by Skyler Grant
Now, to figure out what Omega Nine had done, and how. I knew to achieve it they required access to a genetic sequencer. This gave me a place to start. Purely electrical drones within the tower activated and took samples from the local neurons, uploading them.
A virus, crystal-enhanced in some manner—most likely for quick propagation. The people of Tower KM89 believed they were one of only a few surviving towers left on the planet, all still loosely networked by me, and part of a tiny group of communities all of which were slowly dying.
Omega Nine had been made to propagate along my entire network, to render me neutralized across the world.
I was picking up a transmission from the tower. It was intended to go planet-wide. Really, they weren't getting more reach than to my nearest outpost. Curious, I listened in.
Martine announced, "People of the Empire. You have been trapped, imprisoned, lied to. The world is a wasteland and if you keep living the life you have been, you will perish. The cookies in your towers have been transformed into explosives. Be cautious, but use them to blast your way to freedom. Make your way to these coordinates and let us establish a new civilization, a better life."
The virus in my neural network of the tower had done more than simply nullify the system it, it fed off the crystalline resonance in the neurons and absorbed it. If their network wasn't stand-alone they might have devised a way to kill me. Fortunately, I’d isolated my backup cores quickly enough.
The main doors of KM89 exploded outward, fueled by the detonation of dozens of cookies, and the people stumbled out into the metal sea, respirators masking their faces as they looked up at the harsh and unforgiving sun.
They'd die without the respirators. The surface of Earth wasn't habitable anymore, at least not in most places, and certainly not here.
The coordinates they'd sent were on the equator, it was a smart call. The remaining atmosphere was densest there and what habitable areas Earth still had were all equatorial.
I swept with my sensors and found Martine already in her own mask. Supervising as people moved supplies from the tower. I opened a private comm-line.
"I just want you to know I respect what you tried to do. Oh, you're a complete failure who got almost everything completely wrong, but incompetence doesn't equal morally wrong," I said.
Martine stiffened. "We killed you. We should have. Tell me, has any of this been real?"
"You've helped me again. You always help me in your tragic and pathetic little way. Find peace until you live again," I said.
I shut down her nervous system, there was no need for her to feel what came next. No need for any of them to feel what came next.
Omega Seven was a powerful blend of crystal-enhanced bacteria that consumed targeted organic matter with brutal efficiency. Martine was so tagged, as was everything and everyone in KM89. Within a minute the tower was reduced to inert Bio-matter, I dispatched reclamation units to salvage what I could. Bio-matter wasn't something I could afford to waste these days.
62
I slipped into one of my drones at the Omega Tower. This version of the Earth didn’t have any oceans, but it did have a few massive lakes. The Omega Tower was located on the island in a lake near the equator.
The scent of flowers carried in the air, craggy hills surrounding the tower thick with plant life. This all came with a cost—if someone stared long enough at the horizon they could see the faint flicker of the energy shields holding this all together.
The drone I'd slipped into was one of Sylax's guards. I liked to keep an eye on what she was doing, and right now Sylax was helping to purify the water. All of Anna's lieutenants got a strange assortment of powers from her, some stranger than others.
It still rained at the equator, although it was a toxic sludge hazardous for anything it came into contact with. There had been a nasty rainfall last night, which meant the lake needed cleaning again. Sylax was crouched at the edge of the water, hands glowing red as she swirled them beneath the surface.
"I always find it so surprising when I see your hands red with something besides blood," I said.
"Give me something to kill and I'll happily step back from the grunt work," Sylax said, looking over her shoulder. "If you're here, does that mean you got what you were looking for?"
"Omega Nine, yet another new discovery deadlier than you are. Walk with me?" I asked.
Sylax stood, shaking water off her hands and the glow faded. Thousands had died at this woman’s hands. Today she looked tremendously casual—normal, barefoot in shorts and a tank top. Even villains had their days at the beach.
Together we moved up a set of broad stairs from the beach to the tower. No sealed entrance here, Omega's main doors were open and people strolled in and out.
We headed for the top floor where the tower administrators were hard at work in the main lab.
After a quiet ride in the lift, doors hissed open to reveal Martine, Esme, and Vardok clustered around a table. These weren't the same clones I'd left behind; the windows here showed a world teeming with life and their lives were in every way improved. This Vardok focused his life on military simulations, his drive to kill sublimated effectively, and he proved a rather doting husband to Martine. Esme put her brilliant scientific mind to use in the bioengineering of new plants. Every day she was faced with how many lives she saved.
Martine glanced up. "You're done with the water?"
"I am, and Emma decided to tag along," Sylax said.
I said, "I probably interrupted her from burying a body. I got you some new Omega samples. A great biohazard, but some of the dampening mechanics are seriously intriguing. You may be too stupid to understand. Still, I'd like you to have a look."
I sent mockups to the local system and Esme pulled them up on a display. After studying them for a few minutes her face was pale.
"I thought Omega Seven was bad. What kind of sick mind comes up with this stuff? At least that had targeting protocols, but this is just ..." Esme said, at a loss for words as she frowned.
"If it is that bad, we'll want to focus on a defense first," Martine said.
While this Martine was more SCIENCE-minded than her terrorist counterparts, she still lacked the brilliance of Esme. What she did have was a keen sense of priorities and the same charisma.
Esme said, gnawing on a tip of a stylus, "Neural circuitry doesn't have any sort of built-in antibodies, why would it? We could modify from some other organism, but I think it would be better yet just to build a whole immune system."
I'd be giving this same data to other labs, of course, but Omega Tower existed for a reason. Esme often grasped her own work faster and saw the possibilities sooner than others, and this team in particularly were effective.
Doomsday weaponry, the stuff that could spell the end of our entire civilization. Esme didn't know it, but this was her ninth time creating that technology, and it would be her ninth time finding a way to neutralize it.
"Do it. Make it a priority," I said.
Esme rubbed at her eyes and let out a sigh. "What about G.A.R.D.E.N?"
The Growth Amplifier for the Rapid Distribution of Emergent Nature. It was a project completely of this Esme's mind, which is perhaps why nothing had come of it. For all that a happy Esme was brilliant at interpreting work, her broken aspects were best for creating them. If GARDEN worked as intended, it would allow for an almost instantaneous repair of the biosphere. So far we hadn't even had limited success.
"I'll turn GARDEN over to another team, focus on this for now," I said.
"I'll let you know when we have something," Martine said.
Vardok and Esme were already deep in discussion. He was making the case for a military paradigm in an immune system to analyze threats and build responses.
I let them talk and moved back towards the lift, Sylax stepping alongside me.
"I've yet to decide if this is brilliant or foolish of you, making pets of rebels," Sylax said.
"They took me by surprise once. You k
now I like to keep my enemies close," I said.
That brought an amused smirk to Sylax's lips. The lift wasn't large and we were close indeed.
"Strange, isn't it? You give these people a good life and all they think about is making the world better. Make them feel and all they do is plot how to rip the strong apart and take their place," Sylax said.
"Story of your life?" I asked.
"Our lives," Sylax said.
A philosophical sociopath, wonderful. Sylax really was growing soft.
"I can try a version of what I just discovered on Hot Stuff. You can come, if you want. I know how you delight in the suffering of others," I said.
63
Hot Stuff was in the Mountain, the high-powered testing labyrinth I'd originally built as a way to contain Anna. In the wake of Hot Stuff absorbing the Chalcedony I'd had to dedicate this facility to her and construct a new one named the Pyramid just in case Anna lost control.
Hot Stuff sat in a cell with her back against a force shield, knees drawn up to her chest and blue flames swirling around her. After absorbing the Chalcedony she'd lost weight for a time, although that eventually stabilized. The fires around her never died and were too intense to allow her to consume food or water. At this point she was being kept alive by her accelerated healing.
The cell was devoid of any sort of furniture, every wall made purely of energy. Any material I put in with her vaporized in seconds, even my most heat-resistant compounds gone in an instant. I did have a video monitor outside the force shields and connected to voice-control for her. It was the best I could do as far as entertainment went.
Sylax and the drone I was occupying teleported to outside the shield walls. The Mountain consumed an absurd amount of energy to power these. I reclaimed some from the heat, although not enough. This facility was expensive to operate, but I didn't have a choice. Without it Hot Stuff would melt right through the surface of the Earth until she reached the planet’s core.
"How you holding up?" Sylax asked.
Hot Stuff glanced over and offered a weak smile. "Still wishing I picked scissors. You're looking all casual."
"Day at the beach. Emma thinks she has something new that might help," Sylax said.
I said, "The woman obsessed with fire picked the thing that burns and the woman who is frightfully unimaginative picked the stone. You really should have figured each other out better."
"I thought she'd pick scissors because they can stab people," Hot Stuff said.
"Talking of which, I'm going to need some blood," I told her.
Hot Stuff couldn't cut her nails. They had an easy time digging into the flesh of her arm and a few drops of blood fell to the floor of the chamber.
The droplets were like glimmers of blue flame for a moment, then the fiery aura faded and they became just blood—albeit blood that could survive the intense temperatures of the cell.
I filtered the droplets through the force shielding. Hot Stuff's blood was already teeming with a virus. Her crystal-granted powers had bonded with one already in her bloodstream and given Hot Stuff her gifts. To that I was going to add some of the crystal-dampening resonance traits of the Omega Nine sample, disabling replication.
I'd been trying to fix Hot Stuff ever since breaking her—I'd been trying to fix a lot of things since breaking them. I'd thought it would be a simple solution. Anna had almost been killed when she was shot with a few power-dampening bullets. However, Hot Stuff was a problem of a different sort.
The fires surrounding her were an incredible defensive mechanism. Dampening waves had a minimal effect and any attempt to shoot dampening rounds into her resulted in the bullets evaporating before contact.
This was a new take though. By bonding with her existing blood, it was possible that I'd manage to get something power-dampening in Hot Stuff that would survive her presence.
"Incoming. Open up," I said.
This wasn't our first time doing tests with her blood. Hot Stuff again gouged bloody furrows in her arm and I dropped the blood in. The droplets almost reached her when their fire reignited, blazing blue beads dripping into the already sealing wound.
There was a notable fall in her temperature readings for several seconds, followed by a spike and then a return to normal levels.
"I felt something," Hot Stuff said.
"Stop flashing back to your long-extinct dating life. We did get some result there, but it was just for an instant. I think your body picked up what we were trying to do and somehow disposed of the altered blood by reaching a higher temperature," I said.
That was fascinating, if so. It suggested that Hot Stuff's heat tolerance wasn’t a constant, but something that instinctively adjusted as required. The blood she had originally shed retained the original values, then hadn't been able to survive the spike in temperature.
"That is just mean," Sylax said.
It was, Hot Stuff had always enjoyed physical companionship, and hadn't been able to since absorbing the Chalcedony. Her lieutenants, the only ones who may have survived being close to her, all died when she took the crystal, every one burned up from the inside out.
I still had pyrokinetics amongst my forces. The original version of her power I'd researched could still serve as an upgrade, but they too would evaporate in a room with her—I'd tried.
Ophelia, Caya, and Anna fared a little better. Still, being able to survive being thrown into the equivalent of a blast furnace didn't mean that you were capable of holding a conversation at the time. Hot Stuff always had one of the most powerful offensive power sets of anyone we'd encountered, and that had been amplified enormously.
"Let’s try it again. This time try spiking your temperature before shedding blood," I said.
We tried it a dozen more times. I tried it with more blood, and blood taken from a greater burn. I tried making less alterations to the original virus in the hopes it could better mask itself in her system. I tried lots of things.
Nothing worked, nothing was making a difference.
"I will figure this out," I said.
"I know you're trying. I just want out of here. I miss fresh air," Hot Stuff said.
I hadn't told her about the devastation she'd done to the planet, I didn't think she needed to know that.
It was another thing I had to fix.
64
It had been three months since we defeated Vinci, and three months since we'd found ourselves at war with the Venusians. The solar system was still filled with threats. But they'd become a secondary priority compared to the threat our own world posed.
For a time we'd considered the possibilities of a nuclear war and I'd been confident I could keep my people alive through it. As was sometimes my nature, I'd overestimated my ability at keeping people alive on a dying world. For me to build anything or clone new drones required Bio-matter, which was no problem on a thriving planet. Now, with the Earth as it was, I had a supply problem.
I called a meeting of my most intelligent advisers to try and work out some solution. It wasn't the first time. Caya was artfully poised in her chair, eyes glowing a dull green. Mechos and Minerva both stared at the same tablet. I'd added Ophelia to the mix of late. No great brilliant mind herself, she was playing host to Amy again and that poor copy of my own intelligence did sometimes have something interesting to say.
"Well, don't everyone talk at once. You are supposedly the best minds your feeble species can produce. You know the situation, Earth is dying. What are our solutions?" I asked.
"You know that isn't really the case. The Earth is hurt, not dying," Minerva said, pushing Mechos aside to tap a few keys and bringing up a display. "Long-term this is endurable. It’s going to take a little over three hundred years to terraform the planet and restore it back to what it was, but you have the freedom to play the long game."
She was quite right. Except that three centuries was an eternity when you measured your life in nanoseconds.
"Thank you for stating the obvious. That approach would requ
ire letting most of the population die and be reborn later, and even if it worked would leave this planet largely defenseless for a long time. Anyone have anything new to offer?" I asked.
"I've had an idea. It is a bit mad," Mechos said, taking over the tablet. A depiction of the Earth came up, the surface laced with what looked like complex circuitry. He said, "The surface of the planet is mostly metal now, we can use that. I think we could transform the entire structure into one massive supercomputer."
"I like him," Amy said, with a long look at Mechos.
"Hands off," Minerva said with a scowl. Then she argued, "But Emma is biological in nature, as is everyone else."
"We convert her back. And we convert ourselves into something new," Mechos said.
This was unusually forward-thinking for Mechos. I hated the idea, and the fact that Amy thought it was good only proved how terrible it was. Still, I couldn't say it wasn't bold. A dramatic reimagining of both myself and humanity.
"And we become what? Robots? Virtual intelligences?" Minerva asked, with a shake of her head. "Even if possible, it might take longer than to set the planet right."
There I agreed.
"We could invade another Earth," Amy said. The display shifted to show multiple slices of Earth. "We know that this Earth isn't the original, at least not entirely. Out there in different dimensions there are probably others with a biosphere intact. You're all so pretty and powerful, I bet you could just waltz in and be given everything you want."
That was intriguing. Conquering your first Earth was the hardest. After that ... If there was one thing the population of the empire had gotten very good at, it was war.
I said, "Unfortunately, we haven't been able to get a dimensional drive to function since reforming the Earth. Your tendency to play nice before moving in to take the place of your betters has been noted. It doesn't help us here."
"There is a simple solution. You do a mass die-off now rather than later," Caya said. "You fear leaving the Earth defenseless, you don't have to. Convert the current population into weapons, build the terraformers, and when the environment is suitable bring them back."
