Scion PtV 2

I turned my attention to it.  Saw what it saw.  Images of the future.  I was connected somehow to every part of the being, and I was aware of everything they were aware of.  I had only to look.

It looked for a world.

It found the world it was looking for.

It looked for a particular variation of that world, and it found it.

And it looked further.  It viewed itself and its partner on that world.  The possible forms they could take, the end results.

It looked beyond that, to possible rebellions.

In the midst of that, in the middle of a trillion images that passed through my awareness in a single instant, over an indeterminate span of travel and viewing, one scene was acutely familiar.

The entity as a golden man.

Capes littering the surface around him, every single one of them unconscious, dead, bleeding, crushed, or burned.  He was untouched, coated only in their remains, thick blood and other, pulpier substances dripping and dropping from his fingers in strings.

[...]

I willed for it to continue, to go deeper, to provide more details.  But things moved along.  If anything, my efforts dashed the scene from the ongoing stream of sensory inputs.  Instead, I got a glimpse the futures one step further.  Variations.

Every one of them, futures where the entity had survived.  Futures where the hosts hadn’t fought back.  Futures where they had fought back and inevitably lost.  He was plotting a course to a particular destination in time and causality, just as he’d plotted a course to Earth.  There were criteria, and in each of the visions, things occurred.

These visions were blocked from any particular attention.  Hidden away by some treatment of the fragments, treatment of the entity’s own recollections, so the visions couldn’t be used against it.

But I could see the essential elements.

He would live, because he’d given himself enough power.  With the criteria he had set, there was no way for the hosts to win, unless he deviated.  With the granted powers, there was no way for them to do any meaningful harm to him.  The entity could see the permutations, the ways they moved and interacted.  He called on a particular fragment, yet to be released in search of a host, and-

Familiar.  A familiar presence.

-he could get an understanding of the hosts, filling in blanks that the future-sight and his own mind couldn’t.  See how they moved, how they cooperated, how they didn’t cooperate.  He could see the strategies they could possibly employ, the strategies they couldn’t.

Again, these were censored, blocked in this three-dimensional, xenosensory, interactive memory.

But he could see, and he knew they would fail, as much by their own hand as by his.  He could see how all paths he had considered led to a fulfillment of his mission, his eventual meeting with his partner, in their other forms.  He could see how he wins in every circumstance where he has to fight.  Countless paths to victory.  He would spend the rest of the journey to this planet in picking one, was already setting things up so that paths to defeat would no longer be possible.

- Venom 29.2