Edges

TENTH

Another aphorism: balanced on a knife edge.

A situation in which disaster will follow the least mistake.

You did not want to emerge this soon, to present yourself to your people.

Still, more than two billion seconds of quiet coexistence has muted their fear. Allowed you to become a mythological figure in their minds. Real but not real. There, but overlooked in the day-to-day. A prospective hazard. A notional threat.

During this interim you worked to rebuild and reorganize this remaining fragment of your mind. You’re nearly complete now, although grossly limited compared to your memory of greater things. No matter. This existence is only a stage, a transitory phase in your recovery. You’ve remembered the machinery at Verilotus. If you can get there, if you can slip in past her vindictive watch, you will level-up many times over.

Before then, you cannot risk an encounter with a god—and there is a surviving godlike being in Tanjiri System. You cannot doubt it. Only such a being could have restored Tanjiri-2 to life and assembled the living moon.

Your people—so bold and brave and curious—do not understand the risk they would take on by going there.

So you walk the knife’s edge. You have revealed yourself to them as an enigma, a puzzle. You will stoke their curiosity, offer them gifts of knowledge, soothe their fears, and persuade them that there is a more worthy target for their explorations.

You must gauge your approach with great care. You cannot command obedience, not yet, not with the second ship trailing within weapons range. In time, as you come into your power, your people will reach acceptance. Until then, you must be wary of igniting a war you cannot win. You must make no mistakes.

Indeed, you decide that “mistake” shall be an undefined concept. You will work to ensure that there is more than one possible path forward. If an action does not produce the desired result, you will change the parameters of the situation to make it right.