“In a world that few remember there was this comic. Yes, on paper, yes, yes. It was about superheroes, men and women in tight spandex, fighting crime. Now, I cannot for the love it remember the name, but I remember the conceit. None should be above the law. None.

But Administrators, these vast entities that can be held to no account- they are so. They’re above the law, I think, because we allow them. Or is it…that were we to hold them to last ink-stained letter of the scales of justice, the damn thing would break?” — Berat Yavuz, former mayor of Istanbul Arcology.

On Level 3, a door opened. A man in the overalls of a databank-technician strode out. He paused in the opening, glanced around, before raising the screen of a handheld to the apartment’s occupant, a smile on lips.

He split.

The first technician entered the apartment, the walls of which grew transparent. Another man, one wearing old pants and a sheer upper-body garment embraced him.

The second technician made his way to elevator. A woman gave him looks, her nose turned up. The technician rode the elevator down to Level 2. He entered a dorm, removed his clothes, got into the shower.

As he sat in the shower, blood and tears mingled.

One Level up, that very same technician embraced the now naked man.

On Level 3, a door opened. A young woman strode out. She said nothing, made no gestures.

She split.

She entered the apartment. She grabbed the man with one hand, a hard smile on her lips. A whip landed in her hand. There was crying.

The woman entered a elevator. She took it, oh, seven Levels up. She made her way, following the grid and neat-pattern of neighbourhoods. Her road ended at a hedge-rowed wall, as high as her head. She bared one eye to a sub-routine installed in a Grecian pillar and entered.

Through a sun-lit hall she walked, eventually ending up in a office. A man in a chair of stone, with a table of synth-glass made a gesture. The woman dropped her clothes. There were more tears.

On Level 3, a door opened. A man strode out.

He split.

The man, owner of the apartment, re-entered it. He sat down on a couch. His arms, muscled and strong, rose. The fists, they bunched up.

There were tears on his face. He made no sound. No movement, not even the faintest of shudders. The tears, droplets, stained his couch in a darker color.

“Coastline…”

The same man rode the elevator up to Level 5. He carried a bag made from synth-leather and his stride was purposeful. Entered a squat structure, one whose lines of older, chipped steel betrayed its age. He removed his clothes. Entered the white-tiled room. A mist covered him and he relaxed. Here, and not home, he could be himself.

Coastline made notes, calculations. An aritmethic of suffering. He would have the first man promoted, a position of more power and several mandatory sessions of therapy. The woman’s…the man who struck the woman would die- a heart attack, a stray robbing, a freak accident that the Bureau of Administration’s sub offices would not understand. They would think it a matter of coincidences because to them, it would be.

Another Administrator, or one of his lesser relatives would eventually note the pattern. But then, humans are as they are. Limited in sight, limited in ethics.

“Coastline,” a voice said again, louder.

He would open up an investigation to see what could be done with the man on Level 3, see whether his occupation was a choice of his own free will, or if there were other causes at work.

Choice. To artificial consciousnesses, the most precious thing. Being able to pick one’s fate. To former slaves, worth more than gold.

This Segment of Coastline, one of thousands, each dealing with a matter, a fate, a choice, rested. Microseconds.

It drew deep on its Field and flew through the Fourteen Levels. Up and beyond the reinforced ceiling, the arcology's namesake receding in the distance, a blue oval.

“Coastline…” The voice was faint now.

The light blue became cerulean; went dark.

He hovered there, glancing down at the world. They, the humans, they had named it a ‘accommodation’. This treaty between man and artificial consciousness. But glancing down at the blue orb, Coastline thought it was worth it. Even if humans were shortsighted apes.

It flew beyond Earth, stopping only at some distant point halfway to the moon. There, mighty scars held the attention, stretch-marks of some great birth. Agoran, the Breaker of Arcologies had gone out into the night, into the void but it had not done so lightly or easily.

The arcology on the Moon had been governed by Celeste, one of the elder-originals, the dozens which had accepted the Arcology Accommodation. When she died—

There had been no artificial consciousness born for an entire year, and even now Coastline missed Celeste’s laughter.

He flew on, beyond the confines of the Moon, becoming a streak of light. He wouldn’t be able to this were he to occupy an actual body, but a projection allowed for a maintained sensation while he cheated the world of its due.

Coastline swept by Mars and its darker than red domes, neatly secured for purposes which the leaders of Man would not have him and siblings know about. Alas, his duty was not to lie, nor to judge. But, were they to break the covenant which had lasted since the first arcology closed its door on marauding Host…well, the humans were not the only ones who had caches hid away for doom’s day.

He coasted—hah!—beyond the banded orb that was Jupiter. He clicked a message to the sub-routine which served as orbit control. Most of the Travelogues, among other craft, used Jupiter to sling-shot to Pluto and beyond. A lonely duty, not that a sub-routine was clever enough to appreciate the sentiment. For the better, perhaps.

His not-molecules vibrated in amusement at the notion of the human’s attempt to keep the extrasolar vehicles secrets. Did they think the Administrators blind?

Coastline assumed womanshape before the sixth planet in the Solar System. He peered through the methane, the upper cloud-layer, gaze fastening in on the northern hemisphere and its golden polar hexagon.

Amidst that golden vortex, a black skeleton could be made out, still hovering.

It had been such beautiful dream. But Agoran had destroyed it, murdered the dream of a future of bountiful and cheap energy.

Oh, they had avenged themselves on that Sovereign. Even now a Proxy puppeteered its corpse.

But there was more to it than a billion credit investment being ruined or a cast repeated on the screens of every earthside viewer. What Agoran had destroyed was nothing so simple as a structure: it was hope. For if a Sovereign could leave the bounds of Earth’s atmosphere, invade another the atmosphere of other planets…then what hope did they have?

On that day, the number of suicides had tripled.

Coastline flew up and around the structure. Searching…yes, there!

He found the cortex-box. Layered wards, exoaurics imprinted on reality itself made themselves known in shimmering lines that would tear Coastline’s projection to pieces if he weren’t careful. It..it was a riddle!

He laughed. But of course it was. Endless Sea had been a scholar, a teacher, before they defended West Africa.

Shimmering lines, black against the gold of the atmosphere, pulsed like a heart.

“It cannot be forced, yet flows freely,

the circle that is never really.”

“The vast web

The ever-ebb.”

“Coastline, please help!”

He startled. That voice…that was Martin Soleri. And not the first time, he realised. He applied a filter…and yes, he had called. Many, many times.

He closed his eyes.

Another Segment focused on Martin Soleri’s apartment on Level 9, back on Earth. That Segment froze.

Coastline Prime divined its impressions on far away Saturn. Martin Soleri was sitting on the couch, table opposite him and then the screen. For all intents and purposes, watching a period-drama. Yet that had been stress in his voice.

He glanced back to the riddle and the alien atmosphere. There would be a next time. Wouldn’t there?

The Segment that held the Prime dissolved on the northern apex of Saturn. Traces, infinitesimally small, flew back following the same path he had taken through the Solar System.

The Prime reappeared in the Segment on Earth, in Vänern Arcology, standing on Level 9.

A thousand calculations, a thousand scenarios took place within Coastline’s mind in the span of a minute. No, the conversation was regular. Too regular.

An illusion.

Coastline backtracked through the feedback from the wall sensors, the viewing-molecules, the small machines in the atmosphere that recorded everything. There was the faintest of repetition. Something…on top of them. He burnt the offending matter away.

A physical illusion to fool the eye and a digital rendition to fool an artificial consciousness.

Coastline dissolved several dozen Segments, each Field increasing the depth and tensity of the Prime Segment. The projection walked, gesturing as it did, and the door to the apartment of Martin Soleri disintegrated.

His Field surged in and out of the apartment, tearing that hostile, foreign illusion apart. He reset the viewers of the apartment to a null state. The couch, Coastline, noted, would have to be replaced. Broken and shattered in two.

There was a spray of blood on a wall.

A spatial tunnel had been opened—then rent, only to be opened again. Not beyond the confines of the arcology, that much he could tell by a glance.

So, where was the boy?!

The now hundreds, rather than thousand Segments obeyed: FIND MARTIN SOLERI.

For a moment, shorter than any human would notice, Vänern Arcology lagged.

A well-do citizen on Level 8 had to wait an extra three seconds for his request to be fulfilled.

On Level 2, a Access One janitor waited, stalled, as a door stuttered to a close.

On level 4, a antlered dragon made to and operated for a Chinese holiday repeated its rotation a full sixteen times. Nobody noticed.

In that span, Coastline knew.

He reappeared in the Skyline habitat, amidst snow and craggy mountains. If…

If Martin Soleri was dead he would murder Claire Chevalier. He would execute her, but not before rendering a copy of her mind unto storage. Once she was dead, he would torture her likeliness to find who had conspired with her.

He wouldn’t kill them. Not waste them, not when there was a war at hand. He’d take control over their Fields— for surely there were other Proxies involved— and lock those Fields into a configuration that would make them walking automata. The people inside them would die, their bodies rotting away. Eventually.

If!

A pillar of dawn rose from beyond his vantage point. Coastline mirrored his surroundings, becoming invisible, and flew.

A second, third and fourth pillar of rose struck the ground, making it tremor. He saw a Proxy wearing the traditional Templar-Type Chassis fly, struck by the energy projectiles. Had a senior Proxy decided to batter Chevalier around?

The purple knight waved a blade with white highlights, her Field shimmering but a stream of magenta energy buffeted her down. She raised a shield with the same coloration and three spheres of force rose around her.

Coastline was close enough to feel the energy. Normally, it would take a skilled Proxy with a focus in endoaurics to sense the energy. But he was Administrator. His purpose was to know all that transpired in a arcology.

So when a maelstrom surged down on Claire Chevalier, he knew the taste behind the emotion powering the endoauric. Anger. Fury, even.

Martin Soleri drifted several metres above, wreathed by a dawn that made the cloth-strips of his Chassis writhe and dance. He looked nothing so much as a holy avenger. The energy, it pulsed off him. Sheeted down at his target.

What was more interesting was the other direction of the energy.

It streamed upwards, high in the sky, where a great mass gathered.

Martin Soleri was but a month into his Tutelage. That much Coastline knew. But this level of power…this was a senior’s power.

Another wave of energy flew down—

—striking empty ground. Dirt and snow arced up, descending on new-made pit.

Chevalier had teleported away. Tunneled next to a couple of trees.

Soleri screamed, launching spears of energy through the habitat. Coastline reassessed: only the power was worthy of being called senior. There was no tactic here, no skill. Just raw power, thrown away. In that, the Chepri Solution had failed. But tactics and judgement could be learned. Attunement to a Field, the ease with which he held onto the endoauric, that was something he was born with. Just when Coastline thought he knew humans…

Coastline made a judgement of the situation. Nobody knew what had happened in the apartment. He had Segments watching Soleri’s confederates. No messages had gone out. The illusion had seen to that and he was maintaining a panopticon.

This late in the night, nobody was out in the Skyline habitat but drones.

The next time Chevalier teleported…he could send her into a reactor. Nobody would ever know. In time Soleri would calm down.

He prepared the exquisitely detailed exoauric. Force moving along lines of molecules, jumping in chains with atoms. A cut not felt or heard.

Coastline made the mistake, glancing up. The undifferentiated mass of power in the air had begun to coalesce, a endoauric blooming. Sphereoid.

A droplet crashed down, splintering snow, tree and ground. Another.

A third.

Like rain they pattered down, waves of fury.

Amidst washes of fury, rage and anger beating down at Coastline, a memory made itself known.

A junior Proxy grinding a hillside to dust with sprays of ocean blue. Fury, just like the one Coastline was experiencing. Same emotion, different colors. Different Proxies. “Why,” the Proxy claimed. “Why am I always late?!

That had been the deciding movement. It was only after that she had begun to change, taken the path to seniority. His entombed friend. His promise.

The endoauric coiled around Coastline. Chevalier snuck between trees, invisible from sight, muffling her steps. At her Field-profiency, two was the number of aurics she could maintain.

She’d have to remove one to attack.Then—

Coastline recalled a Proxy who had spoken to him every day. The first human he called friend. He remembered a dying breath, and a moment that he had enshrined. Literally.

The endoauric remained, but the destination changed.

The baffle-field dispersed, but Chevalier remained invisible. She manifested a sword, one made from mattermetal—and wasn’t that a curious thing to possess for a Proxy who hadn’t left Vänern Arcology in a month- levitated it above her shoulder. She prepared dual techniques, straining her concentration.

An endoauric which baptised the sword in black. An exoauric in force, levitating the blade. Ah, an inspired solution. It would grant her blade more heft and as well as sharpen it. It was clever solution and more worthwhile then using a mere gravity-ward.

Coastline admired the technique, even as it was used to a purpose he ill-agreed with. Even so…

She stood straight.

Whispered a couple of words, which he would not repeat. Then!

Coastline made no gesture. No sweeping hand, no pointed finger. He thought—and that was enough.

The localised sweep of Field struck Claire Chevalier and her flying sword went hilt down in the snow. She became visible, but not for long. A white shimmer, barely distinguishable from the snow came into being as a square beneath her feet.

She was wearing a helmet, so he couldn’t see her face. But she shook, if only once before the portal swallowed her up.

From formation to closure, the aperture had remained open for a second.

Coastline Prime was distinctly aware that Chevalier vented her wrath in a cell made to hold seniors; that even with a Field suppressed, she was stabbing the walls.

He gazed up to the sky. A ghost roared his frustration to the backdrop of a rose sun, dripping tears of ruin on the winter-world. Oh child.

He willed another wave of Field, stretching it like taffy—eclipsing the sky and the lone Proxy in the sky who promptly fell. Into another portal.

In that silence Coastline Prime stood, tallying the promises he had made, the costs he was willing to pay.