Epilogue.

Daniel stepped outside and took a deep breath. The smell of fresh-cut grass and honeysuckle filled his nostrils and he smiled. It was time to get to work.

The bus will be here in ten minutes, he thought. He walked to the bus stop, joined by a growing group of his neighbors. They were all wearing the same satisfied smile that he was. The bus arrived as predicted and the group, now more than thirty, all boarded.

He looked over the citizens with pride. Old, young, men, women, they were all his people. He addressed them without saying a word.

Is everyone doing well today?

A chorus of affirmation rose from the people, with only a few dissenters. A young woman named Allison stood and told him that she had been experiencing stomach cramps this morning and an elderly man named Isaac said that his hip was bothering him. Daniel and the rest of the bus frowned sympathetically.

The bus will take you to the medical sector. Please get yourself checked out and report back to me. Hank will tell Richard to tend to you.

Hank was the bus driver and Richard was the chief of the medical sector. Hank was under his dominion (like all the others in his neighborhood), but Richard wasn't. The bus continued as several young women moved to massage Isaac's hip. He smiled gratefully at them.

The bus stopped at the work site and everyone but Hank, Isaac, Allison, and Daniel disembarked to take shuttles to their jobs. The next stop was the city center, where Daniel's office was.

Daniel whistled a tune he didn't know as he walked up the stairs of the grand building. He remembered when it was a museum; now the art remained, but the offices had been taken over by Sam and her staff. He was so grateful that he was allowed to be a Tier 3, only one step removed from Jake himself. Jake had dominion over Sam, and Sam had dominion over Daniel.

The lower-tier lifestyle wasn't unpleasant, of course, but it was less compelling. In constructing his arborescent society, Jake discovered that after four levels of dominion people became jumbled. If hearing one person's thoughts was disorienting, hearing five people's thoughts was maddening. The lower-tiers weren't unhappy, but they tended to be spacey and confused, stumbling from task to task, their thoughts jerking back and forth with no rhyme or reason.

He greeted the administrative assistant outside of Sam's office and let himself in. Sam was dressed in a lovely sundress, sitting at her desk and smiling.

"It's good day," he told her. She nodded. "Jake is well today."

"He is!" she said. "We all are. How is your neighborhood?"

"Well," he said. "A few medical complaints, but otherwise everyone is doing very well. Our productivity has risen significantly since the new software was implemented."

She nodded. It was smart to redesign basic logistics applications around their new reality. "And you?"

He moved around the desk and put his hands on her hips. The rush of excitement in his head told him that it was welcome. "Very good. Not a day goes by that I don't thank God for you, Sam."

They both blushed and she giggled a little. "We'd better wait till morning break."

"Don't want to distract the whole city," he finished. "But they're in for a good time."

A thought flashed through his mind and he felt a pang of a strange emotion he couldn't identify. "I haven't spoken to Cyrus in a few months," he told her. "I... sometimes regret what we did."

She nodded. "Because I do. I was feeling vindictive because Jake was feeling vindictive, but I wonder if we shouldn't just scrap the whole program."

Daniel nodded in perfect agreement. They had an experimental program to produce a long chain of dominion. Ultimately it was just to satisfy Jake's (and therefore everyone's) curiosity: what would happen to a person's mind when they could hear hundreds of voices in their head, all overwriting and being overwritten endlessly.

Cyrus was the 544th person in the chain; he was housed in a facility where he was kept healthy. He could hardly speak, but he wasn't suffering; thanks to the meditation of the overseer (second in the chain), all of them felt an ongoing euphoria akin to what Sam enjoyed in captivity. He currently sat drooling on a couch, his head jerking left and right in response to a thousand cascade thoughts rushing through his head and a vacant smile plastered on his sweaty face.

The image was flushed from his mind by another question. This wasn't from Sam, though; this was the same one that Jake sent out to everyone in his realm every morning.

Are you happy here?

In unison, Sam, Daniel, Cyrus, Allison, Hank, and every living soul in the realm spoke one word:

"Yes."