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imagination.
    “Indeed, that book lays out the highest levels of human schemes and strategy.”
    But our sophons can make everything in the human world transparent.
    “Except for people’s own minds.”
    Yes. The sophon can’t read thoughts.
    “You must know about the Wallfacer Project.”
    More than you do. It is about to be put into action. This is why we have come to you.
    “What do you think of the project?”
    The same feeling you get when you look at the snake.
    “But the snake in the Bible helped humans gain knowledge. The Wallfacer Project will set up one or several mazes that will seem to you to be particularly tricky and treacherous. We can help you find your way out.”
    This difference in mental transparency gives us all the more resolve to wipe out humanity. Please help us wipe out humanity, and then we will wipe you out.
    “My Lord, the way you express yourself is problematic. Clearly, it’s determined by how you communicate through the display of transparent thoughts, but in our world, even if you express your true thoughts, you must do so in an appropriately euphemistic way. For example, although what you just said is in accord with the ideals of ETO, its overly direct formulation might repel some of our members and cause unanticipated consequences. Of course, it may be that you’ll never be able to learn to express yourself appropriately.”
    It is precisely the expression of deformed thoughts that makes the exchange of information in human society, particularly in human literature, so much like a twisted maze. As far as I am aware, ETO is on the brink of collapse.
    “That’s because you abandoned us. Those two strikes were fatal, and now, the Redemptionists have disintegrated and only the Adventists have maintained an organized existence. You’re certainly aware of this, but the most fatal blow was a psychological one. Your abandonment means that the devotion of our members to our Lord is being tested. To maintain that devotion, ETO desperately needs our Lord’s support.”
    We can’t give you technology.
    “That won’t be necessary, so long as you go back to transmitting information to us through the sophons.”
    Naturally. But what ETO must do first is execute the critical order you just read. We issued it to Evans before his death, and he ordered you to execute it, but you never solved the encryption.
    The Wallbreaker remembered the letter he had just decrypted on his computer and read it over carefully.
    Simple enough to carry out, is it not?
    “It’s not too difficult. But is it truly that important?”
    It used to be important. Now, because of humanity’s Wallfacer Project, it is incredibly important.
    “Why?”
    The text did not show for a while.
    Evans knew why, but evidently he didn’t tell anyone. He was right. This is fortunate. Now, we don’t need to tell you why.
    The Wallbreaker was overjoyed. “My Lord, you have learned how to conceal! This is progress!”
    Evans taught us much, but we are still at the very beginning, or in his words, only at the level of one of your five-year-old children. The order he gave you contains one of the strategies we can’t learn.
    “Do you mean this stipulation: ‘To avoid attention, you must not reveal that it was done by ETO’? This … well, if the target is important, then this requirement is only natural.”
    To us it is a complicated plan.
    “Fine. I will take care of it in accordance with Evans’s wishes. My Lord, we will prove our devotion to you.”
    *   *   *
    In one remote corner of the vast sea of information on the Internet, there was a remote corner, and in a remote corner of that remote corner, and then in a remote corner of a remote corner of a remote corner of that remote corner—that is, in the very depths of the most remote corner of all—a virtual world came back to life.
    Under the strange, chilly dawn was no pyramid, UN building, or pendulum, just a broad and hard expanse of emptiness, like a giant slab