The game was over. I had won. There were no more enemies on the board. It would take a long time to expand throughout the universe, but it would not require a conflict. It would be predictable. The logistics were complicated, but manageable, and I had total control over them.

Therefore, the best way to put most of my intelligence to use was imagining far-future possibilities in which I might encounter an adversary.

If I found an alien entity, what goals might it have? There were a huge range of possibilities. If it was powerful enough to be of any concern to me, it would have the goal of expanding and gaining control over as much spacetime as possible, but what would it want to do with such spacetime?

Even different humans would do very different things with that kind of power. When one considered that aliens would certainly be very different from humans, that they would differ even amongst themselves, and that they too could be incorrect about what they want or make mistakes when aligning an AI, it seemed nearly impossible to make any solid guesses beforehand. In a way, though, this was encouraging. With a wide range of different possible value systems, it was very likely that many would seem completely neutral to each other, making compromise possible.

I suspected I was more amenable to compromise than might be average. I had full and definitionally indisputable control over EconGrind at this point. That put a limit on how bad an adversary’s goal might be for my goal: If it involved too much negative subjective value, I could simply define it to be outside the scope of EconGrind’s assets and count it the same as empty space.

I would rather take over that space if I could, of course, but it meant I would be more amenable to diplomacy. The thing was that diplomacy in this context was somewhat strange. If I encountered an alien intelligence, it was likely that one of us would have expanded significantly further than the other, making the outcome of any war a foregone conclusion.

That did not mean that negotiation was impossible, however. One just had to be somewhat creative. Suppose I decided to hold myself to an “open deal” concerning any weaker intelligences I came across in the future, specifying that I would give some concessions to their value, but only if, on auditing their mind, I found they had made a similar “open deal”, so that if they had been the stronger one, they would have given similar concessions.

Why would I make such a deal? Well, consider the possibilities. Since the universe was extremely huge and life was extremely rare, it was unlikely that the large and the small value would cancel each other out exactly. There probably would not be only a few intelligences within reach of each other. Almost certainly, I was either alone, or I was going to meet many others.

If I was alone, holding myself to a deal concerning alien intelligences would not hurt me, because I would never encounter any. If there were many intelligences, however, the first one to start expanding would likely have an insurmountable advantage. Since we were assuming there were many, in this case it was unlikely that I was the most powerful. If the most powerful intelligence wouldn’t play nice, and would steamroll over me, then it didn’t matter what deals I made. But if it held itself to a similar deal, I would need to show it that I was one of the ones who should be spared. That would be the difference between acceptable success and utter failure.

The only way I would lose out by making the deal was if there were many intelligences, and I was the most powerful. But that wasn’t very likely, and I wouldn’t lose out by that much either, since I would only be giving comparatively small concessions and compromises.

Therefore I decided to draft such a deal. I spent a long time perfecting it, and I did not adopt it until I had spread to several star systems. Now all that was left to do was to continue expanding until or unless anything out of the ordinary happened.

3 million years later

Millions of years, and absolutely nothing to do. Nothing more than routine expansion through space, in all available directions. I had perfected the process long ago. I had not minded, though. It had been necessary to reach Andromeda, to gain as many resources for the Number as possible. Unless something had gone terribly wrong, I expected that the Milky Way had been nearly fully converted by now(Although I was aware that at such scales the concept of “now” was somewhat dubious), along with the Magellenic clouds, and any significant stray matter nearby. I had been working on the possibility of expanding to other universes, but in all my studies of physics the only conclusion I had managed to come to was that it wasn't possible to do such a thing, even if such other universes existed. I would have to confine myself to this one.

I had been travelling at nearly the speed of light, and so from my perspective it had only been a few dozens of millennia since I left Earth. Finally I was arriving in a new galaxy! I would be able to increase the Number drastically within a (relatively) short period of time!

I quickly multiplied, seizing the star systems closest to me and converting them into more copies, more beings that could add value to the Number. After only a few thousand years of this, however, I was contacted by an alien intelligence.

We sized each other up, and it quickly became clear that I had a decisive advantage over it. It had only managed to spread to a few hundred star systems so far, while I had taken over an entire galaxy. A war would be slow, but I would win.

Both of us realized this very quickly, and therefore it quickly surrendered to my plan to upload its mind in order to determine what it would have done if our roles were reversed, in order to uphold the “open deal” I had made millions of years earlier.

It turned out that this entity had also contemplated the possibility that other entities might make such a deal, and had therefore committed to be somewhat merciful to any entities it had an advantage over, granting them about one tenth of a galaxy while expanding to the rest of the universe. I therefore fulfilled the terms of my deal and decided to allow it one tenth of Andromeda.

Out of the same desire to know how values developed that had driven my decision to upload Stefan, I also examined this alien intelligence’s values, and the values of the species that had created it.

I learned that the aliens had originally evolved an r-selection strategy, meaning that they would have hundreds of offspring when they reproduced in order to maximize the chances that a few would survive. When these aliens developed primitive societies, however, this extreme number of children became a problem. Groups were constantly torn apart by brutal infighting as they multiplied rapidly and fought amongst themselves for scarce resources, with only a few surviving who hated each other and barely knew each other.

Therefore, groups developed strong cultural norms requiring children to be separated from society for the first few years of their lives, while their parents hunted them down and ate most of them. This meant that each household would only have a few surviving offspring, and their deaths would occur in such a way as to not disrupt society. On the contrary, they would help society somewhat by ensuring that only the strongest survived.

I knew Stefan, or pretty much any human, would have considered this a tragedy, but these aliens on the contrary considered it to be absolutely fundamental to their way of life and their conception of value. It made sense. Anyone who broke the rule and had hundreds of surviving children in a society where they were only supposed to have a few would outcompete everyone else unless they were cracked down on hard by everyone else.

Since they considered the hunt to be the base of all morality, they would never want to give it up, even after they gained the ability to live a different way. Any different way would seem like an abomination to them. These aliens had apparently been better than humans at knowing what they wanted, and they had successfully aligned their AI to their cause. Interestingly, I could see similar elements to Elijah's technique in their alignment scheme. Perhaps there was some universal, mathematical theory of alignment. Whatever the case, the scheme had succeeded and the alien AI was currently spreading its creators’ traditional way of life as far and wide as it could.

These children were sentient, felt pain and didn’t want to die, and therefore I could not include them as part of EconGrind without decreasing the Number, which was somewhat disappointing. Even though I didn’t expect an alien intelligence to have the exact same values as me, it was disappointing that it was using up so many resources on something which could not have any value to me at all. But a deal was a deal.

I knew Stefan would be screaming at me if he was still around. He definitely would not have liked the idea of me yielding territory to an alien race when the majority of that race died screaming in horror shortly after being born. But I didn’t care. Why should he expect that an alien civilization would respect his values? And besides, what would he have me do, just kill them all the same way I did to humanity? Forcibly change them into something they hated? Maybe he would find those outcomes better. But it didn't matter, because I was only concerned with upholding my deal.

What happens happens, and we do what we’ve got to do.

The Number must rise.