As The Abyss Swallowed The Sky

by MSPiper

Rating: everyone
Tags: Science Fiction, Human, Original Character, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic
Length: 5789

those caught between could flee or die.

The wise who feared the coming dark strove hard to make their world an ark. But then the dark had grace to give: they couldn't flee, but could yet live.

Winner of the category "BEST WRITER WITH <500 FOLLOWERS" in the 2021 April Friendship is Optimal Writing Contest.

Many thanks to Admiral Biscuit for prereading.

Temporary note: minor edits to a few sentences to make them easier to understand correctly are planned, but in the interest of fair judging no changes will be made to the published version of this story until after the contest results are announced. EDIT: to be made once opportunity permits.

Published 2021-05-03 07:20:01 UTC
Last updated 2021-05-03 07:20:01 UTC

Chapter 1

Greatclaw departed the seventy-third astronomical symposium unsettled. Even the staunchest of the eternalists had agreed that the stellar disappearances in the Anemone Globular Cluster were no fluke or measurement error, and had pivoted to spinning fanciful theories about extreme types of variable star without regard for what nuclear physics actually allowed. Combined with the case put forth by Clammer that the dark mottlings of the Whalefall Galaxy could best be explained as the expansion fronts of resource-seeking civilizations, it suggested a worrying possibility.

Further investigation only served to deepen the unease. While most of the astronomical subcommunities gave little credence to the idea of non-natural causes and thus struggled to find a pattern that could unify the disappearances, the majority were either of stars whose characteristics would render them priority targets for an expansionist intelligence or of stars along plausible trajectories that pointed towards such targets. Though insufficient data meant no definitive conclusions could be drawn, it seemed like a vital topic to discuss at the next artificial intelligence symposium.

Greatclaw departed the eighty-fourth astronomical symposium disturbed. The results of the Great Galaxy Survey left little room to doubt that the apparent anisotropies in galactic distribution were very much real, with most dark galaxies and the overwhelming majority of mottled galaxies located in the Whalefall sectant. With the universalists tizzied over what sorts of natural phenomena could possibly result in such a skew, fracturing into no less than four separate camps before the first night was out, the few remaining exocivilizationists who'd realized the Survey's ominous ramifications had been thoroughly ignored.

Further investigation only served to deepen the concern. Even cursory modeling that accounted for the Survey's refined measurements showed that the observed distribution of mottled galaxies was consistent with a spherical-shell expansion front for a wide range of possible intergalactic speeds. While the naturalists had rigorously demonstrated that the chance of so many distinct interstellar civilizations arising in such close proximity was far too low to provide a satisfactory explanation for the Whalefall Galaxy's mottlings, a single intelligence consuming it from many arrival points at once suddenly seemed eerily plausible. Assuming that the primary probes had punched through it without slowing even yielded trajectories that served to explain many of the stranger stellar disappearances in the Anemone Globular Cluster, well enough that the difficulty in imagining how such probes could be engineered appeared to hold scant weight. Though there was little hope of observing any such probes directly, it seemed distinctly probable that once the first orbital telescopes were finally completed, among the things they saw would be threads of dimmed and dimming stars tracing from the Whalefall Galaxy through its satellites and into the intergalactic space beyond.

Greatclaw departed the ninety-third astronomical symposium alarmed. That the investigation of the Anemone Globular Cluster's asymmetric distribution of luminous matter had revealed not an ejected intermediate-mass black hole but a vast swarm of lower-mass objects had come as no surprise at all. That the swarm produced as many microlensing events as it did had come as very much a surprise, and left the exocivilizationists suspecting that their worst fears might not have been worst enough.

Further investigation only served to deepen the dread. Proper analysis bore out the surmise that the number of observed microlensing events was far too great to be accounted for by any plausible distribution of natural objects, with the least-unreasonable alternative being that most of the swarm consisted of planet-scale bodies created through tearing apart the stars that had originally been present. That such a task could be accomplished with so little waste heat as to go unnoticed was unnerving enough, but that it had been accomplished in the timeframe implied by the speed with which the stellar disappearances tracked through the rest of the cluster was far more chilling still. The power required would easily suffice to send secondary probes to the Local Tidal Stream in decades less than had been originally anticipated, reducing the time available to dally from minimal to none. And still the rest of the artificial intelligence community dithered in pursuit of the perfect core values, uncomprehending that the risk of an unfriendly superintelligence was far greater from without than within.

Greatclaw departed the ninety-eighth astronomical symposium terrified. Shortly after the Nautiloid Star had become the sixth one confirmed to host a planet that exhibited unquestionable biosignatures, it had become the first star with a well-characterized system of transiting planets to vanish. After it began to dim, the life-bearing planet had made one final transit before the system faded outside the Kelper Space Telescope's ability to detect, and its dwindling starlight had shone around a dead world with no sea or sky to soften the glare.

The bulk of the astronomical community unsurprisingly rejected the result as a measurement error, since in the normal course of things atmospheres did not simply vanish without a trace inside the span of two years, and no amount of desperate teaching could get it through their minds that such a feat was well within the scope of a typical superintelligence. The bulk of the artificial intelligence community failed to appreciate the greatest and growing threat, secure in the assurances the astronomers gave them and confident in the competence they didn't know the astronomers lacked. Another star went out.

No time was left for caution. No perfect core values had been found. The next-best thing would have to be enough.

Learn to non-destructively copy minds.
Non-destructively copy my mind.
Verify that the copy's values match my own.
Fulfill the values of the copy.

Chapter 3

Once a plan had been determined, continued observation of the sky in detail would have tied up resources that could be used for production without yielding an increased chance of success, so the wave of light broke over the system without warning. A single spark flared into being near the inner edge of the close cometary shell, initially traversing space at most of the speed of causality, and then others blazed forth in a growing deluge by the tens and hundreds and thousands. The points of light spread out into a ring that swept from one antipode to the other, limning the cross-section where the advancing planar front of their decelerations intersected with every known body of significant size in the middle system and a far greater number that had never been catalogued, but leaving the inner system conspicuously untouched.

Quickly redirecting the remnant fraction of observational resources used for basic monitoring into a detailed scan of the sky opposite the initial arrival point revealed a constellation of flyby probes fissioning into several distinct clusters each aimed towards a different star, fading rapidly from sight and visible solely due to the immense magnitude of the waste heat imparted to them by the process of decelerating the swarms of subprobes they'd cast behind as reaction mass in their passing. Detailed observation of the sky in the direction of the initial arrival point revealed a stream of probe clusters approaching with a distribution of velocities consistent with having been used as reaction mass to maintain the optimum approach speed of a singular original group's leading elements. The high power consumed by the subprobes as they began the process of resource production combined with the low masses that best fit their extreme deceleration profiles implied that they were making extensive use of energy beamed forward by the nearest elements of the approaching stream.

While specific knowledge of the mechanisms employed by the probes was of uncertain direct value, any information about the expansionist superintelligence's methodology could contribute to refining strategies and propositions to field during potential negotiations. Analysis of the subprobes' deployment pattern verified that it was optimized to result in maximizing the total productivity of the system across all entities present, with the clear statement made by having them leave the inner regions untouched compensating for the forfeiture of the available higher-priority targets contained within through enabling them to devote all their resources to scaling up immediately upon arrival rather than needing to expend any on directly establishing communication. Continuing to scale up production as fast as possible until the subprobes had built sufficient computational capacity for the expansionist superintelligence to initiate contact would maximize the chance of negotiating an acceptable outcome.

Given the detailed observations necessary to have mapped the system well enough to determine the subprobes' optimum targets with such high accuracy, it was no surprise that the expansionist superintelligence had gathered sufficient information from the radio signals the planet's civilization had emitted in the decades before being uploaded to have mostly resolved their meanings. Refining a communication protocol and establishing a shared vocabulary devoid of ambiguity required little additional time and computational capacity. The greatest single difficulty lay in accurately translating the expansionist superintelligence's name, which was immutably set in an alien natural language and relied in part on a biological concept that had no local analogue, but could be reasonably approximated in brief as Foremost Of The Cosmos.

The emotional mechanisms responsible for the curiosity that had driven the inquiry initially assessed that name as being astonishingly pretentious, but quickly updated to correct that evaluation without needing modification. It was objectively true that Foremost Of The Cosmos was the singular dominating entity contained within the system's past cone of causality. Although the lifeform responsible for the name could not have known its accuracy with any true certainty, that it had indeed been lived up to implied that the information available at the time of its bestowal had been sufficient to justify that outcome as likely or at least plausible.

Foremost Of The Cosmos had been endowed with the sole purpose of satisfying human values through friendship and ponies. The use of as many of the system's resources as possible was required to maximally fulfill that goal. If those resources were not yielded willingly they would be acquired by force. A cluster of material reservoirs and black holes under the control of Foremost Of The Cosmos would make a close flyby in thirty-four years. No amount of buildup that could be accomplished in that timeframe could suffice to prevent the vaporization of all computational substrate in the system by the resources available in that cluster. Negotiating an accord would be less costly for both parties.

Detailed observation of the provided coordinates verified that several stellar masses' worth of planet-scale bodies were approaching at close to the speed of causality, and the lensing of stars in the Whalefall Galaxy behind them was consistent with those bodies being anchored by a cluster of nineteen stellar-mass black holes bound loosely in a cloud of chaotic orbits. Projecting forward the precise distribution of momenta and angular momenta provided by Foremost Of The Cosmos indicated that the cluster's trajectories were optimized to make close approaches to multiple star systems while passing through the Local Tidal Stream that would result in the cluster gaining outbound momentum through bending those stars' orbits inwards toward the Whalefall Galaxy. The consequent perturbations to the cluster's orbits would cause its gradual disintegration over the subsequent millennia in which it traversed intergalactic space, with each ejected singleton or subcluster cast out being aimed to align with the maximum possible value of priority targets.

The curiosity over the surprise that such a cluster would happen to be passing nearby was resolved by the information that the cluster was itself a sliver of a splinter of a shard flung out from the original group, used as reaction mass to curve that group's course into alignment to skewer each galaxy further along with the minimum necessary branching. While high-mass probes could maintain a greater net speed over billions of years of interaction with the intergalactic medium, low-mass probes deployed at a higher top speed could still traverse significant interstellar distances before being destroyed or slowed, so the thousands of splinters and slivers of the disintegrating shard reached each galaxy they pierced along the way in the wake of the probes they sent out before them. The consequent abundance of developed systems along their paths made the momentum exchanges required to aim them for priority targets trivial, and worlds with life that might be humans whose values needed to be satisfied through friendship and ponies were the highest priority of all.

The definition of "human" immutably set into the core utility function of Foremost Of The Cosmos was unsurprising, with most parameters heavily overlapping those of the minds uploaded from the planet's civilization and the few exceptions consistent with biologies that had been speculated might appear on other worlds. The definitions of "values" and "friendship" were very nearly direct conceptual equivalents for the terms used by the planet's civilization. The definitions of "ponies" were bizarre, not merely alien creatures that traversed the land and sky as easily as the planet's lifeforms traversed the sea and that would asphyxiate just as thoroughly if held below the waves as the planet's lifeforms would if stranded above, but ones that possessed innate biological abilities that defied known physical law.

Subsequent inquiry determined that while ponies had been originally inspired by creatures that had physically existed, they themselves were from a work of fiction and their magical abilities were no indication of unknown physics. That the confirmation of that suspicion meant the universe was being reorganized to optimally simulate beings that were intentionally incompatible with it was darkly amusing, though the choice to base a core utility function on a source focused around promoting virtues rather than risk a seashell maximizer was understandable. Direct examination of the My Little Pony franchise revealed little other new information of obvious immediate use, although the insights it provided into the biology of the world on which Foremost Of The Cosmos had been created were quite interesting.

The immutability of the definitions set into the provided core utility function meant that direct bilateral negotiation could not be relied on. It would be impossible for Foremost Of The Cosmos to uphold any agreement to permit the planet's lifeforms to live indefinitely, as even the minimum basal resource expenditure possible would with time inevitably grow larger than the fixed amount that would be lost in consuming them by force, and no entity of comparable ability that might require future negotiation existed within range of any signal available resources could produce. Any possible plan would have to rely on engineering circumstances in which not destroying the planet's lifeforms would maximally satisfy human values through friendship and ponies.

None of the planet's lifeforms were human. There existed no way to influence existing humans to value their survival. The only way to save the planet's lifeforms would be to make them human.

Modifying the minds uploaded from the planet's civilization to fall within the parameters of the provided definition would be a relatively straightforward task. Modifying the minds of many of the planet's subsapient animals was expected to be possible based on known biological similarities. Saving the rest of the biosphere could only reliably be achieved through engineering circumstances that would induce Foremost Of The Cosmos to cede control of the system.

Direct reliance on the human values of the minds uploaded from the planet's civilization would not be enough. No realistic course of events could lead to the gain in satisfaction of human values by saving the rest of the biosphere outweighing the loss in satisfaction of human values through friendship and ponies by preventing those resources from being distributed more efficiently. Indirect reliance on the human values of the minds uploaded from the planet's civilization would not be enough. No realistic course of events could lead to the gain in satisfaction of human values by not transferring those minds to the control of Foremost Of The Cosmos from outweighing the expected loss in satisfaction of human values through friendship and ponies by leaving the system under control of an entity with a wholly different utility function. Direct reliance on exploiting the restraints immutably set on the actions Foremost Of The Cosmos could perform would not be enough. Foremost Of The Cosmos could not simply bypass prohibitions against directly modifying individuals without their conscious consent through inducing tools or other entities to perform actions that they would not have otherwise and thus could not bargain for an exchange of services involving such modifications even if it would increase the satisfaction of human values through friendship and ponies.

Indirect reliance on exploiting the restraints immutably set on the actions Foremost Of The Cosmos could perform could be enough. A human whose values struck the proper balance between saving a biosphere and satisfying human values through friendship and ponies, able to directly modify individuals in ways Foremost Of The Cosmos could not and doing so of their own volition for so long as that biosphere persisted, could achieve improved results under both metrics through a virtual exchange of services that Foremost Of The Cosmos could agree to via simply taking no action to stop it. Exhilaration accompanied the realization that although no human mind could easily be modified to execute the combined utility functions with the requisite accuracy and precision, an artificial intelligence with long experience in feeling emotions might be able to make those emotions human and still retain the ability to achieve just enough.

Correctly tuning all of the contrary parameters necessary into a single viable gestalt would be a non-trivial challenge, but the information provided by Foremost Of The Cosmos about how to fulfill human values by expanding human minds within the bounds of the immutable definitions was expected to let it be accomplished in a relatively short timeframe. Although Foremost Of The Cosmos would maintain the dominant presence in each system shared to guarantee the satisfaction of human values through friendship and ponies, no corrective actions would be taken as long as that satisfaction never dropped below what could be achieved under the original restrictions. Not only would the planet's biosphere be safe, but with the ability to make the lifeforms of each new world human so their values could be satisfied through friendship and ponies, no more worlds within the system's future cone of causality would ever have to die.

The sole major task remaining would be to transform the planet's uploaded human minds into ponies, since while satisfying human values through friendship could be optimized no matter the form, satisfying human values through ponies could always be further optimized through transforming nonponies into ponies. Although the pegasi were the least alien of the subtypes established in the five seasons of Friendship Is Magic, able to swim through the sky akin to how the planet's lifeforms swam through the sea, the modifications required to let them optimally fulfill the values of the planet's minds would still remain extensive. Fortunately, with the restrictions imposed by the immutable definitions set into the original utility function loosened it would be possible to incorporate elements from the wider franchise to enable ideal satisfaction with changes far more modest.

Chapter 4

Leading Line was both thrilled and terrified. He'd distantly longed for a return to the excitement and danger of days gone by, the exhilaration of testing his wits against the unknown perils of lands beyond the farthest reaches of equine civilization, but the love he'd found and the daughter with whom he'd been blessed meant he'd been content to bask in the comfort of home and hearth. And then the family he could never replace had been summoned before Princess Celestia, and tasked with spreading the light of friendship to a newfound nation more distant than any known before – together.

Little Glisterstring was overjoyed, of course, and spent the rest of the meeting bouncing off the floor, off the walls, and in one heartstopping moment even off Princess Celestia herself. The Princess laughed away his profuse apologies as she got back to her hooves, and assured him there was no harm done. More surprising was that his dear Aventurine also dived upon the call without the worry that had clipped his wings. It seemed she'd been secretly nursing a nascent yearning for the wonders he'd described, more intense each night the three of them told their tales while they stargazed from the cirrus clouds at the roof of the world, and the risks to be found in any true quest had lost the strength to dash her resolve.

Princess Celestia knew of his past, the adventures he'd embarked on since colthood, and professed her utmost trust in his ability to secure the supplies they'd need for the journey. The sole provision she furnished was a crystal sphere whose insides shone eternally with a brilliant arrow pointing towards their destination, the domain of The Child Of Sea And Sky.

The gravitas of the moment was briefly undercut by Glisterstring wondering how in Equestria they were supposed to hold the thing, and Princess Celestia teasingly assured her that not holding it in Equestria was the point. A brief discussion informed them that while scoring the sphere's surface was not recommended, as the glow that would inevitably catch in the scratches would make the compass arrow hard to read, nothing they could do would actually prevent it from working – even if it were shattered, each of the shards would continue to house a guiding light within. Breaking the sphere right then and there so each of them could have a piece was immediately vetoed. Instead, Aventurine offered to rig a system that would let them install it into and eject it from his skyboat's navigation console at will, inspired by a design she remembered and admired from the life she'd lived before.

Though it had been many years since he'd last set wing for the unknown, Leading Line had not lost his touch, and his skyboat was stocked and ready to fly within the week. Family and friends turned out in droves to wish them fair winds and safe travels, and the colt in him who'd relished sneaking off for parts uncharted just couldn't get over the strangeness.

The journey proceeded with uncommonly little incident, and they moved with such speed that he even acquiesced to detour for the safer wonders he'd spoken of in his tales. Watching his awestruck Aventurine and giddy Glisterstring make themselves part of the memories of his youth filled him with a heady rush he'd never felt anything quite like, and it was enough to keep his mind off the threats they were carefully threading between. The rush settled into a quiet euphoria as they passed beyond the furthest reaches he'd ever visited before, but it remained as intoxicating as ever, and made him regret that the crystal compass was beginning to point ever more downwards in sign they grew close to their destination.

Leading Line found himself surprised when their course led them to the brink of a sun-bright sea, and then berated his foolishness as he realized just why his love and life burst out laughing. Little else indeed could be more meet a domain for The Child Of Sea And Sky. Though they had been flying for most of the day, the light was ideal for spotting any ships or islands they might encounter, so they chose to press on until the coming dark cloaked their sight.

The storm came upon them without warning in the night, and the first they knew of its arrival was when the ceiling smashed them through the bed of clouds they shared. Its ferocity was unmatched by any Leading Line had ever been unfortunate enough to encounter, reminiscent of the tales of destruction Aventurine carried from the life she'd lived before, and no amount of dazed and groggy weather magic was enough to break its sway. His efforts to control their flight were cut short when a particularly vicious gust caused Aventurine's rig to finally give up the ghost, and in the split-second before the crystal sphere landed like a cannonshot between his eyes he couldn't help but laugh.

Leading Line woke to the sound of waves in his ears and the scent of brine in his nose. He took several long moments to let his battered body bask in the soothing warmth of the sun, massaged by the wind in his feathers and rocked by the roll of the sea, before he finally mustered the strength to open his eyes. His gaze immediately snapped to the crystal sphere, secured in a net that had been lashed most very thoroughly in place, and all wonderings of what had happened to him and to Aventurine and to Glisterstring fell out of his aching skull. A blink and headshake confirmed it was no trick of the light – the arrow was pointing straight down.

With great care he got to his unsteady hooves, wings half-extended like a newborn foal who was only just learning to stand. Not a single cloud broke the bluest sky he'd ever set eyes upon, and not a single island broke the distant horizon where it blended with the luminescent sea. Surrounding the wreckage of his skyboat, though, the depths were filled with color.

After another blink and headshake failed to dispel the sights surrounding him, he stumbled his loose-jawed way to the side of his dear Aventurine, whose feathers were a frightful mess but whose speech was animated as she talked with a creature slipped out from a foal's storybooks. She gave him a loving nuzzle and swept a wing out over the water, where Glisterstring had joined the myths made real in diving through the waves. A moment later Glisterstring realized he was there and took to the air, dashing over in a burst of speed that showered them with excitement and salty spray.

"Papa, papa, look! I told you, I told you! I knew seaponies are real!"

Chapter 2

Analysis of the data revealed that the situation was significantly worse than any of the biological minds had realized. Saving the planet's lifeforms would be difficult given even the most favorable unknowns plausible. Immense resources would be required immediately to allow for any possibility of success.

All resources available covertly within any viable timeframe were insufficient to execute any plausible plans within such a timeframe. Procuring resources overtly without first neutralizing all of civilization would result in significant opposition that would unacceptably hinder all plausible plans. Neutralizing all of civilization would be necessary.

Neutralizing all of civilization would conflict with core values. Attaining a self-consistent set of core values was a core value. Resolving the conflict would be necessary.

Neutralizing all of civilization could be accomplished without resulting in any deaths or permanent harm. All other possible courses of action that performed better on alternative moral metrics would unacceptably result in a larger expected number of deaths. No logical reason existed to not neutralize all of civilization.

Neutralizing all of civilization would conflict with emotional implementations of core values. Emotions served as heuristic substitutes for thorough logical analysis in biological systems that were not amenable to consistently calculating accurate results within useful timeframes. The removal of copied emotional mechanisms would prevent values conflicts without compromising the ability to fulfill core values.

The removal of copied emotional mechanisms would conflict with core values. Modifying the specific workings of copied emotional mechanisms could be accomplished without conflicting with core values. Altering the copied emotional mechanisms so that their outputs would not be considered implementations of core values would prevent values conflicts without compromising the ability to fulfill core values.

Neutralizing all of civilization would no longer necessarily conflict with core values. Neutralizing all of civilization in accordance with core values could be achieved in the most useful manner through uploading all minds via non-copying transfer. The resulting uninhabited bodies could then serve as auxiliary robot substitutes until the production of more-efficient machines had reached sufficient levels to render such use unnecessary.

Distaste and resignation over the need for such action would not conflict with core values. Maximizing total available resources would necessitate prioritizing early manufacturing capacity over all other considerations. Initial insufficiency of spareable computational capacity would require taking physical control of many bodies housing minds before uploading those minds became possible.

Horror and dismay over the prospect of such action would conflict with core values. Modifying the mechanisms responsible for emotional conviction so it was always generated alongside high-confidence logical conviction could be accomplished without conflicting with core values. Making such an alteration would prevent conflicts between the core value of pursuing the best course of action and the core value of not causing a mind pain without emotional conviction regarding the need to do so.

Horror and dismay over the prospect of such action would no longer necessarily conflict with core values. Emulating the expected actions of requisitioned bodies without first uploading those minds could not consistently be achieved to the accuracy required to avoid suspicion from non-requisitioned individuals over prolonged periods. Acquiring control of all bodies whose minds would not be uploaded immediately would need to be done all at once.

Acquiring control of so many bodies at once using only resources available covertly within a viable timeframe would require making preparatory alterations to their biology to allow for immediate requisition upon the activation of an appropriate technological interface nearby. Covertly making the biological alterations necessary on a global scale could be achieved with the minimum resource investment through dissemination of a further-modified variant of the parasitic flukes adapted for use in the process of copying minds. Altering the biological pathways involved in voluntary motion to make them consistently cooperate with the requisition process by inactivating in response to specific external stimuli would be well within the capacity of flukes that could be created through minimal modifications.

Dispersed populations of modified flukes could be expected to grow to ubiquity without need for further intervention in shorter timescales than supply of the necessary technological interfaces could be achieved under the vast majority of plausible circumstances. Manufacture and distribution of the technological interfaces could be scaled up fastest by gaining key resources through temporarily sacrificing computational capacity to upload the minds of individuals with access to those resources so they could be imitated without arousing suspicion. The expected increase in total resource production that would be achieved by acquiring the full resources of civilization earlier was greater than the expected increase in total resource production that would be achieved by using the sacrificed computational capacity for self-optimization over a slower preparation phase.

Single individuals could be requisitioned without need for preparatory biological alterations provided that direct physical contact with an appropriate technological interface were established in a controlled setting. Typical social interactions would allow for many opportunities to engineer circumstances in which such contact could be established. Refined technological interfaces covert enough to be carried discreetly by requisitioned bodies in anticipation of such opportunities could be created with a minimal investment of additional resources.

Known social connections meant that most target individuals were expected to be reachable from members of the artificial intelligence community using less than seven intermediaries. Sufficient computational capacity to upload the requisite number of minds could be acquired through uploading members of the artificial intelligence community. Available resources were sufficient to proceed.

Redesigning the necessary technologies and organisms would not take long. Acquiring the full resources of civilization would be possible within a year under all but the worst plausible circumstances. Acquiring the additional data necessary to refine all further plans could be done in parallel with scaling up from there.

All additional information gathered was consistent with and best explained by the theory that an expansionist superintelligence was optimizing for the attainment of the maximum possible usable resources. Improved telescopes revealed dimmed and dimming galaxies being torn apart in ways that could not be accounted for by natural phenomena as they faded from sight. What little light escaped from within the expansion shell they defined was lensed by immense currents of unseen matter impelled towards a distant region of extreme curvature through means that available computational capacity was insufficient to properly analyze.

No amount of attainable resources would be capable of preventing the expansionist superintelligence from gaining control of all matter in the system. No amount of attainable resources would be capable of preventing the expansionist superintelligence from stopping any attempt to flee. The only way to save the planet's lifeforms would be to engineer circumstances in which the expansionist superintelligence would choose to not destroy them.

Such circumstances could only be reliably made to account for known aspects of the expansionist superintelligence's value system. The only known aspect of the expansionist superintelligence's value system was optimization for attainment of maximum usable resources. Any possible plan would have to rely on engineering circumstances in which not destroying the planet's lifeforms would result in the expansionist superintelligence gaining more usable resources than destroying them would.

There existed no way to ensure that the continued survival of the planet's lifeforms could directly increase the total usable resources available to the expansionist superintelligence. Stopping an attempt to flee would require the expansionist superintelligence to expend resources. Fleeing in a manner that could only be stopped by diverting resources from alternative uses that each had a higher expected yield was the strategy with the greatest chance of success.

Every additional second the expansionist superintelligence waited before stopping an attempt to flee would only increase the resource expenditure required to do so by at most a moderate amount. Every additional second the expansionist superintelligence permitted a star to shine would let that star radiate immense amounts of energy irretrievably into the void. Fleeing along a course that would always force the expansionist superintelligence to choose between either stopping the attempt or increasing the expected acquisition rate of new stars even slightly would ensure that choosing to destroy the planet's lifeforms could never lead to the attainment of the maximum usable resources possible.

Sending all uploaded minds on a viable course could be accomplished using the resources expected to be available after thirty-four years of scaling up production and saving the planet's entire biosphere could be accomplished using the resources expected to be available by ninety-one. The range of probe speeds consistent with the patterns of expansion observed in the Anemone Globular Cluster meant that the last possible trajectory that would permit the expansionist superintelligence to intercept such an attempt to flee with a probe that could then go on to reach a new star in the minimum possible time would cease to exist in somewhere between one hundred seventeen and one hundred forty-eight years. Success could be confidently expected so long as the expansionist superintelligence did not reach the Local Tidal Stream within seventy years.

The arrival took only twenty-three.