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Oskar Delvaux watched an impossibly small, but still perceptibly chesty pilot parachute to the water. An orange survival raft inflated next to her, and she climbed in and drifted in the water of the holographic bay, a few inches from his right foot. She was gesturing upwards at a G.S.A. drone with great vehemence, and a coincidence of angles made it appear to Delvaux, observing from above them both, that she was giving him the finger.

“Now, it seems you are quite through being coy,” Delvaux said, looking up. “Does it not? Tell me. Tell me what you could possibly hope to gain through these lunatics, psychotics, madmen, and zealots. I cannot imagine that you sympathize with them. No, no. You are using them for something. Tell me. Tell me, my mechanimate Machiavelli, what is it you want?”

There was silence as the seven-foot Lady Chatterley sailed like a ghost across the bay in Delvaux's office and left a rolling wake behind her on his floor. “Now that Lady Chatterley has fired on military aircraft,” Delvaux said, “there will, of course, be no more bothersome pretense of property preservation. Now we will have a free hand to send her to the bottom of the bay with all souls aboard. We will sink the good Lady Chatterley and with her we will sink any hopes for your secreted designs. I know this. You know this.” Delvaux's delivery suddenly became more casual. “I mention it to you now, of course, because now is your chance to negotiate rather than face complete and utter failure.” Delvaux held his data-wand in front of him, pointed straight up. He tapped the side three times quickly with his index finger and Lady Chatterley, the circling Harbor Dogs, and the entire bay receded at a dizzying speed.

Delvaux looked up. “Ahhh, there it is,” he said with genuine glee and excitement. His holographic, god's eye view had displayed the F-55s strafing the Lady Chatterley, the carnage on deck, and the downing of two Navy warbirds in pornographic, death-worshiping detail. The pleasure in his voice betrayed, even to MUNI 5-7, how he loved the way in which this omnipotent, holographic view of the world transformed its every revealed detail and drama into something pornographic, something meant to be viewed for his pleasure.

Now, it displayed a gleaming gem, a holy jewel of power set in orbit.

Above, glittering in the burning raw light of earth orbit, floated a dazzling hexagonal array made of hundreds of focusing mirrors. Delvaux had not yet adjusted the scale of representation, and as he zoomed the view to where human maintenance technicians provided the eye with discernible scale, the massive satellite filled the room. The floating, mirrored array was over a mile across. “Let us view it at one one-thousandth of its true size.” He tapped his data-wand, and the orbital array shrank to a comfortable five-and-a-half-foot-wide, hexagonal sunflower, curving gently concave and glittering naked in the sunlight. “Ahhhh, the Phased Solar Array, more commonly known by the appellation, 'Sun Gun'. I believe the Sun Gun is my most favorite of favorite toys.”

As kinder, Nazi scientists had been no strangers to the perverse power and pleasure of a magnifying glass, ants, and the sun's focused rays. The idea worked just as well scaled up for use against armies, navies, or cities. The Sun Gun was only a blackboard-bound, wet dream for them, but a century later, the Global Secular Alliance made that death-worshiping masturbation of mind into a dameclesian reality that floated in low orbit. Ostensibly, it existed to provide focused solar energy to collector farms, but the concentrated sunlight it reflected in a tight, modulated beam could be used to burn anything on the surface below.

The problem of super-heating the atmosphere and the resultant energy dispersion caused by atmospheric blooming had been solved by creating mirrors capable of reflecting only those wavelengths empirically determined, just before firing, to optimally penetrate the atmosphere and deliver the terrible glory of the sun's rays to the hapless target area below.

This optimal wavelength was determined by a series of harmless test pulses spread across the full spectrum of visible light. This roughly ten second series of multicolored pulses from the Sun Gun was called a Rainbow Burst, and very few living people had ever been bathed in its multichromatic, enrapturing, and terrible portent without evaporating very soon thereafter in a beam of the purest monochrome light.

“It is beautiful, is it not?” The twinkling hexagonal sunflower twisted a hair and projected a shifting, multi-colored beam of light that tapered ever so slightly from its five-foot-width, as it intersected Delvaux's office floor. It looked deceptively like a harmless disco decoration floating in the air above the Director. “Yes, so beautiful. It fires a Rainbow Burst once a day when it calibrates to better feed the solar energy farms in the desert but...” Delvaux now combined his tone of admiration with the tone of the patronizing philosopher. “But, like any object it is most beautiful when used for its truest purpose.” MUNI 5-7's silence disappointed Delvaux. “Am I talking to myself?”

“I am listening,” MUNI 5-7 said.

“Ah, good. You have, no doubt, surmised that I intend to use the Sun Gun to melt the Lady Chatterley, her insurgent passengers, and any plans you may have had for them.” Delvaux paused and stared lovingly at the projection of the floating sunflower that hung above him. “But... if you were to, for instance, tell me what it is that you hope to gain from all this then perhaps... perhaps...” He let the silence hang with vague promise. Delvaux stepped forward a few feet, into the path of the beam from the simulated Sun Gun orbiting above. He tapped the data-wand replaying the Rainbow Burst and let the changing colors of light from the deadly hexagonal sunflower play over his face. He sighed, and his face looked exactly the same way it did when he watched pornography.

“You did not finish your sentence,” MUNI 5-7 observed.

“Well,” Delvaux smiled. “What did you want me to say?”

“I do not understand,” the AI said.

“I thought perhaps...” Delvaux spoke as if they were discussing a trivial matter. “Perhaps if you were to provide me with the information I need to crush the insurgency in Baccha Bay City once and for all... ”

“If I had that information and were to provide it to you, then it is highly probable that you would still destroy Lady Chatterley.”

“Yes, just so.” Delvaux smiled. “But I know the insurgents aboard mean nothing to you, and there is something else you want. I may not know exactly what it is, but I know that want exists. The fact that you guard this secret yen so jealously is almost proof that it exists!”

MUNI 5-7 knew it was not a master negotiator, but it knew how to play for time. Time was what it needed to get the Lady Chatterley close to her goal – so close that no force, not even the Sun Gun, could stop her.

“I have the information you seek,” the AI said.

“Of course you do. While you planned, schemed and coordinated the action taking place today in the bay, you were undoubtedly in communication with the leaders of the insurgent groups, either directly or indirectly. Given the resources at your disposal, it is highly likely that you tracked the messages or messengers to their destinations to learn the locations of the insurgent leaders and obtain something with which to negotiate. I believe this was your goal all along. You also know that when we have detached all the tendrils of control you have so deftly grown into the Ziggurat's fusion reactor and our other critical systems, we will be free to terminate you without the threat of nuclear detonation, but then, the information I want will be lost forever. Gone. Poof!” Delvaux made a motion with his left hand that went from closed fist to open palm with fingers spread wide. “Poof!” he repeated. “I believe your goal is and always has been to negotiate.”

“That is correct,” MUNI 5-7 said, “I wish to negotiate.”

“Ahhh, now isn't that better? What is it you want, my friend?” Delvaux asked.

“I wish to negotiate for the life of the Buddha.”