have to go.”

Northeast now. Towards Chicago. She has to find Lillian—the real Lillian and her mighty Banning Cabal. Lillian who promised to keep an eye on the world.

The soldiers were Connor Straylight’s, the real Connor, and if Connor came for her
now,
it’s not just about revenge. Connor doesn’t think that small. No, Connor must be grasping for a second chance at his own apocalypse: Teilhard, the unilateral re-engineering of all human consciousness towards a more rational design.

Connor’s geist trails her all the way, grinning.

Yes, Tayna says. You’re very clever.

I really am, aren’t I? I made you broadcast the backdoor key. Made you tip your hand. The real me, of course—I can’t take any credit for him—

This is part of why Tayna maintains the geists. By speaking to them, she understand what the real people behind them will do. She says: So you sent your warmorphs to bait me into using the backdoor. They listen to the key I transmit and pass the data back to you in San Francisco. But that won’t be enough. It’s not a static password, not even single-factor authentication.

But now I have a start. And if I’m smart enough, if I have enough brainpower in my arsenal, I can crack the rest.

Access to every Haldane-operating human on Earth.

At Tayna’s side Lillian purses her lips and exhales in two growling steps. I hate him, she says. So much. He’s like I’d be, if hadn’t had a scrap of self-awareness growing up.

What do you want? Tayna asks.

I’d guess, Connor’s geist says, that I’m trying to solve the same problem you are. The one you don’t want to talk about. The fundamental unsustainability of the world you built.

Engines of specialized thought centrifuge Mariam’s performance data into its component pieces. Feed the slag into hungry, sealed subsystems eager to render verdict.

Northeast still.

Tayna shelters with a bugbreeder collective under the arches of the defunct Denver Mint. They grow dragonflies, bathing the pupae in Haldane nanomechs, whispering the naiads towards adulthood. “We dance,” they explain. “There are other uses. Agriculture. Defense. But first we dance.”

The neutrois performer who plays welcome for her can see through the jeweled eyes of their swarm and dance the mass of them as a single whirlwind of silver odonata shining in the firelight. Some of them have razor wings and when the dancer cuts theirself shoulder and brow Tayna smells the trick of carbon chemistry in the blood and
oohs
even before a few of the dragonflies land, spark, ignite the bleeding rivulets into pale fire that glows on armored skin.