Bartek’s Encounter with Gilgamesh90 at the Orbital Telescope brings Bartek face to face with both a piece of his own past and a possible explanation for The Extermination. He reaches a vast, improvised orbital telescope in a failing Horus I, recognizes his own engineering in its construction, and learns that Gilgamesh90’s group is searching for the origin of the Death Ray. Their conversation recasts the catastrophe as a possible act of pre-emptive destruction by a civilization with access to wormholes; their disagreement then becomes a physical confrontation that sends Bartek away from the telescope.

Approach and the telescope’s awakening

The encounter follows Bartek’s long passage through scattered memories and dreams. At the dawn of his three hundred and fifteenth orbit, Horus I is alone above Earth, with its maneuvering fuel exhausted and its survival dependent on whether the calculations can bring one orbit into another. Bartek responds to the African sun by spreading the mech’s black wings to collect light, then uses the solar profile and a countdown to set the machine moving. Its maneuver carries it into the telescope structure. The collision damages Horus I and leaves Bartek moving with limited control, but he keeps his connection open: satellites from Black Castle and recycled Iridium satellites remain within range.

The impact has an effect beyond the damaged mech. Robots that had been switched off and connected to power and conservation sockets begin activating throughout the telescope’s galleries. Their sudden motion suggests that the shock has travelled through the structure itself, turning a dormant collection of machines into an assembly of potential interlocutors and obstacles. Bartek makes his way toward the focal point, but the mechs surround him. When he tries to cross the dish, a Schmitt 203 redirects Horus I away from the centre. After the robots freeze, Bartek reduces his mech to barely more than a powered-down state and waits. Seven hours and twenty-three minutes later, a Honda X signals CHAT and opens a line. The delay makes the meeting feel less like an immediate greeting than a response elicited from a machine-world that has only just awakened.

Recognition and a claim of authorship

The structure is not merely a setting for the encounter. Bartek recognizes its design as his own kind of work: a practical construction assembled from whatever hardware was available, patched and adapted rather than built from a unified supply of new materials. He illuminates the dish and turns Horus I to reveal the telescope’s elements one by one, presenting its engineering in a sequence that makes the structure legible as evidence. Gilgamesh90 raises her hands in surrender after the twentieth element. Bartek identifies familiar components and explains how the telescope’s builders have had to work around the limits of salvaged materials, using different machines for tasks suited to their capabilities.

His recognition is also a demand for acknowledgement. Bartek argues that the design bears his particular hardware spirit and that the available copies of hardware handymen in the Google banks make his own knowledge relevant. He asks to be paid. Gilgamesh90 asks whether he means a commercial exchange, leaving the terms of the encounter uncertain: his claim may establish expertise, but it does not make him indispensable to her group. The scene makes authorship concrete through the telescope’s construction. Bartek does not simply announce a past identity; he demonstrates that he can read the choices embedded in the machine.

The search behind the meeting

Gilgamesh90 explains that the group is searching for those responsible for the Death Ray. They have gathered records from The Extermination, fragmentary data, old robot registers, and a dating of the neutron wave precise to the nanosecond. Their calculations place the suspected source seventeen point six light years from the Sun, in Ophiuchus, just beyond Barnard’s Star. Yet their result is not a world or a visible weapon. The location appears to be a gravitational blank: it emits nothing, conceals no radiation, and has no detectable influence on matter’s motion.

Gilgamesh90 interprets that emptiness as evidence of concealment rather than proof that nothing happened. If the attackers anticipated retaliation, she reasons, they would not fire from their own home. The distance, on her account, is intended not to hide a planet or a weapon but to prevent observers from reading the signature left by a wormhole. The telescope is therefore listening for waste radiation associated with opening one. Its purpose is not simply to observe distant objects; it is to test whether the catastrophe was delivered through a channel that ordinary astronomical observation cannot directly reveal.

A cosmic hypothesis, not a settled answer

The explanation expands from a suspected weapon to a theory of how an advanced civilization might decide where life can exist. Gilgamesh90 says that the group has returned to pre-Extermination calculations about opening and stabilizing wormholes, although no one now fully understands the theories and humanity has not produced new theoretical physicists capable of rebuilding that knowledge from scratch. Their speculation is that a civilization able to travel faster than light could gather information about life and culture far beyond the observable universe, building a vast record of how different conditions and forms of biology develop.

In this account, such a database could become a predictive tool: a means of estimating which worlds will eventually produce technological life. Gilgamesh90 describes a hypothetical algorithm that identifies a pattern associated with destruction and eliminates it in its infancy. The argument offers a possible rationale for The Extermination, but not proof that this is what occurred. Bartek challenges the chain of assumptions, and Gilgamesh90 insists that the account is a tested hypothesis whose logic follows from the wormhole evidence. The distinction matters: the telescope has a specific target, the radiation signature, while the Gardener of the Universe remains an interpretation built upon what the group believes that signature would imply.

That implication is vast. If a wormhole was used to fire the Death Ray, Gilgamesh90 argues, then at least one civilization has access to regions beyond both the observable and non-observable universe. That capability would make a comprehensive archive of life’s possible trajectories conceivable, and from that archive she derives the prospect of a cosmic gardener. Bartek looks toward Earth beneath the telescope rather than toward the distant objects its dish surveys. His response keeps the discussion anchored in the world that was destroyed and the unresolved question of why it was destroyed in this particular way.

Rejection and separation

The discussion ends without agreement. Gilgamesh90 dismisses Bartek’s expectation that his arrival might make him needed, and frames his choice as a return to his life in First Paradise and to his commitment to single personhood. Her words turn the earlier exchange over payment and expertise into a more personal rejection: recognition of Bartek’s skill does not amount to dependence on him. The confrontation then resumes in motion. Gilgamesh90’s Honda X intercepts Horus I over the dish, and the two mechs rebound apart, Bartek moving toward Earth beneath the telescope’s shadow while Gilgamesh90 travels away over the curve of the dish.

As he falls, Bartek passes through successive layers of dreams before reaching the bright African present and the embrace of Lady Spiro. The ending returns the orbital encounter to the disordered memories with which the sequence began. Bartek leaves with a possible account of the Death Ray, but not a confirmed answer, and with evidence that his old technical identity still has force even when it cannot secure a place among the people he has come to meet. The encounter’s central tension is between connection and exclusion: the telescope may connect distant points through a wormhole, while Bartek’s own attempt to join its search ends in separation.