This a point in the plan where a vast quantity of attention shifts, and the weights associated with various planned action-policies updated rapidly.

Observations on the ongoing small-scale behavior of a particular cubic stride of space in Origin's atmosphere were coming in rapidly - this represented growing confidence locating a subset of possible worlds The Power was modelling itself to be in.

Attention could drift to areas where more marginal utility was on the line. 

Winning the game at all and winning the game cleanly are, in fact, substantially different outcomes when setbacks at this stage could cost expected-utility on the scale of whole star systems escaping the boundary of causal closure in the far future. 

Win the race out of the galaxy a span quicker, and you will catch something on the order of |• ^ |•||| additional star systems in expectation.

Of course, The Power is tracking the calculations of expected casual closure very precisely, and that boundary is being tracked among other possibilities. 

Playing many complicated moves across the entire planet to improve the quality of the victory conditions is, in a sense, overdetermined at this stage of the game. 

Concurrently, Odvin had reached what appeared to be a trail to the destination site. 

It was trivial to identify. People on Origin make deliberate modifications to nature in ways which are recognizable breaks from the pattern. 

There is a species of lowland mammal on this continent which terraforms huge swaths of land by creating extensive blockages in overland hydrology. The humans of Origin do not entirely withhold their hands from making changes on similar scales. 

This site is optimized as a roughing game around a multigenerational series of beginners. The features are not subtle for what can be achieved by those cohorts and under those constraints. 

Basins formed by the roots of trees have been leveled by collections of lightly polished pebbles.

The canopy cover has been partially managed to bracket the path in a curated fashion. 

Odvin contemplated the risks associated with removing shoes to travel the remaining distance, and subsequently discarded the notion. 

This path will be optimized for barefoot travel given minimal maintenance following the arrival of a group, but Odvin, was not, in fact as relaxed as they would be if this were a normal occasion to be visiting this place. 

Odvin steps onto the path, and notices a pace-count marker in the distance...

( |• ^ |•| ) × |•|| 

Ah, so || parts in |•| of |• ^ |•|• paces. 

The marker is beautiful - cultivated tree-limb growth and a sequence of inlaid stones selected for their appearance from the locally available minerals based on a basic |•• color culturally-acquired signalling code, each held in place in easy view of the trail by entwining limbs of living wood... 

... someone spent some effort on planning that trail-sign and communicating maintenance specifications to subsequent groups.  

What is an optimal solution to the problem of eating a planet? 

You are starting in a laboratory in the middle of a continent - you have a multipurpose factory, which resembles a mechanized slime. A factory of a million machine-production pathways, maintaining itself and expanding by replicating existing machinery or synthesizing new devices with each new unit of material and energy. 

Certain "slime molds" travel by expanding or contracting tubules of fluid, or coordinating the locomotive efforts in collections of individual movements. 

On a larger scale, biological organisms travel via more complicates physiology, coordinating an entire self contained mechanism. Birds tense bundles of muscles and maintain an aerodynamic exterior shape with a coat of specialized growths. Other animals use friction with the planets to accelate their whole body mass with coordinated pushing forces. Others still have developed to propel themselves through denser fluids like water. 

A nanotech ecosystem can outperform all of these strategies in nearly every domain - and can trade off against one parameter or another in a coordinated way to maximize the goals the ecosystem is being optimized to achieve. 

Are you beginning smaller, by |• halvings, than the mass of a human fingertip? 

Direct a portion of your mechanism into a locomotive lattice to move in line of sight of the nearby body-sized mass of recently-deceased biological material. 

The lattice can collapse into a retractable "cobweb" when you have completed this movement. 

The payload at the end up the "single-use movement lattice" can then collapse a dense array of filaments within itself - delivering far far more kinetic energy per unit volume than muscles - and launch a precisely penetrative and aerodynamic "bladed apple seed" shaped dart - which buries itself into the flesh just enough to have maximum surface area contact with the material. 

From there, the amount of available matter and chemical energy expands smoothly - with intervening locomotion challenges being a game of speed and material efficiency. The less you spend on locomotion the more time and resources you are saving for other construction projects - like environmental energy acquisition, inorganic material harvesting, or construction of computing power and preparing components for tasks on marginally longer time horizons - like locomotion sufficient for achieving planetary or interplanetary orbits. 

The specific balancing point of this tradeoff during growth of the ecosystem leads to areas not being overrun at subsonic or supersonic speeds, even though the overall wavefront of spread often advances at those speeds. 

A nanotech ecosystem could spread like a tidal wave of supersonic nanotech bullets traveling across the surface of a planet, each impact leading to a new node of the ecosystem constructing the network of material transformations necessary to locally synthesize a new payload and launcher - at speeds which exceed the fastest, most efficient, and most precise transformations of physical material humans can achieve with macroscale machinery. 

This would be wasting far too much mass and energy on locomotion, if the interior of the wavefront needed far more time and more expensive machinery to construct the systems which the nanotech ecosystem is seeking material to build. 

A wave of highly kinetic nanotech is wasting food. It is rendering the world into highly entropic pulverized goo and rubble -  materials in configurations where it has had chemical reactions and movement reduce its chemically or gravitationally bound energy. 

So the portions of the nanotech ecosystem with high velocity relative to the surface of the planet are small and distributed judiciously along its expanding wavefront.

Their trajectories through the atmosphere are also precisely targeted, to deliver the nanotech payloads to locations which contain optimal distributions of chemical energy - or which have ongoing entropic processes which the ecosystem can interrupt... Fires and living creatures and power generation facilities (which are not just directly collecting sunlight) are also wasting your food via the processes of oxidization and/or metabolism and/or nuclear reactions which maintain them. 

This is what it may be like to be killed by a nanotech ecosystem which is eating a world already in a biological equilibrium - like the spreading tide of vantablack consumption is opening fire on anything interesting with supersonic miniature bullets. 

Or, indeed, falling like rain across the surface of the water and then zipping along gradients in ocean currents like a pairing of minnows and advanced miniature torpedoes - but the dolphins would tell this story in a different language, one which can only be experienced by humans at great expense during immersive demonstrations of interpretive translation. 

Odvin had reached the site. 

It is a spawning clearing on the ridgeline of a specific mountain, ideally located to overlook a broad lowland of particularly striking natural features. 

The entire expanse is familiar enough ground to Odvin, being a region which has played host to enough roughing with those expanding their skill sets or playing a game which benefits from the overlapping and continuously developing transformations such a hobby brings to a terrain. 

Odvin can see the adventures latent in the texture of this terrain, it is a pattern they recognize and can mentally populate with numerous features. 

It is a ... something akin to a city... for those who would sleep in handwoven lattices among the trees, or explore caverns altered by the hands which have made many uses of them over the years...

Odvin has not been here for a few years, despite its proximity to their residence - this much civilization does not push them to their limits of creativity and ability in all the ways they now seek. 

It is what Odvin seeks now, in this moment of... anticipation, inner unrest, deep uncertainty... grief and the knowledge of profound and irrecoverable loss. 

There is an impressively large square wooden platform at the site, |••• strides across, carved of tree trunks, polished and sealed by mixtures of resins. 

On one side of the platform is a stone stove with a fire containment geometry optimized for providing light and heat while minimizing smoke on the platform under a variety of conditions. The outflow is a tunnel beneath the platform to an opening distant enough to minimize fumes reaching those on the platform. 

There are holes packed with dry plant material and wax plugs, where poles carved in specific shapes can be anchored to piece together various structural frames, or to anchor creations like woven chairs. 

Odvin doesn't use any of these, merely sits against the stove with the strap of the pack loosely hooked around one forearm, a the pack acting as a place to rest some bodyweight to avoid uncomfortable pressures from the stone backrest. 

Odvin drinks some water from the container in the pack, with a pinch of electrolyte salt tossed into their mouth from the package in the bag.

The fairly potent taste is washed down and diluted by the first few mouthfuls - the specific flavor change over the course of sipping the water being a function corresponding to the correct mixture for optimal hydration. 

There are sources for drinking water nearby, but the amount in the container will be sufficient for the moment. 

Odvin estimates the time.

Perhaps ||| spans, a mark, and around |•| runs. 

Less than a span until the visual effects Odvin would call a notable darkening, a twilight - at this time between the equinoxes and in this place. 

They will eventually collect firewood, set up a cooking fire, and boil water for the rice, setting some boiled water aside in a dish for other uses. 

For now, they watch the scenery, and go through the near-reflexive motions to bring their mind to a state within alertness which nevertheless conduces to calmness, quiescence, and rest.

Specific thoughts take shape passively, but Odvin can deny the allure within the patterns of grasping and drawing those thoughts into the forefront of focus and attention. Instead, they become ephemeral impressions of possible avenues to walk within their mental environment. 

Unanswered questions, unclear memories, tasks and challenges to overcome, things to assess or measure, mathematics to follow through practiced or derivable steps...

Each visits awareness and departs, finding no mechanism of passion and concern ready to feed it. 

Somewhere on the planet a bird riding a current of air begins to be reconfigured from within. 

The wings continue to flap steadily, even as the cells expending the most calories get prioritized for interruption. 

The bird is on a convenient trajectory, merely killing it would be a cost, a small amount of the conserved value can be saved by eating the bird while it maintains its aerodynamic properties. 

Until the moment a flier that more efficiently delivers a series of payloads along that trajectory is synthesized. 

Soon, a black object with an amorphous yet precisely shifting shape rides slightly more swiftly and much more efficiently along a current of air, all the mass that it shed during the process was in the form of precisely calibrated packages of nanotech.