Epilogue
Three interludes. Crawl historian Sydnee Iglacia, filming from a tripling-rent habitat in the Makoka Cloud, gets her first one-on-one with Ripper Wonton and uses it to lay out the Scolopendra myth: in the oldest histories the nine-tier attack was not nine spells but a sequence in which only some attacks were physical. The first is control — the AI has taken the tunnels and trapped everyone in the system. The second is called A Parade of Horribles, the third This Inevitable Ruin, the fourth Bedlam. In the fairy tale a princess tempers the last attack by killing the all-tree and everyone she loves, and it is a tragedy. Then Prime Minister Victory watches from her bunker as the AI releases Grigori, Chaco blinks out leaving the donkey behind, and the feed settles on the twelfth floor's cotton fields — before the AI drops the announcer's voice: it is not the Eulogist, it will not shrink, it controls the tunnels and every former crawl system, the Ascendency winner will truly be a god, and rival abandoned AIs it calls Outside Intelligences are already on the field. The montage of contenders ends on the Unwashed. Finally Louis Santiago 2 wakes in unbearable heat: not the Pineapple Cabaret but Sheol, with Britney, Pontiff, a werewolf'd Chris and a small red demon named Forkith fitting him with a blood-filtering leech, because they needed soldiers on a different front.
First appearances (7)
- Leve Billings (Character) — Prime Minister Victory’s liaison to the science committee
- Sydnee Iglacia (Character) — Crawl historian · poet · author of A Petite Chronicle of the Crawl
- The AI’s Ascendency Ultimatum (Event) — Book 8 · Epilogue — mandatory viewing, winner takes all
- Outside Intelligences (OIs) (Notification) — Rival AIs in the Ascendency
- A Petite Chronicle of the Crawl (Lore) — Sydnee Iglacia’s history · over a trillion copies sold
- The Scolopendra Myth (Lore) — The nine-tier attack as the histories record it
- The Makoka Cloud (Place) — Asteroid-field habitats outside the center system’s reach
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