Winning Peace - Chapter 54:
Azathoth came awake at my touch.
In the Cthulhu Mythos, from whence I gave him his name, Azathoth is the dreaming eldritch deity at the heart of the universe, and it is his dreams which sustain the universe itself. In some ways, one could liken it to the idea of the matrix; the concept that we all lived in a simulated reality instead of a 'true' reality. In other ways, though, the concept of the slumbering Old One is more sinister than that. Even in the thought-experiment of the matrix, our lives still exist.
Human, alien, organic, or artificial... we were all still real, even if that boiled down to an echo of data on a hyper-advanced hard drive in some god-like computer.
But to the mad dreaming god Azathoth?
We were all figments of his incomprehensible wandering mind.
That was the truth of cosmic horror at its core. Everything you were, everything your people had ever been, all of the millennia you had spent growing a civilization from two rocks stacked atop each other, and the millions of years of random chance had spent breeding out maladaptive traits until some accident of genetic convergence gave birth to an abstract mental state that understood itself...
All of that was less than a dream and mattered just as much.
Azathoth, the system I'd built, was meant to inspire that kind of insignificance in the reapers, the same kind of sensation they'd inspired in countless billions of sapient races. Not that I thought the reapers themselves were truly capable of such emotions, but it was more the... spirit of such a goal than the actual accomplishment thereof.
In short, I wanted to build something so vast and incomprehensible that it was to the reapers what the reapers were to the sapient life of the galaxy.
And I'd succeeded.
My main worry, in the initial design stages, was whether or not I'd be able to control what I'd be building. The edge of my mind was always considering the 'truth' the reapers had discovered, the idea that organic and synthetic would eventually destroy each other and thus, to prevent that, must be assimilated into a perfected form that preserved their unique capacity.
In one sense, I understood the cold, logical drive behind such a motivation.
In another, though, I knew that an excess of logic and reason was simply a different brand of madness.
It was a trap, at its core. The very idea of preservation, of producing a great cybernetic gestalt of a species that would remain a perfect distillation of the amalgamation of its constituent parts until time itself ended was a fool's errand. There was no higher purpose in their fight against entropy, just an automated assembly line that had been left on by its creators. The mission was the purpose and the purpose was the mission, an inextricable chain of thought that looped back on itself in a 'pure' circle of self-reinforcing logic that could not be denied.
I didn't want to simply create another problem in seeking a solution to the reapers.
For all I knew, any kind of automated weapon I made would decide that it needed to create more reapers so it could destroy them in turn, continually justifying its own existence.
But, in anticipating that potential calamity, I was at least a few (thousand) steps ahead of the leviathans.
So there was that, I guess.
In the end, I'd realized there was no way I could realistically trust an automated system with such power and scrapped the initial designs entirely. However, the overarching plan to create something with the computational and military resources to make the reapers cower in a foxhole and find god while they were at it hadn't changed.
I'd just had to resolve to keep the power in my own hands, reluctantly.
Which was the other reason I'd named the system after the dreaming mad god at the center of Lovecraft's universe, because I meant for it to remain inactive save for when it was necessary to unleash total and complete destruction on whatever had pissed me off that day.
With that, I truly plugged my consciousness into the greater matrix of Azathoth...
...and I became more.
Councilor Aethyta clutched Liara, her dear daughter, to her as the Citadel itself shook around them.
On the vid-screen before them, the epic clash of the reaper fleet with their own garrison was ongoing.
And so was the message.
"I am Harbinger, emissary of the Reapers. We have come to wipe the galaxy clean of the self-destructive organic species that populate it and the emerging artificial intelligences that would threaten our dominion. We have been stymied by the sabotage of the Master Relay for too long; the final end of the Prothean Empire and the ultimate results of their arrogance approaches. The Harvest will not be stopped. The Cycle will continue. Your species will be consolidated and preserved, just as we have done so to all who have come before and all who will come after."
When the broadcast had first begun, Aethyta had attempted everything to shut it off, culminating in pulling out her sidearm and putting three rounds in her office's terminal.
Her omnitool met the same fate moments later, its functions frozen and footage of the ongoing defeat of the garrison force unstoppably transmitted through it. Anything that could transmit sound was broadcasting that damnable message across the entire Citadel!
And with it...
So much of their infrastructure was now little more than decorative dead weights adorning the ancient station. Even the vessels that the Councilors would use in the event of an unprecedented emergency, this surely qualifying, were little more than omnitools set to loop audio and visual signals.
Instead of staying near the docks where a stray blast or shell might strike and kill them incidentally, Aethyta had led her daughter back to their apartment, where at least they might die among their trappings and belongings that had, until so very recently, seemed terribly important.
Liara wept as another cruiser shattered under thanix-like plasma fire from the titanic reaper-vessels, the bisected hull shattered as its crew was spaced. In that moment, it didn't matter if the ship had been batarian, salarian, or asari. No, it had died in defense of the Citadel as a whole, and its crew would be mourned as the heroes they were.
An asari dreadnought, performing screening duty for the Destiny Ascension herself, scored a lucky hit and pierced through one of the lead reaper's many-jointed limbs. There was a moment of hope in Aethyta's heart as she held onto her daughter-
Then one of the supporting enemy vessels struck a debilitating shot across the asari dreadnought's stern, throwing it out of alignment and costing vital time for-
"-stymied by the sabotage of the Master Relay for too long; the final end of the Prothean Empire and the ultimate results of their arrogance approaches. The Harvest will not be stopped. The Cycle will continue. Your species will be cons-"
A lance of pure light cut through the battle, half-again as large as the reaper's thanix-cannon shots, putting even the human's largest mobile-suit mounted energy canons to shame.
One of the six reapers assaulting the Citadel simply ceased to exist.
The battle paused, the message halted.
The view shifted.
Whatever camera was being used to force-feed them their own doom now looked upon a still-dissipating burst of energy behind a truly massive vessel.
It was the color of asari blood smeared with strange looping sigils drawn in bright crimson that, to Aethyta's mind, spoke of violence in their jagged shapes and cutting strokes.
"W-what is-" Liara began.
"Shush, Baby," Aethyta hushed her daughter. "I don't know what's going on, but-"
Aethyta cut herself off, her eyes widening as the true scope of the vessel finally came into focus, her breath catching in her throat as it passed near a wounded asari cruiser trying to limp away from the battle. To say it simply dwarfed her nation's ship would be a dramatic understatement, making the cruiser look as though it was a fighter instead of a ship of the line carrying hundreds of souls.
"Sweet Goddess," Aethyta heard her own voice echo in the sudden silence of the presidium apartment.
It had to be... at least a hundred kilometers long, if she was judging the scales correctly, and she knew she was. That cruiser had been, once upon a time, Aethyta's own home several centuries ago. She had personally intervened to save it from being scrapped and diverted funding to deliver new upgrade packages in honor of her time spent there, even securing it a place among the garrison's honor guard for old time's sake.
All of which was to say that Aethyta knew that ship like the back of her hand, taking a yearly tour of it during the random inspection of the garrison vessels.
The sleek and dangerous-looking newcomer was some kind of middle-ground between the predatory turian designs and her own people's architectural artwork, blending the gentle curves of their own vessels and the sharp angles of the more militant race.
Then the screen flickered before showing a many-limbed golden spider made of metal and glass positioned in front of a large command center.
She spoke.
"Peoples of this galaxy, your plight has not gone unnoticed. As our exploratory fleet passed through your star systems, we unraveled the mystery of your underpopulated galaxy and your underdeveloped species. We lent our aid to those you call the accosians-"
Aethyta's mind reeled. She'd seen the poor resolution images the crystal-shaping race had produced of their saviors, at least compared to her own race's imaging quality, but...
The size of even those ships had been estimated at ten kilometers.
This... this was a display of power and technology on an entirely different level.
"-and we have heard the wails of the dead through time immemorial. This Cycle is an abomination against sapient life, an atrocity against self-determination, and an offense which cannot be suffered a moment longer. We shall end it."
Then ten more ships, the same size as the first, manifested in bursts of prismatic radiation that seemed to shatter the starlit-nebula surrounding the Citadel.
It was over in a single heartbeat.
Lances of light pierced through the reapers, completely obliterating the enemy force which had, until a moment ago, pushed the garrison to the brink of destruction. Hulked asari, salarian, and batarian vessels lay amidst the debris field forming in the station's orbit.
"Bring forth the weapon," the golden mechanical spider, obviously either some kind of synthetic or heavily-cyberized alien, spoke, and then...
The Citadel, Aethyta knew from far back in her primary school days, was fifty kilometers in length. It was the largest construction in galactic history and beyond her current civilization's means. That was part of what made the Geth, and now humanity, so frightening. The synthetic race, with their single-minded focus, were attempting to encompass Rannoch's star in a mass of energy-harnessing supercomputer substrate that would host them for millions of years. Humanity, on the other hand, produced interlocking one-kilometer struts for their stations at a speed which made even the infamous rachni swarm look slow by comparison. While their ongoing attempts to encompass their moon in a shell of habitable environment and defensive emplacements were less impressive by comparison to the Geth... it was only by that comparison.
No other species worked at such impossible scales.
But, just as the Geth's attempt at encasing the quarian's home star put the human's attempts to encapsulate their homeworld's natural satellite into perspective... so too did this new development.
A dreadnought was a mere kilometer long. The Destiny Ascension reached parity with the reaper dreadnought Harbinger and the largest class of the empire's ships at twice that length. Then one looked to the relays themselves, each fifteen kilometers long.
Then came the Citadel itself, as aforementioned.
Then these newcomers, their ships twice as large as the entire station which housed the government of the largest nation in the galaxy.
Now... this.
A fleet of ten vessels which were each twice as long as the Citadel was a terrifying concept she had never wished to confront, but one which she could intellectually understand in the abstract, even if she wanted with every fiber of her being to deny the reality of it in front of her.
What came next... tearing a hole through space to presage its passage, was a gargantuan beast of a thing so beyond even the impossibilities she'd been confronted with today that it made her want to throw her head back and laugh.
We... we're so small... in the end.
Where before, the newcomers' ships had made cruisers look like fighters... now this thing made their own vessels seem even less than that, making the ten kilometer ships look like the smallest combat drones deployed by salarians.
Aethyta's mind attempted to understand what she was seeing...
"By the abyss, it must be... over five hundred kilometers long..." She whispered, her soul drenched in black terror at the thought that anyone or anything could construct something that size which could still move under its own power.
For all that it was massive almost beyond understanding, there wasn't much more to it. A featureless black ovid body with only a belt of glowing red mechanisms around the center in a continuous belt that, absently, she placed some certainty on being a drive of some kind. It was certainly not anything remotely related to element zero, but the admiral she once was felt certain of it.
She could only hope this 'weapon' would be turned against the Citadel's enemies.
And not her own people.
"Activate the Master Relay," I spoke, the sound of my voice echoing through a thousand subsystems as an undeniable commandment from on high. My consciousness had expanded so far it was a struggle to keep hold on my own aims and goals, to remember why I had done this.
I looked forward to being myself again.
I hated the very thought of it.
The vessels of the galaxy, the relays themselves, and so many worlds were rendered paralyzed by my will.
How could I give this up? Why would I?
Because...
It would be easy. There would be peace, at long last.
It would...
A benevolent conquest, leading the primitive to enlightenment.
I...
Ezekiel Lopez could go home to his wife and child, he could have his family, I would stay and preside over the golden age. It would be glorious-
NO.
I rejected the impulse, the seductive whisper of power, once again.
The Black Hole Bomb cleared the event horizon of the Citadel's relay gate, and I felt it arrive through the FTL array in its control mechanism. All around it, I saw reapers beginning to awaken, shedding off intergalactic ice and dust that had accumulated over the millennia they'd slept. A dim occluded star hung in the distance, tiny asteroids all that remained of a lonely solar system cast adrift beyond the edge of the Milky Way, consumed for the sake of building the reaper's nest.
"Commence Detonation."
In a moment, in an eternity, it was over.
-and I pulled myself, gasping, from the Heart of Azathoth, the world-computer that encompassed a brown dwarf for a power source.
Against all reason and logic, my limbs, made of starship-grade metal that outclassed anything in service by the galaxy's militaries... shook.
I accepted the incoming call by reflex, if anything else.
The Prime Minister took one look at me, my expression mirroring her own disturbed state. "I... it seems foolish, but... that wasn't you Ezekiel, was it?"
I swallowed, channeling the horror and awe at what had almost happened.
And lied.
"No."
Selena Orbis nodded once, accepting it for truth. "Very well. I''d like to schedule a meeting at your earliest convenience now that our systems are working again."
I replied with a nod, the screen cutting out as I sighed in relief and dropped onto the floor lifelessly, shivering as I stared at the port where I'd connected myself.
"Ezekiel?" My wife spoke up, her direct link not something I needed to answer.
"Almost done, Honey. It's almost over." I took a shuddering breath. "I'll be home in ten."
"Okay," Sasha stated. "We'll be waiting."
Before anyone else could call, I rang up the Commander of the 'alien fleet.' "Is the message playing?"
Thonis-Heracleion nodded, her golden spider's head shifting. "Yes. I don't know if it will change anything, but... yes. Maybe I hope it will."
She paused, her tone almost melancholy as she spoke again. "I suppose I'll have to change morphs after this, just in case."
"I did give you-" I began, but she interrupted me.
"Yes, I know. But... a new morph for a new era. Change doesn't have to be bad, you know?"
I huffed a laugh and shook my head. "I know, believe me I do. I'm pretty sure I've spent my life trying to convince everyone else of that, you know?"
There was silence for a moment before she replied. "Get some rest Boss."
I nodded. "Plan to."
The final pressing conversation done, I stared at the starlit sky for another few moments. There was still a lot to do, but it was no longer pressing. Reaper artifacts needed to be cleaned up, a few indoctrinated cells wiped out, and some brush fires extinguished. The salarians. The batarians. The protheans, who were going to be insufferably smug.
But... it was manageable.
I sighed and got to my feet.
It was a brave new world out there and, even if it didn't need a leader, the galaxy could always use some advice from the Smartest Man Alive. Because, in the end, that was all I was. Just a man.
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Terran Empire Technology (Gunbuster): 1-20