“We’ve nearly mopped them all up, but the damage is done,” Peter went on. “They targeted essential life support, in order to take us down as quick as they could. Whoever’s running the operation doesn’t care if all his bots get wiped out in the end, because we’re already good as dead. We can’t survive without those supplies. The plan’s pretty simple, eh, Mom? Destroy our air, water, heat and food supplies, and we die. Call it a tragic accident, hold a big memorial service back on Earth, and after a while drum up support for a new expedition to seed a new colony. That’ll take a few years, but hey, they’ve got time, right?
“It’s a plan so simple it can’t fail. Except that it’s going to, right Mom?”
“As long as they don’t target the cicada beds,” she said.
“And it looks like they haven’t. Whoever they are, they don’t know about your experiments. They certainly didn’t know about the secondary network. So they have no idea what we’re going to do.”
The camera returned to Peter, who now loomed above it, a silhouette whose backdrop was the twisting banner of the Milky Way.
“Dad’s network is still operating, but it was always pretty simple and I was able to take it over long ago. I’m pretty sure they are not able to control it, even if they knew it existed. That network will coordinate the bots we’ve got left while they repair the life-support systems and rebuild our supplies. That could take months or years, but it doesn’t matter. We’ll all be asleep.
“We already proved we could double the size of the colony by having half our people winter over—isn’t that what you’re calling the hibernation, Evie?—while the rest of us are awake. We don’t have enough beds for everybody, so what we’re going to do is cycle through them a few at a time. When those ones are frozen solid, we’re going to store ’em in the hangar and put the next group into the beds. When the crisis is over, the bots will bring us back the same way, one batch at a time.”
Peter gazed in the direction of the battle. “Looks like things are winding down. We might be able to go back soon. We’re not going to broadcast any distress signal. We’ll let ’em think we’re dead. Then, in a few years, we’ll be back up and running, and waiting for them when they send their own colonists.
“Funny thing is, we might be even better off by the time we wake up. The longer the bots have to fix things up, the more resources they’ll have ready when we revive. Everybody ready?”
The camera swung again, showing the colonists standing, turning, gathering together facing Peter and two other suited shapes—Evayne and Mother, no doubt.
Suddenly Peter turned to look into the camera. “You! Twentier! Take this record and hide it. You’re going to ground now, too. I’ll find you when we’re done.
“All right, everybody, single file, and watch out for—”
There was nothing more in the twentier’s memory.
THE KEISHION FAMILY BOTS were repairing each other now. There wasn’t any more work to be done around the house, and the Keishions had settled into something that Corva said was a lot like their normal routine. Supplies and resources were thin these days, but they were industrious people. They were getting by.
Toby spent whole days away from the estate. He could be seen walking in the hills, talking to nobody apparently, but with his glasses on. Sometimes a small swarm of butlers and grippies followed him, and together they would act out dramas and battles in the parkland that wove its way through the city. Corva and Halen stood together one morning watching this spectacle and shaking their heads. Later that day Halen marched out and stepped between Toby and the butler he was talking to.
“Toby, what are you doing?”
“Oh, hi, Halen, what’s up?”
“I dunno. Just a blockade, and all of us aging ten times faster than the rest of the lockstep. Or hadn’t you noticed?”
Toby was holding a grippy like it was a pistol. He let go and it dropped, changing shape and twisting like a cat to land on sudden little legs. He lowered his glasses to look over them at Halen.
“Why don’t you come in here?”
Halen frowned minutely. Then he snapped his fingers and one of the bots that always hung around him walked up and handed him a pair of glasses. He put them on and Toby synced their interfaces.
The hills wavered and were suddenly overlaid with an entire army—thousands of mechs and armed bots, scurrying reconnaissance mice and stilt-legged snipers. Off in the sky, the blued-out shapes of vast rounded forms stood half out of the atmosphere.
Halen peered at one of these. “Nothing like that exists,” he said.
Toby had been wondering how Halen would react to this simulation and decided now that he’d pretty much gotten it right. “Not in the real world, no,” he admitted. “This is Consensus. It’s a game.”
Halen’s lips thinned and he looked away for a moment before saying, in a tightly controlled voice, “You’re playing a game?”
“Yes, I am. You wanna play?”
“No. No thank you.” Toby could see that Halen was working his way up to some sort of outburst, so he decided to stop toying with him.
“It’s called Consensus. Peter and I designed it.”
The air visibly went out of Halen’s anger. “What?”
“After the kidnapping, Peter needed therapy. But we’d come all the way out to Sedna instead, and we didn’t bring any human psychologist. All I had to go on was the ’pedias and psych avatars. So—”
“What kidnapping?”
Toby shook his head sadly. “Something that never made it into the history books, it seems. Peter was kidnapped when we were kids. It was horrible for all of us, but him—he built this shell, and none of us could get through it. So I made Consensus and lured him into it.”
Halen turned around, examining the martial vista. “This is a military sim.”
“I set a challenge for him, I said, ‘Design a world where what happened to us could never happen.’ We were still designing the place when I got lost. This is what a lot of the early versions looked like.”
“Wars? How’s that safe?”
“I played a little trick on Peter,” Toby admitted with a shrug. “I populated the gameworld with nonplayer characters who acted like real people, not like entertainer bots. Pretty easy to do when you can just order your programmer bots to swap out the usual game character minds with libraries of personality types based on centuries of sociology and psych studies. I’d make millions of pseudopeople and then we’d plug in whole new governments and economies and see what they did. It was mostly really bad. Mostly, they ended up like this.” He nodded at the army.
“The thing is, Consensus isn’t perfect. As a simulation of reality, I mean. Nothing is—there’re always assumptions, shortcuts, and if you started with some detailed sim of a particular moment in time and played forward, the game would diverge farther and farther away from what actually happened.
“The point is, if you treat reality like a game, it’s going to show in your decisions. I’m … checking something.”
Halen nodded slowly, but he was frowning again. “You’re studying your brother. That makes sense. But if you’re looking for strategies, Toby … there’s really only one. You know what it is. And Peter and Evayne are terrified that you’ll use it.”
“Wake Mother, you mean?” He shook his head. “I’ll do it for my own sake, but seriously, what’s she going to do? Scold Evayne for becoming a murderous high priestess in the cult of Toby?” He laughed.
“You don’t get it,” snapped Halen. “I knew you didn’t get it. It’s not about you, or her, or Evayne. It’s about what other people believe about you. You’re a god, Toby. Evayne made you into one.”