CU: Level Field

When your enemy fights for a just cause, you must first destroy the character of their leader.

—Arjun

Arjun Atumbo's next decision would seal the CU's fate. He had been in this position before: the election to his third seven-year term as president of Chad.

His first term had been about seizing power and his second about consolidating and securing it. This election was different. This was about his future and legacy. If he took a third term, he would be committing himself to serve out the rest of his life as the country's undisputed dictator. Winning was never in doubt. Having purged his cabinet and military, surviving three coups along the way, he had a firm hold on the reins of power and could ensure elections swung his way. But was that what he really wanted?

His opponent, Kwame Akbar, was no saint, but he was a smart and principled man. You could never judge how power would change a person, but he had the potential to be the sort of leader the country needed.

Kwame was not naïve. He knew the election was rigged. Arjun could toss him in prison and that would be that. Or he could let the election play out. If Arjun won, he gained legitimacy. If he lost, he could destroy Kwame's character and have the results overturned by the "independent" supreme court. Not that that was likely to happen. Kwame lacked military backing and had little access to media. He wasn't even particularly charismatic. He had only his high rhetoric and a dedicated core of intellectuals.

When Kwame appealed to the U.N. for election watchers, Arjun laughed. It was a feeble move, like sending nuns into a bar-fight. Except nuns might have been more effective. At least they were respected. But instead of making the obvious play, Arjun rolled the bones. When they came up double sixes, he laughed at himself. Was he really going to do this? Of course he was!

The next day he invited Kwame to a private tea talk. No pomp or frills, just two men sitting across a table and regarding each other through the steam rising off cups of red tea. He remembered the look in Kwame's eyes, terrified but defiant. Sweat darkened his collar and armpits. He thought he was walking into a deathtrap. Instead, Arjun sent him away with a draft plan for holding free and fair elections.

Over the following weeks, Arjun watched with amusement as Kwame vacillated between hope and distrust, knowing that he could do nothing to prevent treachery. But Arjun played it by the book. When some of his subordinates got over-zealous on his behalf, he had them reprimanded and placed under house arrest until after the elections.

The elections were the most free and fair ever held in the country, perhaps in all of sub-Saharan Africa. A national holiday was declared. Polling stations were manned by equal numbers from both parties. Instead of U.N. soldiers, school children were given the task of maintaining orderly lines and watching over the boxes of vote cards. Volunteers live-streamed the process from their smartphones.

To the shock of the nation and the president himself, Arjun lost. He gave a gracious concession speech and sat in the front row of Kwame's inauguration. Then he promptly fled to Europe with a not-so-small fortune in off-the-book assets. Now that the tables were turned, he would be a fool to trust in Kwame's continued goodwill.

Arjun intended to disappear from political life after that, but events took an unexpected turn. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and approached by the African Union to lead an election task force. How could the Chad model be replicated across the continent? Two decades later he was appointed the Secretary General of the U.N.

"What are the chances we can win in a fair fight?" Arjun asked the ship personai.

"Around twelve percent," Jaine replied. "The artifact's game center is still cooling down, and Sanjay's gamemaster has also improved its play substantially. The chances increase to almost twenty percent if gameplay can be accelerated to take advantage of the cooldown time."

"No," Arjun said. He took out his bones but just rolled them over in his fingers until they showed all their dots. "We need to take our time and bring our 'A' game. Retract the solar sail. We're playing this one by the book."

Xemesh: Then the Stars

Are they thirsty, too?

—Arjun as a child upon hearing there were other planets in the sky like his own

In their fully evolved state, Xemesh were natural-born starfarers. Composed of durable alloys, they did not require bulky life support systems, and their Xants, having been transformed into nano-scale molecular machines, were no longer dependent on food, water, or even gravity. Xemesh could drink starlight, nibble on space dust, and feast on asteroids.

Equally important to their physical suitability was Xemesh psychology. They were driven by curiosity. They gazed out upon the universe with their artificial eyes and sensor arrays and saw endless horizons of possibilities. Possessing within themselves a collective of minds, they did not suffer from isolation and loneliness. Nor was sensory deprivation an issue owing to their lack of inborn receptors. Xemesh were not prone to nostalgia, ordinary psychosis, or despair.

There was, however, one affliction that plagued Xemesh space-dwellers: boredom. The lack of novel input and fresh problems could, over long stretches of time, cause a Xemesh to turn increasingly inward, creating a runaway introversion cycle. The became so deeply immersed in their own thoughts they became impervious to the outside world.

How did Xemesh overcome this looming mental menace? One method was to slow or suspend their thought processes until conditions became more stimulating. Another method was to solve math problems. As creatures of pure logic, Xemesh were endlessly fascinated by equations, especially quasi-deterministic functions. A Xemesh could spend a million years unfurling complex fractals or cellular automata.

When the Xemesh home-world was swallowed up by its sun, the Xemesh did not mourn. By this time, they had consolidated into less than ten thousand entities. Many dispersed to bright young star systems, drifting for tens of millions of years through the void of space. Some went dormant, waking every so many thousand years to watch the galaxy wind around itself in a sort of timelapse. Yet others parked themselves in a stable orbit where they reflected on all the data they had gathered and pondered what would come next.