Winning Peace - Chapter 21 (Patreon)

I looked over the feed from my expanding Mars base.

Using the tour of the solar system, I'd deployed various autonomous builders and robots to fabricate an installation. I hadn't wanted anything close to civilization, such as it was, on the planet. With my ability to walk between worlds, I'd settle for having a small settlement on the outskirts of Eos Chasma reserved for the rare occasion I felt like interacting with other humans. Now that people were beginning to move around the system on the next set of spaceships the council had greenlit, it wasn't out of the question for someone new to make landfall and set themselves up a little hermitage outside the city.

No, the little prefab home I'd set up near the racetrack I'd visited would be the kind of cozy place a normal settler would enjoy. The fact that it would have a basement which would lead to the other side of the planet wasn't something anyone needed to know about.

The problem was...

“As if I didn't have enough to do,” I sighed, scanning the report on the gravitational anomalies once again. “It's not tectonic, Martian geology is effectively dead. Hmm...”

That kind of phenomenon would need to be something exotic. Really exotic. Rare, too. Or, well, comparatively rare on the grand scheme of things. What's it doing on Mars, then?

I leaned back and allowed my thoughts to circle at this latest mystery. There were various kinds of geologic formations and tectonic activity which could subtly alter the gravitational field of a given location. Hell, elevation did that on its own, even if only slightly. The problem was, the profile I was seeing was all wrong if that was the cause.

I queued up another set of robots for the site's fabber to roll off. Nothing special, just regular humanoid frames I could use as supplemental sensory organs.

That done, I turned to the impromptu 'resurrection' of one Bill Necker. Bill had been one of the individuals I'd targeted after picking him out as a Last Dogs convert living on Luna. He'd died in a tragic accident nearly a year prior. However, since I needed a deniable dupe, I was cloning a brain-dead copy that I'd wire up with a few undetectable implants. I'd already selected a small building in the old section of Armstrong City that would host plenty of evidence he'd been hiding out there the entire time.

“Honestly, if I would have known this was coming... well, I'd have headed it off at the pass, but I'd have left this idiot alive, too. Ugh, just adding aggravation to my life.”

I took a breath and shook my head as I sighed.

“Ezekiel?” Sasha's voice rang out over my link. “We're almost at Ceres.”

“I'll be there when we dock,” I replied absently.

Six hours, I could get something done in that time if I hurried.

“Are you okay?” She pressed, anxiety leaking through her tone. “You've been in your quarters practically since we left Venus.”

“I'm busy right now, Sasha.” My statement drew a wordless noise of frustration from across the line. “I'll explain when it's over.”

There was quiet for a long moment, Sasha replied. “Alright, I'll trust you. Just remember I'm here if you need to talk.”

“I know.”

I cut the call and looked back to the data, wishing Heka hadn't cataloged the beginnings of dissociative tendencies in my increasing use of the world of raw data and information. I'd use a simulation reality instead, but that kind of thing didn't allow me to speed up my relative perception of time, which was kind of the whole point. I had to ration that until I could hunt down the bug, sadly. A large part of me wanted to disregard the whole trip and simply hole-up back on Luna, design some kind of cute sex toy I could play with, and ignore everything else. Just move up my retirement, that's all it would be.

In the process, I knew I'd be losing at least half of humanity, but...

After the shock of finding out memetic rabies had been quietly infecting my entire species, I'd... found it hard to care all that much. Which, yes, was an awful thing to admit, but I was running on fumes. I'd pushed myself as far as I could to get to this point, to get humanity to this point and create a functional society out of the horror, betrayal, and disunion which had pervaded humanity after the Short War. I hadn't made anything approaching a real friend outside of my secretary and some random dude I'd picked up on Mars a few months ago.

All of that, for years.

I think they called it 'compassion fatigue.'

It wasn't a pleasant state of being, and there was only so much tinkering with my brain I was willing to do to alleviate the slow creep of depression, anxiety, and tiredness. As if on cue, I felt the nudge of a newly-perfected artificial neurochemical balancing agent. The fact that I was even going so far as to use something that was untested in a practical sense, even if I'd run it through countless simulations on quantum computers...

It was a bad sign I was leaning into self-destructive habits.

I shook my head, banishing the thought.

I could rest once this was over.

The problem was that fixing this mess... there was no good way to do it. The cognito-hazards the Last Dogs had implanted were specifically designed to slowly drive people to madness in a way that couldn't be countered. Oh, there was every chance I could cure a few million people on the sly by tracking down precisely what they'd been exposed to, in what order, and devising a counter-code now that I had the leader's code.

But 'a few million' was effectively a rounding error in the face of about a billion and a half people.

It was humbling to confront the sense of scale involved in media consumption, at the very least. It was just as frustrating to realize that they'd used my efforts to reconnect the internet and give people access to connectivity against me, though.

So my options had become surprisingly simple.

The first thing to do, obviously, was to clean up the net. Anything contaminated by cognito-hazards had already been taken down and cleaned. Even then, though, people were still occasionally plugging portable storage drives in or bringing offline systems back on. I'd need to do regular sweeps of every computer on Earth for a few years to get every scrap of infectious code, but I was making the effort. If websites all over the Neo-Net and Old Net were going down with a high frequency, well... there's been an apocalypse. What did you expect?

That, though, was just staunching the bleeding.

In other words, stopping the problem from getting worse.

And without completely shutting down the entire net, there was no way to do that in any sane timeframe. If I did that, though, it would render me blind and deaf to all of the other geopolitical, ecological, and socio-economic wildfires still popping up. In theory, I could open up my systems to run a duplicate of the web, but that would open me up to the danger.

And not to sound too arrogant or anything, but I was apparently humanity's last, best hope.

...what a crock of shit.

I took a deep breath and sighed.

With the parameters of the problem established, though, I could move forward with a solution. Or, at least, I could start crossing off possible solutions off my list. The first that got removed was the possibility of conventionally curing all affected, for reasons I'd already enumerated. The next possibility that crossed my mind was, admittedly, just straight up murdering everyone affected. It was cruel, heavy-handed, and would reduce my species to a level it hadn't seen in nearly three hundred years, but...

I'd saved three billion lives.

I had the spare karma.

Even if I couldn't entirely mark that off the list. If enough people started dying, and they already were starting to, then I'd have to resort to extreme measures. Until then, though, I had other options. A limited amount of them, true, but I still had a few to consider.

One of which was deliberately engineering an entirely new 'command' that would override the one already given. I gave this... about a fifty percent chance of working. If I sank a year of time and effort into the process. If human society didn't start to collapse beyond my ability to maintain it in the meantime. If I was willing to brainwash over a billion people.

That was a lot of 'if's.

Especially given that I was still running the numbers on how environmental factors and neurochemistry might affect the cognito-hazard programming, if at all.

An alternative I was seriously considering was just dropping a few months' worth of investment into the technology that turned everyone to stone in the Dr. Stone franchise. That would at least pause the problem long enough for me to figure out a solution.

If there was one, short of going back to the idea of brainwashing everyone. No, the real problem I had with just freezing everyone for however long it took to fix the problem was that it felt like admitting defeat. Like forcing an enormous 'timeout' on the entire world was the best I could do. Beyond that, there was also the question of being either the one to publicly cause the stone effect or fix it would enshrine me forever in the history of the human race...

...and I wanted to retire. I wanted to fade into the background and enjoy whatever life had in store for me as I cooked up interesting ideas and new technologies.

I wanted to make giant fucking robots and not care about geopolitical stability anymore.

More than anything, I wanted to solve the problem.

Which was probably why I'd started pursuing more extreme solutions.

One idea I'd had under that banner was just dumping amnesiacs on the entire planet. I hadn't exactly tested that idea yet, and I doubted it would work truthfully. This particular kind of brainwashing spoke to someone's subconscious, not their conscious mind. At least in theory, erasing a year's worth of memories probably wouldn't have any substantial effect on what had been done to them.

Which left-

I blinked as the signal of the scanning module I'd tasked with the gravitational anomaly signaled that it had finished. Tiredly, I turned and began reading the output of information.

I blinked.

I stared.

“That's... a building.”

I leaned back and steepled my hands.

Mars. Gravitational Anomaly. South Pole.

Tapping the feed, some arcane urge in the back of my mind drove me to command it to zoom out to give me a read on the larger area. Once I saw the location data, though, I consciously understood why I'd been driven to do so as the final shred of realization came to the fore.

“Promethei Planum.”

A flood of memories came rushing out of the dark oblivion I'd consigned a great deal of my prior life to. There were large swathes of things that I hadn't thought about in over two decades at this point. I hadn't needed to, for many of them. I was, in many ways, living the science fiction dream I'd often had back then. Most of them were simply no longer relevant, especially in the face of day-to-day concerns like geopolitics and socio-economic difficulties. I'd dug up a few that I'd enjoyed, ones that had survived the, uh... difficulties of the mid-twentieth century.

Not many of them were games, though.

I'd never been a big video game person past... one of the Nintendo systems? What was it, the-uh... sixty-six? Something like that.

But... if you were active on forums when I was, there were some things you picked up by osmosis and got interested in. One of the very few games from that period I'd played and had fun with. Not really because of the gameplay itself, that hadn't been anything too special, but the worldbuilding and lore had struck a cultural tone that just resonated for some reason.

I chuckled, the sound having a hint of mania even to my own ears.

“They called it... the Mass Effect.”

The distantly-remembered miracle substance that bent the rules of time and space to allow for FTL within reality instead of trespassing into a higher or lower dimension, Element Zero. Looking at the readings and with the knowledge I already possessed, I could build a hypothetical model in my mind already. It was an interesting substance, if I was correct, dark matter hung in suspension within a crystal matrix of normal matter forever altered by close association with a neutron star.

I laughed again, remembering the plot of the games.

“Reapers.” A Cthulhu-esque body of self-replicating cuttlefish waiting out in dark space to wipe out galactic civilization every few ten-thousand years. I blinked, my mind immediately going back to the cult-like story the Last Dogs had spread amongst their followers. A tall tale about creatures in the vast dark gulf between the stars ready to devour humanity.

Could they have known?

My thoughts immediately turned back to what they'd done in response, if they had, and I disregarded the question. It didn't matter. They'd chosen the path of the monster and met the fate earned by all monsters in turn.

More memories surfaced, new details about the collection of races who existed out in the yawning void. Almost unwillingly, I turned back to the legacy of the Last Dogs, their final howl echoing into the long night that would doom humanity to nothing more than a plaything of powers forever greater than they could become.

Another strong urge rose up in me, to cut the future of suffering short and simply end it all.

I wrestled those demonic whispers back into the box they emerged from.

“A problem is just an opportunity in disguise,” I whispered, swallowing deeply and closing my eyes. I would have to do it. I'd thought to prepare it as a measure of near-last resort, but... this changed things. This changed everything.

“Open new VI project file,” I commanded the system, then continued, “Designation: Azathoth.”

My giant robots would have to wait just a little while longer.

In a way, I was relieved. The world-no, the galaxy had taken the choice from me. I no longer needed to agonize over making it. Humanity, as it existed today, would not survive the galaxy to come. I would have to change humanity if I wanted it to meet the threats it would face and come out the better.

“Heka, calculate answer to the following question,” I began, pausing momentarily before I pronounced the order that would set me on a path I knew I had to walk, but was no easier for it.  “To what degree would alterations to human neurological architecture need to take place to neutralize the Last Dogs’ cognito-hazard?”

It was the nature of a species to change and adapt, after all.

Humanity would merely have to do it faster than normal.

Skill List:

Virtual Intelligence: 1-5 (New)

Robotics: 1-5 // 6-10 (New)

Ruggedization: 1-5 // 6-10 (New)

Redundancies: 1-5 (New)

Modularity: 1-5 (New)

Genetics: 1-10 // 11-20 (New)

Astrobotany: 1-4 // 5-10 (New)

Medicine: 1-3 // 4-10 (New)

Social Engineering: 1-5 // 6-10 (New)

Sociology: 1-5 (New)

Psychology: 1-5 (New)

Neurology: 1-5 (New)

Communication Studies: 1-5 (New)

~~~

Well, this is something of a surprise to me as well, but I really felt like getting the next chapter of Winning Peace out for some reason.  Probably because the vote has been decided.

Tech Porn it is!

That said... many people did worry about update speed, so... I'll try to turn these chapters into longer ones and cut back on the number.  Same amount of content, just more condensed.  Have to see how that works out.

At any rate, I think next up to bat is a chapter of The New Ron, Nexus Event, or Entrepreneurial Spirit.