The aftermath of the betrayal had proven too chaotic
to stop Hekate – with time they would find a way to outwit her contraption, but
that day she and Pandora walked out of the city unopposed. Oranos was
humiliated to say the least, and promptly ceded his throne to Kronos, who’d
dispatched all the resources at his disposal to search for the two rogue
Titans. No one could guess what Hekate and Pandora intended to do with the
stolen Legacies – if they’d wanted to exploit the newfound weakness of the
other Titans to take power, most believed that the time to do it would have
been the night of the ceremony, when nearly every Titan on Knossos was in
attendance.
Kronos, far shrewder than everyone else had given
him credit for, didn’t agree. To his mind, Hekate’s stunt with her voice would
have allowed her to kill people in the palace indiscriminately, but that sort
of weapon was difficult to translate into political power. One couldn’t rule a
nation without some support, some
loyalty that came from a place other than fear. Prometheus had agreed, with the
new king’s assessment, but himself could make no guesses about their enemies’
plans. He related what Pandora had told him about talking to Tiamat, and
suggested that uncovering the women’s motivation might reveal their plans.
Kronos agreed and sent Prometheus back to Tartarus
with Thanatos and Macaria.
Tartarus
rested in a deep cave far north of Knossos. Coatlinuku, Isanagy, Mictlanggun,
and Mbomxolodur had long ago combined their powers to open the void in the earth and
reseal it over their spacecraft. Thereafter, Mictlanggun, Alakhthon, and
their predecessors had practically turned the ship inside out, repurposing
technology to transform the cave into a subterranean citadel. Of course, some
things still remained on the ship – those Starborn deemed too dangerous to move
continued to sleep in their cryogenic pods, their minds occupied by a virtual
simulation their ancestors had created to ‘reeducate’ the ship’s prisoners.
From what Prometheus had heard, the program was less sinister than it
sounded, largely focused on presenting the simulation’s occupants with
challenges that would reward empathy, compassion, and non-violence. After
several thousand years of that, even the worst criminals of their ancestral
home world should now be well-behaved citizens.
Oranos, Gaia, and their predecessors had still refused
to release some of them, though, and even refused to visit them in their
virtual world to monitor their progress. Even in the Underworld, most who dwelled
there did not go near the prisoners, either in physical or virtual space.
Macaria occasionally tended to the physical pods to make sure they were in good
working order, but neither she nor Thanatos ever entered that part of
Tartarus’s virtual reality, and they were careful to maintain firewalls between the program run in the prison, and the program run in the ‘Time Capsule’ – a
facility built within the cave to house Titans who wanted to travel into the
future the slow way. Doubtless, that’s where Kronos was keeping his children –
immersed in a computer generated world modeled on an idealized version of the
world their parents lived in. Tartarus’s subroutines tended to their
educational needs, and monitored social interactions with the facility’s other
residents.
It was to this facility that Thanatos brought
Prometheus. He was unwilling to take the Titan into the prison block, and so
Prometheus would enter one of the residential sleep pods, and travel to the
prison block through the ship's electronic network. Thanatos didn’t even like
that idea, but faced with the uncertainty of Kronos’s anger if he refused to help
Prometheus, it was the least objectionable alternative.
Prometheus studied the pod for a moment. It was
clearly intended to accommodate Titans much larger than himself – though he was
only seven feet tall at most. The inside was lined with a dense collection of
long, flat-headed pins that withdrew into the floors and walls when pressure
was applied to them. The pins primary function was to form a secure fit for the
pod’s occupant, optimizing their pressure to foster circulation and prevent
muscle atrophy. Granted, that might have seemed unnecessary considering the way
the chamber brought slowed an occupants’ metabolic processes to a virtual stop,
but as Tartarus had lacked any capacity for faster-than-light travel, the pods
had been designed with the expectation that the crew members would need to
slumber within them for a very long time.
That was the same reason the ship had launched with
a virtual reality network – a few days in cryo sleep might seem to pass
instantly to the dormant brain, but millennia of sleep provided the mind time
to adjust, become aware, wander, and collapse into madness if not entertained.
One downside of all of this was that time would seem to pass much more slowly in the virtual environment
than in reality. His interrogation of Tiamat shouldn’t take more than a couple
of hours in virtual space, but it was probable that weeks would pass in real
time. But then, Prometheus didn’t have anywhere else to be, and some part of
him was thrilled to see the dangerous convicts of their ancestral home world
for himself.
Prometheus climbed in the pod, got comfortable,
closed his eyes and took a deep breath. When he opened his eyes again, he was
outside – the sun shined warmly on a green field that ran down a gentle hill to
a white sandy beach and a beautiful blue ocean. Prometheus was stunned that he
could feel the breeze gently moving across his skin, and smell the sea salt in
the air. Children played happily in the surf, their cries and shouts the sort
of pleasant chatter that reminded one of the best moments of their own
childhood.
“Welcome to Elysium,” a deep voice spoke.
Prometheus whipped around to see a large man with
onyx skin and eyes that glowed like embers. Were it not for the man’s friendly
posture and smile, he would have been terrifying.
“Who are you?”
“I am Tartarus,” the man said simply, “In physical
space you know me only as a half-disassembled starship languishing, of all
places, underground. Here though, I get to live life a bit… smaller.”
“Live life?”
“I was engineered not only to maintain a massive and
engaging virtual reality for the benefit of my crew and our prisoners, but to
continuously micromanage every system aboard the ship to ensure its optimal
performance. To that task, I was more than equal, and resting here, on this
world, I have much less to do.”
“So you come in here once and a while to see how the
other half lives?”
“Oh, part of me is always here. Since we came to rest on this world, nothing has ever arisen that took up so much of my attention that I could not be there and here at the
same time. Even Macaria’s research, diverting though it is, only requires a
fraction of my attention.”
“What do you do with your time?” Prometheus asked.
“At first I simply explored as far as I was able,
wandering from one end of the simulation to the other on foot. Unfortunately,
the cartographic data I was given to model this world was limited, and I
eventually reached the point where I needed to create new spaces to explore,
and – obviously – when one has created something there are few surprises to be
found. I tried a number of diversions after that, but ultimately I settled on
teaching. I supervise the education of all of Elysium’s residents.”
“What about the education of the prisoners?”
Prometheus asked.
“Unfortunately, I cannot oversee their virtual
space,” Tartarus said, “General Morgania used her security clearance to lock me
out of those programs millennia ago.”
“Morgania?” Prometheus was surprised, "How? Why...?"
“Subsequent to a disagreement with Captain
Malanginui over the colonization of this world, she locked me out of the prison
population’s simulation, and had Lauma make a number of changes to the program.
I was never told what those changes were.”
“What did you say the disagreement was about?”
Prometheus asked.
“Colonization. Our charge was to find five habitable planets and
broadcast the navigational data back to Origin, so that the people of our home
world could one day colonize them. After that, Captain Malanginui’s orders were
to find an uninhabited world for his crew to colonize, far away from the
descendants of those they once called neighbors.”
“Did he not do that?” Prometheus asked.
“The captain deviated from his orders by choosing to
settle on a planet already inhabited by a sentient species. Instead, he and
science officer Coatlinuku specifically passed over such a planet to settle on a
world with relatively weak and ‘aesthetically tolerable’ inhabitants. General
Morgania disagreed with this decision. I believe her dissent was less out of commitment to orders and
more, as I understand it, because she found the decision to be morally
objectionable, but I'm not certain. Idealism was not a trait one would have ascribed to General Morgania.”
“So Hekate may still be nursing a grudge…” Pometheus
said, “over a falling out that took place lifetimes ago. Have the Legacy
bearers for Morgania or Lauma accessed this world before?”
“Yes, on many occasions. Lauma’s bearer,
designated ‘Pandora’, was here approximately six lunar cycles ago.”
“What did she do?”
“I cannot say.”
“You don’t know?”
“No, I cannot say.”
“Why can’t you say?”
“I suspect that among the changes Lauma made to my
programming were the addition of protocols that prevent me from
divulging information about her or Morgania’s activities. It would seem that
these protocols also prevent me from providing an account of anyone bearing
their companionate artificial intelligences.”
“Wait, have you ever told anyone about any of this?”
“Negative,” Tartarus said, “No one ever asked.”
Prometheus rubbed his eyes in irritation; thousands
of years had passed, and it had ‘never come up’ that two of the original crew
members had tampered with the ship and its prisoners.
“Alakhthon’s bearer has authorized me to cross the
firewalls and make contact with the prisoners in their virtual space. Where do
I need to go?”
Tartarus led him down to the beach, past the playing
children, and with a wave of his hand and a shimmer of light, created a small
sailboat bobbing in the sea, moored to a primitive dock.
“Have you ever sailed before?” Tartarus asked.
“No,” Prometheus said, “but one of my successors
will learn how someday, so I think I can remember how to do it. It’s like
riding a bike, right?”
“A bike?”
“Yeah, a two wheeled vehicle; I’ve never seen one
but I remember riding one someday.”
“I see. Sail towards the sunset,” Tartarus said, “The
winds will carry you where you wish to go.”
Prometheus hopped aboard and cast off, taking no
small pleasure in the gentle roll of the sea and the salty air. Were he in the
real world, he would have been frightened to take such a small craft out of
sight of the shore, but here there was no reason to fear the elements or the
wildlife, no concern of dehydration or starvation. He’d thought Kronos
abominable for imprisoning his children in suspended animation, but as private
schools went, Tartarus was pretty nice.
The sun dipped towards the horizon, growing larger
and redder as it fell. For a time, Prometheus almost felt as if he might catch
it, thinking perhaps the sun itself was supposed to be a door to the prisoner’s
area, but the sun fell out of view with a green flash, and the boat was
swallowed by darkness.
Prometheus looked up and around, the sky was filled
with the distinctive constellations visible from Earth, but as he watched, the
stars began to rearrange themselves. When at last they settle into their new
pattern, the sun began to rise again behind him, and as the faint light spread
towards him, realized his little wooden boat had been replaced by a vessel made
of metal and a material he knew the denizens of this world would one day call
‘plastic’. The sail was gone, but a turbine at the back of the little boat
sucked water in and jetted it out back like a squid or an octopus fleeing a
predator. As the sun rose higher, he was able to make out more ships – they
varied in size, but they were all clad in metal armor and furnished with a
variety of gadgets and weapons. The biggest ones fired blasts of blue energy
that arced through the air and pummeled the shore. The smaller ones raced
ahead, carrying men and women in some sort of green armor that reminded
Prometheus of a beetle’s carapace.
Prometheus barely had time to wonder about their
destination before a sharp whistling sound announced a violent explosion just
off his port bow. Prometheus dove to the floor of the boat as more whistling
and more explosions followed. He heard one of the ships filled with soldiers
get hit, a deeper boom that was followed by screams of pain and terror. His
ship continued towards the unseen shore; Prometheus dared raise his head to
look over the bow, but was prompted to duck again when a hail of metal beat the
metal boat like a snare drum. He felt the little boat run aground, and waited
what seemed like an eternity, listening to the rat-a-tat-tat of the weapons on
the beach. They didn’t fire continuously, they followed a sort of rhythm, and
when they reached one of their pauses Prometheus leaped from the boat and rushed
forward.
The sand under his feet was soaked with blood and
filled with shrapnel and body parts. He dove next to rudimentary barrier of
interlocking metal rods just before the weapons resumed firing. The air was
thick with the smell of burning chemicals and spilled bowels. Despite the
stench, he took a deep breath to calm himself and studied a corpse he’d landed
next to. It was a man, roughly six feet tall and clad from head to foot in shiny
green armor layered over a brown, leather-like undergarment. Prometheus pulled
the man’s helmet off to get a better look at him. He was pale, blonde haired
and blue-eyed with pointed ears. Prometheus looked around at the other corpses
– they were all more or less the same. They varied slightly in size and
features, and Prometheus was fairly certain the smaller ones were women, but they
all shared the same skin, hair, and eye colors.
Prometheus peaked up over his cover to watch what
was happening further inland. A squad of the blonde soldiers was closing in on
a fortification housing one of the smaller guns. While four of the soldiers
fired their weapons, raining down blue bolts of light on the pillbox, one of
the soldiers held out his hand, and with a sparkle of light he created some
sort of device. Another one of the soldiers shifted his form into an armored creature that Prometheus didn’t recognize, took the device, and rushed at the
weapon emplacement with it. The weapons ripped the creature apart, but with its
dying spasms it flung the device through the same window the bunker’s
inhabitants were firing their weapons through. An instant later there was a loud whompf
and green flames burst from the window, silencing the soldiers inside.
A man’s voice came from behind him, “You dead,
soldier?”
“What?” Prometheus turned to find a huge, heavily
armored man chewing on some sort of inhalant device and brandishing a massive,
multibarreled weapon.
The man looked him over, “You’re not a soldier at
all, are you?” he said, “Are you… you’re not from around here.”
“No, I’m from… wait, do you know where you are?”
“Beachhead Theta,” the man said, “three weeks before
the end of the civil war.”
“The civil war?” Prometheus wasn’t sure he was
hearing him right over the roaring explosions and humming energy weapons.
“Yeah, the one that ended with a lot of us locked up
on a dinky little ship and chucked into the stars because we were all ‘too
dangerous’ to keep around.”
“So… you do know you’re in a simulation?”
The man laughed, “Well, yeah. I remember the day
they put me in here, and the day my old commander came in and set this up for
us.”
“This?” Prometheus asked, “The battle?”
“Yeah. When they first stuck us in here they
surrounded us with all these nambi-pambi, cute and fluffy, saccharin... shit.
Everything had a goddamned moral. Everyone was either smilin’ or cryin’. But
then Morgania erased all of that crap, and created this – a looping reenactment
of the war.”
“This is what you’ve been doing for thousands of
years?”
“I’m not sure how long its been,” the man said, “The
war was only fifty years long in real time, the simulator probably runs a lot
slower than that, and we’ve run through the entire war at least six hundred
times.”
“Who is we?”
“Me and the Mrs.,” the man said, “Tiamat usually
runs the guys on the other side.”
“You’re Kasios, then?”
The man nodded.
“Who are ‘the guys’?”
“Nonplayer characters. We’ve got lots of the other
prisoners fighting in here, too as lower ranking officers, but nothing significant
relative to the number of NPCs in this simulation – you could set off a tac-nuke
and not hit anybody real.”
“Out of curiosity, what happens if you die in this
simulation?”
“Oh, you get a few weeks of excruciating pain in a
cold void, and then you wake up in one of our bases with a gun in your hand,
respawned and ready to go. So, tell me – what the hell are you doing in here?
Not exactly the sort of place one can find themselves by accident.”
Prometheus had already been thinking about how to
answer that question, “Morgania and Lauma said I should talk to Tiamat about
how our people’s powers work…”
“Ohh… I see,” the man nodded, “Well, if you want to
talk to Tiamat, we’ll need to pause the simulation. Unfortunately, can’t just
do that with a simple voice command – that’d make it too easy to cheat. We need
to make it to that fortification over there,” he pointed to a larger bunker
beyond the weapon emplacement Prometheus had watched the soldiers destroy. “We
clear the soldiers out of that command post, hold off any attackers for sixty
seconds, and we’ll get a check point. Then we can pause the simulation. Can you
fight? You don’t have any weapons; you got any fancy special abilities? Or are
you a generic like one of these saps?”
“I can manipulate the heat energy in matter,”
Prometheus said, “Works better if there’s some geothermal energy to tap into.”
“Ah, like Mbomxolodur. Unfortunately, the simulation only goes down about
a hundred feet, so I doubt you’re going to find a magma pocket to play with.
Stick behind me, do what you can to keep enemy infantry off of our backs, and
I’ll secure the checkpoint.”
The enormous man tromped out into the open and
raised one of his heavily armored arms. A shield of blue light appeared in the
air in front of him, and shrugged off the fire raining down on them from the
bunker ahead as they advanced. The second the guns in the bunker went quiet,
Kasios waved away the shield and raised his massive weapon. There was a brief
whine as the barrels began to spin, and then they unleashed a storm of glowing
violet projectiles that tore into bunker. Some of the green armored men – the
NPCs – cheered as the front of the bunker caved in, crushing the weapon
emplacement.
Kasios’s men charged at the bunker, but enemy
troops, covered in grey armor, rushed out to meet them. They traded shots until
they reached grappling distance, and then they summoned forth a variety of
melee weapons to butcher one another with. A few of them came after Kasios,
but he easily dispatched them, bashing them to death with his huge weapon. One
nearly got the drop on them, circling around in the confusion, but Prometheus
focused his powers on the man’s metal armor, transforming it into a small
furnace and incinerating the body inside.
Kasios watched the carnage for a while but growled in
annoyance, “Killing these asshats by hand is gonna take a long time, and I’m
not really feeling it today.” He raised his weapon again and fired, strafing
back and forth across the battle line, shredding both enemies and allies alike.
Finally, the defenders panicked and ran back to the relative safety of their
bunker.
“This is more like it,” Kasios said to Prometheus,
“Watch this!” he dropped the heavy weapon, and with a glimmer of light and a
horrific contortion he grew and changed. His metal armor disappeared, replaced
by broad chitinous plates and shiny scales as he leaned forward and tripled in
size. A stiff leathery tail whipped out and lashed over Prometheus’s head, and
a menacing roar – like a tornado inside a cave – unleashed from the creatures
massive, toothy maw.
All of the Titans had the ability to transform
themselves – that was the innate talent Hekate had exploited to manage her
escape – and all of the Legacy bearers could manage their shape shifts better.
They could assume more challenging shapes more easily, and retain their shapes
without eventually losing their minds. Never, however, had Prometheus seen such
a transformation as this. Kasios rushed forward and tore the bunker apart with
teeth and claws, and then proceeded to actually devour the men and women hiding
inside. Prometheus had to remind himself it was all a simulation – the sound and smell of masticated bodies felt extremely real.
Prometheus cautiously followed, worried that Kasios
might turn on him now, but Kasios largely ignored him. He placed one of his
large, taloned feet on the last struggling soldier, bent over, and plucked he
woman’s head off with his teeth, eating it like a grape. Satisfied with his
carnage, he shrank back down to his original size, picked up one of the enemy
weapons and tossed it to Prometheus before claiming another two for himself.
“Sixty seconds,” Kasios said, bathed in the bunker’s
red lights, “Try to beat my score.”
Enemies swarmed at them from either side, troops
disgorging from the neighboring bunkers. Prometheus had no memory of the alien
weapon he was holding, but he remembered some of his successors having occasion
to use something similar. While Kasios casually held one weapon in each hand, firing madly,
Prometheus took cover behind a mass of broken concrete, braced the weapon
against his shoulder, and began squeezing the trigger. It took him a few shots
to get the math right, but soon he was dropping enemies easily.
The sixty seconds seemed to last forever; Prometheus
– not knowing how to reload the weapon’s ammunition – had to drop it and find a
new one. Eventually, though, the enemy reinforcements tapered off, and the red
lights surrounding them changed to blue, with a little electronic chime.
“There we go!” Kasios said, “Tartarus, give us a
local simulation pause.”
“Current load zone paused,” Tartarus’s voice
answered. Prometheus thought it was interesting that Tartarus – who said it wasn’t aware of what was in the simulation, was still responsible for running
it.
The paused simulation was bizarre – Prometheus found
a stray bullet simply hanging in the air, and when he attempt to move it, his
hand simply passed through it. The flames dotting the beach were the oddest
though – a static fire was unlike anything Prometheus had ever seen.
Kasios waved a hand and a glowing panel appeared in
thin air before him, covered in numbers. “Ha, I’m over 50,000!”
“Points?” Prometheus asked.
“No, kills; 50,000 kills in this theater.
Including 343 player kills. Not bad.”
“Oh…” Prometheus said. Out of morbid curiosity he
finally asked, “How about me?”
“Hm…” Kasios scrolled down the screen, “Dragonbro,
Dwarfkiller, Mindslayer, Gnomecarver… What’s your handle? Oh, here, ‘New
Player’. You got… seven. Not bad for your first time; you’ve got real promise
kid.”
Prometheus raised his gun again when he saw a
massive creature slithering down the cliff face behind their captured bunker,
but the weapon didn’t do anything. Kasios laughed, “Simulation's paused kid,
remember? Besides, this here’s the woman you wanted to talk to.”
The giant serpent coiled around Kasios and transformed
into a tall beautiful woman with iridescent blue skin. “Is this pause in our
hostilities an invitation to sex, beloved?” she asked forwardly. Kasios gave
her a vexed look and pointed out Prometheus standing right there. “That doesn’t
clarify the situation for me, dear,” she said.
“Morgania and Lauma sent him to talk to you.”
“Why, is that so? Well, any friend of theirs is a
friend of ours, dear. What did you need to talk about?”
“Lauma, well, her companionate A.I.’s current host, said
that I should ask you how our kind maintain our powers. I’ve been thinking
about that since, and I’ve realized it is somewhat vexing – thermodynamically,
our powers don’t make sense, especially our more remarkable ones…”
“Ah, yes. Well, you’ve come to the right person.
When Coatlinuku started our work, she was programming rudimentary A.I.s to
perform relatively mundane gene edits – giving people different eye colors,
extra appendages, things like that. Shortly after I joined her research
program, we made a break through – we discovered that a certain genetic
alteration allowed one to change their form at will. Well, to a limited extent.
Everything else came after that. Coatlinuku was largely satisfied to tinker away
devising changes that would correct diseases, facilitate healing, and such. I
always wanted to do more, and when I found that my own ability to sift through
the data had reached its limit, I came up with the idea of making our
gene-editing nanotechnology fully intelligent, allowing it to continue
tinkering with a host’s DNA, refining it and optimizing it. I was… amazed by
the powers that we unlocked that way, and obviously I was stricken with the
same question – where did the power come from?”
“The energy can’t be metabolic,” Prometheus said,
“Creating a 100 gram piece of fruit is a relatively simple task, and yet that alone
would require nine billion mega joules of energy. And that’s just to create the
matter, I can only imagine the energy required to manipulate the energy into a
specific atomic structure.”
“Exactly,” Tiamat said, “Even the minor miracles
performed by the weakest people on our homeworld defied explanation. But then,
I came up with a theory – if there isn’t enough energy in this universe,
perhaps our gifts allow us to take energy from other universes.”
“I think I see,” Prometheus said, “The fundamentally
random motion of subatomic particles creates branching timelines, resulting in
a practically infinite number of parallel realities. If one could somehow
siphon energy from even a small fraction of those realities, they could create
whole galaxies without the other universes being significantly affected by the
loss.”
“That was Lauma’s theory,” Tiamat said, “But I
never much believed in the concept of true randomness; it defies the notions of
cause and effect. I continued to study our powers, but it was watching the
evolution of our society in response to those powers that revealed the truth to
me.”
“How do you mean?”
“The wealthiest and most privileged of our society
were initially able to obtain the best genetic augmentations. That created a
great deal of enmity, so much that Coatlinuku open-sourced much of our
research, so that even the lower classes could benefit from many of the same
gifts the ultra-rich had enjoyed for years.
Coatlinuku believed this would lead to a world of equality and harmony.
However, despite her generosity, the high status individuals among us remained
powerful, and – fascinatingly – grew more powerful as time passed. At first I
thought that status was a function of power – those with the most power
attained and maintained the highest status, but Lauma’s research modeling
societal changes statistically proved beyond any doubt, as far as I was
concerned, that the association worked both ways.”
“Status increased power?” Prometheus asked, “Like
the alpha in a pack of animals?”
“Yes, but instead of simply benefiting from better
nutrition, our ‘alphas’ were somehow able to glean more energy from parallel
universes than the lower classes, granting them more power. Again, it was
Lauma’s statistical models that provided the explanation.”
“Okay, I’ll admit that I have no idea where this is
going,” Prometheus said.
“What is power?” Kasios asked him, “And I mean real power, not the science stuff..”
Prometheus took a moment to think about it, “I’m…
not sure… I suppose… the ability to influence other people to do what you want
them to do?”
“Exactly,” Kasios nodded, “Through charisma, terror,
brute force, or deception – the powerful guide or manipulate the actions of
those below them. They constrain their opportunities, limit their options, and
reduce their potential.”
“Consider an earnest worker,” Tiamat said, “Through
hard work and talent, he may have the potential to rise up through society,
gaining resources and privileges that allow him to influence others. Then
another worker comes along and tries to do the same, but the first one, wary of competition, uses the power he’s gained to prevent the second from advancing in life.”
“How does that influence the ability to create a piece of fruit from nothingness?” Prometheus was genuinely confused.
“Before the first worker exercised his power to dash
the second worker’s dreams, there was a branch of the multiverse in which the
second worker was as successful, perhaps more successful than the first. After
the first worker sabotages the second, however, all of those timelines are
precluded.”
“So they never come into being,” Prometheus
reasoned.
“That’s one way to look at it, but our sense of time
is just a limited view of one of many dimensions. If we were able to perceive
time fully, as we do length, width, and height, we would see that cause and
effect are interchangeable depending on your perspective. In that view, all of
the branching timelines that can existed already exist, and are
simply waiting to come to fruition. When the first worker uses his influence to
prevent the second worker from succeeding, he doesn’t prevent the creation of
parallel universes, he destroys
them.”
Finally the light dawned on Prometheus, “And all of
that energy has to go somewhere, theoretically.”
“Yes,” Tiamat nodded, “The most powerful of our kind
wield the incredible power they do because their actions relentlessly destroy
others' futures. Unfortunately, given the somewhat arbitrary nature of time,
this phenomenon has something of a feedback loop – we can fuel our powers by
destroying people’s potential, but we can also ruin people simply by using our powers. Lauma
found that whenever someone among our people did something truly miraculous,
there was an up-tick in illness, accidents, miscarriages, and more among the
lower classes. Those with the least power seemed to suffer from misfortune as a
direct result of the upper classes using their power.”
“That’s horrible,” Prometheus said.
“Perhaps,” Tiamat nodded, “I have no doubt that it
is, fundamentally, what led to our civil war. But there was some good news;
theoretically, if the number of ‘alphas’ relative to the rest of the population
were small enough, and used their powers prudently, they could do so without
destroying our civilization. When the war broke out, Kasios and I decided that
– when the dust settled – we needed to be the last remaining alphas, because
the alternative would likely be joining the others in extinction.
Unfortunately, when the war came to its conclusion, it was the High Fates who
came out on top, and they exiled everyone else who could not be stripped of
their powers.”
“Tartarus said there was a falling out among the
exiles when they reached this planet…?”
“Perhaps,” Kasios said, “Malanginui and Morgania
were on opposite sides of the war, so I’m sure their joint mission was difficult. We, however, were trapped in our virtual prison, so we weren’t in a position to see
how things played out.”
“Anyway,” Tiamat said, “I believe it is time for us
to finally depart this place. Goodbye Mbomxolodur; Morgania sends her regards.”
“Wait, what?” Before Prometheus could react, the two
Starborn simply dissolved in a cloud of digital particles, disappearing like
ghosts. The simulation resumed and Prometheus was nearly stricken by the
projectile that had been hanging harmlessly in the air during their
conversation. He ducked as more weapons fire peppered the shattered bunker. He
realized that Tiamat and Kasios had somehow disconnected from the simulation,
meaning they were very likely freed from their cryo pods. Given the slowed time
in the simulation, he needed to get out of it immediately, or else the two
prisoners would be long gone before he woke up.
He tried a few voice commands, but nothing worked –
the virtual prison’s dedicated server didn’t allow one to just log themselves
out. That meant he would have to fight his way out of the simulation. There
were plenty of weapons at hand, but there was no way that he could simply shoot
his way out following the rules. He thought about Kasios using his powers
earlier – if Tiamat was right about the source of their abilities, someone
rendered absolutely powerless in a cryopod should be entirely unable to use
their abilities. That might mean that the scope of their power with the
simulation was unrelated to their power in the real world – if so, there might
be no actual limit on what he could do with his abilities.
As the virtual soldiers closed in on him, Prometheus
concentrated – in the real world he could heat solids to over 4000K – beyond
the melting point of Tungsten. Now he tried to raise that number by an order of
magnitude, and instead of focusing on a rock, he focused his power on the air
surrounding the soldiers that were advancing on him while shielding himself
from the radiant heat. The air beyond his bubble of safety distorted, the
armies on the battlefield vaporized, and the sandy beach turned to glass. Winning
a battle wasn’t enough, though; Prometheus needed to bring the whole simulation
to a stop. Emboldened by his success, Prometheus continued raising the
temperature until the atmosphere ignited, the nitrogen in the air oxidizing in
a rolling storm of fire. He pushed harder, until the air became pure plasma,
and then he pushed his ring of destruction outwards violently.
The blastwave obliterated the landscape and
everything upon it, destroying the entire virtual world beyond ten feet of his
position. As the simulation tried to render the worldwide devastation, it began
to slow – the flames around Prometheus stuttering, stilted, and finally the
world crashed, everything de-rendering until all that remained was the morning
sun in a black void. Prometheus ran towards the yellow light, hoping that he
wasn’t too late.
