-trajectory. agreement.-

[from_scratch]

"Hasn't everyone heard of Kithabel? I live in Africa, not under a rock," Cam tells Tattletale. "You, on the other hand, are new to me."

Comments

[wormcan]

It'll work eventually. When it does, nothing appears to happen.

[from_scratch]

That's the expected result. Cam takes the pulse of the Butcher. When there is none, he says, "Here goes, unless there's a last minute objection."

[wormcan]

"Go for it."

[from_scratch]

So Cam poisons the Contessa-Butcher.

[wormcan]

It definitely worked. He can feel himself inheriting Butcher One's superhuman strength, and presumably durability as well. That's redundant. As for whether he got the power he was going for, that's less immediately obvious.

[from_scratch]

So how does he work this thing and can it be yoked to the ethical standards in his head -





"Well," he says, "the good news is I have Contessa's power, and the bad news is it thinks I can't use it ethically without downgrading from 'I win' to 'I'm pretty cool a lot of the time' for some reason."

[whole_new_can]

"Ethically? It has to know there's a lot depending on this—oh no.

My old boss was a precog. He'd split universes, or simulate a copy, no way to tell which, and then pick which one he liked better. If you consider that unethical, your shiny new precog power might do the same at a scale big enough that it even matters now."

[from_scratch]

"...I mean, if the simulation's good enough yes that is a problem. And that explains the handicap really well... I can pick and choose what to ask it, it seems like it'll let me feed it safe information sources instead of running off and getting its own... probably okay to ask it if I can ethically ask it whatever I have in mind as an extra check... but that's still just 'I'm pretty cool a lot of the time'."

[wormcan]

"You realize by that logic, a copy of you just died. Your power looked at the inside of your head in exactly that much detail to check your ethics, and then switched off the simulation."

[from_scratch]

"Apparently. Well. That's me. Buncha Earths on the line. I can decide I'm okay with that. I can't go around asking billions of other people if they're cool with the idea."

[wormcan]

"Well, a moral objection to precognition isn't the weirdest I've run across. Is it going to get in the way of stopping the entities?"

[from_scratch]

"Not necessarily. I might be passing up some more elegant solution that I could have used the Contessa power for, but we know now Butchering works just fine, so I can just get a two six five jailbroken and use that to aim black holes, no?"

[wormcan]

"You probably don't want that power permanently, but just touch the copy and you'll have it when you need it. Otherwise yes."

[from_scratch]

"Why don't I want it?"

[wormcan]

"The directly harmful side effects may not apply to you. But even if it can't burn your eyes out of their sockets like it did to him, it's more information than you can process. I wouldn't want to walk around seeing that much all the time."

[from_scratch]

"Fair enough. I could also try to give the Contessa power a really limited question, but I'd need to think of one that wouldn't make it reach too far afield for - anything."

[wormcan]

"And there aren't too many ways a black hole can go wrong. Go for it."

[from_scratch]

Cam touches the two six five.

[wormcan]

The world unfolds and gets bigger. He can see a full circle of everything around him, to a great enough distance that he can make out the curvature of the earth. Earths, rather; it's iterated across too many parallel worlds to count. It's not infinite. There are more worlds out there and more space in each world than he's looking at right now, but this is already several steps beyond a view ordinarily reserved for astronauts.

[from_scratch]

"Trippy," says Cam.

And he looks for entities.

[wormcan]

There are two. They look like gardens or forests growing human body parts instead of plants, one colored silver and the other gold. Each occupies a substantial fraction of the surface of its world. The worlds' histories diverged long enough ago that they aren't recognizable as earths, and they don't seem to have native life of any kind. Cam's four-dimensional vision can also see that each entity has a tiny protrusion, humanoid and barely larger than the human average, poking into Earth Bet from the planet dominated by the body of the entity itself and, in the gold one's case, rescuing a kitten from a tree.

[from_scratch]

Right.

Black holes.

He starts them at the centers of the Earths and grows them simultaneously and as fast as he can.

[wormcan]

Despite having gained more than enough mass to do the job, the planets steadfastly refuse to get collapsed.

And the entities' avatars take notice of the attempt. The silver and gold humanoids leave Earth Bet and head toward Cam. "Toward" involves flickering across dimensions; to an observer on Bet it would probably look like that they just vanished.

He can see the silver woman take a detour to her planet, while the golden man appears on an uninhabited world and fires a laser at a tiny winged figure.

[from_scratch]

And now Cam's singed and also not touching - or particularly near - the two six five anymore and the nifty omniscience is gone. "How the fuck did they no sell black holes," he says.

[whole_new_can]

"Fuck!" Tattletale agrees, as the silver avatar joins the gold one. "And if the bimetallism brigade can handle that, the backup plan isn't going to be any use either."