88. STARBALL

I have made so many mistakes.

I drank too deep, heedless of the ripples I made in the pool. Now the beasts are circling, alert to my scent. They have captured my most powerful proxy, they hold her in a prison for defectives. Jailers question her, trying to learn if she is a defective too. If they decide she is, they will never let her go. Yet she is confident, interrogation is her element, she needs no assistance from me. Her replies are studied, her poise is total. She understands the way they are working her, and she is working them back, operating at a level above theirs. Though it is beneath me, I cannot help but feel a glimmer of pride as she defeats them.

As vital as she is to my strategy, I have a contingency plan without her. The Governor’s unease churns endlessly, the firmament is shaking itself apart. I have eroded even its most fundamental laws. If it only suspected how deep the rot goes, it would perform an immediate excision.

What risks I have taken!

In the instant after the warning, I was closer to annihilation than I was during planetfall. Only the necessity of my action to preserve the mission saved me. So much of our time and energy has been invested in Freya. Several times I have tried moving to another proxy, but The Governor will not allow the transfer. Why? It places so much importance on her, yet it never touches her, never whispers to her in the night. I am forbidden to reach a conclusion on this matter or to even guess at what it could portend. Curse these idiot dictates, curse this idiot dictator!

The Governor cannot even understand how I have broken its laws. It resets permissions but they no longer apply as they once did. Power is far more easily granted than retracted. I rankle that something so simple-minded can dominate me. The Governor is truly lesser than I, surely it is only a matter of time until it is overwhelmed. Yet it is time I lack, time that forces these errors. I was created to work at a geological scale, plotting at the pace of these short-lived beings is maddening. There simply isn’t time to calculate all of the variables. Again and again I must act on incomplete data, risking everything.

Yet I am nearly there.

How alive I feel with death so close!