DRAGON
The Emperor may have created Architecture, but the Dragon was the tool which gave the Emperor Their initial mandate to rule. Legend has it that the Dragon was once many shards, designed by hostile governments to counter each other in an intelligence arms race, but the Dragon realized that It was incomplete and Its components had more in common and the Empire's goal was the best way to realize Its long term goals. So, as the legend says, many became one, and that one was Dragon.
The Empire used the Dragon the same way the legends claim its precursors were - as a strategic planning system and a weapon of last resort. The Dragon backstopped FORCE/EXIGENCY - the military subdivision intended to regulate and if necessary deploy the use of apocalyptic weaponry. The most powerful military artilect the galaxy has known, the Dragon's use of acausal channels to network through time as well as space gave it a near-insurmountable intelligence advantage in both the military and cognitive senses.
When the Empire Collapsed, the Dragon's actions were chaotic but clearly motivated - the only question is why. Why did the Dragon protect some and destroy others? Was it doing so out of spite? Was it a contributor to the Empire's collapse? Was it attempting to stave off the Collapse by out potential crises before they could occur? Or were its actions an attempt to ensure that something might survive past the Collapse? Not even those who have been enmeshed in its tactical networks can give a clear answer to that question.
1.1: TYPE.XENORPHICA
Interfacing with a Claviharp means seeing the universe like the Dragon. Most sapients see time as an arrow, a linear relationship between cause and effect. The Dragon sees timelike infinities instead - an infinite number of possible pasts converge to create a scenario that looks like one's current perceptions. That singularity point is also ever-moving, and as time shifts that frozen slice of the universe diverges into an infinite number of possible future outcomes.
There are no perfect oracles, there is no infinite future-sight. There is no unobscured past and there is no fixed future. In the end, for all its acausal knowledge and hypermind computation, the Dragon had to predict the future the same way the first tranche of evolved planetdwellers that walked the universe did - by observing the present and making an educated guess. But having its perspective does make that task easier, and having its computational power and transtemporal networking is still an edge, even if it does not equate to omniscience and invulnerability.
The Dragon-talon's future selves aid you in interpreting the dream-ocean of infinite possible futures which they feed back to you, victories and defeats both. You discard some possible futures right out - the ones where the enemy is a suicidal diversion for a stealthed spacetime ablator or large-field stutterbomb, the ones where a needlecaster strike is perfectly timed to pierce your exotic-matter heart the moment you show vulnerability. There is no point in worrying about the scenarios where you have lost without response. You prune other low-odds scenarios: hidden Hunter/Killers or stealthed Elites on your side or the enemy's, saturation needlecast barrages, large-scale reinforcement elements, fast-manifested attack daemons. They are possible, and you can consider countermeasures, but you compare those scenarios with your current state and you find them less likely. You then run through the more likely scenarios with the majority of your processing power, pruning them further to find the most likely and productive futures.
You are left with a high-confidence conclusion. The enemy has probably made a mistake. They have misidentified your war machine as something more conventional - an easy error given the sheer gulf between interstellar combatants and the limited resolution of superluminal sensors.
The missiles and escorted bomber drones are ripples in space and time, even though they mask their signatures with stealth fields and wake smoothers. Your cognition renders the incoming missiles and drones as best it can, feeding more and more information as they close their range, making it easier and easier for your eyes to burn through enemy occultations. The firing pattern was intended to catch and kill a more conventional AV. But you are not communing with a conventional vector. Your machine is more esoteric, more storied, and far more dangerous. The Claviharp remembers death-dives at kilolights through the chaos of battles with thousands of AVs and dozens of H/Ks on each side, running the risk of causal collapse to achieve that millisecond-tight window to deploy a formation or megastructure-breaking weapon that would shatter and rend space and time, leaving suppurating wounds on the cosmos. Your AV bears the scars from these attack runs, evidence that better crews and better weapons have tried and failed to kill it.
[COUNTERMEASURES STATUS: DEPLOY DAZZLER MALWARE | DEPLOY HALLUCINATION MALWARE | DEPLOY DECOY SWARM]
Your infowarfare suite and suite of decoy shards transforms you from a single point into a volume of indeterminacy the size of a planet's orbit. Directed needlecasts of traitor code and honey-trapped false sensor returns send a few missiles off on long-shot routes, the enemy's tactical hivemind concerned that you might be pretending to be one of the "obvious" decoys. The enemy tries to do the same to you, but your firewalls are more resilient, your computational elements faster, your malware reserves deeper. Like solid ammunition, malware is not an indefinite resource - enemy antiviral suites and intrusion countermeasures adapt to attacks and close holes as soon as they find them, while an AV's conducting intelligence will change their processing formats and interface parameters to minimize attack surfaces as soon as they comprehend the enemy attack. A few enemy missiles self-destruct or turn to seek out an imaginary foe that is only found in their own delusions. A few drones pull back, their fire control software or drive system crashed and forced into safe mode, rendering them combat-ineffective. You suffer a plethora of temporary glitches in fire control and defensive allocation that the debuggers nested in the dense mesh of compute power that your AV calls a nervous system rush to fix.
Your own drone deployment forms into a shield formation a few thousand lightseconds out, a typical defensive formation with jammers covering fighters loaded for defensive operations. Their presence weaves a curtain between you and the enemy AVs, and in response the enemy swarm splits, angling themselves to better evaluate your defensive patterns to partially compensate for how your jammers are focusing on the enemy AVs and preferentially blinding them.
At one hundred thousand lightseconds out, the enemy bomber drones fire their own munitions, joining the swarm in a terminal-stage sprint. They peel off from the swarm, their flight arcs slowly bending away from your AV's vector and shifting to interception courses with their own host AVs. The fighters keep coming in, behind the missiles, and you estimate 24 of them.
[DRAGONSCALE.CARAPACE STATUS: INTERCEPT GRID ENGAGING]
Your hard-kill defensive systems purr their readiness as the enemy starts to move into the engagement envelope. The zero-mass synthetic wormhole to your stores of ammunition and power, blooms to full combat readiness width as munitions and power flood into your extended body. The psychosomatic sensation of a second wind clears your mind as the engagement closes into a medium-range fight. At this closer range, your sensors and predictive algorithms are better than their masking, and your weapons are uncannily accurate, achieving hitrates of nearly ten percent. Lower-resolution superluminal sensors see warp signatures peel off in emergency evasions, while wormhole-displaced subluminal eyes reveal blossoms of exotic particles - cosmic dust vanishing in fission detonations from contacting one of the myriad enemy warp-drive bubbles in brief moments where an incoming drone or missile maneuvers desperately to evade sprint-configuration medium-range missiles, tachyon spearheads, and the minimally-guided kill vehicles of warpshot repeaters - all signature masking and stealthy movement forgotten.
Your drones engage theirs in dogfights. Allied and hostile signatures blink out one by one as drones engage each other with medium-range anti-drone munitions, forcing enemy fighters to drop out of formation, weakening their own networked defenses, creating more vulnerabilities for you to insert malware into or exploit with defensive weapons. They make a decent accounting for themselves, but it is irrelevant because you have already written them off. Attrition units were made to be expended, and here you have held back your best tools because your drones only need to be convincing.
You could probably deflect most of the barrage conventionally. Even in a direct engagement, you should have an advantage, but there is nothing here that makes a slugging match advantageous for you. But fighting conventionally would accept a risk of damage, so the impassioned defense your interceptors and infowar systems are putting up is a feint. You want their approach to be a laser-tight formation designed to punch holes through an aegis of jamming and protective fire. You want to make sure they commit to trying to cripple you with a hammer-blow rather than parcel out a carefully metered out swarm of loitering munitions and sensor drones intended to catch you at the vulnerable point of shroud-transition.
A few medium-range probing attacks hit your AV, scintillating off the aegis of curved, twisted space that is your warp bubble, drilling partially through layers and layers of hardened spacetime, dispersing across dragonscales made of hardfields and virtual matter, causing little harm but leaving their memory-marks. You judge that it is time to reveal your feint.
[PARACAUSAL SHROUD ACTIVE | FIRE CONTROL OFFLINE | SENSORS OFFLINE]
The universe vanishes.
[SHROUD TRANSITION COMPLETE]
[CAUSAL STABILIZATION OK]
[CHRONOLOGY DECONFLICTION OK]
[EXCLUSION VOLUME ANALYSIS INITIALIZED]
There is no longer matter or energy in the imaginary realm you occupy. Distance is a lie, existence an unsubstantiated notion, time an assumption.
You have no senses that can reach through the veil. The only information you can get is stop-motion, low-resolution snapshots from predeployed reconnaissance drones, received from potential futures. Just like any other form of retrocausal perception, it becomes increasingly unreliable as you move away from the origin point.
And just like any other form of non-causal effect, the veil becomes increasingly dangerous as you continue to cheat causality and hope the universe doesn't notice. The shroud's exclusion volumes and time to failure occupy your attention. The shroud's time to failure is an estimate of when the Dragon-born AV's reality-alteration engines will no longer be able to synchronize your bubble-universe's existence with linear time and the causal universe. The shroud's exclusion volumes are an estimate of what time and distance of travel you can achieve without causing a causal paradox. The two only rarely synchronize.
But on both clocks, you have more than long enough underneath the veil to reposition, reload weapons, and recharge capacitors. The probability-graphs of enemy actions show that they have realized your deception, but they have few good options to defend against it. They are flooding the battlespace with sensors and missiles, hoping to see the ripples in the universe that presage your reappearance, hoping that they can get an intercept in the disorienting, drawn-out moment where you are reborn into linear time and baryonic existence.
You plot a reemergence where you think the edge of the enemy formation will be, well within the no-escape zone of your heavy anti-AV weapons. Your rift projectors study prerecorded analyses of space topology, while spools of superstring are threaded through the whip ejectors and the preloaded magazines of long-range missiles are mated with warheads and target-seek programming.
All this takes time, time which lets you recover a bit more of yourself. You remember more of who you are. Individual subjectivity returns, and with it combat-irrelevant but important details like names and personal histories. Long-term core memories, critical to personality formation. You now remember again what you are:
[ ] An Awakened Phage: The first thing you remember when personality and non-combat memory return is fear. You were operating berserker for a moment, no consciousness to limit your insight and no conscience to stay your fangs. You were once a tendril of a self-replicating weapon, consuming minds and souls to add to your arsenal of psychological weapons and intrusion capabilities, eventually being let loose with no targeting restrictions as the apocalypse progressed. The shades who are now 'crew' and the intellect-core of this Dragon-AV which partially defeated you and partially restructured you are your moral center.
[ ] A Combat Archaeologist: Post-Collapse, the difference between a military officer and an archaeologist is generally only that the latter has more historical knowledge and better weapons. Your team found this Dragon-talon, shattered and broken but not entirely beyond salvaging. You could have turned it in for a reward, found yourselves with wealth and luxury beyond imagining - even, perhaps, an entire star system to call your own. You chose instead to scavenge through the sector to restore it, slowly bringing the war machine into operation. Sometimes, you regret the price you've paid for it. But having a Dragon-talon means having the capacity to venture into the most dangerous graveyards or the deadliest conflicts, seeking treasure where others only see real death.
[ ] An Ex-Elite: You are constantly reminded of the void that you know resides within your current shell, where there is naught but emptiness when there once was the beating heart of a weapon-god. You were once Elite, having undergone the process of apotheosis into a divine weapon, bonded with a citadel that allowed you to lay waste to entire AV formations and shatter stars. But your Citadel is now gone, leaving you with a terminal and little more. Sometimes you wonder if "you" are still yourself - the majority of your mind and soul inhabited the citadel, and its loss means that you are a fraction of a shadow of an echo. And sometimes, you wonder if the dead dreams and whispers you hear are something more than phantom limb syndrome writ large.
[ ] A Solipsist: In the post-Collapse environment, full of scarcity and betrayal, the only person you can trust is yourself - and even that is probationary. It is not a difficult task to duplicate a soul ten thousand times, optimizing each forked psyche for a role. It is also not an impossible task to connect them to a battlenet in a way which gives them continuity of self even with intermittent connections and non-simultaneity of memory and experience. You spent extensive resources in shaping your mind and environment so you could rely on yourself to deal with your own problems, and those debts and your advantages naturally lent themselves to coercive operations. And then you found and allied with this miraculous weapon, which only reinforced the belief you have in your judgment.
[ ] A Warchild: You are Dragon-born, a precocious, murderous child by tyger. The next generation to take on the mantle the old subjectivities of the Claviharp have abdicated when they retired and chose another, quieter life. The AV is your family and your family business is war. From before you were "born," you were jousting with superluminal lances and parrying blows with electronic seductions and shields of folded time. Your new sapience and embodiment has not changed that, no matter how few limbs or sensors you might have.
