Worm CYOA Oneshot – Perspective
When I arrived, I had two goals: Save the world, and defeat the Entities. Lofty, but I thought, within reach.
The two powers I selected were more than enough. Quickly, I had a time travel power that threw me back millions of years. A brief application of Kaleidoscope kept me near the vastly different Earth. Every day I would get ten new charges, ten new powers, and then I would time warp forward by twenty-four hours to begin the cycle anew.
I quickly became unrecognizable as a human. Thousands of thinker powers working together made it difficult to stick to vaguely human thought patterns. Over thousands of cycles, I became a literal god.
When I was confident that my mind could take it, I opened the Kaleidoscope. The futures extended out in front of me, a beautiful fractal pattern spreading out until the end of the universe. Trillions of species, billions of lives, millions of cultures, lost forever, due to the inherent finite nature of the universe. This would not stand. My powers were a testament to the impossible, so solving this problem should be easy.
It was not.
Despite everything, I could not solve it. The Kaleidoscope was dark, the future bleak. I was simply not creative enough to engineer a solution. I needed help. I siphoned off a segment of my own awareness, gave it form, and let it learn from all that I had done. It quickly came to the same conclusion; that the universe had to be preserved. It wanted to help, but alone, it felt that more of its kind would be needed. Soon, its brethren numbered in the thousands, and we all set off to solve The Problem.
In hindsight, it was pretty obvious why we couldn't solve it. They were all just dumbed down copies of me. Why would they be able to solve something that I had been unable to?
Soon, consensus was reached. We needed to outsource out to others. We needed those who were more creative than us. For all of our brilliance, we were blinkered by our powers. Tunnel vision, more acute than anything we could have predicted. More so than anything I could have. I did not notice until it was too late, that my powers were limiting my ability to think, to reason. They made us intelligent, but were we truly smart?
All of them took a copy of my powers. The Kaleidoscope and Power Manipulation powers were locked to me, so they took a bastardized version of each, with limited ability to generate powers, and view timelines. They were enough for them to make new powers over time, and several were creative enough to mix the two, creating accurate precognitive abilities.
They spread out throughout the universe, seeking out new worlds and their inhabitants. Over time, I came to realize something. They had lost sight of their goal. They were becoming increasingly good at stirring up conflict throughout their chosen worlds, recording and cataloguing cultures and species. Then destroying them to propel them to the next destination. They reasoned that when The Problem was solved, they could simply have me restore all of the lost worlds. Why bother putting effort into saving them if doing so denied resources, and could just be rebuilt. Were they really interested in solving The Problem? Or were they using it as an excuse to justify their behavior?
As a pair headed towards an alternative Earth, ancient memories, degraded by storage in an organic brain stirred. I finally came to the realization. I had become the very thing I had set out to stop.
Passing by Zion and Eden, I traded powers. Their latest catch was impressive, but that was beside the point. I sent a copy of a precognitive power to Eden. A planning power. One that was so powerful, that its tunnel vision was nearly inescapable. As I left, I could already see her mind reorient to depend on it.
Observing with a level of satisfaction, and sadness, I watched how she planned so thoroughly, that she was absorbed by her newfound power. Her lithobraking was impressive and tragic to say the least.
I knew the rest already. It would be enough. The result might not be pretty, but even I could not move against all of the Entities. Subtle and stealthy sabotage would have to be the mode of play.
Down on one of the iterations of the planet below, a young girl smiles as she finds a path to victory.