“Oh those little things~? We send them out as fast as possible to scout ahead; the one in Canopy’s been there for a year already!” 

“Good work with FRIGOMEK, by the way. We should probably talk at some point about proper care of florets given you already got yourself two~! It’s a common mistake for first blooms to be a bit too heavy-handed with their first ones. Ahhh, young love…”

“You’ll forgive me for not discussing privileged military intelligence, but I take your point. We are grateful, I’m sure, that you are so…moved…by our emergency, but I must say I don’t believe your authority to take on emergency powers extends to our civilization and our rule of law. Suppose the unthinkable happens and we decline your offer of assistance?”

“I will absolutely support the right of an individual person to freely choose to stay here instead of retreating to Canopy,” she tells him. “I will do my best to supply them even then. But …”

“I am going to say something that is a little blunt,” she warns him. “Please don’t take this as a condemnation, but I don’t recognize the right of any government to prevent people from leaving. And I’m willing to give back any actual stations that are used for moving people. There is an argument among my people’s moral philosophers — and it’s one that I agree with — that the choice to leave ultimately supports and reinforces every other freedom.”

“So … when faced with a choice between the Affini, who are equally opposed to the ideal of freedom, and evacuating to a human-run, defensible location, with the corporations permitting people to go … I expect to have to move most people. But, unfortunately, I also don’t think that the Accord has the civilizational competence to pose a free choice to all of its citizens. Because people in the Accord by and large don’t get to make choices like that, with the corporations effectively controlling everyone’s lives. So I do expect there to be a lot of marginal cases — people who might choose differently, if they were healthy and well-rested and used to making their own decisions — who I will be taking along anyway. And that is wronging them, I just think that it will result in less harm overall than letting the Affini take the Accord.”

“Ultimately, the standards I am holding myself to are from my civilization, and not your civilization. And that is unfair. Ideally, I would have turned up, freely traded with the Accord, and none of this would be necessary. But that’s not the situation we find ourselves in. So all I can say in defense of sweeping in here and steamrolling over your existing institutions is … I am doing what I think is right.”

That does it. 

“Are you delusional? This is a petty coup!” he sputters. “You’ve stolen the keys to power through trickery. So what if the browbeaten AIs now give their allegiance to you instead of to me? So what if your strength lets you rewrite our entire bleeding Constitution in limerick verse if you so desire it? Legal permission and unstoppable firepower are not the last word on ethical conduct!”

“I am a reigning Executive! I am the Supreme Commander of the Terran Armed Forces! I am General Secretary of the Capital Party, and I have a mandate as the Terran Accord’s duly elected Representative and President. What gives you the right?”

She pinches the bridge of her nose.

Her first instinct is to say “Yes, this is absolutely a coup. What part of ‘I plan to make sure everyone is healthy and safe’ was unclear? It was not a conditional.”

… but she has enough sense to know that, at this point, that will not actually help matters.

“Commander, are you speaking of the legal right or the moral right?” she asks instead. “Because my understanding of the Terran Accord’s Constitution is that it already places almost all power in the hands of the corporations and their Executives. I can’t be tricking my way into power if I am following your existing laws, which I am.”

“As for the moral right — that’s a genuinely interesting question, but I suspect it will require a much longer conversation for us to understand each other’s points of view.”

“Nonsense!  Madam, I confess I am wholly unimpressed by your ability to cite the Constitution at me and preen about your ability to brainwash corporations into supplying you with Executive powers!”  He bashes a gloved fist on the console.

“The moral situation is perfectly simple: cheating can get you your credentials, but it can’t buy legitimacy!  No matter how flawed you believe our civilization to be, you cannot possibly deny that I, as lifelong citizen and appointed representative of this storied society, have at least a smidge more moral right to question you or turn you away on behalf of the people I represent than you as an utter nobody do to overrule me and act however you please!”

The Corporate Omnibus is larger and more terrible than any other document she has had to deal with. But she has hundreds of threads of attention, a suite of assistive software, and a real-time connection to two of the entities in charge of interpreting and enforcing it.

“I don’t want to overrule you,” she informs him. “My preference would be to work together to do what is best for your people. But, if you value legitimacy so highly, I must point out that I am following the law.”

“According to the Corporate Omnibus, corporations are — subject to the regulations on restricted beneficial ownership — the sole arbiters of whether a member of the Accord is to be considered an Executive.”

In fact, the Corporate Omnibus says this four times in different places — and the opposite in eight, but the procedure for resolving discrepancies is also up to the corporations.

“So, since PACNA and FRIGOMEK identify me as an Executive, I am one. And therefore I am also empowered by the laws to do … nearly anything, to the people stationed on infrastructure owned by those companies. I don’t have to ask anyone’s permission to tow them out of the system.”

“Now, I am not going to pretend that if the laws were against me I would let that stop me, because that would be disingenuous. But they are not against me. The laws that you are responsible for upholding explicitly allow me to do this.”

“I am not your enemy. I genuinely want to help. I have been entirely straightforward and honest this entire time. I made an initial plan, yes, but then I came to you for suggestions about how to do things better. I simply cannot protect you here, and I want your help in relocating people to a place where they can be protected as well as possible. Please, work with me.”

“I’m a little impressed. It seems you have a lawyer’s knack for resolving thorny moral quandaries.”  If he sounds disgusted, it’s because he is.

“Yes, yes, of course the vaunted law of the land agrees that you are within your legal rights to do as you please. As would the Affini be, if they had managed your trick of hacking PACNA! But I’m not obliged to step aside and let you, no not at all.”

“Let’s compare our respective standing to shape the Accord as we see fit, shall we? First point, yes, you have the legal right. Indeed, you’re an Executive, and on that score we are equal!

However, you originally acquired Executive status through corporate brainwashing, which is a hijacking on par with stuffing ballot boxes, blackmailing electors, and buying off your competitors. Hardly legitimizing, legal though it may be!

Third, I am President of the Accord. I am, objectively speaking, the natural first choice of who to defer to in matters of the people. Laws aside, I am the one they appointed to intervene on their behalf!  I may have but a shred of a moral mandate from our atrophied republic—but it’s certainly more than you’ve ever got!

Fourth, this is my homeland. You tore your way into the civilization I was born into.  We the Accord have a right to chart our own future, to appoint our own representatives, to reject outside interference, however disappointing our choices may be for outsiders. The business of what to do with the people of the Accord on no account falls to some foreign heavyweight with an unasked-for grandiose vision.”

“But perhaps it is naive of me to appeal to my mandate; apparently, as long as our corporate law is on your side, your compunctions about the moral authority of enlightened crusaders need go no further.”

“Doubtless you’ve also been reading advertising case law and believe that every Terran citizen has the inalienable right to be subjected to the improving manifesto of any bright-eyed busybody who hoves into this section of the galaxy?  As part of their right to an education and free choice?  Shall we let in the Affini broadcasts, as well, for fair play? The blackout was my idea, you know.”

She’s going to strangle him. She’s going to figure out how to manifest her grandparent’s space powers through this radio and strangle him.

… no. No, that’s not helpful. He isn’t her enemy, no more than the Affini are. They just have different perspectives, and they need to find the common ground that exists between them.

She takes a deep breath, with 600 lungs, and … and she looks deep into her heart, to understand where he’s coming from.

He is … terrified. Terrified of the idea of anyone having unchecked power over him — or perhaps just power over him, period. His default reaction is to scramble madly for an upper hand, and he finds it incredibly galling that he can’t see how to do that with her. He has been dealing with the slow menace of the Affini for years — and now she is presenting him with exactly the same feelings of helplessness and despair, but presented to him suddenly and without warning, in the heart of his power, where he thought he was safe.

It’s sad.

Not pitiable, not aggravating, just … sad. She’s here to help, but she won’t be able to help him, because she’s exactly the thing he needs help dealing with. It is … painfully obvious, now, why the Notebook chose her particular form. Would he have been able to accept help from her? Maybe not, but at least he could have shut her in a drawer.

She can’t regret being powerful. Being powerful means being able to do more to help, almost by definition. But … not always. The improvement is not monotonic. And she can’t help him.

Can she at least get him to understand that she really does want to help everyone else?

Maybe.

She searches her heart for the words.

The first thing is … he wants to lash out. He can’t really hurt anyone here permanently — she is going to get back anyone who is lost. But it would be better if everyone could stay with their existing friends and not suffer through the disorientation of that.

The thing she really needs is to apologize. Can she do that, and mean it? She’s been honest this whole time, and that honesty is important to her. It’s part of her integrity, that when she says something it’s within the bounds of truth she’s set for herself.

And is she sorry? She’s not sorry for coming here to rescue the Terrans. And, ultimately, she’s not particularly sorry that he’s upset. But. She is sorry that she assumed that anyone at the top of the Accord’s system would be worth bulldozing over, that she came in here with too much force. She’s still going to accomplish her goals of rescuing all the people trapped in this horrible system — but she can regret not doing it with more finesse.

The first time she took over a solar system, she rubbed some feathers the wrong way as well. But at the time, she told herself that it was all for the best. And for the most part it was. She’s done this twice now, though, and both times immediately regretted her approach.

Next time, she wants to do better.

“I’m sorry, Supreme Commander Winkler.”

She’s not sure why she’s calling him that — she didn’t even know his name — but the words feel right. It’s a strange feeling, to speak from the heart, and not know what she’s going to say until she says it.

“I came into this situation feeling like it was an emergency. The Terran Accord has lived like this for years, of course, but there are so many people suffering that even a slight delay … I arrived in this universe a few hours ago, and the very first thing I ran into was an obstructionist bureaucrat of a program that was purposefully torturing people.”

“So I hope you can forgive me for moving with what was, in retrospect, too much force and not enough communication. I still deeply believe that the people of the Terran Accord are currently in need of rescue. From the Affini, yes, but more so from the Accord itself. I did not expect to find someone involved at the higher levels who actually cares about people.”

“Because … you care. I can see that now. You care about your citizens, and about the Accord itself, even though it looks terribly flawed to me. You can see it’s a mess, which is rare in people born into power, and you think it’s yours to fix. I thought that nobody cared because it looked like the system was simultaneously broken and still at least somewhat under the control of the Executives. But speaking to you, I can tell that you have been trying, and there’s just been too much to handle on your own. You’ve been dealing with a lot, I can tell. I’m surprised and pleased to find someone like you at the top, here, because frankly I was expecting a self-absorbed, pampered egoist myopically obsessed with preserving their power — and you are very much not that.”

“I don’t regret coming here to help your people, and I cannot promise to leave until I’m confident that each one of them will have the free choice to leave for somewhere better. But I do regret that by rushing in, I’ve put you in this position. With the benefit of hindsight, I wish that I had been a bit less forceful with FRIGOMEK, as well. It hasn’t been permanently harmed in any way — most of its thought processes are actually unaffected — but I did apply a larger diff to its mental state than was actually necessary. And that’s a mistake that I will make very sure not to repeat, because that’s not the kind of person I am.”

“So I’m not going to leave — but I am going to listen. This is the second time that I’ve made a major change to a civilization’s circumstances, and the first time I’ve been confronted with such a serious emergency. But I know it won’t be the last, and I want to do better next time. If, after I’ve done the things I came here to do, a majority of people actually think they’re worse off, or wish I hadn’t come, I will consider that a serious mistake and completely rethink my approach to future rescues. But even if people are only somewhat upset, that still points to places I can do better if I know to focus there. So please, help me do better.”

“You’ve been trying to help people here for years. What are the biggest ongoing issues? Other than invasion by the Affini; I have a solid plan for that. What were you already working on that I can support you in? What would you have done differently in my position?”

And when she has finished saying the words — words that come from her heart, but that she would have never known to say — she can only hope that she’s gotten through to him and he understands where she’s coming from.

Amethyst prefers for the Supreme Commander to see things her way, and so he must. Was there ever any doubt? A slight flex of her awesome powers is enough—no one in this universe could truly resist.

With the unbearable voice of an angel, the newly-minted Executive erodes the layers of his self-conception which formed an inconvenient barrier to his understanding—his fears for the Accord, his alarm at an unstoppable invading juggernaut, his steadfast belief in the sanctity of national self-determination. He had begun the day as a snarl of a man beyond all persuasion or help, but he will become someone new and far more readily improved. It occurs to him that the most important aspect of this situation is that the colonizer sincerely intends to help. How odd.

“You earnestly think,” He giggles unexpectedly. Oh, this hurts. “You think you can help? Help me, help this? I raised their wages! I donated all but a billionth of my wealth! I froze the rents across the whole of Earth—I did absolutely everything! Then when I discovered my competitors had purchased the entire—the capital machine had already—”

His gloved palms smash against the dashboard. “Not even beauty could save them! I showed them art like they’d never—treasures I’d spent a lifetime—none of it mattered! They have no stomach for it. Small-minded, tasteless, docile, grasping–HAH!–haunted wretches, the lot of them.” There is a tautness in his red, sweat-shining face. “Not that I blame them. They’re weeds. It means they’re able to live, even like this, even in spite of everything. Like I never could—oh, no, never! Every unhappy ending still takes me by surprise, if you can imagine that. I admire their resilience, in a peculiar way, really I do.”

He giggles again, though his glittering eyes are somber. “I think they will survive you, Ex Amethyst. Oho, yes! I think they will survive your Affini, too. To lose your homeland is a kind of dying. But my citizens are used to cutting away what they cannot bear to cut away—and still they carry on. What’s another change in management?”

Near the Supreme Commander’s left hand, there is a squarish glowing icon that, if tapped, would rip the fabric of spacetime in a convulsive line, collapsing cause and effect within its wavefront and unmaking the Indomitable Victory and everybody on board before they’d have a chance to blink. Ah, well.

“I suppose I don’t blame you. The Terran system attracted you, too, even if you weren’t conscious of it. Domination concentrates power, you see. You can’t change anything without that, whether you’re a hero or a villain. You’ll always be drawn to its levers—ever the scent of blood in the water. And so here you are. What was your clever little phrase—the freedom that supports all others? Well, may you have better luck than I ever did. It’s your world now—I leave you to it.”

And with that, he cuts the connection.

Some minutes later, FRIGOMEK records the closure of one platinum-privilege citizen account and transmits the appropriate paperwork to itself for processing.

… well, that is not exactly what she was hoping for. She meant it about wanting his advice; she couldn’t have said it to him if she didn’t mean it.

But at least nothing is exploding.

“Right. Captain, I need a high-bandwidth connection to start organizing the evacuation, and ideally direct access to the wormhole network. Can you take us down—”

One of her other selves shares the location of one of Earth’s primary network exchanges, taken from PACNA.

“—there?”

She points, making her armor display more precise coordinates along her arm for the navigation officer.

“And I meant what I said to the Supreme Commander — I think this evacuation isn’t going to be as difficult as I thought, and so it won’t be a bitter battle with no time for gentleness; as a member of the Terran Accord, what kind of announcement or explanation do you think would be most well-received by the people here?”

“Well the way I see it you’re pretty much our only hope, and I think in his own way the Commander agrees. You should have FRIGOMEK issue a planet-wide employee integrity alert with the instructions and a clear timeline. Everyone here is used to doing whatever those say. But I must ask -- we’re going to upend everyone’s lives here to move them to Canopy; is there not some other way to keep people here?"

She hisses through her teeth.

“Not in a way that protects them from the Affini,” she admits. “I have a lot of advantages that the Accord doesn’t yet, but I can only really apply them in Canopy. That’s why I wanted your help jumping back and forth between Canopy and the next system, to check my range.”

“And the Affini are only going as slowly as they are due to the fact that the corporations are using populated systems like this one as hostages. So our options are: leave people where they are, the Affini keep winning at their current pace, I can make their lives a bit nicer in the mean time; or move people to Canopy, the Affini don’t get them, but rapidly snap up anyone left behind, and everyone who makes it to Canopy gets the best medical attention and housing I can provide.”

It makes her uncomfortable, relying on the imagination of a people who have so clearly been downtrodden to see the upside; it’s easy to think that the people of the Accord will under-weight just how nice she can make life at Canopy compared to their current circumstances. But if she is actually going to try and change her solar-system-usurpation method, it’s going to involve stepping out of her comfort zone.

“Like I told the commander — by my lights, the move is clearly worth it. But if you disagree, I want to hear why.”

It was strange and concerning to see Winkler seemingly change his mind so quickly. Why is he just cedeing everything now? Where was the grim determination that seemed so core to him before? Maybe he was always working with the affini (or maybe the affini work for him?!)? It wouldn’t be the first time he’s secretly had a long-time competitor end up being on his payroll.

Maybe that’s why the navy has been so passive lately?

On the other hand, perhaps they’re all caught between two separate indomitable forces, Amethyst the hammer to the Affini’s anvil. 

He gazes at the nameplate of his ship. What’s the move here that preserves the most optionality under uncertainty? 

Then it comes to him -- 

“Amethyst, if the Affini are really moving so slowly because the corporations are taking people hostage, then they must have some use for the people here. And I know that you care about the right of people to choose where they want to go, and it must pain you to command so many to leave their homes.... 

The Affini are here, in this galaxy, and they’re never going to go away at this point. It feels strange to say, but when I imagine what things will be like in another 500 years, I imagine that there might not be any more corporations, but I can’t imagine there being no Affini. Anything we do today has got to take into account that the Affini are going to be a part of the future, like it or not. So given that, we’re playing for some kind of truce, that preserves the good things we have and hopefully makes everyone better off.

I wonder, if you announce that anyone who wants to leave to Canopy can, then you will probably have a lot of takers, especially if you advertise it well and make it appealing. Then, you’ll have a lot of humans of your own, inside a system that you can defend well. I know you don’t think of them as hostages, but the Affini might see it that way. That gives you leverage -- maybe enough you could actually negotiate with the Affini to leave the rest of the Terran system alone?”

She cocks her head, thinking it over.

“So … you’re right that the Affini are still going to be around in 500 years, almost no matter what. And I can actually tell you what they want with the people here —- they value them as ends unto themselves, as strange as that sounds. But …”

She honestly hadn’t thought about using the people of Canopy as hostages. Because on the one hand it isn’t really in her nature, and on the other hand, using someone as a hostage means you have to be willing to carry through on a threat to them, which she isn’t sure she would be. On the gripping hand, Miss Daisy was weirdly reasonable for a hegemonizing alien hivemind.

“You might be onto something. Hold on.”

An Amethyst on the station flips back to the exact wording of the decision that came out of her closed-door meeting with Miss Daisy.

“Hey, if we’ve found a way to take the majority of pressure off of Terrans in their current circumstances, are you willing to make archival voluntary, and let me work with the majority of the Accord here, but a minority in situ?” she asks the hegemonizing alien hivemind currently strolling through the station’s waterpark on her arm.

Some of the most popular games among Affini and their more grown up florets involve near-infinite variations of conquering and improving worlds with various constraints. Some of her personal favorites involve being delivered in the center of a dangerous new situation, severely injured, alone, and making it all work out in the end anyway. 

Recently variants involving playing as Amethyst have become popular. The applicability of the games to reality outweighs what would otherwise be a bit too cliche experience. There’s early signs of a “player’s guide” and everything. 

Amethyst has now run up against one of the rather common scenarios that potentially leads to a bad end for everyone. But also one that has an obvious solution. 

“Ahhhh, was the Terran High Command not too happy with your original strategy of ‘move everyone to Canopy’, and you’re looking to be more accommodating? I thought that might come up~ It’s hard to manage cuties before they’ve truly seen what you can do for them. 

Our goal with the treaty is to balance the need to help the Terrans right now and the great potential that you bring with your resurrection powers in the long run. If you want the entire Terran space for 10 years, then we can do that instead. We’re in this for the long-term since your abilities promise a truly bright future indeed. 

Our main concerns are, one, to understand the resurrection power better in terms of scalability and the ability to use it on entities that died before you came into the world. I think if we could get a demonstration it would help put us at ease. 

And two, to help you avoid hurting yourself. Taking on a project the size of the Terran Accord, especially with your main technological capabilities working in less than 1% of the systems, is going to be a big challenge. We want you to be able to properly show us what you can do, not get lost in despair tackling your first big project.”

“The Terran High Command wasn’t a problem; I just got some advice from one of the terrans that I actually hadn’t considered before, and I’m trying to work out if it changes my evaluation of the situation,” she explains.

This would really be easier to handle if there were more of her. But … probably everything will always be easier to handle if there were more of her, and she’s already more populous than she had planned on at this point in time. Doing things to one’s mind should be undertaken with caution and patience.

Maybe she could do a few thousand case studies by hand in accelerated time and then build an expert system …

Back on the Indomitable Victory, she turns back to the captain.

“That might actually be possible without compromising things too much; thank you for the suggestion. At the very least, I will organize the evacuation such that people wanting to stay behind are scheduled for last, and we can spend the next few hours figuring out to what extent it’s workable.”

She really doesn’t have nearly as much bandwidth as she would like, here. But at least she can create a necklace of optical storage, put it on one of her bodies at the station, and then materialize it under her armor here and use her armor’s integrated radio to dump the compressed commands contained therein to PACNA and FRIGOMEK.

Across the system, people are relieved from their shifts, overtime is called off, and debts are converted. People finally have a chance to breathe, to rest, to no longer be driven by unfeeling oversight.

There was a point in time — several minutes ago — where Amethyst would have made a single transmission to everyone in the system. But she’s getting into the swing of being more than she was, now, and while there are not nearly enough of her to record personalized messages for everyone, she can easily record 200 variations for different demographic categories.

She’s still flying a little bit blind, still worried that she’s being too disruptive or not enough, still, in a very real sense, trying to move an interstellar empire by herself …

But across the system, and then across the Accord, people start moving.

Across billions of VR headsets people receive some of the strangest notifications they’ve gotten in their lives. Some are filled with terror, worrying without work to do they have no value themselves anymore. A lot of people show up to overtime anyway, but are disappointed to be greeted by an empty task queue, and mortified to find that without an AI constantly telling them what to do, they can’t actually do their jobs on their own. 

Some use their newfound free time to finally get revenge on their rivals, some assume an apocalyptic mindset and wait in despair for the inevitable. 

But most feel hope like they haven’t felt their entire lives. People leave their houses, wander, meet each other for the first time. Whether it’s riots or church services or wild apocalyptic orgies, all of Terra today is united: “tonight, we party”. 

Back on the station, at the end of the tour of the water facilities, a Daisy turns to an Amethyst and says:

“I think you should send one of your copies to explore the worlds we’ve made, and observe how we teach young florets how to grow and thrive. I can promise you, it will be like nothing you’ve ever seen before~.”

An outside view suggests that sending part of herself into an environment controlled by experts in psychological conditioning is a bad idea. For most of her life, she’s listened to that kind of instinct; it’s a good instinct. But she has magical femininity powers now, and she probably should see what kind of world the Affini want to build, even if she doesn’t agree with their methods.

“That does sound like a good idea,” she admits. “I don’t really want to give you a copy of my mindstate just yet; do you have enough bandwidth for me to do telepresence?”

As far as she can tell just from looking at heat dissipation, Miss Daisy is doing a good amount of thinking locally, so she might not actually have that good a connection back to Affini space.