Let's imagine you wanted to assassinate someone.
The Wau stood tall, a towering figure clad in a panther-like black armor, gazing through the massive bay window atop one of Prospero's spires—the prefecture of Sector 14, a remarkably low number for a planet that counted six thousand such districts. His mask, featureless and golden, was forged from hyperchalcum. His silence, his stillness, his sheer presence.
The Wau wasn't looking at the restless city below. As always, he was turned inward. He could process an immense amount of information per second, even without the aid of his dark unit, a dedicated analytical exosuit that remained in his fortress.
Yet sometimes, he deliberately narrowed his field of perception, returning to the comforting scale of a standard human mind—not just to feel like himself, but because sometimes, simply looking at something with the most reduced scope possible allowed for a fresh perspective.
The Wau was waiting for the prefect and his entourage of advisors. His AIs had already locked onto the group a few meters from the door via security cameras. One to two seconds for them, an eternity for his processing speed.
So, let's imagine, he thought, that you wanted to assassinate someone.
Your target is an important figure. And they know they could be the target of an assassination. Take, for instance, the President of the HS Council, residing in the Tower of Origin on the Mythical Earth—the supreme ruler of the HS in a way. Naturally, she has an exceptional security detail. She likely carries some Transient artifact, is surrounded by elite bodyguards, and is protected by members of the Psi corps.
The Psi pose a problem: when you approach the Council Tower, they read your thoughts, detect your assassination intent, tip off the snipers, and you're shot on sight.
There is, however, a way to bypass Psi defenses—a technique reserved for the Void Eyes, the most powerful Psis trained at UniPsi on Mythical Earth, in Munich.
This technique is called the mental box. You trap the thought "I must assassinate the President" inside an imaginary box in your mind. This thought vanishes from your conscious awareness. On the box, you place a label: "To be opened when in the presence of the President." No one can see a mental box except the one who created it.
In practice, such an operation would be more complex: you would create mental boxes within mental boxes. The first label might read: "Travel to Mythical Earth, then open the next box." That box would read: "Get close to the Council Tower," and so on—placing the murder weapon in separate pieces across various locations, methodically progressing step by step. Additionally, your assassin would need to be a member of the Void Eyes, a corps renowned for its unwavering loyalty.
Upon entering UniPsi on Mythical Earth, candidates are assigned a Greek letter ranking. Alphas are stronger than Betas, who are stronger than Gammas, and so forth. Alphas rise to the highest administrative positions, often working on Earth, Prospero, or on major stellar cruisers. Lower ranks engage in research, high-level private negotiations, and so on.
And then there is the Omega rank—the last letter of the alphabet.
Legend has it that Omegas are expelled from the Academy upon failing the test and relegated to lesser universities.
This is incorrect: the rare Omegas—an event occurring once per century—are recruited into the Wau Order. They are rare cases of psychic resonance, exponentially more powerful than Alphas and capable not only of harnessing immense mental force through transhuman modifications but also of withstanding the cognitive load of the AIs integrated into the Armor.
Thus, as a Void Eye, the Wau is fully capable of assassinating anyone. And let's be clear: no human force, no matter its size, could physically stop a Wau. Using mental boxes for such an assault is entirely unnecessary.
Now, let's imagine you wanted to assassinate a Transient.
To put it simply, Transients are gods. That leaves two possibilities:
First scenario: They are truly gods—omnipotent, capable of bending the universe to their will, making two plus two equal five if they so desire. In that case, there's nothing to be done. They can achieve the impossible, such as seeing through mental boxes, reversing time, or even resurrecting themselves once annihilated. The problem is unsolvable. Case closed.
Second scenario: Their power is, in some way, limited. They cannot alter reality at will. There might be a way to kill one. But caution is necessary.
In fact, when they mention the Blind Gods, have the Transients not implicitly admitted that there exist beings even more powerful than themselves?
The Wau's mission is to protect humanity.
And the question of the Transients' existence directly impacts humanity's fate.
In many respects, their influence is positive: they bestow gifts, knowledge, and technologies that enrich human society.
But under what circumstances could their influence turn negative—aside from the philosophical concerns of dependency on external entities?
There are no documented cases, but there are suspicions of misconduct. Information that disappears. Catastrophes that should have been predicted. In a word, mysteries.
As part of these mysteries, the Wau have developed a fable known as the Dog and the Gun.
In this story, the Transient is a kind of woodsman living in a cabin with his dogs—who are humans. Hanging above his fireplace, the woodsman keeps a gun.
Sometimes, the dogs bare their teeth. Sometimes, they even want to kill the Transients—just for curiosity, for justice, for freedom. To test the limits. Every day, billions of humans and Xenos ask themselves: "Can we kill a Transient?" And nothing happens.
Nothing ever happens because the Transient is immensely stronger than all sentient civilizations combined. He has a gun. The gun will kill any dog, no matter how sharp its teeth.
Now, imagine that one day, the gun—poorly secured—falls to the ground. A dog picks it up—out of curiosity, to be helpful, or maybe even to use it, because it has seen its master do so before.
At that moment, the dog becomes dangerous.
The master must tear the gun away from it—and kill the dog.
And then, the strangeness of the universe arrives.
And then, the strangeness of the universe arrives…
If we are in the second scenario—the one where the Transients are gods with immense but limited power—then somewhere, there is a gun. But we are like dogs: we do not understand what it is, and by the time we get close to it, the Transient eliminates us.
The Wau does not want to kill the Transients. But he also does not want humans to be killed by the Transients. The balance of power must be evened out.
In this quest, caution is required: the Transients can read minds, at least on a solar system-wide scale, and across an unlimited number of humans.
At this very moment, a Transient is reading his thoughts.
It doesn't matter. He hasn't found the gun yet.
Maybe the Transient is even amused by his little dog's acrobatics.
And then, the strangeness of the universe arrives.
A few hours ago, within his Dark Unit, the Wau was processing countless requests from across human society.
Among these requests—handled at an average rate of one million per second—there were five types of problems:
First, the "child's wishes"—requests so simple and naïve they might as well have come from children.For example:"I want to be a spaceship pilot.""I want to become a Wau.""I want my mother to stop using drugs."
The Wau delegated these to the standard LE of the HS, fully capable of answering them.
Next came legitimate requests requiring a simple response unavailable in the LEsphere.Often, these were dilemmas requiring wisdom.
For instance, a rural court on the orbital station Francisco, born from the smoldering ruins of yet another revolution, consistently sought the Wau's rulings.
An embarrassing responsibility for someone who wished to remain a neutral guardian of humanity—but the Wau's plan was simple:
For months, he would apply classic jurisprudence to demonstrate that the justice system they distrusted—when rigorously followed—actually worked.
Then came the impossible requests."Wau, make me the President of the HS Council."
The Wau Order had no duty to fulfill selfish fantasies—often written in a state of drunkenness or intellectual indignity.
Then came mass problem-solving, inspired by the Transient methodology, which the Wau had refined over time.He had named it Scalar Equilibrium (ES).
The principle was simple:
Jake, on Earth, loves Lola, who lives on Prospero and is caring for her aging mother, who is nearing the After. Jake writes to the Wau, asking how he can secure a promotion in administration to get transferred to Prospero.
Flora, a pilot of an Ozymandias, has just been scammed by a certain Sky, leaving her deeply in debt. She has calculated that she must work her entire life to repay it or abandon her ship. She writes to the Wau in distress.
Nolca, a farmer on Cade—a barely populated planet beyond Ariel's Gate—laments that no one wants to buy his carrots, even though they are delicious.
Libin, an idle 18-year-old rich youth from Earth, wants to start a meaningful business.
At first glance, these problems seem unrelated.
But in reality, these five individuals could solve each other's problems—if only they knew each other.
The only obstacle?
They don't know each other… yet.
Thus, by practicing Scalar Equilibrium, the Wau made the world a better place—or at least, more hopeful and more active.
However, the Wau did not solve problems in groups of five.
He started with a massive batch of 10 million requests, linking them through interconnection, then trimmed them down into smaller groups—finally resolving the millions of "duels", where two people could help each other directly.
In his free time, the Wau had asked the private LE of the Wau Order to find a mathematical method to model the Scalar Equilibrium he applied intuitively—but so far, without results. Perhaps something deeper than neural networks and modern mathematics was required.
Perhaps he should ask a Transient…
To return to the types of requests the Wau received, there were also the "riddles."
Innocent questions behind which lurked the strangeness of the universe—the invisible hand of the Transients.
One such message had arrived recently:
From: GorylkinTo: Wau OrderMessage:
THE WAU! YOU'RE USELESS!
First, they killed all my friends at Shareplace. Then they locked me up on Calchas. Then they dumped me on Clelia. And a huge asteroid came out of nowhere and blew up the planet, and we couldn't save everyone.
A HUGE ASTEROID, WAU!
Don't you guys have a powerful telescope or something? The truth is, you're not so powerful after all. The Crew of Captain Wau? It's a joke.
The AIs had been unusually cryptic about this Gorylkin—as if they had no record of them in the HS databases, nor any mention of their detention or exile.
A child, clearly. One who dreamed of adventure and had absorbed the fictions of the League.
For now, the mystery was set aside.
Because before responding, the Wau had naturally conducted a verification of Clelia's known asteroid trajectories. The records were well-documented.
And yet—unless the databases had been undetectably corrupted—the asteroid was an anomaly worth investigating.
An official inquiry was underway on Prospero, but a quick dive into the authorities' communications revealed that their top priority was protecting the political leadership from blame.
After querying the Wau AI with intense calculations, the Wau dispatched an Exocet—a slim, silver probe equipped with an AI and a Derive Drive—to Clelia.
It launched from the depths of Francisco, a fractured planet, like a bolt of lightning, before vanishing into the void.
The probe completed its Derive in the Oort Cloud of the system, a few light-days away from Clelia.
From its vantage point, Clelia still appeared perfectly intact through the telescope of the Exocet—because the light carrying the information of its destruction had not yet reached this location.
The Exocet searched for the asteroid.
No trace.
And then—after a few minutes—as if pulled from an invisible current, shimmering in the light of the distant sun,
the asteroid appeared in space.
And it raced toward the planet.
It had appeared from nowhere.
That was why no one had been able to predict its arrival.
Reading the Exocet's report, the Wau's heart froze.
Could matter emerge from pure void?
The answer was yes—quantum fluctuations of the vacuum occasionally generate tiny, unstable particles that quickly annihilate back into nothingness.
The probability of producing… say, two such particles? Infinitesimally small.
The probability of producing enough particles to create a planet-killing asteroid?
Impossible.
A Transient had manipulated the vacuum fluctuations.
The Wau had long suspected they were capable of such miracles.
Now, he had proof.
But his heart had frozen for another reason.
Because he was staring directly at the work of the Transients.
Had he just laid eyes upon the Master's Gun?
Or had the Gun already fallen to Clelia?
Sitting in his Dark Unit, turning these thoughts over in his mind… had he just placed his life in danger?
Reduce mental activity on this subject.
Let them underestimate us.
After all, sooner or later, there would have been an investigation anyway.
Yet, something about Clelia was deeply intriguing.
If the eye of the Transients had turned toward it,
if their destructive hand had fallen on an insignificant rock populated by a handful of humans,
then Clelia must have had a secret.
It was only logical that he should continue his investigation—if only to interrogate the survivors.
The Wau thought to himself:
"If I am still alive… then I have the divine right to act logically."
"Because if my logical actions were meant to lead me to the Gun, then I would already be dead."
Advance.
And these were, in essence, the thoughts that occupied the Wau's mind for one or two seconds—
as behind him, a door opened.