"If you're hallucinating from painkillers, I suppose I must be hallucinating from exhaustion," she muses. "I remember painkillers. Vaguely." She rubs at her calf.

"I have some lovely ones back in my cabin, they're probably fine if your metabolism's within spitting distance of normal, but I'm unfortunately not at all sure what they'd do for hallucinatory women," he says, smiling.

"My biology's mostly the same as baseline, and my few tweaks don't really interfere with that sort of thing, but I don't actually currently have any injuries that require them. Hello and welcome to Milliways, the bar at the end of the universe. Apparently no one has a damn clue which universe is ending but it's apparently been doing so for a damn long time." She jerks a thumb at the window of exploding stars. "This place hijacks doors at random from a wide variety of universes. What's yours like?"

"Well, I can tell you that I'm from anno domini nineteen eighty-three and that I object to having to use that phrasing because he's not my lord and that I'm from Earth and that seven years ago the United States of America was overrun by genocidal murderbots," she says, "for instance."

"...Twenty-nine ninety-seven Earth Common Era," he says. "I think that's the same calendar, but while I don't know much about pre-Jump Earth history, I can pretty definitively assert that none of its countries were ever overrun by genocidal murderbots. That seems like the sort of thing that would make it into most summaries alongside Shakespeare and the pyramids."

"Well, we have Shakespeare and the pyramids. And genocidal murderbots. And mutants, apparently those don't come standard."

"Ah... can you unpack 'mutants' for me? I've known the term to mean different things to different people even without extra universes in the way."

"...In my universe, there's a recessive gene called the X-Gene that, when manifested, can cause changes dramatic enough and apparently out-of-nowhere enough, since it's recessive, to the child's phenotype, that the class of persons who have two copies are called 'mutants.' Effects of the X-Gene range from white hair to blue skin to fully-functional wings to generation of and control over a personal magnetic field to telepathy."

"My sister and I are mutants, and the genocidal murderbots were specifically designed to kill us. We want out. Ideally we would like to come back some day with the resources to turn them into scrap metal, but at this point we'll be happy to settle for being able to survive without having to set guards every night and scrounge for the increasingly small number of places that the Sentinels aren't watching. The Sentinels are the murderbots," she adds.

"I... can definitely offer you somewhere to go," he says. "Several somewheres. I'm actually on my way to my version of Earth right now, and from what I hear it's pretty robust at handling refugees, although your situation might be unusually difficult to explain. The resources to turn the Sentinels into scrap metal... might also be available, but I'm already running a pretty high cost overrun on my last mission; planetary and subplanetary conquests will have to wait until I'm assured of my ability to feed, pay, and equip my people."

"I understand. Back when any of the rest of our family was alive we would have prioritized them over random strangers too." She considers. "If it matters, we can earn our keep; my sister has the magnetism I mentioned, and what it largely comes down to is very good metallokinesis." She points to a cuff on her sister's wrist; it looks to be made of stainless steel. How it got on her wrist is a mystery, since it's flush against the skin and there appears to be no latch. "That used to be coins."

"And if you don't mind my asking, what's your special feature?"

"I'm a telepath. I'm not reading your mind, but I could, or speak to you in your head, or put something there, and with remarkable precision. I've copied languages from people and shared them without touching anything else in there. I can also knock people unconscious or affect their movements without actually touching anything in their minds."

"That's... certainly a special feature," he says cautiously. "Please excuse me if I sound suspicious; I've spent the last six months near-continuously fleeing assassins and the part of me that asks 'what's the most devastating way this could go wrong?' is on permanent high alert these days. I expect you can relate."

"Oh fuck yes I can. I don't suppose it soothes your nerves any that if I had been out to get you I could have simply pretended to be a living telephone?"

"My nerves are not near so easily soothed. But thank you for the thought."

"Understandable. Thank you for not responding to having frazzled nerves by trying to kill me."

"...Is that a common problem?"

"The Sentinels were created because their makers were afraid of us."

"Well, that's... not quite the most atrocious thing I've ever heard, but it clears the top five, I'm pretty sure."

"Really? I mean, we do have abilities that could do some serious damage, some of us. Granted that they went overboard in execution but in terms of motive I'd say they had a better one than most people who commit atrocities."

"It's just such a... wretched failure of imagination," he says. "People have spent vast stretches of history hating and fearing one another for this or that reason, and the answer is never indiscriminate murder, and there's always some fucking fool who thinks it is, and then smarter, more compassionate people have to clean up their damn mess."

"It's not that you're wrong, it's just...I'm pretty sure I could come up with more than five examples of the way you're right. Although I suppose it's possible you have fewer atrocities in your spacefuture," she allows.

"My... space future... contains a couple of interplanetary empires that have made forays into interplanetary conquest. As motives for killing a lot of people go, greed and pride are both worse than fear. I think what puts your example above the standard case of 'they're terrifying, let's kill them' is how much better it could have gone if the people with visions of peaceful cooperation had got there ahead of the people with murderous robots. I have a deep personal loathing of wasted potential."

"They did," she says wistfully. "I guess it wasn't enough. And that's a fair reason, I suppose."

"Visions of peaceful cooperation can be... difficult to carry out. And there is little glory in the trying, sometimes."

"Peace...is never the easiest option," she agrees.

"That depends on the alternatives. And on whether you're taking the short view or the long. This is not a popular philosophy among mercenary admirals, but I've always held that the ultimate objective of any combat effort is to achieve peace as efficiently as possible."

"You're right, of course. The problem is how people define peace, because an absence of peace isn't just the presence of active combat. I've heard that there's a difference between a negative peace, which is the absence of violence, and a positive peace, which is the presence of justice, and obviously that's not a bright line, but sometimes you have to choose between one and the other. And some of the real problems start when people decide that things count as an absence of justice that shouldn't."

He sighs. "Yeah."

"Anyway. You mentioned wanting coffee, right? The Bar," she waves at the countertop, "is magical and sentient and will give you a free beverage."

"...The most devastating ways that could go wrong are... unsettling to contemplate."

"I suppose you have a point. I didn't really have much to lose, so I didn't think much of it. But now I'm imagining something that explodes when in contact with low enough pH."

"My inner paranoid tips his hat to your inner paranoid."

"Did I mention I've survived for seven years in a post-apocalyptic wasteland?"

"You implied something along those lines, yes."

"You don't do that without learning a thing or two about paranoia. Anyway, since you're the one who can hold the door to the universe not filled with death, it's pretty much on you to decide when to leave, although if it's all the same I think I'll let my sister sleep until it's time to go. She's had a rougher time of it the past few days than I have."

"...Should I ask? I can refrain from asking."

"Magnetism includes pushing off the Earth's magnetic fields to fly. Sentinels can't fly. She got us away from a couple of them, but there were others nearby. We had to keep going."

"Mm. Yeah. I think I get the idea." He gives a sympathetic glance to the sleeping girl.

She continues to sleep, oblivious to all sympathy.

"I'm really glad we found this place when we did. I'm not sure how much longer we would have lasted."

"Well, now you have your choice of... coming with me to the admiral's cabin of my flagship, or waiting and taking your chances on the next sympathetic stranger, I suppose. I can wait a little while myself but I'm irrationally reluctant to try the questionably hallucinatory coffee, so I don't want to make it more than a few hours."

"We'll come with you, I think; she can sleep later if we're really rid of those machines. We've no idea when anyone else will arrive or how interested they would be in letting us in to their universe. And, frankly, you've already made a very good impression. I can wake her now, if you'd rather leave sooner rather than later."

"Might as well let her sleep at least for the moment. I'm not in a rush on the scale of minutes, and a better prospect might come along."

"True. So...what's being a spacefuture mercenary admiral like?"

"I find it a very fulfilling career, personally."

"I got that impression. But...better question. What's your particular spacefuture like, compared to...well, you might not be familiar with twentieth century technology levels, but compared to there just being Earth?"

"There are... more planets? Well. I presume your world also contains multiple planets, but in mine they are inhabited and mutually accessible."

"What are some of the non-Earth ones like, I mean?"

"Varied. It's hard to find a... point of entry, a place to start explaining. Um. Mars has people on it now?"

"That's cool. It's just--Earth is one of my options, sure, but...I'm not at all sure familiar is better, in this case. So I'd like to know what my other options are. Is why I'm asking."

"There are about two hundred habitable planets and stations in the galaxy. You can get from Earth to any of them in a couple of months, tops. Back on my flagship I could easily conjure you up the tourism pamphlets of the top fifty or a hundred most interesting ones, but out here I have fewer resources available."

"That's fair. Also, it's been about seven years since I had to make small talk with a stranger, and I'm not very good at it anymore I don't think."

"Valid."

"If there's anything else you'd like to ask me I'll answer to the best of my ability and otherwise I suspect we'll probably stand in slightly awkward silence until it's time to leave."

"Well, then, if you'd like to discuss your historical and tactical situation you can do that, and if you'd prefer the awkward silence, maybe I'll wander around and take in the sights of this bizarre location."

"I'm happy to discuss history and tactics. I can tell you quite a bit about Sentinels on my own cognizance but you're going to have to steer me a bit on the history part."

"I'm mostly interested in the tactics."

"I can think of some things to try on them," says Admiral Naismith. "Some of them I have to rule out because some weapons should not be fired inside the atmosphere of an inhabited planet, but there's plenty more. Do you know how many there are, how wide an area they cover?"

"As of the last time we were able to get any news from the rest of the world--about five years ago--they had covered the entirety of the continental United States and were being sent to Alaska and Hawaii, but had yet to invade any other countries. I wouldn't be surprised if this had changed since then, but I don't know that it has. As to how many there are...according to the numbers as projected six years ago, probably somewhere between one and two hundred million."

"That will make it... annoying to clean them up with a force of five thousand," he says. "But still potentially doable. If they'd overrun the planet, I'd start to worry."

"Judging by their observed density in the areas I've been in, it's possible that someone decided to, say, invade Mexico, but unless the current number is a lot higher than projected they couldn't possibly have overrun the planet."

"Promising... of course, it's unclear how I'm going to get my fleet there in the first place, so perhaps I should be planning for them to have spread out more by the time I get there."

"Bar claims that as long as my sister and I go back there someday time will be paused in the meanwhile."

"...Useful."

"I'd be slightly less cavalier about leaving if there wasn't a decent chance it would mean that no one else dies in the meanwhile."

He nods.

"And then, of course, there's the matter of what to do with the country after. I'm pretty sure the faction of government with the murderbots just straight-up overthrew the rest of it."

"I don't carry around a stable governmental system in my back pocket, unfortunately..."

"Oh, no, I didn't expect that. Just--musing aloud, I suppose."

"Well, that's not to say I couldn't figure something out."

"Oh, sure--so could I, probably, given some time and ideally the ability to study various systems of government and how they work and how they're implemented. I suspect the ultimate answer will depend a great deal on factors I can't know right now, though, like what resources exactly will be available at the time and how much infrastructure the Sentinels have co-opted and how much they've straight up destroyed and who's available to run it."

"Yes. A difficult but not insurmountable problem, and very preferable to the problem of being overrun by murderous robots."

"I think most problems that people have are preferable to that one."

"True."

"Are there any doorlike things large enough to put one of your spaceships through? This place overwrites 'doors' but apparently this is a flexible category."

"...Some of them, yes... definitely not the whole fleet."

"I'm trying to think of more useful questions, but it's hard, without knowing more about what there is to ask about."

"I'm having a similar problem."

"My questions are generally on the order of possible ways to move things between universes on the relevant scale. What are yours?"

"I want to understand what this place is and how it might be useful to me, but I don't know enough to know where to start asking; and I want to give you useful information about my world, but I don't know enough to know where to start explaining."

"I don't really get this place very well myself, to be honest."

"Yes, that's another problem. Lack of obvious well-informed sources."

"So far as I can tell the main value in this place is less the place itself and more the people one meets. Although there are obvious exceptions; a couch is a much nicer place to sleep than some."