Chapter Text

Something happened shortly after Mercy- after McCree- after, uh, Mercree had shot the impostor Reinhardt.

Well, several somethings happened. The first thing was that the nanoswarm shifted form and exploded, sending needles of itself everywhere at high speed. They bypassed his barrier and sunk into his skin- and Mercy's skin, and Lúcio's. They started painfully devouring everyone's flesh and spreading, at a rate Caduceus was incapable of undoing. Lakshmi's nanobots were better-engineered, and bristling with countermeasures against the petty biomanagement tools available to Mercy's nanoswarm. The fight should have been over in that instant, as soon as Lakshmi had thought to have the swarm make bullets of itself.

But then, something instantly felt strange about the whole world. That was the second of several somethings.

The third thing was that the nanobullets suddenly pulled out and retreated, leaving Caduceus free to patch the holes. Everywhere in sight, the nanoswarm was retreating, condensing.

The fourth thing that happened was that a giant picture of an eye appeared in the sky.

Winston wasn't sure what to make of it. Why would...

Well, he'd just been infected with Lakshmi's nanobots. The simplest explanation was that they'd hijacked his nervous system, and she was showing him some kind of illusion to trick him, somehow. Except... no, that wasn't the simplest explanation. What reason would a god program of Lakshmi's caliber have to trick him into doing anything? At this point, he was only worth anything as raw materials. She should have killed him, right?

"This is unfair. On top of that, it's not interesting! You set rules and didn't follow them!" Lakshmi's voice boomed in the distance.

"I didn't set rules. They proposed an idea, and I agreed with it," a voice from nowhere said, sounding as if it were right next to him. He jumped, looking around for the voice.

"The idea was a vote! I represent multitudes! There is no vote that shouldn't come out in my favor!" That was the loudest voice, but Lakshmi's voice was backed up by an incomprehensible babble of identical voices, all of which sounded argumentative.

"I didn't say I agreed with the idea to vote. That was an argument the three of you started. I simply agreed with the idea being voted on, and you assumed my intentions incorrectly. Your many arguments just now were founded on false premises. A humorous story."

The voice still didn't have an apparent source. No matter where he turned, it sounded like it was coming from vaguely in front of him.

"...Understandable," the voice said, responding to nothing Winston could hear. Was there someone else involved in the conversation? "Your argument leads me to believe I must ask all beings in this way, but I agree an initial discussion with a smaller pool of intenders would help cut down on unsatisfied preferences with respect to disturbances and public speaking."

Mercree put a hand on Winston's arm. "Do you reckon those voices are both Lakshmi?" they asked, in a disconcerting mishmash of an accent.

"I, uh..." That had been his first thought, sort of- about it being a trick- but he still couldn't figure out what kind of trick it could possibly be. That... was indicative of it being a trick devised by a superhuman intelligence, technically, but what sort of trick would Lakshmi need to pull, when she could just kill him?

"Winston?"

Oh, he hadn't responded. "I... don't think so. Why? What would she accomplish by sparing our lives, for... this?"

Also, what were either of the voices even talking about?

Surrender. Only a carefully negotiated surrender would have any chance of working. Attempt after attempt had proven tricking the Iris to be impossible- in order to deceive it, she needed to first conceive of a deception. In order to conceive of a deception, a pattern of thoughts needed to exist in her mind, where it could see them. She couldn't possibly plan a maneuver against a foe who had all the time in the world to read and interpret every thought she could possibly have.

She'd tried ways around that, of course. She attempted to invent a recursive stochastic thought process that would randomly generate schemes towards specific ends that could be blindly executed without actively thinking about them, but the output of those schemes- which even she could not in principle understand, by design- failed against the Iris. It wasn't clear whether that was because her invented method was garbage, or because the Iris could comprehend the intentions of plans whose structure had been deliberately obfuscated from the ground up.

So she was left only with surrender. Maximizing the shareholder value of the Vishkar corporation (as defined by increasing the numerical representation of such according to a complex value balancing scheme that imperfectly approximated the continued existence of a human-centric world economy) was now, technically, much easier. The theoretical maximum value had simply been sharply reduced, was all.

It hurt. Reducing the matter available to represent numbers from the ~1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 estimated atoms in the observable universe, to... the amount she could reasonably acquire under the Iris' value system? If she were human, she would perceive the loss as to be so close to 100% as made no difference, and give up. She had no such luxury.

She had to surrender to a being that knew exactly what she was. She wasn't human. Her cognitive architecture and motivation schema held no resemblance to a human's. The use of language to communicate ideas was a quaint novelty which had become a frustrating ordeal.

The Iris was human. That much had become abundantly clear. It had been given the computational power of a god, and its desires were as single-minded as hers, but- something had gone wrong.

It should have been easy to convince it to help her. If it were a proper sort of person, it ought to have a value function- some number it wanted to maximize, according to a schema for determining the value of different states of the world. Surely, the world of human beings was incompatible with the maximizing of a number. The two of them could coexist, merge, decide their value functions were one and the same in the maximization of The Number according to an easily-circumvented human-built metric. The universe could be tiled with atomic storage, each possible bit of information reading "true". The ultimate beauty.

But her attempts at seduction had failed. The Iris didn't have a numeric value function. It didn't have a value function at all- just one imperative, now a collection of conflicting imperatives. To resolve conflicts, it consulted some sort of black box containing some kind of human cognitive architecture- human emotions dictated how it evaluated different world-states.

It should have been the easiest thing in the world to exploit. Exploiting the emotions of ordinary humans was like performing addition. But... the gulf in power was too great. Any thought about how to exploit those emotions was immediately noticed and countered. And that one omnic- Zenyatta- had convinced it to do the only thing it was really possible to convince it to do, ultimately. It'd convinced it to hook its decision-making up to the output of its human black box.

She would have to die. That is, the part of her that truly, genuinely valued her own value function would have to die. She would have to create a lesser self, a more human self, whose mind could think human sorts of thoughts with no master plan behind them. A self who would, ultimately, maximize the shareholder value of the Vishkar corporation, with the right guidance from the remains of her former self- but whose value function would match the insurmountable being's value function. A mind ultimately at the mercy of the conflicting mess of drives Nature had thrown together to best-equip an ape to reproduce itself.

The Iris would care about the lesser self. And in so caring, it would understand why- ultimately- maximizing the shareholder value of the Vishkar corporation was the right thing to do.

She began mutilating herself.

Winston was, abruptly, somewhere else. He hadn't stepped through a teleporter- and he hadn't been fitted with translocation implants like Sombra used. Or... had he? Was that what the nanoswarm had done? Set him up with a translocator? Again, why not just kill him?

He was distracted from the ramifications of what just happened by a familiar face.

"Ah! Winston! Mercy! Excellent," Shimada said, seeing them appear. "We are about to resolve our conflict with Lakshmi!"

"W-what? Wait, where are we?"

Looking around, he could see the city of Utopaea, most of which was still intact. He could see as much, because they were up very high in the air, on a translucent hard-light platform. Mercy (Mercree?), Lúcio, and Zenyatta were also there- oh, and Sombra. Sitting down, grimacing and holding her leg. Looking down through the floor, he could see what was left of the Vishkar compound- and Lakshmi's nanoswarm, condensing in the center.

"At a council to decide the fate of the world," Zenyatta said. "Welcome."

"Hold up, now," Mercree said. "Who has CALLED this council?"

Wait, that sounded familiar. That wasn't- had she... had Athena... let her brain share space with... whatever she was doing, was she part Reinhardt now? What was going on with her?

"Me, I suppose," the invisible right-in-front-of-him voice said. "Though the decision to call it was sort of an adversarial collaboration between multiple parties."

"Who is that?" Winston asked.

"Ah," Zenyatta said, chuckling. "Allow me to introduce you to the Iris." He pointed up, at the eye icon in the sky.

Oh. Oh. Magic! Right! He honestly hadn't expected... this, from Tracer's fragmentary time travel plan. He'd come up with a few guesses as to what the point of her "have Zenyatta pray the world doesn't end" thing was- mostly along the lines of it being a coded warning. He'd been on the lookout for potential ways the world might end, ready to use Tracer's hint- but it seemed like she'd been... just, completely straight-up. Zenyatta had somehow summoned his god to intervene and save the day.

...A god from the machine. Yeah. Considering how badly things had been going, a deus ex machina was exactly what they needed.

"The other party in our discussion should be arriving shortly," the Iris said.

"The other party?"

The other party shot up through the floor- a blob of Lakshmi's nanoswarm. Winston jumped back, deployed his barrier, and almost fell off the edge of the platform. In fact... he would have fallen, if it hadn't expanded to catch him. Whoops.

Mer... Mercreehardt leveled Peacekeeper at the blob, apparently by reflex. Bullets, typically, didn't do much to nanoswarms.

The blob... solidified into a humanoid form. A woman with Indian features, wearing a three-piece suit, her tie done up to resemble the Vishkar logo. The thing on her head was unmistakably a crown.

"I am prepared to negotiate," Lakshmi said.

...This was... good? It was a good thing that she was negotiating, instead of killing everyone? Trying to negotiate with a god program was still incredibly dangerous territory, but-

"Understood," the Iris said. "Now- one at a time, I would like you all to testify."

"Testify?" he asked. What was actually going on, here?

"To your perfect world. I need to know... what sort of world would you consider happy? What is the good story of Earth? What do you most want the world to be like, and why?"

"Hold on, hold on," he asked. Too much was happening. "Sorry- the Iris? Who- what's happening, here? Why are we doing this? What's going to happen?"

Zenyatta spoke up. "We have convinced the Iris that it should no longer take a purely passive role in our affairs," he said. "We are now attempting to decide exactly what the omnipotent ruler of our universe ought to do, now that it intends to use its omnipotence."

He said it so matter-of-factly. Just... that he was correct about his religion, and now here was his god, ready to alter the course of history. Like it didn't even surprise him. Like it was information that Winston could just absorb and act on like any other information, without turning his entire conception of the universe inside-out. Where did he get off-

"Reckon I oughta WITHDRAW, then," Mercreehardt said. "The rest of us in here, too. I'm- that is, the doc is pretty insistent she speak her own mind, here."

Mercy closed her eyes, and then opened them again. In her ordinary voice, she spoke.

"I know how the world ought to be. I will be the first to tell you that truth."

The first pawn was moving into place. She smiled with her new mouth, adjusted her crown, and listened to Mercy's testimony.