Enormous ribcages loom, not far, just outside Libretto. No one has been able to find out whether Septet was once ruled by megafauna or whether the machines have terraformed an otherwise unremarkable, uninhabitable planet and filled it with a skeletal bestiary that never was. I’m predisposed to the latter thought. On Shenzhen Sphere, the seat of the Mandate, there are artificial ruins—places that are and have always been red rust and blackened bones, created because one AI or another enjoys desolation as an aesthetic. And nowhere else in the universe does that aesthetic hold truer than on
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