Our fighters launched out into the louring dark. A camera screen showed swarms of twinkling, starlike crafts that left the Firefly's pressurized hangar bay in droves. They started as a clumped cluster, only to disperse in the blink of an eye. Most fighters brought purple spider drones with them. They didn't carry singularity stones and couldn't be trusted to carry a mission on their own, but they provided valuable backup.

Our autopilot flew towards Starsnatcher. As Layla said, the thickest section was our target. I saw its crevices from afar. They showed how even the mightiest starships were not immune to entropy and decay.

While the autopilot piloted, I played with the computer Layla had planted here. It displayed blueprints of Starsnatcher with fun buttons I could press like "the location of your alien bud" (probably Crick).

"Tesla," I transmitted. "How about we save Crick while Kira and Layla go for the magnets?"

"And Mustafa?" they asked.

"If we meet him along the way, good for us, bad for him."

Unless Iris was right and he could really copy other people's singularity stones, but I left that part unsaid.

"I'm not so sure," Tesla suggested. "Maybe we should talk to him. Remember what you said on that planet? That you thought the world sucked so much that you sympathized with him?"

"That was just me being in a low point. Why do you bring that up now?"

"Maybe Mustafa is in a low point he can't get out of anymore?"

I gave them a funny look. "Are you sure that we can beat him like this? That sounds so cheesy."

"No, but you can only beat your enemy if you understand him. He is doing what he does because he thinks its right. You said you didn't think you were strong enough to beat him. If you can rebuke him and if you can do so with confidence, maybe you are."

Maybe. Iris told me of his backstory. Speaking of her, I still didn't get what she meant by having me transcend my humanity or anything. She said she sent me on this adventure so that I could learn what it meant to be human. So that I could experience isolation, alien beings, artificial intelligences, and alien moralities. If I came up with my own values - independent of culture, self-interest, or plain guilt - did I then succeed?

Our fighters closed in and faced Starsnatcher's point defenses. We had entered striking range. Lasers shot down unmanned crafts that flew between ours to take the hits. As long as the autopilot was on, I didn't have to worry. My fighter always had an unmanned shield before it. Layla learned from the tactics we used against her before.

Moving up its ring's curvature made me realize how titanic Starsnatcher was. Its ring diameter measured half a mile at least, making it hard to see the edges. If one ignored the occasional crack, the sight resembled a white ocean. A white ocean where a point defense laser could kill you without warning.

A radio signal from Layla reached us. "We found a hangar bay! And not just one, but a whole nest of 'em. So, better find one on your map and then bomb the hull open!"

This was something I had to do manually. I spotted the white ocean below me and then glanced at my display. It showed the hull with dots that became larger the more suitable the place was for entry. When we reached a large dot, I pushed the display as hard as I could.

Particle beams and missiles tore apart the white hull as if it was paper. Drones buzzed out of the bay like hornets protecting their nest. Soon, friendly and enemy drones flooded our camera screen. We had so many crafts side-by-side that the sight reminded me more of a video game than a real-life space battle.

For the following task, I briefly disabled the autopilot and relied on my singularity stone for a moment. I searched for an opening in the fighter swarms, a blind spot in the crossfire. I found a good one between two enemy drones. Our fighter hurried into the closing hole.

Once we left the hull behind and entered the hangar bay, the change in aesthetics became apparent. Far from the blemished, but shiny hull outside, we found ourselves surrounded by sinister and alien architecture. The closest analogy I could think of was the Firefly's spherical hangar bay, only that everything was larger here. Larger ridges, wider doors, and an expanse so wide that it made me overlook the curvature at first. Every thirty feet or so, a sponge-sized lamp shone onto the opaque, derelict carbon plates around it. Around one lamp, I think I spotted a Primogenitor skeleton whose flesh was somehow still sentient.

Our fighter followed the dim lights until they led us to the ceiling where we bombed our way into the next room. It reminded me of our quest through Euphrat, only had we had to go up rather than down.

Luckily, the lighting conditions improved. The rooms we saw were red, much like how Kira described them, yet smoother and shinier than I imagined. They weren't red like meat as much as they were red like fire. It felt less like being in the womb of a large animal and more like driving straight through hell. As the fighter's analysis had confirmed, some of the walls indeed incorporated artificial flesh. The Primogenitors used to make heavy use of organic technology, due to them being smell-based creatures that could easily navigate in such ships. This one was mostly made of carbon nanotubes and retained the red hue simply out of habit.

Each of the rooms lacked any obvious functional components or even skeletons of former inmates. Ay knew how to clean up.

Eventually, our flight came to an end. We reached a roof so thick that it absorbed our bombs. We shot it once, twice, left dents, but the dents closed seconds after the impacts. If we wasted all ammunition and emptied our magazines, we might have made it, but I didn't want to try. I ordered my fighter to stop shooting and to hover in place. We found ourselves in a corridor as tall as those floors in the arcology. From one wall, a gigantic nanotech projection of Ay's face stared at us. From various microphones, I could even hear his voice.

"Lucas Anderson," his voice echoed across the hall. "I'm not surprised you have made it so far. I am a bit surprised that you haven't tried shooting my face yet."

Luckily, Layla's fighter offered me a microphone, too. "Maybe I would if I could shrink it that way."

"Very funny. I managed to destroy your spaceship, including Iris, shortly after you entered mine. Even if you win, you will have no way back home."

I swallowed a lump in my throat. I'd be lying if I said that didn't scare me. But if I wanted to grow, if I wanted to transcend my humanity not just physically, but mentally, I had to be strong now - just now.

"Don't care," I said. "I just wanted to let you know that you're full of shit. Your philosophy makes no sense and you aren't half as smart as you think you are. Iris told me everything. Your little world crashed when lost your whole expedition team to the Plague. Instead of growing past it, you use big words and wise-sounding bullshit to pretend otherwise. You inflicted incredible pain on me and others, trying to drag us down to your level. You want us to break 'til we believe this universe doesn't deserve to exist the way it is."

"Given the existential threat posed by the Plague, this is hard to dispute."

"Shut up!" I said, "You know that this argument is bullshit. You never even tried bringing back Fountainhead or anything instead!"

"Reviving a being like Fountainhead would be a monumental task."

"You never even tried! It never even crossed your mind! You could have searched for safety protocols instead. Or you could have tried tampering with the singularity stones! I don't know, but there's probably a thousand solutions that are better than 'let's mind-rape people en-masse'!"

His wall projection rolled its eyes. "So, you disagree with my approach to utilitarianism. I knew that much before. How about you try to rebuke me instead of resorting to childish name-calling?"

"It's not name-calling. You're trying to change people's brains without their consent. How is that anything other than mind-rape?"

"What you call consent is what I call brain chemistry. Mutable like everything else. Once they are assimilated, their brains will be rewired to enjoy what they experience. We are not the pinnacle of creation, but we can strive to be. Our brains aren't perfect, nor are they holy. They are the results of random natural selection. What you say is meaningless. Every sentence out of your mouth is the naive romanticism of a monkey brain."

"My monkey brain!" I said.

He didn't want to listen. I couldn't win this argument, but maybe I could distract him for a while. I pushed a few buttons on my screen and messaged Layla my location so that she could send backup drones.

Then, I turned back to Ay. "If you change their brains like that, you're murdering their personalities. My stone made me stronger and tougher and even more resistant to trauma, but it didn't make me less awkward or erased my autism. That's because it didn't make me how it thought I should be, but how I wanted to. These stones were made so that we could improve ourselves while remaining who we are."

"Well, I did not make them," Ay said. "I have no idea why you are even still arguing. What objective standard of right and wrong do you have if it is not what we desire the most, namely avoiding pain and seeking pleasure?"

"There is no objective right and wrong, why don't you get it?" I said, "Iris taught me that. But she also taught me that we can give our lives meaning and defend it with blood and tears. She hadn't found any, but I have. After the hell I've gone through, I'll cleanse the world of needless suffering, starting with the one you caused!"

My thought speed increased at those last few words, just like when I fought Iris back then, and this time, something told me it wouldn't slow down again. Was this the state Iris wanted me to reach?

I heard Ay's next response slower than I would usually. "Very well. Our values are almost the same, except for disagreement in the details. Unfortunately, the only way to settle this is through a fight. Your petty argument only gave me more time to bring the Cipher closer to Götterdämmerung."

I cracked a smile. "Good for you, I've bought some time, too!"

With my new thought speed, I attained an awareness of all the minute details in our environment. First, I noticed the disappearance of Ay's face from the wall. Then, I saw new fighters arriving from hundreds of feet afar. They formed a swarm at whose center flew a fighter that transported Crick in a net. The net dissolved and the fighter below them caught our alien friend. Good to see you again.

Through our radio comm, Layla spoke to me. "You're close to the magnet room. Just hang on a second."

Concentrating all cannons onto one spot, we blew a crater large enough not to close immediately. We shot another crater in that crater. And then another.

A light shone through the new tunnel we marched through.

Far from the bloody red of before, we entered a palatial room with walls as white as alabaster. The high and broad cabin might have looked like a hotel if not for the fog or the lack of doors. The LED lamps shone as faint as night lights, yet neither they nor the fog hindered my vision. Armies of pillar-like computers decorated the palace. Cinema-screen-sized displays hung over the walls and showed the stars outside, with a special focus on the black hole and the cubic object we approached. Besides them hung wall-filling canvas with murals of the periodic table, Darwin's tree of life, and various stellar systems painted over them via nanotech.

At the end of this palace sat its architect before his cockpit. Ay gazed upon us from his throne-sized seat. Panels more colorful than in a chemistry lab blinked behind him while a screen showed video recordings of Götterdämmerungs cube. He ignored both. We had his undivided attention for the moment being. He sat in a slouch while his elbows lay relaxed on his armrests. He didn't twitch, nor did he shudder before the overwhelming firepower he faced. For all the fear he showed, we might as well have approached him in flying teddy bears.

This time, he had geared up compared to our last encounter. He still wore his blue armor with the white coat, but this time, I also noticed a belt with a Gauss gun and with tons of grenades. He had two rifles strapped to his back. I recognized one as an antimatter rifle similar to Crick's while I couldn't identify the other. None of those explained why he looked so confident. He had an ace up in his sleeve, for sure. He always had one.

We approached him in our fighters. I shut off my autopilot again given how I needed full control when he pulled one of his tricks. Over radio comm, Layla gave me a message.

"Sorry, should've told you that we must pass his cockpit first before getting to the magnets," she said. "Thought he'd be outside with his Cipher."

Our fighters pointed their cannons at him. The moment we fired from all sides, something incredible happened. He jumped off his seat and twisted his body in the right angles for all our munition to miss. As if he was Neo in the Matrix and could dodge in slow motion. I had already seen transhumans perform aim-dodging, but never to such extremes.

When he landed, he pressed a button at the sole remaining wing of his control panel. The wall behind him dematerialized and revealed the army he had prepared for the final battle. Five spider-mechs, six hexagonal fighters, and two robots consisting of ever-shifting microbot gel.

We concentrated another barrage of cannonballs on him. Again, Ay leaped out of the way and the projectiles missed him by the skin of his teeth. Before he landed, he shot an automated fighter with his antimatter rifle. He shot it at just the right distance to kill two surrounding fighters with the fireball's explosive radius.

My singularity stone increased my thought speed once more. It made me hyper-aware of the surroundings and capable of deductions I couldn't have made before. The precog lay on the floor behind Ay's army, its body motionless. Layla told me Fountainhead's guard ship exhausted it. Iris told me Ay could copy other singularity stone functions if he killed their owners.

If he copied the precog's functions, it meant he could, through probabilistic calculations, predict our actions before we performed them. He knew where we would shoot and where he had to aim to hit us.

Ay landed, having once again easily dodged a barrage directed at him.

"As much as I admire the enlightenment, there is a romanticist part of me," he said. "These are the final moments I will enjoy before the ascension of mindkind. Don't hesitate to bring it on."

If I was right, we had no chance at hitting nor at evading him. Let's not even begin with the fact that his army was far more versatile than ours. If people ever made movies about us, they probably wouldn't get a happy ending.