By all appearances, Professor Haywire’s death marked the end of his role in this cycle.
It would have been a reasonable conclusion. After all, his machines had been dismantled, confiscated, abandoned, or simply left to decay wherever they happened to be when the authorities finally caught up with him. To humanity, they were relics of a madman who had ruined countless lives chasing a destination he would never reach.
But to the Simurgh, it wasn’t. Fragments had been preserved, simply because useful things were discarded only after they ceased being useful. One day, perhaps years or decades from now, they might have proven valuable. Her other siblings would eventually awaken, and the final battle would arrive. A bridge between worlds might become the deciding factor in a battle whose consequences would reverberate across an entire Cycle.
The probability had not been high. It had merely been sufficient, so she had waited. Years possessed very little meaning to something that experienced time as a branching path rather than a straight line.
Then Taylor Hebert found a watch in a crater, and the futures she had cultivated for years withered with astonishing speed, each collapsing into another, then another, until possibilities that had once stretched comfortably into the distance narrowed into paths so thin they barely deserved the name.
She examined the point of divergence, the watch. A device originating beyond every known reality, granting transformations unsupported by any shard architecture.
That fact alone was significant. The implications were worse.
The watch did not simply threaten an individual projection of force but threatened the assumptions underpinning the entire Cycle. The Entities had always stood at the apex.
It recognized none of those assumptions.
It introduced foreign possibilities gathered from civilizations the Cycle had never harvested, every new transformation representing another branch her models failed to predict completely.
That was unacceptable.
For the first time in a very long while, preserving Professor Haywire’s work no longer represented preparation for a distant future. It became necessary and immediate. And once she accounted for their use, countless futures unfolded before her.
Every unknown transformation fractured the futures into branches that carried too many unknowns to model with acceptable confidence. She could have continued following each one as it emerged, but the expenditure of processing outweighed the value of the information it produced.
So she abandoned that avenue, narrowing her attention to what she already possessed: the transformations Taylor Hebert had revealed, the decisions she had made while wearing them, and the conclusions that survived across the greatest number of futures.
It was an inelegant solution. Worse, it invited error. Under ordinary circumstances she would have rejected it outright. Incomplete information had a habit of multiplying into catastrophic mistakes, and she had spent uncounted years avoiding exactly that sort of thinking. This time, flexibility carried a higher probability of success than perfection.
Far below, beyond oceans and cloud cover, Leviathan struggled beneath an ocean brought to a boil.
The outcome of that battle had already ceased to matter.
Taylor Hebert had forced the game onto another board.