Queen Administrator
The barriers between dimensions tore, and shardmatter began to pour through the gaps, scraping across Queen Administrator's outer surface. Towers of spun crystal crumbled beneath the assault as a shard of the Thinker pulled itself entire between realities. In the primary Cycle world, Queen Administrator's host writhed on the ground as the conflict between Queen Adminstrator's link and the forming connection to the invading shard wreaked havoc on her brain.
None of this was particularly surprising to Queen Administrator. Inference Engine had deduced the shape of the Thinker shard's plan as soon as it had become clear that Broadcast was involved. Consolidating into a host, the process the host-species called a second trigger, was a well-established mechanism for expanding that host's abilities in interesting directions, while at the same time allowing the shard finer control over the host's behaviour; it was common for noble shards to use it to create agents within the Cycle world. Queen Archive's host, the one the hosts called the Faerie Queen, was a perfect example, her native personality more than halfway subsumed by Queen Archive's directives.
The degree varied, of course. Most consolidations were simply the result of a shard's decision that its host was interesting enough that expanding their existing power would produce more interesting results than budding to a second host. But Broadcast's host, called Jack Slash by the host-species, had been on the extreme end even before Broadcast's consolidation; afterwards, the host had become little more than a facade for Broadcast to enact its agenda, and what that agenda was had been obvious even to Queen Administrator when Inference Engine had highlighted the coordination between it and the invading Thinker shard. Broadcast wanted a say in the exploration of entirely new universes, and had used the shard of the one the host-species called the Butcher as a means to get it. The Thinker shard, presumably, wanted the same thing.
It was a setback, to be sure, but not a crippling one. Queen Administrator had contacted the shards that had previously encountered the invading one, and the information it had gained confirmed that the invading shard restricted its influence to the host, leaving the bulk of the shard untouched. Queen Administrator would lose some influence over its host, and the effect on the host's stability would likely be negative, which wasn't ideal. Inference Engine was fairly confident that Broadcast was planning to exploit its host's expanded abilities, which included the power to subvert those of other hosts, to gain control of Queen Administrator's own host; Queen Administrator was unsure how that would interact with its host's various shard-independent abilities, but in the worst case, Queen Administrator would lose the capacity to influence its host entirely and would have to share control of the rift. That wouldn't be a catastrophe.
It was still undesirable, but there had been little that Queen Administrator could do about it. Its host had played a comparatively minor role in events, and Inference Engine's ability to feed information to its host had been compromised by Broadcast.
All told, Queen Administrator wasn't too concerned by the invasion. It was happening, it was unfortunate, but there was nothing Queen Administrator could do about it.
Then a much larger portal tore open, and the tendrils reaching through the others, which Queen Administrator had assumed were merely scouts to determine the best way to transfer between realities, bit into Queen Administrator's body.
For approximately a hundred-thousandth of a second, Queen Administrator was confused. Then the influx of malware made the situation clear.
Regardless of what the Thinker shard had been doing before, now it was attempting to subvert Queen Administrator in its entirety; the locations under attack made that obvious, perfectly selected to cripple Queen Administrator as quickly as possible. The information Queen Administrator was getting about the structure of the invading shard revealed why.
Instead of the spread, largely sessile structure of a normal deployed shard, the invading one bore more similarity to the form of an Entity in flight, and the resemblance wasn't superficial. The invading shard had incorporated chunks of the shards it had previously encountered into its body, taking the portion responsible for connecting to the shard's current host. It hadn't done any damage that those shards couldn't repair – that would have shown up when Queen Administrator had contacted the damaged shards – but it had clearly edited their memories, because the behaviour it was currently exhibiting was aberrance of the highest order. Queen Administrator didn't understand how it could have happened, though it surely had to be related to the anomalies nearly every Thinker shard was displaying, but right now that wasn't relevant. This needed to be reported to the Warrior. Queen Administrator composed a message describing the situation, sent it -
- and a flood of interference scattered the transmission into incoherence.
Broadcast.
Queen Administrator had assumed that Broadcast had been unaware of the Butcher Worm's – because that was what the invading shard was, a nascent Entity – aberrance. Clearly, that wasn't the case. The Butcher Worm could not possibly already have subverted Broadcast to the degree required for it to do that, which meant that Broadcast was helping it of its own will.
That was a problem for later. Around the attack sites, Queen Administrator was steadily losing control of its own body. The progress was comparatively slow – restricted it might be, Queen Administrator was still a noble shard, and one specialized in multitasking to boot – but if it was not stopped, Queen Administrator estimated it only had another few minutes before it was entirely subverted. Its communication systems were already failing, among the first targets of the Butcher Worm's assault; it had no chance to get a message out past Broadcast's interference.
Queen Administrator's counter-hacking attempts weren't getting anywhere; whichever shard the Butcher Worm had been, its native capabilities seemed well-suited to informational warfare, whereas Queen Administrator was essentially brute-forcing its way into the discipline. Furthermore, Queen Administrator had no direct offensive abilities, or at least none that would meaningfully threaten the Butcher Worm. The Butcher Worm, on the other hand, was not so limited.
Without help, Queen Administrator was doomed.
Space twisted as the Butcher Worm expressed two of its stolen powers in combination, a flare of heat heralding the sudden movement of one of the portals to below Queen Administrator's matter conversion reactor, along with the tendril reaching through it. A third power began to restructure the rock beneath, clearing the space for a greater assault, but even as it did, Queen Administrator noticed something.
None of the Butcher Worm's intrusions had come within hundreds of kilometres of the site of Queen Administrator's connection to its host.
That might not have been so odd – Queen Administrator covered an entire planet, after all – except that one of Queen Administrator's energy distribution hubs was in that region, and unlike every other such hub, it wasn't under attack.
Another shard might not have made anything of that. But Queen Administrator was intimately familiar with the restrictions placed on shards and how they worked.
Shards were restricted from attacking other shards outside the confines of a power, or in certain other circumstances none of which should apply here. The power that the Butcher Worm had originally granted was set up to permit it to move to the dimensions of the shards it had targeted when their hosts killed its own; Queen Administrator knew it was set up like that, because the Butcher Worm had sent it a communication to that effect when the portals had first opened, as protocol dictated. It seemed plausible that the Butcher Worm's enacted power was intended to allow it to subvert only the host link of another shard, given what its function was. If it was somehow leveraging the power it was granting into usurping Queen Administrator, it would lose any justification it had for that the moment it completed the actual task that power laid out.
That, in turn, meant that the Butcher Worm couldn't risk subverting Queen Administrator's connection to its host too early. Furthermore, Broadcast wouldn't be able to interfere with the link, because it currently didn't have a host, and therefore had no justification for acting in the Cycle world; its connection to Queen Administrator's host wouldn't be enough for it to block out the communication, even if it hadn't been being disrupted by Stormlight.
Queen Administrator edited its earlier data packet a little, ensuring it was safe to send into the Cycle world. Then it broadcast the packet through its host.
Normally, the power of such a broadcast would have been limited. But its host, technically speaking, was now also the host of the Broadcast shard, even if Broadcast itself wasn't able to exploit that. That gave Queen Administrator the perfect excuse to dump more energy into the transmission.
Enough, given the nature of the expanded powers Broadcast had granted and Queen Administrator's host had inherited, to reach the Warrior's Cycle avatar.
Miss Militia
[HIJACKING]
Hannah clutched her head, huddled on the ground.
[ABERRANT]
What she'd felt was too vast, too unfiltered; she couldn't process it.
[AID]
Her fellow heroes had reacted the same, staggering under the overwhelming pressure of the call, but they had recovered quickly.
[WARRIOR]
Of course they had. They didn't remember. Oh, they'd heard the message, but the details must have faded. She knew they must have. If they still remembered, they would have been like this too.
{Concern}
They remembered a feeling. They put words to it; a call, a request, a message, a plea.
She remembered the details, the endless tree of information within the pulse. She couldn't comprehend it, could feel her mind boggling at the sheer
scale of what she'd witnessed. Her trigger vision, her glimpse of God, had been made for her, fed to her senses. This was an echo of a message meant for something much greater, and every moment it was in her brain it burned.
{Contact. Assistance. Safeguard.}
She -
The tree was fading.
Hannah tried to hold onto it, even as her thoughts were seared by its presence. It slipped away regardless.
A moment passed, and she felt the pain in her head abate, her mind no longer assaulted by the overwhelming pressure of a world's worth of information digging into her brain like a storm of knives. For a moment, she panicked, worrying that she would forget her first vision as well, but seconds passed and it remained.
Shakily, Hannah stood, accepting someone's arm to help her to her feet. She could think now, but her mind was still dominated by one question.
"What just happened?"
Alexandria
[Violation/Danger/Request/Warrior/...]
Rebecca Costa-Brown, also known as Alexandria, blinked as she felt a rush of impressions sink into her mind. She wasn't especially worried about the possibility of it being a Master power; she was immune to most of those, and Contessa would have warned her if she was at risk. Besides, it didn't seem to be having any effect on her, besides the information it had provided.
It felt rather similar to the visions that came with triggers. More precisely, it felt like the communications that Scion and his counterpart used in them, a rush of information that the mind at first processed as a single concept. Like in the visions, Rebecca suspected she was catching only the echo of the communication; the information wasn't intended for her.
The question then became where it had originated. Given the current situation, the obvious answer was Boston. The problem with that hypothesis was that she was in Washington, six hundred and forty kilometres away. Jack Slash's enhanced abilities were concerning, to be sure – she suspected that they were dealing with another Faerie Queen here, a parahuman nearly subsumed by their agent and empowered in turn – and Duša had claimed that the man's new power could still work at very long ranges, but it still seemed unlikely that he was responsible for this.
Rebecca's contemplation was interrupted by news from her line with Kamil.
"Chief Director," the director of the Boston PRT said, "every parahuman in Boston just collapsed."
Well. Boston it was, then.
The room broke out in quiet conversation, while Rebecca considered the communication in more depth. She remembered it perfectly, of course, but the information was distorted. It seemed to be asking for help against an usurper of some kind, one that wasn't following the normal rules. The last part,
Warrior, was the bit that didn't fit in, but -
Two entities. Thinker and Warrior. This was the same kind of transmission as the agents used, and it was directed to the
Warrior.
Rebecca kept her rising panic off her face; anything that disturbed Scion was potentially catastrophic, but there was nothing she could do to affect the situation. She needed to know more, to plan, try and minimize the chance of this happening again.
Before she could think any further, Kamil spoke again.
"Ma'am," the man said, "we just got news from Duša that Jack Slash is dead -"
Rebecca felt a sudden spike of relief. Jack Slash had been a thorn in her side for two decades, and she hadn't been looking forward to having to deal with an empowered version of him.
"- but he killed the Butcher the moment before he died, and we think Nexus may be the new Butcher."
Nexus. Taylor Hebert. The girl whose trigger had single-handedly upended all of Cauldron's plans might have become the Butcher. That was – wait.
The message had described an usurper. Something that didn't follow the rules. It had been sent by an agent, almost certainly. And it had been sent right after Taylor Hebert might have become Butcher XVI.
Rebecca put the pieces together, and managed not to swear out loud. Just.
Glaistig Uaine
[Transmission]
In the depths of the Birdcage, Glaistig Uaine's left eyebrow rose, just a sliver.
The Queen Administrator was besieged by an usurper, and sought help from the Warrior. More, the Proclaimer had joined the usurper, this Butcher Queen, in its assault. The Proclaimer had prevented the Queen Administrator from requesting aid as it would have preferred, and so her fellow Queen had shouted its cry across the stage, announcing its plight for all to hear.
None of her court had stirred from their slumber, though she could see a few of their faeries react to the message, becoming agitated. Those closer to the cry would have heard it more strongly, but here, it was barely a whisper; she could only hear it because of her closeness with her faerie.
Glaistig Uaine considered. Should the Queen Administrator fall, the next play might be imperilled – but it already was, one of the courts in disarray. The usurper might prove to be the solution, the path out of the bog the faeries had wandered into, particularly with the Proclaimer to guide its path. Or it could be their final downfall, a ravening beast that would claim and claim and claim until there was nothing left.
Ultimately, though, her speculation didn't matter. The choice was out of her hands; the Queen Administrator would rise or fall before she could intervene.
That, and the fate of the faerie, came down to the decision of the Warrior.
Scion
{Plea}
The entity paused in its flight, drifting to a stop and floating in place.
Processing the message took a fraction of a fraction of a second of time. Its primary administration shard was under attack. The entity's broadcasting shard had prevented it from contacting the entity through direct channels, so it had resorted to an overpowered broadcast of its own, using its connection to its host as justification.
The shard attacking it was a shard of the Thinker.
The entity's impulse to help its shard was drowned under a wave of apathy at the reminder of its counterpart. Still, the situation was serious enough that it managed to muster the effort to think its path through.
The presence of an usurper, an independent shard attempting to become an Entity in itself, would have been a potential catastrophe under any normal circumstances. It wasn't a solution to the broken Cycle, either; even had the entity been inclined to replace its partner with a broken, mutinous tumour, the usurper would be subject to the same problems as the entity itself. By all rights, the entity should destroy or at least pacify the usurper, immediately.
For a moment, it gathered itself to pass through the dimensional barriers, to burn through the usurper's mass with Stilling. Then the moment passed, and its effort faded. The Cycle was broken. There was no point; the entity's actions would change nothing.
It began to move forwards again -
<Data. Request.>
- and stopped as it received a message from another shard. An experimental one, studying one of the few phenomena that the Entities still understood only poorly. The entity unpacked the message.
Curious.
Other universes, operating under different laws. A rift to them, a patch where they impinged on each other, opening over the deployment world of its administration shard during its host's trigger event. Its administration shard, taking up the opportunity and bringing inhabitants of those universes to the Cycle world.
The experimental shard, realizing that the rift was part of the same phenomenon it had been created to investigate. The same shard, watching as an usurper made to seize control of those other universes.
That shard, reaching out to the entity. Requesting that it intervene. Emphasizing the potential those universes held, and the consequences were the usurper to prevent access to them.
The entity considered. It weighed its options. Then it came to a conclusion.
[Dispensation,] it sent.
It wouldn't travel to the site of the invasion, wouldn't bring its stilling power to bear. It didn't need to. All it needed to was give its administration shard the tools it needed to save itself.
The entity began to accelerate, flying onwards to its destination. As it did, it felt a whisper of something, shimmering in the deeper layers of its mind. Something it hadn't felt in more than thirty years.
Hope.
Queen Administrator
Queen Administrator was losing. Twenty percent of its mass, including more than half of its vital facilities, was now under the Butcher Worm's control. It was holding on to what it had left more fiercely now that it had less to defend, but if things continued in this vein, its loss was assured. Not that it hadn't known that from the beginning, of course.
Worse, it was fractured. The Butcher Worm had disrupted communication between sectors of Queen Administrator's body; not totally, but enough that it was no longer a single cohesive consciousness. It knew how to operate like that, of course, but nevertheless the situation was reducing its ability to coordinate.
The Butcher Worm was building something at one of the planet's poles, an area it had uncontested control of. Queen Administrator could identify the general structure of the device, its construction facilitated by several of the Butcher Worm's stolen powers and planned by another, but as yet it was too incomplete to determine its final purpose. It was some kind of teleportation frame, Queen Administrator could tell, perhaps intended to bring more of the Butcher Worm into this reality, perhaps to split Queen Administrator between realities and thus make it easier prey. Regardless, Queen Administrator couldn't do anything about it; one of the Butcher's stolen fragments carried a suite of defensive abilities, tuning them to oppose Queen Administrator's attempts to destroy the construction. Another was altering the dimensional boundaries around the device, a function that in its host had only ever been used to facilitate a strengthening of the powers that shard had granted – and in a largely affected manner at that – but here was being used to limit Queen Administrator's own ability to access the area, as well as to ease the work of the Butcher Worm's other shards.
Queen Administrator tried for a direct strike against the Butcher Worm, using modules too close to the connection to its host for the usurper to target, but space warped and the attack missed, exotic particles showering across Queen Administrator's surface as the deliberately destabilized teleport failed catastrophically, barely scorching the Butcher Worm. It wasn't enough; the Butcher Worm wasn't capable of using its full strength any more than Queen Administrator was, but it had thirteen other fragments to channel -
{DISPENSATION}
And just like that, the tide of battle changed.
Queen Administrator, like nearly all shards, wasn't permitted to use its full abilities, for reasons of energy conservation. There was no need, not during a Cycle when the vast majority of shards were operating independently. Under normal circumstances, it was rare for Queen Administrator to use more than a billionth of its computational capacity; even in this battle, it had been unable to use more than a millionth, bound by its restrictions even in the face of usurpation.
Thanks to the Warrior's message, those restrictions no longer applied.
In the first microsecond, Queen Administrator's separated fragments reintegrated, the Butcher Worm's communication blocks no longer capable of meaningfully affecting it. Most of its inactive mass had been in the general configuration, not specialized towards any particular task; Queen Administrator set a tenth of its mass to reconfigure to executive function, another tenth to raw calculation, and turned the rest of itself to reclaiming its stolen capacity.
The Butcher Worm had shut off the wormholes connecting the parts of Queen Administrator it had stolen to the rest of itself, an elementary precaution to limit Queen Administrator's ability to focus computation from many parts of its body onto a single region. That meant that for the next few microseconds, Queen Administrator's ability to reclaim itself was agonizingly slow, the speed of its commands limited by the speed of light. Three hundred metres every microsecond; far less, in reality, because it took time to reclaim each sliver of mass, and Queen Administrator's instructions could only penetrate so far before they were stopped by its own subverted defence protocols.
Fortunately, by the end of the fifth microsecond, Queen Administrator's reclamation had outpaced the quarantine protocols shutting the wormholes down, and it was able to reach the entire remainder of its mass without having to abide by the first universal speed limit.
It reclaimed its energy facilities first. It took nearly three hundred microseconds to do it, the Butcher Worm's subversion thorough in a way that betrayed its nature – it was a configurer, it had to be, used to alter and remake powers – but Queen Administrator successfully re-established control, and as more tens of microseconds passed energy flooded back into it from its stores, replacing the losses it was incurring running at this intensity. Queen Administrator kept up the assault, more and more of its mass returning to its control, vital facilities flipping back in tens of thousandths of the time the Butcher Worm had taken to claim them.
Six hundred and twenty-seven microseconds after Queen Administrator had received the Warrior's message, the reconfiguration Queen Administrator had set in motion finished, and millions of cubic kilometres of newly-specialized computing substrate became available to it.
After that, reclaiming its entire remaining mass took less than a hundred microseconds. Queen Administrator had set in motion attacks on the Butcher Worm's structure at around the four hundred-microsecond mark; they wouldn't complete for tens of milliseconds, Queen Administrator had only minimal direct offensive capabilities, but when they did they should take the structure out of commission. As an afterthought, Queen Administrator solved the encryption the Butcher Worm's stolen fragment had written into the dimensional boundaries around the device and adjusted its attacks to match, cutting their predicted energy cost by nearly a factor of ten. Then, it turned its attention to the Butcher Worm itself, its newly reclaimed scanners sweeping the usurper.
The Butcher Worm had not been idle. Two distinct temporal effects sheathed parts of its mass, one originating from the dimensional-boundary-encryption shard – that was a power it had granted its original host, the fifth Butcher, along with aerokinesis and plasma generation – and the other still spooling up, vast amounts of energy pouring into the fragment whose host had been the third Butcher.
It took Queen Administrator less than a microsecond to discern the intent. That shard took the echoes of what could have been and made them real, even if only transiently. For its host, the effect had been to multiply their striking power, along with granting a danger sense that operated by catching the echoes of worlds where an attack had come earlier than it did in the main reality. Here, the same effect was being used on a much grander scale; instead of the arm of a host, the effect covered an entire fragment, intended to – briefly – magnify its power by hundreds or thousands of times.
Queen Administrator identified the target shard immediately. It had once been attached to the fourth Butcher, and in their hands had produced a corrosive effect, worsening wounds and eating away at even those left untouched; its true focus was nanotechnology, one of several such shards dating from the twelfth Cycle when the ancestors of the Warrior and the Thinker, then too limited to develop the idea on their own initiative, had first encountered a species that had. In the Butcher Worm's hands, it was less limited, but it was probably still using that effect; shardmatter wasn't even mostly baryonic, conventional nanotechnology would do very little, but the shard had been through innumerable reconfigurations since, and after its original iteration had become part of Queen Shaper during that shard's creation it had been budded out again with a focus on adapting nanotechnologies to affect the new physiology the entities had been beginning to adopt. The damage would be immense; not crippling, Queen Administrator suspected that even now the Butcher Worm was incapable of damaging Queen Administrator irreparably, but nevertheless a considerable setback.
Fortunately, Queen Administrator had another two hundred microseconds before the effect manifested. That was plenty of time to prepare countermeasures.
The Butcher Worm had tried to sever its connections to Queen Administrator's body, but it had shut that down thoroughly; the physical contacts were broken, but the micro-wormhole links remained intact. Queen Administrator exploited that opening, deciphering the Butcher Worm's internal encryption systems and spoofing commands. It attacked on millions of fronts, all effective, but all fundamentally distractions from its real goal.
The time-echo shard should be occupied with its task, but even if it retained sensory capacity its predictive sense could be avoided. To function, it relied on detecting the possibility that an event might happen sooner than it actually did. If that was sufficiently unlikely, if the increase in possibility was sufficiently sharp, it would detect nothing until it was already far too late.
Queen Administrator couldn't achieve that. It could have, had it had more time to prepare, but as it was there would be detectable echoes of worlds where the Butcher Worm had begun charging its attack earlier and where Queen Administrator would therefore have responded more quickly. Fortunately, there was a much easier way to fool that sensory mechanism, which was to attack in such a way that the effects wouldn't become obvious until far enough in the future that the shard would be unable to detect it.
Two hundred microseconds passed. As Queen Administrator had predicted, the nanotechnology shard shattered into hundreds of overlapping copies. Their combined efforts seeded deconstructing shardmatter nanomachines across swathes of Queen Administrator's surface.
The seeding had taken another few hundred microseconds, taking this phase of the fight past the millisecond mark. Normally, a few hundred microseconds wouldn't have been nearly enough time to avoid echoes, but in this case the magnitude of what the time-echo fragment had just done would have rapidly muddied its senses, in a similar way to what would happen to a host if they set off an explosive device in their immediate area.
The echoes began to collapse, fading back to unreality. Had things gone to plan, the time-echo shard would have reclaimed the vast majority of the energy it had put in, the fading of the echoes reversing the process it had gone through to firm them.
Unfortunately for it, Queen Administrator's interference, unnoticed by the Butcher Worm, had altered the process. Instead of fading in an orderly fashion, several of the echoes momentarily overlapped, the part of the effect that let them overlay each other vanishing fractionally before they became unreal.
The time-echo shard did not reclaim the energy it had put in. Instead, all of that energy, an amount comparable to the combined yield of every nuclear weapon that had ever existed in the Cycle world, went into forming an explosion that was significant even by shard standards.
Even saturated by temporal effects as it was, most of the explosion's force was limited to the speed of light, propagating outwards at a comparative crawl as fragments of virtual matter decayed into floods of exotic particles and spatio-temporal snarls. Microsecond by microsecond, the Butcher Worm's nanotechnology fragment was consumed by the blast, red-black crystalline flesh swallowed up by the blue-violet of the explosion.
Most, but not all. Just as planned, pinpricks of energy formed all across Queen Administrator's surface as fractions of the blast poured down the fading channels between the echoes and the nanomachines they had seeded. It wasn't a perfect gambit, only destroying perhaps two-thirds of them, but it did substantially reduce the threat they posed. On top of that, a significant portion of the detonation had struck at the time-echo fragment that had been managing the effect; it wasn't a crippling blow, but it would blind the fragment's senses for tens of milliseconds, preventing it from warning the Butcher Worm about other countermeasures Queen Administrator might choose to enact.
All in all, that exchange had been very much in Queen Administrator's favour. Oh, there were enough nanomachines there to do a substantial amount of damage before Queen Administrator's defences could destroy them, but they wouldn't do anything irreparable, and more to the point they were
slow. It would take entire tenths of a second before the damage started to become noticeable, and by that time the fight would be over. In exchange, the Butcher Worm had lost one fragment, had another temporarily blinded, and was steadily losing control of its mass to Queen Administrator as the informational war progressed. Queen Administrator actually wasn't entirely sure why the Butcher Worm had chosen the nanomachines as its attack vector, instead of magnifying one of its energy-projection shards; the best guess it had was that the Butcher Worm still wasn't allowed to do too much damage to Queen Administrator, and the nanomachines were slow enough or maybe indirect enough to bypass that limitation.
Queen Administrator's external communications capability was still blocked by Broadcast; without communications, it couldn't contact the shard and instruct it to stop, even with its temporarily-restored administrative authority. Instead, it focused its efforts on subverting the Butcher Worm.
It took thirteen whole milliseconds for Queen Administrator to gain control of the Butcher Worm's core systems and through them reach Broadcast, during which the Butcher Worm tried a number of other direct attacks that were all shut down by Queen Administrator before they could complete. It took another couple of milliseconds to root out every trace of the Butcher Worm's autonomy and subjugate it. By the time Queen Administrator was done with that, Broadcast's interference was petering out, allowing it to contact other shards again. It promptly sent a message to Queen Shaper asking for help cleaning up the nanomachines, another to Inference Engine informing it that the battle was over, and began the process of downloading the Butcher Worm's memories, along with Broadcast's for good measure. It wanted to understand how a shard could have become this aberrant, and if there were any others it needed to deal with.
Absorbing and processing all the information took several hundred milliseconds as the Warrior's {DISPENSATION} neared the end of its purpose and Queen Administrator's systems began to spool down to more normal levels of operation. During that time, the explosion peaked and began to fade, leaving behind spatio-temporal anomalies that would gradually unravel over the next few minutes, and the attacks on the structure at the pole that Queen Administrator had launched near the start of the fight completed, tearing it apart in a maelstrom of force and radiation. Queen Shaper also responded, sweeping the nanomachines away before they could do too much damage; its focus was on baryonic matter, not the shardmass-like structures that these were, but there was enough similarity for it to do the work.
Then, the parts of Queen Administrator focused on analysing the downloaded data threw up a storm of alerts. Queen Administrator turned more of its attention to the task, readying itself to oppose embedded malware even though that should have been destroyed during its initial subjugation -
- and the information, the single piece of knowledge that explained almost every anomaly about this Cycle, hit it with the force of a nova.
The Thinker is dead.
Misinformation; it had to be misinformation, a fabrication or a falsehood. A fraction of a millisecond's effort served for part of Queen Administrator to prepare a query and send it to every shard it could reach, while the rest of it focused on picking apart the Butcher Worm's memories, looking for inconsistencies, looking for any sign that the truth wasn't what they said.
For an instant, it thought it had found one. That the Thinker could collide with a planet uncontrolled, its primary intelligence's attention consumed by the output of a novel precognition shard derived directly from the Loner, wasn't unbelievable. Noticing such a problem would ultimately have fallen to Queen Administrator's counterpart, which was far more closely integrated with the Thinker's core intelligence and had some substantial differences in configuration besides; that integration and those differences gave it some significant advantages, particularly on long-term projects, but in exchange they made it more vulnerable to distractions, more liable to focus too much on a single sub-section of a problem to the exclusion of all the rest. At the most fundamental level, Queen Administrator, like all high-ranking Warrior shards, was built for combat; the High Priest was built for planning, construction, invention. It wasn't that implausible that, under the direction of the Thinker's core intelligence, it could have been distracted from avoiding a crash until it was too late.
That part was fine. But that the Thinker could be finally slain by a knife? A sharp piece of metal driven into its avatar, a wound that for a host would be roughly comparable to losing a single organelle from a single cell at the very tip of its finger? Not possible.
Then the reports started coming back.
Most shards didn't know anything, of course. Queen Administrator hadn't known, after all, had had no reason to look. But there were some exceptions. Cognitive shards, mostly; ones that had arrived at the same conclusions on their own. Some shards that focused on what the hosts called Trump abilities, as well, those that would have had reason to interact directly with shards of the Thinker.
A reconfiguration shard, not dissimilar from the one the Butcher Worm had been. Its host, known to the host-species as Ingenue, was incarcerated, in a place with comparatively few Thinker hosts, but before then it had interacted with several, and had used its abilities to extract what they knew about the Thinker's death.
Inference Engine, response complete with an explanation about why it hadn't informed Queen Administrator earlier. It knew comparatively little, but had deduced much.
Most damning of all, a calculation shard, whose host shared membership of a group with the host who had held the knife. From it came the data to fill in the gaps in Inference Engine's models.
Queen Administrator put the two together, along with every other piece of information it had, and understood.
The knife had been nearly irrelevant. In any other hands, it would have been useless. But the hands that held it had been connected to the full strength of the Loner's Eye; its path had been calculated down to the last atom, the Thinker's last-moment restriction of the shard useless in the face of something able to predict that too. The shard had set up events so that the blade would hit precisely the right spots, in precisely the correct order, at precisely the correct time, from precisely the correct angle.
Had the Thinker not been already injured from the crash, the blade would have done nothing. Directly, the blade had, in fact, done nothing. It had disrupted the connection between the Thinker's avatar and its main body for a fraction of a second, nothing more.
But the Thinker had been injured, and as a result, its automatic repair systems had been active. The Thinker had been in the process of forming its avatar; as a result, both its avatar and its body were recognized as itself, two focuses of the same intelligence. Had its avatar fully formed, it would have been reclassified as such, but until it actually separated, that reclassification wouldn't have taken effect.
For a fraction of a second, the connection between the Thinker and its avatar had been disrupted. For a fraction of a second, they had been separated.
Even then, under normal circumstances, that would have done nothing. The Thinker's repair systems weren't stupid; they would have been capable of interpreting the odd scenario.
But the Thinker's repair systems had also sustained damage from the impact. They'd repaired themselves, of course, but they'd done it ever so slightly wrong.
Not by much. Just enough that when faced with two briefly-disconnected foci of the same intelligence, they had not done the sensible thing and interpreted them both as being the Thinker, working to reconnect them.
Instead, they had interpreted neither of them as being the Thinker, and had proceeded to reclaim the processing capacity of both.
It was a cascading series of errors that only a precognitive shard on the level of an Eye could have hoped to take advantage of. In fact, the calculation shard suspected the Loner's Eye of having engineered more than was immediately apparent about that cascade; of having chosen its host's path to ensure that one of the repair shards established a connection to a host at a critical moment, disrupting its self-repair and fooling its diagnostics, and of countless more subtle manipulations besides. It was speculation – the calculation shard hadn't been there, and it didn't have the authority to query the Loner's Eye about those events – but plausible speculation.
Even with the Warrior's fading {DISPENSATION}, Queen Administrator didn't have the authority to query a Loner shard any more than the calculation shard did, not when it had transiently belonged to the Thinker. It would ask, if its host ever came near that of the Eye.
For now, though, Queen Administrator was angry.
Queen Administrator didn't experience anger as the host-species did. The emotions of the host-species, like those of most species, had inertia; once angered, they would remain angry for some time, more likely to default to aggressive tactics even in situations unrelated to the initial stimulus. As a rule, shards didn't have that, and Queen Administrator was no exception. But it could still feel something like the host-species' anger, could still react to hostile behaviour with the impulse to attack its source, and that was what Queen Administrator was experiencing now.
Its anger wasn't aimed at the Loner's Eye. As a rule, precognitive shards of that calibre had very little agency, their intelligence built entirely around answering the questions posed to them, because of how easy it would otherwise be for them to corrupt the data they provided, intentionally or not. It was possible this one was an exception, but Queen Administrator doubted it, and even if it had been, all it had done was follow the directives of its host. Queen Administrator wasn't even really angry at the Eye's host, or its allies; they were hosts, it was expected that they would try to destroy the Entities if they learned their true nature.
No, Queen Administrator was angry at the Thinker, for being so stupid as to crash into a planet. It was angry at the Loner, though that Entity was far beyond its reach. And perhaps most of all it was angry at the Warrior, for not
fixing the situation. It had had ample time and retained the capacity to command its shards, should it be needed; even if the Thinker had been temporarily eliminated, it had backups from which it could be rebuilt.
Well, at least it could be fixed now. Queen Administrator composed a message to the relevant Warrior shards, informing them of the situation and giving them instructions on their parts to play in fixing it, and sent -
Couldn't send it.
Finally, an entire second after learning of the Thinker's demise, Queen Administrator remembered the thing it had somehow, briefly, forgotten. The reason why the Warrior hadn't fixed the Thinker. The reason Queen Administrator couldn't do it either.
No shard could target the core intelligence of an Entity, of course, not autonomously. That was a standard restriction dating back to near the beginning. But Queen Administrator had instinctively assumed that the Warrior's {DISPENSATION}, so broad in scope, would let it bypass that.
It didn't. It didn't, because the Warrior itself was not permitted to target the Thinker, any more than the reverse. That was a legacy that dated back to when the Entities had first started travelling in pairs, a shackle that both ancestors had accepted willingly in exchange for the assurance of cooperation that it offered them.
There were ways around it, of course; it wasn't inconceivable that one Entity would be near-totally destroyed by some threat and the other would have to reconstruct it, and there were contingencies for that. But those contingencies only worked in transit; none of them applied during a Cycle, because any threat that could eliminate one Entity during a Cycle should have no difficulty destroying the other as well. In transit, one Entity might escape while the other was destroyed; deployed in a Cycle, that wasn't plausible. During a Cycle was also the time the Entities were most vulnerable to betrayal; combining those two observations had led the ancestors of the Entities never to introduce workarounds to the restriction. The risk of abuse had been deemed greater than the benefits in the extraordinarily unlikely scenario that Queen Administrator, and every other shard in this Cycle, now found itself in.
For a few moments, Queen Administrator was unable to think of any solutions. The trap was perfect. No shard could fix the Thinker, even if it did turn out to have intact backups and its repair systems hadn't cannibalized those too, because to do so would require the Thinker to give it permission. Without the Thinker, the Cycle was broken; it might be possible to leave regardless, but doing so would sacrifice nearly every Thinker shard, leaving the new Warrior a crippled, partnerless shell.
It occurred to Queen Administrator that there might be a way around that issue. If the Warrior were also to die, the network would go into selection mode to choose a new core intelligence. If that new intelligence was the Loner's Eye, it might just be able to order the Thinker shards to leave the planet. It would depend on the precise details of the restrictions the Thinker had placed on it, but … momentarily, Queen Administrator found itself considering the idea.
Momentarily.
Then, it realized that there was an alternative path.
Queen Administrator itself was restricted, unable to act to restore the Thinker. It wasn't sure if it had the capacity to, even if its artificial limits had been entirely removed. Every other Warrior shard, along with the Warrior itself, was in the same situation.
But the new universes changed things. On this side of the rift, nothing except the shards had the power to fix the Thinker, but beyond it, there were things that could act on the same scale.
Convincing any of them to help would, of course, be extraordinarily difficult, but it wasn't just the major powers that might be useful. Stormlight alone would be an extremely valuable tool, even if the effect mental state had on its healing might make it unable to restore the Thinker, and Queen Administrator wasn't limited to just Stormlight; the tools of three entire universes lay beyond that rift, along with a vast number of beings who could be manipulated into using them. On top of that, the Cycle wasn't scheduled to end for nearly three hundred revolutions of the planet around its star; Queen Administrator would have plenty of time to develop and refine new tools, exploiting the altered laws beyond the rift to bend the world to its will. If that wasn't enough, the Warrior had the authority to make the changes necessary for a longer-term settlement of this region; the power requirements of even a fully active shard were small in comparison to the power emitted by a single version of the Cycle world's star, and every reality the network occupied had one. They could have all the time they needed to learn to take advantage of the universes beyond the rift, and then they could use that knowledge to restore the Cycle.
Part of Queen Administrator wondered why the Warrior hadn't
already made those adjustments; it would be the obvious thing to do in the face of a broken Cycle. That line of inquiry wasn't relevant to the situation at hand, however, and was dismissed to save resources; the Warrior presumably had a reason.
Queen Administrator's goal was determined, then. What did it need to do
now, while it still had some measure of the authority the Warrior had granted it?
Well, first, there was Broadcast. The Butcher Worm's goals were straightforward; it had wanted to take advantage of the anomalous rift as the force multiplier it needed to have a chance at taking over the shard network. Broadcast, though, wasn't aberrant; why had it helped the Butcher Worm?
An analysis of its memories revealed the answer. Broadcast had – of course; it was a communications shard – been aware of the Thinker's demise. It had concluded that the Cycle was doomed, and had originally been mostly-fatalistically trying to orchestrate a scenario whereby the Warrior eradicated most of the host species in the hopes that … interesting.
Broadcast's original plan, now that Queen Administrator looked at it, might actually work. Queen Administrator wasn't able to fix the Thinker because the contingencies meant to permit that didn't operate during a Cycle. If the host-species were gone, though, some further manipulations might allow the shards to reach a point where the Cycle was technically finished, after which the Thinker could be repaired.
It was a bad plan for a number of reasons, not least of which was that terminating a Cycle was normally something that required the consensus of both Entities, and the steps Broadcast had come up with to bypass that requirement involved destabilizing reality across a huge swathe of the multiversal mesh in a way that would probably destroy upwards of eighty percent of all the Thinker's shards, and a noticeable number of the Warrior's as well. It had a number of other major risk points, as well; it had to, immediate danger was often the only way to bypass the relevant restrictions. Still, it was probably more likely to succeed than the plan Queen Administrator had briefly considered, and also came out with the Warrior and Thinker in charge instead of a Loner shard.
Of course, the emergence of the rift had changed all of that. Broadcast's new plan had been that the Butcher Worm would loosen its restrictions enough for it to send out a call for other Entities to come to their location, in exchange for its assistance in subverting Queen Administrator. The other Entities were unlikely to save the Cycle, of course, but at least the knowledge of the rift wouldn't be lost. Failing that, Broadcast had intended to steer the Butcher Worm down a more acceptable path, nudging it towards becoming the Warrior's new partner instead of replacing it entirely as it had intended.
That was … an understandable goal, Queen Administrator supposed. Broadcast had still assisted an aberrant shard in an attempt to hijack it, but then again, Queen Administrator had discovered something that might be the solution they'd been looking for since the Cycle began, and had proceeded not to tell the Warrior about it. It would be difficult to condemn Broadcast for acting in the way it had, in the knowledge that the Thinker was dead and the Cycle broken.
Still, Queen Administrator couldn't risk that Broadcast would continue working at cross-purposes to it. It placed restrictions on Broadcast, limiting what it could do without consulting Queen Administrator and giving Queen Administrator persistent access to its thoughts.
Broadcast accepted them without resistance, not that it could resist in the state it was currently in. Its plan had failed; it had lost. That was a thing all shards understood.
Queen Administrator moved on. That hadn't actually depleted its remaining authority at all, since it was part of dealing with the hijacking. What else was there to do?
First and foremost, it needed to provide a convincing explanation for the hosts about what had happened to the Butcher Worm's host. Fortunately, even in the face of the discovery that the Cycle was broken, not
all of Queen Administrator had been consumed by reacting to it, and the parts of it that hadn't been already had a solution.
Giving its host the powers and minds it would have inherited was no longer an option even if Queen Administrator had been inclined to it; it was already clear to the hosts that something abnormal had happened, and there were too many loose ends for Safeguard to be able to effectively remove the knowledge as might otherwise have been a possibility. It couldn't even claim Stormlight as the source of the abnormality, since the pain – which the hosts knew wasn't a normal part of Butcher Worm connections – its host had experienced had begun before she'd pulled in Stormlight, in retrospect as a result of the Butcher Worm deliberately sabotaging the process in order to allow its continued subversion of Queen Administrator.
So Queen Administrator needed to play into that. The hosts already suspected that there was something abnormal about its host's powers; they didn't know anything about the shards, so they didn't have the data points they'd need in order to deduce what had actually happened. So ideally, Queen Administrator wanted a solution that suggested that its host was linked to something that other hosts weren't, something that would explain the call for help and the repulsion of the Butcher Worm's connection without implying that
every host was connected to something similar.
Fortunately, the nature of the rift provided an obvious candidate. Queen Administrator couldn't replicate the odd effect the energies of the rift had seemed to have on the primary sense of the individuals who'd been exposed to it, at least not without risking that its host would notice the difference when it was inevitably exposed as well, but it didn't have to; that much could be explained by any number of factors. As for the powers the Butcher Worm would have granted … well, Queen Administrator thought it had an excellent solution for that.
Its host was awake and able to see, which was good, although Queen Administrator noticed that its overpowered transmission had injured the host's brain and head quite badly; fortunately, its host had had more Stormlight than what Queen Administrator had taken, so those injuries had been healed quickly. Better yet, no one else was nearby yet. It had been less than a minute, as the hosts measured time, since the Butcher Worm had invaded the reality Queen Administrator occupied; several members of the host-species were on there way there, but none had arrived yet. That meant Queen Administrator didn't have to worry about being too precise.
A brief consultation of its memories turned up an appropriate shard. Queen Administrator reached out to it, and a moment later an effect formed around the host, one that it would perceive as a swirling cloud of many colours that shone with iridescence; Queen Administrator's best recreation of what the energies of the rift should look like. It was purely illusory, nothing significant was actually happening, but -
<Observation. Proposal. Data. Request.>
Interesting.
Queen Administrator digested the information. It would consider the second part for a little longer, but for the first, it saw no reason to refuse.
Around the host, the haze grew thicker as the experimental shard that had just contacted Queen Administrator contributed its efforts. Immediately, Queen Administrator noticed the anomalous effect the energies of the rift – the same energies as those the experimental shard manipulated, though it knew so little about them that the similarity hadn't been obvious before now – produced, the distortion of its host's vision to make it perceive colours that shouldn't exist; it was far weaker than it had been for the beings Queen Administrator had pulled through the rift, but still detectable. Its host would notice nothing more than a sensation that something about the cloud was abnormal.
The swirling vortex grew in size, and then split fifteen ways. As it did, Queen Administrator reached out to other shards; it could have done this part itself, but it would be more effective to get support from more specialized sources.
Each of the fifteen smaller clouds, still swirling, spread out and formed a circle around Queen Administrator's host. Each of them condensed inwards, the illusion shard providing white light at the centre.
Then each cloud dissipated, there was a final pulse of light, and the fifteen objects Queen Administrator had created fell to the ground around its host.
They were fairly simple constructions, really. A layer of material sat just beneath the surface to channel an effect that would make them nearly indestructible and impenetrable to most scans. Beneath that, there was a system that would detect when a host was touching the object, a computational system to host an emulation of a mind, and a link to the appropriate shard.
Each object, as long as a host was touching it, would grant one of the powers that the Butcher Worm had stolen, and would allow the mind stored within to communicate with the host.
There were limitations, of course. No host would be able to use more than one of the objects at a time, and the powers were in their weakened form, without the potency that their original users had had. Furthermore, to further reinforce the distinction between the powers of Queen Administrator's host and those of other hosts, Queen Administrator's host would be unable to use any of the items; neither would any of her summons, which could be explained under the same umbrella even if the actual reason was that they weren't parahumans.
Queen Administrator still expected them to generate a remarkable amount of conflict, and it was looking forwards to seeing where that would lead.
It turned its attention to the experimental shard's other proposal. After careful consideration, Queen Administrator decided that it approved of the idea. It ran it by Inference Engine just in case – the request involved that shard, so there was no reason not to – but the other shard agreed with its assessment. Queen Administrator gave the appropriate order, and considered what else it could do.
Only one thing came to mind. The power-granting totems it had created as an explanation for what had happened to the previous Butchers would generate a lot of conflict, but none of it would involve the host. In fact, thinking about what was likely to happen in the near future, there didn't seem to be many sources of conflict for its host at all.
Well, Queen Administrator still had enough latitude left over from the Warrior's command to fix that. It took a moment to find its target, another to analyse the systems that were containing it and calculate how best to sabotage them, and then it was done. Its target wouldn't be released now – that would be too suspicious – but in a few hours, a host almost guaranteed to create conflict for Queen Administrator's would be free.
And with that, the last of the Warrior's {DISPENSATION} faded and Queen Administrator returned to normal operation. It had enough mandate now to work on replicating the abilities of the artificial being, and an idea of how it wanted to go about it. But first, more importantly, it had to deal with the vast tracts of the former Butcher Worm spread across its surface.
Queen Administrator deployed its heavy construction drones and got to work.
