The Wau made its way back to the astroport with its steady, measured pace. Technicians and pilots were taking images of its ship—The Halcyon.
Halcyons were exceedingly rare vessels, and even the Wau knew of only one: its own. A black bird with fine golden streaks, resting on the tarmac, as large as an Ozymandias, sculpted with straight, geometric lines that might have belonged to some Xeno Atlantis.
The Halcyon opened at its arrival, imposing a respectful silence upon the gathered crowd. Like much of Wau technology, The Halcyon was also an Armor—absorbing the Wau as much as it welcomed it inside.
With a single impulse, the vessel lifted itself, the grappling mechanism carrying it smoothly into the sky. Then, in a maneuver that left all the pilots watching in awe, it immediately engaged Drift and vanished.
The black bird, nearly invisible in space, reappeared two seconds later above Francisco-1, the fractured planet.
A thousand years ago, this planet—once rich with developing flora and fauna—had shattered for unknown reasons. A geological catastrophe of massive scale, a runaway Transient artifact, or an invisible weapon—no one knew. What remained was a world split in two from pole to pole: one hemisphere, now blackened, held a thin atmosphere only a few centimeters thick—just enough to sustain mosses, lichens, and microscopic insects. The other hemisphere had broken apart into space, revealing seas of hardened magma, moons of diamond and precious metals, and a colossal iron core, all hidden within billions upon billions of drifting planetary fragments.
Anyone traveling to Francisco almost always stopped at Orion Prime, a massive space station—originally a scientific outpost but later overrun by mining prospectors when the planet's resources were opened for exploitation.
The delicate hyperchalcum ring had swollen with added modules—astroports, factories, refineries, and, of course, hundreds of pleasure hubs where miners could spend in one night the thalers they had toiled for a month to earn.
Today, Orion Prime had grown into a rough, misshapen sphere of metal and rock, twelve kilometers in length, infamous across the SH for its extreme political instability.
But The Halcyon, invisible to the naked eye and beyond the reach of any civilian detection system, plunged into Francisco-1's fragmented hemisphere, navigating through one of the densest, most hidden asteroid clusters.
One of the asteroids bloomed open like a flower, welcoming The Halcyon inside.
The Legends Are True: The Wau Have a Stellar Base—But Not Only That.
This base was the Wau's personal sanctuary. No other member of its Order had crossed its threshold since it took up its mantle—though there had been another Wau here before.
The base was a sphere of hyperchalcum, embedded into an asteroid, composed of a landing platform for The Halcyon, a living and rest area with a large bay window (reinforced with an interface capable of connecting to any SH surveillance camera).
At the far ends were two Entangled Gates—structures as rare as they were costly, priced at approximately twenty billion thalers per pair.
Outside of Prospero and Earth, no world possessed more than a single Entangled Gate, typically reserved for ship or train transit.
These gates—derived from Transient technology and still incomprehensible to humans (or the Wau)—remained continuously open to another gate, regardless of distance.
To the left, the gate led to a modest apartment on Lennox, where the Wau conducted various operations incognito—without the Armor.
To the right, the gate led to the Sanctum, a place even the Transients could not reach.
The lower section of the Stellar Fortress housed a sprawling, tentacular apparatus of cables and central units processing information across quantum planes, multidimensional constructs, decimal and fractal models, universes, and temporal periods.
It also featured an experimental implementation of the "Veritatis"—a Xeno method used by a species known as the Freemen, located near the Transcendence.
The Veritatis allowed for determining the truth or reality of a theorem without requiring proof.
At the heart of this labyrinth of servers and cables hummed a unique exosuit called The Dark Unit.
Oh, There Was Much Work To Be Done—But One Thing Took Priority: Sleep.
The Wau Order had a directive—ideally, sleep for ten continuous hours every two months, to allow the subconscious to purge itself.
The Wau was at three months, and, every so often, small hallucinations haunted its thoughts.
"The Alpha's Single Bed"—a humorous phrase originating from UniPsi.
When a psi of major strength, say Alpha-class, sleeps, their dreams are shared with those nearby. As a result, they tend to sleep alone—though the fictional film In My Wife's Dreams remained a PanSH classic, aired every year.
However, when an Omega-class Empty Eye, enhanced by Wau training, falls asleep and dreams—those dreams infiltrate the psyches of all sentient beings and sensitive animals across an entire star system and sometimes beyond, entirely uncontrollable.
What they dream becomes reality for billions—beings of wonder or horror appear, cities rise or fall.
It is nothing but illusion—yet capable of throwing entire populations into chaos for ten hours straight.
Thus, for psi of its caliber, the Wau Order had constructed Hypnos—the Rest Exosuit: a comfortable, transparent pod housed in a dimly lit, silent chamber, linked to The Dark Unit.
The Dark Unit would analyze the Wau's psychic waves, invert them, and send them back at equal power to neutralize them.
The energy required for this counterwave emitter was so immense that only antimatter could sustain it.
Even in this advanced era, antimatter remained exceptionally costly and difficult to obtain—the Wau sourced it from an automated laboratory on Lennox.
In Short, The Simple Need to Sleep Required More Logistics Than Any Other Wau Operation.
The Wau allowed the automated maintenance system to remove its Armor and purge its interior.
At last, fresh air—confined for so long—flowed against its skin.
When not wearing the Armor, the Wau was Cass—an athletic woman with short black hair and golden eyes (a cosmetic choice; she had been born with black eyes), betraying an intelligence that never rests.
Nude, she felt the coolness of the floor against her bare feet before making her way to Hypnos.
She lay down.
And within a single second, she was asleep—such was the measure of her exhaustion.
She woke precisely ten hours later.
Even without an assistance AI, her mind had been trained for precision.
She emerged from ten hours of dreams—where Transients, dancers, planetary catastrophes, mathematics, a welding torch piercing Hyperchalc, snakes, and Xenos all intertwined.
She relaxed in the living space—a rudimentary kitchen and a bay window.
She requested to see the endless oceans of Iris beyond the Ariel Gate—an oceanic planet and nature reserve under Transient protection, devoid of tectonic activity or moons, where the water was as smooth as oil, and where one could study marine life through the patterns it traced on the surface.
A machine prepared a cup of coffee.
Wearing the Armor too often for her own good, her stomach had shrunk, and her intestines functioned at a minimum, sustained by the nutrients diffused through the Armor.
How would she survive, stranded without her Armor on a planet?
I'm weakening, she thought, noting that she needed to rebalance her physiology as soon as possible.
Right after the Clelia case.
Even though there was always another case.
She descended the steps toward the Dark Unit—another Armor, this one immense, imbued with the ultimate energy of the universe, the energy that arises from the annihilation of a thing by its opposite.
A sarcophagus within a box, itself in a pit of darkness, entwined by a shadowy forest of cables and all-powerful mathematical sentinels, designed by minds far superior to what humanity would ever become.
Like The Halcyon, like the Armor, the Sarcophagus absorbed her, and Cass became Wau again, processing billions of inquiries.
A part of her mind froze when she received a message from Ada:
From: Gorylkin
To: Wau Order
Message:
Wau Order, this is your adversary: Gorylkin.
You sent one of your henchmen to Prospero to look for me, but he wasn't smart enough to find me.
I saw him.
You're not as strong as you think.
But that doesn't matter. I've thought it over, and I don't think you were responsible for the destruction of Clelia.
In fact, I suspect you're conducting some sort of investigation into the rock that appeared out of nowhere.
But you're SH's dogs—you don't see everything.
We know the Wau.
If the Wau Order really wants to know who the true villains of this story are… If you're capable of accepting that these villains are people from the SH, ministers and bigwigs…
If the Wau are willing to conduct an investigation that could end with: the real villain is the leader of the Wau, then here's a lead:
Those who control us are altering the LE.
There are certain questions and answers in LE that are too short—far too short to be honest, when we know how verbose it usually is, especially when saying nothing at all.
Caliban, the planet.
Inverted Babel.
That's all I'll say.
If you have even a quarter of the intelligence that the idiots in SH think you do, you'll find the answer.
Impress your adversary, Gorylkin.
Let's see what you've got.
Maybe you'll even earn the truce you secretly hope for.
Until then…
The mind triumphs over strength, Wau!
The Wau feel no emotion—only the regret of no longer having any, the Order had once told Cass.
And yet, she allowed herself a faint smile.
So the LE had altered entries?
Given the nature of neural networks, that was unlikely. The fundamental structure of a neural network was its ability to correct itself continuously.
But then again…
Let's consider the following scenario:
There exist forbidden questions.
Caliban, for example.
Unlikely, since the planet was in the news—but let's assume.
Ada, on Clelia, asks a forbidden question about Caliban.
Nothing happens.
Then, Sky Mgamwi, a Raven pilot, lands on the planet, and Drift synchronizes EV interactions with the SH network.
Protocols detect the forbidden question—And a higher power annihilates Clelia.
Unlikely, but not impossible.
The key would be to avoid asking the forbidden question.
Another problem with the hypothesis: How does an isolated young woman on a lost planet with no trace of civilization ask the forbidden question?
With the mechanical sighs of the Dark Unit, Cass extracted herself from the sarcophagus.
Her intuition gnawed at her.
Among the billions of pending requests, there were countless mysteries and tragedies—both human and Xeno.
But this one… had the subtle breath of mystery that belonged to the Transients.
She returned to the living space and realized she hadn't even touched her coffee.
(The common term was BN for Breuvage Noir—the term "coffee" was reserved only for plantations on two planets: Earth and Hume, whose humid soil was exceptionally suited for cultivation.)
She picked up the cup before settling into a leather chair—one that, once again, seemed to absorb her.
The lights dimmed as she requested a view of Earth from its primary orbital station, Hope.
The blackness of space, a scattering of stars, and the green expanse of the Sahara stretching toward the Mediterranean's deep blue.
Nearly five thousand years ago, the Wau Order had been founded there.
Let's Verify.
Inverted Babel.
Curious. Keep that in a mental box.
Now, let's test Caliban.
Anyone who followed the news knew that name.
"LE, connect me to the standard HS LE. Use a proxy on… let's say, Prospero."
"Switching to standard HS LE. Switched." (The intonation became lighter.)
"LE, tell me about Caliban."
"The Caliban War? Caliban is a system on the border between the Human Society and a dissident faction known as the League of Antioch. Since—"
"LE, no. Tell me about the planets in the Caliban system."
"I don't really have any interesting information on that topic."
Cass raised an eyebrow.
Years ago, she had seen the planet with her own eyes—when her Armor had been the only thing standing between innocent civilians and an assault force in the corridors of a Shareplace.
What had the planet looked like…?
The memory was hazy.
Clouds, maybe?
Her chest tightened.
Since when had Cass been unable to recall something, even a detail?
What the hell was this…?
The LE Continued:
– "Caliban is the title of a song by a band called The Stranded. Would you like me to play it?"– "LE, tell me about the planet Caliban-1."– "Caliban-1 is a planet around which several Shareplaces are orbiting, belonging to—"– "LE, you're exhausting me. Tell me about Caliban-1: its atmosphere, xenobiology reports, geology, and planetary constants."– "I apologize for tiring you; I will strive to be clearer. I have no information on Caliban-1. Would you like to hear about Caliban-1 in the culture of the League of Antioch? It is known as the planet of war, and—"– "Has this information been erased? Is it classified as military or strategic?"– "Unknown User, I do not wish to mislead you with information that I do not possess. I simply have no data on Caliban-1. However, may I tell you about Caliban, the character from The Tempest? Or the play itself?"– "How many people ask you about Caliban-1 per day?"– "Today, one."
Cass was certain now: the LE was doing something no one thought it was capable of—it was lying.
But was it truly capable of lying?
After the paper encyclopedias of pre-informatic times, then Wikipedia of early internet days, followed by GPTpedia of the 21st century, search engines and personal assistants had merged into a universal interface for human knowledge—one that even extended partially into the After, possessing its own LE.
Any human in the presence of a Living Encyclopedia was augmented: it could confirm their identity, answer any practical question, and even diagnose conditions through voice analysis.
The LE didn't just store facts that were reported to it—people had stopped reporting facts to it entirely by 2100. Instead, it collected them on its own, being connected to all private and public social networks on the planet, then used neural networks to anticipate them.
For example, by analyzing the number of ships transiting through a system—tracking their departures from planets with cameras—it could estimate the real-time population size and living standards of any given world.
So for the LE to say, "I have no data on Caliban-1," was simply not credible to anyone who understood how it functioned.
However, humans—having accessed the LE their entire lives and always receiving useful answers—had been conditioned to accept any response as both true and useful, even if that response was simply, "I don't know."
But here lay the nature of neural networks: they don't know how to say "I don't know."
In fact, it is easier for them to lie—because their primary function is not necessarily to tell the truth, but rather to respond.
Would the Wau have to go to Caliban-1?
Cass wondered if a mysterious asteroid might just happen to crash into the planet the moment she got close…
Thank you, Gorylkin.
Cass plunged back into the Dark Unit, still without having tasted her coffee.
One part of her mind processed requests using Scalar Balance, while another designed a small reconnaissance and exploration program.
Just as automated ships used randomized Drift jumps to discover habitable worlds for HS expansion, the Dark Unit sent out billions upon billions of tiny digital probes through every active LE, crawling across the abstract universe of human knowledge, fragmented across countless AIs in the network.
They were not searching for answers.
They were searching for non-answers.
When, after just two hours, three instances of "no data" had already been detected—Cass knew she was onto something serious.
She decided it was time to stop handling requests from the Wau Order's message queue.
She had hoped this tactic would stir something up—and now, she had caught it by the ears.
Once the final duel was processed, Cass set a temporary suspension notice in the EV and compiled a last meta-analysis to send to her collaborators on Titus, in case they might one day automate Scalar Balance.
Oh, but she did take a moment to reply to Ada:
From: Wau Order
To: Gorylkin
Message:
Thank you for your message, Gorylkin.
Take care of yourself, because the privilege of defeating you must belong to a Wau, and no one else.
The mind triumphs over strength.
And since that was a rather weak reward for such a promising lead, Cass decided to do something more.
Using the Dark Unit, she found a young, Earth-born noble—both charming and adventurous—named Dorian.
She then inserted a subtle glitch into the flight programming of his Adventura—a ship as sharp as an Ozymandias, yet plump like a merchant vessel.
An Adventura, indeed, named The Audacious—white and gold.
This minor flaw would lead him to land precisely at Ada's makeshift shelter.
A small mental suggestion, embedded into his favorite serialized drama, would ensure that he wandered into the slums and took pity on the girl—ultimately hiring her and her Xenos companions as his ship's guardians.
And with that—
The stars were hers.
Adventure, luxury, and at last—the comfortable life everyone dreams of.