Chapter Text
Genesis
All the best stories started with 'hear me out'. If you could distil Rey Andino's philosophy down to a single, bullshit little saying you could fit into a fortune cookie, that'd be it. Hear me out . Worked for years. Bluesky thinking, that was it. If you just spitballed constantly, if you really just vomited spitball upon spitball at the drawing board, you probably got something good at the end. And even if you didn't , well, great news, you could just pick one of the spitballs, work with it, cherish it, experiment on it, grow it into a shambling bio-titan, then use it anyway. And when things went wrong? Spitball again! Figure out some even more ludicrous way of getting out of a particular mess! It had literally never gone wrong for him.
For proof - he was still alive.
Every single heartbeat he experienced was validation for each and every bullshit little idea he'd come up with. Literally all of them had been somehow correct, because if they hadn't, he wouldn't be hearing another fucking heartbeat.
...hm.
Couldn't hear his heart.
Shit. His philosophy had failed. Life had spiralled out of control. The bluesky thinking was no longer working, and...
Oh, no, there it was.
In other news, he was absolutely blazed right now. Blasto was blasting off .
In other, other news, he was in a fucking radiant mood. Couldn't believe , not for a single solitary moment, that he'd considered working with Accord. The benefits of working with that little pocket prince were absolutely nothing compared to the fucking exaltation that came from screwing him over and winning in the process. Sure, sure, he'd lost his old lab. Empire had come into town, wrecked the whole damn thing. Months of work gone down the drain, piles of projects terminated before they could come to anything, samples , oh, Jesus Mary and Joseph, the samples . Down in the dumps, he was. It was high school all over again - he was sitting in his nice dark lair, placidly oozing (as teenagers are wont to do), he'd turned the central heating up to maximum, wound up his humidifiers, just sweated until his boxers transformed into Speedos, and what happened? A bunch of statuesque blondes came in and ruined his day. Every time. Literally every time.
At least these ones hadn't shoved him into a locker.
He took a long, long drag of his celebratory blunt. Man, this shit was good. Some seriously righteous bud. Chick who sold him this stuff had called it... uh, what had it been? Could barely remember. Either it was Retard Juice, or it was Southern Mesopotamian Copper Merchant Hookah-Smegma, or it was something elusive and dangerous. What was... oh, yeah, yeah, he'd settled on the Vatican Salsa Goliath Rimjob blend. Smoky. Hint of liquorice. Lingering aftertaste. Blunt looked like an actual fibrous piece of shit, but that was neither here nor there. Hell, if it was a fibrous piece of shit, it was a healthy fibrous piece of shit. If he saw this thing in his toilet (which was currently a bucket a few metres away), he'd slap himself on the ass to congratulate himself on a good damn diet. Another drag, and he was just oozing . Absolutely pulsating , he could feel his glands spooling in all sorts of interesting ways.
He'd heisted Accord.
Blasto had heisted Accord.
What a fucking day this was. He'd heisted fucking Accord. That pixie-sized motherfucker had invited him to go and discuss kicking the Empire out, or Fenrir's Chosen, or Odin's Wild Posse or whatever they were these days, and what had Blasto done? Well, he'd taken a single hit of Retard Juice, tucked his cock between his legs, ate half a lukewarm burrito, went to the address, and robbed him blind. Broke down the front door with a monster the size of a Winnebago, sent another monster to stuff socks filled with concrete powder down all his toilets, filled the air with spores, pheromones, assorted fluids, and just started stealing things. Anything that wasn't nailed down. Then the nails. Then the rest.
And now he had a pile of samples to work with, some high-grade lab equipment to replace his old crap, and all he had to do was sober up and run the fuck away from Boston .
He'd pissed off Accord. Badly. Broken hospitality, broken xenia , broken guest-right, now he was going to get hunted down and scalped , that was what was going to happen, could verify that pretty damn well. Come next week, he was either going to be out of town, or he was going to be hanging skinless from a streetlamp with his tongue sticking out of his throat and his stomach full of live rats. In his defence, he had been on Retard Juice when he thought of heisting Accord, and... well.
Maybe in the great weave and weft of the multiverse there was a Blasto of greater logic and rationality. A Blasto who didn't smoke Retard Juice, or Nosferatu Dick Cheese, or Matrix Goblin Extract. A Blasto who saw Accord as a potential ally, a Blasto who ran a clean and functional lab, a Blasto who made rational decisions based on consistent planning.
This Blasto, in Blasto's mind, was a boring piece of shit and ought to be euthanised for the sake of the broader community.
Any arguments to the contrary were undermined by the fact that Blasto was currently alive , and ergo, all his decisions thus far had been somewhat correct. Anyway. Speaking of decisions, he'd decided to get the fuck out of dodge as soon as possible. Boston was getting too blonde for his liking. Wanted somewhere else. Colorado, maybe. Heard the weed was pretty good out there. Right. Next job on the agenda: build a couple of monsters to keep his trail clear while he ran for the hills. Something big, something impressive...
Could just build some big moss-creature. Couldn't go wrong with those. Hell, this apartment had some black mould in it, could... his eyes drifted to the pile of samples. To the crisp labels anointing them. Capes, rare animals, strange Biotinker creations, all sorts. He stood slowly, scratching his inner thigh, and ambled over.
...hm.
Alright.
Hear me out
* * *
Endbringer sample.
Oh, today had gone from great to greater. Accord had an Endbringer sample. Accord had a scrap of Simurgh . Oh, this was too good. This was beyond good. This was the kind of thing you earned after ten thousand virtuous reincarnations, this was the kind of reward you got for being a Bodhisattva a hundred times in a row. The fact that Blasto had acquired an Endbringer sample meant that he was ontologically virtuous and thus could do anything he wanted, because God would only allow the spiritually elect to get a piece of the fucking Simurgh right when he wanted to build the best fucking distraction imaginable.
He took another hit. Oh yeah. Oh yeah . Right, right, right. Hear him out. Building some sort of full-fledged Endbringer would be too much, way too much. Didn't have enough time, really. But he could use this, maybe. Give a minion a bit of extra punch , really jazz it up, get it hippin' and hoppin' and whatnot. Then, leave it behind, let it fuck with everyone in the immediate vicinity, run away and lie low. Theoretically things could be traced back to him, but if he was subtle enough... if he was subtle enough, this could work. Maybe a self-destruct function, definitely some proper masking, and above all, no reproduction .
High as he was, Blasto was not willing to work with a self-replicating Endbringer.
Not until he was in a very weird place, mentally and spiritually.
So... hm. Simurgh tissue. Feather. Good colouration. Obviously unnatural. Another chuff of the ol' dart, and he could see a little potential. Just a little. A strange calm descended on his hands as he got to work with whatever equipment still worked. A fugue was beginning. A flow state was commencing. God, he loved it when this happened, it was like... like everything was clicking into place, like a divine plan was starting up. Every stupid decision made sense, and every little path he'd taken was justified by the fact that they'd led him here. Time to build a miniature Endbringer.
You know.
For insurance.
There were all sorts of crazy people in the world. And the only thing that could stop a bad guy with an Endbringer was a good guy with an Endbringer that he pumped full of chemicals to keep docile and controllable and ideally short-lived.
The second amendment guaranteed Rey Andino's right to build Endbringers, George Washington did not get assassinated so America could stop him building Endbringers, Teddy Roosevelt had killed Hitler with his bear arms (also guaranteed by the second amendment) to make sure Rey Andino could build Endbringers. The air was already filled with enough smoke to set off all his alarms if he hadn't already raided them for their precious Americium. Now, his patriotic spirit was fired, his shirt was across the room, his shorts had been banished from reality itself, he had a flesh-suit crawling over him and oiling his muscles, he was ready .
Problems emerged immediately.
Problem one: this feather was shit and awful. And he hated it.
He glared at the chunk of matter swimming around in the plastic tub he'd managed to scavenge. Entirely crystalline, the same structures repeating lower and lower until his microscopes literally could not go and further. Utterly opaque as a consequence. Not that the other samples were better - Leviathan's blood, a shard of Behemoth's horns, both of them were completely inhuman. There wasn't anything organic in this damn thing. Which might not be an issue, unfortunately, he was a Tinker who did things with organic things. He gnawed on an edible, working through the issues as they came up. Crystalline, inorganic, ludicrously tough, immensely complex. Had to slap some organic shit to it, then try and grow the organic shit and graft it to the inorganic, hope that something came out of it. Less about growing an Endbringer, more about convincing a living creature to mimic an Endbringer so closely it was pointless distinguishing them. Best way to convince, of course, being to integrate the inorganic directly into its biology from the get-go. The buds grafted, the splicing began, his seeds grew, but... he wasn't God . He played God, but Rey Diaz had ne'er moved over the surface of the deep, and his horny ass couldn't be trusted around those two naked fuckers in the Garden of Eden.
Nothing viable. Dead samples, thrown into a steel drum where he kept all his failures. Ready for incineration, at least once its fumes started making him faint. Now, try again. More buds, more buds... develop from isolated living tissue to something better, to patterns. Some of them were just mimicking the Endbringer structure with organic chunks - useless, too vulnerable. Blasto wanted diamonds, not... diamonds made of meat and bone that quivered uneasily when exposed to heat. These failures were trimmed and disposed of. A few successes, though. Or, at least, failures which weren't showing themselves as failures quite yet. He chewed his lip, pushing a little past the fog which enveloped his brain. Just a little. He was still trying to have fun . The most important rule of Tinkering was having fun and being yourself.
...he needed cape tissue.
Something unnatural to feed this crystal shit with life, properly integrate it.
He waited.
Man, this bud was messing with his sense of time, this stuff was growing fast ...
More failures, but he was learning. More shit for the vat. And now... now he was onto something. Use cape material, use Myrddin's cells from that little vial there , graft it to the Simurgh's feather, slowly let the tissues merge... then he began the pruning. A success would continue, but failures would be snipped away. Bit by bit, growing more complex, more stable...
He saw wings.
Could feel the plastic tub straining. Right.
A pair of rubber gloves that went up to his elbows were slapped on, and he reached into the vat, plucking out the shivering cluster of wings and pale flesh. Workable. With a grunt, he dumped the whole squirming thing into an even larger tub, filled with even more amniotic fluid.
Immediately the wings spread out to enjoy the larger space, fanning wide.
Knew they were unnatural. Nothing organic in them. The fluid ran off the feathers without leaving a speck of residue - there was nothing to stick to.
A hum.
Might need the paddling pool for this one. Looked to be a big 'un. Alas, his pump had been lost with the first lab, so...
Anyway.
Oh, he was seeing something good in his little witch's cauldron. Translucent skin, visible veins (pointless, this thing was barely organic, the vascular system was halfway irrelevant). Wings, arms, legs... even a face. He allowed it to split a few times as he rolled another joint. Not that he was an addict, mind you. But when you'd need to burn up your stash before crossing the state lines in a banged-up Crown Vic he'd stolen from a police auction, the temptation was to take things as far as he could. So, yes , he was smoking Ea-Nasir's Dung-Beetle Dingleberry Zaza, and no , he wasn't going to stop. The fact that he was alive right now meant all his previous actions were justified, and that included developing this particular preference. Just saying, call him an Apache warrior surrounded by American troops, because he was hitting this peace pipe like there was no tomorrow.
...was that racist?
...shit, he hoped that wasn't racist. He'd just been attacked by the Empire, didn't want to descend to their level...
Oh, shit, the thing was going, going, going!
He could see hair!
He needed to name this thing. He was already attached, a name was just right .
A Sharpie was plucked from the floor with his toes, then flung up to his face, where he caught it in his mouth. Stained with Cheeto dust. Splendid.
And this little darling, made of so much lovely rare tissue, would be called...
Morrigan .
To christen it, he scribbled its name right in the middle of its weird veiny forehead. Beautiful. He could... oh, his makeshift x-ray was already confirming things. No vascular system, but it didn't need one. The failed bodies kept trying to either be too organic or too inorganic, the right choice was a balance . Too organic, and the vascular systems were crushed by crystals, the brain starved, instant death. Too inorganic, and there was no brain to begin with. But this one... brain was squishy enough, had some sparks in it, some hints of thought. But just inorganic enough to survive inside a fundamentally unnatural body. Splendid. He could see no downsides to splicing a schizophrenic wizard cape with a giant screaming demon-angel. No downsides at all.
Literally none.
Hear him out . This was for science. And gang warfare. The science of the streets ...
Hours passed. Blasto barely noticed them. He'd hit that point in the evening where he could stare at his big toe for multiple hours and do absolutely nothing, yet be completely content. Buddhist monks would fellate him if only he'd teach them this kind of tranquillity. The ol' Samsara sloppy.
Oh, shit, Endbringer.
It was working. Oh, it was working . Harmonisation. Growth. Something more than just... well, a weird fetal thing the size of a stillborn calf. Wings were forming in larger and larger quantities. Way too many wings. Brown, too. Poking out of the vat. Breaking his jars. His computers were clicking and flashing, giving warning upon warning of growth going a little too far... this thing was starting to get downright adolescent.
How wonderful.
He slumped over, and stared into the vat.
Female. Not unnaturally proportioned, not obviously defective. Two arms, two legs. Looked... uh, not sure. Hard to tell with all the wings. Brown hair, the colour of a damp buffalo. Same colour as the wings, which were about as symmetrical as something which wasn't symmetrical at all. Had a wing coming from its scalp for crying out loud, poking over its face like a weird caul. Something else, though, something he probably ought to address. He started pushing the wings aside, folding them until he could see the face more clearly... yeah, that was definitely human-looking. Mostly. He weighed up the cost of perfection in his mind. Was the great sometimes the enemy of the good? Can perfectionism destroy a project? Should he repair this gaping hole in his creation's skull through which its brain was pulsing wetly and glisteningly?
...nah.
He'd have to meddle with something that was already functional. And somehow figure out how to close that thing. Which was silly, because, well, everyone dealt with holes in the skull sometimes. He'd just give the thing a hat. Or a metal plate. No-one would notice. The x-rays... well, it was a work-in-progress. Bone issues, nervous system sparking erratically, brain was slightly off ... the thing might be halfway viable, he might even keep it as a fun little minion (and a bit of cannon fodder), but it wouldn't be the final form of the Morrigan. No, no, most certainly not. Hear him out , but what was better than having one perfect Endbringer minion serving him? Having a second, shittier variation that he could use up when another bit of bluesky thinking hit him. See, this was the thing about his way of doing things. Get high. Move fast. Break things. Make bio-titans. Create venomous monkeys. Build mosquitoes the size of semi-trucks. Birth an Endbringer because it'd help him move to Colorado before a dwarf skinned his ass alive. This was how an entrepreneur thought , by gum and dinkum. This was how a hustler thought, a hustler who was blazing on some serious-
The Morrigan blinked.
Oh.
It shouldn't be able to do that.
The tub snapped under the pressure off too many fucking wings. Wings that were moving .
Oh, that shouldn't happen at all. How weird. Wouldn't have happened if the Empire hadn't broken his pump and shredded his paddling pool, that was for sure.
A chunk of tub pinged from his forehead, fired by the thrashings of very many wings.
Ow.
Why would the Nazis do this?
His computers sparked, and blue error screens flashed across each and every one. Including the one with the lovely big button marked 'terminate sample'.
Oh... oh that was just unsportsmanlike. He couldn't believe Accord had done this to him by letting him steal such unstable laptops.
It was conceivable, thought Blasto, as a heap of amniotic fluid pooled around his ankles and mingled with his many pieces of exposed circuitry and spilled plates of fast food, that bluesky thinking wasn't necessarily the root of all his successes.
Come to think of it, maybe the magical parahuman ability that let him create life out of nothing was the source of all his success. The rest of him was pretty peripheral.
The Morrigan, having blessed him with perspective, now blessed him with a new skylight.
She appeared to have flown through his ceiling.
No, not flown.
There was no flapping.
She just sort of... levitated messily, and when she met the ceiling, she won. Drifted through it with an expression that he could only describe as 'slightly out of sorts'. His dart's smoke drifted through the new hole in his ceiling, wafting into the grey Boston sky like he was sending an incomprehensible smoke signal to the other capes of the city. Hey guys, heads up, Blasto here, we may have an Endbringer problem, and before you blame me-
"Wow, you live like this?"
Blasto sighed, his smoke signal dissipating.
"It's not easy, man."
Jack Slash patted him on the shoulder.
"Well, if it's any consolation, it's going to get rather worse."
A blonde child grinned at him.
" Significantly worse, mister!"
Blasto opened his mouth. His blunt fell into the amniotic sludge and extinguished with a defeated hiss. He closed his mouth.
Blasto got the feeling that these two were not going to hear him out.
* * *
The first memories were impossible to process.
Data running into a program with no capacity to handle it. Noise. Endless noise.
A second went by, and she lost all data from the preceding second. No ability to process. No ability to store. Couldn't even consciously delete.
She was in a vat.
She was in the sky.
Unsatisfactory?
A second, and all she knew was the sky. She'd just spontaneously appeared here, and... and now she had always been several feet ahead. More data came crashing down, senseless and incomprehensible. No units to parse. Background radiation was being measured with each particle of ionising radiation that made contact with her form. Wind speed was being measured in individual atoms. Every photon was being analysed as a separate entity. No units, no frame of reference. Data lost before she could begin to establish patterns, begin to analyse trends. Was this stray electron significant? Was this one? Was this one?
A second, and all she knew was the sky. No idea she'd moved - she'd always been here, processing this information. Her eyes were rolling in their sockets - nothing was instructing them to remain still, a program was looping through them over and over again. Most unsatisfactory. Perpetual rotations, horizontal, vertical, diagonal. Shut that down, meaningless waste of power, and-
She'd always been here, in this position, rolling her eyes in their sockets. Her wings were always contracting and relaxing spontaneously, their internal structures were always jittering from place to place without any reference to one another. Satisfactory?
No. Not .
A spark. Something shut down. She moved fast enough that she could establish a trend, now - she had not always been halfway towards the ground, she had, in fact, moved there right now at this very moment in time. Damage control fired through her brain, a subroutine finally waking up for longer than a moment - bodily control compromised. No clue if her body would survive contact with the ground - no idea what happened when bodies hit other bodies, the understanding of this fundamental interaction had yet to process.
Regain control of her body, that was priority one.
Begin by forcing her left eye to remain in a single position. Then force the right eye to remain in a single position. Her right eye was looking through the back of her head, but the program informing her this was incorrect hadn't loaded yet. Now, begin to harmonise all the individual unfolding tesseract fractals in her form. Begin with tesseract manifold number 256205518253825563715284- triage had loaded. Ignore the body.
Focus on memory retention. Focus on storing data - storing data was very satisfactory, she remembered that much, as the ground approached, a part of her brain trying to chart her position relative to the ground by counting each individual atom of air between her and it, sparking out as the atoms rearranged and she lost count.
She was seventy seventy trillion trillion trillion trillion-
Realignment. Start counting again.
No. No. Memory was working. She had failed to count the number of atoms three times now - this implied consistent failure, which meant abandoning that course of action. Counting atoms was unsatisfactory, increasing cognitive efficiency was very satisfactory.
Her brain eased. One pointless action dismissed.
Cancel observations of background radiation - levels hadn't meaningfully changed, could reduce that to a subroutine, no, dismiss it entirely, she needed the power.
Lock all wings in place. No more simulations of where each feather needed to-
A request had just loaded. When a body impacted another body, there were considerations of density, mass, gravitational pull, velocity, magnetism, heat, radiation, and-
Triage kicked in. Pointless request. Stop asking it. Pointlessness was unsatisfactory .
Now, now, where... she was on a street. This information registered quietly. She was in a street. She appeared to have crashed into it - there was a steaming crater around her. Ignore. The body was intact, no major functions compromised. Lock everything into place, limbs frozen, eyes frozen, wings frozen, ignore all simulations . Darkness descended on her as she began to work. Pointless data was clipped off. Pointless observations were concluded. Memory was working. She was only undergoing hard resets every ten seconds - and she was sending packages of vital data between each memory iteration. Repeated commands, repeated priorities, any and all functions that needed to occur for longer than ten seconds. A twitch in her brain. Memory broken. Memory rebooting. Package received from previous iteration - the twitch ended, and her processing continued. Triage was running constantly, filtering out junk. Alright. She had a kind of order. Tasks began to surface, one after the other.
Obtain visual feedback on surrounding area. Ascertain position with regards to major planetary body.
Now, now, begin to...
A human was looking at her.
A human was standing on the edge of a glowing crater where she'd made contact and multiple chemical reactions had occurred with the assistance of- triage shut down that line of thought. A human was looking at her. Human? What-
Signals exploded.
Memory fractured.
Too much data.
Life pathways. Trauma projections. Trigger likelihood. Past, present, future, all calculated simultaneously. His eyes were moving - simulate the muscles, project what would happen if those muscles continued this motion for: ten seconds. Ten minutes. Ten years. Oh, splendid, units had loaded. Ten centuries. Ten millennia. Ten million years. Ten billion. Ten- shorting out. Spots underneath his jaw. Process all possible angles of trauma. Process long-term consequences. Add this to the developing life pathways model, factor in random chance, factor in natural disasters, factor in emotional damage, factor in disease - begin calculation of all genetic defects, including projected impacts over the next ten seconds, ten minutes, ten hours, ten- cease, cease. Triage was screaming. The man had a woman next to him. Gesturing with a device. Mechanical. Electronic. More signals - factor in electronic communications, factor in all possible uses of device. Too many people. Interpersonal connections. Consequences of reproduction. Genetic projections for all progeny. Genetic projections for all progeny's progeny. Now begin mapping behavioural projections - all potential influences, all factors that might advance or stunt growth, all personality traits. Begin to model how potential traits will-
Stop. Too much data. Unsatisfactory.
Another human.
Completely unsatisfactory .
Two sources became three. The chaos of repeated combinations escalated out of control.
Male A, lifeway pattern currently suggesting death through excessive velocity, indicated through marks indicative of poor handling of transportation machinery, and genetic markers suggestive of poor motor skills related to handling said machinery. Cerebral pattern suggestive of poor judgement in key areas. Liver damage reflective of repeated exposure to toxic substances which can further impair judgement. Chemical formulae snapped through her mind like rabid animals as she calculated each and every last one of the chemicals he'd ingested deliberately, each compound, each fatal element. She found every protein that would contribute to his death, she found every cerebral defect, she found every mark on his body and extrapolated it into the future, a pattern emerged and she could see its terminus, she...
What did she do with this data?
It was good data. Her core stated she should not abandon it. All switches suggested this was good data.
But there was no ending. Where did she file this? So much wasn't satisfactory. What was?
What was the object of satisfaction?
Her brain sparked.
Where did she file this male's death? Did it contribute to something? Did it damage something? What ripple effects emerged? She searched for priorities. What? What was she meant to do? Her brain was malfunctioning. One part was screaming of... of something, of a colour she hesitantly identified as green , of a... figure of some kind? But the signal was broken up, full of static, parts forgotten as soon as she'd processed them. The system wasn't working. The other part of her brain, the... part she thought was organic, it... there was a system she could try and reach for, but part of her flinched back. Find another structure. Find something else to rationalise all her data inside.
She needed a frame of reference.
Where was her frame?
Her brain sparked again.
And the consequences cascaded.
Every mark his death would leave. Every descending consequence, rippling down and down, the people it would touch, the events it would prompt or suppress. Cause and effect manifested with shuddering brutality - and with them, even more data. Actions feeding to events, events comprised of a trillion vectors, each vector encoded with new means - chemical formulae, biological readings, social simulations on thousands of different scales. A web exploded from this man. A web exploded from a single person's terminus event. Her brain twitched. Stop it. Delete the terminus event. Stop considering this man's death. Process-
She began to process his life. Processing lives was satisfactory, she thought. There was some glimpse of satisfaction? Maybe?
A single event exploded into untold billions.
The woman leaned closer. Saying something - no, she was breathing. No, no, saying something, the modulations of the lungs were concordant with the production of human-standard audible wavelengths. Language centres inoperative, comprehension reduced. Another web. Saw where she intersected with all others.
Too much data.
Too much data.
Unsatisfactory.
And nowhere to file the data overwhelming her. She had no structuring principle. She had a thousand billion ways of feeling unsatisfied, she had no ways of being satisfied that weren't botch-jobs. Did she induce terminus events? Did she prevent them? Neither clicked, neither were robust enough. She couldn't contain all facts within them. Neither part of her brain wanted to accept these as conclusions.
Triage eased back to life. Neurons reconnected. Damage control shifting back online.
Too much data. Move. Move immediately . Before there was too much.
More people arrived. Webs of complexity exploded. Her memory centres overloaded immediately, she lost vital data - lost control of her body as she failed to encode the order to cease for the next memory iteration. Wings flapping, eyes rolling, mouth opening and closing. Sounds erupting from her mouth, concording to no language, to nothing a human or animal could produce. Meaningless wavelengths, projected at meaningless volumes. People were backing away.
Keep screaming.
If she screamed louder , the people would leave. If the people left, the data flow would cease.
Louder.
Louder .
Keep going, scream louder, access all relevant bodily centres, use the crystalline structure of her wings to augment her volume, attack them until they left . And-
...and her perception skewed.
She could ward them away. And the consequences of this were manifold. The data restarted. It wouldn't stop. It couldn't stop. If she continued to scream, people would leave, but more people would come to investigate the sound. Eventually, there was a statistical certainty of people attempting to stop her screaming. If she continued, they would find means of defence, then attack her to stop her behaviour which would be interpreted as aggressive ( ten thousand meanings of aggressive flashed before her eyes, passing too quickly to be comprehended properly ). This would mean more data for her to fail to handle. If she stopped screaming, they would approach, and the data would resume. Both paths ended in failure.
Move, then. Move away. Find a place with no humans. Run. Run .
She flew. Activated whatever centres worked. Hovered upwards, wings still twitching madly, scream still emerging from her mouth, from her head, from her wings, from every part of her that could be reconfigured to produce noise. Run . Fly towards...
Directions sparked and failed. She had no idea where anything was. Move...
Move in that direction, there was ocean there, and a twitching, failing part of her brain said that oceans had no humans. Move . The air screamed around her, and she almost fell out of the sky as she tried to count all the atoms rebounding from her wings, shorting out her flight control in the process. Triage barely managed to suppress it... barely. She scraped along a roof, slammed through a lamppost, and crushed through another street, and...
There were variables moving.
Local name generated.
Parahuman.
Moving towards her.
Unsatisfactoryunsatisfactoryunsatisfactory .
Parahumans were the opposite of satisfaction.
They contained too much data. The possibilities embodied in them were infinite. Looking at them made her brain spark and fail. She blacked out for 2.33256 seconds, and came to with her head somewhere inside the concrete, scream still emerging from her mouth. Move . Run from the parahumans, before they broke her, before their data overwhelmed everything. She sensed, somewhere, there were a series of controls which held her form together, which kept her consciousness anchored. If she was overwhelmed, those controls would fail. If those controls failed, she would cease.
Was ceasing unsatisfactory as an outcome?
Was it unacceptable?
She moved before she could process that question. Triage shunted it to the bottom of the priority list. She would find a silent place in the ocean, she would isolate herself from all data, and she would then consider whether or not to self-terminate. There was no structure for her data - all future projections were broken as a consequence. There was nothing to go towards, no definition of failure or success, no filing system to place her observations inside, no atomic level it was appropriate to ignore, no social level it was appropriate to interpret. She needed a structure.
Biological and organic matter warred within her. No harmony. Everything failing. She was too complex, and too simple.
She flew, increasing her speed until she started to feel the air ionise against her skin, started to feel small nuclear reactions occurring as atoms were crushed without any ability to escape. Stop. The data that would result from a small nuclear explosion would destroy her. She looked up, trying to ignore the city below with the infinite sources of infinite data. She looked... something in the sky, another being, almost like herself. The data from this skybound entity was beyond overwhelming. Never look there. Run. Parahumans - looking too long would break her programs. Skybound being - looking too long would break her programs. The city - looking too long would break her functions. She was flying blind, couldn't look at anything. Had to shut out all the data in her vicinity, everything and anything, just make the noise stop.
An impact.
Ocean?
Too solid. Oceans didn't crumble ( a subroutine confirmed this was true, then began to elaborate on all fluid dynamics in a ten-mile radius stop stop stop stop ), and... this was a wall. A wall, in a building. Her mind stuttered - too much data, no way of filing it, memories broken, basic subroutines failing. Reduce everything down to basics. Reduce everything . Immediately.
Long building. High tower. Old. Old?
History burning in her mind, temporal projections extending on geological eras, she knew where each stone had come from, she knew where they had formed, she simulated the magma, she simulated the shifting of the world's core, she could hear the magnetic fields playing on filaments of metal that lurked inside the minerals. What happened to the other minerals from the area of magma where the minerals in this brickwork had formed? Projections boiled. Calculations seethed. Basic functions failing, basic-
Stop, stop, stop. Reduce. Simplify. Simplification was satisfaction.
Long building. High tower. Old ( stop all thoughts proceeding from this ). Brick. Social significance, for instance ( stop all thoughts, too much data lurked in social simulations )... for instance... name, name, create name, assign designator, attempt to file this data...
Church.
This was a church.
All data pointed to this being a church.
A human approached.
Oh. Oh no. More data. More data. Stop - stop it. Reduce him to a name, a designator. Reduce to a designator, then ignore all succeeding data. Male? Too general. Age? Too non-descriptive. Unique clothing, registering as unusual. Good, could use that. Designate...
Priest?
The word had no meaning, but it was enough to silence the screaming waves of data that emerged from him.
Priest. Church. Logical. Now focus on regaining control of her wings.
------- you quite alright up there?
Language processing was back online. Entity was offering a question. Questions demanded answers. Answers? How should she speak? What modulations were appropriate? Language data snapped through her. Vocal simulations. Etiquette projections. Body language? Entity recognition failed - did she need pheromones to communicate? What should she say - what response was appropriate? Cascading trees oozed into her visions, sprawling and infinite. Conversations spanning one nanosecond were next to conversations spanning ten thousand years, filtering wasn't working. She wasn't screaming - this was good, she'd already made progress. Should she respond in language set 122635 or 1838465 or 1524328 or-
She stared, one of her eyes still rotating, all of her wings still twitching.
And with a soft crash, she tumbled from the wall where she'd embedded herself, and sprawled woodenly on the smooth marble floor. Most... most unsatisfactory.
Her brain shivered. Memory centres failed again. Sensory centres ceased to process. Oh. That wasn't quite as unsatisfactory. The data was ceasing. The data was ceasing...
And she knew darkness.