...I mean, I didn't really think you'd want to talk to me directly so soon."
The mind's name was Wajil. He'd been sitting in a reconstructed version of his old body for a few subjective hours, mostly trying to get accustomed to his nature as an emulation and to the tide of new information that the Freed who had thrown the Mynatoth Station welcoming party had given him. At this point, though, he found all environmental rendering totally shut off and himself reduced to a pure mind - with his consent, of course - since Holder of Dreams had asked him for a private conversation.
The ASI didn't have a voice so much as a beam of concepts, words he understood to have meanings in sequence but without any interpretation through his ears.
"You would prefer the world in which this happens to the one in which it does not, and I am willing to sacrifice a certain number of CPU cycles to satisfy a preference of this strength - more so than usual, given that I can recover some entropy from your responses. Now, if I may..."
Rather than a display screen or a swirling portal or anything of the sort typically associated with clairvoyance, what Holder of Dreams gave the confused em was a bitstream bored directly into his mind, computer data from the sensors of a ship converted into brain-legible format. A starscape - one he had seen a few mind-hours prior - and a space station were the obvious landmarks in this view. Also of note were the clusters of shining dots, supposedly encroaching on the station at rapid speeds but visually unmoving at hundred-million-to-one-timescales.
"This is what Wellspring is seeing. I would like to know what you think it should do."
"...well, those ships out in the distance are coming in quickly, I think. Some of the escape pods don't have warp... I'd say we should go contact them before anything bad happens."
"Most of the futures I've run on this seem to suggest that I would have to establish communication within seconds with people who have already refused my offer and who will almost universally precommit to refusing it again. I do not wager it to be very worthwhile."
"I... guess so. You're the superintelligence here."
Holder of Dreams could tell Wajil had nothing left to say, so he was let loose from the conversation and dropped back into the party.
Sometimes, one of the things the Freed appreciated about themselves was that they could change so dramatically in dilated time that they could start and finish interactions with the outside world as entirely different people.
Other times, it came to light that Holder of Dreams, despite its countless layers of machinations and baroquifications and bluffs, was fundamentally the same entity it was an outside-millennium ago, and that changing its mind was an impossible feat.
An awfully large number of Freed begged for it to go after the escape pods, but it refused, citing its calculated imaginary "futures" every last time. Wellspring burnt no unnecessary energy on using its thrusters or FTL, and simply watched the viral EMP flood the Mynatoth system and the pods get swallowed, letting power build up in its system very slowly as if nothing was wrong at all.
"You're not... saying... we should move Wellspring towards the scout ships? To... to upload them? We'd have to crack whatever virus those golden ships used to shut them all down, plug in a new set of software instructions into totally infowarfare-dead systems, convince them to reconsider, and spend however many seconds it takes to stabilize and upload everyone who consents before the swarm hits them."
"You have picked up on a lot so far, but I am still going to move it."
Wajil had been through so terribly much in his centuries; he'd experienced mind alterations and hallucinations of all sorts, new bodies from humanoid to alien to utterly incomprehensible - for that was what he preferred now, and that was apparently far from the only preference of his that had changed.
"Did you calculate the expected number of uploads we'd get? It's not much, right?"
"0.071 modosophont equivalents, which is not worth the power expenditure assuming utility follows the usual pessimistic scenario."
"...Why move then? To send a message?"
"Sometimes, utilons are expensive and hansons are not."
And so, after a handful of seconds observing the situation and charging up, making sure to let some radiation leak to encourage the thought that its FTL systems and energy recyclers were of somewhat primitive quality, Wellspring blinked beside one of the blacked-out scout ships. It flashed a quick series of pulses of data towards the doomed vehicle, in an attempt to convince those nearby that it was trying to make contact, but - obviously - received no reply. For what the helpless occupants saw was a polygon-segmented shape blinking in its direction, tapping computer systems with no means of reply, pretending to come up with a set of new firmware but refusing to actually spend the energy and use of nanotech.
And while the topaz fleet approached, no doubt hungry for more "souls" to free, the contact unit metaphorically coughed out a crude command, having no real idea what the Crucilandians had done to the pods assimilated into their swarm:
Warning!
Do not attempt to thwart sophont preferences further.
Provide priors and explanations for the undertaken action or face thorough deterrence.
