Chapter One
A New Beginning
The virus didn’t announce itself.
That was perhaps the cruelest part of it — the way it arrived without theatre, without the dramatic, trumpeted warning that humanity had always imagined the apocalypse would carry. There was no flash of light in the sky, no comet trailing fire across the clouds, no government broadcast cutting through prime-time television with a stern-faced general standing before a map of catastrophe. The Veyra Strain, as it came to be called in the months after its identification, slipped into the world the way a knife slips between ribs — quietly, efficiently, and with devastating intent.
It began in the autumn.
Somewhere between the first reported cluster of cases in a coastal city in Southeast Asia and the moment the World Health Organisation upgraded its threat classification to the highest possible level, approximately four hundred million people were already carrying the virus without knowing it. The incubation period was long — brutally, almost surgically long — giving the pathogen ample time to root itself deep into the cellular architecture of its hosts before the symptoms announced themselves. When they finally did, it was already far too late for containment.
Arthur Wexter watched it unfold from a damp flat in Leeds.
He was twenty-three years old, unremarkable by most measures, working a logistics coordinator job for a distribution company that still insisted on using spreadsheets built in 2009. He had a narrow face, dark circles perpetually stamped beneath grey eyes that tended to observe rather than participate in whatever room he found himself in, and the kind of lean, angular frame that suggested he ate regularly but never particularly enthusiastically. He kept his dark hair short on the sides and longer on top, not out of any real vanity but because it required the least amount of maintenance. He paid his bills on time. He read more than he socialised. He had strong opinions about geopolitics and almost no opinions about football, which made him something of a social outlier in the part of the North where he’d grown up.
He was, by his own frank assessment, deeply ordinary.
He watched the news the way he did most things — with a detached, analytical interest rather than any particular emotional investment. He tracked the infection curve on independent data-aggregating websites before most of the mainstream outlets had even properly mapped the spread. He noticed the lag between what governments were saying and what the numbers were telling, the soft language used to describe what the hard data was screaming. He bought extra tinned food not out of panic but out of simple probability calculation. He stocked medications. He kept his head.
By the time the United Kingdom entered its third national lockdown — this one with considerably more desperation behind it than the ones the country had weathered before — Arthur had been working from home for eleven weeks, watching the world through a succession of screens. The death toll climbed with the kind of consistency that stopped being shocking and started being simply awful. Hospitals in Manchester stopped accepting non-emergency patients. The army began constructing overflow mortuary facilities at three separate sites within forty miles of his flat. He could hear, on the stillest of nights, the distant groan of refrigerated lorries that had been repurposed for reasons the council announcements were carefully vague about.
The Veyra Strain attacked the respiratory and neurological systems simultaneously. Patients described it, in the early stages, as a pressure behind the eyes and a warmth in the chest that felt almost pleasant before it turned. The pleasant phase lasted roughly six hours. What followed it lasted considerably longer, and considerably more brutally. Bleeding from mucous membranes. Severe inflammation of the brain stem. The body’s immune system, in its frantic effort to combat the replication rate of the virus, turning cannibalistically on its own tissue in a cascade of hyper-inflammatory response that liquefied organs with a thoroughness that left pathologists shaken.
The mortality rate, once the symptoms presented fully, hovered somewhere between sixty and seventy-two percent, depending on which study you believed.
By the time the world’s cumulative death count crossed the one billion mark, it stopped being a statistic and became something that had no adequate word in any language Arthur could think of.
He wasn’t immune to the grief of it. He wasn’t made of stone. He’d lost his aunt in Norwich in the second wave, a woman who’d smelled of lavender and kept too many ceramic owls on her windowsill and who had, without fail, sent him a birthday card with a crisp ten-pound note tucked inside it every single year since he was four. He’d lost a university colleague to it, a sharp-tongued young woman from Edinburgh who had been three weeks from finishing her doctoral thesis. He carried these losses the way a logical person carries grief — stored carefully, not denied, but set aside from the mechanism of daily function.
He kept going. He kept watching the numbers.
And then, in the February of the second year of the crisis, something extraordinary happened.
He didn’t feel any different when they came to his door.
Two people in full PPE gear — the kind that had become so commonplace on the streets by then that Arthur barely registered it — knocked on his flat door at half past eight on a Tuesday morning. One of them was a woman from UKHSA who introduced herself with the clipped efficiency of someone who had knocked on a great many doors that week. The other was a man from a research consortium whose name Arthur didn’t catch because his attention had already fixed on the tablet the woman was holding, where a document was pulled up with his name and a list of haematological reference numbers.
They’d been running a broad retrospective serology survey on recovered patients and on a sample population of those who had never reported symptoms. They had cast the net wide. The net had, against all statistical expectation, caught Arthur Wexter.
His blood was doing something that no other blood sample in the survey had done.
“Your immune response to the Veyra Strain is,” the woman said, and paused for a fraction of a second that told Arthur she was choosing her words with care, “atypical.”
He looked at the reference numbers on the tablet.
“Atypical,” he repeated.
“We’d like to bring you in for further testing. Voluntary at this stage. But I’d be doing you a disservice if I told you it wasn’t extremely important.”
He looked at the numbers again. He looked at her face. He looked at the numbers once more.
“Alright,” he said. “Let me get my coat.”
The next fourteen days were the strangest of his life, which, in retrospect, was saying something, given how they ended.
The facility they took him to was in Wiltshire — a research complex that had been designated an emergency national scientific asset six months prior and had, since then, been running at around three hundred percent of its intended capacity. Brilliant and exhausted people worked in shifts around the clock inside it, and Arthur walked through corridors that smelled of antiseptic and burnt coffee and human urgency in a way that reminded him of the hospital at two in the morning — that particular blend of crisis and competence that lived permanently on the edge of breaking.
They were patient with him. They explained things thoroughly, which he appreciated. The short version, as a lead virologist named Dr. Hargreaves — a small, intense woman with reading glasses pushed up on her head who looked like she hadn’t slept in four days and probably hadn’t — delivered it to him on the second day, was this:
His immune system had, for reasons they were still trying to fully understand, developed an antibody response to the Veyra Strain that didn’t just neutralise the virus. It dismantled it. Comprehensively and rapidly, in a way that no engineered therapeutic had yet managed to replicate. They’d been trying to synthesise the relevant proteins from his blood samples for ten days. The results were promising. Profoundly promising.
“How promising?” Arthur asked.
Dr. Hargreaves looked at him with the particular expression of someone who had been in science long enough to be superstitious about optimism, but who was currently losing the battle against it.
“If this scales the way the preliminary data suggests,” she said carefully, “we may be looking at a viable treatment pathway. Possibly a cure.”
Arthur was quiet for a long moment.
“What do you need from me?” he said.
That was, really, the only question that mattered. He’d worked it out already — alone in his small assigned room the previous night, lying on his back on the narrow bed and staring at the ceiling while the numbers ran through his head. One billion, two hundred million dead at the current count. The curve still climbing. The trajectory, absent intervention, pointing toward figures that the human brain struggled to genuinely hold. He had something in his body that might change that trajectory. The calculation wasn’t complicated. It was, in fact, one of the simplest he’d ever done, even if the weight of it pressed down on him in the dark with a heaviness that made his chest ache.
The answer was obvious. It had been obvious since the moment the woman with the tablet had shown up at his door.
“We need plasma,” Dr. Hargreaves told him. “A significant volume. More than is typically taken in a standard donation. We need to isolate the factors and begin replication at scale. We have the equipment. We have the team. We just need—”
“How much?” he asked.
She hesitated.
“Arthur,” she said, and the use of his first name was gentle in a way that told him everything before she continued, “the volume we’re discussing isn’t compatible with…” She stopped. Started again. “We’ve been working on a way to do this that would allow you to—”
“How much,” he said again, not unkindly.
She told him.
He was quiet for a very long time after that. Long enough that she began to say something else, something about ongoing research, about other options, about they weren’t there yet but perhaps in time—
“How many people?” he asked.
She understood the question. “Based on current infection modelling, and accounting for production time and distribution — conservative estimate — we’re talking about saving somewhere in the range of three to four billion people from mortal illness. Possibly more. The treatment would also clear active infections in existing patients. We’re talking about potentially ending the crisis within eighteen months.”
Arthur looked at his hands. They were ordinary hands. Unremarkable ones.
Three to four billion people.
“Right,” he said.
“You don’t have to—”
“When do we start?” he said.
He thought about a great many things in the days that followed.
He thought about his aunt and her ceramic owls. He thought about the Edinburgh woman’s unfinished thesis, and whether someone had found it and done something with it. He thought about a specific afternoon when he was nine years old when his father had taken him to a reservoir in the Dales and they’d skipped stones across the water for an hour without saying very much at all, and it had been, in the way certain quiet hours are, perfect.
He did not tell his father what was going to happen. He wrote him a letter instead, long and honest, and left it with one of the facility’s administrative staff with instructions to have it delivered three days after the procedure. He felt that was the right way to do it. A phone call would have been harder on both of them, and Arthur had never been good at conversations that required him to perform emotion he was genuinely feeling. The letter let him be accurate.
He was not heroic about it. He didn’t feel heroic. He felt the way he imagined most people felt when facing down a calculation that had only one answer — not brave, precisely, but clear. Resigned, perhaps, in the truest sense of the word: resigned to a conclusion that the logic had reached before the heart had any say in the matter.
The morning of the procedure, Dr. Hargreaves came and sat with him.
“You could still—” she began.
“No,” he said. “Let’s get on with it.”
They sedated him before the worst of it began, for which he was grateful in the abstract. But the sedation, as it turned out, was imperfect — a factor of the extraordinary physiology they were trying to work with, his body metabolising the anaesthetic faster than they could account for. He was not fully conscious for what followed, but he was not fully absent from it either. He existed in a dim, chemical half-space where sensation arrived stripped of its sharpest edges but arrived nonetheless.
Cold. That was the dominant impression. A cold that began at his arms where the lines went in and spread inward with a slow, terrible patience, like winter moving through a house room by room as the heating fails. He was aware, in a vague, dissociated way, of the sounds of the equipment around him — the rhythmic mechanical pulse of the apheresis machine working through its cycles, the low, urgent murmur of voices — Dr. Hargreaves, others — doing their careful, necessary work. He was aware of the pressure changes in his body as the plasma went out, the blood returned, the plasma went out again. He was aware of his heart, which was doing its best.
There was pain. Not the sharp, localised pain of a wound, but something more fundamental — a deep, systemic wrongness, as though his body was registering an objection at the cellular level to what was being asked of it. His skin went grey and then, in patches, something worse than grey. His extremities stopped feeling like his own.
He thought, in the last coherent stretch of his awareness, about the reservoir in the Dales. The flat grey water and the sound of the stones and his father’s hand, big and warm and certain, briefly on his shoulder.
Not bad, he thought, in the abstract, drifting way of a mind running low on the things it needed to run. As lives go. Not bad at all.
His heart stopped at fourteen minutes past three on a Wednesday afternoon in February.
Outside, it was raining.
The white was total.
Not the white of a hospital ceiling or a blank wall or a winter sky — those whites all had texture, depth, the memory of colour waiting at their edges. This white was something else entirely. It was the white of absence, of a space that had not yet decided what it wanted to be. It pressed against Arthur’s perception from every direction simultaneously, warm and dimensionless, and for a long, suspended moment he simply existed within it without thought, without weight, without the peculiar chronic low-level discomfort of having a body.
That last part, he noticed first. The absence of pain. The absence of cold. The absence of the machine’s rhythm and the chemical heaviness in his blood. He was — he ran a quick internal inventory — nothing. Or rather, he was him, precisely and completely him, but stripped of the animal complaint of flesh.
Then he became aware of the floor beneath his feet.
He looked down. It was white, like everything else, seamless and without joint or seam, but solid. He was standing on it. He was, in fact, standing, which required some readjustment of expectation given the last thing he remembered was being horizontal and comprehensively dying.
He looked at his hands.
Ordinary. Unremarkable. Still his.
“Right,” he said, to the white.
Then he looked up, and saw the panel.
It hovered in the air before him at roughly chest height, a rectangle of something that was not quite glass and not quite light — it had the depth of a screen but the solidity of nothing, its edges clean and faintly luminous, the way the edge of a door looks when there’s a bright room beyond it. The surface of it was filled with text and values and indicators arranged with a precision that suggested it had been designed by something with an extremely good grasp of information hierarchy and a considerable amount of time to think about it.
At the top, in clean, pale lettering that Arthur could read with perfect ease despite never having seen the typeface before in his life, were the words:
REINCARNATION PANEL Cycle Assessment — Soul Identifier: WEXTER-A-23-UK-PRIME Status: Processing Complete
Below that, a dividing line, and then a section headed CAUSE OF TERMINATION, which read, with clinical brevity: Voluntary biological sacrifice. Exsanguination via plasma extraction. Confirmed. Beneath that, a note Arthur found mildly interesting: No resistance recorded at point of termination. Soul departure: clean.
He read it with the same methodical attention he’d given the infection curve data, his eyes moving line by line down the panel.
The next section was considerably more arresting.
CONTRIBUTION ASSESSMENT
The list beneath it was long. At the top, in values he didn’t yet have a unit for:
Direct preservation of sentient life (immediate effect): 3,847,200,000 Projected long-term preservation contribution (modelled over 50 planetary years): 6,100,000,000+ Catalyst status: Confirmed. Sole-source contribution. Willingness coefficient: Maximum. No coercion recorded. Alternative self-preservation options available at time of decision: 3 (declined)
Below the list, a running total, rendered in a pale gold that stood out from the rest of the panel’s cooler palette:
TOTAL CONTRIBUTION POINTS: 4,847,390 CP
Arthur stared at this for a moment.
“That’s…” he started, then stopped, because he didn’t actually have a baseline for comparison. He had no idea if that was a lot.
A sound answered him. Not quite a voice and not quite music — something between the two, like a single note played on an instrument that didn’t exist yet. Then the panel updated, a new section unfolding from the bottom with the smooth inevitability of a breath:
POINT VALUE CONTEXT Average soul contribution upon natural termination: 12–400 CP Average soul contribution upon notable self-sacrifice: 800–4,000 CP Your contribution: 4,847,390 CP Classification: Unprecedented within Sector 7 of the Observable Multiverse
He read that three times. Then he looked up from the panel, as though expecting something, and found only the white.
“Unprecedented,” he said quietly. He didn’t say it with pride, particularly. He filed it.
The panel shifted again, transitioning from the assessment section to something new, the heading changing at the top:
REINCARNATION AWARD — TIER: DIVINE GENESIS
Available to souls accumulating sufficient contribution points for divine classification. Awarded at the discretion of the Multiverse Administrative Construct (MAC). Current threshold for Divine Genesis: 1,000,000 CP.
You have accumulated 4.8x the minimum threshold.
As a Divine Genesis recipient, you are entitled to the following:
The list that followed was not short.
Arthur read it with increasing attention, his expression settling into the particular focused stillness he adopted when processing information that was going to require significant recalibration of his understanding of reality.
— Assignment of one (1) uninhabited planetary body within designated sector — Full planetary sovereignty and creative authority — God System: Standard Divine Edition (upgraded to Enhanced Divine Edition upon your point multiplier — details below) — God Pixie Companion: Class 1 Navigator (assigned upon acceptance) — Starting Divine Energy Reserve: 940,000 units (scaled from point surplus) — Rank designation: Nascent God, Rank 1 — Access to: Basic Reality Shaping, Atmospheric Sculpting, Elemental Seeding, Biological Template Library (Standard), Observation Layer (passive), Intervention Layer (restricted — upgrades available)
He got to the bottom of the list and paused.
— Note: The Multiverse contains approximately 11,400,000 registered Nascent Gods at current census. Divine hierarchy is non-static. Power, influence, and rank are earned and expanded through the management, development, and growth of your assigned world. You are not the first. You are not the most powerful. You are, however, among the most promising — and the universe has, in its long memory, seen what promising becomes.
— Further note: You may decline this assignment. Your points will be converted to a standard reincarnation at the soul tier corresponding to your contribution level. The choice is yours.
Arthur looked at the decline option for approximately one second.
Then he looked back at the full list.
“God System,” he said aloud, testing the words. “My own planet.” He considered the note about eleven million other nascent gods and felt, not daunted, but something more interesting — calibrated. Placed. The universe had just told him where he stood in a hierarchy he hadn’t known existed two minutes ago, and where he stood was at the bottom, and he found that he didn’t mind that at all. The bottom was a known position. The bottom had a direction attached to it, and the direction was up.
He reached out and touched the panel. Or rather — since he wasn’t entirely sure he had hands in the way he’d previously understood the word — he directed his attention toward the section at the bottom of the display, where a single luminous indicator pulsed with patient, unhurried light:
[ ACCEPT DIVINE GENESIS ]
He pressed it.
The panel didn’t vanish so much as it evolved.
It restructured itself in a cascade of unfolding information, new displays blooming outward from the central display like the pages of a book being turned by invisible hands — quickly at first, and then settling, until what hung before Arthur was not a single panel but something more like an architecture of panels, layered and arranged in a way that somehow remained perfectly readable despite its complexity. At the centre of it, a new heading:
GOD SYSTEM: ENHANCED DIVINE EDITION Bonded to Soul: WEXTER-A-23-UK-PRIME Initialising…
A progress indicator moved with brisk efficiency. Then:
Initialisation complete.
Welcome, Nascent God.
Your God System is your primary interface for the management, observation, and development of your assigned world. It will track your Divine Energy (DE), display your current abilities and their limitations, log your world’s developmental progress, and alert you to significant events within your domain. It will grow as you grow. It will unlock as you unlock. For now, it is limited — not as an insult, but as an architecture. Power without structure is noise.
Your current abilities are listed in the DIVINE PANEL. Your starting DE reserve is displayed in the top right of your field of perception at all times. You may access your full System interface by directing your intent toward the OPEN SYSTEM command.
Arthur noted, somewhere in the periphery of his awareness, a faint luminous indicator — a small, clean readout that seemed to exist just inside the edge of his vision without being in his vision, the way a word sits on the tip of the tongue. He directed his attention toward it and it expanded briefly, showing him a simple bar and a number: 940,000 DE. He noted it and let it recede.
Then he heard a sound.
It was small. It was, in fact, remarkably small — a sound like a single bright note from a bell no bigger than a thimble, followed by the very slight disturbance of air that suggested movement in a space where there had previously been no air to disturb.
He looked to his left.
Floating approximately level with his shoulder, roughly the size of a large apple, was a creature that Arthur could only describe as a person made very small and then given wings — though that description undersold it considerably. It was humanoid in the most fundamental sense: two arms, two legs, a head, a body, the general proportions of something that had once been, or was distantly related to something that had once been, a person. But it was rendered in a palette that was entirely its own. Its skin had the faint luminescence of something that generated its own light, a warm amber-gold that pulsed very gently like a heartbeat made visible. Its features were sharp and alert, with large eyes the colour of pale green sea-glass that caught the ambient white of the room and gave it back brighter. Its wings — four of them, arranged in two overlapping pairs at its back — were translucent and veined with light, currently in a state of rapid motion that kept it hovering with complete stillness.
It was wearing, Arthur noted with some bemusement, what appeared to be a small jacket.
It looked at him. He looked at it.
“You’re the God Pixie,” Arthur said.
“Pip,” it said. Its voice was surprisingly clear for something its size — not tinny or thin, but properly formed, with an accent Arthur couldn’t place. “That’s what you should call me. Pip works fine. Unless you want to use my formal designation, in which case—” it made a sound like a brief sequence of tones rather than syllables — “but honestly, Pip is easier and I’ve found that new gods who spend a lot of time on formality in the first hour tend to be insufferable going forward, so I’d rather start us off right.”
Arthur observed this for a moment. “Pip,” he said.
“That’s the one.” Pip did a small, efficient loop in the air that seemed to be its version of a nod. “I’m your Navigator. Class 1, which means I’m assigned to you for the full duration of your development, not just the early stages. That’s a function of your points tier, in case you were wondering. Lower-tier gods get a Class 3 — helpful enough, but they rotate out once you hit Rank 5. I’m permanent.” It said this with a tone that managed to be simultaneously matter-of-fact and privately pleased.
“Permanent,” Arthur repeated.
“For all practical purposes. I know what you’re thinking,” Pip added.
“Do you.”
“You’re thinking: is it actually useful, or is it just decorative?” Pip crossed its small arms. “I’ve had that thought directed at me eleven times across nine gods, and the answer is always the same: I know more about the mechanics of this than you do, I know more about the Multiverse administrative structure than you do, I know more about the mistakes that new gods make in their first century than you do, and I have survived all of my previous assignments in good standing, which is not as trivially easy as it sounds. So yes. Useful.”
“Good,” Arthur said, without sarcasm. “I don’t have much patience for decorative.”
Pip looked at him with its sea-glass eyes for a moment, assessing. Then something in its expression shifted — not quite warmth, but an upgrade from professional neutrality to something more like genuine attention.
“Good,” it said, mirroring his word back at him. “I’ve worked with altruistic gods. I’ve worked with power-hungry ones. I’ve worked with ones who thought they knew everything on arrival and spent their first fifty years unlearning it. You’re…” it tilted its head, “…different. I can work with different.”
“What’s the briefing?” Arthur asked.
Pip seemed to appreciate the directness. It turned in the air to face the panel array, and a portion of it shifted and reorganised in response — a map bloomed in the centre display, a rendering of a solar system that meant nothing to Arthur yet but that his eyes moved across with instinctive attention. One planet highlighted: small by planetary standards, third from its sun, oceanic, young. The kind of young that showed in the turbulence of its surface imagery — volcanoes threading the dark, oceans that were still settling the argument of their own boundaries.
“Your world,” Pip said. “Currently in late geological formation. No life yet — you’ll need to seed it, or let it develop naturally, or some combination of both, depending on your management philosophy. It sits in a habitable zone, good star, stable orbit. The raw material is excellent.” A brief pause. “You’ll need to name it. Unnamed worlds can’t be fully integrated into the God System until they have a designation. It doesn’t have to be complicated. It just has to be yours.”
Arthur looked at the planet on the display. Young and turbulent and full of unrealised potential, turning slowly in the pale light of a sun it hadn’t yet properly met. He thought about the word that had been with him since the earliest history lessons of his childhood — the old word, the original word, from the Latin his language had swallowed and kept. The word that meant earth, soil, ground. The word that meant the very substance of a world.
He had no attachment to sentiment as a general rule, but there was something that felt right about taking an old word and giving it to something new. A kind of inheritance. A quiet acknowledgement of where he’d come from, even as he stepped into something that had no frame of reference in anything he’d known.
“Terra,” he said.
The panel registered it immediately. The designation field that had read [UNNAMED] updated in a clean, immediate shift: TERRA.
Pip made the small bell-sound again, which Arthur was beginning to recognise as its version of acknowledgement. “Terra,” it repeated. “Good. Clean. Easy to work with.” It turned back to him, wings maintaining their steady hum. “Are you ready?”
Arthur thought about that for a very brief moment.
He was, by most reasonable measures, dead. He was standing in a white room that existed outside of any geography he had known. He had, three minutes ago, accepted the governance of a planet he had never seen in a universe that apparently contained millions of beings in the same position. He had a God System overlaying his perception and a small glowing person in a jacket for a permanent companion. He had no power base, no rank worth mentioning, eleven million competitors, and a world that was still making up its mind about whether to have continents.
He also had, he noted, an energy reserve of 940,000 units of something called Divine Energy, the precise capabilities of which he had yet to fully inventory. He had time — apparently an extraordinary amount of it. He had, above all else, the same quality that had gotten him through a pandemic and into a research facility and onto an apheresis machine without flinching: the capacity to look at a situation clearly and decide what to do about it without waiting for certainty that would never come.
“Yes,” he said.
And the white room dissolved.
There was a moment of nothing.
Then there was everything.
He stood — if stood was still the right word for what he was now doing, which he wasn’t entirely certain of — on the edge of a coastline that was still in the process of deciding where it ended. The ocean before him was not blue, not yet. It was a deep, heavy grey, young-water grey, full of minerals it hadn’t yet sorted, churning against a shore of dark volcanic rock whose edges were still sharp enough to remind you they had once been something interior made exterior by extraordinary heat. The sky above was vast and pale and electric at its upper reaches, streaked with the kind of clouds that form when an atmosphere is still settling its chemistry, bruised yellows and deep violets running through a base of thick pearl-white.
There was no life. Not yet. Nothing with eyes looked back at him. Nothing with roots had claimed the rock. It was completely, absolutely, and in its own way magnificently empty — a canvas that had been stretched and prepared and was now simply waiting.
The air, or what served as air, moved against him. It smelled of sulphur and salt and deep stone and the particular electric scent of rain that hadn’t fallen yet. It smelled, in the way that all first things smell, of pure potential.
In the corner of his perception, the DE counter pulsed its quiet pulse: 940,000.
Pip hovered at his shoulder, saying nothing for once, which Arthur found he appreciated.
He looked out across the grey ocean of his world, the young, violent, empty world that the Multiverse had handed him like a blank page, and he felt the weight of it settle on him — not heavily, not oppressively, but with a kind of solidity that he recognised as the weight of something real. He had governed nothing in his previous life. He had managed a logistics spreadsheet and paid his bills on time and made a single, clear-eyed decision at the end of it that had apparently made him, by the universe’s accounting, exceptional.
He had a long way to go. He understood that completely. He was at the bottom of a hierarchy he didn’t yet fully understand, with abilities he hadn’t fully mapped, on a world that didn’t yet have so much as a bacterium to call a citizen. He was no hero. He harboured no particular illusions about his own goodness — he’d made the calculation, done the arithmetic of the sacrifice, and acted on the answer. That was logic, not virtue. He intended to run this world the same way: clearly, methodically, without the fog of sentiment that tended to make things needlessly complicated.
But he also looked at the churning grey water and the sulphur-scarred coast and the electric sky of Terra, and felt, very quietly, something that wasn’t pride and wasn’t love but existed somewhere in the neighbourhood of both.
Mine, he thought. Not possessively. Just accurately.
“Right, then,” he said to Pip, his eyes still on the horizon where the young ocean met the young sky in a smear of grey and violet and the faint, distant glow of volcanic light. “Brief me fully. What can I do? What can’t I do? What are the most common mistakes?”
Pip, who had clearly been waiting for exactly this question, opened its small mouth and began to talk.
And the planet turned beneath them, slow and indifferent and waiting, in the dark of its young sun’s early reach.