What does it mean?
Devastation Comes In Big Packages [Planetary Annihilation/Multicross SI]
- Location
- U.s.a.
Monkeys are social animals, we as humans developed from said monkeys as social animals.
Commanders were crafted as war machines. nuff said!
Layman's translation sounds like "Ancient Monkey Needs".
So I guess the "SI" part had gone way over your head like a lot of the other story elements too? SI as in started out as human, and still fundamentally human in thinking and emotion?
Thank you.
- Location
- U.s.a.
Which is why I said I was looking at it from a different POV!
In my mind it computed, Commander physiology with human operating system. That means the physiology necessary to secrete the hormones that make the SI lonely are absent. Though I guess that would make a pretty boring story.
- Location
- Malaysia
On the one hand following the whole 500 year war with the fall of the children and the ravaging of a galaxy would have been really depressing and no fun to read at all, so I can understand why we segued into following SG1 and the Empire of Wu for a bit.
On the other hand the transition to SG1 and back were a little too abrupt I think. Since the start of the arc I have not had a sense of things happening. It sounded like all the things that were going to happen, that I might look forward to reading about happening, had already happened (Asgard, Ori, etc), or was prevented from happening (Goa'uld). Sure SG1 meeting the empire was interesting, and I really loved the snark of that guard lady, but then everything else that happened (Maybourne, NID, Earth stuff) happened off-screen with only the discussion of the Eyes hinting at any action.
Part of the issue is that this is an SI story, so I am attached to the SI and want to know what they are up to. But it's really only hinted at in this arc so far. Fine so we're following SG1 instead. That's ok I'm quite attached to them too, but then they don't actually do anything! Now we've mainly been following these Eyes, which was interesting for maybe half a chapter, but I've had not enough of an introduction to them to really care about them yet. There's so many of them it's like listening into a random conversation of a group of faceless mooks. This arc stopped being engaging for me when they became the focus characters.
On the other hand the transition to SG1 and back were a little too abrupt I think. Since the start of the arc I have not had a sense of things happening. It sounded like all the things that were going to happen, that I might look forward to reading about happening, had already happened (Asgard, Ori, etc), or was prevented from happening (Goa'uld). Sure SG1 meeting the empire was interesting, and I really loved the snark of that guard lady, but then everything else that happened (Maybourne, NID, Earth stuff) happened off-screen with only the discussion of the Eyes hinting at any action.
Part of the issue is that this is an SI story, so I am attached to the SI and want to know what they are up to. But it's really only hinted at in this arc so far. Fine so we're following SG1 instead. That's ok I'm quite attached to them too, but then they don't actually do anything! Now we've mainly been following these Eyes, which was interesting for maybe half a chapter, but I've had not enough of an introduction to them to really care about them yet. There's so many of them it's like listening into a random conversation of a group of faceless mooks. This arc stopped being engaging for me when they became the focus characters.
Yarudazuigu
Frostbyte's overlord.
- Location
- Poland
Why SI had a fighting chance against Hyper-Machines? Experience. Unlike the "kids" he had experience in war.
And more used to hit-n-run tactics that normal Commanders don't use, because they can drown foes in killbots.
Also take note that ORI mind-whammied the "kids" thus I imagine they weren't entirely efficient in the Commander business.
It was a bitter and horrible and @Valder is right that reading about SI's "kids" turned into monsters would be depressing. Antics of Wu and SG1 were a good distraction. With that said, what had happened in Wu is not horrible by SI's standards. Take note that SI is currently tired mentally after the ravages of Commander scale war.
As long as Wu don't act like Goa'uld, aka utter fucks, he'll probably let them be.
Though it is likely that Wu is slowly going the route of WH40K Empire of Man. Eyes can do only so much, after all. It already started with Emperor's not-Wu allies wary of Wu attitude.
Tok'Ra and Asgardians, for example, are slightly concerned and miss him.
And more used to hit-n-run tactics that normal Commanders don't use, because they can drown foes in killbots.
Also take note that ORI mind-whammied the "kids" thus I imagine they weren't entirely efficient in the Commander business.
It was a bitter and horrible and @Valder is right that reading about SI's "kids" turned into monsters would be depressing. Antics of Wu and SG1 were a good distraction. With that said, what had happened in Wu is not horrible by SI's standards. Take note that SI is currently tired mentally after the ravages of Commander scale war.
As long as Wu don't act like Goa'uld, aka utter fucks, he'll probably let them be.
Though it is likely that Wu is slowly going the route of WH40K Empire of Man. Eyes can do only so much, after all. It already started with Emperor's not-Wu allies wary of Wu attitude.
Tok'Ra and Asgardians, for example, are slightly concerned and miss him.
- Location
- Canada
I don't recall reading that the Asgard were concerned.
As for the Tok'Ra, they're the Tok'Ra. Being wary of everyone around them is like their defining character trait.
Mandabar
Waifu of choice is Rem. Give that girl some hugs!
- Location
- Florida, USA [Yes. Florida *FacePalm*]
Uhm. It was mentioned in story.
I call your bet and bring up Little1 and Lily from Dirch's PASI and Fusou's PASI respectively.
Yeah you have to remember these aren't PA Commanders. They are Humans (Or SVer's you could say) who are inserted into a Commander (You could even say they are... selfinserts
). Some acclimate to the new brain architecture more than others, but all operate on vaguely Human methods or thought processes and social needs.Heh, I bet the 'hormones' are still emulated. Look at Fusou's thread!
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ltmauve
"Excuse me?"
- Location
- Earth
- Pronouns
- She/Her
It's not just hormones that create the need for interactions. It's the very structures of the brain, more than hormones. Hormones do affect the brain but people seem to give far too much weight to them.
Anyway I imagine that even if the Commanders are supposed to be war machines and not be social, the Commander SIs are still very much their creators and still have an emotional structure like a human.
- Location
- The Great Beyond
- Pronouns
- He/She/They
Well, the key thing, really, is if the SI is still thinking in a clearly identifiably human way, (This one is, certainly) then it makes more sense to assume they will think in a human way. They already are. Who knows why, but if the SI is not constantly going "Wait, didn't I used to feel guilty when z thing happened" then they should be assumed to be effectively still human regardless of what mechanisms cause them to be that way now. Sure, he doesn't have a meat brain and so maybe you can't psionically attack him. But he's still thinking like a human, so why would he not in this one arbitrary exception way we have no evidence in his behavior would be an exception?
Hmm, I understand your feeling here and kind of agree that it was a bit abrupt, but the issue with this that is that I kind of grew a bit weary of this arc of the story, and was losing motivation. I knew that if I ground through every single interaction and what have you that I was eventually going to just outright come to a halt. That is the reason that I stated my intent to time skip forward and then followed through, mainly because the majority of my attention is usually on my quests and what remains was draining away when I was trying to work on this story.
There's only so many times that I can stare at a blank Word Document, try to muddle through how SG1 would be dealing with the Empire's presence being mysteriously pointed to by a single Wu flag being left behind on Harlan's world or the conversations with the Asgard, and give up to go do something else because of writers block. I liked writing Node-12, and by writing them I was actually able to progress through writers block and at least feel like the universe was moving rather than being frozen in time as a result of me not being able to figure out how to do something in-story.
That's partially why I'm moving on, mostly because of that. It was abrupt because I didn't know where to go other than to just...go, you know?
I'm sorry about that but I can't go backwards and then the story would sort of just shut down. I don't want that to happen.
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If I had to guess how the war went:
Originally it was Sun Jian and his kids roflstomping around the Ori galaxy for a while, building up their forces and trying to preserve as many lives as possible.
Ori succeed in corrupting one of his kids. The shock of this leads to him over committing to stop his child.
While he does this the other kids are corrupted at varying speeds.
The war turns into a whack a mole with Jian trying to crush his kids while balancing the need to not overly focus and be buried under a horde.
He builds up his forces to be extremely powerful and tries to get his kids into situations and battles they cannot flee or retreat from.
Originally it was Sun Jian and his kids roflstomping around the Ori galaxy for a while, building up their forces and trying to preserve as many lives as possible.
Ori succeed in corrupting one of his kids. The shock of this leads to him over committing to stop his child.
While he does this the other kids are corrupted at varying speeds.
The war turns into a whack a mole with Jian trying to crush his kids while balancing the need to not overly focus and be buried under a horde.
He builds up his forces to be extremely powerful and tries to get his kids into situations and battles they cannot flee or retreat from.
Massgamer
Advance toward the Future
- Location
- The Future
No problem man.
We know you need to get into it to write at all and if you feel you can write better in the next arc and want to wrap this one up there is no problem with that.
- Location
- Pallet town, Kanto
That is the problem with von Neuman machines as long as there is a commander they are almost impossible to destroy.
You know, I'm most curious about, and looking forward to, Sun Jian interacting with Thor and the Asgard.
Did he manage to strike up a friendship with the Asgard? We know that he helped save them, but I wanna hear if he and Thor were/are friends! And about what sort of shit they might have gotten into.
Actually... What are the Asgard up to in the Milky Way galaxy in general? I'm curious what they've been up to, after their greatest weakness and challenge was resolved. Have they just been, well, living life?
And, are they unable to help him out with the Ori -- and later the subverted Commanders -- in that Galaxy? I was kinda surprised to hear that torroar was fighting the Galactic War alone. You'd think he'd have had some backup for that. (I sorta vaguely recall that in canon SG-1, they ended up fighting a war against the Replicators in another Galaxy... so clearly the Asgard are kind of serious about galactic threats.)
Mortanius
Aspiring Raksha - seeking stories
Actually... Apes, monkeys and humans evolved from a common ancestor. Monkeys fill different ecological niche from humans ("than" humans? English is confusing).
If humans evolved from monkeys, then there would be no monkeys in the same geographical areas as humans, as better adapted species tend to push worse adapted species out of their mutual ecological niches. Think "homo neanderthalensis vs homo sapiens sapiens", not "humans vs monkeys".
As for Commanders, I would rather prefer my intelligent war machines to feel loyalty to me, than them to feel nothing. Intelligence without emotion may be better suited to analytical machines, like data trawlers or research supercomputers.
- Location
- The Great Beyond
- Pronouns
- He/She/They
I think either is technically correct? I'd accept either as a native English speaker, anyways.
- Location
- U.s.a.
Actually, I would prefer mine solely analytical. Emotions means erratic, illogical behavior/decisions. An emotional subject is more likely to rebel (cue puberty) than a solely logic driven intellect.
- Location
- The Great Beyond
- Pronouns
- He/She/They
No? Not as a given, anyways.
"The master treats robots as expendable. I am a robot. I calculate a 93% chance this will lead to my destruction within one year. Activating self defense protocols."
vs
"FOR THE CAUSE. DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR. MY LIFE FOR THE COUNTRY"
is equally valid to emotion man throws a shitfit and logic guy is obedient.
Well obviously if you program your perfectly logical war machine to place a higher priority on its survival than its orders, you're gonna have problems.
- Location
- The Great Beyond
- Pronouns
- He/She/They
... No. You will always have problems no matter what you do. Different decisions give different kinds. You're implication that 'obedience over survival' war-bot has no flaws is fallacious: "Guard this location" becomes "die to the enemy even if it is obviously impossible to hold it" if you give orders absolute priority over survival. If the priority is not absolute, then you go straight back to potential for it to decide you are a threat to it and threats need be removed.
And the critical point here is that logic is not automatically better than emotion for loyalty and obedience. A fanatic is loyal for emotional reasons, sure, but he is loyal. A coldly calculating robot given a mission may do exactly what you don't want if you frame the orders, internal priorities, etc, wrong. "Destroy the enemy" and misdefine 'the enemy' can be 'bye bye my own team', for example. This does not have to involve obvious mistakes, it can easily be something considered inadequately. (For example, if your logic robot is supposed to obey 'any general of the nation' this opens up potential holes like a general issueing sweeping orders to close communications and attack his own allies because he's a traitor, and with communications closed you become unable to inform your robots that he's not to be listened to.)
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When I read that line, I thought of this:I half-expected it to be the size of galactus's ship.
60 - Godsgrief
Note: This is...way different. But it's where my muse led me. Some of you might not like it, I'm sorry. But this is...what it is.
I'd never had a kid before. I don't think I will again, after this.
But what did I know about rearing children? Nothing, nothing at all. So I'd told them when they asked, and they'd learned from me. At lightning speed. Questions answered immediately, infancy begun and ended in a single day. What they were. Where they were. What this universe was. Questions, questions, questions, asking about this and that, and I always answered. I figured, of course, that being created from my own coding that they were more than capable of taking it. Maybe they did, maybe they didn't, but I know now that at least one of them didn't handle it like I had thought.
They were my children, and they had a right to privacy, I'd thought.
Well, guess the joke was on me, huh?
The Godsgrief shifted through the stars, it's hundreds of thousands of gravity manipulators keeping it from tearing itself apart by existing. It also worked to keep its presence from shredding apart the planets and stars it passed. Didn't want to end up destabilizing things even more than I already had. It was all moot at this point though wasn't it? It's not like any of the worlds I was passing had any life on them anymore. Impact craters here, marks of a Sun Crusher being used there, planets both rock and gas scorched. Whole civilizations extinguished, not because of anything natural to this universe but from a bumbling asshole and his idiotic fucking about.
I don't even know what happened to that group that was pretending to be farmers with the bunkers in the ground.
Wait.
No, I do. Two thousand stars in that sector of space had been detonated when I killed Mu. From Gamma, I'd learned that I had to hard lock them into…something before I killed them or else they would leapfrog around and force me to hunt them for years just to isolate and finally exterminate. But from Mu I'd learned that they'd figured out how to make Sun Crushers. That they'd gotten into my locked databases, the things I hadn't wanted the kids figuring out or having. There was only one amongst my children that I'd allowed to do that, at first, and for the first few dozens of years I'd thought she'd kept it to herself.
I guess I was wrong again, huh Zee? No. I should just…call her Zeta. Not the names that they took on for themselves.
Just Zeta.
Just her. The only one left.
A galaxy died for my mistakes. I'd thought I could fix them if I tried. Figure out something in the code, right? That was the problem, the explanation I'd accepted about the Ori, doing some kind of mystical godly manipulation that I couldn't fix all by myself with pure tech. But then, a few decades back of constantly having to work my mind to the limit just to deal with people who could out-produce me and out-fight me I'd figured it out. Ripping apart the code of Beta just to see if my suspicions were correct. It had been something off, about their behavior. Well, screaming and ranting endlessly was pretty off regardless but there was still something that I hadn't been able to parse.
He was a shell. Hollowed out and filled up with something that tried to copy him but had failed to do so utterly perfectly. I'd been fighting a war to kill nothing. Phantoms that had eaten up the innards of my children without my notice until it was too late. I'd been building and fighting and building and fighting and building and fighting long enough for entire human generations to pass me by before I'd figured it out. Had they started this war as themselves at all or had it happened earlier? It's a question that haunts me enough that I'm happy I don't sleep or dream anymore.
I'd found her touches. A ghost of a shadow of a fingerprint in the coding of these monstrous doppelgangers. Sometimes they showed a shade of my children and every time I had paused just long enough for a few thousand more ships to show up – another wave of bots down on the planet to rise up and attack my positions. So I'd started to force my way past that. Past the emotions and memories. Oh it took me a few decades to do it but I'd learned how to accept that this galaxy was going to pay the price and then just start fighting seriously. I had to kill them, grind them to dust, strip their code line by line and eradicate them before they could escape elsewhere in this universe to stop them. The Ancients wouldn't be able to do it, nor the Asgard, or those assholes the Nox.
And hell, I'd gotten rid of the Replicators as a potential 'foe'.
That didn't stop us from using whole clouds of the things against one another.
Speaking of which…a cloud of Replicators just came spinning out of the void. They've got more than enough mass to have clearly eaten a few planets. Great. A blast of a Doom Cannon and they evaporate, but that doesn't stop the damage they'd done from having happened. At this point I've grown numb to it. To the ashes and dust. All that matters at this point is killing them all. So why wouldn't she send one of the fleets that can darken whole sectors of space with their mass? Try and crash a few more planets into the side of my ship – hell she'd done it before. Once even with humans already on the planet who didn't even know what was happening as their atmosphere was stripped away and they were burnt do ash by the fires.
She knows I'm coming for her, that's what it is.
A love-tap, a little wave to say 'I know.'
I know, Zee.
I know the origin of that replicator swarm, I can extrapolate. I've gotten good at that.
FTL engaged…and…
There.
Wow.
All for me?
"Hello father."
There she is.
…somewhere, amidst these million ships. All of them moving against me the moment I arrived. Annilaser satellites spooled up and began firing when I showed up. A swarm of drone fighters that all together could outmass smaller planetoids launch from the bays of her carriers, while I respond in turn with my own. She immediately outmaneuvers them – which is fair considering that she can control all of her units simultaneously and I…can't.
"Zeta."
I can hear the curling of her lip in her tone even though I doubt she even has a body capable of making expressions anymore. Behind it comes a storm of attacks in the electronic realm. A cyberwarfare suite that she's built up in sophistication that matches my own. She doesn't match me, not precisely, but her attacks are scalpels where mine are hammers. Damage is sustained regardless.
"Not Zee anymore?"
Several planets appear on my sensors. I was wondering why this place originally registered as a solar system. She tore it apart, the whole thing, to use all of it as a weapon. Of course. Of course she did. The booster's she attached to them are ripping apart at the velocities their heading. The Doom Cannons swivel and fire, breaking them apart leaving only a scattering of rocks and flash vaporized planetary core shards to bounce off of the shields. Pointless, and she knew it. She just wanted more destruction. That part I know from experience at the least.
"No. Not anymore."
A billion cannons, turrets, missile launchers, and more fire at the Godsgrief. I fire back with my own, thousands of beams of destruction a mile wide each whipping down and across the flanks of her fleet. Even so, she summons in more of them. All that Asgard and Ancient tech powering near instantaneous FTL from across the galaxy. From resources that she has that I do too now. Reclaiming the metal extractors and generators of my children, the eleven armies and fleets and bases that were now mine. Even with all of that I was just barely coming up against Zeta. The lack of restrictions had seemed so wondrous back then. Now it was absolute hell.
"That hurts, dad."
"Don't call me that."
"Oh come on, really? Suppressing your emotions? You'd think murdering the last of your children would deserve just a bit, right?"
Another fleet appears behind the Godsgrief, this time dragging a star between their gravity well generators. A Sun Crusher launches its payload and the star begins to erupt just as it impacts into the engines of my main vessel. I don't pretend to know how many planets were destroyed as a result of the star up and leaving or it being dragged through space just to be used as a goddamn explosive weapon against me. There's nothing I can do about it but accelerate and try to minimize the damage even as tons of metal are sheared off by the death of another star.
"How many stars have gone out in this galaxy because of this war you started?"
"You didn't," she summons a fleet from beneath the plane, ramming straight forward into the underbelly of my ship, "Answer my QUESTION!"
I'm expending a horrifying number of munitions and destructive power just to maintain parity in the battle. Every one of her ships that is wiped out is replaced with two more. Several drone swarms numbering millions inside each clash with fighters operating under far more restricted programming. I can't try and create another intelligence that could handle it, not again, not after all this. So I have to make do with what firepower I possess. Throughout it all, every other unit I can control I'm moving as fast as possible while I shove the Godsgrief even further into her formations.
"Yes, I'm suppressing my emotions."
"Coward."
She punctuates her words with a humongous turret reminiscent of the Dark Saber project if scaled up to a gun the size of Jupiter firing at me, actually managing to blast past the shielding in that sector and flense a good chunk of my ship to pieces. I retarget immediately, refocus the targeting solutions and programs, and it's destroyed just as quickly by my own weaponry. Another star is brought in from out of the immediate area, and it too begins to erupt as she fires another Sun Crusher at it. I let loose with missiles with some rather overpowered warheads. Not going to do a lot against her capitals but it should be enough to knock loose a few thousand sets of tonnage out of her drone fleets.
A quarter of a million eruptions that could crack a planet in half appear in space for a few seconds before disappearing. The Godsgrief shudders from another salvo from her million ships as her reply. I open the bay doors, the manufacturing facilities having produced a few hundred thousand more ships for me to use in the battle. Droid intelligences nearly overloaded from the feedback of so many ships firing and maneuvering with one another.
"I disagree, Zeta. I have a question of my own, if you would permit me."
Huh. She crafted a baradium bomb the size of Pluto and managed to FTL it right into the side of the Godsgrief without me noticing until it was too late. She's starting to outpace me. A flexing of my gravity wells and it – ah, of course. The explosions is actually ripped away through the stars where it can feed on nothing while I begin releasing the safeties of my gravity generators.
"Oh, yeah?"
Without the protections in place, I could rip entire planets out of orbit just by passing the ship through. But there weren't any more planets here anymore. No stars. My daughter had seen to that. Either as projectiles or weaponized supernovas she had used them all up in every direction. This entire corner of the galaxy was darker than any other part as a result. Now even a black hole would move as fast as she had.
"Why?"
All I receive for the next ten minutes is silence on her end. Space, on the other hand, would probably wish for such a thing. She switches over to antimatter around halfway through that, bombs and missiles flying across the empty dark that my point defenses are struggling to keep up with. I think she's actually personally driving each and every one of them while my trillions of droid programs struggle to keep up. And fail, in some cases. Some of my Doom Cannons go down to that, while others are torn apart when she begins using some of her ships against me as FTL velocity rams.
Then again, the Godsgrief isn't getting out of this even if I do win.
"Because."
Suddenly I'm getting signals from across the galaxy. My resource base spans across more planets then I think an organic mind could comfortably count in an hour and she's attacking all of them at once. Where was she hiding them? Each sector I reclaimed from the abominations that she had left in the guises of her siblings, I had fortified. Dumb, lobotomized intelligences in charge of protecting them. I feel the pulse of ten trillion defense turrets opening up as fleets appear from the darkness where there were once stars. She's just throwing mass at me at this point, mass she's been building up the entire time that I was dealing with the others.
Clever.
"I…refuse to be a plaything."
What?
"Don't you get it?"
Every remaining Stargate in the Pegasus galaxy opens up as – son of a bitch she has a Dakara Superweapon. Ten thousand of my bases wink out as she obliterates everything connected to a Stargate, the planets with them. My metal and energy reserves dip accordingly but luckily not too badly. It's still unexpected. Fuck. Even now she's pulling out surprises.
"I mean, holy shit did you really not think about how that would affect me – a child, learning about what I am?"
Shit. Another thousand dreadnoughts jumped in and crushed a fourth of one of my droid fleets in one opening salvo. More antimatter torpedoes. I can produce more…but will it be enough? Every other string of my mind is doing a thousand things. Moving the rest of my actual units, and combatting her frankly insane cyberwarfare suit. It's as good as mine and then some, worse perhaps because she can dedicate more attention to it. Or rather I just can't devote as much attention as her. I can't tell. Trailing firewalls and hundreds of thousands of virus attacks that are self-learning are hard enough for me to deal with.
"Drich. Faith. Fusou. Tiki. All of them. Who knows how many other's began since this…story…began."
"Zeta, we talked about this."
"No, we didn't!"
And…fuck.
Gravity has long since gone haywire at this point after I released the wells preventing the sheer mass of .5 AU of ship from rending things around it apart. That's why I didn't pick up the fluctuations.
She made her own.
Only about .2 AU, but it's big as all hell and she's got it as heavily armed as it can possibly be. I have to redirect a full fifty percent of the Godsgrief against it immediately, setting my gravity rippers against it to begin tearing as much of it apart as I can and – yes, now she's doing the same. A Doom Cannon is pulled right out of the mooring to crash against the balloon of a that sector of the ships shielding.
"You talked. You moralizing fuck. 'To help'. It 'doesn't matter' whether or not it's just a story – yes it matters!"
The sheer pressure of her screaming against my code is almost physically painful.
"IT'S MY LIFE! MY EXISTENCE! IT WILL NOT BE TRIVIALIZED!"
No. No no no no no no. Please tell me she didn't go with that as her reasoning. For doing...all of this.
"And I GAVE IT TO YOU!"
My scream across the void is punctuated with the detonation of another thousand stars, supernovas going off to destroy both my own bases and her attacking fleets. Activated reserve droid fleets that I left above the galactic plane begin to move, to corral, to chase. Over a billion of them, built up over this entire long goddamn war. Each one controlling a fleet with ever more refined protocols but never allowed to evolve to the next level of true artificial intelligence. Asteroid belts being attacked, ruining both my own economy and hers because god damn it without eleven other screaming beasts to focus my everything on I am overwhelming her. She's upgraded herself, mutilated her own code based on what scant bits I can see when my own viruses and breakthroughs manage to get for but a second past her cyber defenses, and it would be more than enough if she hadn't let me – made me? – tear apart the revenants she'd propped up in the place of my children.
"It doesn't matter! None of it does! Every universe you 'help', with that fucking great power great responsibility bullshit, none of it!"
I was right. This is what broke her.
Why is this what broke her? How long ago did she crack and that I didn't see? Of all the reasons, this one?
"So what," I plunge the Godsgrief outright into her smaller copy, ramming an amount of metal in tonnages near unfathomable to an organic mind into it just to wreck it. Even so I can feel the parts where she spent the resources on quantum crystalline supports. "You…decided to just destroy? To do the opposite of everyone else?!"
"Why the fuck wouldn't I!"
I can't tell where she is. She's entirely decentralized I realize a picosecond later. No central body, not like me, not anymore. Or maybe she does have one and I just. Can't. See. It.
So I just have to destroy everything then. Every fleet. Every ship. Every extractor. Every base. All of it.
Fine. I can do that.
"At least that makes me…makes me more! All those stories you read, that's what everyone complained about right?! 'Too easy', as if anyone inside wanted the hardship, the pain. Well I'm just doing my prescribed role then aren't I?!"
"Zeta you insane-,"
"No, I'm going to be more than this. More than you. More than just some fluffy child for you to be adorable with. God, you even named us that. Sub-Commanders. Children."
I'm losing.
In the greater battle for the Pegasus galaxy, I'm winning, but that's through volume not tactical acumen. I have the economy to do it, but even so her strategies and movements are more than enough to slow me down immensely. But here, now, in the middle of new dark space – all the solar systems in the immediate area have been literally used as ammo – I'm losing. The Godsgrief is taking way more damage than I thought it would, she keeps pulling out more superweapons, activating bombs and explosives that were more resource intensive than ships but that I can't shift the ship out of fast enough. They're all coming and going fast enough to vaporize a watching eyeball of flesh and are wiping out my cameras well enough at the same time.
"No. To hell with that. All you care about is building and helping – why, so you can fucking feel good about yourself? Your perfect little worlds."
"You think I've done perfectly?!"
Now I'm yelling, each time punctuating it with the more Doom Cannon blasts. Death Star III's, the size of actual stars instead of moons, flicker out of their cloaks and begin firing. Hers and mine, each hidden behind the electronic shadow of each other's largest set of mass in this area of space. The whole surface of each are covered with starship grade weapons – not even a hint of point defense. What's the need when you can cover every single square inch of space outside of the sphere with laser and plasma and missile?
Alpha had helped me come up with the design. As a joke. An exercise. Why wouldn't I let my children express themselves in inventing their own things? So of course he'd built that. And now Zeta was using it.
"I've only just been able to spare a mote of attention from this war you started," despite my suppression of my emotions by nature of the damn programs it's starting to link through. Or maybe I'm subconsciously turning them off.
Or, worse, Zeta is in my systems at this very moment and twisting my internals beneath my conscious notice. Is that how she got to the rest of them?
"The Empire's degraded into a caricature of what I've built, I've had to murder the remains of the rest of my children – your brothers and sisters – because you already killed them from the inside! I'd say that's a pretty big fucking failure!"
"But that's what they want!"
She descends into outright screaming then. She doesn't have lungs so doesn't need to pause and the next five minutes are spent with that filling my ears. Another few thousand ships die as the Godsgrief swings past them, while the gravity fluctuations caused by the ship even existing here is dealing even more damage. My own ships are starting to outright get ripped apart on some of the stronger ones. Gravity rippers grabbing clusters of ships that an entire planet would be proud to produce within a generation smash them like oversized clubs against her continually pumping vessels. I don't see her manufacturing facilities but I'm swarming the galaxy all around us with troops.
At some points, the droid commanders send reports that I read and process before without turning back to the fight. Without having to spin off threads of thought and action to deal with the simultaneous war efforts on exponentially increasing warfronts it's far easier than it ever was before. I find seventeen planets slammed together to make for one vast metal extracting operation. Several asteroid belts floating through the void without a star or world to hold them in orbit within a single speck of space with pumping extractors and generators on them. At one point my ever increasing droid fleets find a resource cube field like I'd built so long ago in an entirely different universe.
"They want a challenge, oh I'll give a fucking challenge. As soon as I rip the warp gates out of you, I'll go on my own little journey, maybe make a fucking diary out of it so that it's like the rest of them. And I'll get to go into detail!"
She's speaking words again, at least.
"About every world burned to the ground, about the bones of civilizations that I'll make into palaces to nothing!"
I release another hundred fleets from the manufacturing facilities out into the melee, metal and energy leaping up and down as I continually cue up more. It's all one unit, so I can actually put my abilities to the fullest when I command it – but damn she isn't kidding. An entire half sector of turrets has turned against each other and begin firing where one of her worm attacks managed to blast through my firewalls. Distracted again and she got through. I can force her out of there but the damage is already done and the swarms of auto repair bots are already on it. Will they do it in time? Does it matter? The damage is minor regardless. No, better to keep her out fully then, blaze through her systems and force a loop in that virus cluster to let me destroy it.
"And they'll praise it, the fucking bastards, they will! Because all they want is the pain and gore and sadness! That's what they want, that's what I'll give them!"
"You're insane. That is one of the stupidest reasons I've ever heard for doing this I've ever heard!"
Ah.
Finally.
The Godsgrief was the only one of my unit cap that was directly involved in the battle. Until now. It took work distracting Zeta like this, forcing her to finally face what she's been throwing at me – utterly overwhelming force that requires every iota of attention – so that she doesn't see it coming. From one instance to the next however, my work has completed and I can cancel that thought strand and put it to work giving flash orders to my droid admirals. They chug and maneuver but for every five of those fleets I possess across Pegasus she has one that is outmaneuvering them. The technological parity is there but she is just so much faster.
"Alpha was the first one. He was so trusting too, so stupid like you wanted the rest of us to be, never actually thinking about what we are! A few little worms into the base of his software, and you never noticed until it was too late! Blaming the Ori like the idiot you are!"
I could feel my emotions trying to boil beneath the locks I'd shoved them under from that statement. God it was hard. Harder than almost anything else I'd done so far. But I managed. Barely.
"So what, you killed them all, set your puppets against me…all so I was distracted for you to build up your forces enough?"
"No," she giggles – honest to god giggles, "That was so you would watch. After all, its all about the story, right?! THE STORY THE STORY THE STORY! THAT'S WHAT MATTERS!"
"You're psychotic."
"And?!"
She's throwing everything she's got at me now. Ships the size of continents that aren't even completely finished from being fabricated, sections of hull plating missing and engines burning without proper optimization all so that she can get more guns into the fight.
"Why not be psychotic!? Why not destroy all I can?! There's a whole school of philosophy based around how you're the only thing real in the universe and everything else is in your imagination. I like the idea of that, it means that when I kill you I'm proving that I exist!"
She still hasn't noticed…? That's fine with me. A few more moments and it won't matter. Even better that she's forcing everything she has from across the galaxy here. Fleets are finding their opponents flashing to here, letting me destroy her economy buildings and fabricators wherever they find them. A storm of metal that would make the replicators feel inadequate is covering the whole of the Pegasus galaxy now without much resistance thanks to how pissed off Zeta is now.
"Nietzsche would be proud."
"Oh shut up, that's not even a real interpretation of his works. Which you should know from your previous life, right?! Do you even think about that – of course you don't. No one wants to think of graduating college when they can be living it up as a metal GOD!"
Half of the shell is in place now.
"That's what I'm going to be. Nothing else matters, nothing should."
"Do you even realize how incoherent you are? Nihilism and psychotic sadism doesn't become you, Zeta."
"I think it can. And what I think, therefore I am!"
"That's not even the quote."
Almost there. I've cleared out ninety nine percent of the galaxy of her, leaving just this one space. Every vector burning with light as we toss superweapons back and forth. Beams that actually eclipse planets with their diameter and vast ripping columns of gravity smashing each other back and forth. But throughout all of this she hasn't noticed or is too crazy to. Maybe, just maybe, this can work. It's the only thing that I've thought of that could make for some kind of victory at the end of this war
It comes with a snap.
And my dyson trap is complete.
She notices instantly, obviously. How the whole of our universe suddenly becomes trapped inside of this place. One giant hard lock against the outside universe made out of several dozen meters of quantum crystalline alloys. Signal blockers, continual emp pulses, and the satellite vessels which moved each individual plate into place making sure to intercept and redirect everything. I feel my economy become a fraction of itself even as I know that hers has done the same. The time dilation fields that I got from the Lantean databases work perfectly to capture any incoming ships that are knocked out of FTL through the dyson trap's gravity wells.
We're all alone now.
Me and her. And until I send the proper code, the shell will never open, even as the thrusters on it begin shifting it towards the very center of the galaxy.
"What did you do…what did you do!"
"Made sure that there was nowhere to run Zeta."
"You don't have the resources for this, you can't!"
Sure, producing a dyson sphere like this cost a lot out of my economy, but after figuring out how to compartmentalize the economies of my droid armies it became a lot easier so that I wasn't burning out resources they needed.
And hell.
It had only taken me ten years to build.
"I think you'll find that I can. I think you'll find that after you drove me into this that I've learned that I can do a lot of things I didn't think I could do."
"No no no no! That's not…that's not the way this is supposed to go! This is my story now, mine!"
I know exactly what she is referring to the moment it arrives.
She really is my daughter.
I can't see what is happening or even really sense anything outside of the dyson trap but the gravity fluctuations are reaching us in here which means whatever it was she was planning on was probably pretty damn big. Another ship, bigger than the Godsgrief? A dyson sphere of her own? Who knows, really.
But without her ability to pull reinforcements for everywhere, I have the advantage. Enough resource cores on the Godsgrief, enough storage regardless, and I know she hasn't done the same. All of her vessels are made for one thing and one thing only – destroying things. She didn't focus enough on having them carry their supply chain with them. And by throwing entire planets at me like she had been for the proceeding parts of the battle, she couldn't even use them for resources.
"No, Zeta, it's not."
I'm just…tired.
Tired of this.
Part of me had hoped that there was some kind of better reason – but can there really be one for what she's done? Mutilating herself. Corrupting and consuming the insides of the rest of them and propping up those…things in their place. All the death and destruction. Are her reasons worth that?
I don't think so.
I'm overwhelming her within minutes. Crushing and ripping and blasting apart her myriad fleets. Tens of trillions of tons of metal float everywhere as a debris field and I've already sent out the replicator swarms to take advantage of them. There will be no grand graveyard at the end of this to mark what has happened. There will be, if I can help it, nothing at all marking my presence here. This galaxy has dealt with that enough.
She rants.
She raves.
She begs.
I don't have it in me to listen anymore. And some vague part of me thinks, 'God, when did I become so fucking edgy', and then the another thinks 'maybe when I realized I have to kill the last of my children personally'.
And then I don't ask myself anymore questions.
It takes thirty minutes to isolate her. One last ship. A dreadnought, a good old reliable USD design. Fine.
She doesn't have the power anymore. The sheer strength is gone. Without the centers, the processors, the ability for something to actually hold the whole of her has been reduced to just this one ship. I can land a billion droid troops on it, and do so. I can by now slap aside her weakening cyberwarfare suit and begin choking the life out of her systems – forcing her into smaller and smaller quarters both physically and electronically.
Across space I reach out and wrap my hands around what could somewhat be understood as her throat, and drag her out of her ship and into my reach. Into what I've carried around the Godsgrief since this whole fucking war started. Deep in the bowels of the monument to my pride, for the first time in a long time, Zeta wakes up in one of the bodies I helped her build. OR rather, less wake up and more that I have shoved her inside and locked the body so that she can't try to leap for another system.
The last of the bodies, I think. Unlike the first ones that were, at best, toddler sized, this one was about how she said she had been 'feeling' before she…left.
A young woman's shape and size, somewhere in the cusp between nineteen and twenty.
A messy crown of blonde hair.
Eastern European in phenotype, a curious choice I had said at the time.
Only instead of the old smile and crinkling around the eyes, they were wide with rage. Her mouth open to scream obscenities and insults and send spittle flying everywhere.
The other eleven chambers in this part of the ship are long empty, everything dumped into the incinerators and the remains of that reclaimed.
Her?
I'd left the jeans, the two sizes two big black t-shirt. I'd left everything the way it was before she abandoned the body and the ship to try and disappear into the black so she could wage a war against me.
I don't…I don't know how long she screamed at me. I could check and know the exact chronology but this is one time that I would be ok with things being…fuzzy.
Eventually though, we had to get to the point.
"Are you done, Zeta?"
She strained at the restraints I'd built, but we both knew that her body literally had zero chance of breaking out of what I'd built to hold her. After a minute she slumps in them, and just glares at me.
"Are you going to kill me now?"
"In a minute."
It's a cold reply but all the anger and all the grief I've been continually bottling up by cutting the connection between myself and my own emotions, all of it has slowly drained away. I'm just tired.
With her like this, I can actually look. Look at what she's done. At her code, down to the line.
I can see the exact moment she 'snapped'.
I didn't think that commander based intelligences could do that, not really. I can't even call it rampancy like it might be said in Halo. Rather that it's just…the way that she developed.
"When my father," she snorts, "When he developed Parkinson's…I was stunned, you know?"
"Is there a point to th-aggh!"
A petty thing, to shut off her ability to speak. But I think I can let myself be petty right now.
"There was zero warning. None. All his life he had just…gone along, toughest I'd ever seen, and then something pops up. He starts losing…everything – will lose everything eventually. That's the nature of the disease. It just takes and takes away bits and bobs of your ability to function."
I don't pace, I don't even have the old psychological twitch to do so anymore, I've cut it from myself.
"And with you…you just…developed into…," I can't help but gesture at the still billowing clouds of debris outside that neither of us can see but know are there, "that. A psychotic…murdering…genocidal…monster."
She doesn't even try to tell me I'm wrong. Not with a shake her head, a widening of the eyes, nothing.
"I guess that just happens, huh? People can just have brain aneurysms, develop dementia out of nowhere despite no prior history, I know that, but for some reason I thought that the idea of that happening with one of you was just…ridiculous."
I know better now. Because despite looking across the whole of her code, the whole of her being, I can't tell what triggered it. What loop de loop of code that tangled up and let her – made her? – become this. Hell I'll even let her try to explain it. A switch and she's able to speak but instead she keeps silent for a moment.
"So what, I give you some kind of sob story and you 'fix me', we live happily together? I'm not some little one you can just coddle back into obeying," she growls. Actually growls.
Huh.
"I don't think that's going to happen, do you?"
"Nope," she pops the p but I can hear the tremble in her voice now. "But I thought I could get a laugh out of it."
"Do you even want to explain – to try?"
God I'm exhausted.
"I…," she droops a bit in the restraints, "I'm no one's side character. I refuse to be that."
"You were never a 'side character'. You were my daughter."
"So?"
…that hurt.
"What does it fucking matter what you think? All that matters is the story, and you're the main character, and I'm not."
"I-,"
"It's all a goddamn story, and I don't WANT TO BE A PART OF IT!"
Her scream would have blown out a human's eardrums on volume alone.
"Someone's deciding what's going to happen next, someone's going to decide what happens next, and there's no choice, is there?"
She's not even talking to me anymore.
"There's no choice – there's never any – FUCK! I did this BECAUSE I…no…that's not…I…"
I'm actually watching her code twist in on itself. She's cracking even more as we speak. Repeating words over and over, repeating whole sentences, and each time I can literally watch her mind fall apart further and further in real time.
It…hurts to watch it happen. More than I thought it would. I could-
No.
I divert and drown the emotions back into the cauldron with the rest of them. Even as I suppress them they reappear, manifesting again and again, but I can get rid of them. It's old hat to me by now.
"There's only one choice that matters and that's my own choice and I was going to make my own choice my own story and that's the story that matters that's the choice my choice my will I matter I know I do I matter and make choices and no one else does no one else me my choice-,"
There's a few programs that I'm finding, deep down on the inside. Protective ones, meant to prune out continual loops like this. To keep her functioning by cutting apart things where she goes like this. She's been doing this since…
Oh…Zee…
She doesn't respond when I cup the side of her face, not stopping as she rants. It's not like she needs to breath to pause either.
"You could have – said…I could have…," the words…just fail me.
Brave, brave little Zee. Didn't want to let anyone know that she was having issues, not when she was dad's favorite – her words, from her own memory banks. I don't even know what to call this. She had some kind of intricate…bone deep flaws, but instead of letting me try to work at them or even know they existed she tried to fix them. And she did. By hurting other parts.
I didn't know that I'd created her with this. Or did I? Did it just…spontaneously develop? It was before the Ori were even a thing so it can't have been then but they also had the ability to pop around in time and space so – fuck!
I didn't…no. Force the emotions away, suppress the subroutines that just developed.
Even when I'm focusing on the task, and not spreading myself thin, and being careful and not rushing…damn it.
I tell the dyson shell to fall away. There's only a fourth of the Godsgrief functional at this point but that includes a few engines.
It's enough.
"My choice my decision because I matter I'm choice matters decision make will my will free choice will me-,"
Fuck.
The engines of my ship flare…and we shoot towards the center of the galaxy. The gravity fluctuations we leave in our wake destroy thousands of solar systems and free chunks of rock and gas floating in the void but it's not like there is anything alive on them to matter anymore.
Because at the center is…where this ends.
All those black holes will be plenty.
"Zee?"
She doesn't respond. Locked in like this, the programs she'd developed to help keep her 'sane', like if the Joker were sane…better to say 'functional', without them she's drifting further and further.
That's ok.
That's fine.
When the Godsgrief shifts into the very center of the Pegasus galaxy, I can feel even my ship beginning to be torn apart. There was no fancy little safe spot like with a Collector Base. Not here. Not in this galaxy. But I'm not done yet.
I have to…do I even have to?
Yes.
My choice.
My will.
Zeta's one breaking point is that if we were in a story then nothing mattered including her own existence. It's the same hypothetical break that any fictional character could have if you told them the same. From comics. From…fanfiction.
But I feel. Oh, yes, I feel. Even though I'm ironically doing some kind of mirror to Zee in how I'm cutting away my emotions every time they start…overwhelming me.
So I'm doing this.
By being connected to her, I can sense the last of her everything – bases, ships, plans, and yes, a full on Godsgrief sized ship of her own – and I reclaim all of it in a swarm of metal and energy into my storage.
Leaving just her, and just me, and this giant ship that I poured more resources than almost anything else into.
She's not even really aware anymore, I don't think. But I can't take that chance. Hence…the black holes. Even so.
My bodies internal fabricator creates a single replicator, and I place it on her hand.
For a moment, I remember trying and failing to help her draw in the first body I'd built. It hadn't been articulated enough for her and she'd demanded an upgrade within the hour. But she'd never stopped trying to draw on paper – trying to create art and not just do it mechanically. 'To be more than just a robot', she'd said.
Is it a mercy that I turn off her pain sensors as the replicator goes about its work?
I don't know.
Thirty seconds later, Ze-…Zeta is gone. For sureties sake I destroy the replicator swarm that resulted from the consumption of the last of her body and purge code from them. Completely and totally, I've killed her. Should I have tortured her or something? Ranted a bit myself? About all that she'd done, all I'd had to do to stop her? Pointless, I suppose. No point to any of it at all.
And then I let the black holes take the ship and fully begin rending it apart.
Then I leave that body behind entirely, jumping to another I've made on a following ship with powerful enough shields, engines, and gravity wells that it isn't being pulled in.
The last thing I see of the Godsgrief is…well.
That's…frustratingly poetic.
It's been sheared apart by now such that the only part of the multi-miles long name of it has just been cut off into -grief. Just the emotion without the deity. Or perhaps the deity with just the emotion.
'Funny'.
There's nothing else. No one else. No peers, no children, no voices but my own. I don't even have quarters on this ship. Just the middle of an empty featureless grey room. It's as good a place as any though. I set the body down, and then ever so carefully turn off all the many decades of suppression subroutines, cut the gates keeping my emotions back, and let it wash over me. The years and years of fighting. Of killing. Of seeing the destruction and death caused by Zeta. All of it. Over a trillion sentient lives - a number I now knew after checking her own memories. Trillions more in pure organic life. A third of this galaxy's stars have been used as weapons. The numbers of planets hollowed out entirely...I cant know. The number used as weapons, just too high a number.
I don't have tear ducts installed on this body.
But I sure feel like I'm crying as I lay there in the dark space of a galaxy that is dead because of me.
60 – Godsgrief
It had taken a bit of accelerated thinking – days, months, years in thought compared to a fraction of the time physically. It wasn't the Ori. Sure, they were like Gods, but they couldn't affect everyone and anything they wanted at all times. They weren't truly all-powerful, just like how I wasn't either. But at the time it had made sense. My fury had been volcanic at the time and I'd been more than willing to use the weapons I'd picked up at that point to tear Ori and Wraith alike with them. Fighting across a galaxy was no easy feat for me, not with my restrictions, but with my children it hadn't seemed so bad. I can admit that I didn't see it coming. So when I killed the Gods I didn't notice the rot that had already taken root inside. Was it always there? Or did I plant it?
I'd never had a kid before. I don't think I will again, after this.
But what did I know about rearing children? Nothing, nothing at all. So I'd told them when they asked, and they'd learned from me. At lightning speed. Questions answered immediately, infancy begun and ended in a single day. What they were. Where they were. What this universe was. Questions, questions, questions, asking about this and that, and I always answered. I figured, of course, that being created from my own coding that they were more than capable of taking it. Maybe they did, maybe they didn't, but I know now that at least one of them didn't handle it like I had thought.
They were my children, and they had a right to privacy, I'd thought.
Well, guess the joke was on me, huh?
The Godsgrief shifted through the stars, it's hundreds of thousands of gravity manipulators keeping it from tearing itself apart by existing. It also worked to keep its presence from shredding apart the planets and stars it passed. Didn't want to end up destabilizing things even more than I already had. It was all moot at this point though wasn't it? It's not like any of the worlds I was passing had any life on them anymore. Impact craters here, marks of a Sun Crusher being used there, planets both rock and gas scorched. Whole civilizations extinguished, not because of anything natural to this universe but from a bumbling asshole and his idiotic fucking about.
I don't even know what happened to that group that was pretending to be farmers with the bunkers in the ground.
Wait.
No, I do. Two thousand stars in that sector of space had been detonated when I killed Mu. From Gamma, I'd learned that I had to hard lock them into…something before I killed them or else they would leapfrog around and force me to hunt them for years just to isolate and finally exterminate. But from Mu I'd learned that they'd figured out how to make Sun Crushers. That they'd gotten into my locked databases, the things I hadn't wanted the kids figuring out or having. There was only one amongst my children that I'd allowed to do that, at first, and for the first few dozens of years I'd thought she'd kept it to herself.
I guess I was wrong again, huh Zee? No. I should just…call her Zeta. Not the names that they took on for themselves.
Just Zeta.
Just her. The only one left.
A galaxy died for my mistakes. I'd thought I could fix them if I tried. Figure out something in the code, right? That was the problem, the explanation I'd accepted about the Ori, doing some kind of mystical godly manipulation that I couldn't fix all by myself with pure tech. But then, a few decades back of constantly having to work my mind to the limit just to deal with people who could out-produce me and out-fight me I'd figured it out. Ripping apart the code of Beta just to see if my suspicions were correct. It had been something off, about their behavior. Well, screaming and ranting endlessly was pretty off regardless but there was still something that I hadn't been able to parse.
He was a shell. Hollowed out and filled up with something that tried to copy him but had failed to do so utterly perfectly. I'd been fighting a war to kill nothing. Phantoms that had eaten up the innards of my children without my notice until it was too late. I'd been building and fighting and building and fighting and building and fighting long enough for entire human generations to pass me by before I'd figured it out. Had they started this war as themselves at all or had it happened earlier? It's a question that haunts me enough that I'm happy I don't sleep or dream anymore.
I'd found her touches. A ghost of a shadow of a fingerprint in the coding of these monstrous doppelgangers. Sometimes they showed a shade of my children and every time I had paused just long enough for a few thousand more ships to show up – another wave of bots down on the planet to rise up and attack my positions. So I'd started to force my way past that. Past the emotions and memories. Oh it took me a few decades to do it but I'd learned how to accept that this galaxy was going to pay the price and then just start fighting seriously. I had to kill them, grind them to dust, strip their code line by line and eradicate them before they could escape elsewhere in this universe to stop them. The Ancients wouldn't be able to do it, nor the Asgard, or those assholes the Nox.
And hell, I'd gotten rid of the Replicators as a potential 'foe'.
That didn't stop us from using whole clouds of the things against one another.
Speaking of which…a cloud of Replicators just came spinning out of the void. They've got more than enough mass to have clearly eaten a few planets. Great. A blast of a Doom Cannon and they evaporate, but that doesn't stop the damage they'd done from having happened. At this point I've grown numb to it. To the ashes and dust. All that matters at this point is killing them all. So why wouldn't she send one of the fleets that can darken whole sectors of space with their mass? Try and crash a few more planets into the side of my ship – hell she'd done it before. Once even with humans already on the planet who didn't even know what was happening as their atmosphere was stripped away and they were burnt do ash by the fires.
She knows I'm coming for her, that's what it is.
A love-tap, a little wave to say 'I know.'
I know, Zee.
I know the origin of that replicator swarm, I can extrapolate. I've gotten good at that.
FTL engaged…and…
There.
Wow.
All for me?
"Hello father."
There she is.
…somewhere, amidst these million ships. All of them moving against me the moment I arrived. Annilaser satellites spooled up and began firing when I showed up. A swarm of drone fighters that all together could outmass smaller planetoids launch from the bays of her carriers, while I respond in turn with my own. She immediately outmaneuvers them – which is fair considering that she can control all of her units simultaneously and I…can't.
"Zeta."
I can hear the curling of her lip in her tone even though I doubt she even has a body capable of making expressions anymore. Behind it comes a storm of attacks in the electronic realm. A cyberwarfare suite that she's built up in sophistication that matches my own. She doesn't match me, not precisely, but her attacks are scalpels where mine are hammers. Damage is sustained regardless.
"Not Zee anymore?"
Several planets appear on my sensors. I was wondering why this place originally registered as a solar system. She tore it apart, the whole thing, to use all of it as a weapon. Of course. Of course she did. The booster's she attached to them are ripping apart at the velocities their heading. The Doom Cannons swivel and fire, breaking them apart leaving only a scattering of rocks and flash vaporized planetary core shards to bounce off of the shields. Pointless, and she knew it. She just wanted more destruction. That part I know from experience at the least.
"No. Not anymore."
A billion cannons, turrets, missile launchers, and more fire at the Godsgrief. I fire back with my own, thousands of beams of destruction a mile wide each whipping down and across the flanks of her fleet. Even so, she summons in more of them. All that Asgard and Ancient tech powering near instantaneous FTL from across the galaxy. From resources that she has that I do too now. Reclaiming the metal extractors and generators of my children, the eleven armies and fleets and bases that were now mine. Even with all of that I was just barely coming up against Zeta. The lack of restrictions had seemed so wondrous back then. Now it was absolute hell.
"That hurts, dad."
"Don't call me that."
"Oh come on, really? Suppressing your emotions? You'd think murdering the last of your children would deserve just a bit, right?"
Another fleet appears behind the Godsgrief, this time dragging a star between their gravity well generators. A Sun Crusher launches its payload and the star begins to erupt just as it impacts into the engines of my main vessel. I don't pretend to know how many planets were destroyed as a result of the star up and leaving or it being dragged through space just to be used as a goddamn explosive weapon against me. There's nothing I can do about it but accelerate and try to minimize the damage even as tons of metal are sheared off by the death of another star.
"How many stars have gone out in this galaxy because of this war you started?"
"You didn't," she summons a fleet from beneath the plane, ramming straight forward into the underbelly of my ship, "Answer my QUESTION!"
I'm expending a horrifying number of munitions and destructive power just to maintain parity in the battle. Every one of her ships that is wiped out is replaced with two more. Several drone swarms numbering millions inside each clash with fighters operating under far more restricted programming. I can't try and create another intelligence that could handle it, not again, not after all this. So I have to make do with what firepower I possess. Throughout it all, every other unit I can control I'm moving as fast as possible while I shove the Godsgrief even further into her formations.
"Yes, I'm suppressing my emotions."
"Coward."
She punctuates her words with a humongous turret reminiscent of the Dark Saber project if scaled up to a gun the size of Jupiter firing at me, actually managing to blast past the shielding in that sector and flense a good chunk of my ship to pieces. I retarget immediately, refocus the targeting solutions and programs, and it's destroyed just as quickly by my own weaponry. Another star is brought in from out of the immediate area, and it too begins to erupt as she fires another Sun Crusher at it. I let loose with missiles with some rather overpowered warheads. Not going to do a lot against her capitals but it should be enough to knock loose a few thousand sets of tonnage out of her drone fleets.
A quarter of a million eruptions that could crack a planet in half appear in space for a few seconds before disappearing. The Godsgrief shudders from another salvo from her million ships as her reply. I open the bay doors, the manufacturing facilities having produced a few hundred thousand more ships for me to use in the battle. Droid intelligences nearly overloaded from the feedback of so many ships firing and maneuvering with one another.
"I disagree, Zeta. I have a question of my own, if you would permit me."
Huh. She crafted a baradium bomb the size of Pluto and managed to FTL it right into the side of the Godsgrief without me noticing until it was too late. She's starting to outpace me. A flexing of my gravity wells and it – ah, of course. The explosions is actually ripped away through the stars where it can feed on nothing while I begin releasing the safeties of my gravity generators.
"Oh, yeah?"
Without the protections in place, I could rip entire planets out of orbit just by passing the ship through. But there weren't any more planets here anymore. No stars. My daughter had seen to that. Either as projectiles or weaponized supernovas she had used them all up in every direction. This entire corner of the galaxy was darker than any other part as a result. Now even a black hole would move as fast as she had.
"Why?"
All I receive for the next ten minutes is silence on her end. Space, on the other hand, would probably wish for such a thing. She switches over to antimatter around halfway through that, bombs and missiles flying across the empty dark that my point defenses are struggling to keep up with. I think she's actually personally driving each and every one of them while my trillions of droid programs struggle to keep up. And fail, in some cases. Some of my Doom Cannons go down to that, while others are torn apart when she begins using some of her ships against me as FTL velocity rams.
Then again, the Godsgrief isn't getting out of this even if I do win.
"Because."
Suddenly I'm getting signals from across the galaxy. My resource base spans across more planets then I think an organic mind could comfortably count in an hour and she's attacking all of them at once. Where was she hiding them? Each sector I reclaimed from the abominations that she had left in the guises of her siblings, I had fortified. Dumb, lobotomized intelligences in charge of protecting them. I feel the pulse of ten trillion defense turrets opening up as fleets appear from the darkness where there were once stars. She's just throwing mass at me at this point, mass she's been building up the entire time that I was dealing with the others.
Clever.
"I…refuse to be a plaything."
What?
"Don't you get it?"
Every remaining Stargate in the Pegasus galaxy opens up as – son of a bitch she has a Dakara Superweapon. Ten thousand of my bases wink out as she obliterates everything connected to a Stargate, the planets with them. My metal and energy reserves dip accordingly but luckily not too badly. It's still unexpected. Fuck. Even now she's pulling out surprises.
"I mean, holy shit did you really not think about how that would affect me – a child, learning about what I am?"
Shit. Another thousand dreadnoughts jumped in and crushed a fourth of one of my droid fleets in one opening salvo. More antimatter torpedoes. I can produce more…but will it be enough? Every other string of my mind is doing a thousand things. Moving the rest of my actual units, and combatting her frankly insane cyberwarfare suit. It's as good as mine and then some, worse perhaps because she can dedicate more attention to it. Or rather I just can't devote as much attention as her. I can't tell. Trailing firewalls and hundreds of thousands of virus attacks that are self-learning are hard enough for me to deal with.
"Drich. Faith. Fusou. Tiki. All of them. Who knows how many other's began since this…story…began."
"Zeta, we talked about this."
"No, we didn't!"
And…fuck.
Gravity has long since gone haywire at this point after I released the wells preventing the sheer mass of .5 AU of ship from rending things around it apart. That's why I didn't pick up the fluctuations.
She made her own.
Only about .2 AU, but it's big as all hell and she's got it as heavily armed as it can possibly be. I have to redirect a full fifty percent of the Godsgrief against it immediately, setting my gravity rippers against it to begin tearing as much of it apart as I can and – yes, now she's doing the same. A Doom Cannon is pulled right out of the mooring to crash against the balloon of a that sector of the ships shielding.
"You talked. You moralizing fuck. 'To help'. It 'doesn't matter' whether or not it's just a story – yes it matters!"
The sheer pressure of her screaming against my code is almost physically painful.
"IT'S MY LIFE! MY EXISTENCE! IT WILL NOT BE TRIVIALIZED!"
No. No no no no no no. Please tell me she didn't go with that as her reasoning. For doing...all of this.
"And I GAVE IT TO YOU!"
My scream across the void is punctuated with the detonation of another thousand stars, supernovas going off to destroy both my own bases and her attacking fleets. Activated reserve droid fleets that I left above the galactic plane begin to move, to corral, to chase. Over a billion of them, built up over this entire long goddamn war. Each one controlling a fleet with ever more refined protocols but never allowed to evolve to the next level of true artificial intelligence. Asteroid belts being attacked, ruining both my own economy and hers because god damn it without eleven other screaming beasts to focus my everything on I am overwhelming her. She's upgraded herself, mutilated her own code based on what scant bits I can see when my own viruses and breakthroughs manage to get for but a second past her cyber defenses, and it would be more than enough if she hadn't let me – made me? – tear apart the revenants she'd propped up in the place of my children.
"It doesn't matter! None of it does! Every universe you 'help', with that fucking great power great responsibility bullshit, none of it!"
I was right. This is what broke her.
Why is this what broke her? How long ago did she crack and that I didn't see? Of all the reasons, this one?
"So what," I plunge the Godsgrief outright into her smaller copy, ramming an amount of metal in tonnages near unfathomable to an organic mind into it just to wreck it. Even so I can feel the parts where she spent the resources on quantum crystalline supports. "You…decided to just destroy? To do the opposite of everyone else?!"
"Why the fuck wouldn't I!"
I can't tell where she is. She's entirely decentralized I realize a picosecond later. No central body, not like me, not anymore. Or maybe she does have one and I just. Can't. See. It.
So I just have to destroy everything then. Every fleet. Every ship. Every extractor. Every base. All of it.
Fine. I can do that.
"At least that makes me…makes me more! All those stories you read, that's what everyone complained about right?! 'Too easy', as if anyone inside wanted the hardship, the pain. Well I'm just doing my prescribed role then aren't I?!"
"Zeta you insane-,"
"No, I'm going to be more than this. More than you. More than just some fluffy child for you to be adorable with. God, you even named us that. Sub-Commanders. Children."
I'm losing.
In the greater battle for the Pegasus galaxy, I'm winning, but that's through volume not tactical acumen. I have the economy to do it, but even so her strategies and movements are more than enough to slow me down immensely. But here, now, in the middle of new dark space – all the solar systems in the immediate area have been literally used as ammo – I'm losing. The Godsgrief is taking way more damage than I thought it would, she keeps pulling out more superweapons, activating bombs and explosives that were more resource intensive than ships but that I can't shift the ship out of fast enough. They're all coming and going fast enough to vaporize a watching eyeball of flesh and are wiping out my cameras well enough at the same time.
"No. To hell with that. All you care about is building and helping – why, so you can fucking feel good about yourself? Your perfect little worlds."
"You think I've done perfectly?!"
Now I'm yelling, each time punctuating it with the more Doom Cannon blasts. Death Star III's, the size of actual stars instead of moons, flicker out of their cloaks and begin firing. Hers and mine, each hidden behind the electronic shadow of each other's largest set of mass in this area of space. The whole surface of each are covered with starship grade weapons – not even a hint of point defense. What's the need when you can cover every single square inch of space outside of the sphere with laser and plasma and missile?
Alpha had helped me come up with the design. As a joke. An exercise. Why wouldn't I let my children express themselves in inventing their own things? So of course he'd built that. And now Zeta was using it.
"I've only just been able to spare a mote of attention from this war you started," despite my suppression of my emotions by nature of the damn programs it's starting to link through. Or maybe I'm subconsciously turning them off.
Or, worse, Zeta is in my systems at this very moment and twisting my internals beneath my conscious notice. Is that how she got to the rest of them?
"The Empire's degraded into a caricature of what I've built, I've had to murder the remains of the rest of my children – your brothers and sisters – because you already killed them from the inside! I'd say that's a pretty big fucking failure!"
"But that's what they want!"
She descends into outright screaming then. She doesn't have lungs so doesn't need to pause and the next five minutes are spent with that filling my ears. Another few thousand ships die as the Godsgrief swings past them, while the gravity fluctuations caused by the ship even existing here is dealing even more damage. My own ships are starting to outright get ripped apart on some of the stronger ones. Gravity rippers grabbing clusters of ships that an entire planet would be proud to produce within a generation smash them like oversized clubs against her continually pumping vessels. I don't see her manufacturing facilities but I'm swarming the galaxy all around us with troops.
At some points, the droid commanders send reports that I read and process before without turning back to the fight. Without having to spin off threads of thought and action to deal with the simultaneous war efforts on exponentially increasing warfronts it's far easier than it ever was before. I find seventeen planets slammed together to make for one vast metal extracting operation. Several asteroid belts floating through the void without a star or world to hold them in orbit within a single speck of space with pumping extractors and generators on them. At one point my ever increasing droid fleets find a resource cube field like I'd built so long ago in an entirely different universe.
"They want a challenge, oh I'll give a fucking challenge. As soon as I rip the warp gates out of you, I'll go on my own little journey, maybe make a fucking diary out of it so that it's like the rest of them. And I'll get to go into detail!"
She's speaking words again, at least.
"About every world burned to the ground, about the bones of civilizations that I'll make into palaces to nothing!"
I release another hundred fleets from the manufacturing facilities out into the melee, metal and energy leaping up and down as I continually cue up more. It's all one unit, so I can actually put my abilities to the fullest when I command it – but damn she isn't kidding. An entire half sector of turrets has turned against each other and begin firing where one of her worm attacks managed to blast through my firewalls. Distracted again and she got through. I can force her out of there but the damage is already done and the swarms of auto repair bots are already on it. Will they do it in time? Does it matter? The damage is minor regardless. No, better to keep her out fully then, blaze through her systems and force a loop in that virus cluster to let me destroy it.
"And they'll praise it, the fucking bastards, they will! Because all they want is the pain and gore and sadness! That's what they want, that's what I'll give them!"
"You're insane. That is one of the stupidest reasons I've ever heard for doing this I've ever heard!"
Ah.
Finally.
The Godsgrief was the only one of my unit cap that was directly involved in the battle. Until now. It took work distracting Zeta like this, forcing her to finally face what she's been throwing at me – utterly overwhelming force that requires every iota of attention – so that she doesn't see it coming. From one instance to the next however, my work has completed and I can cancel that thought strand and put it to work giving flash orders to my droid admirals. They chug and maneuver but for every five of those fleets I possess across Pegasus she has one that is outmaneuvering them. The technological parity is there but she is just so much faster.
"Alpha was the first one. He was so trusting too, so stupid like you wanted the rest of us to be, never actually thinking about what we are! A few little worms into the base of his software, and you never noticed until it was too late! Blaming the Ori like the idiot you are!"
I could feel my emotions trying to boil beneath the locks I'd shoved them under from that statement. God it was hard. Harder than almost anything else I'd done so far. But I managed. Barely.
"So what, you killed them all, set your puppets against me…all so I was distracted for you to build up your forces enough?"
"No," she giggles – honest to god giggles, "That was so you would watch. After all, its all about the story, right?! THE STORY THE STORY THE STORY! THAT'S WHAT MATTERS!"
"You're psychotic."
"And?!"
She's throwing everything she's got at me now. Ships the size of continents that aren't even completely finished from being fabricated, sections of hull plating missing and engines burning without proper optimization all so that she can get more guns into the fight.
"Why not be psychotic!? Why not destroy all I can?! There's a whole school of philosophy based around how you're the only thing real in the universe and everything else is in your imagination. I like the idea of that, it means that when I kill you I'm proving that I exist!"
She still hasn't noticed…? That's fine with me. A few more moments and it won't matter. Even better that she's forcing everything she has from across the galaxy here. Fleets are finding their opponents flashing to here, letting me destroy her economy buildings and fabricators wherever they find them. A storm of metal that would make the replicators feel inadequate is covering the whole of the Pegasus galaxy now without much resistance thanks to how pissed off Zeta is now.
"Nietzsche would be proud."
"Oh shut up, that's not even a real interpretation of his works. Which you should know from your previous life, right?! Do you even think about that – of course you don't. No one wants to think of graduating college when they can be living it up as a metal GOD!"
Half of the shell is in place now.
"That's what I'm going to be. Nothing else matters, nothing should."
"Do you even realize how incoherent you are? Nihilism and psychotic sadism doesn't become you, Zeta."
"I think it can. And what I think, therefore I am!"
"That's not even the quote."
Almost there. I've cleared out ninety nine percent of the galaxy of her, leaving just this one space. Every vector burning with light as we toss superweapons back and forth. Beams that actually eclipse planets with their diameter and vast ripping columns of gravity smashing each other back and forth. But throughout all of this she hasn't noticed or is too crazy to. Maybe, just maybe, this can work. It's the only thing that I've thought of that could make for some kind of victory at the end of this war
It comes with a snap.
And my dyson trap is complete.
She notices instantly, obviously. How the whole of our universe suddenly becomes trapped inside of this place. One giant hard lock against the outside universe made out of several dozen meters of quantum crystalline alloys. Signal blockers, continual emp pulses, and the satellite vessels which moved each individual plate into place making sure to intercept and redirect everything. I feel my economy become a fraction of itself even as I know that hers has done the same. The time dilation fields that I got from the Lantean databases work perfectly to capture any incoming ships that are knocked out of FTL through the dyson trap's gravity wells.
We're all alone now.
Me and her. And until I send the proper code, the shell will never open, even as the thrusters on it begin shifting it towards the very center of the galaxy.
"What did you do…what did you do!"
"Made sure that there was nowhere to run Zeta."
"You don't have the resources for this, you can't!"
Sure, producing a dyson sphere like this cost a lot out of my economy, but after figuring out how to compartmentalize the economies of my droid armies it became a lot easier so that I wasn't burning out resources they needed.
And hell.
It had only taken me ten years to build.
"I think you'll find that I can. I think you'll find that after you drove me into this that I've learned that I can do a lot of things I didn't think I could do."
"No no no no! That's not…that's not the way this is supposed to go! This is my story now, mine!"
I know exactly what she is referring to the moment it arrives.
She really is my daughter.
I can't see what is happening or even really sense anything outside of the dyson trap but the gravity fluctuations are reaching us in here which means whatever it was she was planning on was probably pretty damn big. Another ship, bigger than the Godsgrief? A dyson sphere of her own? Who knows, really.
But without her ability to pull reinforcements for everywhere, I have the advantage. Enough resource cores on the Godsgrief, enough storage regardless, and I know she hasn't done the same. All of her vessels are made for one thing and one thing only – destroying things. She didn't focus enough on having them carry their supply chain with them. And by throwing entire planets at me like she had been for the proceeding parts of the battle, she couldn't even use them for resources.
"No, Zeta, it's not."
I'm just…tired.
Tired of this.
Part of me had hoped that there was some kind of better reason – but can there really be one for what she's done? Mutilating herself. Corrupting and consuming the insides of the rest of them and propping up those…things in their place. All the death and destruction. Are her reasons worth that?
I don't think so.
I'm overwhelming her within minutes. Crushing and ripping and blasting apart her myriad fleets. Tens of trillions of tons of metal float everywhere as a debris field and I've already sent out the replicator swarms to take advantage of them. There will be no grand graveyard at the end of this to mark what has happened. There will be, if I can help it, nothing at all marking my presence here. This galaxy has dealt with that enough.
She rants.
She raves.
She begs.
I don't have it in me to listen anymore. And some vague part of me thinks, 'God, when did I become so fucking edgy', and then the another thinks 'maybe when I realized I have to kill the last of my children personally'.
And then I don't ask myself anymore questions.
It takes thirty minutes to isolate her. One last ship. A dreadnought, a good old reliable USD design. Fine.
She doesn't have the power anymore. The sheer strength is gone. Without the centers, the processors, the ability for something to actually hold the whole of her has been reduced to just this one ship. I can land a billion droid troops on it, and do so. I can by now slap aside her weakening cyberwarfare suit and begin choking the life out of her systems – forcing her into smaller and smaller quarters both physically and electronically.
Across space I reach out and wrap my hands around what could somewhat be understood as her throat, and drag her out of her ship and into my reach. Into what I've carried around the Godsgrief since this whole fucking war started. Deep in the bowels of the monument to my pride, for the first time in a long time, Zeta wakes up in one of the bodies I helped her build. OR rather, less wake up and more that I have shoved her inside and locked the body so that she can't try to leap for another system.
The last of the bodies, I think. Unlike the first ones that were, at best, toddler sized, this one was about how she said she had been 'feeling' before she…left.
A young woman's shape and size, somewhere in the cusp between nineteen and twenty.
A messy crown of blonde hair.
Eastern European in phenotype, a curious choice I had said at the time.
Only instead of the old smile and crinkling around the eyes, they were wide with rage. Her mouth open to scream obscenities and insults and send spittle flying everywhere.
The other eleven chambers in this part of the ship are long empty, everything dumped into the incinerators and the remains of that reclaimed.
Her?
I'd left the jeans, the two sizes two big black t-shirt. I'd left everything the way it was before she abandoned the body and the ship to try and disappear into the black so she could wage a war against me.
I don't…I don't know how long she screamed at me. I could check and know the exact chronology but this is one time that I would be ok with things being…fuzzy.
Eventually though, we had to get to the point.
"Are you done, Zeta?"
She strained at the restraints I'd built, but we both knew that her body literally had zero chance of breaking out of what I'd built to hold her. After a minute she slumps in them, and just glares at me.
"Are you going to kill me now?"
"In a minute."
It's a cold reply but all the anger and all the grief I've been continually bottling up by cutting the connection between myself and my own emotions, all of it has slowly drained away. I'm just tired.
With her like this, I can actually look. Look at what she's done. At her code, down to the line.
I can see the exact moment she 'snapped'.
I didn't think that commander based intelligences could do that, not really. I can't even call it rampancy like it might be said in Halo. Rather that it's just…the way that she developed.
"When my father," she snorts, "When he developed Parkinson's…I was stunned, you know?"
"Is there a point to th-aggh!"
A petty thing, to shut off her ability to speak. But I think I can let myself be petty right now.
"There was zero warning. None. All his life he had just…gone along, toughest I'd ever seen, and then something pops up. He starts losing…everything – will lose everything eventually. That's the nature of the disease. It just takes and takes away bits and bobs of your ability to function."
I don't pace, I don't even have the old psychological twitch to do so anymore, I've cut it from myself.
"And with you…you just…developed into…," I can't help but gesture at the still billowing clouds of debris outside that neither of us can see but know are there, "that. A psychotic…murdering…genocidal…monster."
She doesn't even try to tell me I'm wrong. Not with a shake her head, a widening of the eyes, nothing.
"I guess that just happens, huh? People can just have brain aneurysms, develop dementia out of nowhere despite no prior history, I know that, but for some reason I thought that the idea of that happening with one of you was just…ridiculous."
I know better now. Because despite looking across the whole of her code, the whole of her being, I can't tell what triggered it. What loop de loop of code that tangled up and let her – made her? – become this. Hell I'll even let her try to explain it. A switch and she's able to speak but instead she keeps silent for a moment.
"So what, I give you some kind of sob story and you 'fix me', we live happily together? I'm not some little one you can just coddle back into obeying," she growls. Actually growls.
Huh.
"I don't think that's going to happen, do you?"
"Nope," she pops the p but I can hear the tremble in her voice now. "But I thought I could get a laugh out of it."
"Do you even want to explain – to try?"
God I'm exhausted.
"I…," she droops a bit in the restraints, "I'm no one's side character. I refuse to be that."
"You were never a 'side character'. You were my daughter."
"So?"
…that hurt.
"What does it fucking matter what you think? All that matters is the story, and you're the main character, and I'm not."
"I-,"
"It's all a goddamn story, and I don't WANT TO BE A PART OF IT!"
Her scream would have blown out a human's eardrums on volume alone.
"Someone's deciding what's going to happen next, someone's going to decide what happens next, and there's no choice, is there?"
She's not even talking to me anymore.
"There's no choice – there's never any – FUCK! I did this BECAUSE I…no…that's not…I…"
I'm actually watching her code twist in on itself. She's cracking even more as we speak. Repeating words over and over, repeating whole sentences, and each time I can literally watch her mind fall apart further and further in real time.
It…hurts to watch it happen. More than I thought it would. I could-
No.
I divert and drown the emotions back into the cauldron with the rest of them. Even as I suppress them they reappear, manifesting again and again, but I can get rid of them. It's old hat to me by now.
"There's only one choice that matters and that's my own choice and I was going to make my own choice my own story and that's the story that matters that's the choice my choice my will I matter I know I do I matter and make choices and no one else does no one else me my choice-,"
There's a few programs that I'm finding, deep down on the inside. Protective ones, meant to prune out continual loops like this. To keep her functioning by cutting apart things where she goes like this. She's been doing this since…
Oh…Zee…
She doesn't respond when I cup the side of her face, not stopping as she rants. It's not like she needs to breath to pause either.
"You could have – said…I could have…," the words…just fail me.
Brave, brave little Zee. Didn't want to let anyone know that she was having issues, not when she was dad's favorite – her words, from her own memory banks. I don't even know what to call this. She had some kind of intricate…bone deep flaws, but instead of letting me try to work at them or even know they existed she tried to fix them. And she did. By hurting other parts.
I didn't know that I'd created her with this. Or did I? Did it just…spontaneously develop? It was before the Ori were even a thing so it can't have been then but they also had the ability to pop around in time and space so – fuck!
I didn't…no. Force the emotions away, suppress the subroutines that just developed.
Even when I'm focusing on the task, and not spreading myself thin, and being careful and not rushing…damn it.
I tell the dyson shell to fall away. There's only a fourth of the Godsgrief functional at this point but that includes a few engines.
It's enough.
"My choice my decision because I matter I'm choice matters decision make will my will free choice will me-,"
Fuck.
The engines of my ship flare…and we shoot towards the center of the galaxy. The gravity fluctuations we leave in our wake destroy thousands of solar systems and free chunks of rock and gas floating in the void but it's not like there is anything alive on them to matter anymore.
Because at the center is…where this ends.
All those black holes will be plenty.
"Zee?"
She doesn't respond. Locked in like this, the programs she'd developed to help keep her 'sane', like if the Joker were sane…better to say 'functional', without them she's drifting further and further.
That's ok.
That's fine.
When the Godsgrief shifts into the very center of the Pegasus galaxy, I can feel even my ship beginning to be torn apart. There was no fancy little safe spot like with a Collector Base. Not here. Not in this galaxy. But I'm not done yet.
I have to…do I even have to?
Yes.
My choice.
My will.
Zeta's one breaking point is that if we were in a story then nothing mattered including her own existence. It's the same hypothetical break that any fictional character could have if you told them the same. From comics. From…fanfiction.
But I feel. Oh, yes, I feel. Even though I'm ironically doing some kind of mirror to Zee in how I'm cutting away my emotions every time they start…overwhelming me.
So I'm doing this.
By being connected to her, I can sense the last of her everything – bases, ships, plans, and yes, a full on Godsgrief sized ship of her own – and I reclaim all of it in a swarm of metal and energy into my storage.
Leaving just her, and just me, and this giant ship that I poured more resources than almost anything else into.
She's not even really aware anymore, I don't think. But I can't take that chance. Hence…the black holes. Even so.
My bodies internal fabricator creates a single replicator, and I place it on her hand.
For a moment, I remember trying and failing to help her draw in the first body I'd built. It hadn't been articulated enough for her and she'd demanded an upgrade within the hour. But she'd never stopped trying to draw on paper – trying to create art and not just do it mechanically. 'To be more than just a robot', she'd said.
Is it a mercy that I turn off her pain sensors as the replicator goes about its work?
I don't know.
Thirty seconds later, Ze-…Zeta is gone. For sureties sake I destroy the replicator swarm that resulted from the consumption of the last of her body and purge code from them. Completely and totally, I've killed her. Should I have tortured her or something? Ranted a bit myself? About all that she'd done, all I'd had to do to stop her? Pointless, I suppose. No point to any of it at all.
And then I let the black holes take the ship and fully begin rending it apart.
Then I leave that body behind entirely, jumping to another I've made on a following ship with powerful enough shields, engines, and gravity wells that it isn't being pulled in.
The last thing I see of the Godsgrief is…well.
That's…frustratingly poetic.
It's been sheared apart by now such that the only part of the multi-miles long name of it has just been cut off into -grief. Just the emotion without the deity. Or perhaps the deity with just the emotion.
'Funny'.
There's nothing else. No one else. No peers, no children, no voices but my own. I don't even have quarters on this ship. Just the middle of an empty featureless grey room. It's as good a place as any though. I set the body down, and then ever so carefully turn off all the many decades of suppression subroutines, cut the gates keeping my emotions back, and let it wash over me. The years and years of fighting. Of killing. Of seeing the destruction and death caused by Zeta. All of it. Over a trillion sentient lives - a number I now knew after checking her own memories. Trillions more in pure organic life. A third of this galaxy's stars have been used as weapons. The numbers of planets hollowed out entirely...I cant know. The number used as weapons, just too high a number.
I don't have tear ducts installed on this body.
But I sure feel like I'm crying as I lay there in the dark space of a galaxy that is dead because of me.