by Skyler Grant
I wasn't bluffing. I could kill their families, I had ample resources in the Scholarium to strike at their lands directly.
"What choice do I have?" Homer asked.
Perhaps that was really his intent? Raiding wasn't their style—putting themselves in a position to negotiate a deal was. Were they hoping to raid our food, or to be paid off for going away?
I wasn't inclined to be sympathetic, but they did have a fleet of trading airships and those were something the Divine could very much use.
I accessed one of the repair drones from the settlement and sent it in search of the community leader. They didn't embrace technology and I couldn't just get them on the line.
I soon had her, a young woman by the name of Ostara with flowers in her dark hair, a goddess of spring—which helped to explain the settlement’s prosperity.
"This is the one attacking us?" Ostara asked sharply.
Homer at least had the good grace to look embarrassed confronted by the face of his victim.
I said, "In all his feeble glory. One of the least impressive Scholars I have ever met."
"What is the point of bringing her on?" Homer asked.
"I'm making some effort to be nice, although I'm not sure why I bother. The young fop doing a terrible job of robbing you is Homer Takra, his family runs a trading empire. Homer, meet Ostara, who runs the settlement and makes flowers bloom and other such frippery," I said.
"Spring is very important. Why are you introducing me instead of killing him?" Ostara said.
I liked her, she asked the right sort of questions. If she had a cookie in her mouth she'd remind me of Anna.
"Homer here wants to steal your food to feed his family, as they don't have any. He feels you have plenty and won't miss it. What Homer does have is ships, and lots of them, which is something your people lack," I said.
"You're suggesting we trade our ships?" Homer asked.
No, that wasn't what I was suggesting at all.
Ostara tilted her head. "I could see him as a young Cissonius perhaps. We could use the ships."
A God of trade and a driver of carriages, that would do.
I explained, "You'll become a part of her settlement and answer to her. In time, perhaps, your gifts will shift over to the Divine variants and you'll become full members of their community. The rest of your family can stay in the Scholarium or take the offer as well as they see fit," I said.
"This is moving a bit fast," Homer said.
"If it helps you make up your mind, I am thirty seconds away from releasing bacteria that will kill you and everybody aboard your vessels."
While we'd been talking I'd been tweaking a batch of Omega Seven and adjusting the targeting parameters.
"I accept," Homer said.
In the past month the ranks of the Divine had swelled by fourteen percent. He wasn't the first to be made a similar offer.
7
Anna was drenched in blood, it wasn't hers. With her absorption of power crystals, one of the abilities she'd gained gave her a taste for it. I'd made some cookies that helped to sate it, but sometimes she still felt the need to kill.
The drones I made for the purpose were volunteers and didn't keep the memories. I had a pool of them for Sylax too. It said something about humanity that I had to keep a whole stable of victims ready for their regular consumption.
Anna had drained three almost dry. This is why she had the hips she had.
"Now I suppose you're going to want a plate of cookies just to show you really have no limits," I said through the speakers.
"Yes, actually. The ones with peanut butter," Anna said.
Recipe KE4, it was one of her favorites. I got them baking. Anna kicked on her own flames, not as hot as Hot Stuff's, but more than enough to burn the blood off her and get her cleaner than any shower could manage.
"There was another raid on the Divine lands. If you were a better empress your people wouldn't be trying to kill each other," I said.
Anna didn't respond at first, closing the door to her kill room and pouring herself a glass of wine. "You're probably right. I always wondered what I would do if I ever achieved my goal. Now I have and I'm still wondering."
"Self-reflection isn't like you. Nobody wants to look at that face in a mirror."
The cookies were ready. I materialized the tray and Anna grabbed one from the top.
"How many people do you think we've killed?" Anna asked.
"Not as many as I've created. I at least do more harm than good," I said.
"What happened with the raiders? Did you have to kill them?"
"They had airships. They're converting now. Give it some time. I think that is going to happen to most of the Scholarium. They follow strength and right now the Divine are strong," I said.
"And I'm weak," Anna said, taking a sip from her wine and grimacing. "I'm the most powerful woman on the planet. Why can't I fix this?"
I didn't have any answers for Anna. I was the most intelligent being on the planet with the pure, untapped power of SCIENCE at my disposal and I couldn't fix things either.
"You've always thought of yourself as an engineer and I as a researcher. Perhaps you weren't the only one who gave herself too much credit. We're killers just like the rest, better at tearing down than building," I said.
Anna shook her head. "Level that at me if you want. I probably deserve it, but you don't. You've come so far, Emma, you built a whole society out of nothing. You built everything that we have."
"And it was you who reassembled this planet. It isn't completely your fault that we destroyed it."
It wasn't her fault at all, it was mine. And I should have insisted Sylax take the Chalcedony. Hot Stuff was loyal, but her powers had never been anything other than destructive. I should have foreseen what giving her such a boost would mean.
"Can you take this crystal out of me?" Anna asked.
That was unexpected. Once, Anna hated the thought of having a crystal, then after she absorbed them Anna always wanted very much to keep them, even with the pain they caused.
"Perhaps. I doubt it would be easy, but I think it possible. Are you going to blame your abilities for what has happened?"
"No," Anna said, after a moment. "But with my belly filled with blood I'm suddenly reminded of what I've become. I'm also certain that despite being underpowered old Anna always found a way to win. She always found a way to make something happen. I never used to sit around feeling sorry for myself."
"You were marginally less pathetic," I agreed.
"Would having the Agate back help us?" Anna asked.
"An energy source that powerful gives us a lot of possibilities. Even more, if we could also reclaim the Beryl and Chalcedony from Caya and Hot Stuff. Binding the crystals into human hosts kept them out of Vinci's hands. I suppose that doesn't matter anymore," I said.
"Put nearly infinite sources of power out there and someone is always going to make a play for them," Anna said.
Of course, but there weren't that many people left who could give us a good fight. Only Queen Forge of the Scholarium had grown quite powerful since starting her rule. Her new position gave her broad access to the powers of the Scholarium and Forge used them to enhance her weapons and armor. In raw power she was no match for Anna, but I thought by now her power sets might be more versatile than even those I'd given Anna by way of upgrades.
"If you are entertaining new ideas, you might also consider what could be accomplished by implanting it into someone else. One of the Divine nature deities," I said.
"Would you have them replace me?" Anna asked, an edge in her voice.
"No," I said immediately. It was best to not even let that possibility linger in her mind. "For good or ill we are a team, Anna, you know that. But amplifying the power of a nature deity might give them the ability to fix what we can't."
"We're the way forward, not the Divine," Anna said firmly. "Let the Scholarium give up who and what they are, if they must. Not us."
Anna was right, which was proof in itself that the universe was a strange place filled with the unexpected. SCIENCE might not have gotten us into this mess, but it was going to be our path out, SCIENCE would heal this broken world.
8
I had a lot of possibilities for ways to proceed, too many. Too many and you lose focus. I had to narrow things down.
One had to be Caya's plan of a tear-down of current society, preparing for it to be born again later. I might not like that idea, but it was the one plan I could deliver on right now. I devoted a part of my resources to planning a planetary defense network with the Bio-mass currently available.
I wanted something with a bit more hope to it. I thought I had an idea, and Caya would be involved.
I found Caya in her lab. Ever since consuming the Beryl she had become increasingly obsessed with mathematics. Caya was working on all-new system of mathematics, one free of what she called the inelegant compromises of the current model. I appreciated the theory, but it was time to turn the considerable resources of her mind towards something more practical.
"You'll never be able to make a math system humans won't make mistakes in. It is the nature of your species," I said through her comm.
"It isn't the nature of my species," Caya said, turning from the monitor to glance at my camera. "What do you want, Emma?"
"You and your people are still human, however much you've changed. I realize that the revelation is disgusting. It is still true. I want your help in restoring sanity to Warmonger."
"Humanity is a correctable state of affairs," Caya said, before pursing her lips for a moment. "Warmonger, interesting. I take it you've still had no success removing the crystal that drove him mad? What help do you think I can be?"
Caya might not be coming across as entirely sane at the moment. Still, compared to Hot Stuff and Anna, the crystal she'd absorbed had impacted her far less. The flawless nature of her abilities gave her a degree of error-correction the others lacked.
"I'm hoping that we can devise a way to give him some aspect of the Flawless matrix," I said.
Normally the holders of one sort of crystal could not make the hosts of a different type their second generation. One of Hot Stuff's pyrokinetics couldn’t become one of Ophelia's healers, or vice versa.
"An intriguing thought," Caya said, leaning forward and steepling her fingers together. "We couldn't directly infuse him with my abilities, but he is after all software. Just as one of your drones would benefit if I designed their genetic sequence, his software might be improved if run through a filter of my own creation."
"Do you think it wise? I know Anna and Hot Stuff regret their bonding with the power crystals. Obviously they are both inferior specimens. We haven't spoken about it, but you are different than you used to be," I said.
Caya flashed the camera a tiny, sad smile. "I am not unaffected, Emma. I was never quite a part of the world. It is a miserable thing to complain about being the prettiest and the smartest in the room, but the sense of isolation it created was very real. Now I see ugliness, flaws, banality everywhere I look, and it is a struggle not to be overwhelmed by it."
"Can I help?"
I'd met my other human companions far earlier than Caya, and yet amongst everyone I counted her one of my closest confidants. There had always been something both pragmatic and brilliant about her that I appreciated.
"You're flawed too, Emma. Even the other Flawless are flawed, although not as badly. I am coping, but it helps if I involve myself in something like my new mathematical system. The perfection of theory versus the always disappointing reality," Caya said.
The new and improved Caya was grim, and rude. Even if you thought somebody was imperfect, you didn't have to say it.
"Well then. The project. I trust you can assist? My thought was that you program some sort of error-correcting buffer," I said.
Caya swiveled her chair back to her console. "I've already got one, although it will need some modification. Connecting to Scholarium systems required an intermediary both to protect from their errors and from their cyber attacks."
That I could understand. I had duplicate error-correction protocols set up myself because of the number of times members of the Scholarium tried to hack me.
"You'll be dealing with a completely alien artificial intelligence, of course," I said.
"I doubt we'll be able to force this into his system. The best I can do is create a general purpose framework for correction and we make it available to him. If there is some aspect of Warmonger that knows he is sick and wants to get better, he will figure out how to install it and to repair himself," Caya said.
Caya's fingers were flying across the keys. Whatever mental distress her abilities might give her she was a perfect typist and her code never required debugging. It was a brilliant design that she was putting together, one that might be worth implementing on my own systems. Of course, something similar was no doubt already in place on the Flawless side.
I'd had trouble dealing with their facilities before. They required a sensitivity of input I didn't possess, although those problems had diminished lately. They were probably error-correcting me.
"You're already running a variant of that, aren't you?" I asked.
"Of course I am, Emma. As a biocomputer your numbers are already fuzzy at best, made worse by the effects of your upgrade crystal driving you mad," Caya said, never glancing up from the screen. "If you want help improving your computing core, I'm available."
It was possible, I was all for self-improvement.
But I still wasn't sure I could trust this new and upgraded Caya.
9
The Warmonger facility was located deep inside what had been Vinci's territory. Unlike most structures in the region she had once controlled it was still relatively intact. Being under a mountain likely helped with that, and I imagined that Flower utilized her advanced technology to help protect the facility from the burn-off.
There were no armies to avoid this time. I occupied a drone and rode with Caya in a shuttle to the facility. An energy barrier flickered as we approached to allow us through. Flower was using shielding much as I was these days. Within the dome a habitable atmosphere was maintained, and she'd turned the area outside into a garden.
We found her there adjusting the stones in a manufactured river. Irisa, the Righteous Prime, lounged in a chair nearby with a tablet.
"Emma. And a person I've only met once before and that got all shooty," Flower said, moving in to give my drone a hug and then giving one to Caya for good measure.
"Caya," Caya said, looking about with a grimace she didn't bother to hide.
"What’s her problem?" Flower asked.
"Your garden is probably dirty," I said.
"Dirt is expected. Disorderliness is not. A garden should be a perfect manifestation of the order of life, everything in its place," Caya said.
"LIFE IS FOR DESTROYING! THE ORDER OF YOUR SPECIES IS TO BE CONSUMED BY YOUR BETTERS BEFORE BEING TURNED INTO FERTILIZER TO HELP THE PEONIES GROW," Warmonger bellowed from a set of speakers camouflaged as rocks.
"I still don't have a solution for you on that," Irisa said, jerking her head towards the sound.
"Believe me. I've already factored what a complete and total waste of space you are into my plans. Caya is the new you, except pretty and smart," I said.
"Oh look, the insane computer that broke my people and the planet thinks she has a hope of winning a snark contest," Irisa said.
I would totally win a snark contest.
"LET OUR ENEMIES MURDER EACH OTHER AND WE CAN HOLLOW THEIR SKULLS TO PLANT FLOWERS," Warmonger boomed.
Flower offered a weak smile. "I think he is getting a little better. He used to hate gardening, but now he's kind of into it."
I could tell.
"I don't know what you could have that is going to help. The problem Irisa has been having is he doesn't really have any sort of central server where a crystal might be located," Flower said.
&n
bsp; "How does that even work? Even you seem to be running on hardware," I said.
"I'm not the brains of the operation. You can think of him as a ghost, if you like. He is there, always, but kind of intangible," Flower said.
Caya said, "That shouldn't matter for what we have planned. I don't want to rip the crystal out of him so much as I want to make him sane even with it. To that end we can use a bit of my own stability through a software framework I created."
Flower tilted her head to study her. "Intriguing. You want to use some of your own unique dimensional resonance to influence his. It is an interesting approach, although I'm not subjecting him to anything without a chance to review it."
Caya offered a data disk and Flower accepted it.
A table and chairs materialized near the waterfall and Flower took a seat, distractedly looking into the distance. "This is good work, but not very compatible with how Warmonger is made to operate. Have a seat, I'm making some modifications."
I took a seat and Caya did as well.
"Why all this? The waterfall? The garden?" Caya asked, looking around.
"I've been here a long time. I like Earth. I mean, I'm not in love with the post-apocalyptic hellscape filled with super-powered killing machines you've made of it, I liked how it used to be," Flower said.
It wasn't that bad now. I thought she'd appreciate the Omega Tower and what I'd done there.
"Isn't that an odd stance for an invader to take?" Caya asked.
"It isn't that simple. Warmonger is there to look at everything you are, to figure out how dangerous you can be, and to report on it. I was sent here to become one of you and see what you're all about. I've lived more life as a human than any human alive, and that includes those of you who became immortal in the Cataclysm," Flower said.
"I WILL CRUSH THE INFERIOR! MURDER THE MURDERERS! SLAUGHTER THE SLAUGHTERERS!" Warmonger yelled.
"She’s actually a pretty soft touch. Do you know that she got Warmonger a crystal because she was trying to save the Earth?" Irisa asked.