Chapter 9

When John creates a space ship, he follows a very simple ranking system on how to designate the different types for different purposes, as creating a jack-of-all-trades ship would not be all that efficient. Effective, maybe, but not efficient.

First would be a Science vessel or other "civilian" types. They didn't have any weaponry and were limited to sensors and defensive shielding. They were rather weak for this reason and were only used for safe things. One up from that was a Surveyor type. A Surveyor was a science vessel but was able to investigate areas that would require defensive weaponry. Normally it was in-between a gunship and a cruiser in armament and size, but it is not suited for assault, only defence. A Surveyor is in essence, a military-oriented science vessel.

A Scout was a dependency, which meant that it had a limited range that it could reach without needing to refuel or return to a base of operations to resupply. A Scout's speed was emphasised over its weaponry, it had the best possible sensors to scout an area, and is normally was a stealth vessel. A fighter, another dependency, was the same size as a scout, but more focused on a combat rather than a recon role. As dependencies and rather small crafts, these war machines could be carried inside of another ship. Dependencies also did not take strength from one-on-one confrontations, but more from swarming tactics.

Gunships were small and fast and were normally equipped for the defence of a fleet. They were the space-faring versions of a destroyer. A Cruiser was a faster warship, larger than a Gunship, but less heavily armed than a battleship. Its size allowed for long missions and was cheaper to make than a Frigate. A Cruiser was superior to a Gunship in some ways, but in other ways, it was better to have a Gunship ready.

A Frigate was a warship with a mixed armament, and in terms of firepower and size was just below that of the ship of the line; it was the mix of a Gunship and a battleship. A Dreadnought was a normal battleship that is larger, and a very high damage and defence capability; it was the elite version of a battleship. A Frigate would win against a Gunship and Cruiser, but would loose against a normal battleship in power and defence, let alone a Dreadnought.

A Carrier was used as a portable base for smaller vessels like the Scout and the Fighter types. However, it did not only serve to house the Fighters and Scouts, it also held supplies for a fleet. It is large enough to allow for a frigate or smaller to dock inside of a hangar for repairs and resupply. If a Dreadnought and a Carrier were to go head-to-head, a Carrier would normally win if it was fully loaded at the time with its Fighters, otherwise, they would be evenly matched. Really, it would be up to whomever it was that commanded the vessels. Both types were capable of destroying a Frigate.

A Capital Ship was an exceptionally large warship such as a Dreadnought or Carrier. It was normally the flagship of a fleet and was the hardest ship to destroy within that fleet. It had the potential to take out a normal Carrier or a battleship.

When John abides by these types of vessels, and he takes into account that other races tend to do so, he was able to come up with a very simple ranking system to determine different threat levels. It started at zero as nearly anything could take that ship out, and it could barely be able to withstand space itself. The prerequisite for being considered at zero was that the species had to have colonised their own solar system, if at all possible. The negative numbers were reserved for a populace that was pre-spaceflight, at negative one being that of a craft unable to withstand the long-term effects of something like solar radiation. For example, he would consider the early twenty-first century and earlier for humans as being in the negatives, from his original sector.

Then came the part that would actually rate the threat level, and not just how technologically deprived the species was. This was determined through how much damage one fleet could do to another overall, as well as on an individual basis. On an individual level, a ship with a higher rating would be capable of killing ten ships of a lower rating before it was brought down. The overall threat was rated a little differently, however. Unlike how it was down to a pure kill to death ratio for the ships, it was based on how fast the species could reproduce, their technological advancement history in generations, lifespan, tactical history, rarity in the multiverse, total population - which was different from their rarity, and finally required surviving versus living conditions. And that was only the Combat rating of a species.

Really, what John did was stereotype a particular species, and dealing with that species as per that stereotype. It was very effective, especially when he came across a species that was determined to be too dangerous to other species to allow to live. It didn't happen often, but it did happen.

Redlight was one such species, headed by MOTHER, and as such did not possess the capability of sentience or sapience yet had a conquering ideology at its core. It was understandable really, as it was, in the end, nothing more than a weaponized virus.

John wondered how his species would be looked upon by others if they were to know his own species statistics. He wondered if they would look upon him in the same respects as a circle would a sphere, or if they were "above" him as a sphere would a circle.

Either way, he figured it wouldn't really matter.

John was trying his hardest not to step on anyone's toes, as the humans said. He was trying to look rather benevolent, and aside from his laissez-faire attitude in regards to technology, he didn't mind stepping in when he found something that gave him pause. He preferred a non-intrusive method of observing, but again something would give him cause to intervene because his self-imposed morals told him to.

The something that would give him pause, could even be a species that had its sole purpose of ending any other life. Now, John would take exception to this, as he was part of that "Other life" they would deem inferior. In fact, if a life's sole purpose was to end life and was unable to evolve to a state where they could reason, then it was normally one of the rare species that was deemed too dangerous to allow to live. Normally they would only be under quarantine, but sometimes genocide was the better - more logical - option.

These are some of the things that John likes to think of - among a very large amount of other things, sometimes simultaneously - when he did not require one hundred percent of his processing potential focused on one sole thing. Fortunately that almost never happened, and in fact, John took extra precautions so that it didn't happen. He learned his lesson from the aeroplane crash that nearly took out his entire airfield.

He had had to expand - and add more - "server farm" type organisms whose sole purpose was to add more processing power for the massive and expansive being that was John.

Since he was already at it, he had gone ahead and created extra backup memory storage for more redundancy. In fact, John went so far as to create entire galaxy's worth of these areas, and planets. Even the observation posts that had been in orbit around every single star in a single galaxy was not enough to sate his paranoia, as they were only automated - albeit highly sophisticated - monitoring platforms. That, and they were stuck in a separate timeline. Essentially, John wanted to make a local galaxy server so that if he had to change the flow of time in different timelines, then there would be backups locally to take care of the extra load.

All of this extra processing allowed for extra nonessential processes, to be able to drop at any given time, but to be used so as to not allow the processors to remain idle. After-all, there is always something worth thinking, but sometimes other efforts take priority. It's all well and good to expand on the philosophy of the art of war unless you were currently being shot at in a war.

The extra processing also allowed for him to realise that when he explored Dark Space, a place wherein there was absolutely nothing if you were to ignore the "floating" Universes comprised of both matter and - matter going "backwards" in duration - Antimatter, and Em, he was actually exploring both the ninth dimension and the zeroth dimension. The zeroth dimension was to represent the sheer nothingness whereupon the ninth dimension was unable to represent, despite the fact that the ninth dimension was supposed to hold the zeroth dimension.

The guard fell asleep, and prisoner zero escaped.

He was sure that the good Doctor he made - if he did say so himself - a good impression would appreciate that sentiment.

Luckily there was still a check and balance, wherein the tenth dimension would naturally shift the zeroth dimension back into place to repair the broken symmetry so that it could both not exist, and yet be ever present as it was wont to do. After all, the zeroth dimension had to be there in order for the first, and for that matter the rest, to exist. However, the zeroth dimension was reliant on the tenth dimension to stay put, to exist and not exist in its neutrality. Yet again, the tenth dimension was reliant on the lower dimensions to be present.

What was even odder, was that Em was almost acting as if it was a "physical" representation of the tenth dimension, acting upon the lower dimensions to hold it within itself - the prison that was the tenth dimension, and Em as the guard of that prison.

Perhaps as much as a cop, a fed, a soldier, and an Interpol agent would represent the four most prominent forces in a standard universe.

While John was at it, he might as well throw in another metaphor and say that the entire system of dimensions zero through ten was a bureaucracy, whose sole purpose was to fuel itself. It was an authoritarian autocracy of "symmetry" with Em as the words in the newspeak dictionary by which George Orwell had written to warn others of, Franz Kafka had nodded his head in both empathy and sympathy, and Edwin Abbott had once illustrated the perspective of such beings.

When the metaphor regarding a newspeak dictionary was concerned came up in John's thought process, he was reminded of a glancing observation he had made and had thought odd. It was odd indeed that earlier in the human's English - and as time went on some other languages - speaking populations were slowly becoming illiterate as time went on. Well, only illiterate in the sense that the words by which was readily available and widely used were slowly becoming less and less in volume. Sure, the English language was evolving in the sense that there were some new words introduced occasionally, but they were normally of nouns to describe new things.

Of course, the words were written in a dictionary with a proper definition, but that did not mean the people had those words readily available to use in speech, and if they did it was not probable that the general public would understand the - sometimes older, yet more specific - wording. In fact, John found that if a person's speech was deemed more literate than others, they would be scorned rather than the general populace take the time to educate themselves further to understand the previously obfuscated wording to them. They were looked upon as individuals that liked to feed their own superiority complex, or something similar.

John found it very odd that the percentage of the population of literate people rose, yet at the same time the percentage of literate people declined. That was to say, more and more people were able to read and write over time in a percentage, yet people's capability for information to be discussed was stunted with a higher illiteracy percentage of meaningful words to describe the information worth discussing.

He wondered if this natural evolution of linguistics was actually a devolution in disguise or an Orwellian wording in a "modern" day society.

This was why John so loved observing species, they provided the best food for thought observation could buy.

*LB*

A/N: This looks, at first, as a very "filler" type of chapter. However, it does hold quite a few crosses, you just have to guess what they are, and squint to find them. It's very "Where's Waldo," I think.

Except for the fact that the crosses were fairly obvious, depending on your definition of a proper cross.

Anyway, any of you that might have been reading my "Harry Got Board" series, I had discontinued it, because I just don't remember where I was going with it and as such, I had lost the muse to write it anymore. It had gone on un-updated for a long enough time that I thought it was reasonable to consider it dead now.

That being said, I have not written a Frankenstein cross yet, so there may be a resurrection in the future regarding your favourite green eyed wizard and the world of Remnant. The resurrection just might not be along the same storyline.

Hope you all enjoyed, and please review.