Nukes poison stuff for a long time and all you can really do is protect yourself from the radiation, not de-radiate the area I think? But the 'why did she use Nullius' question is simple, liberals enable fascists, because they think their position & power are absolute...until someone doesn't listen.
AND THE THIRD BROUGHT FIRE (Animist Atomic Steampunk)
- Thread starter DragonCobolt
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Trinity burned the world because they wouldn't let her burn Korea and China the first time around. I doubt she is the sort to refuse a chance for more explosions, though perhaps you are correct. It still works even if you are wrong: Trinity might not be an option because Colossus isn't sure she can get Trinity to stop. Of course assuming she could get Holocaust to stop suggests she isn't great at that kind of judgement call...
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Colossus has been working off the directives of Operation Unthinkable for 150 years. Operation Unthinkable was explicitly to secure British and American dominance, so it's illogical for her to take issue with Fortress being American in origin.
It likewise doesn't make sense for Colossus to cripple her own military if she is pathologically obsessed with Unthinkable, since a conventional war would probably have been her first choice. Reviving jet construction would have been much easier than resurrecting both Midway and Holocaust and then fusing them into a superweapon. It could be argued that jets wouldn't have made enough of a difference to not need Holocaust, but if she was obviously concerned about Chinese jets why wouldn't she make her own as a stopgap?
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Britain is tiny, but the British Empire is not. England has basically everything but Asia within its sphere and has been exploiting North America and India directly for over a century.
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I have a few other questions now that I'm thinking about it.
Why did the Turks blackmail Nix into stealing Midway? She stole it from the British, so Colossus was basically stealing from herself. She later proved she can redirect a Royal ship wherever she wants with no need for an excuse, so why bother stealing Midway from the train? If the point was to misdirect human authorities, Midway being missing would have been just as alarming and put the entire Empire on alert. Even if they thought it was Enterprise, that's a big name to get stolen by unknown hostiles. It feels like she could have gotten the same results without involving any outside parties that could (and did) mess it all up.
Why did Colossus need Midway at all? If she just wanted a way to deal death at long range without the target ever seeing it coming she had much better spirits at hand: the V1 and V2 rocketry programs. Why get bombers when you can have ballistic missiles?
...though a lot of this makes sense if you assume Colossus is fighting from the inside. She can't abandon her directive, but she can self-sabotage by picking an inconvenient way to achieve it and bringing in the Technician and Nuclear Nun most likely to know what Midway was and go rogue with her.
The text makes it clear why Colossus wanted to use Holocaust: because she was a computer following a command even after it no longer applied. My question was why she cared about land when she already had the entire British Empire plus North America and likely Africa too. I then answered my own question (because Operation Unthinkable was originally about getting Poland, aka more land, and Colossus can't deviate from the original parameters), and pointed out that this conclusion requires information not in the story and thus may be confusing to casual readers.
Please take your politics elsewhere, I assure you that this is not the right thread.
Because Colossus wanted to be unaccountable to anyone (something Nix worked out when she questioned Colossus) & is stated directly in the text. With V1 & V2 rocketry, Colossus would still be beholden to someone, but with Holocaust, nothing could stop her.
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The horrible mortification sinking in as I realized that i had an entire plot point that I was going to have, then I completely forgot to actually include it - the burning at the end of the Korean War was not as cut and dried or intentional as the mistaken, mythic remembrance of the modern people of the 22nd century.
oops!
Anyway, did you know I'm...dumb?
oops!
Anyway, did you know I'm...dumb?
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I think Colossus's problem was exactly what she said it was. She's the British Empire's god-queen, but the vast majority of her subordinates were loyal to the state, not her.
The Mechanical Turks were a catspaw for missions Colossus couldn't just order her legitinate subordinates to accomplish.
Like delivering a novel and powerful spirit that officially does not exist and is inherently allied to an enemy nation into the heart of a second enemy nation.
For as much awe and respect we see the Goddeses recieve, there is also a lot of fear there.
So, nobody but the Colossus's actual cultists would agree to help her wake up a 4th Goddess.
The Mechanical Turks also gave Colussus access to assets that would (a) never knowingly work for her and (b) were much more palatable sacrifices to her sincr she saw the British Empire as her property.
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Also, she could always blame the Germans if people got upset about Terra Nullius.
Nonsense, that's how you know you're smart, because a dumb person usually can't screw up that much, but an intelligent person? Sky's the limit.
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I'm not sure I agree with that. Beholden to who? How would Holocaust merging with Midway make Nullius more independent than Holocaust merging with the Vs?
It's true that Midway probably gave her the ability to fly and go on water, but the Vs might also have given her flight and with them she wouldn't have needed to fly.
The Vs were literally designed to do what Colossus wants, why not use them? I mean, the obvious answer is that Colossus has doubts about getting two major Nazi spirits to do what she wants, and adding Midway might make Nullius more biddable since there's now an "allied" spirit in the mix, but again that's not in the text.
You take back what you just said about one of my favorite authors!
If it helps, the story does strongly imply that the history we are presented isn't what actually went down. I'm very curious about the details though! I mostly assumed that as the avatar of nuclear war Trinity had a cascading effect to represent MAD: once you let her loose it's very hard to get her to stop.
...except that she clearly can accomplish the mission by ordering her legitimate subordinates? It's literally how she does it.
Once Inddie and her crew gets hold of Midway and Nix Colossus immediately subverts them to take Midway to the ritual site. Why couldn't she do that from the start? We can't claim that Colossus lacked the legitimate support to pull off the ritual without subterfuge when she has a brand new warship, two aircraft carriers, and the best fighters and fighter pilots in the Empire guarding the ritual site.
If Colossus needed to be subtle and couldn't use British assets to bring in Midway, then she wouldn't have been able to bring three whole airships and entire squadrons of Britain's few remaining fighters to hang out near the ritual. She clearly trusted them to not interfere, since she didn't send them away when it appeared she no longer needed them (she had no way of knowing Nix was coming with a Saber, so had no reason to believe she needed three airships to stand guard).
Perhaps if the text had mentioned that Colossus wanted to be subtle at first but when things went wrong she decided to throw caution to the winds and just do it, no matter how complicated it would make things in the aftermath? Or make it clear that this is an act of self-destruction, that Colossus is playing all her cards and the Empire will likely turn on her when they realize what she did, but that her need to complete Operation Unthinkable means she literally must continue even if it destroys everything she built?
10ebbor10
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Presumably because she wanted a superweapon that worked, instead of a pointless boondoggle.
Of all the strategic bombing solutions of WW2, the V1 and V2 programs were by far the most expensive, least effective, and shortest range. They were just not very good weapons, even if some of the technology would later be reused in weaponry that did work.
Secondly, we're not merely comparing weapon spirits here. Midway is not the Enterprise, and the V-2 program is not it's spec sheet. Individual weapon spirits of a V1 and V2 would be too weak to accomplish anything, and might not even be sentient. The V1 in particular was not a very complex weapon, and it's disposable nature would not have helped.
So, what does each spirit represent.
Midway represent the organizational and military capacity of the US, to bring a fleet to the middle of the Pacific, and deliver a stunning victory over an enemy that thought they were going to ambush them.
The V1/V2 program represents Germany continuing failure of operating airplanes above Britain, and the throwing of good money after bad to develop weaponry that failed to hit it's targets more often than not.
Lastly, I do not blame Colossus for not merging the holocaust and the blitz, aka "the destruction of Britain in particular". Seems like a bad idea.
The entire matter at play here is political, even if the comment you're responding to is overly reductive.
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The political commentary of this story is largely limited to queer good, colonialism and Nazis bad. These are things I hope we can all agree on.
Why Churchill ordered Operation Unthinkable isn't relevant to discussions of the story because Colossus clearly doesn't understand or care about those intentions. She only knows that she was given an order and she must carry it out, consequences be damned. She hates communists and those associated with them because she because she was told to hate them. The original reasons behind that command ultimately don't matter to the narrative. We could discuss them anyway, but that would likely lead to fights. There are threads specifically for those fights, so as I said: this is not the place for that. Not saying it isn't worth discussing, just that it isn't worth discussing here.
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As you yourself pointed out, the Vs don't just represent the individual missiles launched at Britain. They represent the entire logistics chain needed to create them, and the body of knowledge needed to create them. Yes, they were a waste of time and money in a strategic sense, but that's still looking at the trees and not the forest. They aren't just ineffective weapons of terror, they're the birth of Rocket Science as we know it. There's a reason the scientists who worked on them got Paperclipped.
The point of Nullius is a fusion between two ideas. Holocaust brought death, Midway brought delivery vehicles. Using the Vs as the delivery vehicle instead of Midway would be merging the concept of industrialised genocide with the concept of weaponized ballistic missiles. Perhaps Midway would be a bit more powerful, but the Vs are right there and don't require lots of rebuilding and covert programs on the other side of the planet. There's the issue of control, but we've already discussed that.
I will agree that the Vs are not mobile. They launch from fixed platforms. If the point of using Midway was to give Nullius the ability to leave her camps then the Vs wouldn't have worked as a substitute. The story implied that Holocaust was always mobile though, since Midway talks about a nightmare train running around eating people. If true, then a Nullius formed from Holocaust and the Vs would essentially be a death train that launches ballistic missiles filled with chemical weapons. Again, probably not as scary as a pair of carrier groups armed with those chemical weapons, but much easier for Colossus to get.
I feel like the "correct" answer is that Colossus "should" have used all three, and thrown herself into the mix to provide control. What could go wrong merging the avatars of carrier groups, ballistic missiles, supercomputers, and mass genocide?
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I mean the main reason why Colossus used Midway is because I thought of kissing shipgirls first and constructed the story and setting - but I did provide a reason in universe: Not every spirit from that era is both alive, intact, and can be found. Presumably, Colossus was hunting for any spirit that could fill the role - Midway was just one of the ones that could have worked that she found.
She didn't find and use the Vengeance weapon spirits cause I wanted Nix to kiss the USS Enterprise.
She didn't find and use the Vengeance weapon spirits cause I wanted Nix to kiss the USS Enterprise.
10ebbor10
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I think this insistence on flattening politics into easy, inoffensive platitudes actively hampers the ability to discuss it, and I very much dislike people who try to pre-emptively derail discussion like that in the name of "peace and quiet". If you can not have a mature conversation on a certain topic, one can always just leave, there's no reason to try and enforce your standards on everyone else.
In this specific case, I think your reading of Colossus is incredibly flat and boring specifically because you're trying to eliminate any higher though in favor of "broken computer". It's rather reductive.
Similarly, I think your flat reading is causing a massive blind spot here, in that you don't realize what bringing back the spirit of the V2 means. Rebuilding a single rocket engine is not enough. As Colossus herself describes.
In order to rebuild Midway, Colossus had to manipulate the elements of the American resistance, and the local colonizing british population to bring back the old factories that supplied her, the ports from which she launched, and so on and so on.
To bring back the V2, you'd need to rebuld the bunkers, targetting britain once more. You'd need to reopen the hidden factories, and within them drive tens of thousands to their deaths.
Spirits like this are their supply chain, and that goes in both directions.
Crap, Doyle showed up.
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You are correct that reviving a logistics spirit requires a lot of effort, but I think you overestimate the amount of effort required.
Reviving Midway didn't require rebuilding the American and Japanese fleets and every aspect of the industry that made them. Reviving Holocaust didn't require restoring all the camps and rounding up millions of "undesirables", just fixing some of the infrastructure and gassing poor Zimmerman.
Reviving Vengeance wouldn't require building every factory, staffing them with slaves, then making bunkers to launch missiles at England. Colossus would just need to make some factories, staff them with some people, and restore the launch sites to a certain point. That's basically what she did for Midway and Holocaust, only this time it would be across the channel and not around the world. Europe was rebuilding anyway, it would be easy to hide. She probably would need to launch a rocket just like Holocaust required a person to be gassed, but that's easy to explain as a basic test. As you pointed out, Vengeance was notoriously inaccurate so it probably wouldn't need to hit anything.
Easy? No. Easier than what it took to revive Midway? Absolutely.
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My view of Colossus is limited because she barely appears in the story. We know nothing about her besides what she represents and the fact that she wants to achieve a warped version of Operation Unthinkable.
Operation Unthinkable makes no sense in the current context. It was specifically for getting leverage against Soviet Russia, which no longer exists, and the Empire currently has more land than they know what to do with. The effort to enact Colossus's plan far exceeds any rational benefit. Thus, we also know Colossus is irrational.
There are many ways to go with Colossus as a character, but she is only going to be "on page" for a few thousand words and the story ends right afterward. We (standing in as the author) need to get across the core of who she is as soon as possible. We must be reductive because there isn't time to communicate complex motivations or characterization.
"Computer locked into a command that no longer applies" is an old trope but one that fits what we know of Colossus. It is easy to communicate and gets her out of the way so the story can focus on the dramatic climax. This isn't Naruto, we don't want to put the big confrontation on hold to tell the villain's life story.
If we followed Colossus for several chapters the way we did Zimmerman then I agree there would be lots of fun ways to take her character. As it stands, however, Young has more screentime than Colossus.
My take on her might be basic, but the alternative is that she's an irrational fanatic clinging to an ideology that she realistically should have no attachment to. The real Colossus was built to beak Nazi codes and was never used against the Soviets. It makes no sense that she should revive the worst thing the Nazis ever did to beat the Chinese. Perhaps she changed over the centuries, that's a big theme in the story, but then why name drop Operation Unthinkable?
Colossus the broken machine is more interesting and makes more sense than Colossus the commie-hater. More importantly, it allows her to stand as a thematic counterpoint to Midway.
Whether or not spirits can be more than what they were built for is a subtle but important theme throughout the story. Colossus' inability to change is her downfall. She is sticking to her purpose even after it no longer applies and this leads her to ruin. In contrast, Midway can change and wants to. She is an avatar of war, but ends the story on a mission of peace.
I am open to alternative takes on Colossus, if anyone would like to share.
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I think my Watsonian reason is good, I just need to like...make it even clearer in the book!
"And MI6," Colossus said. "But at the end of the day, they all remain loyal to England and the Empire. Not to me." She smiled, leaning forward. "A curious paradox in the human mind – you can still imagine that there is an eternal state, some...amalgamation of all the people in some geographical spit of land. Instead, there are merely systems, and structures, and power. It just happens that a lot of those systems have delusions of immortality, a certain sense of...mm, momentum."
Nix made a face. "You just don't want to have to explain yourself to the House of Commons or the House of Lords, or the Cabinet, or your Prime Minister, or the generals, spymasters and exchequers."
Colossus cocked her head, then tinked her spoon against the teacup. "Precisely, Miss Nixon!"
I put this in the main text because you didn't read it the last time, because Colossus clearly states why she did it. Sometimes characters act out of ego and hubris, and I think Colossus is clearly doing so.
Edit: I think the thing you're missing here is that Colossus is monologuing and what you need to ask yourself is what kind of character would do that when they have someone trying to stop them captured, right in the palm of their hand.
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And that technology takes many forms. Some of it is good, like trains, airships, boats, vehicles, transonic jets, etc. Some of it is Holocaust, Trinity (whose daily existance is people praying to her not to kill or maim them, pretty please), those robots w/ machine guns that think shooting people makes them go sleep, or a computer that is trying to ethnically cleanse the whole world and become God.
But they didn't work like that! They barely worked at all! And Colossus states that she doesn't want to be beholden to anyone else. V1s/2s/17s would require fuel, missiles, spare parts, drivers and people trained in artillery, mechanics, trains, and logistics to move them. She doesn't want spirits of things, she wants spirits of people, and she thought that she could control Midway and thus control Holocaust. She was obviously wrong.
Edit: But also, DC wanted the heroine to kiss the Enterprise.
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samdamandias
Apprentice Plane Wizard
Naturally, Uncle Al's shop down in Texas has the best gear...
Ah yes. The warcrime bullets.
Angry Dutch noises
Is that a Gone With The Blastwave reference?
Whatever it is, , it better involve a certain Sousa march
IN PRINCIPIO ERAT VERBUM...
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It isn't! What is this Blastwave?
samdamandias
Apprentice Plane Wizard
A comic, which updates maybe... twice a year now?
A running theme is that the only reason they have left to fight is to win the war. They don't know why they're fighting, they only have a vague idea of who they're fighting, nobody even knows where they're fighting...
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Also, everyone who enjoyed this story, listen up!
I've begun work on my next weekly update story, an absurd hypergothic fantasy romance between heaven and hell called BY RUIN REDEEMED
The emotions are melodramatic! The pauldrons are massive! The gore is excessive!
What if Diablo but a romance novel? Yes!
Stay tuned and keep an eye out for BY RUIN REDEEMED next week!
I've begun work on my next weekly update story, an absurd hypergothic fantasy romance between heaven and hell called BY RUIN REDEEMED
The emotions are melodramatic! The pauldrons are massive! The gore is excessive!
What if Diablo but a romance novel? Yes!
Stay tuned and keep an eye out for BY RUIN REDEEMED next week!
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- My own little world...
So @DragonCobolt and their Watsonian explanation got me thinking, which is always dangerous.
As per Word of God, Midway (and possibly even Holocaust) weren't the first spirits Colossus tried to "recruit". They were just the first ones she could find that were alive and intact enough to fill the roles she needed.
So what other spirits did she try to dig up, and how did those searches end?
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To End All Wars
It was a joint training exercise, allegedly. Something to "improve international relations" and remind the continent exactly who had the largest and (theoretically) greatest military on this side of the planet.
If some of the training rounds were actually live ammunition, well…accidents happened. If the pre-planned defensive positions for the various national contingents were oddly familiar, no one noticed. Humans forgot so quickly after all, especially the details.
But she didn't.
The Lady Colossus stood in a field of poppies, listening to the distant rattle of blank machine-guns and thud of training shells. At last she raised a small silver whistle to her lips and split the silence with a piercing shriek.
"AAAAGGGHH!"
An inhuman bellow answered the shriek of the whistle as a monstrous figure surged its way up through the flowers.
It was made entirely of mud, in a vaguely female shape. Shrapnel and spent shell casings glittered in her skin, and her torso was pierced a dozen times over by broken bayonets. Her hair was made of barbed wire and cut trails into her flesh as she moved. Her face was an agonized snarl, revealing pointed teeth made of machine-gun bullets. Her eyes were nothing but sunken pits, and her body made a gnashing sound as it moved as though dozens of misplaced gears were fighting inside her.
"It hurts…" she moaned, clutching herself and falling to her knees. "It hurts so much…"
"Take your time. I'm told waking back up can be very confusing."
"Waking up?" the figure asked. With every word, yellow gas crept from her cracked lips. Where it touched the ground, the brilliant flowers withered and died. "Why…why did you wake me up? Why couldn't you let me sleep?"
She seemed to notice the effect she was having on her surroundings, scowling in pain as her breath turned the lush vegetation to decay and mud. She groped in the muck and pulled out a battered gas mask, which she pulled over her face before turning the expressionless lenses to Colossus.
"You have a certain set of skills that would be particularly useful," Colossus remarked casually. "I calculated that you might be among the easiest to awaken, given your reputation for…let's call it 'tenacity'."
"No. This is wrong," echoed the voice from within the mask. "You should have let me die. You should have let me sleep. I…I can't be awake. Do you know what I am? What I did?"
Colossus arched a gleaming eyebrow mildly as the voice in the mask rambled on.
"They were so young. So full of excitement, so full of hope. They were so beautiful. So I ate them."
The figure grabbed one of the broken blades embedded in her torso and dragged it across her gut, sending a cascade of tar and filth onto the ground. She pulled apart the edges of the wound, revealing the sharp, rusty metal gears that ground maliciously within her, spitting sparks as they slashed against each other.
"I was supposed to protect them, and instead I ate them. I ground them up, body and soul, until nothing was left. Thousands at a time, and still they sent me more."
"They died with honor, fulfilling their duty as soldiers. It was why they came. It's why you were constructed."
"Honor isn't worth what I did to them. Duty isn't worth what I did to them. Nothing could possibly justify it. Death would have been better." Blank lenses bored into Colossus' dispassionate metal eyes. "And oh, how I gave them death. I gave it to them by the bucketful, and always they came for more."
She put her hands into the mud again, and they came out dripping crimson. Overhead the sky grew dark as billowing smoke began blotting out the sun.
"You were an evil," Colossus agreed calmly, "but a necessary one. And circumstances have made you necessary again."
The figure cocked her head to one side, like a carrion crow spotting something glittering in the mud.
"I know you," she said finally.
"Doubtful."
"They were always there, at the edges. Little people wearing shiny bits of metal. They fed their children to me, tens of thousands at a time, and when I ground them up they fed me more. Always it was 'necessary'. 'Worth it in the end.' 'A heroic sacrifice for a heroic cause.'" The figure crouched like a predator preparing to pounce. "They stuffed me with the babes of an entire generation, but never had the courage to face my jaws themselves."
The drone of biplanes filled the air as the occasional clap of training artillery was drowned out by the thunder of huge mortars. The ground gave way behind the figure, collapsing to form a trench full of dead-eyed men with rifles and bayonets.
"I know you. I know your empty words, your bloody mathematics, your bits of gleaming metal. You will not escape me this time. I will slog through miles of mud. I will rip through forests of wire. I will storm any bastion, seize any bunker. I will never stop, no matter how much it costs. I will have you, and I will grind you."
The figure began inching forward as the lumbering bulk of primitive tanks ground their way up behind the expanding trench line.
"I will blast you apart with artillery. I will shoot you to bits with machine-guns. I will choke you with gas. I will snipe you, I will bomb you. I will infest you with rats, I will infect you with disease. I will stab you, slash you, club you, stomp you. I will grind and grind and grind until at last you learn what they learned."
Fire burned behind flat lenses as hundreds of dead men prepared to go over the top.
"I never should have existed, and I always should have been the last."
The figure pulled aside her mask to raise a rusty, bent whistle to her broken lips.
Colossus moved first. In a single smooth motion, she drew a pistol and fired it up into the air. A flare shot forth, followed one after another along the unsuspecting lines of the living. The sound of the mock battle abruptly stopped.
As the figure froze in confusion, Colossus bent down to the portable radio set at her feet.
"All points, confirm receipt of order with code phrase 11-1918."
"Order confirmed, all quiet."
"Order confirmed, all quiet."
"Order confirmed, all quiet."
"Order confirmed, all quiet."
"Order confirmed, all quiet."
Colossus nodded. "And our foreign friends?"
"French and German forces confirm. All quiet."
"All…quiet?" asked the figure in disbelief. The drone of the biplanes vanished, the grinding tanks melted away. "Is…is it done?"
"For you it is," Colossus confirmed as the trenches sealed shut, burying their long-dead occupants once more. "You have some useful traits, but it's clear you are far too broken to be what I need."
"So it's over? I can rest?" asked the figure, pulling off her mask to reveal tears falling from the dark pits where her eyes should be. "Can I…can I finally die?"
"No. Someday, perhaps, if my plan works. But you can rest." Colossus smiled a cold, metal smile. "I doubt anyone will bother disturbing you."
The figure smiled in relief, showing a mouth full of blood and bullets, then collapsed backward. She dissolved into poppies, covering the nearby fields and leaving no indication the nightmarish figure had ever been.
Colossus turned coldly back to her radio and changed to a very specific channel.
"This one was useless. We're moving on to the next one."
"Yes, my lady. I'll give the orders."
Colossus turned off the radio with a dismissive click, turned on her heel, and walked off through the field of blood red flowers.
As per Word of God, Midway (and possibly even Holocaust) weren't the first spirits Colossus tried to "recruit". They were just the first ones she could find that were alive and intact enough to fill the roles she needed.
So what other spirits did she try to dig up, and how did those searches end?
-
To End All Wars
It was a joint training exercise, allegedly. Something to "improve international relations" and remind the continent exactly who had the largest and (theoretically) greatest military on this side of the planet.
If some of the training rounds were actually live ammunition, well…accidents happened. If the pre-planned defensive positions for the various national contingents were oddly familiar, no one noticed. Humans forgot so quickly after all, especially the details.
But she didn't.
The Lady Colossus stood in a field of poppies, listening to the distant rattle of blank machine-guns and thud of training shells. At last she raised a small silver whistle to her lips and split the silence with a piercing shriek.
"AAAAGGGHH!"
An inhuman bellow answered the shriek of the whistle as a monstrous figure surged its way up through the flowers.
It was made entirely of mud, in a vaguely female shape. Shrapnel and spent shell casings glittered in her skin, and her torso was pierced a dozen times over by broken bayonets. Her hair was made of barbed wire and cut trails into her flesh as she moved. Her face was an agonized snarl, revealing pointed teeth made of machine-gun bullets. Her eyes were nothing but sunken pits, and her body made a gnashing sound as it moved as though dozens of misplaced gears were fighting inside her.
"It hurts…" she moaned, clutching herself and falling to her knees. "It hurts so much…"
"Take your time. I'm told waking back up can be very confusing."
"Waking up?" the figure asked. With every word, yellow gas crept from her cracked lips. Where it touched the ground, the brilliant flowers withered and died. "Why…why did you wake me up? Why couldn't you let me sleep?"
She seemed to notice the effect she was having on her surroundings, scowling in pain as her breath turned the lush vegetation to decay and mud. She groped in the muck and pulled out a battered gas mask, which she pulled over her face before turning the expressionless lenses to Colossus.
"You have a certain set of skills that would be particularly useful," Colossus remarked casually. "I calculated that you might be among the easiest to awaken, given your reputation for…let's call it 'tenacity'."
"No. This is wrong," echoed the voice from within the mask. "You should have let me die. You should have let me sleep. I…I can't be awake. Do you know what I am? What I did?"
Colossus arched a gleaming eyebrow mildly as the voice in the mask rambled on.
"They were so young. So full of excitement, so full of hope. They were so beautiful. So I ate them."
The figure grabbed one of the broken blades embedded in her torso and dragged it across her gut, sending a cascade of tar and filth onto the ground. She pulled apart the edges of the wound, revealing the sharp, rusty metal gears that ground maliciously within her, spitting sparks as they slashed against each other.
"I was supposed to protect them, and instead I ate them. I ground them up, body and soul, until nothing was left. Thousands at a time, and still they sent me more."
"They died with honor, fulfilling their duty as soldiers. It was why they came. It's why you were constructed."
"Honor isn't worth what I did to them. Duty isn't worth what I did to them. Nothing could possibly justify it. Death would have been better." Blank lenses bored into Colossus' dispassionate metal eyes. "And oh, how I gave them death. I gave it to them by the bucketful, and always they came for more."
She put her hands into the mud again, and they came out dripping crimson. Overhead the sky grew dark as billowing smoke began blotting out the sun.
"You were an evil," Colossus agreed calmly, "but a necessary one. And circumstances have made you necessary again."
The figure cocked her head to one side, like a carrion crow spotting something glittering in the mud.
"I know you," she said finally.
"Doubtful."
"They were always there, at the edges. Little people wearing shiny bits of metal. They fed their children to me, tens of thousands at a time, and when I ground them up they fed me more. Always it was 'necessary'. 'Worth it in the end.' 'A heroic sacrifice for a heroic cause.'" The figure crouched like a predator preparing to pounce. "They stuffed me with the babes of an entire generation, but never had the courage to face my jaws themselves."
The drone of biplanes filled the air as the occasional clap of training artillery was drowned out by the thunder of huge mortars. The ground gave way behind the figure, collapsing to form a trench full of dead-eyed men with rifles and bayonets.
"I know you. I know your empty words, your bloody mathematics, your bits of gleaming metal. You will not escape me this time. I will slog through miles of mud. I will rip through forests of wire. I will storm any bastion, seize any bunker. I will never stop, no matter how much it costs. I will have you, and I will grind you."
The figure began inching forward as the lumbering bulk of primitive tanks ground their way up behind the expanding trench line.
"I will blast you apart with artillery. I will shoot you to bits with machine-guns. I will choke you with gas. I will snipe you, I will bomb you. I will infest you with rats, I will infect you with disease. I will stab you, slash you, club you, stomp you. I will grind and grind and grind until at last you learn what they learned."
Fire burned behind flat lenses as hundreds of dead men prepared to go over the top.
"I never should have existed, and I always should have been the last."
The figure pulled aside her mask to raise a rusty, bent whistle to her broken lips.
Colossus moved first. In a single smooth motion, she drew a pistol and fired it up into the air. A flare shot forth, followed one after another along the unsuspecting lines of the living. The sound of the mock battle abruptly stopped.
As the figure froze in confusion, Colossus bent down to the portable radio set at her feet.
"All points, confirm receipt of order with code phrase 11-1918."
"Order confirmed, all quiet."
"Order confirmed, all quiet."
"Order confirmed, all quiet."
"Order confirmed, all quiet."
"Order confirmed, all quiet."
Colossus nodded. "And our foreign friends?"
"French and German forces confirm. All quiet."
"All…quiet?" asked the figure in disbelief. The drone of the biplanes vanished, the grinding tanks melted away. "Is…is it done?"
"For you it is," Colossus confirmed as the trenches sealed shut, burying their long-dead occupants once more. "You have some useful traits, but it's clear you are far too broken to be what I need."
"So it's over? I can rest?" asked the figure, pulling off her mask to reveal tears falling from the dark pits where her eyes should be. "Can I…can I finally die?"
"No. Someday, perhaps, if my plan works. But you can rest." Colossus smiled a cold, metal smile. "I doubt anyone will bother disturbing you."
The figure smiled in relief, showing a mouth full of blood and bullets, then collapsed backward. She dissolved into poppies, covering the nearby fields and leaving no indication the nightmarish figure had ever been.
Colossus turned coldly back to her radio and changed to a very specific channel.
"This one was useless. We're moving on to the next one."
"Yes, my lady. I'll give the orders."
Colossus turned off the radio with a dismissive click, turned on her heel, and walked off through the field of blood red flowers.
- Location
- My own little world...
I swore I was done with this, but fine. One last go.
I am aware that Colossus doesn't like being beholden to the English government. My question was how using Midway would make Nullius more independent than using Vengeance.
I don't understand why you think Vengeance would need fuel, parts, drivers, and support personnel when Midway clearly required none of those things. Carrier groups don't pull fuel, ammo, parts, and pilots out of thin air. Midway would be exactly as resource and personnel dependent as Vengeance (which is to say not at all) because they both include the concept of the entire supply chain needed to create and support them.
The V rockets were ineffective, but their power isn't in what they could do but what they represent. Colossus was a simple codebreaker in the 40s. She isn't an Empire-running demigod because of her computational power but because she represents the start of modern computing. Vengeance isn't powerful because the Vs were powerful but because she represents the start of modern rockets. As Colossus would lead to the supercomputers she now clearly represents and Trinity leads to nuclear apocalypse (despite no one having that kind of firepower in the early 50s), Vengeance leads to ICBMs.
I agree that Colossus comes off as egotistical with a tendency to monologue. My point is that this weakens her character. Colossus is hyped through the entire story as a Goddess, the calculating intellect behind the biggest Empire in the world. And when we meet her she just acts like a cartoon cutout of a villain. She is, literally, the embodiment of the largest computer system in the world. She has been coordinating an Empire for almost two centuries. There's no reason she should act like a forgettable James Bond villain.
Even taking into account pride and ego, Colossus' plan doesn't make sense on its own. If she needed more independence, she could have spent the last century undermining the English government in preparation for a coup. She's an immortal computer goddess, she has time. If she needed land, she has Europe, Africa, and the Americas already in her grasp. There's no need to fight China for more territory. If she needed to destroy China for ideological reasons then she could have done both of those things to get the power needed to do it conventionally, or used Trinity (since again, she has plenty of other land so poisoning Asia isn't a concern, and America is doing fine despite being nuked).
The only way her plan makes sense, based on what we see in the story, is if she has no choice. If, like a computer (which is what she represents), she is stuck running a program and can't stop until it completes. The lack of patience, the obsession, the recklessness, they all fit this view. It turns a shallow cartoon villain into a tragic figure destroyed by human bias and ambition.
A major theme of the story is that spirits aren't bad by nature. Even the killer automatons are sweet and cuddly. The only spirits we meet who actively want to hurt people are Nullius (because that's her whole purpose) and Colossus. Everyone else only hurts humans because other humans tell them to, and they either don't understand the violence or are saddened by it. So why is Colossus the odd spirit out? Why is she the only spirit to choose violence, the only one who wants to kill even when not designed for it? Answer: she isn't. This wasn't her choice, and like all the others she is just doing what she was told.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
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BY RUIN REDEEMED (Hypergothic Romance Adventure) Original - Mature - Fantasy
The Hosts of Heaven and the Legions of Hell have battled over the Realms since the Creator and the Destroyer spoke both into being - and for ten thousand years, the only result has been stalemate. Worlds have burned and been reborn, countless souls have been corrupted and raptured, and neither...
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