Chapter 630: 69
Date
2011 February 26th - Friday - Earth Bet Time
Day 6106 - Thursday - Administrator Network Time
Alexandria's Shard was a confounding piece of work. It was of course from Eden. so that meant the Shard was in some kind of hibernation, and the power was thrown together with the least effort that the Shard could exert.
Thanks to the Shard's inability to connect properly to the Network, it lacked all the understanding of the human body, so when Alexandria drank the vial it did a quick scan of the Host's body and used the easiest solution based on its skills.
It basically recreated the woman's brain on one of the crystalline servers and then put the body in stasis, effectively creating a puppet for the copied brain to drive around. This stasis was not the usual quantum lock that many Shards, including him, made use of. Instead, the Shard simply layered the body into multiple dimensions like the Endbringers or the Shard's own body. This was paired with a small bio-manipulation power that kept the puppet alive.
It was a quick and dirty job, but he could see the potential in it. After all, he was planning something similar for Dragon and had it prepared for Taylor in case somebody figured out how to destroy her body.
This situation with her brain was also what granted her the enhanced brain, allowing perfect recall and increased learning speed. Sadly, it was just a side effect of the brain being copied onto a crystalline databank. The rest of the powers were, however, bog-standard flight and enhanced strength with one exception. Usually, Shards came with a limiter that obviously limited the granted power, while for Alexandria this limiter was partially missing.
In his experience, all Shards were balanced to generate the most conflict, so in theory, none of them should much stronger than the others, yet Alexandria was miles ahead of anyone. Apparently, the poor Shard connected to her applied the limiter the last before going back to hibernation so it didn't work properly.
Taking over the Shard was rather easy, with the battle generating enough communication noise to infiltrate it and allowing him to start his usual process.
The first thing he did was to find and spoof the connection to the Path of Victory, then went to town on the entire Shard. He, of course, updated it, while isolating the consciousness of the Shard. He also added several redundant defenses to the alteration. After all, the Shard would spend an increased time around Path to Victory.
For now, he altered nothing about the power, though he installed a very durable and redundant shut-off switch. In the worst-case scenario, he wanted to deny such a powerful asset to the enemy.
His last addition to the Shard was a powerful listening post. It would transmit everything around Alexandria to him, hiding in the same senses that the Shards used to see around their Hosts, effectively giving him his first mole in Cauldron.
Watching the discussion about the blind spot was rather interesting. Of course, their plans would not come to fruition because of his spying, but it would definitely be funny watching them flail around.
The news that Contessa's Path shattered didn't surprise him. He made a big enough splash as of now that the Shard's original plan, whatever it was that it came up with, was no longer viable. So, he expected that after an initial recalculation Path to Victory would provide Contessa a new and upgraded Path.
The question was, would the Shard be able to calculate in his actions covered by the defenses, or would it try to model him?
In the end, it didn't matter, soon he would be making contact with the corpse of Eden, and that would fill in enough information in the spotty database that he inherited from the original Administrator Shard, and provide him with enough security keys to be able to ignore everything in his way.
He knew that the Path to Victory shard was from Abaddon, so there was a chance it was part of a plan by the third Entity. But he hoped that as soon as the powerful Shard saw that it was outnumbered it would give up.
But for now, he would leave it alone. He had enough dangerous Shards to deal with for now.
It was rather telling that after perusing some databanks that were used for Alexandria's backup; he found that they have been involving Legend with Cauldron less and less lately. While the man was hardly an innocent, he had a definite line, and Cauldron crossed that line so many times they didn't even remember that such line ever existed.
So, knowing that, he went a little differently with Legend.
He proceeded with the usual takeover project but instead of leaving without improvements; he added a few things. He made sure that the Shard had enough energy to function for the foreseeable future and added a few extras.
Legend's thinking was reduced when he was in his Breaker state, so he improved that aspect, and made sure there was no loss of brain function while he used it. He also copied the ability to turn into light and immediately set his Simulators on figuring out how to effectively turn Taylor into lightning.
He also added a kind of dream workshop where the hero could experiment with laser combinations instead of the actual world. It would increase his effectiveness several folds. He also added an option of instead of the usual blue and white lasers Legend could choose to use rainbow-colored lasers.
Because why not…
However, Legend's better disposition didn't save him from having a giant and powerful listening post and shut-off switch being built into his Shard.
With that, he could collect information about Cauldron, the PRT, and the Protectorate.
Sometimes he felt like he was cheating…
Thanks to the fact he was granted access to the dimension where Cauldron resided, he also had got the addresses of all the capes in their employ and the experiments they were holding. The Slug was a simple aberration that he simply took over. Fortunately, the Shard behind the parahuman, while in hibernation as all Eden Shards, had automatically taken copies of memories of people it erased. He took great care to copy those onto a secure data bank, protected behind several layers of firewalls.
When the time was right, he would use the Shards connected to the Case 53 parahumans, and he would restore their memories while also restoring their original form. It was the least he could do for them.
Taking over the Custodian granted him intimate knowledge about the entire base, allowing him access to things that Alexandria didn't know about or never cared about.
He methodically went through all the parahumans in the building until he arrived at the three most important. Doormaker, Clairvoyant, and Numberman.
Numberman was a natural trigger, so he had to be more careful to take care of the Shard, but luckily the Shard was obsessed with Mathematics, like Efficiency with efficiency and Bombie with explosions.
Its task was to continuously improve the Entities' understanding of pure mathematics. It then distributed these improvements at the end of the Cycle amongst the other Shards, allowing them to make improvements to their inner workings where applicable.
He simply added a filter between the Shard and Host that allowed him to alter the information he received, similar to Coil.
While he added the listening post and shut-off switch, he used the acquired data to improve his own predictive algorithms and even set up some of his Simulators to experiment with it.
Doormaker and Clairvoyant were rather easy to take over, thanks to the degradation of their minds, senses, and bodies they were practically on the cusp of being puppets of the Shards. Of course, those Shards were hibernating, so he expected that if nothing changed within five to ten years, they would become nothing more than unresponsive vegetables.
While the powers were not that powerful, thanks to the hibernation, the Shards didn't know or didn't care to set up protection for their bodies.
He set up Doormaker with a new power source and added a module that would for now keep the man in good health both in body and mind, while upon a flip of a switch it would heal him.
Clairvoyant got the same treatment, but he also eliminated the strain the power put on him and Doormaker.
Of course, he copied both of their powers.
Doormaker's power wasn't really anything new because he could already make portals, but the targeting was a little more sophisticated than his, so he integrated that into his repertoire. Clairvoyant however was much more useful. The parahuman's Shard directly connected to the central scanning Shard and used their data of the targeted area to show whatever the parahuman wanted to see.
Thanks to this, he gained a direct route to those Shards, but because they were also directly connected to Zion, he couldn't really do anything to them.
For now, he just set it up so he would get a copy of what Clairvoyant looked at, helping him build up a picture of the situation outside of Brockton Bay. And added a filter that would prevent the Cauldron cape from seeing specific people or places.
And then there was Eidolon.
The man and the entire Shard were a mess.
The Shard was connected to several dozens of almost empty husks of Shards, with only enough energy remaining in them to make sure they didn't die fully. It was also connected to several Shards that were in the process of being sucked dry.
It was his first task, after spoofing the Path of Victory, to connect several battery modules to the Shard, and stopping the draining of the other Shards and disconnecting the husks.
For now, he set aside the Husks as a later project and concentrated on the main Shard.
Apparently, originally it was a Shard that was for experimenting with power combinations. The Host would gain the ability to choose from the powers near him and freely experiment with combining them. And if the combinations were viable, and proven to be stronger than the powers it made it up, then at the end of the cycle the Shard would report this and the Entities would merge those Shards.
It seemed the High Priest's name was well deserved…
But more than likely thanks to Eden's death and Cauldron's inept handling something got mixed up and instead of making use of powers near the Host, it made use of the powers near the Shard.
Thanks to this, and Eidolon's use of the power, its energy reserves ran out much faster, and because it couldn't contact Zion for a top-up, it had to make use of its higher authority to drain lesser Shards.
He even found some plans for becoming a new Entity in the data banks of the Shard. Though from what he saw, there was no chance in hell that it would have succeeded.
That wouldn't have been such an issue if, because of Cauldron's butchering of Eden's body, the Shard didn't get access to the Shard that was tasked with overseeing the Endbringers. Due to Eden's death, and his limited understanding of human minds, it used its authority, security keys, and this connection to activate the Endbringers.
Then when Eidolon fought against them, the Shard had to use up more and more energy, while it felt the disappointment radiating from Eidolon. Misunderstanding that (showing once again why it was not Entity material) it just activated more and more Endbringers. This resulted in even more severe energy usage by the Shard, leading to a cycle that would have led to the canon events had he not intervened.
Once again, he was struck by how uncanny it was for the Shards to choose Hosts that matched them so well…
Unfortunately, he couldn't simply use this connection to shut the Endbringers down. The Shard that was connected to Eidolon's Shard was simply created to oversee them, give directives, and collect information. So, it could start them, give them broad objectives and watch them. However, the only shutdown function it had would only function if the Shard got the notification that the Cycle ended from either Entity. Sadly, he didn't have those specific keys, and while he could have shut it down, he didn't know if Zion or any other Shard (like Path to Victory) knew about this.
Plus, he was pretty sure if he just simply shut the Endbringers down, making them vanish, the humans would obsess over that, not resting until they figured out what happened to them. And also, his simulations showed that if the Endbringers vanished at the same time without explanation, there was a real chance of the Truce failing, and actual wars breaking out between heroes, governments, and villains.
So, for now, he simply took over the Shard, disconnecting it from Eidolon's and moving it to a secure dimension, protected by all manner of abilities, while he spent some time trying to understand the Endbringers.
It gave him a direct connection to the Endbringers, but he was pretty sure that the Simurgh would immediately notice any meddling and retaliate. He wasn't sure he was ready for that kind of confrontation.
In the end, he simply set up a block to prevent the activation of the rest of Endbringers, no matter what, but he couldn't rescind the orders from the already active Endbringers. He could send a new one, but he was pretty sure the Simurgh knew Eidolon enough that she would immediately know it wasn't him that sent it.
The question was: would the Simurgh be happy with that or try to retaliate?
He didn't know, but he had several ideas on how to solve all of his issues with one action…
While fiddling with the Overseer Shard, he got a rather interesting notification.
One of the Shards. specifically, the one connected to Clockblocker, on his network was observing a young woman, who got into an event that was prime for triggering, and the Shard was requesting permission to connect to her fully.
He quickly reviewed the situation around the girl.
She lived in Denver and was on her way with her friends to the cinema when an all too frequent firefight broke out between two of the many gangs populating North America.
The girl herself was studying to be a doctor, but one bullet hit her best friend and she was despairing because despite her knowledge she couldn't do anything to save her. Taking her to a safer place would probably help but, because of the flying bullets, they couldn't move.
Before giving his permission, he quickly went over the power that the Shard would grant. Apparently, it chose to give the young woman a stasis power. However, it wouldn't convey the same invulnerability that Clockblocker had, instead, she would be able to place several dozen people in stasis, stopping them from moving, or experiencing the passage of time and protecting them to a certain level, allowing among others timely rendition of medical help.
This was contrary to the previous practice, where the given power would offer a solution for a problem, that was no longer an issue. This new approach would help her with her chosen profession and also help in the current situation. It was also given that there was no Conflict Drive included anywhere in the connection.
Proud of the Shard, he gave his approval, then spent some time streamlining a new triggering system for the Shards he allowed contact with the humans, before returning to dealing with the insane threats facing humanity.
Weekly Power Status
-- Power
Ranking 
-- Power
stone