GoldFinger
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Ch. 224 -
🕑 Added 2022-05-08 08:32:07 +0000 UTC"Alright. Just look into this." I said, adjusting the cognitive assessment sensors onto her eyes.
"Okay. Now don't blink. It's going to flash, but nothing you can't bear." I flipped the switch, and the device scanned her, injecting blank cognitohazard data into her, before checking the results.
Today was the day. After a nice little vacation, today was the day we were going to go into the Magicians world.
And this was a final set of tests I was prepping before we left.
"Why do we have to do this again? Didn't we do this last week?" Wanda asked.
"For precision. We're dealing with soul imprints here. They can be affected by even minute alterations in mental states. And that can change a lot in a week." I replied, as the screen showed green.
"Okay. Everything's looking good." I pulled out an injector, jabbing her with it.
Then, I brought out a rack with a wet nanofiber mesh screen stretched out over it, with a memetic agent printed out on it.
"A few tweaks, but the A.I. will handle that. Look into the screen again, and relax. Let the memetic agent act on you. This will hurt a little, so brace yourself. The extraction mechanism I injected into you will take a sliver of your soul and merge it with the cognitohazard. Then I'll buff it out with the artificial souls I created, and bada bing bada boom, you'll be puppeteering a clone body of your own in no time." I explained.
"I see. Why explain it to me? As long as you know how it works..." Wanda yawned, before wincing as I activated the extraction mechanism.
A silver white bit of spirit particles tinged in red exited her eyes, disappearing into the memetic agent on the nanofiber mesh screen before her, containing the soul imprint.
"I'm telling you this because where we're going, souls are important for using magic. They are part of the extended internal circumstances that you'll need to account for in spell casting. It's better then that you know how the soul imprint that you'll use to control the clone is different from your own true soul."
I lifted the rack, setting on the tattoo press hung over Wanda's clone body, and pressed the tattoo into her chest, between her breasts, marking her with the soul imprint.
With a snap of my fingers, an energy probe extended out form a portal and I zapped the tattoo with the stored chaos energy battery, activating it.
Wanda gasped, her body twitching as an electric sensation ran through.
"I can feel an overlay of another consciousness form over me like a VR headset for the soul. It's weird." Wanda said with glittering eyes like a kid with a new toy, " I like it!"
I smiled.
"I'm glad. Now, listen here. Some final words before we leave." I took a seat beside her.
"Remember what you said last night. About staying here, where it's safe. How you had a bad feeling about this?
I thought it over, and I think you're right. We just need the ship to be there in the void of existence for the initial entry into the world, because of some of the necessary devices I have here in the ship. But once we get the clones in and run a few tests, we don't need stay there the whole time. We can just come back and live it out here. It's way safer and we have the protection of One Above All here. It's the right choice."
Wanda looked at me, surprised.
"Really? Wasn't it necessary for the plan you had?"
"Yup. But running those experiments can be done later. We have an eternity to live through. I'm in no rush. At most this will take an extra year or so if we don't stay there. I'll need to be extra careful with the clones but nothing too hard."
"That's great! I thought you'd start ignoring the kids again with the experiments and research. Riley told me you tend to get overly engrossed in it."
"Yeah. I thought so too. Which is why...this." I gestured, and Wanda gave me a kiss.
"I'm proud of you."
"You say that as if it's a great leap forward. It's just a small decision." I chuckled, "Anyway, get ready we leave in ten."
"I'm ready when you are." Wanda replied.
I grinned.
"I was born ready, bitch. Let's go." We teleported to the control deck, and I snapped my fingers, opening a massive portal above the former plateau at the end of time, which had now been turned to more of a barren desert plain at the end of time.
The ship rose up, through the portal and off into the void, as the kids teleported in too.
"We are going already?" Riley asked, confused.
"Why didn't you call us Papa? I wanna see!" Ace jumped up, into a high chair, peeking out the windows, as Star and Saraswati followed.
Outside the ship we could see entire universes passing by, like tiny glass beads freckled with dusty little spots, shining bright, entire galaxies and nebulae, the size of a skin cell at this distance.
If one looked carefully, you could spot nigh imperceptible creases in the fabric of reality, forming the rough shape of a humanoid figure wreathed in starlight, a head of flowing hair made up of nebulous matter wrapped around himself, four criscrossing horns formed into a crown, twisting across it's frame, as it curled up into the seeming shape the naked eye would mistake as the glass bead we saw earlier.
Eternity.
The most powerful cosmic entity in the MCU and the embodiment of the universe itself!
Around him, weaving through his form was a thin barrier, flickering and pusling every so often, thinning his presence in the multiverse.
My barrier protecting the MCU timeline.
Up above us, a man with a huge head in a royal blue cape raised an eyebrow, silently noting our passing ship, as the kids waved at him.
Sporting a faint smile, he returned the gesture.
Something unexpected of The Watcher, but then again, we were already creatures as powerful if not more so than him. At this point it may as well have been a courtesy.
The ship got faster and faster, zooming past them and we soon left the MCU behind us, as we went farther.
The universes spread out beneath us, like an infinite eight dimensional lattice, shrinking smaller and smaller, until multiverses appeared, stretching out to infinity in clumps of worlds, like ball of goo with debri sticking out.
Even faster now we went on, as things and concepts started to disappear and what replaced them was a vast nothingness. An absence of creation.
The void of existence. The space that rested between worlds, but the bigger, badder version of it.
Our sense of time and space began to wither away as we zipped through it because time and space didn't exist here.
Nothing existed here.
The kids began to trip a bit, unable to cope with the sheer conceptual weight of nothingness bearing down on them before the cognito-filters implanted in their bodies stabilized them.
"Papa...I feel ...woozy!" Star stumbled over, Riley leaned heavily on the windowsill, while Ace gagged over the railing, motion sick from the lack of motion.
Only Saraswati was fine. And by fine, I mean in shutdown, slumped against the wall in self preservation.
I picked Star up in my arms and rubbed his back, administering them all a doze of nanomedicine.
"Now do you know why I didn't call you over?" I giggled and Wanda slapped my shoulder.
"Don't laugh at them!"
"You're one to talk."
She was barely holding it in as well.
What can I say? It was funny to see them sprawled out like stray dogs on a hot summer day.
"Am I dying?" Ace asked horrified.
"No. You are a reality warper in a place without reality, disoriented by the lack of reality, like a fish out of water. First time jitters. It's normal. You'll get used to it." I snapped my fingers, lowering the intensity of the reality anchors by a level, as the ship's reality exerted itself stronger on the kids.
"I'm dying." Ace lolled her head.
I shook my head, teleporting them to their beds.
"You'll be fine. Give it a minute." I patted her back, before returning.
"Is that the world? That yellow-blue Eye Of Sauron looking thing?" Wanda pointed at a huge semi-torus shaped ring of multicoloured streams of frayed pulsing energy in the distance.
Within the streams each existed little torus shaped worlds, flowing through them like blood.
"Yup. That's the one. Each of those streams of energy a Old God." I explained.
"They're pretty." She cooed wistfully.
"Try looking at them using True Sight." I suggested.
"I know that tone, Jay. The last time you said something like that, I got shredded by hell rabbits." Wanda wagged an accusatory finger at me.
"They're going to look horrifying, aren't they?"
I just smiled.
"Why don't you find out?"
"Uuunn! Okay, fine. I will." Wanda couldn't resist the curiousity.
Silently, she cast the spell on her eyes and immediately hurled lava onto the floor, doubling over.
"My eyes! My eyes!" She cried, pummeling the floor.
I snickered as I knelt down beside her and gave her a hug.
"The eyes and...and mouths ..and ...t-the...I don't know whta helf thak ing as-" Her speech broke down into gibberish when she tried to describe them.
"I fell in love with a fucking sadist." She pouted, pinching my ears.
"Ow ow, okay. I'm sorry. Should've just showed you a picture." I cried, slapping her hand away.
"In my defense, I just wanted you to know what we're up against first hand."
"What we're up against? Can you even go against those....things?" Wanda asked.
"It's easier than you imagine. See how they're not stretched out infinitely? That's because they're not infinite in the traditional sense. They're already fraying stretched out this far, see." I pointed at the solar flare like appendages extending out from the flaming ring of energy.
"Just like most other things you know, they are limited. And if they are limited, they can be killed. Hell even if they were limitless, I could still kill them eventually. Just so long as I have prep time and enough resources."
"I will trust you on that." Wanda replied, clutching my hand tight, squeezing it softly.
"Shh.. it's going to be okay." I caressed her head, kissing her forehead.
"I know." She sighed, "I know."
"Computer, run a stress test on the boundaries. Find a crack in their net. And prep our shuttles. We leave in 3 minutes. Once we're in, take the ship back to the MCU." I ordered,
teleporting us to the cloning bay.
"Get in your clone and get ready." I said, and Wanda rose up, kissing mw on the lips.
"You too." She hugged me tight, "See you on worl-"
Boom!
Suddenly, the whole ship shook.
"Sir, 548 miniature black holes have spontaneously appeared in our periphery." The A.I. informed me.
"Excuse me what?! Here? How?"
Immediately, I pulled up the external sensors, and scanned the void.
And what I spotted sent a shiver down my spine.
"Of course, it's them. Of fucking course. Damn worms! Just don't know when to give up!" I cursed.
"What is it?" Wanda asked concerned.
"Nothing." I replied, delaying the shuttles launch.
"Doesn't sound like nothing." She insisted.
"Okay, fine. Remember Worm? That world I went to a while back?"
"Oh! It's the space whales?" She asked, amazed.
"Yup. Brought the whole pack." I cracked my knuckles, "And it's about time I genocided them out of existence."
"I won't even ask how. But why? You said they didn't care about each other very much." Wanda wondered.
"They don't. But they do care about negentropy, which I achieved." I answered, "To the point that they will even risk exhausting their shards to death if it means they can chase me down through the omniverse. Over 500 of them committed seppuku on my front porch just now. To make a point.
Imploded into black holes when they realised this was the only way their exhausted asses could help their species' effort.
Thousands more are coming, no doubt.
Stay here. I'll deal with them."
With that I disappeared, arriving outside the ship, and scanned the non-existent horizon.
There in the distance, was a whole horde of them, prismatic and shimmering, their extradimensional shards flowing in and out of higher dimensions like gutter water after a flood.
Like oil and smoke.
Why didn't I see this coming you ask?
Good point.
It came down to the way or rather the difference in how my geass and their Path To Victory worked.
And in the way the void functions on a scientific level.
My geass works out via what I call the Laplace Positioning System. LPS for short.
It finds put the position of all particles via the psychosphere, relative to the relevant psyches. In my case, since I had amputated the akashic records off of my code, the relevant psyche being one. My own.
Then using those positions and their current vector components, it determines the next courses of action, laying them out in the form of entire timelines, each with different outcomes from the point the geass was activated and going forward.
This meant that if say, a meteor was going to crash into Earth on the other side of the world, it wouldn't show me 'Meteor crashes into Earth.', it would instead show me, 'You walk for fifteen minutes, then the planet shakes, then a massive storm of fire and dust consumes you.', because the latter would be relative to my psyche. It would be what affected the world relative to my position in it.
Path to Victory on the other hand takes note of all possible outcomes and then condenses them into one optimal timeline, giving you the steps to make sure that the outcome you desire comes to fruition. It doesn't tell you the 'how' or 'why' of your actions. It doesn't even tell you if the option it picked is what you really want.
The shard decides for you what it thinks you should do. Just the 'what'. And even then a very specific 'what'.
What you have to do. A lot more powerful, but with a heck of a lot less freedom of choice.
The user is practically a slave to the shard's choice-making algorithm.
It's the reason I chose geass over it.
A lot more work but an accompanying amount of freedom. The rest, I can extrapolate to fruition satisfactorily.
The problem then comes with the void.
The void is a place without well, anything. It's the void of existence. Nothing exists here. Not even 'nothing'.
What you bring into the void is what you take back out. No changes. No trades. What comes in, stays in and if you so choose and are able to do, gets taken out of here.
And you see the fatal flaw here yes?
My geass works based on the position of all things relative to me.
If nothing exists, there is nothing to predict.
They really planned it out, these space whales.
Chsoe the perfect spot to ambush me in.
The one place where my geass can't be used but their Path To Victory can.
They didn't attack me inside the universe spanning barrier cloaked over a cosmic entity.
They knew I would have nailed them to the fucking cross if they had so much as tried.
No. They chose to wait, hidden until I came out.
Not that it would help them but still.
My geass may not work, but I have an A.I. and a host of predictive algorithms myself.
This is why I trust technology over magic and superpower crap.
Technology works. Everywhere. Anytime.
No hiccups. No accidents.
Because this?
I can't possibly have predicted....this.
I mean who wakes up and thinks, "Ah! I think I will fight an army of space whales in the void of existence today!"?
I didn't even know they could cross through the threshold of their own multiverse, much less do this!
How many of them even are there....186840 space whales.
Plus the 548 that smashed against my windscreen.
Great. Just great.
Did they bring their whole planet here or something?
Putting all their eggs in one basket.
Not a great plan.
"Why do they have to do this? Now, when I'm so close to this?" I sighed.
It was going to be tiresome, a chore honestly.
But I knew why they were here.
Not just because it was their civilizational goal to achieve negentropy, but also because of higher level security purposes.
When a civilization like theirs gets to a certain level, like a 4 or 5 on a Kardashev scale, or in the case of the space whales, when they assimilate entire colonies into worm-like, biomechanical masses shifting through the multiverse with their planet busting slingshots, they realise something as a necessary truth.
The multiverse is a dark forest and everyone of note is either the hunters or the hunted.
Sure, maybe when you meet someone else, another alien civilization they will be nice and open and friendly.
But more likely, they will wipe you out at the first sign of weakness.
Because they are operating on the same paradigm.
Are you really going to take the chance, go into the clearing with open arms?
No. Of course not.
Not unless you're an utter idiot.
So what do you do when you find not only your civilizational goal, but also find out that it was a single individual that completed what your whole species couldn't do in millions of years?
You see him as an absolute threat and hunt him down.
It's only logical, essential even to your own survival.
To me this was a battle.
To the space whales? This was fight for their lives against an ungodly monster.
A jihad, so to speak.
Of course they suicide bombed my ship with black holes.
It was to be expected.
And now, it all made sense.
Why Galatea wasn't there.
Why she hadn't reported back.
Why she had run away with Paige.
And more importantly, how these dickwads found me.
She must have known. And fearing the worst, she must have thrown the locator beacon to them, playing with their Path To Victory shards habit of picking the most optimal path to success.
If they had to choose between me and her, I was clearly the juicier target.
And she knew her creator would be stronger than her, so she wasn't worried about me.
Paige however was a squishy human bearing my child. And my child was to be protected.
It was her prime directive.
Protect my children.
And that brings us here.
Heh.
Hehehehahahahah!
Maybe I should should be honoured.
A type 5 alien civilization considers me a universal threat to their very being!
How many others can claim that?
A lot, given the omniverse but I still find it an achievement.
You gotta admit. That is hella cool as a feat!
And to think just 5 years ago I was scrambling to get an internship at a two bit hedge fund and considering dropping out of college.
How far I have come!
I grinned evilly.
Time to squash some worms!
