Stranger From the Sky, chapter 16

A Slight Alteration….

Back at the Kindred's Hive, the other heroes were being released from the storage pods Brainiac had had them in. It wasn't a pleasant process…."Please remain as calm as you can," Omega's voice sounded throughout their midst, even as he, Kitten, Athena, Haywire, and Raven moved among them, helping those of them who seemed to be having trouble righting themselves, "the discomfort you are currently feeling is the last stage of the removal of the nanoprobes from your bodies." Even some villains were present, Lex Luthor in particular rubbing the back of his neck and trying to overcome this tingling, queasy feeling. "Where—where are we?"

Robin was over by Starfire, who was still out. "Is…is she gonna be alright?" Right at that time, he needed some reassurance; the notion of a life without her was just too painful to even contemplate.

Athena knelt by her, scanning the Tameranean with her senses. "She will be fine. I can sense no permanent damage, though I would advise her to not exert herself for a few days."

"But what happened? And why did it hit Star worse than any of us?"

"I do not know. But I believe she was the one who called us, under coercion from Brainiac. She fought the effect of his control however, enough to use idioms she normally does not use, in order to alert us. That resistance might account for her current state: she fought the effect harder. And she won, in part, in that it did alert us. But calm yourself; She is unharmed." She gestured to the Kindred known as Epsilon. {{Please, if you would, examine this one more thoroughly. She may have injuries I cannot sense.}} Epsilon conferred briefly with Alpha, then {{Certainly, my Lady.}} He produced his instruments and began scanning.

Athena was taken back a bit. My Lady? Back on Osira, or, rather, the conquered world she'd last been headquartered on, she'd had a certain rank, but it was due solely to her status as a researcher and warrior. She was uncertain what to make of this….deference?

"Dude….." a groggy Beast Boy began, with Terra coming to, right beside him. From the looks on their faces, they both had the mother, father, aunt and uncle of all headaches. "What hit us? It was like, we were fine one minute, then, the next….."

"You were all attacked by Brainiac. Apparently, he made the quite logical deduction that removal of this world's enhanced power beings from this world would make his goals more attainable than they had previously been." Omega, Kitten, Haywire, Raven, and Athena moved among them, checking them for injuries. The nanoprobes were being flushed from their system, good, good. "Apparently," Omega continued, dryly, "he left something to be desired as a host."

Shortly thereafter, once everyone had been returned to their proper locations, the Titans conferred back at the tower. "Still hated having to hide while everybody was in danger," Hank chafed.

"But you did not hide," Athena explained. It had partially been her idea: when she'd noticed the absence of any humans in the Tower, she'd contacted the Orb via Link, learning that it had enveloped the last remaining two. "You denied our opponent the accomplishment of two of his crucial goals and provided a means to strike back at him at the appropriate time. That is hardly the same thing as hiding." Working through the Orb, they'd gathered in the incarcerated humans.

"But how did you find us?" Robin was puzzled. "I mean, that cybership of his could've been anywhere."

"But he was not. We knew three things about our opponent." She ticked them off on her hand, "one, he was currently trying to access the Thinkers'—excuse me, the Kindred's computers, two, that he was lying in wait for Kitten and me to walk into his trap via some entrance other than an above ground one. So the underground entrance was indicated, and three, in order to remain undetectable by this world's superbeings, he had to be in a different quantum state than everyone else. Not wildly different, or he wouldn't have been able to interact with this world at all. By finding his quantum state—which Alpha did, with some difficulty—and combining that knowledge with the rest, we deduced his ship, the physical portion of it intersecting this world, must be residing in or near the tunnels of the Tower's underground entrance."

"So what did you do to him? Plant some kind of bomb on his ship?"

Athena smiled without humor. "Nothing quite so obvious as that. With the Orb's help, we contacted Missy, who, it turns out, is…quite good with machines and a natural at reprogramming computers. We had her…make some changes to Brainiac's source code. Altered it slightly."

"It was Athena's idea," Omega spoke up. "It was a sure thing that, once he realized we knew where he was—being able to liberate his captives would of course be a good indicator of that-, he'd simply have no choice but to stop being there, one way or another. There was a high probability that he'd just digitize and delete his own ship. Or rather, the ship that was here, the one his captives were on. But he wouldn't want to lose any information he'd already acquired. We just gave him a little something extra. Simply destroying this one ship would've accomplished little, in the long run. As it is, the programming now accessible to all his selves has been….changed."

"Let me guess," Robin was still holding a just-now-coming-to Starfire's hand, "you had him figure out pi to its ultimate decimal point. Or something similar. Right?"

"Oh, no." Again Athena smiled. "I'm sure a machine as sophisticated as Brainiac has failsafe subroutines built in specifically to defend against such attacks. No, what we did was…a bit more subtle. Let's just say, we gave him what you would call, 'food for thought.'"

…

Brainiac was a machine, albeit a very sophisticated one, of course, and thus immune to emotion. Nonetheless, it seemed something of what the humans would call a shame: all that effort, wasted. And he wasn't even sure how, exactly.

His programming was intact, core components functioning as they should. Whatever no doubt nasty surprise the humans had left him in his other ship/self had been designed to destroy him completely, or at least, as they understood the term. They couldn't know (not that it really mattered if they did) about all his other ship/selves scattered throughout the galaxy. As such, even had they been allowed to destroy the first ship, it really would have accomplished nothing.

Now to examine the digitized version of the box, "see" what was inside.

It was empty. Strange. Perhaps a decoy, a distraction of some sort? But the captives had already been freed. Why leave behind an empty box?

Brainiac was acutely aware that he didn't possess all the knowledge that there was. That was the whole point of his programming: acquire all knowledge.

But it occurred to him, acquiring all the knowledge there was, was not the same thing as acquiring all the knowledge that there could be. The image came into his vast, linked positronic brain of a farmer sowing seeds in a field, the seeds sprouting—and the farmer harvesting the sprouts before they had a chance to produce fruit. That seemed very wasteful.

Perhaps…perhaps the universe could be persuaded to produce more knowledge than it already had?

Many races had reached a certain pinnacle of technological development: the remnants of the Kryptonians, the inhabitants of Raan, the Guardians of Oa-the list went on. But many more were just now on the very cusp of technological breakthroughs that would revolutionize the way they interacted with each other, and the universe as a whole. How could he encourage that?

Earth: the Earthlings had great, nearly infinite potential. A portion of his presence, in humanoid form, was there. His attention was attracted by the sound of a human infant in distress; he traced this sound to a waste receptacle behind a tenement.

This made no sense to him. Why go to the trouble of producing an infant, then leaving the infant in a waste receptacle? What could be gained by that?

Perhaps the infant was defective somehow. That must be it. Well, he could fix that. Organic beings were actually pretty easy to repair.

There being no one else around, he simply took the infant back to his other cybership, out beyond the ringed planet, and, after satisfying himself that there was nothing physically wrong with the boy-child, he immediately began preparations to increase this human's intelligence level.

It occurred to him, that, in time, the human or his descendents might even surpass himself, intelligence-wise. But Brainiac lacked the sort of ego that would be threatened by such a possibility; if the infant or his descendents did surpass him, that only meant his mission to increase the overall available knowledge had succeeded beyond his most positive computations.

Now for a suitable planet, where he could work, undisturbed…..

The planet known to some as Colu seemed promising.

The End.