In a flash I isolated the amai's thoughts, easier now since there weren't so many patterns, and not only had all of 77's stress vanished, but something was actually absorbing it from other amai she interacted with; including, surprisingly, the once-violent subject 98.

Nine subjects remained. Seven. Five. Four.

I couldn't believe my three eyes: four had not died. Subjects 63, 77, 97, and 98 showed no signs they were going to die. Two girls and two boys, each a different race, two with badly tainted histories, now shared something in common, something that overrode their greed and prejudice and restored them to a state of innocence.

"It must be some evolutionary thing, a nirvana or something," I dinned.

Aether responded by further ramping up the power. Trees and flowers, the whole progress of nature, darted around me in the blink of an eye. For the four survivors, the way of their hearts became their will, and their will their reality, with no resistance at all. They built a shelter, then the wood rotted, so they built another with steel, which rusted, so they carved stone, and it cracked and withered away. They tamed nature and nature fought back, but they found balances and continued to progress, to build more and more impressive structures. There was no war. They didn't claim what another had taken or take what another had claimed. Aether kept expanding the boundaries of the construct, feeding it more energy, but what drove them forward did not break.

"Don't implode the server!"

"There is no danger," came the disjointed response, from a malvirai concentrating on a thousand overclocked processes. Energy screamed through red-lining HNADC connectors, and Aether could direct no more into them. The progress of nature was a blur. Several minutes would pass before the malvirai would be satisfied, before she would concede.

Even given eternity, what drove the four would not break.