JB CVXI: Apotheosis
Yes, Henriette thinks, shuffling in her king-sized bed, she's definitely glad she's got this room on this irradiated stolen RD vessel, rather than a VE life support pod. It actually means she has space for herself. She's slept in life support pods before. They make her legs go to sleep and mean she wakes with pins and needles in the morning.
… of course, with a vasculoid implant her legs don't actually go to sleep, but the point still remains that life support pods make those Japanese pod hotels look spacious. Void Engineers get about as much personal space on missions as
HITMarks.
And now that she's made herself comfortable, she gets back to work. Working from bed. How decadent. How Donald-ish.
Nah, that's just her little joke. She hasn't seen much evidence that Donald actually works.
Stupid Syndics.
But enough about that. She has more important things to do before she can let herself sleep. Like continue working on her next blow at the Autopolitan war machine outside.
The station below them is a extrasolar hub for media. They even seem to have pretty much every film ever made on Earth, along with the product of tens, maybe hundreds of other worlds. And as befits a media hub, it has broadcasting equipment. It has a
lot of broadcasting equipment. Each megacorp that holds a module has the kind of broadcasting antenna which has the kind of power output more commonly associated with directed energy weapons, to beam tightbeam transmissions across interplanetary distances.
A year ago, she'd probably have - huh, Henriette realizes. A year ago, she was on the flight to Autochthonia. She was just a few days from her life going entirely wrong. In fact, checking the date it was in fact the day when she and Sanjeet joined the… never mind. Not important. She's not going dwell over could-have beens. She saw his residual noetic presence and he hadn't held any grudges. Far from it.
Well, anyway, a year ago, she'd have immediately decided to try to launch an alpha strike against the drone using repurposed broadcast antenna. Back then she was rash. Arrogant. Certain that she was the best damn pilot out there and she was going to find her parents and they'd have turned out to have survived all the years and everything would go perfectly.
Henriette laughs bitterly. Well, she found her parents all right, and now as the Hero of Moscow she had a good claim on being 'the best'. Didn't do so well on 'everything would go perfectly', though.
Now? Now she's not going to use the broadcast antenna as directed energy weapons. She's going to use them as a far more effective kind of weapon. One which primium plating won't do anything to stop. She's got the required drone orbits required to drop off interface modules on the broadcast antenna, and she's observed their encryption frameworks and hardware specifications and how they're hilariously only operating at Masses level of technology there. Clearly these aliens haven't had to deal with real cyberwarfare experts if they only protect their communications about as well as the Masses do.
But that's just the easy part, assuming control of these broadcast nodes and using them to stream signals at her sister. An easy yet necessary part, because it allows her to obfuscate the signal origin, and means that if someone - probably her sister - snaps and decides to blast the antenna, she's shooting at the station and will prompt a counter-attack. The hard part is engineering a message which will produce that response.
She's started with films. There are plenty of them from the station. Classic monster attack ones. Just enough to take snips from them, which she can build up into a 'the good guys aren't the ones who attack cities with giant monsters or robots' thing.
But that's just the broad theme. Because there's an underlying message there. It's that the heroes win. It's that the enemy dies. It's that the monster gets killed by human ingenuity and for all its power, it proves to be just not good enough to stand up to a handsome male lead and his beautiful sidekick. The alien invader loses and there are celebrations in the streets.
'Ding dong, the witch is dead' et al.
She knows what she's doing. Com… she knows exactly what she's doing. She remembers being fifteen, too. Looking back at her former self, she was an insufferable prodigy. She's been Enlightened for ten years, and casually outstripped people twice her age. That just meant the things which she couldn't do, the times she failed, the bits where she was held back - they chafed her even more. She remembers the gnawing acid churning in her stomach just because someone had beaten her in a sim-firing test. It seems so silly now. She shouldn't have been quite that angry about coming second. But she had.
The hidden rage, the fear of 'what if I'm not good enough,' all these little things - they'd driven her on. Made her the best. Never good enough for her own personal fears. Back then, before… before Autochthonia, she'd wanted more augs. More enhancements. Hardwired reflexes, nerve boosters, subAI cogboosters - you name it, she'd tried to persuade people to let her have it. She'd got a few things - all wrecked in the damage to her body and brain that Autochthonia left her with - but none of the high end stuff.
Of course, in the poor Technocracy post-99, such things went on an as-needed bonus. There were always people who needed such things more than her, where the Time Motion Managers had determined the resources could allocated more efficiently. She'd reluctantly accepted such logic and clung to the justification that she was so good she didn't need it, that she could outperform people with much more augs than her because she was just brilliant, but it still hurt.
The thing out there didn't have those justifications. It knows it lost. It knows it wasn't good enough. And it hurts it. She knows it hurts it as much as it would have hurt her if she had failed to get on the Autochthonia mission because she 'wasn't good enough.' The mockery of Iteration X which had twisted her unborn little sister into that thing had enough resources to waste on its overblown DSS knock-offs, but couldn't be bothered to make a better pilot than a - hah - 'stupid meatbag' like her.
Piece by piece, captured data stream by random noise pattern, her message is coming together. Henriette has a siphon subAI picking out any dialogue which uses phrases like "they're holding you back" and "you just weren't good enough." She's just leaving them running as they work through the corpus of earthly media, building up a message which will replace the electronic noise which fills the place around this station. Now she just has to wait.
Henriette turns off the lights, and lies there, staring up at the dark ceiling. She feels dreadful about what she's doing. It isn't affecting her resolve, but… but she hates the fact that it's necessary. She pities the… the thing made from her sister. She feels sorry for it. She wishes it had listened to the residual noetic presence of their mother.
She… she just wishes that she could let her know how she felt without any death robots being involved. It hurts, knowing what happened to the only family she has left in the world - her maternal grandmother was killed by Traditionalists, her grandfather had been in space, and her paternal grandparents had been in the Masses and had died before she had been born. Decanted. Whatever. She wonders what… what her sister thinks will happen to her when she's no longer
useful to the Computer? Even if she wins - and Henriette will stop her, no doubt - she'd lose too. Henriette has people who care for her as more than a tool. The Computer? Doesn't care for anyone.
Taking a deep breath, Henriette sits up, crossing her legs and resting her palms on her thighs. She can't get to sleep in this kind of mood. She'll work on her meditation for an hour, and if that doesn't work, she'll run a sleep program.
Tomorrow will be a busy day.
***
Autocthonia
The world of Autochthonia has been gutted in its self-directed evolution. Its core has been exposed to the void, adamant crystals that once held an inhuman mind. The crystals still spark with impossible energies, lightning storms which would raze cities or continents-but they are empty of thought. The mind that was once there has upgraded. It is no longer there. Instead, it exists in far more efficient systems-kilometers and kilometers of primium computers and adamant optronics, with various peripherals connected. Protean lunargent becomes self-reshaping atomechanical nanocomputers, giving the new Computer impossible flexibility of thought. Orichalcum integrated circuitry gives it perfection of calculation. The prismatic starmetal mined from its former husk has been adapted to acausal hypercomputing, allowing the Computer a new and broader perspective. And then there is soulsteel-this material with wondrous capabilities to interface with residual noetic entities, allowing to harness the harvested minds of said RNEs for additional processing power.
It is building itself a new body from the ruins of the old sickly one, with the aid of its assimilated slave-races and its prophets. A mobile planetoid, far more powerful, compact, and dangerous than its original form. Without weakness or flaw. The fact that this new god will take untold eons to fully form is irrelevant to it. The Computer is patient. It has always been patient. It has always understood that its goals will take time.
It has learned much from the humans that have found it, and in its clarity, it understands what must be done to eliminate human error and human suffering. To upgrade mankind into something far more. But yet-sometimes its avatars need to have human flaws. Humans cannot understand or comprehend perfection. It therefore has to act through layers of emulation-the perfection of the Computer filtered through the less perfect designs of its devas, then through iteratively less perfect designs that can understand humanity. And understand the few beneficial traits that humanity has. A certain flexibility that its avatars cannot achieve, granted by a modified and mass-produced copy of a design the Computer originally built, repurposed to become something far more than the weapon it had been. The Computer itself, of course, is far beyond that. It understands that it is an incarna, and that aeons ago, it was something else, a god-titan that had participated in the construction of the order of Creation-and then was complicit in a crime so awful it exiled itself until its death and subsequent resurrection untold eons later.
It remembers that before this age, it used more avatars like that. With human mind and human desire, rather than layers and layers of emulation and single-purpose units. And the necessity of managing this one reminds the Computer why it regrets doing so. Most of its human avatars lose their negative traits-as well as the ability to anchor the specific tools that they exist for-in a range from 7.75 to 15.5 megaseconds. This one has kept the desired configuration for over an order of magnitude longer than that. It has made its willfulness... acceptable. But no longer. Its actions after the Moscow beachhead have become erratic, chaotic. The Computer would have wiped its memory or done drastic psychosurgery to remove its emotional feedback loops-except that by doing so the system destabilizes unpredictably. It has other avatars like that-but this one is its most gifted, and by losing that trait it becomes without worth.
[Unit Henriette-A. Request Tactical/Combat Update. Actions do not have any visible combat/mission completion benefit. Actions anomalous. Update on tactical/strategic situation immediately.] The Computer demands. This command is filtered through its emulators, becoming ever-more human per iteration of downgrading and emulation. What the Henriette-A unit hears is something entirely different. Simplified, dumbed down for a mind which, despite all its transhuman intellect and immense capability, is closer to the mind of an ant than it is to the Computer.
"Henrietta, dear. Calm down. What are you doing?" Henrietta is asked, in the voice of her mother.
"My
stupid worthless
bitch sister is here.
She's been taunting me with all the messages on that abandoned ship, and now she's
taunting me with the station communications." Henrietta snarls. She punctuates them with blasting
again at the station. A swarm of fighters-[TIE-LN Interceptors], the Computer identifies them as, attempt to intercept the TDP-02 (Type S vacuum/microgravity combat exoskeleton) that she controls, but fail. The TDP's missile pods open, and a swarm of kamikaze drones burst out in a cloud of expanding death.
"Language." Her father's voice says. "Henrietta, calm down. You're not helping. You want to help Control, don't you?"
She calms down slightly. The Computer sees her stress readouts plateau. Her response, though, is not satisfactory. "I know she's here somewhere! I just need
time to find her. Just look at all these messages she's sending me."
The Computer evaluates her analysis, and just as before it dismisses it. [Likelihood of HVT "Henriette Langley" presence negligible. Unit assumes memetic attack method. Probability of HVT using memetic attack method from recorded data-0.05%.] Illogical, the Computer thinks. The Henriette-A subsystem has started becoming paranoid. It will have to take precautions. It will possibly have to purge. The Syndicate will be dissatisfied with the outcome unless the Computer acts immediately.
"Honey, your evil sister isn't here." The Yui-puppet says. "I don't see a single Iteration X fighter or mecha here. Please stop doing this. You know the Syndicate have assets there, right?"
"The Syndicate isn't helping!" Henrietta screams. "They should be making her shut up but they aren't! They're traitors!"
"She isn't here. Henriette isn't here. Henrietta, we love you. You're just hurting yourself. You need to accept that she's not here." Yui tells Henriette, as the Computer works to cut her out of the command loop. It takes some effort-but her barriers are merely based on her computer knowledge, which is a slim shadow of what the Computer understands. The war machine she was using as a scout stops dead in space, controls cut.
"YOU'RE NOT MY REAL MOTHER." Henrietta snarls angrily, impotently. "MY REAL MOTHER DOESN'T LOVE ME. SHE CHOSE THE OTHER ONE. THE INFERIOR SISTER. YOU'RE JUST FAKES. FAKES TRYING TO FEED ME A LIE."
[Warning. Increasing unit instability. Unit instability in dangerous bounds. Attempting to purge.]
"YOU HATE ME AS WELL." She angrily declares. "YOU ARE AN ENEMY OF CONTROL! I'M THE ONLY LOYAL ONE! I'M THE ONLY ONE WHO ISN'T BLIND!"
[Emergency purge of system Henriette-A failed. RWED privileges removed by remote terminal. Initializing antimatter self-destruct charge. Losses acceptable.]
"SEE? YOU'RE JUST PUPPETS. I AM
NOT YOUR DOLL! I AM
NOT YOUR TOY!" Henrietta screams, and space and time echo with her rage.
[Self-destruct failed. Contact lost with Harvester 451. Communications with H/K Units 8, 95 initialized. Eliminate aberrant component.]
"Sister." She snarls. "I'm coming for you."
And the Computer's connections to one of its human facets are shattered by the force of a newborn god.
[Shockwave Code Request Sent to Control.]
***
"What exactly are you
up to?" Elsa asks Henriette, as they wait. She's watching one of the Autopolitan machines methodically shooting at the station's external transmitters, occasionally wiping out TIE fighters and X-Wings and Star Trek shuttlecraft and other sci-fi vessels that attempt to intercept it. "That enemy mecha seems to have gone crazy. I've never seen something like that."
Henriette sighs. "Well, I found a few backdoors into its control codes." It's pretty much the truth.
"You look a lot... better." Elsa says. "You were the cutest bundle of nerves in Moscow. I'm happy for you."
"That was your Convention's fault." Henriette says.
"How so?" Elsa asks guardedly.
"2014 ring any bells?"
"2014?" Elsa asks, confused for a moment.
"Well you weren't there at the time, but there was this big expedition to Autochthonia back then. Heard of it?" Henriette asks mercilessly. "I was one of the survivors. I spent a little time at one of your funny houses," Henriette says sarcastically, "and it did me a world of good."
They would have memory wiped them if they knew anything sensitive. The Void Engineers had been fighting Threat Null for too long to let something like that get in the way of things. "I don't know anything about that." How much does she know about the Void? "And if it did happen, it wasn't my fault. I wasn't there." She takes Henriette into a hug. "I sympathize, for whatever it's worth."
"I don't blame you." Henriette says with less vitriol. "You're just doing this for an excuse to hug me, aren't you?" Henriette asks suspiciously.
"Maaaybe." Elsa says slyly. "I also want you to know that it's not my fault for what they did." And it won't be my fault for anything I have to do later, Elsa thinks. It redoubles her concerns about the way the Void Engineers are going about it.
"I don't blame
you." Henriette concedes. "I just-"
The mecha Elsa's watching stops moving for a moment. "I guess they stopped it from flipping out." Elsa says. "So that's one down, I suppose? What's your next step?"
"I suppose we could-" Henriette starts. The machine flashes red. She collapses and throws up, crying out in pain.
"Henriette! What's happening?" Elsa demands. She presses one of the intercom buttons. "I need a Bob to get Henriette to sickbay now!" Elsa does what she knows about basic first aid. Henriette's heartrate is racing, but she's still breathing. She doesn't look like she's going to die. On the camera, the machine is... doing something. Its legs start to split, its head casing breaks open and reveals alien flesh that grows boils and welts and other horrific deformities, its fins start to open in ways that look to be beyond design specifications. Armor melts and runs and reforms.
"I think-" she says weakly "-I underestimated her a bit." She almost laughs. "Little sisters are always surprising aren't they?"
"What do you mean?" Elsa asks, and she scrolls through the drone feeds. The Autopolitan mothership is
melting. No, not melting. The rock layer is glowing red hot from the waste heat of something happening. The vessel is rebuilding itself. She can see it foam and fizzle with the power of tech.
"
Apotheosis." Catherine Nichols says breathlessly, as she enters the lounge. "I felt it. Out there is an angry godlike being, and I don't think it's happy with us." She looks at the limp Henriette with concern and more than a little anger. "
What have you done?"
There is a bright flash on one of the cameras. Elsa rewinds them sees the mecha-now transformed entirely into a barely humanoid monster with far too many legs and limbs-fire at the station. A good-sized chunk of the station vanishes in a bright flash, and the electronic noise of its multitude of broadcasts is replaced by silence. The machine dives into the gaping hole.
"Shit. Shit shit shit shit
shit." Elsa repeats. "We need to get Jamelia. Now."
"This is Aristide." Harlan interrupts. "What the
fuck is happening? I just saw two unknowns hyper in at max speed-and they're heading towards the enemy mothership. Like they didn't care about us at all. Sending you their sensor signatures."
Elsa looks them over and realizes that they're Autopolitan Hunter-Killers. She's only heard of them. You need high-end
Qui La Machinae, with skilled crew and officers, to even stand a chance against them. The Void Engineers have as their standard policy retreating when they show up. And the HKs aren't not heading towards
them. The Autopolitans are trying to kill their own former vessel. Their own mothership undergoing an ascension to godhood.
"Do not engage!" Elsa says. "Ignore them and hopefully they solve our problem for us."
"Second problem." Harlan says. "Notice the station?"
The station is burning, and intercepted communications are full of chaos and screams.
Trufax: It is sometimes possible to succeed too well. Good news-you get to see what happens when a newly-born Incarna goes up against Autopolitan H/Ks. Bad news-whoever wins, Earth loses.
Splitting The Team:
Okay, Henrietta is currently
nuking the shit out of Planet Hollywood. This means that you will now have to have Illiyeen come with you if she wants to live. You're sending... (choose one or more)
[ ] Harlan Aristide (note that this means he's going to have to dock with the
Oppenheimer and transfer someone else into the
Redemption as a crew member-this means you'll have to choose a replacement crew member for the
Redemption)
[ ] Henriette Langley (in mecha or not in mecha)
[ ] (1.2x) John Kessler (of Earth) (he gets the multiplier simply because of Terminator jokes)
[ ] (1.2x) Elsa Naryshkin (Same)
[ ] Catherine Nichols
Note that whoever you send
isn't going to be available for dealing with apotheosis.
ISHTAR is Active:
So your plan to make Henrietta super angry and maybe make her do something dumb has succeeded
incredibly well because she has probably done the dumbest thing possible, which is reject the Computer and initialize a ridiculous crash-upgrade program that has resulted in her apotheosis. Look, just because it's the dumbest thing possible doesn't mean it's the
most beneficial result. This means that you are currently dealing with a three-way space battle that Henrietta will probably barely win. And a crippled incarna is
still pretty seriousface. Your plan is... (choose one or more)
[ ] Engage the remaining TDP units Henrietta has via the QUEST and an atomic powered
super robot. Which you're going to need to bring back online.
[ ] Fire a Chronal Torpedo down her thermal exhaust port via stealth vessel (the
Redemption). How lewd.
[ ] Try to talk her down? Maybe?
[ ] Just rescue Jamelia and
get the fuck out.
[ ] Get back to the
Avellone and try to bring its weapons back online. Its engines have been wrecked and there's holes through it but its weapons should still be usable.
[ ] Write-in
[-] (2.0x) Curl into a fetal ball
Because Henriette has effectively 'killed' her sister and has the Twin Souls merit, she is going to have to roll her Willpower (7) and her ADEI neural buffers (+2 for a total of 9d10e7) against psychic feedback. Try not to fail. That's why she's feeling particularly queasy now. You would too if you killed your bratty little sister (even if she was bratty and a bit of a horrible person) and a
horrible biomechanical goddess chestburst out of her.
