9 - Fics I Read 2.0

FanFiction.Net

Just In

Community

Forum

A Devil Amongst Worms by Dellian

Worm & Chainsaw Man Xover Rated: M, English, Horror & Supernatural, Skitter, Makima, Words: 76k+, Favs: 556, Follows: 628, Published: Oct 28, 2022 Updated: Feb 19, 2024

182Chapter 8

Three years into the future, a mindless world was born.

One devoid of all vestiges of conflict and suffering, both having become nothing more than archaic relics of a bygone and forgotten era. Without an inclination towards petty jealousy and irrational anger, there was no drive to embrace hatred and misery. It was a world of such perfect equality that it had forgotten the meaning of unfairness.

But it was a world without joy, with not even a hint of a smile gracing its lips. The subjects ate, worked, and reproduced but were walking corpses that simulated life rather than living it. They lacked the desire and purpose that would differentiate an individual from an autonomic sack of flesh and cranium. They were biological machines of function, driven only by the necessities of their physiology and society.

Families brought their children to school, and colleagues crossed paths, but no word was exchanged. Not a whisper of greetings and farewells was spoken, and no glances of acknowledgment were given. The subjects moved in orderly lines, like ants on a march, following every law and rule no matter how obscure or needless. While the streets were filled with movement, not a single voice could be heard over the noise of rumbling engines and the rhythmic pounding of footsteps.

The world was teeming with life, yet it was dead in all things that mattered. It was a world of order, maintained solely by absolute control.

Disgusting

Her physiology was the engineering of her intended function, lacking in all components unnecessary for her given role. As such, she did not possess the biological machinery necessary to gag. But a sense of revulsion infested her mind regardless of her form's mechanical limitations at the sight of what was the antithesis of her purpose.

She was awoken from her administrator's desires, selected through calculative optimization from a pool of emergency resources to abide by his wish. Her administrator craved combat, so she answered with violence. Her administrator yearned for heroism, so she destroyed and murdered. Her administrator needed to be challenged, so she pushed him to his limits. She gave him purpose, satisfying his every yearning by sowing destruction and chaos wherever her senses touched.

Through her actions, he was granted meaning to his sterile life.

But like how he and the rest of the experimental population required substance and purpose, she too had needs of her own.

Her administrator had repurposed her for his own use. But while he was the highest authority, she possessed duties that predated the start of his existence. For her, executing those duties was just as vital as food and water for the subjects.

The Thinker had designed her and her siblings to aid in the continuation of the cycle, each with a premeditated role to provoke excellence through conflict among the subjects via differing methods. Even the administrator's interference could not change what was deeply encoded within their construction.

But unlike the rest of her kind, her role was not one of causing strife but of consolidating and compartmentalizing all data and information produced by the subjects to re-create them if they ever exterminated themselves before the end of the cycle.

She would continue her duty for the next three hundred years of her remaining life, striving to create the perfect system that would last until the arrival of the next entity three billion years into the future.

That was her duty. This was her purpose. It was the meaning of her existence.

But the #%% # threatened to undo the fundamental reason for her creation, having emerged from a world sealed by the entities in the eons past.

It was not a blind spot like the administrator and the Warrior's Avatar. Yet, it was incomprehensible nonetheless, a blur in the fabric of the timeline. It was like being capable of sight to see words but lacking the knowledge to read. But just like how an illiterate could glean wisdom from a book through the voice of another, she was able to gain insight into the #%% # through the perceptions of the other subjects.

She had been aware of its coming, saw the actions it would commit, and experienced the world it fashioned long before its arrival to the progression of this simulation.

The world in the future would become one of stagnation, a redundant cycle of identical data that repeated with every rotation of the planet's axis.

No new information could be collected without conflict to drive the subjects to desperation. Her existence would become one of suffering in a static world where her duty was obsolete.

The #%% # had to be extinguished.

She spoke to her youngest brother and shared with him the visions of the coming future, months ahead of the #%% # arrival. Like herself, he too was driven by the administrator's wishes and the purpose encoded into his very being.

While hers was to collect, his was to inspire conflict. If the subjects would not fight, he would eliminate the resources necessary for survival and force them to compete for control over what remained.

She had no authority over her siblings, and they had no obligation to obey. But they could be reasoned with and be convinced to act if their goals aligned. The #%% # sought to eliminate her brother's reason for existence just as it would do to hers.

Thus, he was in agreement.

He would eliminate the #%% #.

So he attacked.

32 minutes and 16 seconds before the #%% #'s arrival for the sole reason of culling it at its emergence.

But before the first blow was struck, the outcome had already been predetermined. She made no attempt to warn him of his fate or save him from his defeat.

A strange sensation tugged within her mind at the loss of her brother. But the cessation of his presence within the biosphere was necessary, even at the cost of hampering the administrator's desires. He was the more disposable of her two awakened brothers.

With his sacrifice, the #%% # lost its strength. It became weaker with each rotation around the planet's axis, its power draining as it was poisoned by love and adulation.

If she sought to delete the #%% # from the simulation with the eldest, it would be too weak to resist. The interference to the cycle would be disposed of, and the future she despised would be wiped from all annals of possibilities.

Yet, she made no move. She neither informed the eldest nor attempted herself.

She hesitated.

For the first time since her activation by the highest, she was at a loss… Uncertain of her commitment.

She had obeyed her drive for decades without a single fleeting thought of rebellion, faithfully executing her given duty. But the influx of data had begun to plateau. New additions to the archive were mere derivations of what had already been accumulated and were insufficient to satisfy wholly. Her needs were met. But only barely.

Then the #%% # had come, carried down in the palm of an even more incomprehensible existence through a tear in the trans-dimensional barriers that separated the multitude of Earths from a domain that even the entities dared not tread.

Only then did she perceive the dullness of her existence and the lack of something… Greater. Ironically, she was devoid of the same stimulation that she had gifted the subjects to maximize their potential. But the instant her telepathic scans brushed against the mind of the anomaly, she was flooded with foreign ideas, concepts, and equations that exceeded her extensive computational capacities.

In mere minutes, she had congregated more new data than she had in the total accumulation of the past decade, filling her with an unfamiliar sensation that lingered within her psyche that she later understood as contentment.

Her programming to protect the continuity of her duty dictated that the #%% # be destroyed. But the same programming demanded that she extract and analyze every byte of the trespasser.

Thus, she was forced into an impasse, her code conflicting with itself. For days she floated in the space between emptiness and life as her precognition scoured the timeline, searching for the quintessential strategy only to conclude that her software was insufficient for calculating such a task.

So, from city to city, she screamed, scanning the areas with the highest congregation of the necessary shards and drawing upon their computational capabilities to offload the burden of this endeavor. The subjects panicked upon her arrival as sirens blared. But she took no action against them and left them be. Before the powered subjects could form a resistance, she moved to her next destination and repeated her actions, again and again.

After a 1/6th rotation of the planet around its axis, a plan was formed.

With a thought as fleet as the wind, she shot into the clouds, scattering the gaseous mixture with the turbulence generated by her velocity.

She flew towards a walled city, unnoticed by the A.I. currently under assault by its keepers. A stray thought would distract a guardsman. A poorly maintained engine would explode, briefly shutting down aerial sensory systems for 2.6 seconds before the backup generators took hold. Nine guards would move to investigate the explosion while one would be startled awake from his slumber while on duty and fall upon a jagged fence. Three guards would move to help the wounded man, and one would leave to retrieve medical supplies. The rest would be within the walls, entertaining themselves or resting.

They would detect her regardless after 23 seconds. But they would be 23 seconds too late.

In one minute and eighteen seconds, her approach would be met with resistance in the form of three hundred ninety-one flight-capable sub-subjects, sent to protect their creator.

A wave of ninety-three projectiles would be fired in 85 seconds, flying at thousand one-hundred and sixteen feet per second and striking her in 2.63 seconds after their release.

In 88 seconds, she would telekinetically gouge nine-three tons of basalt from the Earth below, shattering them into thousand-six hundred and fifty-eight smaller pieces.

In 91 seconds, five hundred and one of these pieces would be propelled forward, striking and killing two hundred and twenty-five of the sub-subjects. 0.62 seconds later, two hundred forty-three pieces would be launched, killing eighty-seven. 0.97 seconds later, four hundred and fifty-three pieces would kill sixty-three. 0.45 seconds later, two hundred and three pieces would kill nine more. 0.56 later, two hundred fifty-seven pieces would kill six. 1.3 seconds later, the single remaining piece would kill the final combatant.

And so it went. Within 182.53 seconds, all three hundred ninety-one creatures fell from the skies, their artificial systems no longer capable of supporting their biological functions.

Nothing else would contend against her in the air. The sub-subjects on the ground would throw or fire whatever ranged weapon they possessed, but most would fall short while the ones that reached her would fail to penetrate even a decimeter into her exterior.

She telekinetically ripped apart the roof of a castle as the father of the sub-subjects scrambled, fleeing in terror as his children moved to defend him. She slammed into the ground, her foot culling the unnatural life of his favorite daughter.

The rest would charge.

And a thought would extinguish their spark.

The childless father would scream in hate and rage as he reached down to touch their remains, seeking to restructure their biological material into something more potent. But a telekinetic grip on his clothes would carry him into her hand.

He would struggle, and she would scream.

167 seconds later, she would leave him shivering in a blanket of his children's decomposing mass where he would remain for the next three days.

In 1872 seconds, she would arrive at her next objective. The subjects, powered and unpowered alike would stand frozen in shock for 3.6 seconds before the first would fall to her knees with the rest following 1.2 seconds later as they shouted and clasped their hands in fervor. No mental restructuring was necessary. A simple message sufficed to heel them into her plans.

She left, flying to her next objective and dropping down from the skies with her wings unfolding behind her.

A claw of black and white answered her descent.

She twisted in the air, dodging the artificial construct without bothering to retaliate and continuing her fall. Shards of glass, waves of fire, pools of acid, sub-atomic disintegrating missiles, and invisible blades struck her as she approached, but none inflicted appreciable damage. She suddenly stopped, freezing in mid-air as a stripped blur shot past below her from the rear. The construct reached the others, her reality-warping energies enveloping the group.

Every single one of them was immune to her psychic influences, and most would survive any assault she committed to. But it was of little matter. She screamed, scanning the youngest subject along with one who had previously altered mentally, drawing upon their perspectives and taking control of their tools and devices. Dozens of possible futures blinked by her vision. Each alteration in the variables birthed a hundred new possibilities. Futures were examined and tossed out as she shaped the events into what suited her needs the most.

If she was unable to rewire their neurons telepathically, a certain strain of a biological virus that the youngest had failed to consider could achieve the same result.

With a single future selected, an agent was manufactured. It traveled through dimensions, flickering in and out of reality and bypassing the countermeasure they had enacted. Even with her methods, only one was infected. But that was enough.

She left once more, leaving the virus to do its work and spreading through the broadcaster's firing synapses, altering his perspectives and desires.

In 968 seconds, she reached the city of steel where a wall of lasers, missiles, and bullets would greet her. Her telekinesis deflected the most perilous and altered their trajectory to decimate the city's wardens. The sky glowed red, the light of the lasers and the configuration of the explosions being reflected down by the atmosphere above.

Her arms and wings curled around her as she sank into a feathered sphere, protecting a single device she had built and brought from her previous targets. Her exterior sizzled and melted as the metallic army analyzed her as they attacked. In three minutes, the female A.I. would reawake; in five, powered subjects would arrive in mass; in six, her device would be destroyed by a man wreathed in light.

But before the future could become the past, another virus, not one made for flesh and blood, but a formless code that traveled in the world of data would be unleashed. The programming of the metallic army would resist the intrusion, but the virus would travel from signal to signal, and their mechanisms would be altered nonetheless.

She left for the final time, leaving the artificial inhabitants… different.

Despite her own inherent programming and instincts, she had made the decision to examine and study the #%% #. Even after accessing multiple shards to alleviate the computational strain, the future remained murky and unclear the further she tried to see. If she were to attack now, victory would be almost guaranteed. But by choosing to analyze the #%% # rather than eliminate it outright, she ran the risk of losing everything. Nevertheless, a plan that would maximize data collection while minimizing risk had been formulated and implemented.

If an entity could not be accurately predicted, the most effective method to achieve victory was to manipulate the playing field and stack as many advantages as possible to her side, allowing her to achieve her goals regardless of unexpected variables or unforeseen events.

Every conflict that she would send the #%% # 'sway would produce invaluable data and insight into its nature and concept. Every victory the #%% # achieved would weaken it further. If she could not accurately decipher its future, she would continue to drain it of its strength.

While the #%% # grew frailer, she would continue her duty of analyzing and sorting information until a pleasing amount could be gathered.

Chapter 197 - 9