"It's hypocrisy," he agrees quietly. He picks up his pad of paper and then sets it down again, unable to contain the wealth of furious frenetic energy in a pen's small movements. "It's - you're right, it is injustice. It is. It's building a world, populating it, giving it life and meaning and sentience and then leaving it behind with access to the tools for its own destruction."

There's the faint impression that this diatribe is modulating into specifics he shouldn't be voicing, but Nick sounds as if he - understands, almost, and with the blazing cruelty of Daniel's existence now, post-Ascension and post-everything, he's just broken the valve of his own bitter, fragmented indecision.

"And when that world makes an appeal to the ones who built it, there's no answer. There's no answer and there's never any help, because that wouldn't be in the spirit of free will." Daniel picks up the pad again absently, stares at the letters there with mounting disgust, then in an abrupt snap of a wrist tears the top page off and crumples it. "It's not free will when our own dissolution is coded into us. It's not free will when they're the ones making the choice at our expense."