章 1288: 49
Convolution 5.3
The week after the Dragonslayers operation were peaceful, as if it was the calm before the storm.
There was no news on the Birdcage disruption, either of Teacher's demise or of Canary's disappearance. The PRT had chosen to suppress the news to avoid public panic. The orders came direct from the Chief Director, and Dragon was the first to be silenced as soon as it was reported, orders which I witnessed through Ascalon.
These orders suited me well. Recent operations had put us in a state that was arguably overextended, and I needed this time to consolidate.
"Alert: Crime detected." The synthetic voice of Offensive Bias, our new AI reported. I hoped that eventually it would be as powerful and loyal as its namesake in Halo. So far it had proved every bit as useful as I'd hoped, and then some.
On the array of screens before me, a particular location near the Trainyard flashed with a circle homing in. Nearby camera feeds were hijacked and showed an armed mugging in progress.
"Executing standard unpowered crime response protocol."
Offensive Bias transmitted the map data to the closest squad captain and sent a text to Brockton Bay Police Department's crime reporting line. Taylor's communications bug, which was outfitted with high quality eyes, fingers, and vocal cords, sat beside me in the console room. It would transmit the view of the map to Taylor, who sent in the vanguard while sitting in school.
Amelia and I watched as Soldier bugs quickly emerged from the shadows of the alley, from rooftops, balconies, and corners. There were screams from both the victim and the perp as the bugs attacked.
The victim fell back in a panic to the wall at the end of the alley while the perp was wrapped up in silk and sticky goo. A single uniformed soldier arrived to guard the scene while the BBPD was on their way.
With the new relay bugs and Amelia free to work on biological experiments all day, Taylor had covered the whole city in her bugs.
Aside from these unpowered crimes, there were a couple of new skirmishes with Empire 88 as they seemed to be testing our capabilities, but nothing big, and we did not participate in person. A small time independent villain I'd never heard of before also tried his luck, but we captured him and allowed the PRT to take the arrest. Everything was being handled by a combination of our soldiers who now patrolled openly on the streets, and Skitter's new bugs.
The smaller bugs made visible swarms in public areas, while the soldier bugs kept themselves hidden until there were crimes in progress.
"Offensive Bias, get me a list of all the crimes that happened over the past few days and how they were dealt with."
"Retrieving today's crime reports for Brockton Bay."
The video feeds were replaced with a list of the various crimes that occurred, most of which were detected first and handled by CRUCIBLE forces.
"What percentage of crimes are being handled by CRUCIBLE now?" Amelia asked.
"92%."
"And how well are we responding to them? What percentage are we successfully intercepting before victims get hurt or lose their things?"
"Of the crimes which CRUCIBLE responded to, 93% were intercepted before any harm or loss of property. 54 incidents of drug dealing were not included in this calculation because the purchasers did not attempt to consume the drugs before interception."
"How does the BBPD and PRT compare?"
"Averaged over the past month, the BBPD only successfully intercepted 6% of crimes in progress before any harm or loss of property, while the PRT successfully intercepted 0%."
Amelia and I looked at each other. "Looks like we're doing pretty well," I said.
"That's an understatement. Do we even need the police or PRT anymore? We're doing all the work now, and way better than they did. They just show up to make arrests," she said.
"Well, the police still deal with investigative work, car accidents, and speeding tickets. Plus, we don't handle stuff like domestic abuse yet."
"Hmmm. Maybe, but it's not like we can't do all of that as well."
"Yeah do we want to be doing any of that stuff? Leave the menial things for police, we have better things to work on than waste our time filing paperwork and going to court."
"I guess that's true."
O O O
While our policing of Brockton Bay may have looked impressive to an outsider, from my perspective it already mattered little in the grand scheme of things.
The nature of the game had already changed, as a result of several key developments.
Once Canary was settled in, I immediately had her Master Coil in order to perform some experiments to determine how much his shard could simulate me and Agate.
To my great dismay, we discovered that the simulation was almost perfect. Coil accurately reported the effects of my magecraft and knowledge I revealed in a test timeline, which neither he nor anyone else in Worm could possibly have known without reading my mind.
The lone exception was Agate, who was apparently beyond their sight, so long as she was in agatespace acting on her own. Anything Agate did while phased out resulted in a reported observation that was wrong even in the timeline Coil kept—ie, his experience of reality didn't match with the actual reality. But if she simply followed my orders, or stayed in real space, it was still simulated. Apparently even the mere expectation that Agate would do something would result in the simulated result of that expectation as if my belief was true, so it was obvious that the shards' were collectively reading our minds and learning to model us even if we might have had some immunity in the beginning.
With this came the realization that it was most probable that Scion and the Simurgh were already aware of my presence and my knowledge of how Scion was defeated in canon, rendering it potentially useless. The fact that I was still alive was either because I had been deemed not a threat by Scion, or because he hadn't yet consciously paid attention to me to realize I was a threat, but the instant he used his PtV it could be game over.
The only way that Scion could lose is if he allows himself to die. If he gets surprised by seeing Eden and crushed by his emotions, then refuses to use PtV. From the beginning, the strategy would have taken a miracle, and if Scion already knew about it?
The conclusion was obvious. We were screwed.
The only reason I wasn't in a cold sweat was because it would soon become irrelevant.
I already had my get-out-of-jail-free card.
It had started with Agate's idea that Scion's barrier was only limited to a small area of real space, and that the path would be open at some point beyond the moon's orbit.
I had briefly entertained the idea of kidnapping String Theory to develop a way to get to the moon, but in the end Leet and Offensive Bias had a much better solution working together.
Agate herself could have physically flown to the moon, but at her top speed of 500 miles an hour it would have taken weeks, and if we were wrong, it would be a lot of wasted time. Not to mention Agate refused to do it.
Then last week I hired Uber and Leet shortly after taking over Coil's organization. Leet had squandered a lot of potential, through no fault of his own, on building cool techs early on when he didn't know about his restrictions. Entire tech trees were out of his reach now because he'd built critical components that were needed for everything else. Fortunately, he was quite meticulous and kept a lot of documentation around, so after I hired him last week, we discovered that Haywire-style portals could be developed, which then became my top priority. He had finished it a while ago, but to ensure this wouldn't blow up in my face, I kept it in storage until Offensive Bias was ready to use its Trump-Thinker power to reverse engineer it before rebuilding it again, even integrating some of the limited information on Haywire's notes that came with Dragon's database.
Unlike Agate, the new portal Tinkertech could directly target the moon for a portal. So we opened up a portal right at the edge of the range limit, and sent Agate through, attached to a rocket courtesy of Offensive Bias.
It wasn't long before Agate confirmed that she reached a point in real space where the barrier was gone. She also confirmed that the range limit on portals moved with her—so while the shards had a spherical limit centered on Earth where they were stationary, if Agate was on the moon, she could make portals to the space beyond the moon. At the same time, the ability to make stable portals was related to local gravity sources too, such that the range limit for Agate wasn't quite spherical while on the moon, but drastically reduced on the side of the moon's orbit around the Earth that was opposite of the moon's current position and much bigger within the moon's own gravitational pull.
Regardless, the path was open, and it would take about 12 seconds to shift planes, including the 2 seconds it would take for Agate make a portal for me to get to the space beyond Scion's barrier, and ten seconds to activate the ARMP: User Travel to a random plane.
In other words, I had already achieved my main goal in a rather sudden way, and had no real reason to stay in Wormverse except gathering more power that I could take with me to the next plane, or building up my power base here in support of future activities.
As such, I had turned my attention towards preparing to leave.
Before leaving, I had two main concerns. The first was to gather power that wouldn't be rendered useless by going to another plane.
If other planes didn't have Wormvoid, most Tinkertech might become useless.
I couldn't take shards with me because they were simply too large to fit in the tunnel through Kaleidoscape. Even if I did manage to do it, if the new plane had no Wormvoid or alternate Earths, the shards would still be useless, or even crush me to death by appearing on top of me.
Trying to bring people other than myself was dangerous. Attempting to bring more souls, or any soul made of too many spiritrons, was hypothesized to increase the chance of attracting the attention of Beasts of the World, whatever the Wormverse counterpart was, or even more dangerous universe-level protective measures while we passed through the Second Magic's path to the Root during the first portion of Kaleidoscape Pathway formation. Even if their existence was merely conjecture, I had no intention of testing my luck against such godly entities yet. Maybe if the person coming along was extremely useful, but since capes were basically certain to lose their powers because I couldn't bring their shards, it was an unnecessary risk for little gain.
Magecraft wasn't immune to this problem of incompatibility either. Magics other than True Magic generally had Thaumaturgical Systems behind them. Only the simplest and most universal magics, or magics closer to the Root could be expected properly to work in other planes. I suppose Planeswalker magics also qualified as being "closer to the Root".
So if Wormvoid was unique to Worm, what did that leave me with?
Knowledge was obviously one source of power. Cranial's services had been convenient for this, and information stored digitally was also vital.
Biological modifications or constructs were potentially another, as long as they worked off of normal physics and biology rather than any dimensional shenanigans. Amelia's projects, under my influence, was already focused on this.
Mundane technology was an option too, but I had to weigh that against the Tinkertech I would want to at least try to bring along. I could only bring enough stuff to fit in a space equivalent to a commercial van.
Money and raw materials were potentially useful as well. Any other universe that had human civilization would probably find precious gems and metals good for trading, and if it was a modern Earth type of setting, US currency could be tradeable too.
The other main concern was wrapping up my business in Worm. Leaving Worm was not necessarily a permanent state of affairs. With a Beacon here, I could conceivably return whenever I wanted. The only limitation was that it took time to build up the special energy necessary to access the Creation Mystery in each plane. One trip's worth of energy took about a week to gather, and Agate did not know any way of speeding it up. The energy was simply passively drawn from the Root as long as she had a partner with a soul and continued to have the authority to use the Second Magic. Zelretch had been experimenting with using GRAIN, True Ether, and the Sixth Imaginary Factor to artificially create this new form of energy, but it had not been fruitful by the time I obtained Agate.
In practical terms, this meant that I would benefit from ensuring that CRUCIBLE stayed viable as an organization, delaying the end of the world by killing Jack Slash, and establishing a power base I could draw resources from, if I can find a way to move more stuff between planes before Scion destroyed everything.
It was with these thoughts in mind that I had been aggressively expanding our economic and military power base with Offensive Bias, the true capabilities of which made our rule over Brockton Bay look like mere child's play.
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