Chain 013: Alpha Centauri

Chain 013: Alpha Centauri
Location: Alpha Prime, Chiron, M.Y. 2101
Identity: Drop-In (Drone)
Faction: Cybernetic Consciousness
Drawbacks: [+600] Alien Crossfire, The Little Terraformer That Could, Xenocidal Native Life
(Abilities: Salvage Engineering, Sorcery Savant, Lifting Yourself Up, Xin Sheng)
[Free] Binary Starchild
[400/1600] We Must Dissent
[1000/1600] Empath
[1200/1600] Groupthink
[1600/1600] Future Society: Cybernetic

Waking up on an alien world in a makeshift base is not an experience that most people would generally find appealing. Doubly so considering that the faction  didn't even exist until radicals split from the University faction and stole one of their two existing colony pods - the Cybernetic Consciousness, apparently, oh no that's not a pretentious name at all.

Chiron - at least, in this universe - is a vaguely Earth-like planet. There are a few differences, sure, like the fact that the planet has 40% more surface area, its gravity is 30% stronger, the atmosphere is marginally breathable but twice as dense so breathing unfiltered air will kill you in ten minutes, the biggest plant life is barely larger than a palm tree, the day is eighteen hours long, and... oh, yes, Planet is SELF-AWARE AND WANTS TO KILL US ALL. The fact that the leader of this faction fled from the University across the sea to a different continent and founded their home base within the laughably-named Monsoon Jungle meant that it was easy to keep everyone fed and encourage a strong population growth early, at least. The problem, of course, is that this continent was home to three other factions, and its location made Alpha Prime a key target of virtually every other faction.

To clarify a bit in terms of geography (that none of you will probably care about), this continent is roughly the size of Eurasia, though it's split mostly in two by a strait to the south and a sea to the north, with two thirds of it being the eastern portion. The Monsoon Jungle is on the western coast, and the land going southward from there continues past the equator, getting narrower until it forms a "fist" and ends at Cape Storm. On the opposite side of that strait are the Great Dunes, and a truly massive mesa hundreds of kilometers in size is set between the Dunes and the Upland Wastes. So naturally, two of the three most aggressive factions landed there. To the north in the Wastes, the Believers, an ultra-religious group of militants. To the south, the Human Hive, a pseudo-communist police state. It's little surprise, then, that the trod-upon drones of that faction rebelled and fled, finding refuge near Cape Storm under the leadership of Foreman Domai.

In the early days, I kept my head down and tried to help out everywhere that I could. Things were honestly not all that bad, and thanks to the larger-than-expected amounts of food available, growth was encouraged. We'd founded a third base at the point that two alien ships were seen to have been fighting in orbit, the two Progenitor factions crashing to the planet surface. Not much that could truly be done at that point, however, so we kept on going. Which was perfectly fine... until the Believers stormed the newest base we'd founded, without even having so much as a scout patrol to defend it.

Working on a terraformer for Miriam Godwinson wasn't bad, aside from literally all of the native life responding poorly to us trying to clear xenofungus from the local terrain. Little did everyone realize this early on that it was quite literally the mind of the planet itself. We'd honestly have defected back if we could, but her commisariat - I'm sorry, her "psych chaplains" - kept everyone in line and shot anyone who stepped out. It was likely fortunate that she was distracted by her borders meeting the Hive's and Yang sending his own forces to probe her defenses, otherwise she would have likely wiped the Consciousness out. It's quite a shame that the chaplains assigned to us were thrown into an attacking mind worm boil, though, allowing the rest of us to flee and rejoin our people.

Some of us were taken a little more seriously after that. Especially those of us who felt a resonance with others. I was one of those - but my talents didn't lie solely there, but also in assisting in research. Usually field research. It was clear that I wasn't one of the usual Talents that were hand-picked to aid the faction, but nonetheless I made myself indispensable. These were still the early days, with less than a hundred thousand souls in the faction, and so it wasn't truly surprising that one could climb the ranks. Especially when they seemingly embraced the same cybernetic ideals that our leader, Aki Zeta-5 herself, had.

(More the pity that my talents enabled me to subvert her via her implants and sheer charisma - oh, she was still her own person, but certain characteristics were more... relaxed... than they otherwise might be. And others pushed in a much more aggressive direction.)

It did not take long, with my whispers in her ear, to start putting the faction on a more militaristic front. Most factions might be able to plunder technology from conquering bases, but it seemed we were unique in that we could get technologies that were used by units who we fought. A Unity Rover from the Hive, and we were able to adapt the doctrine of mobility. Soldiers equipped with mining lasers from the Believers, and in short order our rovers were armed with the same. And that was without the unexpected bootstrapping that I had provided, the thing that solidified myself as her right hand - and it was black boxed, but I had examples of compact fusion reactors in the Warehouse that I could reverse engineer and adapt for the armed forces. Suddenly our capabilities grew in a geometric fashion.

Without question, it was a short term solution... but when the short term is twenty years, a lot can happen. Alpha Prime was utilized for military mass manufacture, while the other bases' supply crawlers utilize seemingly every square kilometer of resources. When there were enough rovers to keep the borders safe, Alpha Prime shifted gears massively, secret projects being cranked out in a handful of years where otherwise they should have taken decades. The Weather Paradigm. The Merchant Exchange. The Command Nexus. With each triumph, our faction grew - and then, with the smallest provocation from them after a diplomatic spat, both the Hive and the Believers declared Vendetta upon us.

Because, you know, humans left any war-like mentality behind on Earth. Which by the way is currently a cinder. Yes, war is such an ugly word, surely it's better if we call it any other name.

In any event... Yang attempted to send probe teams, but overlapping patrols of rovers saw to their destruction; while the rovers handily annihilated everything outside of their bases, infantry took the bases themselves. There was some civil unrest, and the Free Drones agitated for the bases that had formerly belonged to Yang, but we'd lost enough men taking them; the investment was too much to simply give them away for virtually nothing. Though the bases were gradually depopulated and deconstructed, in favor of building new bases in a more... organized pattern across the whole of the continent.

The Great Desert and the Wastes were seeded with trees, and research into equipping terraformers with psionic defenses worked rather surprisingly well. Proper fusion technology was researched as the rest of the split continent became forested, just in time to get into conflict with both the Progenitor factions simultaneously, oddly enough. Probably because we didn't kotow to them.

To be completely honest, I absolutely cheated when it came to fighting them - instead of sending an army, Aki sent me and rovers to mop up behind me. While the aliens were well-equipped for psionic combat, I'd been honing my talents with magic. It's similar, admittedly, but different enough that their usual defenses were not enough to prevent us from simply rolling into all of their bases and taking them over. The volcano of Mount Planet, the eastern third of the central continent with the Manifold Nexus, the Straits of Prometheus. We controlled a full third of the planet. And cutting a deal with other factions for neutrality and signing a pact to avoid founding any more bases spread a lot of goodwill, as did Aki's avowed disinterest in running for planetary governor or any kind of supreme leader. Which instead made us a valuable political ally to literally anyone who wanted to do anything of value - we had half the planet's population by this point.

More projects were completed at the spawling city of Alpha Prime - the Planetary Datalinks, the Net-Hack Terminus, the Planetary Energy Grid. Our research teams worked in tandem with many factions, and though our databases were nearly unassailable, this didn't stop other factions from pilfering and trading technologies with us. We were the hand that uplifted humanity as the decades turned to centuries, as human lifespans doubled, as mind worm boils grew massive and learned to fly, as perimeter defenses ringed cities at a distance and synthetic fossil fuels immolated hostile native life.

We bought massive amounts of goodwill by spreading our fusion research to all the other factions without anything in return - even though this inevitably brought conflict between the rest of the factions. Technology marched forward and our forces were equipped with the best. Artillery batteries saw missile launchers replaced by plasma shard launchers. Plasma steel sentinels were given armor of neutronium and photon wall sheilds. Perimeter defenses were augmented by tachyon fields.

In any other world, this might have been enough. The Gaians pursued the Ascent to Transcendence after we'd built the Space Elevator and the Telepathic Matrix. And frankly... we were tired. We'd gone back to space with energy-collecting satellites, we were mining the moons and asteroids for raw resources, and research was proceeding into building a robust interstellar ship to return to Earth. It seemed a very good time for me to have half of my warehouse filled with databanks, the sum total of human knowledge in the Planetary Datalinks... and a number of canisters of industrial grade nanopaste.

The Ascent to Transcendence... the Gaians and University achieved it simultaneously. And it went horribly wrong. The mind of an awakening alien god should have been childlike and full of wonder, and instead... It saw things that were not It, and It was repulsed by them. Demanded their destruction. Transcendi bled from the eyes, nose and ears and died in massive numbers of cerebral hemorrhages. Dierdre Skye, Prokhor Zakharov, and Cha Dawn were all left catatonic as their bodies shut down. Unshielded empaths were affected by migraines. Xenofungus was a pain at the best of times, but abrupt forced growth took place across the planet. And from the fungus came apocalyptic numbers of mindworm boils, bases were assailed by the flying version, locusts of Chiron.

(The lesson learned: I will need to begin considering the consequences of others' actions. If only I were still an Achron, but it is a taxing ability, one I've not been able to activate again yet. In time, I hope to, but... for now, impossible.)

Our terraformers were upgraded with fungicidal pods and were accompanied by combat units before being sent out en masse. The fungus was poisoned and torn out from where it had crushed the magtubes between our bases, the grid-pattern of the outermost bases working like cutting out the frontal lobe. While we tended to our own territory, the deleterious effects across the rest of the planet were reduced; we equipped gravships with terraforming equipment as well, and sent them across the oceans and land. It took decades, but the planetary mind was effectively lobotomized. The grav formers flew across the planet, rebuilding roads, reconnecting even others' bases, and exterminating the fungus where the hostile native life hid.

In the wake of all of this, the former University flocked to our banner, their leader little better than a vegetable. It is not much surprise that the Spartans and Peacekeepers fought over what was left of the bases belonging to the Gaians and their offshoot, while the Morganites clung by way of paying for our services in controlling the native life and defending them; a group of entirely naval based people, the Nautilus Pirates, weren't on land where we could aid them and were eradicated.

When Aki Zeta-5 launched the solar shield and ran for Supreme Leader, it was a foregone conclusion that she would win. It was a surprise that both the Peacekeepers and Spartans denied the results and swore a pact together, but... well, that splintered, to no one's great surprise. And while they had recently ascended to quantum lasers, the gravships that defended our territory had singularity lasers. The hovertanks that sieged their bases had string disruptors. They simply couldn't repel firepower of our magnitude, and in their surrender, Aki cemented her total victory and set goals: to terraform the planet to a safe state, and to return to Earth - and then the stars, with a humanity that enjoyed clinical immortality.

Tempted as I was to stay by her side and watch it happen... the multiverse is a wider place, and I intend to see more of it.

Still, the most depressing thing I've had a hand in doing: watching a nascent god gain awareness and power, and having to kill it. I hope not to repeat this feat, at least not for a long time.