Untitled Work in Progress, Part III

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.

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