BECMI Chapter 458 – The End of the World, But Nobody Knows it...
I was somewhat wary of betrayal as I worked on the missile, but Truth had definitely shaken the mind of the, uh, transformed?, commander, and likewise he could not believe that we were lying to him, since we definitely weren’t.
We wanted that thing gone. If for some reason he decided that we all had to die with it, that was a different problem which we could deal with at the time.
In the end, I waved everyone off, and they went out to have a whole lot of fun killing as many Mu Spores as they could before the thing in the sky cooked off.
I was more than a little surprised when the commander sent a bunch of bots and mechs after them for fire support. The base had no problem recycling the things we’d killed and making more of them, and we really didn’t have any real desire to destroy anything.
Like we’d said, we’d retaliated when shot at, and if he didn’t shoot us, we’d go take care of our business.
I was taking out ingots of gold and washing them in complex patterns across a duralloy shell definitely not expecting to be turned into something capable of blasting apart an Immortal creature.
The crafting check was actually the easiest part of all of this. The main part was imbuing it with power, which couldn’t be done quickly unless using Immortal Power, and using IP might be sensed by the thing above.
No, I wanted this thing to feel like some mundane mortal attempt that it could bat away without thinking about it… only to fail and not have enough time to respond appropriately.
That had to include being sealed to time-sighting and similar avoidance mechanisms, basically meaning this was a one-shot attempt riding on Source-driven unknown futures, the only timeline going forward from this point was one, and it couldn’t see that one.
So I basically Meditated and infused 12.5k goldweight of relative power into the thing every eight hours, my only concession to time being using IP to ‘reset’ the missile’s gradually rising resistance so that my efforts could continue for sixteen hours a day. 25K of goldweight equivalence burned, helping make a bomb that was at the very least equal to the one that had brought down Darkmoor!
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“Your comrades are energetic and very powerful,” the hesitant voice of the commander, scrubbed free of his jellied method of making sounds, came out of the sole android that was now watching me, although there were three other cameras present whose eyes never strayed from me.
I spent most of my time in Meditation, Singing the Sublime Chord and making the whole silo echo hauntingly with the grim music and nature of this realm, ethereal lights dancing over everything in various hues and tempos as the Sublime Chord rose and fell ceaselessly, Eternal Crafting doing the job ten times faster than a more mundane method of Item creation.
I was totally aware an Eternal could just have sacrificed some IP and turned the missile into an Artifact before sending it off, accomplishing all of what I was doing in an hour, but such a thing would have a conceptual weight too easy to detect.
Nope, rocks and pebbles, sand and dust, nothing to see here, all puny mortal stuff, yessirree.
“They are indeed quite enthusiastic, Commander,” I agreed without moving my lips or changing my pose, the very air speaking smoothly and my Magevoice filling dozens of his microphones all over the base at the same moment. It was a minor flex that showed I wasn’t staying behind because I was the weak one. “I see you have been enthusiastically emptying your armory, too. Has something gone wrong with the scenario you have calculated?” I asked quietly.
There was a long moment of pondering silence from the walls. It didn’t bother me, as I could Sing the Chord for hours, days if needed, and release my perspective from the constraints of time if required. Invoking Eternal Timelessness, there could be a thousand years between question and answer and it would be the same as a few seconds, if I so adopted the mindset.
A minor yet powerful advantage when time itself could become your weapon, or your tomb.
“All my calculations indicate my firebase will not survive the calamity to come.”
Doing the Infusing certainly didn’t take my full attention, or even a tithe of it. I was focusing more attention on the Gallivants and their energetic destruction of malevolent fungi, looking at all their Markspace displays and enjoying the show while giving advice here and there.
Helos could easily imitate most of my spell versatility at this point, courtesy of being an Avatar of a god of Silver Magic. He didn’t have my raw power yet, but I had centuries more time to accumulate power than he had at this point. They were all at or near the Apex, merely accomplishing things that needed to be done to prove their right to walk through the Arch of Eternity by its standards.
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Two roads for the Eternal: become Divine, or become a Titan. All variations on the Roads of the Eternal extended from that first choice.
The Titan road could become the Divine Road at a later date, but it was difficult to do the reverse. Going from non-finite back to finite was a massive demotion in potential power and status in the eyes of the Alignments, and difficult to accomplish. It was much more likely you’d disperse into the reincarnation cycle, your power going back into Creation, then successfully revert yourself to finite status.
Aaaand I was drifting away from an answer as I contemplated the readiness of each and every one of them to reach Eternity. Right…
“You believe it will fall onto this island and destroy it? Or something else?” I inquired back calmly, curious as to why he was so pessimistic.
“Further inquiries once the nature of this place was known have resulted in further clarification of some particulars. I do not have full access to the scientific capabilities of old, given my… lack of fellow soldiers, but knowing it was a sealed dimensional fracture, I was able to finetune some of the sensor readings and dredge data out of the old databases to compare to.”
“I see.” And I did. “You believe that the explosion will open a dimensional rift and attract further attention of a hostile sort.”
“Yes. The odds of it being friendly I calculate as slim to none. It is likely to be either hostile or friendly to the creature above, and I judge that in neither case will it be well-disposed to myself.”
I pondered the various scenarios involved.
We were going to smash that thing with an ungodly amount of real energy shot through with Primal and Divine Kickers that were going to rip that thing apart. It was already sitting on the Veil, half-in, half-out, dimensionally extruded into this space and so a weakness in the Veil here.
We were going to rip that thing wide open and raise a trans-dimensional hue and cry that something was up here, and prompt something to investigate.
Given the levels of power here, they’d likely investigate really fast.
The most likely responders would be Immortals.
Immortals would be opposed to the technology, and to the Mu. They’d wipe this place clean on general principle, even the Entropics. After all, demons couldn’t make use of the place if the Mu were, and the Mu were basically a rival Immortal civilization at this point, one of the things Immortals fought to keep away from Nown.
On the Far Shore of home, where this base had been, a big gaping pit had been burned down for a good two thousand feet. Nothing had survived it.
I could only surmise that the Commander had eventually known his time was up and launched his attack as a last exercise in futility. It likely didn’t hurt the creature at all, but did disrupt the Veil.
Some Immortal caught a glimpse of it, came to investigate, and wiped the Theggla-Mu and Shadow Kheper clean.
The Impetus of Time, clearly witnessed by myself and my Sims both here and on Delpha, would be pushing for the same things to happen here, resonating between the timelines and keeping them roughly in parallel, or at least trying to.
If it was something friendly to the Theggla, or the Theggla survived, the same fate would occur to the base regardless.
“I agree with your assessment,” I said cordially after weighing the variables. “The precise nature of what will happen will vary, but your fate is likely the same regardless.
“Your priority thus must shift to either preservation of your legacy, or wiping your legacy entirely. Which do you intend to pursue?” I asked calmly.
The silence was weighty. I was basically asking him if he intended to kill us or not.
“You said time was moving slower in the outside realm. Is there any record of myself or my people there? Are we remembered at all?” he asked, his voice somehow stricken in its cadence, if not its tenor.
“There were remnants of technology left behind here and there, inscrutable things that few could understand and most simply destroyed because of the random threat they represented. Details, history, records, memories, stores of knowledge… the only things I have discovered bearing such welcome knowledge were all corrupted by Aberrant psi-tech, the most famous of which was the Ei of Hazz. It was a self-defense AI fused to something organic which might have been a human, might have been alien, and was totally mad and crazed.
“The Ei had contacts with the defense bases in the north of the continent, and eventually used them to wage war on the humans and other races who arose here. It culminated in launching a world-cracker which annihilated the mortal kingdom opposing it, and the Galactic Federation ship which had crashed here.”
There was a silent weighing of my words. “There were no non-humans present on our world in the past. And this Galactic Federation your speak of… it was a distant trading partner at best, kept at arm’s length. We went to them, they did not come here.”
“Astute of you. The technology the Ei used was of a similar level to that of the Federation I am familiar with, but it used different mental processes and modularity of design to reach the same results. That makes complete sense, Commander.
“As for the other races… they did not arise until magic rose on this world, and I believe it was the magic coming here which resulted in the destruction of your civilization entirely.”
“My records on the destruction of the world are very incomplete, suspiciously so. I cannot tell if they are degraded or were wiped away. Things I remember myself are shadowed and foggy after so very long, and I have nothing to verify that they are naught but a dream. I cannot even say for certain how and why we arrived here, merely presupposing that we had been enclosed and defeated by a superior power and confined here, then forgotten about.”
“Those are the hallmarks of Immortal influence, Commander. Blanket wipes of memories, extinguishing and burying proof of the existence of alternatives, then starting anew with a new narrative of their own liking and devising.
“The emergence of magic likely caused a great upheaval among your people, particularly the lower classes, as it is a source of power that cannot be controlled easily. Then the Immortals became aware of you, the existence of magic here, and made the decision to claim this world for their own Immortal Projects.
“Your civilization was encouraged to destroy itself, wiped away in turn, and a new era of low technology, reliance on Immortal false gods, and the rise of individuals to power who could birth new Immortals began.”