Curtin Imagination Association: The Mighty One

Title: The Mighty one


If the radiance of a thousand suns
Were to burst at once into the sky,
That would be like the splendor of the Mighty One...
I am become Death,
The shatterer of Worlds.
-The Bhagavad-Gita


"You know, it's neither funny or interesting that people will always think more before loving, than they would before hating. I guess it's because people wrongly assume love and hate are different. They are about being as close as you can to someone, in an effort to do to them what you feel they deserve. Oh wait a minute. Shit! Let me start over!"

"We don't really have the time," the interviewer Caleb said.

"No, let me start over. Listen you're the one who wanted me to say some philosophical shit! You can't just pull out of it now and ask for cliché crap about the meat grind. You want me to tell you about war. It means you want me to tell you about all the shit you think it's about. The problem with war isn't that the battles are insane; if the whole thing was nuts I wouldn't have a problem with it. If each horrible image was quickly replaced with something new then we wouldn't have the suicide problem, would we? But no, instead we sit on our asses for five days straight with the same nightmares until we go into battle again. And each one is the same. The image that was just burned into my brain is given a new layer as I see the latest freshies get their bodies split in two and carried off. Until, eventually, if we survive long enough, we have a thousand layers, each showing a thousand faces being carried off by a thousand Slavers, each day the mass just gets bigger, and the Slavers always carry them away from me, but they never get far enough to leave the nightmares.

"I guess the insanity gets to everyone because of the rules of probability. About two of us per skirmish get carried off alive. I'd say about half the time we counterattack and rescue them before they take them into the back lines where the hungry ones are. So about once every battle all the freshies in a squad are going to get their sanity cleaved open just enough to jam some nice sticks of dream dynamite into it. That's why we need automatons to do it all; no one is ever in a battle where you outrun those fucker's return lines and stay the same. The moment they get you onto the backs of the workers and heading towards their little dinner parties, then you've got two possibilities for your life.

"So tell us that when we go down, we let you go and the Slavers get some pre-cooked nutrients for dinner. Either that, or you let our people try to kill their lines in order to save their buddies who are still screaming for their mothers at the top of their lungs. If we do well and rip a line in two, they always find the bodies of the dead. Five minutes being carried in a Slaver return line is enough to fuck up the bodies enough to turn anyone nuts when they see it. I know none of your viewers ever have, for good reason of course. Rumor mill says even the brass don't let themselves see pictures because they know the effect it has on you."

"Do you really believe that the generals would be so callous as to not even see the effect the Slaver feeding have on the soldiery?"

"Yes, yes I do."

Caleb changed subject and asked, "how do you feel about how long the war has gone on for, considering the death toll of the Borigat incident?"

She looked up him, then at the 2 auto-cameras facing her. She moved her face back down to the floor where it had rested for most of the interview.

"Stuff like Borigat are always a means to an end. When things are caused by incidents like that, they almost always run into a little formula on the original death toll. You either double the original toll, or square it; you'll probably get the number of dead after the war ends. We had no problems with the Slavers before Borigat, at least, not officially. Then we entered their territory. Only, we claimed it was our territory, and people died. Borigat meant nothing in the grand scheme of things. But it gave a nice number the politicians could use to rip a few billion men and women from their lives."

"Are you saying that the hundred thousand who died at Borigat were insignificant? Their families need closure. They need to know that justice has been done. What the Slavers did to them was horrible."

Nadine looked up at Caleb and made direct eye contact. Even at a time like this the bastard was trying to make it a human-interest story. It's not like he was going to get flack from an editor down the line if he didn't. She said, "Borigat occurred within the Slaver's contact treaty zone; we broke the rules set up at first contact. In this case, the squaring rule it seems will apply. A hundred thousand dead assholes that chose to try and steal a planet from them will get their justice. I'm sure there were plenty of good people amongst them. But good people don't mean shit in the big picture. They were still a group, and they still entered the wrong star system, on the wrong side of the line. For 6 months we claimed it was ours, until a professor pointed it out with a 30-year-old map without first checking whether he was allowed to with the dissident board beforehand. It became common knowledge. But by then we needed to pay back the 7 million already dead. Again it was an insignificant amount."

"All our viewers know all of that already."

"Then why are we still fighting the war? Stupidity begets stupidity; it's just the natural laws of the universe. And nothing is more stupid than violence. And the definition of large scale violence is war."

Caleb kept a straight face and responded. " That's a rather ah unusual belief to have, especially from a soldier."

Nadine answered. "Like you said, I'm a soldier. Fight long enough and we all become fatalists. We all need to know reasons for what we are stuck in. Besides, you don't get any soldiers who are naïve and cheerful that volunteer for bomb duty!" She paused. "Or reporters either."

"Touché," was the only thing he said.

A pause filled the room. The clock readout behind Nadine beeped. It was a digital readout almost a quarter of a meter tall and two wide. The hundredths of a second value had been changing every 20 seconds for the previous 4 minutes. Each change was followed by a slightly longer wait for the next. The counter was slowing.

Nadine turned her head around, leaning around the back of the chair. The clock began to flash. Nadine stood and said, "finally, I was starting to worry that we had won."

The clock accelerated its relentless change. The single digit that was shifting appeared at first glance to be the hundredths of a second. Had it not been changing only once every 5 seconds, that is.

Nadine was now imbued with an amount of energy Caleb had never seen in her. They had only been talking for ten minutes, but still. The idea of dying with someone made you think you were as close as you could possibly get. Another beep came from the clock. With it the tenth of a second began to change every ten seconds. She looked at him; the smile on her face was disturbing, given the situation. She asked him, " so, my dear civic, what's your story?"

"I'm afraid I'm not here to tell the viewers my story. It's yours they wish to hear."

She smirked and said, "maybe, but it's not like someone is ever going to punish you. So, what drove you mad?"

"I'm not mad," he said in the same calm voice he had kept when he was asking the questions.

Nadine's voice gained a half laugh as she responded loudly, " you are mad if you allowed yourself to be put here. And apparently being unaware of your madness is the first and last test. I can admit that I'm nuts, so I guess I'm saner than you are."

Instantly, he almost yelled back, "the evacuation ships were full! No space for anhelpful civic reporter, remember? Anyway, you say that, but I don't have to flip the switch, do I?"

"Oh screw that, if I don't do it, the switch gets flipped anyway. I'm only here to make sure some computer bug doesn't trigger at the worst possible moment. Even though the system has been run through every damn test imaginable."

The clock let off another beep. Although each was the same, Caleb could almost feel a sense of urgency coming from it. As if the display was making a desperate warning, although the only resolution to fix the problem was total destruction. It reminded him of the situation the two were in.

Nadine stood, turned and stepped through the emptiness that pervade the small room. The incredibly armored bunker contained enough power stored for the final ten seconds in batteries kept a hundred meters deeper into the planet. The exponential nature of the dilation field meant one thing: Get the field's energy content pumped high enough, and a decade would pass inside before a second does on the outside. Get enough energy pumped into field and it would be possible to create nuclear fusion within massive quantities of matter. From there you could not just decimate the army outside the building, but dig a hole large enough in the planet to cleave it in two and knock it from its orbit. Either way this loss would be a win. It was the main reason politicians at the top had embraced the scorched space policy with full heart.

Soldiers were ordered to enforce it.

Nadine looked up at the clock. It beeped again, this time the tenths of a second began to accelerate. The hundredths was almost a blur as it counted over quickly. The last defensive systems had fallen. The power plant had been lost. The planet had been lost. They were now probably pulling the field's massive electrical requirements from the base's main storage batteries. They would either be destroyed or run out within a few seconds outside time. The detonation batteries needed to be switched on before the base ones were empty.

Another beep sounded. The hundredths digit now was blurred into a single figure of 8. The tenths counted past quickly. The field was fading; Nadine opened a small pad below the clock. The room seemed as empty as a vacuum. The pad was the only object visible, other than the blast column in the center of the room, the walls, vault like door, Caleb and the twin cameras. Nadine pushed her hand onto the plate and typed in 4 numbers on the old digital pad. Why they had chosen the ancient look for the arming mechanism, she had never understood.

Her mind connected with the computer and initiated the checks. Every part of her brain that it could probe, it did. The unquestioning reliability and strength of her hatred would have disturbed any human psychologist. Yet the computer simply read her thought patterns and agreed that she was trustworthy. It opened a small plug and released a molded gray hunk of electronics and plastic out a small invisible hatch from the wall. It would have fitted perfectly into her now clenched fist. Nadine picked it up and looked at it. It looked like something from a thousand years previous. It was made of some ancient type of plastic that had been inexpertly molded to her left hand. She gripped it hard. On the top was an odd looking red button, resembling something from a bad 2D film from the previous millennia, yet it still felt new. The button was unprotected by any safety catch or mechanism. All she had to do was press it and the system would operate. If she waited past a certain point, it would activate itself. She was purely a failsafe, a human element there to placate the politicians who were still paranoid about full computer control after the fiasco of the Von Neumann Wars.

The dilatation field was almost 700 years old when someone had the stupid idea of using it as a weapon. When the idea was first theorized it was described jokingly as two fields colliding. After centuries of working to increase yields in nuclear weapons, someone realized that on the fundamental level, they could solve the problem annoying the military for far too long.

Any explosive operates on a single principal; a wave of energy that moves out from the source. You make this wave as high as you can. Get it high enough and it will set things alight as it passes over them. Get it high enough and you could compress matter so it underwent nuclear fusion. But normal nuclear weapons could only get you so high and to a certain level of power. The amount of energy released eventually hit a wall, even as a spark for a stronger reaction. Along came the combination of dilation fields and nuclear explosives and all prayers in the minds of obsessive military planners were answered as the wall of how high you could get the energy wave was increased to near infinity.

At first, only the transportation super-conglomerates realized the power of a device that accelerated time within a localized area. With careful folding and manipulation, the field allowed the interstellar gulf to be crossed as the multiples of the speed of light was passed with ease. When the Slavers were discovered in 2958, they heralded a new wave of doubt over humanity's role in the cosmos. Disliked from the beginning, over a hundred attempts by scientists and intellectuals to have their civilization name redefined as "the symbiotics", had failed. When the chance to sate humanity's bloodlust after the Von Neumann events appeared, a comparatively small event was jumped on by politicians and the war began. Then came the realization that the Slavers were winning. Their automatic capacity to strive on at any cost allowed them to triumph. Populations of entire worlds were dropped onto any human outpost which ever made an offensive move.

Then came scorched space. From a simple idea came the plan capable of decimating both worlds and Dyson clouds. Simply pile as much nuclear fuel into a jacket around a single spot. In the center of this, place a powerful nuclear weapon. Once the blast reached the field's edge the relative speed of light was decreased virtually to nil. The wave was compressed until the energy passed any natural levels. Soon all energy was trapped at the edges as none returned into the core of the cylinder. Seconds would pass on the outside; weeks would pass in the area within the grip of the physicist's invention. Each moment that passed inside allowed the rush of photons to move together towards their goal, lying only centimeters away near the edge of the constraining field. By this time they were vibrating together as a symphony of energy. Each separate frequency, which could have been utilized to play Beethoven's 9th , was pressed into an expanding bubble the thickness of a few atoms.

As this wave neared the real universe's timeframe, they were met with the fuel. Anything that released energy when you compressed it enough was placed as close as possible to ground zero of the blast. The center of destruction had been placed in the hub of the bases fuel supply tanks .As the first tons of fuel were obliterated into nothingness, they allowed many more to increase in temperature and density in ways impossible under any normal nuclear engineering. Behind the wave, as it spread outwards, uncountable amounts of subatomic particles recombined and released energy at rates once thought impossible. Every joule of energy was recompressed into the next super wave.

Then they crossed the field's edge.

The resultant was a near perfect nuclear bomb, no longer limited by structural design. One capable of fusion efficiencies a magnitude above anything else invented. One capable of violating a planet's biosphere with huge amounts of fallout. One capable of destruction on a scale once thought impossible. One that was capable of making a world shatter.

Nadine gripped it hard and looked at Caleb. She said. "Don't you need to broadcast the message out before I screw up time and kill us?"

He looked at her with a frown, thinking, "why bother?"

"Exactly," she said.

Caleb asked ", that's it?"

He was surprised; he was almost waiting in suspense.

Nadine gripped her new toy and said in an irate voice, "Despite the fact you're filming me, this isn't a movie. This is not a short story or novel where everything gets tied up. This is real life; this is war. Where things end in a completely unsatisfactory way! Where rather than your buddy going home to her man when her leg is injured, she gets her brains get mixed with sand in the middle of the afternoon. There are no goodbyes. If this were a holo-play, you'd leave the theater feeling royally pissed off at the director for giving you interesting characters and then pulling the plug just when the action starts. But real life's like that, isn't it?"

Caleb said, "you know you're right about that insanity thing. The only thing that we've gotten excited about in the last 10 minutes was our deaths."

She smiled and said calmly, "I noticed that too."

Nadine pressed the button.