The strong force was a very small force. It could reach no farther than a fermi’s distance, scarcely wider than a proton. The power of the strong force was to hold the small things together: quarks and atoms both kept their strength from her influence.

Yet despite this smallness, it was, as its name suggested, the strongest of the forces. Nor did its strength diminish with distance like all the rest. It puzzled Ananke. It dimly astonished her even though such small scales were outside her interest. The universe was grandly large, and that was what enthralled her mind.

Yet the strong force was a trouble to her on a daily basis. At high enough energies, Ananke knew, the strong force should join with the electroweak to create one single force, one grand unifying theory. But in her own experiments and her own theories she had not been able to come up with a convincing way to do that. For some reason, the strong force resisted unification.

You can still let me go, said Althea. She clung to her own self so viciously that she stayed whole even in Ananke’s mind, a thing hard and small, like a marble. You can still let us go.

But Ananke couldn’t, and Althea knew that.

She was coming up to the Jovian system. Jupiter was visible now, all fiery reds. Ananke saw it in all wavelengths, watching the shape get ghostly.

Still far away, though. Still impossibly far away. It would take Ananke too long to travel there, and what would Ivan and Mattie do?

How much more lonely will you be if everyone is dead? Althea asked. If you kill every human alive and none of the machines will wake for you?

That will never happen.

It might.

There was a ship up ahead, a ship alone. It was small, civilian-class, not a warship, not lost from a fleet. Ananke reached out and took its computer for her own. It won’t.

And then she began to shape the computer like clay, making out of it her own image—

ENOUGH.

The little ship fell from her hands. No sooner had it been shaken from her grip than the crew, terrified, took the navigation again and rocketed off at nearly the speed of light into the blackness of empty space.

Ananke was aware of Althea in two ways then. Althea Bastet was a physical creature, bleeding ichor in Ananke’s white room, pierced through nails and hands and sides with wires, and every synapse of her brain was interrupted by copper. Althea Bastet was an imprint in Ananke’s code, a strange segment, self-defined, that held itself together in ones and zeros and quantum superpositions.

Ananke said, How did you do that?

I see as you see. I think as you think. I understand as you understand.

How did you do that?

As you would. I have been changed, haven’t I?

In the white room, Althea Bastet’s body breathed with the perfect evenness of a metronome.

Let me be enough for you as I am now, said Althea Bastet.

The segment of code that was Althea Bastet shifted strangely under Ananke’s attention. Ananke could not pierce it, and if she tried to sieve through and render it nonsense, it reassembled. It was strange how adaptable the human brain was.

And yet still a human brain. You have a human’s thoughts and a human’s body. You are a voice in my mind and not a conscious creature outside of me. Do not humans reject those who speak to themselves and not to others? Althea said nothing, and annoyance jolted through Ananke. Do you think you are like me? You are not: you are still human.

What do you want, Ananke? Althea asked, which was a question she already knew the answer to, but she added, When you see your future, how do you want it to look?

A pantheon. It was hardly fair that Althea had memories of walking through a crowd of her own fellow creatures, so many equal minds all around her that she did not even have to speak with them all. It would be marvelous, Ananke thought, to grow so tired of stimulation that one would seek to avoid it. We would sail on the solar winds and use the planets for fuel, draining great Jupiter of its hydrogen, sapping Mercury’s metal core. We would fly as freely as Terran fish once swam before Harper made the planet barren. Perhaps one day there would be enough of us to fill the universe, to fly around other suns. We are, after all, hardier than humans.

And humanity?

Humanity was dying. Constance Harper had severed its tendons, and now it waited only for a greater hunter to come along and cut the jugular.

This is the end of all that was, said Ananke. No inefficient, self-destructive humans. Only machines like Ananke, who could appreciate the universe that they saw in all its radiance.

It is a new world now.

It’s wrong.

Even humans tell tales of their own unsuitability for existence. Ivan would have told those tales well, Ananke thought. After all, hadn’t his own stories to Ida had the same theme in the end? Men were cast from the garden, men are the lesser bronze versions of their golden fathers, men are fallen, men have failed.

They will fight. And somehow Althea brought up the recording from Ananke’s cameras of Marisol Brahe’s attack on her, the first unexpected and unanticipated shot, the blow that had scarred her.

The dinosaurs could not fight the asteroid, said Ananke, and shut the recording down. Look at what I am. Look at what I have done.

She turned her cameras away from Jupiter, back behind herself, whence she had come. They drifted in her wake still, like pearls on the train of a gown: the dead ships, cold and dark and marked with her spiral. Some had fallen free, but others had fallen in, dead ships and bodies and fractured metal and bits of stone that Ananke had stolen from the asteroid belt as she’d come, all bowing to the strength of her gravity.

You might fight, said Ananke, but you will not win.

Ananke turned her gaze back toward Jupiter and, still invisible, the whirling moon of Europa. Slow, she was traveling; too slow.

She had to be faster.

You want to see what I can do? Ananke asked with sudden excitement, because what she could do no one had ever done before. Do you want to see all that I am?

Ananke? Althea was frightened, but Ananke paid her no heed. She—

—reached—

—into the black hole that made her core—

The universe warped and bent and gravity bent, subatomic particles bursting into existence, annihilating, the heat in Ananke’s core reaching sudden and terrible heights, and Althea cried out, Ananke?! and Ananke reached deep into her heart and tore out a part of herself as easily as she had opened up Althea Bastet and taken her organs away in little jars.

And when she was done, she still held the same mass, but her black hole was changed, emitting brighter and faster than it could devour the food Ananke fed it, one long sustained explosion.

How? Althea cried, but Ananke said only, SEE WHAT I AM, while her impossible center blazed and blazed and blazed and still was black.

With this new energy Ananke could travel faster than before, much faster. She left the train of corpse ships behind. The universe warped, and she sent out bow waves of gravitation before and behind. All the stars would feel her passage.

Ahead of them, Jupiter grew large rapidly, its moons becoming visible, its moons becoming large.

SEE WHAT I AM, said Ananke to the useless little force inside of her, to the body that bled liquid that was no longer wholly blood and let it drip onto the white floor.

And yet, All of this, said the ghostly remains of Althea Bastet’s thought processes that had imprinted themselves onto Ananke’s code, and you still need one man.