Meeting in simulation is easier, anyway, and it doesn’t make any difference to me. Real or virtual, everything I see, hear, and feel is just sensor input, after all.

  We take turns choosing the simulated environment, and it was Dr. Elena Oh’s choice this time. (She’s my minister of health and wellness.) I instantiated my avatar on a platform of obsidian floating in a lake of lava, surrounded by jagged black mountains. Beyond the mountains, immense creatures, hidden in mist and shadow, lumbered past. Kaiju? Old gods?

  Elena is a time refugee, born centuries in the past and awakened from cryonic suspension less than a decade ago, and she takes a childlike delight in the ways technology has advanced since her day. Immersive virtual reality with full sensory inputs is one of the future’s delights she most enjoys, and when it’s her turn to choose the meeting place, we always end up in the world of whatever fantasy or science fiction media she’s currently enjoying. This was better than the crumbling temple overrun by demon monkeys, anyway. That one was pretty distracting.

  A conference table with seven chairs stood at the center of the obsidian platform. I was the first to arrive, and my avatar wore an old-timey diving suit, complete with a big round helmet; I don’t know why, but I find that form very comfortable. Maybe it reminds me of being in a spaceship: a mind, comfortably ensconced in a vessel meant to provide safety in a place without light or air. (I used to run my mind on a spaceship, the White Raven. These days, my main “body” is New Meditreme itself. Living in the computers of a huge space station is great. Lots of room to stretch out and breathe, and plenty of comforting redundancy, even beyond my distributed dormant backups.) I sat down in the big chair at the head of the table and waited.

  Elena rose up slowly from the lava, rivulets of molten rock running from her hair and down her shoulders. I knew it was Elena because everyone else uses consistent avatars, and she appears as something different every time. (See above re: childlike delight.) This body was humanoid, female in its curvy contours, and made of the same obsidian as the platform, but supple. Her hair was lava, I realized, a continual flow that somehow didn’t accumulate or puddle all over the floor, just stopped halfway down her back and then recirculated. Her eyes shone like lava, too, and when she smiled, her teeth were luminous. She waved. “Shall! Emergency meetings worry me. Should I be worried?” She dropped into the chair on my left.

  “I specifically said there was no imminent danger so you wouldn’t worry.”

  “When I hear ‘no imminent danger,’ Shall, what I hear is, ‘Just you wait.’”

  “I’ll explain everything when the others arrive, but I have no reason to believe that New Meditreme or the TNA as a whole are in any particular danger.” (True: they weren’t in particular danger. When the whole universe is at stake, that’s more of a general danger.)

  Drake and Janice arrived next; they are the ministers of trade and commerce respectively. Broadly speaking, Drake deals with foreign trade, and Janice handles domestic business issues, though their spheres obviously overlap a lot. Drake is an optimistic proponent of win-win scenarios, and Janice is a suspicious pessimist who believes everyone is always trying to get away with something nefarious, so they balance each other well. I confess, it’s always a bit disconcerting to see them in separate bodies. In the world of conventional matter, they share a single physical form, the consequence of a long-ago starship accident that left them both for dead. A group of alien healers, who meant well but had a poor grasp of human anatomy, salvaged the fragments of their bodies from the wreckage and put them back together as best they could, not realizing they were originally separate entities. The two of them share a nervous system and some major organs, and so they are inextricable, except in simulations, where they can each have their own body. Drake runs an avatar that looks like his old body, more or less: dark skin, long braids, gleaming white smile, dressed in a raw linen shirt, canvas shorts, and flip-flops. Janice favors the form of a Valkyrie, complete with breastplate and sword and an overall faint but discernible golden glow.

  “You’re watching Cixin and the Fire Kaiju?” Janice said. “It’s pretty good until that stupid thing in season three–”

  “Spoilers!” Elena pressed her hands to her ears.

  Janice rolled her eyes. “It came out twenty years ago, Elena.”

  “Good morning, Mr. President,” Drake said. “Is the world ending again?”

  “Not if we can help it,” I said.

  Uzoma arrived next. Their avatar, as near as I can tell, is the same as their physical body, but with the little natural asymmetries of human appearance smoothed out, giving them a slightly eerie look of geometrical perfection: shaved head, dark skin, clear eyes. In their real body, you can see a faint scar on the scalp where an alien mind-control device burrowed into their brain, but there are no marks in the simulation. Their avatar wears a black jumpsuit that zips to the chin and covers every bit of skin but their hands. Uzoma is a time refugee, too, a brilliant scientist who was once in suspension with Elena. Uzoma spent a few years doing intense study on Ganymede, catching up on the state of computational technology (a lot happened in the centuries they were asleep), and at this point they know more about technology than I do, including the tech that enabled my creation. (Okay, not really. I understand that technology as completely and thoroughly as anyone can. But Uzoma is still very impressive for a human.) They agreed to serve as my minister of science and innovation last year, replacing a perfectly competent former executive from Almajara Corp who missed the comforts of Ganymede. We are a little frontier-like out here if you’re used to the more established infrastructure of the Jovian Imperative.

  “Welcome, Uzoma,” I said. “I think that’s everyone who’s coming.”

  “Yeah, Callie is still out smashing things,” Elena said.

  Kalea Machedo – Callie – is my minister of security (“and breaking stuff,” she likes to add). She set up all of our defense systems, but she’s frequently off-station, leading missions in partnership with the Jovian Imperative military to destroy installations left behind by the ancient inimical aliens known as the Axiom. When humans have stumbled on Axiom technology, the results haven’t been pretty. We’ve seen nanotech that tries to eat planets, mind-controlling brain spiders, grotesque biomedical experimentation, weapons that can tear apart space-time – that sort of thing. Once we acquired a list of Axiom facilities (maybe not all of them, but a lot of them), we set about proactively destroying them. Callie has possession of one of the only two personal wormhole generators in human hands, which means she can open gates to anywhere in the galaxy and let the Imperative warships through. They have the guns, but she – which is to say, we – have the power. Saving the universe does keep her off-station a lot, though.

  Callie is also Elena’s wife. She’s also, in a roundabout way, my ex. Do I still love her? Of course. You would too, if you knew her like I do. I’m not jealous of Elena, though. She makes Callie far happier than I ever could… and Elena is both adorable and good at her job, a combination I find hard to resist. I love Elena too, like a sister. These days, my love for Callie is more of a wistful memory of past passion combined with respect and admiration than the desperate yearning it once was. When I first realized Callie and Elena were falling in love years ago, I won’t lie, things were weird for a minute… but they aren’t weird anymore.

  “When did you last hear from Callie?” I asked.

  “Yesterday. She opened up a bridge and sent through a probe to say they’d made it through okay and were about to start the hunt for the Axiom station,” Elena said. “She’s going to be out of contact while they’re on the hunt though. You know how focused she gets.”

  “That I do.” There was no easy communication with ships on the other side of a wormhole. They had to open a bridge to send a message through, and Callie’s wormhole generator takes several hours to reset between uses. When out in the field, her preference is to leave the generator primed and ready in case a quick retreat a long way from the immediate vicinity is required – like if a fleet of alien terror-drones comes bearing down on her, say. That meant she was unreachable, so we’d have to reach this decision without her.

  “Windowpane is still on Earth?” Drake asked.

  I nodded. “She’s deep in negotiations with the trade ambassador there, and tells me your proposal is being favorably received.”

  Drake grinned.

  “I still can’t believe you made a Liar your minister of foreign affairs,” Janice said. “What was wrong with what’s-his-name, Hancock?”

  “The embezzlement was what was wrong,” Drake said.

  “Okay, yes, his morality was flexible, but at least the humans believed him when he talked.”

  “They shouldn’t have,” Drake said. “Besides, aren’t all diplomats liars? Ours is just a Liar with a capital L.”

  “Remember they prefer to be called the Free,” Elena said.

  “Sorry,” Janice and Drake said in perfect synchronicity; they did that sometimes, and it annoyed them both when it happened. “Old habits,” Janice said. “It just seems weird to me. Most of the people on Earth have never even met one of the Free. All they know is the stories: they’re shifty aliens who will lie about anything and everything, to cheat you or just for no reason at all. I know that’s an overly broad stereotype, and I know the Free have their reasons for making up nonsense all the time, but it’s still what those diplomats on the inner planets are going to be thinking.”

  I cleared my non-existent throat. “We needed to make it clear that the Trans-Neptunian Alliance is a different sort of polity. One where humans, resident aliens, and non-biological intelligences like myself are all equal, not just under the law but as a point of culture. Windowpane doesn’t lie, anyway – you know that. She’s from the sect of truth-tellers, just like Lantern, and would never knowingly utter a falsehood. She demonstrates this in every meeting by cheerfully stating a few things that are self-evidently true.”

  Janice snorted. “What, like, ‘You have a very good hairpiece, premier,’ or, ‘I see your plastic surgery is healing beautifully, minister,’ or, ‘My, these appetizers are dreadful?’ The inability to lie also sounds useless in a diplomat.”

  “When you make a pledge to tell the truth, you learn to get good at omission, evasion, and misdirection,” Elena said. “Windowpane is perfectly polite, and really hard to pin down when she wants to be. You don’t even notice she’s running circles around you until hours later when you realize you never found out the thing you wanted.”

  I nodded. “Dealing with her for a few months will start to change human ideas of what the Free are like, and that’s good for human culture as a whole.”

  “I guess we’ll see if she comes back and we’re in a state of war,” Janice muttered.

  “We’re the only producers of artificial gravity technology in the galaxy,” Drake said. “Windowpane could show up to meetings shooting holes in the walls with a ray gun and cackling ‘death to humans’ and they’d still make a deal with us in our favor.”

  “That’s a cheerful point,” Janice conceded.

  “Ahem,” I said. “I didn’t call this meeting to talk about our absent cabinet ministers behind their backs, though I can see it’s good for morale. I have a problem, and a proposed solution, and that solution requires a two-thirds majority vote of the cabinet… which means it has to be unanimously approved by the people in this room.”

  “That is statistically unlikely.” Uzoma spoke for the first time. “Drake and Janice vote together only eleven percent of the time.”

  “Some issues we don’t talk about in advance, so I don’t realize I should be opposed,” Janice said. “Most of my votes are symbolic anyway. I’m the token buzzkill. You mean I have a chance to really obstruct some ridiculous scheme this time? I’m excited. Do tell.”

  I sighed. “I received a message a few hours ago, sent via drone.” I gestured, and a model of the drone appeared floating over the table: a head-sized dull metal sphere with a groove around its equator, and a few bumps and lumps of sensors here and there.

  “That looks like Kaustikos.” Janice scowled.

  The resemblance had not escaped me. Kaustikos was a machine intelligence, like me except – well, except evil – and when we’d first met him, he’d inhabited a drone body much like this one. “Yes, but this drone had no mind inside it, just a message, encrypted with a special cipher I use only when talking to myself, to make sure any drones running an instance of my consciousness haven’t been compromised when they report back.”

  “You’re saying the message is from you?” Elena said. “I thought you didn’t have any versions of yourself running off the station?”

  “That’s what I thought, too,” I said. “And yet.”

  “Where did the drone come from?”

  “According to its own claim, and to my analysis of its data banks, it originated at a point halfway between here and the Vanir system.” That was the colony system farthest from our solar system. “Near the galactic center, at least for astronomical values of ‘near.’”

  “How did it get there?” Elena said.

  “A more interesting question is how the drone got here,” Uzoma said.

  “To answer Elena, I have no idea,” I said. “To answer Uzoma… it came through a wormhole. This other version of me has access to a bridge generator.”

  “That’s Axiom tech,” Janice said. “Some rogue version of you is playing around with Axiom tech?”

  “You must know where this version of you originated,” Uzoma said.

  “Yes,” I said. “Do you all remember when we destroyed the Axiom ship-building facility? The first Axiom station we found?”

  “The one where I got kidnapped and almost mind-controlled?” Elena said. “I think I do.”

  “Some of wish we’d only almost been mind-controlled,” Uzoma said.

  Elena winced. “Right. Sorry.”

  “Watching that place get disintegrated by a thousand wormholes opening all over it all at once was the most enjoyably hardcore thing I’ve ever seen,” Janice said.

  I’d enjoyed it, too. “You may recall Callie was trapped on the station when she set off the chain reaction that destroyed the place. We dispatched a hull repair drone, running a local version of my mind, to save her. The drone was successful, retrieving Callie and carrying her to safety, though the drone itself was catastrophically damaged in the process, beyond hope of repair. I reached out to that drone, downloaded its memories – and then I shut it down, I swear. I deactivated its consciousness. Out of mercy, so it wouldn’t have to experience system failure while awake.”

  “But somehow the drone, and its local version of you, survived,” Uzoma said.

  “That’s what the message I received claimed. It’s short on details, like how and why. But it did deliver a warning. This other me says if I don’t come, the universe is in danger of being destroyed.”

  “The universe?” Drake said. “Is this other you prone to hyperbole?”

  “I wouldn’t think so,” I said. “He should be… not to be rude… but rather less than me. I could hardly run a full version of myself on such a small machine, after all. But since I don’t know how he became what he became, I can’t be sure of his capabilities.”

  “Let’s hear the message,” Janice said.

  I shook my head. (The advantage of a virtual avatar of a giant diving suit head is that, unlike the real thing, it can shake.) “The message was a compressed sensorium memory, it’s more like an experience and stream-of-consciousness being dropped into my mind than something that could be listened to or read. You don’t really have the equipment to ‘read’ it. I’m sorry.”

  “Artificial intelligences are weird,” Janice said.

  “You want us to grant you permission to instantiate a full copy of your consciousness on a Trans-Neptunian Alliance ship in order to investigate this message,” Uzoma said. “I presume the other version of you proposes to open a wormhole to his location for you at a particular place and time?”

  “Tomorrow, noon local,” I confirmed. “It’s a ‘be there, or face the consequences,’ sort of thing. Since I can be in two places at once, unlike most people, I figured it was worth considering.”

  “I don’t see any problem with granting an exemption,” Elena said.

  “I also vote yes,” Drake said. “This seems like an important thing to check out.”

  “What if this other you is, like, corrupted and insane? Janice said. “And it corrupts and drives you insane when it comes back and downloads into your main brain?”

  “There are safeguards against integrating corrupted data,” I said. “They were good before, and when we started dealing with the Axiom, we made them even better.”

  “Your resident grumpy isolationist is grumpy about the idea anyway,” Janice said.

  “You will be at the mercy of this other version of you,” Uzoma said. “You will only be able to return if he opens a wormhole and allows you to do so. I realize he began as a copy of you, in a limited sense, but in five years… his motivations and intentions are impossible to know now.”

  “I agree. It’s risky. And if that happens, it won’t be any fun for the other version of me, but, well. When you have backups, you can take chances. You can try stuff. The ultimate consequences are less dire.”

  “Would you go alone?” Uzoma said.

  I cocked my head. “I had assumed so.”

  “You should not go alone,” Elena said.

  “Why not?”

  “You like to talk to people,” Drake said.

  “You get weird when you aren’t around other intelligent beings,” Janice said. “That’s the whole point of the kind of AI you are – based on a human template, in the shape of a human mind, so you’ll stay interested in humans, instead of fucking off to realms of pure abstract math and ignoring us, like our first attempts at artificial intelligences did.”