[i]And we shall call you Tactics, as that is all you are good for.[/i]

The ground beneath her feet is frozen. The temperatures are as close to zero as can be managed. Shifting chemical reactions, freeze and contract and freeze, occur in predictable cycles in a knowable global weather pattern. Understandable, controllable. Accounted for.

[i]Imagine, then, the horror.[/i]

Beneath her feet she can feel the planet writhe. Even amidst the crystalline beauty of the snowflakes animate matter moves and twists and finds ways to multiply. Even through the blizzard contaminated water packets accumulate carbon, iron and various trace elements and propel themselves under their own power. And beneath the ice, in the water, the planet positively seethes with a riot of impure groupings. Even this frozen wasteland is so, so far from perfect.

[i]Stillness is not a method. It is a policy objective.[/i]

There is more than holy duty to the sweep of the Zero-Entropy Device. Its motion represents the condensation of variables as surely as its firing does. The Kathresis converts the chaos of the crystal-fire reaction into its antithesis; the broken spilling energy turned in on itself until it inverts. Tactics converts the chaos of organic life itself into its antithesis; the broken spilling emotions overwhelmed with feeling until they invert. Love so deep it turns into prediction, calculation - [i]aim[/i]. It knows you like it knows itself. It knows where to place the shot. If it guessed right - well, that is love. All the chaos of your life and self expression reduced to a known quantity, processed, and resolved. Catalogued in place in the hierarchy of all things and left with no energy to stray.

[i]Love is not a policy objective. It is a targeting system.[/i]

In the dream, she is Tactics. She is the filter through which the chaos of the world becomes knowable. A broken spirit world of eight trillion divines - gods, ancestors, spirits, ghosts ever on. Eight trillion who have forgotten that they are one. Eight trillion demons. She will love them all in the way they are supposed to be loved, and no other. She will love them as she loves the One who will answer to the policy objectives set by the legitimate authority. In this dream of ice, she knows her function at last.