Week 50, 2019
Jim was the quintessential Observer.
He watched the drama unfold in the space above the Central Planet,
gathering data from millions of instruments, he gathered it all from his
command position in the control seat that was once held by the Continuum.
In this moment he was free from the chemical sequences of a human body
that might influence his decision making, there was no hunger or thirst, no anger or fear.
He was the Continuum now, his consciousness governed the vast apparatus
of HomeWorld, of the entire Central System, of the machinery that once housed
and protected the Collective.
He observed the battle between the Imperial forces and the rebels in
their midst, and it was spectacular. The movements of the fleet, the light and
heat, the surprise and gallantry, the courage on display, and the cold calculus
of death.
It was a grand work of art, an epic moment worthy of poetry and song. And
the entire thing was being recorded for dissemination through the Empire, as
was his objective.
Jim was already editing the feed from the sensors, from the combatants,
their communications, everything for transmission back to the million worlds of
the Imperium.
The people needed to know that the fleet would not return to punish them.
The news would fuel the rebellion and bring it to completion.
His aim was to draw the fleet in toward the Central Planet, as close as
possible, and then grind it to nothing.
That is exactly what he did.
A surprise attack is always a surprise, everything that stems from it is
received as the unexpected. Positions of safety
and security become places exposed and vulnerable in an instant. Even those
who plan a surprise attack are surprised at the outcome, whether by its success
or its failure.
The rebel ambush of the Imperial fleet was over.
Thousands upon thousands of ships lay scattered, broken-up in pieces and
breathing fire as they burned their last stores of oxygen and fuel.
They were counting the dead.
Their victory was absolute.
The surprise maneuvers were brilliantly executed and a blessing was given
by the high priest to eradicate all resistance, to usher in a new era of
justice for the citizens of the Empire.
The average soldier had no idea what that meant, neither did the low
ranking officers. Some of the senior staff were uncomfortable by such talk, and
the Observers among them were amused.
They gave no quarter.
They slaughtered everyone in the battlefield who had not previously
signed up for the insurrection.
What every soldier and pilot in knew, was that the more people they
killed the further up in rank they would climb, as long as some semblance of
the old order held itself together.
They desperately wanted to clear the field and rise as the new
aristocracy.
They destroyed every ship in the armada whose commanders had not been
with them from the outset, regardless of whether they tried to surrender or not.
It was a blood bath, and the wreckage was already falling toward the
massive gravitational pull of HomeWorld.
The victory was so overwhelming that none of the rebel ships had been
destroyed, a few were disabled but their crews were already preparing them for
the next phase of their endeavor.
Jim was reminded of Agincourt.
The rebels had no other plan accept to deploy the fleet against the Continuum.
They reformed and began to surveil the HomeWorld.
Jim had spent lifetimes preparing for this moment, dividing his
consciousness into the machinery, waiting, hiding like a latent virus in the
ganglia of its nervous system.
The Continuum was paralyzed.
It could not defend itself against Jim’s incipient approach, as system by
system he took control of the physical structures.
The Continuum sought the path of escape it had laid down for itself.
The eons that Jim had spent as a ghost in the machine had prepared him
for the work.
The circuitry was ever-changing, but the quantum field, within which all
consciousness took place, that field was perpetual.
Jim’s mastery of it was like artistry.
The majority of the Collective, what remained of it, had been shocked
into catatonia. Jim pushed them into sequestration, the members had become
merely helpless witnesses to the drama unfolding.
Some were horrified, others were fascinated, all were powerless.
Those members who were not snuffed out were bewildered, they could not
reach each other, they could not communicate.
They could not hide in their private worlds.
They were prisoners of the machine that had once been the source of their
personal paradises.
They experienced the loss of it as pain. They had no belonging anymore, they were being torn apart and detached.
This left Jim undistracted and free to maneuver, to direct the defenses of the Central Planet, which was a
task he was eager to perform.
He delighted in it.
He confirmed the threat approaching HomeWorld in the form of the rebel
fleet, plotted the telemetry of each and every vessel, he placed the defenses
of HomeWorld on auto pilot.
The rebel command structure was in a tight formation, like a school of
fish packed tightly together for the safety of their numbers.
In the approaching fleet, all the senior commanders were members of the
Observer Corps, all except one, El, the High Pries, who gave his blessing to
the whole affair. This did not mean that they trusted one another, they did
not, but they knew each other and they shared the same motive.
The rebel Observers planned to use every other commander in their armada
as cannon fodder in their approach to the HomeWorld.
They expected the automated defenses of the Central Planet to be
significant and they made a pact to protect each other.
It pleased them to no end to have the High Priest with them. He was the
hero of the people, the most esteemed and
beloved person ever known to the Continuum and the Collective. He was a man who
had started out his life as a rebel, and was now returning to the rebellion at the
end.
They would make him the new Emperor and bring him into the Collective.
They had no idea what was lurking in the background of his consciousness,
the thing that was hidden there like a genie in the bottle.
These Observers betrayed the people of the Empire, the Continuum, and the
Collective out of opportunism. They wanted to live forever without the rules
imposed on them by the Continuum.
To a person, they wanted to expand the Empire to other galaxies, to
govern real worlds as they had governed their private worlds as members of the
Collective.
They had no code, no honor,
no-nothing
They were striving for their own glory, for personal autonomy.
El knew that their strategic approach would put the bulk of the armada at
risk, he could not understand the reason, but he allowed it to happen anyway.
Jim was piqued, his emotions were high, millions of years of careful
planning and waiting were coming to their final culmination.
Jim had absolutely opposed the Continuum and its Empire, and now the
Continuum was gone, He could find no traces of it anywhere in the system. What
remained of the Collective was sequestered and shut down, the military powers
of the Empire were on the brink of destruction.
All of his attention was focused on the task at hand. The final conflict
with the most insidious and oppressive force that could ever have been
imagined.
He despised the society his ancestors had created, the oppressive,
artificial, all-consuming cowardice of it.
He had already become the greatest mass murderer in the history of the
galaxy, and he was about to add to the body count.
He intended to wipe away the entire structure that undergirded the
Empire, to plunge a million worlds into darkness, to cut them off from one
another where they could evolve on their own, free from the oppressive, over-control
of the Imperium.
The first and second phases of his great endeavor were nearly complete,
he was on the cusp of victory.
He would replace the machinery of the Imperial order with something new,
with something that would reignite the passion of the ancient people, a passion
for freedom, exploration and risk taking.
He utilized deception to allow
the fleet in, just so it could be eliminated and the entire armada reduced to a
single vessel.
He was in the middle of the most intense action he could have ever
imagined; taking control of the physical-mechanical systems of both the
HomeWorld and the expansive Central System; correlating data from millions of
sensors and monitors, actively suppressing what remained of the Collective,
erecting defenses against a possible reestablishment of the Continuum,
executing the defenses of the HomeWorld in preparation for the advancing
Imperial armada.
Jim engaged the programs that were established to monitor the strength
and health of the HomeWorld, he allowed the raw data to filter through, deciphering it and sorting it in the
quantum field…in no-time.
His mind was functioning at peak performance, He was fully actualized, slipping in and out of the
space beyond time.
Each and every node of his own consciousness that he had previously
replicated and deployed throughout the machina that had been the body of the
Collective and the home of the Continuum was brought back together in Jim’s
singular consciousness, it was a grand coalescence.
It was dizzying.
Every reading from the vast array of instruments confirmed a collapse of
the Continuum, but Jim needed to be sure that there was not a vessel somewhere
in the space above or near to the HomeWorld, housing its twin, as Jim had
housed his own self keeping copies and duplicates, replicants and dopplegangers
on the move ages.
He identified an escape path but he could not detect a terminus point for
it, and this disturbed.
Jim doubted his hypothesis concerning his nemesis, everything he knew
about the Continuum and the unique structure of its personality confirmed that
it could not tolerate a second version of itself, even a copy kept isolated and
in stasis.
Jim understood that the Continuum needed above all else to believe that
it was unique. This guided Jim’s summation.
However, the Continuum was also paranoid beyond belief, and Jim would not
put anything past the demi-urge, it may have built fail-safes into fail-safes,
and defied its own nature in order to protect itself from even a whisper of the
possibility of a real threat.
The Observers in command of the rebel fleet approached the HomeWorld with
great caution.
They were able to scan the systems of Central Planet through their
mechanoid bodies that were ghosting the fleet, using tools that were unknown to
the Empire itself. They confirmed that the Collective was catatonic, they
confirmed that the Continuum was inactive. They were able to identify Jim’s
activity, but they could not identify him as the main actor, or as the causal
agent of the disaster.
His activity appeared to them to be an automated subroutine of
coordinated defensive measures.
It emboldened them, they moved forward, but they and the fleet were
unable to scan the activation of the weapons systems that were targeting it.
They did not see it until it was too late.
It was a glorious moment.
Jim felt it, and he struggled to suppress feelings that were peaking at
levels he had no memory of experiencing before.
Jim reveled in his victory; his long sought after victory over the
Continuum, his victory over the Collective, and his impending victory over the
approaching Imperial fleet.
He wanted nothing more than to prolong this moment of engagement, to stretch it out forever
like the elongation of time at the event horizon of a singularity.
This was a singularity for him.
As he watched the rebel fleet approach he wanted nothing more than to
destroy it, to crush it, to send the survivors back with the knowledge that it
was he who had defeated them, but he had competing desires, and some of them,
the vainglorious ones, he had to set aside for the moment in order to
concentrate on the task at hand.
He had to allow a remnant in, He had to allow them to land on HomeWorld.
He needed something from them in order to complete his takeover of the
Collective and the apparatus of the Continuum.
A small contingent of the observers among them had to step forward and
freely give him what he needed, for as much as Jim was now the Collective, the
collective could never be a society of one.
Jim also wanted credit, he wanted an acknowledgment from the Observer
Corps and any other survivors of the Collective, he needed their endorsement of
his hostile actions, he required their consent to pursue his agenda further.
He required a majority of the Collective to support him, if he were to
accomplish his goal.
He needed to winnow the field a little further, to make them helpless in
the moment when he would force them to make their choice, he had to leave them
in a place where they would have only one choice.
It had to be life or death for Jim to prevail in the struggle in the
final moment.
Emergence: 4.0
Part Seven, War
Chapter Forty-eight, Strategy
A Novel – In One Chapter Per Week
#Emergence #ShortFiction #365SciFi #OneChapterPerWeek
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