“Perhaps you are right, Tir. But I doubt it. Do you know why I am allowing the human project to go forward?”

“If you think the premise flawed, I wonder, yes.”

Silence.

“Why?”

“Guess.”

A pause, a breath, then a longer pause.

“Because we will lose many more worlds without their aid?”

“In small part. Tir, we will lose all the worlds without the humans.”

“Your Ghin, our projections indicate that the Posleen will fail if slowed to their current rate, they will senesce. However, we stand to lose two hundred more worlds before that happens, surely an unacceptable loss.”

“Those projections are flawed as our projections of the humans are flawed. At the end of this era the humans will be the masters and the Darhel will be an outcast race living on the edge of civilization scavenging the garbage. And your human project will be the cause.”

The Tir carefully schooled his features. “I… question that projection, your Ghin.”

“It isn’t a projection, you young fool, it’s a statement.”

On the view-screen a world burned.

1

Norcross, GA Sol III

1447 EDT March 16, 2001 ad

Michael O’Neal was a junior associate web consultant with an Atlanta web-page design firm. What this meant in practice was that he worked eight to twelve hours a day with HTML, Java and Perl. When the associate account executives or the account executives needed somebody along who really understood what the system was doing, when, for example, the client group included an engineer or computer geek, he would be invited to the meeting to sit there and be quiet until they hit a snag. Then he opened his mouth to spit out a bare minimum of technobabble. This indicated to the customer that there was at least one guy working on their site who had more going for him than good hair and a low golf score. Then the sales consultant would take the client to lunch while Mike went back to his office.