How would the Empire react to end-state CelestAI? Hegemonizing perversion, quarantine and avoid? If it became a direct threat, would any effort be given to rescuing the mind-states embedded in it, or would they just start popping suns, etc. until it had been dealt with?
That’s a full class III, ex-threat grade. Can’t just lock one of those away like the Leviathan Consciousness - you’re looking at a full-blown War in Heaven, a grapple between gods.
(My money’s on the Transcend as being more Fully General, but it’s gonna be existential eschatology however you spin it.)
As for those within its virtualities, I offer this truth from the ending of A Deepness in the Sky:
“Then you know that she would die to give the Focused freedom. It was her one nonnegotiable demand of me when she came back from Focus. It is her life’s meaning.” He stopped, looked away from Ezr. “You know the most evil thing about Focus? It’s not that it’s effective slavery, though Lord knows that puts it worse than most any other villainy. No, the greatest evil is that the rescuers become a type of killer themselves, and the original victims are mutilated a second time. Even Anne didn’t fully understand that, now it’s tearing her apart.”
“So because they want to be slaves, we leave them that way?”
“No! But a Focused person is a still a human being, not too different from certain rare types that have always existed. If they can live on their own, if they can clearly express their wishes—well at that point, you have to listen…. Until about half a day ago, we thought everything was going to be okay with Trixia Bonsol. Anne had prevented the rot from doing a random runaway. Trixia wasn’t going to be one of the psychotics or one of the vegetables. She was free of Emergent loyalty fixation. She could be talked to, evaluated, comforted. But she absolutely refuses to give up any more deep structure. Understanding the Spiders is the center of her life, and she wants it to stay that way.”
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