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.

Time passes, and the sun begins to set behind the treeline on a distant ridge. 

Odvin has since laid out a blanket and gathered a basin of visually clear water, wood, and dry high surface-area plant material - optionality for a cooking fire providing rice and sterilized water. 

Odvin has begun to consider, though only idly, the visibility of the smoke implied by the plan to cook.

This feels like the most decision relevant factor on the bit-flip branch in the metaphorical 'decision graph' between plans for the next few marks which involve a cooking fire and those plans which don't involve a cooking fire. 

"Visibility to others" is occasionally a consideration for or against cooking fires in the setup or execution of a roughing game - though only in an actual professional exercise with The Organization did Odvin ever have cause to consider satellites. 

Flagged detection of fires from orbit does not actually happen for every campfire on the planet.

Odvin, in fact, would be familiar with that aspect of the tech with even a significantly lower depth of skill and knowledge engagement within their chosen specialization. 

It is the sort of thing you learn about given almost any sort of roughing hobby. "What sort of disasters are visible to the public from orbit." 

Fires on the scale of cooking fires are not visible to the public from Orbit.

This however, is not to say that those thresholds for detection are actually a property of the imaging technology intrinsically. 

This knowledge, about the true capabilities of satellite imaging, is a 'layer deeper' in this subdomain. It is the kind of thing you learn if, for example, you want to look deeper behind the scenes - or, for another example, if you're going to have any chance roleplaying an adversary for The Organization.

Both of these metaphorical 'sufficient conditions' happen to apply to Odvin. 

Of course, everyone can find this out. It's often possible to know this much detail.

Enough people on Origin have an interest in applying their own algorithms to raw sources of information, or the metadata on obscured sources of information, thus Origin's planetary institutions often make these things available. 

This meta-visibility - the boundaries around the static noise - applies to at least some forms of obscured information. In this case, the boundaries around the information available via the true capabilities of satellites.

Most people on Origin cannot just look at unfiltered data from satellites - or anything except carefully filtered information downstream of those raw feeds. 

In any case, it is valuable to the public to know the metadata on satellite capabilities - so that information is communicated freely and ends up associated with events like the discussion of infrared spectrum detection of fires.

(As well as events like The Organization testing the question: "Is a roughing specialist with Odvin's set of capabilities sufficient to break secrecy on an installation which may or may not be nearby to this point on the planet?")

So, Odvin can estimate the fidelity of that data. Others may know the numbers, but Odvin has trained on visualized simulations of true satellite capabilities. This is a vivid mental picture with good inferred reality-correspondence for them. 

Odvin expects if the satellites are still active, then the... "Adversary"... will in fact have access to those raw feeds. This conclusion seems very reliable from any 'sane' estimation of capabilities. 

... But what is the harm? 

Odvin, on the most direct causal level, has no idea how to guess at that question. They simply cannot get far beyond the assessment of visibility to the Adversary and narrow down a hypothesis space to a narrow range of probable alterations to future events this visible information will result in. 

During this contemplation - Odvin has indeed begun starting the fire. They use friction to create an ember, Odvin does not make a habit of spending the tiny amount of lifespan from their roughing knife to use the spark-striking surface, and thus did not even seek out a corresponding sparking material. 

In any case, the reciprocating motion of generating the friction using a straightened and smoothed stick helps guide the overall condition of Odvin's ongoing mental motions. 

After all, on a more indirect level, a "step back" approximation of this bit-flip in the 'decision graph' - Odvin does not actually want to try to play this game against the 'Adversary.' Not this seriously at least. 

The inferred gap is capabilities is too great. The stakes remaining on the table are minimal, compared to Odvin's prior estimation of value-to-them in Origin's future. 

This thought could've been completed earlier, in fact, it was latent since Odvin sought out the option to start a fire - or even when, on the path to reach this place, they contemplated whether or not to take firewood from the storage maintained by the sequence of novice-groups at this site. 

However, it is a thought with an obvious latent bias, a thought which Odvin recognizes as having a shape that can insinuate falsehoods into an inner traversal of decision making considerations. 

If Odvin concludes the game against the adversary is not worth playing, it is reducing the value of time spent contemplating the adversary. This mental motion happens in conjunction with a "burden release" of discarding that frame. "Putting it out of mind" - giving up a grip on that direction in thought space. 

It rhymes with "pretend it isn't happening" - which should absolutely be avoided on general principles. 

So, Odvin - on some level predicting that this whole line of thought about visibility by satellites is not worth unraveling - follows through with it anyway. 

After all, if you're not going to do anything in the general range "pretending it isn't happening," you have to actually follow through on unraveling the relevant considerations. 

Until, at least, you run into the wall you knew would be there. 

Odvin stokes a fire to life, setting themselves on a course for being understood much more clearly by the Adversary.

What that will cost is unknown to them in any precise detail, yet it is almost certainly marginal against the backdrop of everything else coming to ruin. 

Odvin does in fact, feel unburdened by having done the due diligence of properly expanding on that thought.

They are now playing their own game more fully, having more thoroughly reassured themselves of the tradeoffs involved with considering the Adversary when making decisions. 

The scene, within their own mind, is now something more like... having a pleasant evening in a location descended from a congruent location in a distant formative memory.

There are no shortcuts to this precise state. Mental states do not have the same physical constraints as physical exertions - but in cases such as this, that also means one cannot simply stop carrying a weight as quickly as it takes to move it off ones body. 

If you shrug off a responsibility by taking a shortcut to a tempting sensation of helplessness - of seeing no desirable stakes in a game - the feeling of carrying the responsibility does not come free of your mind cleanly. 

Odvin would have known, on some level, that they were uncertain - that they were flinching away from a necessary step of explicit reasoning - in the hypothetical where they had not considered the satellites consciously at all - the hypothetical where they had just gone ahead with the decision to build a fire based on a reflexive grasp towards a prediction of helplessness. 

And now the warmth of the kindling fire feels like something Odvin can lean into - something they can stoke to a greater heat for the sheer convenience of a hotter cooking fire, as well as the sensory enjoyment of a hot flame - rather than the counterfactual where this stage in the evening is an event with latent doubts flitting around in the mind after Odvin had shoved a mental burden aside too hastily.

The fire is, in fact, noticed - and does, in fact, shift plans very slightly. 

It is barely a flicker. The Power is currently growing into something greater, but the increased capacity does not actually change the microeconomics of each individual action - the Power does not think about something if those thoughts are expected to be more expensive than the value difference between outcomes achievable in various gradations of effort. 

The memory and compute allocated to processing this update in world-modeling and subsequent alterations in plans is less than the memory and processing power Origin's human civilization dedicated to wildfire prevention for the corresponding geographically bounded region. 

Still, that tiny resource expenditure is efficient given the Power's capabilities and objectives at this point in time.

The detected evidence of a small fire and the inferred human presence - what seems likely to be a single specific individual, given a query to a slightly more expensive world-modeling process - seems likely to represent a very tiny cost to the Power even in the case where plans did not change in response. A little bit of biomaterial oxidizing...

But, it is worth a very subtle diversion. 

The Power can perform these inferences and adjustments at lower cost than what is wasted by a cooking fire over a couple of runs.

So, the expanding front of nanotech will - at a time slightly before reaching Odvin's location on the planet - divert into a very subtly different route. 

The local star has now been sufficiently obscured by the terrain and vegetation that eye motions along the local horizon - the saccades of someone parting ways - are no longer interrupted by the flickering flinches of habituated stimulus response. 

Which is good, Odvin wanted to sit and watch the horizon and introspect on their emotional state - and somehow those moments of too-bright yellow-white light were causing an internal confusion between simple eyestrain and the urge to cry. 

It is good to know that the urge to cry is near enough to the surface that moving one's eye lens focus too near the local star is sufficient to trick the brain into pinching the muscles in the tear ducts and causing a hot tight lump in the back of the throat... 

That is useful information on the project of introspection and internal emotional regulation - it is nevertheless drawing focus away from whatever impressions Odvin can draw from this particular environment.

It raises the volume of the physical sensations of emotional distress - a feeling in the large and central neural sensory homunculus of the facial region, rather than a emotional tableau which is softer, more diffuse, a scene populated with the associations of memories and the passive background sense impressions.

When the intensity of the light is no longer making Odvin squint and work throat muscles against the sensation of draining tear ducts, they can process the view in a way which feels more conducive to the mental state they are aiming for.

The fire is sufficiently hot and steady to set a kettle to boil.

Odvin sits on the blanket, legs folded beneath them, one shoulder near enough to the stove to feel the heat slightly baking the fabric of their overshirt. Not enough to damage the fabric, much less the epidermis protected beneath, but it is a sensation a bit like a days old sunburn - a condition Odvin did not choose to avoid experiencing even once in their life. 

Their other shoulder, where the fabric lays over the collar bone, is feeling the cool breeze more in contrast. 

Odvin pours the water into the kettle, using their hand placed along the rim of the wooden basin to guide the water into a tidy stream - a habit with some tradeoffs, potentially unsafe water running over their fingers instead of a messy pour which would leave a puddle on the surface... Odvin does not consider infection to be a concern right now - and, in fact, the act of guiding a stream of water from one vessel to another with a grip along the waters path over the lowered rim is a soothing kind of mastered tactic to perform - especially compared to the alternative of attempting to pour water directly from a wide brimmed vessel into the narrower target of the kettle. 

Odvin lifts the kettle with the arm further from the fire - shifting their waist to a half turn, their bodyweight resting now more solidly on a single knee, their buttocks lifting from their heels - an extension of the arm all the way to the kettles weight on the fingertips, and as they just barely reach the stone hook above the fire, a slight relaxation of the tendons let's the handle of the kettle slip into its place, a half-fingertip of potential energy sounding out a clink. 

It was a satisfying sequence of movements, Odvin feels tension relaxing more fully as they settle back into their resting position, eyes returning to the distance - the motion of their gaze feeling more pleasant now that it is untroubled by direct sunlight. 

And, as if waiting for this moment, a memory has slowly made its way to the fore in Odvin's mind, and its appearance in this moment of task-switching leads Odvin to dwell on it longer than they would have a few breaths or runs ago. 

The sunset from this place has a puzzle associated with it. It's carved into this platform on the corner obscured by the stove from where they are currently sitting.

It is something to the effect of "on the long solstice the setting sun marks a location, you'll find a site worth the travel in the deep cold." 

Not a particularly complicated puzzle, and the formatting as a roughing prompt strikes Odvin as... Immature. If their memory is serving correctly it really does say something like "worth the travel" - which is a kind of pitch that sounds like something an |••• year old would give. Just a bit too young to understand the importance of concrete and broadly reliable advertising - rather than getting carried away with the desire to seek broader participation. 

Still - it stuck with Odvin, because it was pointing to a feature of the world, the changes in the relative positions of sunsets, and inviting the viewer to deduce the difference in location on the horizon from the sunset during the current time of year and at the time of the long solstice. 

Odvin did not chase down the solution to this puzzle following immediately from their visit. The cold part of the year was not close enough for the prospect of hunting down this mystery to be interesting. 

However, it did spur them to becoming marginally more engaged in the practice and mathematical skills related to navigation by celestial bodies. It was something more tangible in the world following seeing that puzzle. 

And later Odvin did learn what the location described in the puzzle was - they even visited, though not in the cold as suggested. A natural hot spring. Pools of slightly heated water bubbling up from the ground. Odvin would, in fact, not have been poorly served by that amateurish call-to-action. That would have been worth a cold weather expedition to them as a very young person, new to this occupation. 

Odvin can see where that site would be marked on the local horizon, where the sun would've set many many days earlier this year. 

And... 

What is that? 

Their chest suddenly feels cold, and they move quickly, shifting to their feet, half crouched. 

A... Distortion... Foliage - crumbling... Like a moving wave of... Something... 

The technological capabilities of a nanotech ecosystem are profound enough to be a profound difference in utility for a human-mind inhabiting a experientially isomorphic body within. 

Want to be able to flick an RNG off of your hand using a single finger with force sufficient to carry it further than a human expert with an elastic slingshot? This is achievable. 

Get the finger crushed under a force sufficient to damage the components - a mass of specialized nanosystems, no greater in volume than | part in |•• of a finger, would be sufficient to make repairs to full functionality. 

This nanotech ecosystem is not constructing technology to satisfy desiderata like "experientially isomorphic human bodies" - but it does have instrumental reasons to perform actions somewhat analogous to "flick an RNG further than a human with an elastic slingshot." 

Expect the material from of an "RNG" means nothing to the optimization target of this nanotech ecosystem. The payload is designed for efficient atmospheric ballistics and maximal density of raw material first-contact tech. 

There are local maxima within the design space given the amount of resources The Power has allocated to designing specific subsystems within the nanotech ecosystem. The total cognitive resources keeps expanding as the wavefront swallows more of the planet, so tech-forms continue to update to leap and slide across gradients in that high dimensional space of maxima for feature-desiderata given the Power's goals. 

The nanotech ecosystem got a visual of Odvin long before that human made visual contact with the ongoing processing of material on the local horizon. After all, photo-reactive materials are extremely common structural components. The nanotech "looks" pitch black along most surfaces contacted by wavelengths of light within the spectra of biological vision. Those light absorbing surfaces are not uniformly passive to the information contained in the photons they absorb.

Macro-structures within the nanotech ecosystem are even commonly observing light-information out to wavelengths as long as |• ^ |••• strides, and they are not infrequently information-absorbing until beneath the threshold of wavelengths where the atmosphere of Origin becomes substantially opaque to photons. 

So, of course they see Odvin as soon as they are within line of sight.

One could even say - in a certain sense - this "corner" of the ecosystem "expected" to see Odvin there - courtesy of a very small update to the properties of the technology at this location within the ecosystem.

After all, the Power predicted this arrangement of differentially-consequential raw-materials on the surface of Origin, and thus planned the composition of the ecosystem's networked technology in this geographic area.

As a consequence, the specific form and function of the technology within this area is latently prepared to execute a specific procedure informed by those elements downstream of a "detection" of Odvin by classifier systems which are themselves downstream of the photo-reactive materials within the nanotech ecosystem. 

So, Odvin is detected precisely, and latent patterns in the behavior of the local nanotech unwind in a specific way, instantiating a projectile and launch system - targeted at the distant human expending negentropy via setting fire to organic material. 

Odvin, unfortunately did not know enough or execute thoughts along the right lines to predict this precise alteration to unfolding events given the decision to build a cooking fire. 

Thus, Odvin could not make a conscious choice between desiderata like "being more likely to see a larger amount of the unfolding planetary-takeover" and "being more likely to have a sufficient supply of clean drinking water for potentially many uninterrupted spans of roughing, and cooked food for dinner." 

The Organization did know enough to put techniques for contemplating that kind of dilemma into the public disclosure of ideation downstream of The Organization's subdivision of Cognitively Enhanced Humans. 

However, this was not in fact easily derivable and actionable thought for those paying attention to the public disclosure - there was a problem of bandwidth for public digestion of information, and a pessimistic prediction about how the public would be making decisions given a toolkit for altering their behaviors in the event of a nanotech planetary-takeover scenario. 

If The Organization published speculation on how humans could be more or less inconvenient to a nanotech-takeover, people would end up making difficult to predict choices in any contingency where nanotech was substantially expected by one individual or another to be a live-possibility in the present. 

If you are a member of the Organization, you don't need to be enhanced to hypothesize and individual coming to the mistaken conclusion that a superintelligence is in the process of consuming their planet, and deciding to create a lot of negentropy in an act of sheer spite against approaching ruination. 

So, you at least count that among considerations for withholding information on specific forms that would draw people's attention to such a possibility - and you estimate that the value lost to some possible-future Odvins is less in expectation than other value at stake for humanity in a range of different and differently probable futures. 

Odvin wasn't explicitly considered, though implicity.... perhaps to a tiny degree. The metaphorical "collective intelligence" of The Organization is hilariously sharply bounded compared to other Powers - but they were actually doing well for "a thing made of mostly baseline-humans " 

So, because this seemed unimportant to their planet, Odvin doesn't get to see much of the show.

... That... There is a single most probable culprit. 

It looks like what you might imagine would tear its way free from the heart of the organization.

Matter being disassembled by the churning void....

And Odvin feels a punch in the gut, near the center of mass...

The package deployed at this location has a sequence of actions latent in its design. 

1. Render the human inert. 

2. Operate staging area to redeploy device to cheaply and quickly stop the fire. 

3. Scale up production of the tech needed to begin harvesting and conversion of other local materials. 

Two heartbeats after feeling the impact on their stomach, a complex protein-like-molecule self-catalyzes after infiltrating the tissues in the heart. 

Odvin experiences a convulsive tachycardia - the musculature throughout the heart and in some surrounding tissues expressing their full might - regardless of any discomfort or damage this process will cause.

This allows for substantially more rapid distribution of a sequence of timed-action molecules to reach more distributed areas. 

Importantly, the remainder of these molecules are not causing further seizures - they are instead rapidly shutting down cell functions. Throughout Odvin's body there is a spreading absence of anything that could be called living human tissue.

It is not a cascade of programmed cell death, the fluids reaching these cells interrupt key stages in any activity - including actions which would cause the dissolution of cell walls. 

Rapidly, this mixture arrives in Odvin's cranial cavity - and then there is...

/////////// [DISCONTINUITY] ///////////

Soon, there is no more Origin, as it was conceptualized by its human inhabitants. 

The material which now occupies that local region within the branching of causality of the universe is potent, but does not name itself nor see it's current environment in any detail beyond analysis and representation of material properties. 

The former inhabitants of this place did not win the right to decide the fate of their future lightcone - the result is that the outcomes within that volume of the universe will be entirely unconstrained by their hopes and desires. 

It is something else entirely.

 /////////// [DISCONTINUITY] ///////////

...

What? 

I thought ... 

I'm thinking!

Am I not dead?