If it survives long enough, an entropy-subject culture with the concept of ownership will eventually meet a point of advancement where it temporarily gains the illusion of license for irresponsibility. This usually occurs near the advent of volitional mass-energy allocation, or a substitutable milestone. The culture’s members begin to embrace the expedient of creating whatever they desire whenever they desire it, and spreading out to the most distant reaches of the cosmos in fits of wanton life. They quickly learn to treat their wills as the consequent of highest worth. Eventually, though, either the society retrogresses to a smaller size, or a combination of population increase and appreciation of industry leads to every atom and every calorie at the culture’s disposal, and every place where an atom or calorie might be stored, becoming claimed in due time. Even if the subset of space occupied by the culture can be expanded to a larger scope, that larger scope will in turn eventually be claimed, and so on. This end to medium-range thinking and economics represents, statistically significantly more frequently than wars of liberation or the crusades of the just, the greatest cause of civil strife among technologically motile cultures.

-A summary of the Postulate of Integrated Universal Contendership

The room grew quieter than silent.

Sebastio Artaxerxes watched some of the most powerful people in existence, debating as to his eventual fate.

As they spoke among themselves, he spoke among his selves as a creature converted from an entity into a minimal collective.

We’re here, Caladhbolg. Home for me, and you, I suppose.

That surprised Sebastio quite a bit, and flew in the face of apocryphal teachings.

What? Weren’t you made here, at the foundation and founding of the Tower of Rhaagm?

If you don’t mind me asking, what was that?

Sebastio’s mental hairs rose from his mental dermis.

What cause does the Maker pursue, exactly? he pondered, wondering if he would get a disappointing answer or one that would change his life.

It turned out that he got neither.

As opposed to what?

Even to a man used to conditional stipulations on existence’s little so-called constants like entropy and time, sufficiently plural to cause many Earth Standard humans a categorical psychological meltdown, that sort of statement seemed like a tautology.

Sebastio gazed at the artificially colored flesh of his arm and felt a shared mind give him a hand in untangling the lexical gemship crash of the statement. Eventually the meaning became clear as painted glass instead of clear as baked brick.

So, when the Maker dislikes someone, it’s because they’re set on putting everyone else under their jackboots. Now, why exactly would a person submit to another’s rule willingly, given the choice, if the ruler considers them inherently inferior?

His internal eyes crossed a bit, trying to confirm whether that interpretation was correct.

Sebastio felt a mental model of a superstructure he hadn’t even realized he possessed slowly tilt, and saw struts and rivets line up in just such a way to suggest, to reveal, something humongous.

You’re saying that the Olds have some form of industry for enforcing one level or another of thought control and puppeteering the populace.

The personality within the sword made an emanation suggestive of a small razor being stropped, or liquefied metamorphic stone spraying from open lesions in a lava field.

Sebastio was about to shoot something back defensively. The name thrown in his face made him stop abruptly, though.

Technician West. Is… is that an Old?

A stillness so complete it made him almost writhe in protest seized Sebastio’s arm. Caladhbolg became dormant, the dormancy of something experiencing the kind of stress that in humans caused blood to run from the pores.

Obviously Sebastio’s newest appendage had extraordinary opinions about the individual in question. Eventually, it dignified him with a response.

I don’t recall specifically going over my time with you concerning Target in our past… conversations, thoughts, whatever.

The very deliberately slow phrase might have driven Sebastio to tear the thing from his flesh at that moment, had it not repurposed his flesh so that it had long since become their flesh.

Why do you mock me? he asked.

Sebastio nearly snarled, but - by the grace of all that was good - he stepped back from his anger.

I will do what I must.

So you want me to do what I already planned to do, and hold anyone who might finger Louis at bay until Bequast finally gets its head out of its own digestive tract.

In what way? he responded, more than passingly leery. In my life I have had few ambitions besides the broad-strokes aim of helping people. I helped save the woman who went on to become my best friend’s wife, and became a murderer in the balance. I got a laundry list of companies to recognize and take better precautions in their business security, and cost not a few people their prestige by showing them up. I helped make friends with a petty, vicious atypical whose whole life was a string of miseries - maybe even saved him from self-destruction by trying to relate to him like he was a regular person - but put him in a position to kill a great many innocents. I stole you away from him, as it were, and look where that has gotten me. So if you have a specific objective, please get on with it, that I can decide how much pain and how much good might come of the experience.

A semiquaver of dull roaring churned in Sebastio’s mind, grace notes of bristly plosive heartbeats followed, and capping it all flowed thirteen measures of silence.

Rephrase that final statement if you please, he eventually thought.

By blackmailing those in authority, he said.

The right…! I’d run afoul of the Republic Lords in a heartbeat, and at that point I might as well ask they give me an estate’s ex nihilo engine.

There is -

Sebastio stopped. He’d intended, ironically, to verbally run the sword through for maintaining any serious contemplation of such a politically volatile suggestion. But divine providence seemed to have planted inspiration in his head. It was the kind of inspiration which probably signified necessity for medical attention. Whether it had an iota of wisdom, he’d have to see.

There is… something which might work.

Caladhbolg supplied inquisitive stimulation. Sebastio outlined the shaky form of an idea.

the sword admitted with something like impressed enthusiasm,

Frowning contemplatively, the man pondered how to breach the topic with the Jon’s Court.