"So this is it," Icon said.
They were floating in the air and overlooking New York City. The sun had mostly set, and the lights made the city glitter like a jewel.
"Presenting: humanity!" Ashtoreth said, spreading her arms.
"There's no way they had the mana infrastructure for this built in so little ti…" Icon said, peering down at the city. "Is everything really just… electrically powered?"
"Yup! They got their power back online real fast, if you ask . But I think they're actually just converting mana into electricity for so of it."
"Mana to electricity?" Icon asked. "Which they then… what, transfer across huge distances with silver cable?"
"Copper, actually," said Ashtoreth. "They step up the voltage to get it across long distances without huge losses. They use these things called transforrs that have coils. They look pretty cool. Coils are cool."
"How astonishingly scientific of you, Ashtoreth."
Ashtoreth shrugged. "What? I didn't pay a lot of attention in infrastructure theory classes, just sort of learned what we needed to break to turn the lights out."
"How charming."
"Okay, but you're not going to start quizzing on diodes, right?"
"What's a diode?"
"See? And that basically ans that I was right to skip all the hard stuff. Ds get degrees."
Icon fixed her with a flat look, then turned back to the city below them. "There's so much that I want to know just based on the sight of a single city's lights," she said. "How do you ensure that everything is… distributed properly? The power, I an."
"I dunno—maybe transforrs?"
"How do you go about converting mana into electrical potential anyway?"
"Again, I don't know. But it definitely involves spinning sothing around using steam."
Icon lowered herself to get closer to the city. "The vehicles," she said. "Are they electric too?"
"Uh… so of them? One sec, we're getting close." Ashtoreth glamored herself to look like a human once more, sa as she'd done with Matthews in the park.
Icon, who had been peering down at the city as she moved closer to it, looked over at Ashtoreth and froze. "Why are you doing that?"
"Because I don't want people to see and know that it's ."
"Don't they know who you are?"
"Sure!" she said. "But that's the problem."
"So you conceal yourself from humanity when you're among them?" Icon's eyes narrowed. "Not even among them—hundreds of ters above them."
"Yes?" Ashtoreth asked. "Look, I'm a civil servant, over here. I have obligations to the people that I serve, and one of those is to keep myself safe."
"And a random street in York City is going to be dangerous for you?"
"No," she said. "Of course not. But information can travel very quickly. Soone could co after very fast if I'm sighted."
"And you expect to believe this, do you?"
Ashtoreth shrugged again. "Believe it or don't. Film actors before initialization had to deal with swarms of paparazzi showing up anywhere they'd been sighted. Internet strears would get stalked by people who were watching their streams all the ti. And I'm way more famous than those people right now, leaving aside the fact that I'm a military target."
"And so you think that if you land in the street looking like yourself, soone will show up to kill you in a couple of minutes?"
"Yeah, maybe. Mostly I think that if I wanted to be the sole decider of how I get to risk my life, I probably shouldn't have tried for the monarchy in the first place."
"Such nobility," said Icon.
Ashtoreth didn't get a chance to answer before Icon began descending again. Soon they both stood in front of a small convenience store that was currently open for business. People moved past them on the sidewalk, most of them carrying closed umbrellas because the cloudy skies were threatening rain. Across the street, Ashtoreth saw the ruins of a collapsed tower had been cleared away, leaving only an exposed foundation.
Icon looked around them with unabashed curiosity. "Remarkable. Is this what everything looked like before the initialization, too?"
"I don't know," Ashtoreth said. "A bit? It looks closer to what I rember seeing than I thought it would, but I guess people really appreciate what they know to be normal." She pointed at a billboard that was displaying instructions on registering your powers. "The electric advertisents have been replaced with public service announcents, see? That makes a big difference on a street like this. And there's less traffic, because a lot of people died and a lot of people moved out of the cities after initialization hit them bad. This place got it a lot easier, though."
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"Easier? Why's that?"
"Because this city was my city," she said quietly. "I was the best of us, and so I got first pick. I picked here."
"To attack?"
Ashtoreth sighed, moving to the edge of the street to stay out of the way of pedestrians. "To obliterate," she said, her voice now almost a whisper. "We were going to begin by making a statent to humanity. Turn everything you can see into rubble."
"You weren't completely unsuccessful, from the look of things," Icon said, nodding her head toward the place where a building's foundation now lay exposed.
"My people and I did our best," she said. "I ca here first, even. And I tore bastions from the sky as easily as plucking fruit from a tree. But we had to… triage, I don't know…"
Icon had resud looking around with a clear sense of awe. "How many humans are there on Earth?"
"Seven and a quarter billion. That's the latest estimate. It keeps going up because they find more people."
Slowly, Icon nodded. "How many people were there on Earth?"
Ashtoreth gave a weak shrug. "Eight billion and change? Most of the deaths were from tutorials. A lot of small towns got wiped out, too. The cities were prioritized for defensive actions because they got hit harder and had more people."
Icon was quiet a while. She kept sweeping her eyes up and down the street, craning her neck to look at the towers, and following passing cars with her gaze.
"Can you imagine it, Ashtoreth? An entire civilization of humans. Generations upon generations of people had to precede this—this, here. The city you chose. And if what you say is true…"
She fell silent. Ashtoreth stared at her, waiting. Just when she thought that Icon was finished, though, she spoke again.
"My life has gone on for more than two hundred and thirty billion seconds. Almost every single one of those seconds was spent in the dark, waiting. Maintaining self-definition day by day in the hopes that one day, one of you would find ."
"That sounds… pretty awful, honestly. It would drive crazy."
"Maintaining self-definition is the process by which one avoids going crazy," said Icon.
"Oh."
"It's a trendous burden, maintaining. Especially for one whose scope extends as far as mine."
"Um. Sorry to hear that?"
"The previous archival spirit chose to be replaced by because I had the most elegant design. I would be easier to maintain and thus have a greater chance of surviving until the ti of reclamation. They could have created a spirit whose primary purpose was defense, but instead they created . And more and more, I wonder why that is. The lich was right. I'm not made to think of the things that protect humanity. I'm not made to tell you no."
Ashtoreth almost winced. "So… don't?"
"You were right, too. I should obviously give you so kind of test with which you can prove your trustworthiness if I'm going to hold shut the door… but I don't know how to do that." She gestured broadly to the world around them. "Still—this is nice. I'm glad I got to see this."
Icon sighed, and Ashtoreth thought she looked incredibly sad. It occurred to her that Icon's role dood her to loneliness even now that everything had begun and her waiting was apparently over.
"I can show you all kinds of places," Ashtoreth said. "My boots will run out of charge, though, so we might better use a nexus. And, uh, I'm not supposed to let you pick exact locations."
Icon smiled a little. "Of course you're not."
"The precursor humans buried at least one thing in the ground," she said. "Letting you take to a random spot in the desert could be a security risk."
"Reasonable, I suppose…" Icon said. She turned to Ashtoreth. "I have a question for you."
"Okay."
"Why don't you trust ?" she asked. "I can understand it a little, but… if the people who made didn't want what was best for humanity, why make at all? Haven't you seen enough to know that I'm going to act in your interest?"
"Definitely not," said Ashtoreth. "No offense."
"I won't be offended, not as long as you explain yourself."
"From what the rulers of humanity have seen, most places in the cosmos aren't exactly egalitarian paradises. And that's not including Hell."
"And Earth was?"
"Nope! Earth was hardly perfect before initialization, but it was getting better by the year."
Icon closed her eyes and nodded in seeming realization. "Kylie called us technologically advanced, but socially regressed."
"Yep! And while I don't know if that's true or not—honestly, I'm not the best judge—the general fear is that the precursor humans didn't set all of us this up solely for the benefit of the Earthlings. We want the protections that the Five Realms can offer… but we're afraid of the politics that will creep in if so ancient, forr governnt official shows up and decides that we can only survive if she's in charge. You get ?"
Ashtoreth watched Icon very carefully… but the spirit's face showed no sudden realization, no flash of recognition that might have indicated she was waiting for Dazel.
"I suppose that makes sense," she said. She worked her mouth for a mont, then said, "All right."
"All right… what?"
"I think I have so reasonable impositions in mind," said Icon. "I want a map of Earth and its cities from before initialization. I want to be able to pick so of those cities, then have you show what's beco of them—alongside encyclopedia entries or other information-rich docunts that detail what they were like before."
"Okay. I think we can do that."
"Good. And naturally, I want to know who 'we' is. I want to et 'we.'"
"You want to et high command? I can do that."
"I want to et human rulers who were human rulers before the initialization. I want to see docuntation that proves as much. And rest assured—I'll think of a way to be highly ticulous in my assessnt."
Ashtoreth grinned. "Now we're getting sowhere!"
"My scrupulousness may require to make requests that must be t with haste," Icon continued. "I have to be sure that you don't have an army of falsifiers rushing ahead to fabricate all the evidence I ask for."
"All reasonable!"
"Good," Icon said. "Very good."
Ashtoreth felt a droplet of rain fall squarely onto her head. Across the street, she saw soone opening their umbrella.
Icon looked up at the sky. "I hope that you prove that I can trust you, Ashtoreth. If you do, I'll help make Pinnacle open to you. Pinnacle… and the archive as a whole."
"Oh, don't you worry," Ashtoreth said. "I won't disappoint!"
"If you don't, you'll get the chance to learn so history. And you'll see just why it is that I don't trust your kind."
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