Bianca, armed with accumulated Understandings, rejects Temple’s comforting myths about the Messenger and focuses on its observable limits. She notes that the orbiting intelligence grasps mathematics but often fails at everyday or sensory concepts, suggesting a different, constrained mode of awareness and a narrowing obsession with its plan and looming catastrophe.

Drawing on experiences with mathematically minded stomatopods and her ant-based computation work, Bianca leverages a colleague’s seeing-ant innovation to encode images as a spiral of light and dark. She prepares a picture of the Sky Nest’s launch and invites dialogue, cloaking her approach in ritual to gain the Messenger’s attention.

After initial silence, God responds procedurally, struggling to decode the visual signal until Bianca supplies formulae describing the spiral. Comprehension clicks; the Messenger even has a word for airship and demands more. Bianca withholds further data to control the exchange and realizes, from God’s hunger for images, that the Messenger is effectively blind to the planet and relies on radio to “see.”

When the Messenger rises above her horizon again, Bianca transmits an image of Seven Trees’ interior bustle. God falls silent, a first in living memory, leaving Bianca—and the world’s scientists—waiting. Meanwhile, the Sky Nest reaches its operational ceiling; cold slows testing, but Viola reports progress within tolerance as Portia’s dangerous mission phase approaches. Under global scrutiny, Bianca waits for the Messenger’s next move.