Tiamat studied the younger Titan for a moment before turning her attention back to Kasios, “That doesn’t clarify the situation for me, dear.”
“This is Prometheus. He’s an alpha like us, visiting from the world. Morgania and Lauma sent him to talk to you.”
“Why, is that so?" Tiamat turned her attention to their visitor, "Well, any friend of theirs is a friend of ours, dear. What did you need to talk about?”
“Lauma, well, her Legacy A.I.’s current host, said that I should ask you how our kind maintain our powers. I’ve been thinking about that since then, and I’ve realized it is somewhat vexing. Thermodynamically our powers don’t make sense, especially our more remarkable ones…”
“Ah, yes. Well then, you’ve come to the right person," Tiamat's lower half returned to its snake-like form and she slithered about the area inspecting the frozen carnage while she talked.
"When Coatlinuku started our work, the nanotech gene-editors she was using were directed and managed by rudimentary A.I.s - not at all like the ones we Alphas are hosts to. Coatlinuku was using these simpler A.I.s to perform relatively mundane gene edits – giving people different eye colors, extra appendages, disease resistance, regenerative telomeres, and things like that,” Tiamat explained, “But shortly after I joined her research program we made a break through – we discovered that a certain genetic alteration permitted telepathic abilities that outright violated our beliefs about what was physically possible. From there, we discovered the ability to change our forms at will - to a limited extent - and the ability to create objects by simply imagining them. Mind over matter.
"To say that these discoveries were groundbreaking or revolutionizing would be a terrible understatement. We had found a way to allow any person to perform miracles. Coatlinuku was largely satisfied to tinker away devising changes that would correct diseases, facilitate healing, and such, but I always wanted to do more, to keep pushing the envelope, to see how much we were truly capable of.
“When I found that my own ability to sift through and comprehend the data had reached its limit, I commissioned Kasios to spearhead the development of an A.I. program dedicated to that purpose. Eventually, that evolved into a semi-sentient iteration of Coatlinuku’s original gene-editing nanotechnology – AZAG – which itself spawned the programs you now refer to as ‘Legacies’. These more advanced A.I.s that could not only edit genes and learn from their successes and failures, but also adapt a host to dynamic environmental conditions and even respond to their host’s will.
“Effectively, the nanotechnology took over the task of innovating new gene edits, creating new abilities. I was amazed by the powers that we unlocked that way. Obviously, I was stricken with the same question you are – where did the energy for our amazing new powers come from?”
“It can’t be metabolic,” Prometheus said, “Creating a one hundred gram piece of fruit is a relatively simple task for a Titan, and yet that alone would require nine billion mega joules of energy. I can only imagine the additional energy required to manipulate the coalescing matter into a specific atomic structure.”
“Exactly,” Tiamat said, “Even the minor miracles performed by the weakest people on our home world 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, “And I think it likely does explain some of the more casual uses of our powers. Any one of us can harness the transmultiversal energy to create a piece of fruit or reshape ourselves into an animal of comparable mass. But those among us who had received Legacies gained abilities far beyond those. Increasing or decreasing our mass greatly, creating objects fashioned from materials with high atomic numbers, destroying objects at a whim, manipulating different forms of energy… It seemed that every person who received a Legacy A.I. gained some new and amazing ability. It was observing the people who didn’t receive the A.I.s, though, 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, culminating eventually in the Legacy A.I.s. That created a great deal of enmity, so much strife 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.”
“That seems optimistic…”
“Indeed,” Tiamat said, “Those who had power were motivated to keep it, increase it, and resist any attempts to elevate others to their level. There had always been a few deviants who’d used the powers we gave them for unethical purposes, but that chaos was ultimately trivial next to the abuse of power that came from the upper classes. The haves may always be inclined to abuse the have-nots, but many of those gifted with Legacy A.I.s became outright monsters. They used their expensive new powers to destroy lives, businesses, even whole communities, and generally for the pettiest of gains. Public health among the lower classes tanked, and I thought, at first, it was the result of some Legacy bearers using their powers to deliberately create a public health crisis, just so they could salvage their dying medical industries.”
“Dying?”
“Yes, of course,” Tiamat said, “Whatever my personal aims may have been, the reality is that our research was successfully curing diseases and making most serious injuries trivial inconveniences. Even those who lacked the means or talent to treat themselves could find someone in their community adept at healing. Hospitals became inefficient, and medicine became less applied and more theoretical. The same problem hit our agricultural system – people could literally make most foods with a snap of their fingers. Coatlinuku and I weren’t too concerned about that – there was still call for naturally grown food, but despite that many of our planet’s farmers were outraged; they seemed to think if at least some people weren’t starving, they were getting screwed over.
“We encountered all sorts of resistance to our work in that general vein,” Tiamat explained, “people angry that other people were no longer hungry or cold or sick. Coatlinuku imagined we’d push through all that and arrive at this ideal world where the only work people needed to do would be science and art. As I said though, as the upper class grew in power, the lower classes became unhealthy and miserable, despite Coatlinuku having practically created a panacea for all of society’s problems.”
“You think the upper classes were somehow drawing their power at the expense of the lower classes?”
“Oh, I’m confident that they were,” Tiamat nodded, “We originally believed that power increased status, but it was Lauma’s research modeling societal changes statistically that proved, beyond any doubt as far as I was concerned, that the association worked the other way.”
“Status increased power?” Prometheus asked, but then snapped his fingers, “Oh, like the ‘alpha’ in a pack of animals.”
“Yes, exactly. Though, instead of simply benefiting from better nutrition, our ‘alphas’ were somehow gleaning more energy from parallel universes than the lower classes, granting them more power, and for some reason that was hurting people.”
“Okay, I’ll admit that I have no idea where this is going,” Prometheus said.
“What is power?” Kasios asked him, “Socially, I mean, not physically.”
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 farmer,” 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 farmer comes along and tries to do the same, but the first one uses the power he’s gained to prevent the second from advancing in life. He buys up all the property and refuses to sell. Hordes the water, undercuts his competition at the market, and so on.”
“How does that influence our ability to create an apple from nothingness? Or to create a storm or an earthquake?” Prometheus was genuinely confused.
“Before the first farmer exercised his power to dash the second farmer’s dreams, there was a branch of the multiverse in which the second farmer was as successful, perhaps more successful than the first," Tiamat explained, "After the first farmer 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," Kasios nodded, "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 could have existed already existed, and were simply waiting to come to fruition. When the first farmer uses his influence to prevent the second farmer from succeeding, he doesn’t prevent the creation of parallel universes, he destroys parallel timelines that already exist.”
Finally the light dawned on Prometheus, “And all of that energy has to go somewhere, theoretically.”
“Yes,” Tiamat clapped, “The most powerful of our kind wield the incredible power they do because their actions relentlessly destroy other’s futures."
"That's... terrible."
"Oh, that's not the worst of it. Given the somewhat arbitrary nature of time, this phenomenon has something of a retrochronal bleeding effect; we increase our power by destroying people’s potential, but we can also inadvertently ruin people 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. Productivity and happiness declined. Those with the least power were suffering from misfortune as a direct result of the upper classes using their power – even when that power was used altruistically.”
“You're right, that’s worse,” Prometheus said.
“Perhaps,” Tiamat nodded, “I have no doubt that it is, fundamentally, what led to our civil war. When we took the issue to the High Fates there was a very, very ugly disagreement over what to do. Coatylinuku believed we could weather the problem and come out fine. Morgania believed that allowing people to continue on willy-nilly would destroy us, but also believed that, theoretically, if the number of ‘alphas’ relative to the rest of the population were small enough, and if they used their powers prudently, they could do so without destroying our civilization.”
“And the High Fates?”
“They agreed with Morgania,” Kasios answered, “They began maneuvering towards a future where only a few would have the godlike powers conferred by the legacies. Everyone else would be remade into a generic,” he pointed at one of the blonde-haired combatants laying in shreds on the ground.
“The politics got complicated,” Tiamat said, “There was more than a little side-switching in the course of the war as people’s ideals shifted and the High Fates agenda became clearer. Coatylinuku started out opposing the High Fates, trying to defend her dream of a colorful world populated by billions of gods. The devastation wrought by the war eventually crushed that dream, though, and she found solace in the High Fates' military commander.”
“Malanginui,” Prometheus said, “her husband.”
“Yes," Tiamat said, "He was an alpha, like her, but he believed in the High Fates' vision of the future - or at least he said he did - and he persuaded Coatylinuku to quit the war.”
"They wrote a book about it," Kasios said, "A lot of romantic nonsense, really, but regardless, when Coatylinuku surrendered, the war effort she'd supported pretty much fizzled out."
“And you? Who did you side with?”
“Well, Morgania initially sided with the High Fates,” Kasios said, “as they were pursuing the social agenda she’d advised. Eventually, though, she realized that the High Fates planned to cut her out of this new oligarchy, so that they would be the only Alphas left on the planet when the dust settled. At the beginning of the war, Morgania might have accepted that arrangement, but over time she came to feel that the High Fates were not competent to be the sole wielders of that power. After Coatylinuku surrendered bringing the first half of the civil war to an end, Morgania went rogue and recruited the two of us to help her fight the High Fates' Union of Equal Peoples.”
“What were you going to do if you won?”
“The exact same thing the High Fates were going to do,” Kasios admitted, “Except we would be the ones keeping our powers, and they'd be sucking dirt."
"Why would anyone... why did anyone fight in a war between two factions with the exact same aim?"
"The High Fates' supporters in the UEP were borderline fanatics," Tiamat said, "Conformity was practically a religion for them, and the High Fates were going to make everyone conform. Our 'heretics' fought for us because they agreed that the greatest power should be kept in fewer hands, but that there was still room for individual freedom, even among the lowest classes."
"Eventually the High Fates realized that they couldn't beat us by strength of arms alone, so they bent their own ideology a bit," Kasios said, "They revised their plans for a 'cure' to allow everyone to keep some pittance of their powers."
"Most of our followers saw that as a reasonable compromise and that pretty much let the air out of Morgania's war effort," Tiamat said glumly, "Pretty soon, Morgania was signing our declaration of surrender."
“Why did you two end up in prison while she went free?” Prometheus asked.
“Well, Morgania was a professional soldier from the start,” Tiamat explained, “She had certain ideas about how the war should be fought, and she more-or-less stuck to her ideals. Probably a good thing, really, because it meant that even after years of war she had enough social and political capital to negotiate for a surrender that didn't end with a mass execution.”
“We were scientists, though,” Kasios said, “Originally, anyway, and we had a bit different idea of warfare that didn’t leave as good of an impression on our history books. We were... more detached from the costs? Morgania handed us over to the High Fates as a sign of good faith.”
“You’re not mad about that?”
“Not really,” Tiamat said, “We weren’t fools – we knew the war was lost, and owing to choices we made, execution was a likely end for us. Late in the game we found out that the reason Malanginui had managed to subvert Coatylinuku was because he was already angling for a way to keep their powers..."
"Exile on the Tartarus," Prometheus understood.
"Exactly," Kasios said, "Because Morgania distanced herself from our unsavory actions and handed us over to the High Fates, she was able to get a spot on the ship, and avoid a lifetime living under the High Fates. It also gave her the political leverage to get us and a few other 'war criminals' loaded up on the ship as prisoners that she would be responsible for."
"Wait, the High Fates put the prisoner's former commander in charge of their imprisonment?"
"There's a reason Morgania didn't think they were fit to lead," Tiamat said.
"Yeah, 'insert blonde joke here'," Kasios laughed.
“Tartarus said there was a falling out among the exiles when they reached this planet…?”
“We were trapped in our virtual prison, so we weren’t in a position to see how things played out,” Kasios said, “but from what Morgania told us – and the truth is hit and miss with her – she wanted to try settling all of us Alphas on an uninhabited world, and essentially let nature take its course.”
“Without an existing underclass to feed on, we’d all be much weaker than we were on our homeworld,” Tiamat explained, “and without the means to replace or reproduce our Legacy A.I.s, the relative size of the most powerful portion of the population would shrink once we all started having children. Lauma apparently did the math and supported Morgania’s plan – the social stratification that would emerge from disparate power levels over time wouldn’t become problematic so long as the number of Legacy bearers remained constant while the Titan population grew. The end result would be a societal compromise between the Civil War’s two viewpoints – everyone would have a lot of power, but only a small minority would have godlike power.”
“That sounds reasonable…” Prometheus was confused as to why there should have been an issue of what sounded like a fair compromise.
“It was reasonable,” Tiamat agreed, “but Malanginuini and Coatylinuku doggedly believed that the Legacy A.I.s would eventually find a way to reproduce themselves and that would upset any balance between the bearers and the nonbearers, inevitably creating a world just like the one they’d left. But then they found a world populated by fast-breeding pre-iron age hominids. They decided that the Titans could instead settle on that world, assume the identities of the indigenous gods, and live off the worship of the natives.”
“But that would also just recreate the same problem that started your war,” Prometheus said, “the lower classes would still suffer and die as the higher classes rode high on their misery.”
“That’s true,” Tiamat said, “but on this world, Titans would never be the lower class. Top and middle, yes, but with a large native population to lord over, Titans would never be at the bottom of the ladder. To them, that seemed the perfect solution – Titans could use their powers uninhibitedly, and rest assured the price would be paid by the primitive anthropoids that were still painting cave walls with their feces.”
“It’s kind of funny,” Kasios observed, “Because everyone back on our homeworld thought we were monsters and Malanginuini and Coatylinuku were heroes, but take us all to a different world and it becomes pretty clear that we’re all monsters.”
Prometheus had always had a touch of cynicism about people – he believed that in the end, with good governance they could be good, but he also believed that even good people were only good until they found themselves in a bad situation. Even still, though, it was jarring to hear how cold his king and queen’s original predecessors had been. On the other hand, neither Oranos or Gaia ever seemed to care too much about the humans. They weren’t misanthropic, but they were certainly apathetic. Gaia always spun it as a ‘big picture view’ – she cared too much about the world and all its creatures to worry about the welfare of a few individuals in a single species. Tiamat and Kasios’s story added a bitter chill to that perspective.
“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 prisoners simply dissolved in a cloud of digital particles, disappearing like ghosts. The simulation resumed and Prometheus was stricken by the projectile that had been hanging harmlessly in the air during their conversation. The steel-jacketed bullet bounced off of him harmlessly, but he had to duck as more weapons fire peppered the shattered bunker.
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, Prometheus knew 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 within 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 molten 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 blast wave 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 stuttered, 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.
“Why, is that so?" Tiamat turned her attention to their visitor, "Well, any friend of theirs is a friend of ours, dear. What did you need to talk about?”
“Lauma, well, her Legacy A.I.’s current host, said that I should ask you how our kind maintain our powers. I’ve been thinking about that since then, and I’ve realized it is somewhat vexing. Thermodynamically our powers don’t make sense, especially our more remarkable ones…”
“Ah, yes. Well then, you’ve come to the right person," Tiamat's lower half returned to its snake-like form and she slithered about the area inspecting the frozen carnage while she talked.
"When Coatlinuku started our work, the nanotech gene-editors she was using were directed and managed by rudimentary A.I.s - not at all like the ones we Alphas are hosts to. Coatlinuku was using these simpler A.I.s to perform relatively mundane gene edits – giving people different eye colors, extra appendages, disease resistance, regenerative telomeres, and things like that,” Tiamat explained, “But shortly after I joined her research program we made a break through – we discovered that a certain genetic alteration permitted telepathic abilities that outright violated our beliefs about what was physically possible. From there, we discovered the ability to change our forms at will - to a limited extent - and the ability to create objects by simply imagining them. Mind over matter.
"To say that these discoveries were groundbreaking or revolutionizing would be a terrible understatement. We had found a way to allow any person to perform miracles. Coatlinuku was largely satisfied to tinker away devising changes that would correct diseases, facilitate healing, and such, but I always wanted to do more, to keep pushing the envelope, to see how much we were truly capable of.
“When I found that my own ability to sift through and comprehend the data had reached its limit, I commissioned Kasios to spearhead the development of an A.I. program dedicated to that purpose. Eventually, that evolved into a semi-sentient iteration of Coatlinuku’s original gene-editing nanotechnology – AZAG – which itself spawned the programs you now refer to as ‘Legacies’. These more advanced A.I.s that could not only edit genes and learn from their successes and failures, but also adapt a host to dynamic environmental conditions and even respond to their host’s will.
“Effectively, the nanotechnology took over the task of innovating new gene edits, creating new abilities. I was amazed by the powers that we unlocked that way. Obviously, I was stricken with the same question you are – where did the energy for our amazing new powers come from?”
“It can’t be metabolic,” Prometheus said, “Creating a one hundred gram piece of fruit is a relatively simple task for a Titan, and yet that alone would require nine billion mega joules of energy. I can only imagine the additional energy required to manipulate the coalescing matter into a specific atomic structure.”
“Exactly,” Tiamat said, “Even the minor miracles performed by the weakest people on our home world 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, “And I think it likely does explain some of the more casual uses of our powers. Any one of us can harness the transmultiversal energy to create a piece of fruit or reshape ourselves into an animal of comparable mass. But those among us who had received Legacies gained abilities far beyond those. Increasing or decreasing our mass greatly, creating objects fashioned from materials with high atomic numbers, destroying objects at a whim, manipulating different forms of energy… It seemed that every person who received a Legacy A.I. gained some new and amazing ability. It was observing the people who didn’t receive the A.I.s, though, 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, culminating eventually in the Legacy A.I.s. That created a great deal of enmity, so much strife 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.”
“That seems optimistic…”
“Indeed,” Tiamat said, “Those who had power were motivated to keep it, increase it, and resist any attempts to elevate others to their level. There had always been a few deviants who’d used the powers we gave them for unethical purposes, but that chaos was ultimately trivial next to the abuse of power that came from the upper classes. The haves may always be inclined to abuse the have-nots, but many of those gifted with Legacy A.I.s became outright monsters. They used their expensive new powers to destroy lives, businesses, even whole communities, and generally for the pettiest of gains. Public health among the lower classes tanked, and I thought, at first, it was the result of some Legacy bearers using their powers to deliberately create a public health crisis, just so they could salvage their dying medical industries.”
“Dying?”
“Yes, of course,” Tiamat said, “Whatever my personal aims may have been, the reality is that our research was successfully curing diseases and making most serious injuries trivial inconveniences. Even those who lacked the means or talent to treat themselves could find someone in their community adept at healing. Hospitals became inefficient, and medicine became less applied and more theoretical. The same problem hit our agricultural system – people could literally make most foods with a snap of their fingers. Coatlinuku and I weren’t too concerned about that – there was still call for naturally grown food, but despite that many of our planet’s farmers were outraged; they seemed to think if at least some people weren’t starving, they were getting screwed over.
“We encountered all sorts of resistance to our work in that general vein,” Tiamat explained, “people angry that other people were no longer hungry or cold or sick. Coatlinuku imagined we’d push through all that and arrive at this ideal world where the only work people needed to do would be science and art. As I said though, as the upper class grew in power, the lower classes became unhealthy and miserable, despite Coatlinuku having practically created a panacea for all of society’s problems.”
“You think the upper classes were somehow drawing their power at the expense of the lower classes?”
“Oh, I’m confident that they were,” Tiamat nodded, “We originally believed that power increased status, but it was Lauma’s research modeling societal changes statistically that proved, beyond any doubt as far as I was concerned, that the association worked the other way.”
“Status increased power?” Prometheus asked, but then snapped his fingers, “Oh, like the ‘alpha’ in a pack of animals.”
“Yes, exactly. Though, instead of simply benefiting from better nutrition, our ‘alphas’ were somehow gleaning more energy from parallel universes than the lower classes, granting them more power, and for some reason that was hurting people.”
“Okay, I’ll admit that I have no idea where this is going,” Prometheus said.
“What is power?” Kasios asked him, “Socially, I mean, not physically.”
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 farmer,” 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 farmer comes along and tries to do the same, but the first one uses the power he’s gained to prevent the second from advancing in life. He buys up all the property and refuses to sell. Hordes the water, undercuts his competition at the market, and so on.”
“How does that influence our ability to create an apple from nothingness? Or to create a storm or an earthquake?” Prometheus was genuinely confused.
“Before the first farmer exercised his power to dash the second farmer’s dreams, there was a branch of the multiverse in which the second farmer was as successful, perhaps more successful than the first," Tiamat explained, "After the first farmer 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," Kasios nodded, "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 could have existed already existed, and were simply waiting to come to fruition. When the first farmer uses his influence to prevent the second farmer from succeeding, he doesn’t prevent the creation of parallel universes, he destroys parallel timelines that already exist.”
Finally the light dawned on Prometheus, “And all of that energy has to go somewhere, theoretically.”
“Yes,” Tiamat clapped, “The most powerful of our kind wield the incredible power they do because their actions relentlessly destroy other’s futures."
"That's... terrible."
"Oh, that's not the worst of it. Given the somewhat arbitrary nature of time, this phenomenon has something of a retrochronal bleeding effect; we increase our power by destroying people’s potential, but we can also inadvertently ruin people 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. Productivity and happiness declined. Those with the least power were suffering from misfortune as a direct result of the upper classes using their power – even when that power was used altruistically.”
“You're right, that’s worse,” Prometheus said.
“Perhaps,” Tiamat nodded, “I have no doubt that it is, fundamentally, what led to our civil war. When we took the issue to the High Fates there was a very, very ugly disagreement over what to do. Coatylinuku believed we could weather the problem and come out fine. Morgania believed that allowing people to continue on willy-nilly would destroy us, but also believed that, theoretically, if the number of ‘alphas’ relative to the rest of the population were small enough, and if they used their powers prudently, they could do so without destroying our civilization.”
“And the High Fates?”
“They agreed with Morgania,” Kasios answered, “They began maneuvering towards a future where only a few would have the godlike powers conferred by the legacies. Everyone else would be remade into a generic,” he pointed at one of the blonde-haired combatants laying in shreds on the ground.
“The politics got complicated,” Tiamat said, “There was more than a little side-switching in the course of the war as people’s ideals shifted and the High Fates agenda became clearer. Coatylinuku started out opposing the High Fates, trying to defend her dream of a colorful world populated by billions of gods. The devastation wrought by the war eventually crushed that dream, though, and she found solace in the High Fates' military commander.”
“Malanginui,” Prometheus said, “her husband.”
“Yes," Tiamat said, "He was an alpha, like her, but he believed in the High Fates' vision of the future - or at least he said he did - and he persuaded Coatylinuku to quit the war.”
"They wrote a book about it," Kasios said, "A lot of romantic nonsense, really, but regardless, when Coatylinuku surrendered, the war effort she'd supported pretty much fizzled out."
“And you? Who did you side with?”
“Well, Morgania initially sided with the High Fates,” Kasios said, “as they were pursuing the social agenda she’d advised. Eventually, though, she realized that the High Fates planned to cut her out of this new oligarchy, so that they would be the only Alphas left on the planet when the dust settled. At the beginning of the war, Morgania might have accepted that arrangement, but over time she came to feel that the High Fates were not competent to be the sole wielders of that power. After Coatylinuku surrendered bringing the first half of the civil war to an end, Morgania went rogue and recruited the two of us to help her fight the High Fates' Union of Equal Peoples.”
“What were you going to do if you won?”
“The exact same thing the High Fates were going to do,” Kasios admitted, “Except we would be the ones keeping our powers, and they'd be sucking dirt."
"Why would anyone... why did anyone fight in a war between two factions with the exact same aim?"
"The High Fates' supporters in the UEP were borderline fanatics," Tiamat said, "Conformity was practically a religion for them, and the High Fates were going to make everyone conform. Our 'heretics' fought for us because they agreed that the greatest power should be kept in fewer hands, but that there was still room for individual freedom, even among the lowest classes."
"Eventually the High Fates realized that they couldn't beat us by strength of arms alone, so they bent their own ideology a bit," Kasios said, "They revised their plans for a 'cure' to allow everyone to keep some pittance of their powers."
"Most of our followers saw that as a reasonable compromise and that pretty much let the air out of Morgania's war effort," Tiamat said glumly, "Pretty soon, Morgania was signing our declaration of surrender."
“Why did you two end up in prison while she went free?” Prometheus asked.
“Well, Morgania was a professional soldier from the start,” Tiamat explained, “She had certain ideas about how the war should be fought, and she more-or-less stuck to her ideals. Probably a good thing, really, because it meant that even after years of war she had enough social and political capital to negotiate for a surrender that didn't end with a mass execution.”
“We were scientists, though,” Kasios said, “Originally, anyway, and we had a bit different idea of warfare that didn’t leave as good of an impression on our history books. We were... more detached from the costs? Morgania handed us over to the High Fates as a sign of good faith.”
“You’re not mad about that?”
“Not really,” Tiamat said, “We weren’t fools – we knew the war was lost, and owing to choices we made, execution was a likely end for us. Late in the game we found out that the reason Malanginui had managed to subvert Coatylinuku was because he was already angling for a way to keep their powers..."
"Exile on the Tartarus," Prometheus understood.
"Exactly," Kasios said, "Because Morgania distanced herself from our unsavory actions and handed us over to the High Fates, she was able to get a spot on the ship, and avoid a lifetime living under the High Fates. It also gave her the political leverage to get us and a few other 'war criminals' loaded up on the ship as prisoners that she would be responsible for."
"Wait, the High Fates put the prisoner's former commander in charge of their imprisonment?"
"There's a reason Morgania didn't think they were fit to lead," Tiamat said.
"Yeah, 'insert blonde joke here'," Kasios laughed.
“Tartarus said there was a falling out among the exiles when they reached this planet…?”
“We were trapped in our virtual prison, so we weren’t in a position to see how things played out,” Kasios said, “but from what Morgania told us – and the truth is hit and miss with her – she wanted to try settling all of us Alphas on an uninhabited world, and essentially let nature take its course.”
“Without an existing underclass to feed on, we’d all be much weaker than we were on our homeworld,” Tiamat explained, “and without the means to replace or reproduce our Legacy A.I.s, the relative size of the most powerful portion of the population would shrink once we all started having children. Lauma apparently did the math and supported Morgania’s plan – the social stratification that would emerge from disparate power levels over time wouldn’t become problematic so long as the number of Legacy bearers remained constant while the Titan population grew. The end result would be a societal compromise between the Civil War’s two viewpoints – everyone would have a lot of power, but only a small minority would have godlike power.”
“That sounds reasonable…” Prometheus was confused as to why there should have been an issue of what sounded like a fair compromise.
“It was reasonable,” Tiamat agreed, “but Malanginuini and Coatylinuku doggedly believed that the Legacy A.I.s would eventually find a way to reproduce themselves and that would upset any balance between the bearers and the nonbearers, inevitably creating a world just like the one they’d left. But then they found a world populated by fast-breeding pre-iron age hominids. They decided that the Titans could instead settle on that world, assume the identities of the indigenous gods, and live off the worship of the natives.”
“But that would also just recreate the same problem that started your war,” Prometheus said, “the lower classes would still suffer and die as the higher classes rode high on their misery.”
“That’s true,” Tiamat said, “but on this world, Titans would never be the lower class. Top and middle, yes, but with a large native population to lord over, Titans would never be at the bottom of the ladder. To them, that seemed the perfect solution – Titans could use their powers uninhibitedly, and rest assured the price would be paid by the primitive anthropoids that were still painting cave walls with their feces.”
“It’s kind of funny,” Kasios observed, “Because everyone back on our homeworld thought we were monsters and Malanginuini and Coatylinuku were heroes, but take us all to a different world and it becomes pretty clear that we’re all monsters.”
Prometheus had always had a touch of cynicism about people – he believed that in the end, with good governance they could be good, but he also believed that even good people were only good until they found themselves in a bad situation. Even still, though, it was jarring to hear how cold his king and queen’s original predecessors had been. On the other hand, neither Oranos or Gaia ever seemed to care too much about the humans. They weren’t misanthropic, but they were certainly apathetic. Gaia always spun it as a ‘big picture view’ – she cared too much about the world and all its creatures to worry about the welfare of a few individuals in a single species. Tiamat and Kasios’s story added a bitter chill to that perspective.
“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 prisoners simply dissolved in a cloud of digital particles, disappearing like ghosts. The simulation resumed and Prometheus was stricken by the projectile that had been hanging harmlessly in the air during their conversation. The steel-jacketed bullet bounced off of him harmlessly, but he had to duck as more weapons fire peppered the shattered bunker.
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, Prometheus knew 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 within 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 molten 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 blast wave 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 stuttered, 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.
No comments:
Post a Comment