ObDanny:
I make two notes here:
The ontopathics repelled Queen Administrator from one potential trigger event. They didn’t destroy her.
It should not escape notice just how tremendously useful the Docks and the dockworkers could be as a resource to someone who has the functional equivalent of Tinker Bignum. Especially when you don’t have the reproducibility problem.
On the question of guessing PRT ratings, at least once they have a chance to figure stuff out a bit, but before Exponential Escalation takes hold:
Blaster 3 (techlekinesis applied to moving electrons; i.e., lightning)
Brute 4 (she’s got the mil-spec basic package, but that’s pretty much concentrated on durability and regen, not strength)
Master 5 (neural laces multitask and remote-control like whoa)
Mover 2 (techlekinetic low-altitude flight, plus double-jumping and all those hax)
Thinker 6 (smrt)
Tinker HOLY FUCK
The main reason I decided on “Tinker: Holy Fuck” is the one thing she can do that canon tinkers can’t: understand exactly how everything works , which includes the ability to teach other people how everything works and how to build more of it. That’s even more powerful than self-replication, because those people now have their own understanding of it that they can build on, or pass along themselves. tl;dr Armsmaster can build a nanothorn warhead; Dragon can examine it and build many nanothorn warheads; but e!Taylor can give someone a masters in nanoengineering and turn them loose to found Nanothorn Industries, Inc., producers of ridiculously lethal weaponry in many convenient form factors and assorted spin-off products.(edited)
That’s what really makes her chart-breaking: from the PRT’s perspective, she can turn people into self-replicating tinkers . Using nothing but words and a whiteboard.
By comparison, Teacher can make conventional tinkers (who still don’t understand what they do), at the cost of crippling their faculties with his loyalty-fu. That’s not as potent as being able to stick “My First Nanomachines: Little Rascals for Little Rascals” or “Dr. Faust’s Guide to Genetic Mutants You Can Make At Home” up on t’interwebs and expect results. (Not that that’s what you’d call efficient pedagogy, but the thing is that it is possible .)
(Nor is either of those likely to happen, either. Is just an example.)
As for what one soph can do…
Well, there’s this thing called the Magic of Friendship Technology of Synergy.
Also, the Transcend is really smug about its ability to be the pebble with the deciding vote. Somewhere in a Cirys swarm far away, an efficiency submind is complaining that that was actually a really extravagant care package and it could have managed with, ooh, a quarter of the mass-energy budget, maybe less. (A kindness submind points out that that’s why they don’t let the efficiency submind do the operation planning on its own.)
Space access:
The Simurgh has, among other function, the job of keeping humanity limited to Earths, as that’s where the shards can touch; so while manned space flight is going to get shot down, she doesn’t interdict all the commsats, say. If you have a way to precog-shield whatever non-sophont payload you’re going to launch - to make sure its aura of THIS HURTS YOU doesn’t reach her - you can sneak one past her.
Flechette’s power:
This is also, in this AU, why it takes/would have taken, assuming no intervention, Flechette’s power to kill Scion, because it’s the shard designed as an inter-entity weapon, and as such can manage tricks like “hitting all possible versions of/all points on the quantum probability curve of an object simultaneously” and “firing at right angles to reality”. You could blast away at Scion all you wanted with conventional mass-energy weapons, and it wouldn’t do anything, 'cause you can’t hit the symbiote/shard/core; only it’s mass-puppet in four-space.
On the Panpraxis:
Short version is that it’s an encyclopedia of practical engineering/colony design library complete with helpful expert systems working out the Path to That Thing You Want, primarily intended for use in survival situations where what you need is a communications laser that can reach the local stargate relay, and what you have is a rock.
Inspired by something I remember from A Fire Upon the Deep , ISTR, but essentially it works out a big ol’ project plan for you, complete with helpful descriptions of how to perform each step, even when it comes to things like “make charcoal; find some rocks that look like this and behave like that; test them in these ways; etc., etc.”
That’s not something that she’s going to put out there on its own, because it’s ridiculously dangerous in the wrong hands or even many of the right hands. But if she thinks that a detailed plan to let people grow spider-silk skin weaves using only common household ingredients is something the world should have, it’s something that can provide a detailed set of baseline-friendly step-by-step instructions for how to get there from here.
S-classitude and self-replicating tech:
On the other hand, “Technically, yes, I’m an S-class threat with my army of presumably self-replicating warbots, but on the other hand, my army of presumably self-replicating warbots only came out to help fight Leviathan and then left peacefully. Have fun explaining why you don’t want their help next Endbringer attack.”
Better yet, the army of presumably self-replicating warbots is helping with the cleanup, rescuing survivors, providing supplies and medical care, and one of them rescuing a small girl’s kitten from a tree in the middle of a flooded park has 10 million hits on YouTube. Your move, adverse PR guys.
That’s where you start out with the secrecy. But when you have to break the secrecy, you should go big. The kind of big where your adversaries more or less have to put up with you or look like idiots. Like, say, Endbringer attacks, where in the aftermath you have the chance to point out to your press conference that of course they’re self-replicating, because how else can you get enough of them to make a meaningful, lifesaving difference against an Endbringer? And, yes, you understand the reasoning behind the PRT’s concern for such things, but it’s a bad policy that would have got a shit-ton of people killed had you gone along with it. So sorry.
Attitude:
To a certain extent, I’m playing by one of the themes I have for the ISS, which is the way that they constantly irritate other intelligence agencies by playing by James Bond rules in a universe that ought to run by le Carré rules. Which is to say: flamboyant misdirection .
The sort of thing that makes the PRT dismiss connections between her and those events in the same way as they would dismiss the idea that Mouse Protector has been secretly behind Cauldron, the Elite, and the Bavarian Illuminati all along.
On the former, apart from being about to have a bad experience with the official heroes and no particular way to maintain a secret identity at this point, both this Taylor and her advisor are pretty confident that not only will working within the system not work, but that the system will actively try and stop her from making a difference.
On the latter: she’s getting advice from a machine well-read in the Eldrae Book of Adventuring, which is all about the “if you’re going to save the world, make sure you do it in style!” theme. Magnificently complex plans with spandrels that exist for no purpose other than dazzling bystanders with performative awesomeness are pretty much exactly how things are supposed to be done, by that book.
(Well, the thing to bear in mind is that the first half of Phase I is all pretty much emergency pantsing, not very well planned. Taylor’s not exactly had a chance to plan anything yet, and is not going to have time to do so imminently.
Her most obvious problem, apart from somewhere to hide out, amounts to Space Elf Needs Resources Badly. So PR-wise, while solving that problem - especially as it may involve a little necessary villainy - the PR objectives amount to keeping the heroes sufficiently soothed to not make her a priority, the villains sufficiently intimidated likewise, and absolutely everybody at least as confused and off-balance as she is right now. Everything else can wait until she has more than 12% of a plan.)
Potential Leviathan attack:
It’s mostly probabilistic: Brockton Bay is overdue to be hit by something (especially once conflict intensifies), and given that it’s coastal and has an aquifer, if it’s an Endbringer, it’s most likely to be Leviathan. But in accordance with that “all paths lead to victory” maxim, the overall plan will have sub-paths in it for “Different Endbringer attacks”, “Endbringer attacks somewhere else; need to transport forces to hero there instead”, “Slaughterhouse Nine come to town instead”, and so forth, all the way down to “Things to do while waiting around being bored, like picking off the Merchants”.
(Not that pantsing Skidmark and hanging him in wedgie position from the PRT’s flagpole wouldn’t be fun, but it is, shall we say, non-core.)
Effectiveness of Armsmaster’s lie detector:
Eldrae kinesics aren’t sufficiently different from human to make it much more than less reliable, especially at first. (You’ll note that Tattletale’s power could still get a fairly accurate read, for example.)
Now, there are such things as face-saving programs, which soften, and emotional response dampers, which more or less eliminate, the assorted tells that kinesic readers can use, which she could dig out of the library. On the other hand, the problem with using those to wipe your kinesics is that the resulting flattened affect is a pretty obvious tell in itself.
There has not been much work done on creating more effective ways to lie without kinesic tells, since
(a) None of it would fool an alethiometer. Hell, it won’t even fool an MRI machine circa now; and
(b) To steal a quotation from SC2, “Human. We Ur-Quan never lie. NEVER!
It is a weakness to lie and, as you have noticed, the Ur-Quan are not weak!”
What can the Empire (or the Transcend specifically) actually send through an interdimensional wormhole?
What you can send through a between-universe wormhole is –
(Assuming, for a moment, that you have found two universes with natural laws which are compatible enough to send mass-energy between without it dissolving instantly into adjacentia. Inasmuch as universes are random agglomerations from the primordial chaos’s all-set and the set of identical agglomerations is an infinitesimal, although also infinite, subset of the infinite set of stable agglomerations, which is an infinite subset of the infinite set of all possible agglomerations… well, don’t count on it.)
– similar to a conventional wormhole; it depends on how much energy you feel like putting into it.
Yes, this does mean it could send a certain admiral and her shiny superdreadnought All You Other Endbringers Are Just Imitating to solve the problem her way. It won’t. But it could.
Why not?
It breaks the First Commandment of Interventions.
“Thou shalt not cockblock someone else’s torrid affair with awesomeness.”
Think like an awesomeness-maximiser. Teach a soph to be awesome, they’ll generate awesome for the rest of their lives. Be awesome for them, they’ll still be a schmuck tomorrow.
another random thought: you said that parallel dimensions is not the normal state of the verse, so there’s a shard responsible for it. That would be Coil’s, wouldn’t it?
The currently operational Worldline Demux is one of Scion’s shards that he didn’t give out. It has the sort of insane energy requirements to do what it’s doing that it might not even be possible to pass it to anyone not an entity.
Given that he is a Cauldron cape, it’s possible that Coil has a crippled version of Eden’s equivalent shard, but whether or not he actually can split and unmake worldlines in the physical sense or whether its still the canonical simulative corcognition has yet to be decided. (Depends on whether I want him to have that much power, and/or what it’ll mean for the shape of the plot.)
(To fill in a little background, Worldline Demux is a force-multiplier shard for the Entities’ experimentation. It works [and big endgame-period discovery spoilers here for those who care about such things] like this:
The way universes naturally work (and this is a horrible, gross, lies-to-children popsci version of the theory) is that in macroscopic quantum systems, like universes, you can approximate the probability curve of aggregate wave function distributions as something like a bell curve. The resolved classical universe as we actually perceive and experience it is essentially the peak of the curve. The falloff to either side, for the most part, can be conceived of as naught but shadows and echoes. Not that there aren’t interactions or ways of manipulating things for useful ends available with sufficiently advanced technology.
What Worldline Demux does is, by means of copious brute force applied to quantum fuckery, reshape that probability curve such that it has a multitude of lower peaks rather than one big one. The result is that you end up with multiple experienceable worldlines, one per curve-peak, which can be considered “parallel worlds” occupying the same space. This allows an Entity with it to run multiple parallel iterations of its experiments on the same planet, to multiply its potential gains.
The space in question, Worldline Demux only having so much energy to apply, is pretty much confined to Earth-local space. This is two reasons the Entities don’t want humanity getting offworld; one, they might notice the difference from out there, and two, because the peaks are lower, mass-energy in Earth-local space is less real than mass-energy outside it. If you think of the height of the normal peak as “real”, that amount of realness is being shared between multiple worldlines. (This is what makes Sting , Flechette’s power, so damn deadly, because it synthesizes q-states that are baseline-level-of-the-universe real.)
Assorted other implications are left as an exercise for the reader.)
So, Earth’s reality is a bit less real then outside due to entities.
What’s happen when the thingy that transforms one peak into many stops working?
How violent will be quantum state redistribution?
An uncontrolled collapse would be apocalyptic.
As in, Earth survives, significant parts of biosphere, atmosphere and hydrosphere will be a little redistributed and heated up, cosmically speaking?
In this case, where you’ve got coherent local data replaced by a mass of random q-states, we’re talking “a shit-ton of mass-energy spontaneously decoheres and recoheres as super-energetic super-simple particles, mostly photons; i.e., an Earths-shattering kaboom”. This is how the Entities end the Cycle.
Shards, free will suppression, and precogs:
For the shards to do this would be self-defeating for the Entities. They’re trying to use the branemeats (to coin a term) as creativity farms to find a solution to their entropy problem, and that’d be pointless if they p-zombified them, because they could just run a giant p-zombie simulation and have done with it. They need the logotic wacky to make their plan work.
Their precog works as well as it does because most people don’t exercise their free will in unpredictable ways all that much, and they have a friggin’ huge dataset and oodles of computing power to throw at the problem. So usually there’s just a little fuzziness in the process such that it doesn’t work to pull end-of-First-Lensman-I-can-tell-you-exactly-where-individual-hairs-will-fall-in-10-years tricks. It’s good, but it ain’t Visualization of the Cosmic All.
(This effect is also why Contessa’s PtV occasionally spits out “recalculating” and returns a different number of steps.)
This effect is also responsible for the “causality interference” that is responsible for blinding precogs to each other, but it’s not just precogs. Anyone who demonstrates an unusually high Cíëlle Vagary, or worse, actual in-the-technical-sense miracles that generate impossipoints, will fuck with precognition in the same way.
(It’s basically the same problem as Destiny 's Vex have simulating the Guardians. You can have a perfect causal simulation that predicts that Bob there will turn left at the end of the street, but there’s always that tiny unsimulatable possibility that he’ll say “fuck it”, and turn right anyway. Or turn up. Or turn down the bed. Or turn into a herring. Will defeats law.)
To get into those spoilers I was avoiding earlier for those who just plain can’t resist, their precog-simulations also have essentially the same vulnerability as the Vex’s - namely, you can’t simulate what you can’t outcompute. Now, I’m not saying moon-brains are the answer to this problem, but I’m not saying they’re not the answer, either.
What would happen if SS namedropped Taylor on PHO or in an interview?
In retaliation for Taylor zapping her?
PHO would delete the post, because the mods are very clear on the No Civilian Identities thing even when capes are not only outed but self-outed. You can’t even “out” New Wave on there.
As far as everyone else, not a damn thing. After a debut like that, the cat is well and truly out of the bag. Hell, her name’s on the local news already.
(Although Shadow Stalker would be in for some pretty heavy-handed disciplinary action for trying to break the rules.)
Squealer’s background:
Is this: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11392470/chapters/25565397
Simurgh’s tinkering:
For our purposes here, the Simurgh’s tinker-fu comes from having, essentially, privileged access to the combined, unredacted databases of all the tinker shards in the live network; i.e., could emulate anything a Scion-shard Tinker could build. In theory, if there was an Eden-shard Tinker who had tech in his database that no Scion-shard had, she couldn’t emulate that, because (a) those shards aren’t part of the same network, and (b) those shards don’t have a functional hub to validate them any more anyway.