The Machine God

Chapter 277

The Right to Decide

Artensah stood on the bridge with his hands clasped behind his back.

One of the viewing circles showed the basement. Two guards were lifting the Marquess’s body between them, carrying her toward the stairs. The sealed gateway sat behind them, black plates interlocking to seal the portal beyond. The metal walls had been torn apart. Pods lay broken and empty across the floor.

Another circle showed the city from above. Streets lit by torchlight. A crowd still gathered near the ruins of the estate. Tiny figures milling about in the dark.

An illusion shimmered into existence beside him. Gretahn, his second aboard the Hunter-Killer Starship Dawnspear, projected from somewhere below.

“We’ve finished questioning the survivors, my lord. The Marquess’s aide and the remaining guards. We selected a few of the locals at random, as well.”

Artensah didn’t turn from the circles. “The staff?”

“Gone. We’re confident the invader took it along with the guard’s wands.” Gretahn paused. “He entered the city the evening prior, disguised as an Exalted. He was carrying a staff and spellbook matching the ones taken from the Discipline Ship. The gate guard reports the invader’s spirit familiar announced him as a Fifth Circle.”

Artensah allowed himself a thin smile at that. “Claimed to be one of us. Cunning.”

“Yes, my lord. He intimidated the guard into silence and entered unchallenged.”

“It matches the pattern.” Artensah watched the guards on the circle carry the Marquess’s body across the estate grounds toward the teleportation formation. “Second Circle Lirum. The assault squads. Every encounter follows the same progression. Engagement, overwhelming force, then theft.” He tilted his head. “The invader has a fondness for collecting our things.”

“Your orders, my lord?”

Artensah considered the city on the second viewing circle. Five thousand people. The invader had walked among them. Spoken with them. Perhaps shared what he knew. The Marquess’s staff was unaccounted for. The sealed gateway was beyond their ability to reopen, and the invader had claimed it for himself through the System.

The city was compromised.

“Withdraw everyone loyal to the Empire.”

Gretahn’s illusion went still.

Artensah continued watching the circle. The crowd near the estate was beginning to thin as people drifted back to their homes. Torches bobbed along the streets. A normal night resuming after an abnormal disruption.

Gretahn stirred minutes later. “Withdrawal is complete, my lord.”

Artensah closed his eyes.

His awareness unfolded. It was always there, the web of connections stretching from every mind that served the Empire through him. Or feared it because of him. But now he reached into it deliberately. Found the threads that terminated in Harborhill.

Over a thousand of them. Red filaments stretching from the people below to him, each one a life lived under the knowledge that the Stars could take everything at any moment. The rest either knew not the power of the Empire, or they lived their insignificant lives in fear of one of his fellow Exalted.

Perhaps even the Empress herself.

He opened his eyes.

“Kill each other with fury and hatred,” he whispered. “And if you survive, kill yourself upon realizing the horror of your weakness.”

The words traversed the threads, carrying the compulsion of one of the Exalted. An instruction written directly into the minds of every soul connected to him by fear.

On the viewing circle, the city changed.

A thousand people struck at once. There was no warning, no signal that anyone could detect. They simply turned on whoever stood closest and attacked.

A man walking beside his wife seized her by the hair and threw her to the ground. A woman at a market stall drove a fist into the face of the vendor she’d been speaking with. Near a tavern, three of the patrons spilling out the door turned on the rest, swinging bottles, kicking at legs, dragging people down.

Screaming erupted across the city. People stumbled backward from neighbors they’d known for years, hands raised, shouting questions nobody answered. Some tried to run. Some tried to fight back. Some froze and were dragged down before they could do either.

The panic spread faster than the violence. People trampled each other in narrow streets. Doors slammed. Windows shattered as people threw themselves through them to escape. The torchlight guttered as bodies crashed against the poles holding them, plunging entire blocks into darkness where the screaming continued without the mercy of sight.

Artensah watched.

Gretahn’s illusion stood motionless beside him. The projection’s face was carefully blank.

The violence peaked. Then the second wave began. Artensah’s thralls staggered upright from the carnage they’d wrought, stared at the blood on their hands, at the broken bodies around them. Their mouths opened. Some screamed. Then the compulsion’s second clause took hold, and they turned what was left of their fury inward.

The streets went quiet.

Not entirely, though. On the viewing circles, survivors moved through the aftermath. Huddled over bodies. Peered through shattered windows. Pressed themselves into alleyways, shaking, alive, surrounded by the dead.

Irrelevant. The bombardment would handle whatever remained.

“Initiate Cleansing Protocol,” Artensah said. “Level the city. Leave nothing standing.”

Gretahn’s illusion bowed. “Yes, my lord.”

Artensah turned and walked toward the bridge exit. Behind him, the first salvo lit the circles in white.

“Once that’s done, continue testing the new tracking spells. The Empress wants the Invader found.”

He didn’t look back.

***

Alexander ducked under the overhang and tossed the snow hare onto the flat piece of metal he’d been using as a cutting board.

Eight days in the mountains, and he’d settled into something resembling a routine. The overhang was a natural shelf of rock jutting out from a cliff face, deep enough to block the wind and wide enough for a fire pit and a bedroll. A stream ran past about ten meters below, barely a trickle beneath a skin of ice.

The Empire had come looking. Ship after ship. The occasional whispers. One squad had even flown by overhead, clearly sweeping for something. His suspicion that they would be developing magic to track him had been right, but he’d been careful once the hunt began in earnest. Minimized his presence as much as he could.

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He hadn’t seen anything for the past two days, so either the Empire had lost him or they were being patient. He was betting on the former. Assuming his tricks had worked, they should have treated any early detections as false-positives and moved onto other methods.

He flicked a hand. Three sheets of metal he’d left leaning against the rock face launched from their resting positions and shot toward the nearest tree. They hit in sequence, the first biting through the trunk at the base, the second and third carving the falling timber into sections before it reached the ground. Then they scooped up the logs and floated back to the fire pit, before stacking them.

Alexander headed for the stream. He crouched, cracked the ice with a knuckle, and washed his hands in water cold enough to make even his superhuman joints a little stiff.

His disjointed reflection stared back at him. Several days of facial hair, uneven and scruffy, covering a jaw he barely recognized without it. No shirt. The cold didn’t bother him anymore, not at these attribute levels. The muscle beneath the skin was lean and functional, the kind built by movement and combat rather than by design.

He looked like someone who’d been living in the woods for months rather than a week.

Alexander turned to Droney, who hovered near the fire pit. “Check it out. I look like a real wilderness hermit now.”

Droney beeped. Unimpressed.

Alexander stood and rolled his eyes, heading back toward camp. “I know the muscles are because of my attributes. But I earned this facial hair using the way of the hermit.” He settled beside the fire pit. “By lying about doing nothing.”

Droney rotated its entire body in a slow, deliberate roll.

Alexander grinned. “Did you just roll your eye back at me?”

Droney’s visor settled back into its forward position. The bond radiated innocence.

“Awesome.”

Alexander tossed two logs into the pit, then placed his palm over them. An electrical field crackled between his fingers and the wood, intense and focused. Moisture hissed out of the grain in thin jets of steam. The logs dried in moments. Then he discharged a single bolt into the driest one. It caught immediately, flames spreading across the surface and licking at the second log beside it.

He turned to the hare. A thin metal blade floated up from beside the cutting slab, joined by a set of narrow metal rods he’d shaped from scrap earlier in the week. Alexander raised his hands, fingers spread, and went to work.

The blade moved on its own, guided by Metallokinesis, making the first incision along the belly while the rods held the hare steady. He’d never skinned an animal before arriving in this world, and the first few days, Droney had fed a step-by-step tutorial directly into his mind through the bond, delivering each instruction a half-second before he needed it.

Now, his hands conducted the tools like an orchestra. The blade drew back the hide in smooth pulls while the rods rotated the carcass, held tension on the skin, and pinned the limbs in sequence. He didn’t touch the hare once. The whole operation played out at arm’s length, Alexander’s fingers making small, precise gestures that were considerably more theatrical than Metallokinesis strictly required.

Droney watched from beside the fire. The bond carried something that felt like reluctant admiration.

He had to admit this kind of life had its own charm, though that was likely only because he didn’t need to eat or drink as much as a normal person anymore. Not to mention the freezing cold also wasn’t capable of killing him.

Alexander had spent the free time catching up on technical reading. Something he rarely had time for these days. He’d come a long way since arriving on Earth 1, from talented cybernetics and computer technician to budding engineer and superhuman powerhouse.

He’d pushed himself harder than anyone. Taken on risks others would think crazy. They wouldn’t be wrong, but they also wouldn’t and couldn’t hope to have achieved what he had in a single year.

Between his powers and his attributes, he now stood in reach of the Dragon Lord and the Ice Queen. Two of the most powerful Tier 2s, and undoubtedly soon to be two of the newest Tier 3s.

Within a year, certainly. Perhaps even sooner.

But as much as he’d joked with Maximilian on Mars, Alexander knew he wasn’t quite there yet. His abilities were more versatile, but the Dragon Lord’s raw power and experience were still beyond his own.

Not that it really mattered. Even with his healthy paranoia and pessimism, he didn’t believe there would come a day where they would ever have to throw down. They’d met at the middle of that bridge on the red planet, and continued on knowing they were going to be peers. Godlings. Divines. Mass murderers. Maybe even saviors.

The hare floated toward the stream, his second mental thread continuing the work. It was time to gut and wash the carcass. Metallokinesis continued to pulse, performing the task hands-free.

Alexander’s primary mental thread continued circling the problem he needed to address with Droney. The M.G.S. was going to be an immediate priority when he returned home, but there were still a number of problems.

The main one was the very first problem he’d discovered with Droney. Before it became Droney. The power supply. Every single drone he’d built used power cells. Fancy batteries. Useful, because he could recharge them with Electrokinesis. Safer, because failure meant considerably less energy discharge than a generator.

But they were also serious limiters.

And while Santiago Systems had provided him with a massive catalogue of technology, even they relied on Goliath’s power generation units. He’d seen the specs, and none of them came close to the hydrogen micro-fusion reactor the size of a golf ball that existed at Droney’s core.

The technology was some of the most advanced he’d seen, and while he’d been a bit ambivalent about it at the time, it had long since become obvious to him that it was alien tech.

Julia and Maximilian hadn’t known where the drones came from. AEGIS supplied them, but even they were just the middle-man. The drones were supplied to a lot of the more promising guilds, ostensibly to increase superhero engagement through streaming.

Not even Raelene had been able to offer more information. So that was a dead end.

And he couldn’t replicate the tech, because it wasn’t a matter of simply fabricating copies and slapping some bits and pieces together. Active fusion was not something to mess with, and it was certainly not something to attempt in his basement workshop.

Which brought him back to Goliath. One of the remaining mega-corps.

There was no way they would have sold him what he needed before, and he hadn’t wanted to pick a fight with a second major faction. But with Santiago Systems scrambling for new leadership and unlikely to bother him ever again, maybe it was time to reach out.

After all, Grimnir was now a Special Asset. Which meant their status as supervillains was no longer a barrier to trade.

In theory.

And he had plenty of credits. Not more than he could ever spend, but more than he’d realistically need for a long time to come.

The hare floated back and stretched itself over the fire, aided by metal rods pinching and pulling it.

The second problem to completing the M.G.S. was the core. Once the power issue was resolved, he could begin implementing the plasma railgun technology he’d designed. Though, without using his own superpowers as the power source, it might be better to fall back on basic laser technology instead.

But the system as a whole required an intelligent source to operate it. From his first drone, he’d been experimenting with and refining the simple artificial intelligences. They’d come a long way. Even more so since Talia’s improvements. But he couldn’t trust the M.G.S. to a series of logic gates.

He’d even considered using his last Ensoulment slot on the supercomputer and incorporating it as the core…

Except that might very well get the planet glassed by the Galactic Council. Even Droney’s existence was a risk, but since they hadn’t detected anything wrong while it was on the Nexus, he figured Droney passed the test of whatever they scanned for.

Or they simply couldn’t detect it because of his soul fragment hidden at the heart of the little drone’s form.

Which left him one real option.

Droney.

But the process would require some serious modifications and upgrades, and he was not comfortable with turning Droney off. Since reconstructing itself at the top of the tower, the little drone had existed continuously, never once shut down.

It was as close to alive as any machine probably could be.

And even though Droney couldn’t really have true freedom, bound as it was to his very soul, he wasn’t sure he had the right to decide its future anymore.

So far, he’d danced around the issue successfully because Droney genuinely enjoyed being part of the chaos and madness that Alexander got into. And when Alexander wasn’t risking his life, Droney… enjoyed things. It liked watching birds and the sunset. It played with Felix when he was spending time as a golden retriever. It helped Annie train. Played music for Talia.

He’d even caught the little drone helping Augustus once, carrying platters of treats to the table.

Alexander never interfered when he sensed Droney… living. The very idea felt wrong.

Which is why he’d been avoiding the conversation. He didn’t want to ask, only for Droney to say yes because it had no choice but to obey.

And it was more of a problem now, because since whatever had happened to him at the fortress, Droney had… grown up. Matured, perhaps. That was the best way he could frame it. The little drone’s sense of humor had developed fast. It conversed more. Even now, he could sense Droney was listening to music internally.

That wasn’t the behaviour of just a machine.

Alexander sighed.

Droney turned to him and beeped.

“Yeah, buddy. I’m okay.”

He paused, staring into the blue-black nanovisor that wrapped around Droney’s ‘face.’

“We need to have a conversation. You up for that?”

Droney beeped back. Serious.

“Okay. Here’s the deal…”