Swordlover87

Written for the 2022 Art Exchange Event!

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It's a quiet evening for Containment Automaton #74.
Admittedly, it's always quiet where Containment Automaton #74 is. No one is sent there to have a friendly conversation. People only show up in taciturn groups of two or three — all lined faces, set jaws and bulky industrial equipment, with jobs far too important to permit chitchat. They file out of unmarked black vans. They go into the facility. They perform maintenance. And then they leave, their memories excised from their heads by drugs applied with surgical precision.
Containment Automaton #74, of course, doesn't know or care about any of this. It was made for one thing, and that's stopping intruders in their tracks. Its solid-state brain is filled to the brim with counter-infiltration tactics and carefully curated combat training. It looks the part, too: a towering, hulking thing with a gunmetal gray carapace, every panel on its body concealing a different way to eradicate threats to security. And as if that wasn't enough, it stands in formation with at least 73 other automata just like it.
But right now, not a single one of those deadly machines has anything to do. After all, it's a quiet evening. The automaton stands there, and tracks a bird in the darkening sky just to keep itself occupied.

At the edge of Containment Automaton #74's vision, something moves like a gentle breeze.

The automaton's targeting reticle dilates, snaps towards the disturbance. It sees nothing. But even nothing is too much.
It is now on guard, and it begins to ready its weapons one by one. Simple automatic firearms; military-grade chemical lasers; stranger equipment, like portable ritual configurations and deific pacts. Every module is stamped with a familiar three-arrowed seal. A cacophony of whirring and clicking echoes across the desert as the automaton's brethren follow its lead, unfolding their own weaponry like blooming steel flowers.
Working in sync, the machines fan out to cover as much ground as possible. They keep their weapons at the ready, communicating in short back-and-forth bursts of radio. They send out cautious feelers of radar and ultraviolet. They search diligently, finding nothing, and keep searching right until the moment that something invisible cuts three of them in half at the waist.
The automata are thrown into disarray. They fire at nothing. Thaumaturgic countermeasures are spun up hastily, but don't seem to have any effect; the invisible intruder is proving worryingly evasive. Whenever a shot of anti-magic goes its way, it's already gone. Never there. It's a shimmer in the air like heat on a summer day, a gust of wind slicing past as two automata spill their silicon guts into the sand. And it's not stopping at five.
The fight goes downhill, fast. Containment Automaton #74 has just enough time to send out the emergency alert before its cranium is split down the middle.

Silence in the desert.

There were 90 automata, in the end. Every single one of them lies broken on the sand.
At the edge of the robot graveyard, the air darkens and thickens like caramel. A shape resolves itself. Humanoid, tall and slender, six feet of gleaming black obsidian. Two wrist-mounted blades with edges thinner than an atom slide silently out of sight as their owner assesses the situation.
Omniscient-Limited Intelligence OLI-42, also known as Ollie, checks the integrity of her perceptual camouflage. All systems nominal. She glances over her shoulder at the smoldering wreckage of Containment Automata #1-90, and lifts her chin slightly. Her opaque visor betrays no emotion, but inwardly, she allows herself a smidgen of what might be called pride.
Not for long, though. The mission has only just begun.
Ollie directs her gaze forward, at the monolithic installation she's been tasked with infiltrating. Deep within that concrete fortress lies something that's been causing a great deal of trouble for her superiors. She doesn't actually have the faintest idea of what it is; her mind has erected a black wall of ignorance around it. More likely than not, knowing would sear the augments right out of her head. It's a good thing her limited omniscience was carefully crafted to avoid such threats as these.
She doesn't need to know what it is, anyway. She just needs to know where it is. And her orders were simple: destroy on sight.

Ollie creeps down a narrow tunnel, nothing more than a shadow on the wall. The turrets at the entrance were easy enough to deal with. She knew where each round was going to hit before it even left the barrel; dodging was as simple as not being there. Then, with a flick of her nano-alloy blades in the right place, she could make short work of the delicate firing mechanisms. Quick and painless.
The security personnel she encounters in the tunnels from time to time are a little more problematic, given the unpredictability of human decision-making. She has to get creative. It's a good thing her weaponry works just as well on meat as it does on metal.
A twinge of discomfort from around the corner, a flicker in her perceptual camouflage. Ollie curses herself: she's gotten distracted. When you know nearly everything, it can get difficult to focus on what's important. She mentally readjusts her path to avoid the Scranton Reality Anchor humming just around the bend — which she hasn't yet seen, but nonetheless knows is there — and slips off into a side tunnel.
Red lights sweep the halls. Keening alarms raise their voices. The facility is on high alert, has been for the past half hour. They know she's here. Which isn't a problem, necessarily; it just makes her job a little harder.
Up ahead: a massive steel bulkhead, doubtlessly closed and locked down to keep her away from her quarry. Not like it matters. With but a thought, part of Ollie's obsidian carapace reconfigures itself into a blowtorch. She reroutes reserve power to heat and turns the lock mechanism into bubbling slag. Then, with both hands, she grips the bottom lip of the steel wall and heaves it up, up, out of her way.
As she enters the next hallway, her heads-up display lights up and starts chirping.

ENCRYPTED VOICE CALL. ACCEPT?

She takes the call. A holographic window blooms on the inside of her visor. Command's dispassionate, metallic voice comes through in surround-sound: "There's a task force detachment converging on you. Be ready."
They're right. The nugget of information has provoked a realigning of her near-omniscient mind, like a pebble dropped in a pool, and things are falling into place now. She knows enemies are on their way, knows where they are and how many; she can almost hear the heavy tread of reinforced combat boots.
She grunts an affirmative and takes a sharp right into another, thinner side tunnel, already reconfiguring the plan around this new variable. Her adversaries must have guessed at her limited omniscience, realized she was beelining straight for the blackbox at the heart of the complex. Of course they'd preempt her with something a step above simple security patrols. Of course this wouldn't be easy.
As the audio link window folds away and vanishes, a smile cracks Ollie's face beneath the visor. She's already looking forward to it.

The members of Specialized Task Force Chi-6442 see a great deal of signs that something has gone very wrong on their way to the target. They see automatic turrets wrenched free of walls. They see other counter-intrusion measures disabled wholesale, ritual circles broken, laser grids cut to pieces by their own burning outputs. They see — parts of people, separated on every axis in clean sections like medical diagrams. And they chart their foe's path, a path that neatly sidesteps every single Scranton Reality Anchor in the complex with unimaginable precision. ("You'd have to be omniscient," one of the operatives quips, and gets a single, very grim chuckle for his trouble.)
When Chi-6442 arrives in the final stretch of corridors, they see nothing amiss. This, of course, is the greatest cause for alarm yet.
Some of the operatives begin setting up gear as a precaution. They unpack and assemble strange contraptions, things that monitor the strength of reality or track the glow of a living thing's soul. The others fan out and form a perimeter: a strategy as old as time, but still quite effective in keeping anything from sneaking up on you. They keep their weapons raised and their eyes peeled.
They have someone keeping watch on the ceiling, too, but they still don't see Ollie perched up there until she unfolds her limbs and drops on them.
Unlike the robots from earlier, the task force was expecting her, so it's not so much of a complete upset. They scatter, but keep to a loose formation. Radio links crackle with interference and hastily shouted commands. Ollie lands in their midst, crouched, a great spindly black spider. Then she's gone. An unseen arc of destruction passes across the room — a deathly shimmer in the air — and three operatives are messily decapitated before the task force commander can figure out Ollie's path. Sacrifices. Necessary ones? She'll unpack that later. "There!" she shouts, streaming telemetry and calculations to her team in real time. "Three point eight degrees, full power, go!"
The portable reality anchor in the corner has just finished powering up. It's a solid block of laughably complex machinery. It has the approximate size and shape of a suitcase, even sporting a handle, but is ten times harder to lift. Two men manage to heave it off the ground and swing it around, while a third sets the output to maximum width. There's an unearthly humming, and a reverberating dry snap like a breaking bone, and the world —
shifts —
— and Ollie is caught directly in the conical stabilization field emitting from the device. Her ephemeral, barely-there body freezes and flickers as if struck by lightning. It seems to fill out, become more solid. Then her perceptual camouflage cuts out entirely. She's midair, about to slice through another enemy's neck, but the sudden failure of her camouflage jars her. The attack turns into a glancing blow; she lands badly.
Kneeling, she casts her gaze around the room. Chi-6442 are converging on her with their weapons raised. Their black body armor glints. The reality anchor, humming away, suffuses the corridor with a shifting dreamlike feeling. Her suit whines in protest as she rises, unsheathing gore-slicked blades, and goes to meet them.
The fight is protracted and ugly. Under the staring eye of the anchor, Ollie's capabilities are diminished, but she's not even close to being disabled. She fights with grim, fearsome determination and preternatural awareness of her enemy's moves. She breaks guns over her knee. She breaks spines over her knee. The world blurs into a bloody miasma as the members of Chi-6442 fall one by one at her hands. If she could get to the anchor, smash it to pieces, this would be so much easier; but Chi-6442 seems determined to make themselves into human shields for that aggravating piece of hardware.
"Why are you bothering?" she wonders aloud as flesh gives under her blade. "Don't you know you're going to die anyway?"

Time passes.

It's over. Everyone else is scattered across the room, broken in fascinating configurations. And she has the commander dead to rights. She has her by the throat, pinning her to the ground with one hand. The woman's body armor has been split open, shucked, like a clamshell, and her weapons are little more than shreds of tin foil. She's done.
Ollie's HUD is still tracking potential threats and highlighting weak points; she dismisses every pop-up. There's no need.
This woman put up a good fight. She deserves some respect. Smoke hangs in the air as Ollie waits, silently, for any last words. But all she gets is a steely glare and silence in return.
Oh well, Ollie thinks as she breaks the commander's neck.

"That was foolish, Unit 42. Worse than."
Ollie trudges down the narrow hallway, jagged concrete outcroppings scraping against her shoulders. The construction of the facility's deeper areas is bizarre, to put it mildly; she can only conclude that the uneven terrain and spiked walls are intentional intrusion countermeasures. They're less interesting than the laser grids, and considerably more annoying. There are no lights anymore, either.
"Above all else, you were built to think. Not just think, outthink. Your partial omniscience drive is the most advanced model we've made yet. You know everything, or as near as makes no difference. But they caught you with a portable reality anchor. Why? Don't answer."
After the machine was smashed, her suit systems began to reactivate in fits and starts. Automatic healing, radio links; no camouflage yet. Command started laying into her as soon as comms were back online. She hasn't had a chance to get a word in for the past ten minutes of walking.
"You like this too much. That's the problem. A fight is like paradise to you. And when it's too easy for your tastes, you— handicap yourself. Intentionally or not, it doesn't matter. You've been doing it since you were first gestated. Your handlers always said it would be a problem one day; we were willing to wait and prove them wrong."
She keeps her eyes fixed on the ground. The voice is a low, angry drone in her ears.
"You need to stop. This is a wake-up call. You are not in training anymore. You haven't been for a long time. This is the most important thing you will ever do. Act like it."
Before she can respond, the audio link window shrinks away and vanishes.
Ollie pauses in the middle of the hallway, finds a relatively spike-free patch of wall to lean against, sinks down into a sitting position and stays there. Her headlamp marks out a clean circle of visibility, beyond which is darkness. She stares into the darkness. It makes her feel a little better.
The forty-one Omniscient Intelligences that came before Ollie are all dead. She knows that much. Some were tasked with the same mission as her, and didn't return. Some perished in stranger ways that she wasn't allowed to know about. Some simply burned out early, shriveling in their gestation cocoons, screaming. So many failures. So many false starts. If there's anyone who can destroy that thing lurking at the heart of the complex for good, it's her.
She cannot mess this up.
Her newfound resolve gets her to her feet and carries her deeper and deeper into the bowels of the earth. The walls begin to open up. There are more traps, bizarre contingencies to ward off time-travelers and godly influence. She escapes them all. She moves.
Enormous hatches begin appearing on the sides of the tunnel, few and far between, and spaced unevenly. They're shut fast with a ludicrous amount of locking mechanisms each. She quickens her pace because she knows exactly what this means: these are the decoy containment chambers. Sixteen identical steel tombs, no distinguishing features. Together they make up one of the final lines of defense — sheer confusion. Because only one of them contains the object she's looking for.
By the ninth chamber from the top down on the left-hand side of the tunnel, Ollie stops. Here it is. This is the door she sees every time she closes her eyes and reaches within herself, to the part of her that knows nearly everything.
She holds up her right arm and spends a few minutes shifting around the programmable matter of her suit. She needs as much mass as she can muster up for this. Her forearm swells and bulges like an overfilled balloon, extending out into a heavy, slightly tapered barrel. The end slants sharply as if it's been lopped off. Air vents and heat dissipators form along the body of the weapon, like gills. To finish the job, on her helmet, a second visor extrudes and snaps down over the first — making sure she doesn't burn her own eyes out.
Aiming at the edge of the hatch, she powers up the particle cannon.

Anyone inside the containment chamber at that moment would see a searingly bright beam of something that looks a great deal like the surface of the Sun, cutting methodically through the door's hinges and hermetic seal mechanism from the outside. Such an observer would be blinded in an instant, if they didn't have eye protection, and then burnt to a crisp shortly afterwards even if they did.
The hinges are obliterated within seconds. The door creaks dangerously. An obsidian-black hand finds its way into the white-hot seam and pulls, wrenching the door free of its moorings. With a horrible metal screech and a riot of clattering steel and splintering concrete, it's hurled out of sight.
Ollie leaps into the chamber, her boots skidding and sliding on the curved metal floor. It's a massive space, and it echoes. She completely ignores the shifting mist in the air and the tungsten sphere suspended high above her; they're secondary features. She's not done with her particle cannon yet. It's already powering up for another shot, barrel visibly glowing an angry red from the sheer volume of energy building inside it. As it charges she swings it around, aiming across the chamber, directly at a squat assemblage of tanks and tubes built into the far wall.
She fires. The laser punches a molten hole through the machine and completely ruins its inner workings. A deluge of translucent liquid gushes out of the ruptured tanks, pooling in the curved bottom of the containment chamber.
The particle cannon shuts off. Steam hangs in the air, mixing with the haze already there.
Ollie knew what was waiting for her. She knew exactly what that assortment of machinery could produce, was likely already starting to produce. She went for the most dangerous thing in the entire room, hoping she could end the fight before it began with a single decisive shot. Now she's staring at the machine's gutted remains, unsure if she got there in time. She tries to convince herself that her plan worked, that the trouble is over, and almost, almost manages to do it—
Not fast enough. One of them's been gestated already. Brace for impact.
—before something hits her from behind like a freight train.
The sheer force behind the attack is enough to send her skidding across the floor. Reeling, she turns to see a broad-shouldered figure silhouetted against the empty doorway. Chunky armor and a glowing visor. The overall shape vaguely reminds her of her own suit. The figure is wielding a ridiculously large gun in both hands with almost insulting ease, and she belatedly realizes that this is what must have hit her, from a point-blank range. Now that she's thought about it, her back is beginning to ache in twenty different spots.
Irantu was indeed blinded by the initial flash of the laser, but his eyes are already recovering. He reloads, the barrel of his minigun spinning with a series of reverberating clicks. "You must be the intruder."
Ollie's wounded suit is repairing itself. It's slow going. She flattens herself against a wall and begins to reconfigure her particle cannon into something a little more portable. "That would make you the last line of defense," she says, mostly to buy time.
"That is close enough," he says, and fires off another stream of bullets.
The noise is horrendous. Ollie dives for cover, her boots sprouting wheels to speed her along, and her free forearm growing spikes so she can grip onto the wall and swing herself around. She's a black streak in the air. The gunfire carves a pockmarked trail in the wall behind her as she moves. Irantu's aim is impressively good; he tracks the moving target like he's spent his whole life doing it, which he has.
"I've heard about you," she shouts over the din as her weapon patiently reshuffles its parts and location. "Task Force Tau-5. Cyborg supersoldiers carved from the flesh of a dead god. Out of everything your superiors could send against me—" she ducks and rolls beneath another hail of gunfire, then clambers up the wall with adhesive palms— "we're probably the most evenly matched."
"And I have heard about you. The pre-mission briefing was not very informative, though. I only know that you have extrasensory abilities, and are very, very strong." Irantu reloads once more, his barrels smoking. He strides through the sludge pool at the bottom of the chamber, lifts his head to look up at Ollie, and abruptly realizes what she's doing. With barely a moment to spare, he dashes out of the way of the carbide slug that strikes where he was just standing like a lightning bolt.
There's a thunderous explosion. Dodging only marginally reduces the damage when the projectile's kinetic energy is that high. Irantu is flung into the gloom and vanishes, a cloud of smoke billowing in his wake.
Ollie hefts the compact railgun sprouting from her shoulder, its twin conductor rails fizzing with electricity. There's already a second projectile sliding up in the center and two more under construction. She has to make these count; her suit's drawing from reserve mass-energy to print them.
Within the haze, something shifts. Irantu rises, his armor charred and chipped, his visor glowing like a beacon. "This fight will be highly engaging," he intones.
Ollie smiles inside her helmet. Despite everything, it feels good to let loose. "I was thinking the same."
No more words are necessary. She begins with a triple salvo: BOOM kt-chak-chak BOOM kt-chak-chak BOOM. Three more lightning bolts from the heavens. Irantu dashes ahead of the railgun slugs, but not quite fast enough; midstep, he loses his foot to the third shot. Although he goes flying and faceplants in the sludge, he doesn't seem anywhere near as perturbed by the injury as he should be. As he levers himself onto his elbows and aims his minigun, Ollie notes that the stump has already stopped bleeding.
And then he's shooting, and she has to move, skittering across the ceiling like a spiky black roach. She passes the heavy steel cable holding that enigmatic tungsten ball in midair. Irantu avoids firing at or near it; she doesn't have time to unpack the reason why. With a flying leap, she crosses the upper circumference of the chamber and geckoes herself onto the far wall, then quickly spins towards Irantu far below. Her free shoulder sprouts a missile rack, but the suit's cache only has enough mass left for two heat-seekers. She lets them fly anyway.
Her opponent stands, bracing himself against the wall and leaning on his gun for support. He stares up at the missiles screaming towards him, as if gauging distance or performing calculations — then lunges forward and punches one of the incoming explosives, actually punches it with his fist. That fist quickly ceases to exist. The momentum of Irantu's strike carries him forward, causing the second missile to streak right into the wall and explode ineffectually.
Blood streaming from the ragged non-hand at the end of his arm, Irantu staggers forward. He hooks his gun under his arm like a crutch and unslings a second weapon from his belt, this one smaller but chunkier. Ollie leans forward, squints, has barely enough time to get a good look and register what the thing is before he's firing and the phrase pops into her head: sticky grenade launcher.
She leaps for it, but the hail of tiny explosives partially catches her in the side. The blast isn't very spectacular. There's a contained, muffled whump and that's it. She wheels sideways and crashes into the wall, then slides down, slowly.
Ollie's not done, but she almost wants to be. A patch of her suit has been blasted away, revealing a thinner, more flexible but less mutable carapace beneath, which itself is cracked badly. The surrounding material is snaking together to close up the gap at a maddeningly slow pace. Underneath all of that, there's a stabbing pain in her ribs. She grips the wound and hauls herself to her feet. Irantu is lumbering towards her, visor clearly visible through the gloom. No time to think. No time to breathe.
Her railgun is drooping on her shoulder like a sunflower head; with a thought, it jumps to attention. She slams her left hand into the wall, digging her fingers into the steel, then wills her suit to start chewing it up for fuel. To keep Irantu distracted, she retrieves a handful of conventional, stupid explosives from internal storage and flings them toward him in a wide arc. He holds his good hand and arm over his face as if shielding it from the sun. It's almost comical. Several of the bombs detonate against his suit, carving craters into the reinforced plastic-steel plating; one hits a seam and produces a gout of blood. Yet still he keeps on coming.
Ollie is almost ready. She just needs a bit more mass. She doesn't want to die here, of course, but there's a fuzzier, darker feeling underneath that, and it makes her heart race as she digs her fingers deeper into the wall. This fight is giving her a rush she hasn't felt in longer than she can remember. This is different from the sterile training facilities. She doesn't just want the fight to keep going. She wants to win.
"Eyes on me!" she shouts, and unloads her fourth railgun slug point-blank into Irantu's gut.
The cyborg staggers. A waterfall of blood gushes out of his midsection. The shot pierced all the way through; his spine was surely pulverized when it went out the back. But he stays on his feet, raising his grenade launcher, pitching forward and pulling the trigger again and again. She's turning when the deluge of bombs hits, so the initial explosion slams her against the wall face-first, and the next few blasts drive her even deeper into the steel. Fiery pain flares up in her back and arms. Her railgun is blown to pieces. Her suit flakes away like soot.
Then he socks her in the back of the head, and there's the unmistakable sound of something shattering.
A thick, fuzzy silence falls. Irantu drops into a kneel, a pool of red spreading beneath him.
Ollie's crouched against the wall. She grips her head and turns, slowly, agonizingly. There are other injuries. Unspeakable ones. Most visibly, though, part of her visor has been smashed. And something is showing through. It might have been called skin, once, but it's been plated over with so many reinforced plastics and underlaid with so many subcutaneous implants that it's difficult even to tell what its original color was. And near the bottom, barely visible: a staring, eerily human brown eye.
"Why do this? Why work for them?" she rasps. "You could raze them to the ground if you tried."
Irantu spits blood. "My team does not work for the Foundation. This is our choice. Every day. We help them keep the world safe."
In answer, Ollie unsheathes her blades. Two arcs of obsidian pass cleanly through Irantu's neck, and the half-inch of shielding surrounding it, as if passing through air. His head rolls.
"And when they ruin someone else's world?" she asks the corpse. "What do you do then?"

Her systems aren't cooperating. She used up far, far too much mass-energy in that fight. Even before it, really. The particle cannon was just plain flashy in hindsight.
She's sitting against a wall, examining the damage. Heavy stripping of the suit's outer layer on her side. Craters in its programmable matter, peppered along her arms and upper back. Gouges and cracks in her helmet. A hole right through her visor. And countless stinging scrapes and bruises and cuts and broken bones all over her meat body. Nothing is healing up the way it should. Maybe it's because she burned through both regular and reserve power, or maybe it's a lingering effect of that reality anchor, or maybe everything she's put the suit through has just caused it to throw up its arms and quit. None of the options feel particularly surprising.
Her camouflage never came back online. She's not sure why she only realizes this now.
Ollie braces herself against the ground and stands, with much difficulty. Her blades are still out; she didn't feel like putting them away. She looks up, at the steel cable and the tungsten sphere hanging placidly in the center of the chamber. Her objective is in there. She's just about finished the mission. There's nothing between her and victory.
She backs up a few paces, then flicks her arm upwards, just barely managing to suppress a wince. The blade mounted on that arm fires off, spinning, and slices right through the steel cable before embedding itself in the ceiling.
The ball drops. It hits the pool of gestation fluid with a whump and sprays translucent sludge everywhere. There's not enough fluid for it to float, even if it was anything close to light, so it just sits there.
Command's voice crackles in her ear: "Destroy the artifact. Do not otherwise interact with it." This would have startled her, if she had any capacity left to be startled.
Ollie stares down at the sphere, breathing slowly. Her head feels fuzzy. She could spend an hour processing the chamber's walls for raw material, then make another particle cannon and vaporize the thing without having to lay eyes on it. It would be easy. But it would be long. And if she's being completely honest with herself, she wants to know what it is. Of course she does. It's the blackbox, the question mark, one of the unimaginably few things she can't figure out just by pulling the information from nothing.
"Repeat: Do not interact with the artifact."
She makes the executive decision to ignore Command. The mission is complete. She deserves a bit of leeway. As a reward. Just this once.
"Repea—"
She shuts her audio links off. With her remaining blade, Ollie slices open the containment sphere and takes one look at what's inside.
She's dead before she hits the ground.

"Sir," an attendant says to his superior, "should we begin the gestation process for the next OLI unit?"
The superior in question is too busy putting their fist through their monitor to answer. It produces a beautiful, and rather satisfying, shower of sparks.

In the aftermath:
"But why? I don't get it. Whatever its mission was, there's no reason the entity should have jeopardized it like that."
The woman in the suit scoffs. Her young secretary is having to jog just to keep up with her brisk walk. "Do you know what happened today, Barlow?"
"Our containment facility was compromised, and they're reorganizing and repairing the whole thing, and because this is a level-five blackbox site, as a precaution we're all heading to the infirmary to wipe our own memories with aerosol amnestics?" he says hopefully.
"No. From their side, not ours. What happened?"
Barlow thinks. His boss's dress shoes click on the tile floor in perfect rhythm. After a few seconds, he says, "They thought they'd figured the gauntlet out. Right, Ms. Hawthorne?"
Hawthorne nods, almost imperceptibly. It's a cue for him to go on.
He forges ahead. "Not even we know every trap that's been laid in there. It's a necessity when you're dealing with things that can just look into your head and pluck out what they need. It's a necessity when you're dealing with omniscience. Our enemies sent in something that… that couldn't have been truly omniscient, we know that, but it must've been close enough for it not to matter. And it got through almost every trap. It knew what they were. It even dealt with Samsara."
She nods again.
"What I just don't get is— why? Why did they lose?"
So close. Hawthorne sighs, and decides to go a little easier on her subordinate, if only because neither of them will remember this in an hour. "There are two reasons. One, the sheer volume of data to manage would have led even a semi-omniscient intelligence to miss crucial details. For our purposes, the most crucial of them all was the Class I amnestics piped into the chamber. Its suit visor was cracked, you know. Easy for the gas to get in. We're still working on its biology, but we know it was human enough to be disoriented by that."
Barlow nods, understanding.
"That's the first reason. The second reason is that omniscient intelligences are all the same." She doesn't look at him. "It doesn't matter what kind of walls you put on their perception. It doesn't matter what kind of training you give them. They want to know everything, and they want to know it now. They'll do anything for it. And that's the final trap. That's the one thing our enemies haven't been able to engineer out of their supersoldiers. The one obstacle they'll never be able to get around.
"You want to kill an omniscience? Give it the most tantalizing puzzle box it's ever seen, and put a killsprite in the middle."
END