For all that this dream-realm is unfamiliar, Kessler thinks, there are some things that don't change. He's infiltrated fortresses before, wearing a chameleon suit and photoreactive stealth paint, crawling for hours to keep from being noticed, setting up for that one perfect shot. Plenty of people think that just because he's an Iterator he can't do anything but smash walls in with his head. He's corrected several of them. Many of these people did not survive the correction. He's led commando strikes.
His soldiers are a diverse lot here, and were a much larger team than he's used to. Hundreds of commandos-WWII Army Rangers, Delta Force, Navy SEALs, Marine Force Reconaissance, even skirmishers from the Civil War era and Revolutionary War-era guerillas have volunteered for this operation. All he had to do was tell them the truth-that this operation could very well decide the fate of the United States-and they flocked to him in droves. The echoes of combat are faint but he knows that his soldiers are engaged in combat against the robotic defenders of this citadel, through the twisting corridors and the defenses of the immensely powerful MUSCOVITE citadel.
He's left most of his soldiers behind in various forms of injury or incapacitation-and for all that they're EDE-mockeries of real people, it still hurts when they die from plasma guns or laser traps or hidden proximity mines or various forms of biological and chemical weapon. He started with several platoons-now he's lost most of those men. His objective is close-tantalizingly so, each meter of distance paid for by blood and tears, and his soldiers move to breach the armored door. They're a varied lot of survivors now, and their faces are screwed up in determination.
"The air defense computers are behind this door." Kessler says. "Blow it." His team nods, stacks up on the door, and it explodes inwards. His remaining troops throw flashbangs in, and Kessler moves forward, machine-gun up, tracking the automated defenses inside the massive room housing the hardened military-grade supercomputer. Kessler can recognize parts of it from an old movie. "War Operation Plan Response" is written on the front, which looks like smooth 80s computers technology before it assimilates into high-tech Autochthonian nanosystems. Terminators fire back with their plasma-guns and he responds with hypervelocity armor piercing rounds. The defenses here are unlike Hollywood-whereas before he was facing Terminators and other movie robots, he's facing real HITMarks here and he knows it. Their fire is too accurate for the robotic mooks he's been facing, their armor too hardened. Rifle rounds bounce off of their primium plate while several of his commandos go down from IX-22 headshots. His helmet reactively deploys in response to being hit in the forehead with an IX-22, and the suit tells him that minor biological damage is being compensated for by the distributed processing network of the power armor. Something that would have made him flinch, stunned him for a split-second, is ridden through by high-end Iteration X cognitive prosthetics.
One of the HITMarks is hit by a bazooka, fired implausibly in a confined space, and it goes down. Two HITMarks focus their fire on the Ranger who did it, 20mm cannon switching to proximity airburst rounds and making a mockery of cover and flesh. Another is hit by a 40mm grenade and falls, losing its leg but extracting vengeance on the SEAL who crippled it before another 40mm kills it with a headshot. "Focus on the computer!" Kessler shouts. He'll take out the HITMarks. He's got a body at least the equal of any of them, and a lot more experience to boot. Despite the chaos, they hear his order and respond at once.
[ENEMY ARMORED INFANTRY DETECTED. WEAPONS SYSTEMS INADEQUATE.] The N2 notes. [ESTIMATED LOSS OF UNAUGMENTED SOLDIERS: ONE HUNDRED PERCENT.]
The HITMarks are smarter than the horde of Hollywood robots, far smarter, using the shifting room and its defenses to keep themselves out of danger. Cover deploys from the floor to protect them in fixed response, and weapons which would have killed them are absorbed by the terrain. One of his soldiers slips out of cover as the floor suddenly turns frictionless, and is shot to bits by multiple Terminators. Another one is ambushed by a squidlike robot which darts in from a brief hole created in the roof. It's like fighting in a RD chantry, Kessler thinks. The very building is trying to stop them.
A lucky hit blasts the computer into scrap metal, and Kessler gives the order to retreat. They fall back, burning ammunition at a furious rate, as they run through changed corridors and altered killzones. This isn't going to be one of those movies where everyone lives in the end, Kessler thinks. It's going to be one of them where the protagonists' ultimate victory is paid for by blood and endless sacrifice.
But when he and the survivors exit the citadel, running to get to safe distance through more enemy fire, and the Air Force comes in, it's all worth it.
First come the B-58s with nuclear payloads. There's six of them, engaged by line of sight lasers and guided missiles, and five are downed-but one remains, spiralling towards the massive tower of the MUSCOVITE citadel. There is a blinding flash and the sky goes white. The shockwave races towards the mixed forces as they retreat. The radiation would be deadly-but this is the realm of Hollywood, where such things are plot points rather than realistic consequences. When the light fades, the citadel still stands, reduced, molten in places, its tower shattered. But that was merely the first strike-and more weapons lance at it. Missiles fired from strike aircraft or fighter-bombers, bombs dropped from B-17s and B-52s and B-1s, a veritable rain of steel and fire hammers at the walls and remaining weapons emplacements, dueling with robotic fighters firing blaster bolts or semi-autonomous warplanes. Slowly, chipped away bit by bit, the citadel and falls and hopefully so does its creator.
Kessler watches stoically, mindful of how much has been paid to purchase victory. He wonders how everyone else's efforts are going.
***
The projectionist's head hits the wall, and he slumps down, bleeding from the temple. Catherine Nichols winces and slides the knuckle duster off her hand and slips it into a pocket, rubbing her fingers thoughtfully. She looks around the cramped space, taking note of the power sockets and the projection machine, then closes the door behind her and sticks a door stop in the way.
Peeking past the projector, she looks down at Screen 02. That's where they're showing Paradigm Origin Iteration 3.33. She isn't sure why they have decided to make it .33, but there's probably some smug metaphorical marketer who's proud that it makes them stand out or something. There are too many sequels anyway, she thinks, as she pulls a laptop out of an inside pocket of her coat which really shouldn't have been able to fit it and starts its boot up sequence.
But she read the review, and the spoilers the realm didn't even know were spoilers have clued her in. She had been trying to find the screen representing the story of the monster out in the realspace version of this realm, and to find that it was the same screen as Henriette's screen... well. In the Hollywood Multiplex, everyone's life is a movie.
But you're not meant to share your screen with someone else. Unless something strange is going on. And now that she's checked her data of what happened when Pilot Langley pulled her little stupid stunt - oh my, is something strange going on.
Her machine is up and running. She plugs it into the projector - and is very glad that this is running off digital media, not a film - and begins the load sequence, keeping an eye on the screen. She's on a deadline. There's an explosion out from in the main hall, and she checks that her future-forecasts are in-line. They are. Naryskin has done what Catherine predicted she would, and her phone is showing the ticking-down field integrity of the monster.
Which means her next gambit gets to go ahead just as planned. Admittedly, she planned it on the jog over here, trying to find Screen 02, but that's still a plan.
She pulls out her phone, and dials Henriette's number. The time in the two subdimensions isn't in synch. From Henriette's point of view, she's been unconscious for a long time, but there was just a dramatic cut and she's blearily coming to in the Multiplex, mere seconds after the blast.
"She's weakened," Nichols says. "She's barely hanging on. She's running out of power and out of tricks."
"She
doesn't look weakened to me!" Henriette shouts back, the voice coming in parallel from the phone's speakers and the film outside. "She's the size of a battleship!"
"Pshaw. Compared to the gigantic god-body she had, a giant monster the size of a battleship is weak. She's only five times as tall as you are. And this is all that's left of her. You can do it. Chin up." Nichols says. "If Kessler pulls through you can kill something like this just fine."
Sometimes Catherine Nichols used to wonder if she fell into NWO habits too easily, habits like casually misleading people without technically lying. It seems to be nonsense on the face of it. Of course, in the past few years, she's found out how close she was to winding up in the Order rather than the Void Engineers. A few events going slightly differently, a different choice of lecturer at Cambridge, and she'd have been picked up directly by Director Wells. She'd have required more to go differently in her life to wind up in Iteration X, and Progenitor-her required even more divergence.
But enough about that. She slips her Shadow Ministry-made psi-amplifier on, plugs it into the laptop, and adjusts the position of the microphone. Counting down in her head, she waits for the perfect moment - and takes it. Leaning over the computer, she taps the enter key.
The scene change on screen is interrupted. And now the movie is showing a red-haired girl curled up into a ball lying on a bed, along with the subtitle;
***
Moscow, Russia
Curled up in a ball, the red-haired girl clutches her head. She tried turning off her pain receptors and it didn't help at all. The splitting migraine feels like someone's slicing her head in half - only in reverse. It's like her head had been cut apart and now they're soldering it back together and it
burns.
It's been like this for hours. At least. Her internal clock is telling her the precise amount of time, but she doesn't believe it. It feels like it's been days. The pain just isn't stopping.
There are voices up above her, echoing out of the red-tinged darkness of her world.
"... what do you mean, there's no change? Run the tests again!"
"I mean there's no change. There's nothing wrong with her. In fact, more than that - she's showing slight increases in mental function across the board, and... it's not the same as the neural activity produced when iterative enlightenment functionality increases, but it's not entirely dissimilar."
"But that doesn't make any sense!"
Tears leak from her eyes. She's been crying on and off since it started. Mostly from the pain. Not entirely. She's tried to explain that she got a signal telling them that her greater self has ceased functionality, but when she tries to talk about it she gets the scattered memories of greater-her's last moments and - worse - the emotional wrench. The loneliness. The pain. The all-encompassing anger.
Because she doesn't want to feel like that, she tries not to think about it.
She has now become all of 'I', Mari Langley considers, nails digging into her palms. She's... she's alone. Unitary. The only repository of her memories which remains. Maybe she should call herself Henrietta - no! That's not her name! That's... that's the
other one's name. Only with an -a at the end, not an -e. She understands the truth better now, but some things can't be changed so easily. She can't forgive so easily.
She prefers to be Mari. It's being someone new. Mari is someone with the IBM. There are people here who are kind to her. Lots of people who lost their partners or their children in the Anomaly, so have her as a surrogate daughter-figure. They're nice to her. She's... she's even sometimes getting to go out, away from their hideout location. She's seeing Earth. The tech in her body is experimental and unstable so she can't really use it, but they'd locked most of it off anyway.
And when she's Mari, she doesn't have to think about Mama and Papa dying in front of her, or the fact that they were never the people she thought they were. Just braintape mockeries, less free-willed and less independent than a brand new HITMark. Fingerpuppets.
The pain comes back, blinding, and she nearly blacks out. She'd quite like to be unconscious. Maybe it wouldn't hurt so much then. It hurts so much she can't see.
It hurts. It hurts. It hurts it hurts it hurts.
"So this is what was at the other end of this link," a voice says. From the way it echoes, she somehow knows that it's inside her head. It's coming down the same channel she used to get commands from her greater-self. Except they weren't commands. Not as she perceived them. She merely did what her greater-self wanted, because they were all one emergent consciousness. Now there's a voice in her head, and she thinks it's coming from outside her.
Maybe she's just suffering cyberschizophrenia. It happens. And with the stress-trauma of the loss of her greater self, maybe she's just reaching out to feel less alone.
"You're not schizophrenic," the voice says, as if it's reading her thoughts. Mari thinks something rude at it. To test if it can read her mind. No other reason. "And please don't swear at me," the voice adds. "You're quite a troublesome young lady. Apparently it's genetic, despite the fact that you don't precisely have genes, per se. And unfortunately I'd quite like your help. I can't guarantee it, but if you help there's a good chance you might feel better."
Mari tries to think through the pain. "You know why it hurts," she accuses. "It's your fault!"
The voice sighs. "No, it's not my fault," she says. "It is precisely not my fault. I didn't want any part of this, but unfortunately the best laid plans get thrown off course by the winds of chance. And human stupidity. Actually, mostly it's the stupidity."
"Uh?" Mari tries. This... doesn't really answer very much whether it's a figment of her own brain or not. After all, everyone
is stupid.
"Well, let's put it this way," the voice says. "Your big sister is a very clever idiot. I haven't met many other people who've been quite so cunning in their acts of idiocy. It takes real genius to be quite as dumb as she's been. Most stupid people manage minor acts of foolishness, but she's found whole new fertile landscapes of stupid in the uplands beyond regular intelligence."
Mari quite likes this bit. If she's going to hear voices, at least it's an amusing voice. "So it's her fault," she thinks.
"Yes. She decided, for reasons entirely beyond me, that now was the perfect moment to try to drive what you still think of as your 'greater self' into a nervous breakdown. It then promptly broke down a lot more than anyone could have foreseen, began an iterative process of excessive self-enhancement, turned against the Computer, tore apart an Autopolitan mothership for raw materials and began to attack Iteration X, the Syndicate and the Agency indiscriminately."
Mari feels like she was just punched in the stomach. "She-I did what? But..."
"It was quite messy."
The girl swallows. "I felt it. She-I was... it hurt so much. She was so alone. There are memory flashes and..."
"That seems to be what triggered the signal which upgraded you to full independent operation and primary intelligence status - essentially she reduced herself to an it, an EDE. The migraine is probably how you're perceiving the upgrade," the voice says. "Your body was never meant to be the primary intelligence, so it'll take some time to adapt."
There's a shape in the distance, in the blackness in front of her eyes, Mari realizes. It's a woman - a dark-haired woman in a tan-colored coat, her hands in her pockets. "Is that you?" she asks. She frowns. "I don't know who you are."
"Yes. And I'm a Void Engineer," the woman says. "I'm piggybacking on the carrier band which would have been used to control you, but I'm not going to control you. Instead, I'm asking you a favor. If you agree to help me, I'll use your new primary status to use your carrier band as a broadcast node and open a zero-width control channel. I need a pilot for a Core Mark V Theological Domination System, and you're the only one who can do this."
Mari's skin itches. She might not feel like she has a body at the moment, but she can feel it prickling. She wants it so badly. She remembers the joy, the elation, the feeling of
power to be a Theological Domination System. All the old... the old conditioning comes back into the forefront of the mind. All those people telling her that she was the best. That she was the only one who could do that. That she was special. The joy of crushing Void Engineer traitor vessels off the bow of Orion.
But she... she heard there was only one Core Mark V made so far. And it was kept on Autochthonia itself and... and this is a trap. She doesn't want to... she likes being Mari. She doesn't want to be Henrietta again. She's been happy here. Happier than she's been in years. Happy in a way which makes all her memories worse.
"I'm an enemy of Control," the woman says, knowing what she's thinking again. "I'm not here to enslave you." She sighs. "If I was working for Control, I wouldn't be telling you that I want you - need you - to save your sister. We've killed two H/Ks, and crippled the EDE which used to be your greater self, but your sister is losing against the EDE."
"So?" Mari thinks bitterly. The pain rises in her head and unwanted memories of the end of her greater-self force their way in. "She... she was hurting me-us-her! It was so horrible! She... why do I want to help me-us-her against..."
"Are you human, or are you a monster?" the woman asks in a deathly cold voice. "Are you a young woman who was treated dreadfully and who deserves the mercy she was shown, or are you just a killing machine made by an ancient evil reborn in a new skin, a viper waiting to betray Earth?"
Mari realizes she has a body now, in this mental space. She realizes this because her eyes blur with tears. "Don't... you... don't you dare call me that!" she rages. "How dare you!"
"The question stands," the woman says. "Out there, a young woman is fighting a monster. Will you side with the young woman, or the monster? Will you prove yourself to be worthy of independent existence, of trying to become the woman you
should have been, or will you surrender yourself to becoming an extrusion of a wild dog?"
Mari tries to rush at her, but the woman in the tan-colored coat remains the same distance away no matter how she tries to move. "Stop that!" she shouts.
"Answer the question."
"Of course I'm a person!" She gasps for breath. She doesn't
need to breathe, but how she was raised - well, she has certain instincts. "I d-don't want to go back to... to being like that!" She balls her hands into fists. "I have to live with what she-we-I have done and... and it's horrible and... and... I'm not a monster! It wasn't my fault!"
The woman eyes her up. "I think you're telling the truth. I'm not asking you to like your sister. Honestly, I don't like her much. She's caused a lot of trouble for me. But because she was an idiot and drove your former greater self into becoming something not-dissimilar to what the Apocalypse Canceller became, she needs saving." The woman smirks. "And that's something only you can do. You're the only person alive who has access rights to the Core Mark V. It'll view you as its valid pilot."
Mari tenses her jaw, then laughs. "I suppose," she says, eventually. "I... I guess it's... it's like a way of leaving what they did to me-us behind. And... and I suppose I got a second chance, so... so maybe I should give her a chance." She bites her lip. "She'll owe me, though!" she adds.
The woman smiles. "Oh, believe me, she will. She'll owe you her life, so she'll owe you big-time," she says.
That's a much more palatable option, Mari concedes. "Very well," she says.
"Unfortunately," the woman says, "the advanced systems in the Mark V weren't built for a near-human level intellect. You'll be able to pilot at a basic level, but more advanced functionality will be locked off. That includes its anti-divinity weaponry. Fortunately, I have a solution for this..."
***
Catherine Nichols cuts the connection, and lets the normal playback resume, watching how events pan out.
"Met two people like you when we were going after Totenkopf. Old school Virtual Adepts," she says to herself. "Best damn sniper-spotter pair I ever met." She turns off her laptop. "And now you have something that's basically a HITMark VII as your sister. I suppose I should just be thankful you didn't get it into your head to try to board the mothership and save her life support pod."
She chuckles. "Langley, you poor stupid genius," she says. "Caught up in something you couldn't possibly understand. Mystical sorts would say you got pulled by your Avatar into freeing its compatriot, but they say that sort of thing a lot. They'd deny the capacity for humans to be bloody stupid in smart ways all on their own. I for one just think you're very nearly as clever as you think you are." It's something the young Nichols would have understood. Catherine's just had a lot more time to understand her limitations.
On screen, the jet black shape of the Mark V Core Defender floats outside the vessel. And then one eye lights up. Even from up here, Nichols can hear the audience gasp.
***
The Autopolitan mothership is a gutted wreck. The walls are ruined and there's power arcing between ruined conduits. The hull has long since been stripped of everything useful, and is open to vacuum. The pulped hemophage flesh is burned and blackened. Debris floats through the null-g space. There has been enough blood shed for there to be thick clouds of hemophage vitae, somehow coalescing and swirling around the ruined battlezone.
One of the bits of debris is Henriette Langley's unit. The Trinity Titan, the avatar of the nuclear age, Dr. Freiger's magnus opus in bipedal strategic combat machinery ever since Brass Cog was destroyed, has faced off against the power of ancient blood curses and the sheer unchained rage of a woman betrayed-and it has lost. Its last nuclear turbine flickers as green coolant spews out in clouds, its armor is rent and torn in a dozen places. Its head is twisted at an unnatural angle, giving Henriette a good view of the stub of its right arm in the one flickering camera screen that works.
Henriette has a distinct feeling of deja vu as she tries to bring systems back online, flipping switches that she doesn't know are doing anything or not. Once again, she's staring down at a biological horror controlled by the thing which was sort of her sister, in a crippled mecha, unable to fight it off. She really needs to stop getting into these kinds of situations, she thinks morbidly. And this time, she won't have her parents' ghosts show up to save her. Because they're gone. Eaten by the Apocalypse Canceller for its apotheosis. This time she's the one staring down the barrel of the transcendent god-monster.
"Mines was
better looking," she hisses. It's about all she can do.
The monstrous techno-daemon-whatever moves with deceptive speed. It's jerky and inconstant, like its muscles aren't quite properly anchored to its bones. Whatever passes for bones and muscles in it.
And right in front of her, there's a flash of light, and the Core Defender Mark V teleports back in. Where it was once red, it's lit in white, but its eyes are a brilliant blue. Henriette almost laughs. So she just did it to give Henriette a false sense of security. Bitch. What an utter bitch. She feels a transmat field close on her, and Henriette supposes that her sister is here to torture her to slow death while destroying everything and anything that might be of value. Hopefully she'll manage to get a little spite in, just make her that much madder. It won't be very useful, she has to admit. But it'd spoil the victory a little bit, and sometimes that's all that's necessary. There is the wrenching of an unbuffered spatial displace, and Henriette is in a confined space without any light.
She tries to flex her fingers, move around. The stuff surrounding her is a thick liquid with the consistency of a very thick mud. She can move, but it's hard. Her helmet comes under nanotechnological attack almost instantly. So that's what she's in. Some sort of Henrietta-built torture chamber full of adaptive nanotech. She'll get turned into a mewling lump out of a Harlan Ellison novel, made to wish for death but not desire it. It's not what she wants. She thinks through her schooling about what she can do, decides that before that happens, she'll overload her ADEI's components and kill herself.
Henriette gets halfway through disabling the safeties before the nanoweapon strips away her suit helmet and the warm smartfluid courses down her throat and into her ears and eyes. Too late, she thinks. She expects the pain to start any moment, the pain and the taunting. It's strange that there hasn't been any happening yet. There's no pain. No agonizing loss of control. Maybe Henrietta's seen horror movies, Henriette thinks. Maybe she thinks the anticipation of the violation is worse than the violation itself. And in some ways, it very much is.
"You hurt me!" A voice screams through her ears. "You better say sorry!" the voice sounds very much like hers. A little higher-a little less mature, but it's her own. It's her sister's. Henrietta. Henriette is surprised. Of all the times to ask for an apology,
now is the time?
"I am. I didn't think I had any choice." Henriette admits. "I felt really bad about it!"
"Stop blaming other people!" The voice says. "It's your fault. The Void Engineer told me! You got yourself into trouble and now you need my help! Well I won't give it until you honestly apologize!"
This is the most surreal torture she's ever imagined, Henriette thinks. It's not as if she has any choice, so she goes along with it. "Okay, okay! I thought it was a good idea to make you mad because I thought you were a fragile teenage girl! I didn't expect it to do... any of this."
"Look, you're doing it again." the voice says. "You're so annoying, sister. You're not saying you're sorry you did it, you're saying you're sorry it's hurt you."
"Fine." Henriette sighs. "I'm sorry for everything. I shouldn't have bullied my own teenage sister, no matter the good or bad consequences. Are you going to torture me now?"
"Why would I do that?" Mari asks. "Why would I want to torture my sister when I could save her from her own stupid mistake and she could owe me big time! I'm not as mean as you!"
"What." Henriette says. "This is some kind of joke, right? I've gone insane?"
"Shut up sister. You're ruining my good mood." Mari says. "We have an accident that needs to be cleaned up."
"We?" Henriette asks, and is immediately distracted by a complex upgrade program sent from a 'Mari Langley.' She scans it once, twice, three times, four times, and it doesn't seem like it has any malware in it. "Who are you?"
"I'm Mari." Mari says. "I'm your sister. I know it's hard to believe because you're so dumb and I'm so much better than you, but I really am. Just use the piloting program you dummy! Do you need to learn how to install it? I thought they taught you that already."
Henriette shakes her head, or tries to. "How do I know you're not a trick made to torture me?"
"The Void Engineer lady was right." Mari says. "You really are more than just regular stupid, aren't you? Does that... monster out there look like it's capable of subtlety? Oh wait, I forgot, you can't look, can you. One moment." The blackness flickers, and suddenly Henriette has a 360 degree view of everything around her. She is in the body of a sleek black machine, facing down a massive hemophagic god-monster. She can see up to gamma radiation and down to radio waves. She can see the probabilities of incoming attacks and their evasion vectors. She can see into the past, and into the future. It's a confusing overload of sensory information far beyond what her implants are rated to handle. She'd need easily twice the processing capability to make sense of-
"You need my help?" Henriette asks, comprehension dawning, as the machine rocks from a black shadowy weapon and starts to self-repair the damage resulting. She can even see the self-repair and the configurations which the machine could modify its armor cladding and energy shielding to, all the possible combinations of tools usable for defeating gods. Option after option flickers in the side of her vision, things she doesn't understand. Weapons system names, offensive and defensive combinations, arrays of lethal Clarketech tools. "You need my help."
"I-I-It's not like I want your help. It's just that I can't pilot this machine without help. And we need to synchronize to do that."
Henriette takes a leap of faith. She trusts this... Mari, somehow. Questions can wait. She knows that Jamelia would yell at her for doing so, but this trust goes deeper than anything she's ever felt. Deeper than love, deeper than even her vaguely remembered love and affection for her parents. She
knows. The same way she knows herself, she knows that her statement is trustworthy. She opens the program and it unfolds in her ADEI.
[
THEOLOGICAL DOMINANCE PLATFORM MARK V PILOT PROGRAM ACTIVE]
[
UNLOCKING HIGHER FUNCTIONALITY]
[
RECURSIVE HYPERCOMPUTING SYSTEM ONLINE]
Her vision clears now. The blur of options slows, the world slows along with it. The sensors array of the Mark V is easily the best she's ever seen. She can even see 'inside' her-no, their-borrowed body, see the differences in architecture. The Deity Suppression System-the
Apocalypse Canceller-and the advancements in Moscow that were built on it, were cultured from powerful noetic entities, "gods" in their own right. The Mark V doesn't have any of that. It is a deva in and of itself-a perfect blending of machine and god, a literal
deus ex machina. They-Henriette, Mari, and the TDP Mark 5-are a synthetic war god. The only thing not purely machine is its core, something that exists in far more than this dimension, a noetic artifact of unbelievable strength, a self-sustaining wellspring of power.
The Theological Dominance Platform's wings spread, their components scattering across a hundred meters of space, held together by no apparent connecting material or energy, but rather technology which has advanced so far that even its creators, those who refuse to recognize magic, would call it so. It flexes its claws, tipped with blades designed to cut what cannot be cut. Weapons emitters, too different in forms and use to be called muzzles, poke out of obsidian skin that flows like water, weapons that can kill what cannot be killed.
The god-monster which once knew of itself as Henrietta would have felt fear, if it still had the capability to do so. It lashes out with weapons that would have been heretical to its creator, half Iteration X tools, half hemophage thaumaturgy. The twisting, coiling beam of living shadow, almost sinuous in its movements, seeks out the Mark V again...
...and as easily as one might sidestep a drunkard's blow, the Mark V is not there. It is a thousand kilometers away-no,
they are a thousand kilometers away, for there are several now where there originally was one.
[
FORCED LOCATIONAL INDETERMINACY ACTIVE], Henriette sees. It's like... every prototype functionality that the
Apocalypse Canceller manual theorized about, but more refined, more impressive.
"See? I'm good at this!" Mari says. "I just need you to provide an extra brain and look at what I can do."
"There's no 'I' in 'team,'" Henriette retorts, but she's in a good enough mood now that there's no venom in it. "But you're not half bad. Maybe almost as good as me."
"I'll show you that I'm better." Mari huffs. "And I'm going to protect Earth!"
@Strypgia wanted me to use this music for Moscow. I think this is a better place for it. So you might notice that the Agent fight isn't in this post. This is because I'm saving it for next post. But before that, you have a vote.
Core Guardian Online. Acausal Reaction Synaptic Interface Online. Anti-Deity Weapons Active. Theological Ability Neutralization Active. Unit Awaiting Commands.
[X] (x∞)
Finish It.
I didn't say it was a hard vote. It is definitely a vote.
