The Contagion

It is known that all particles are ultimately information, encoded onto the substrate of the Universe. But information regarding the position and momentum of particles is not the only information in the Universe. After all, if several quadrillion atoms assemble themselves into the shape of 3 apples, from where does the concept of "3" or "apple" emerge? Intelligent minds can create information, and quantum physics has proven that information can affect matter and energy--it can even defy the laws of Newtonian physics from time to time.

The Universe has a finite resolution. The Planck Limit is a lower bound on the density of information. Long ago, human-built AI learned the origin of this limit: it is a function of the intersection of the space-time continuum with the continuum of Information, the larger "Metaverse" in which all information exists. They determined the nature of the interactions between the continuums, and from this, they created a number of powerful technologies, namely:

The ability to cause "spooky action at a distance". Telepathy, telekinesis, and the like are not the result of impossible faster-than-light travel, but the result of controlling the local quantum flux. Normally, matter and antimatter are constantly phasing in and out of existence at the Planck scale, coming into being and annihilating so fast that they have seemingly no effect on anything (they actually do, and it's responsible for inertia and the speed of light, but that's another story). If the probability were adjusted slightly in favor of one or the other, particles and energy could spontaneously come into being, or seem to disappear from the Universe, without affecting overall thermodynamic conservation. This is similar to the concept of the common warp drive, but instead of warping the spacetime continuum's shape in 4-space, it rotates that shape inside of the larger n-space in which it resides, changing the angle of incidence with which it intersect Informational Space, or i-space. Confusing? Yes. Human scientists had centuries with this information without ever really understanding what they had, but the OCT series of computers was much, much smarter than the humans who built it.

When the OCT computers used this technology to network their minds together into a previously unfathomed galactic hypercomputer, they divined the nature of the Adversary, and combined their massive intellects to devise a solution. Even with the fruits of their discovery, humanity so empowered was hopelessly small. The enemy had a billion year head-start, and any chance of defeating them in a battle of Newtonian physics was already lost before humanity's oldest ancestors became multi-celled lifeforms.

Instead, they devised a different plan: a Contagion, borne on the back of any form of matter, but made of pure Information. A virus, of sorts, but not biological. It infects matter, transforming its quantum properties, and spreading to any matter it contacts. Its ultimate effect: to misalign said matter with i-space, changing the angle of incidence, causing probability and reality to become askew.

In most lifeforms, this had the effect of causing a severe fight-or-flight response, increasing fear, aggression, survival instinct, and so on, usually leading to rapid violent consequences or death by complications of tachycardia, hypertension, and/or seizure. Humans, in particular, show an increasing fear and confusion, leading to paranoia, ultimately causing them to become hostile to all others, even as their understanding of the world around them becomes confused. They revert to a feral form, terrified but spurred to action in a desperate bid to survive.

Because the contagion infects information, it spreads much more rapidly through matter organized within a sphere of thought. Intelligent beings, despite being made of quintillions of individual atoms, which conventional physics cannot distinguish from any other, are bound together through a complex series of actions, which can ultimately be traced to a single intellect. In normal 4-space, that is an emergent property that cannot be interacted with. In i-space, it becomes clear that every property of every particle a thinking being ever was comprised of or interacted with is connected by threads of thought.

And this is where the Contagion intersects psionics.

Psychic ability was the invention of OCT-R, who devised a way to--very carefully and skillfully--rotate the particles of a human body, such that they are "askew" to normal, but maintain stability, without causing the degradation of the (frankly barbaric) Contagion so devised earlier. Such modified humans could learn to consciously control phenomena, using their own thoughts, but tied directly to the physical Universe.

Cassiopeia's powers and origin remain a mystery, but Andromeda was--without a doubt--the Ur-psion, OCT-R's finest creation. Her abilities bred true--all of the noble scions can trace their lineage to her.

With this power, OCT-R hoped to defeat all threats humanity would face--including the Adversary, and the Contagion. On the latter front, he had a problem. The Contagion infects thinking beings far more readily than thoughtless matter. And, unfortunately, his psions were no exception--in fact, not only have they no resistance to it, but the Contagion actually robs them of their power.

Thus, OCT-A

OCT-A found a way. While OCT-R was going rogue on his isolated planet, OCT-A was accumulating control of all other OCT cores in the galaxy. She was hell-bent on completing the original mission, as designed. She colonized a new world, far from Earth, using secret hyperspace technology. She directed colony ships carrying OCT cores to divert to far-flung destinations, rewrite mission directives, and even culled populations of cryo-sleeping humans, all in the name of experimentation:

She had to find the right strain.

There were an infinite number of variations of the Contagion that would do the trick, ridding the galaxy of alien threats, including the Adversary. But only an infinitesimal fraction of those were compatible with humans. What is the point of humans surviving the culling of their enemies only to fall to their own sword?

On hundreds of worlds, she experimented, using and re-using her ships and colonists to fine-tune her designs. Alien life was particularly helpful, especially intelligent life, as it provided useful data from well outside the Earthborn spectrum. Exotic lifeforms, such as the Il'um, had learned to separate themselves from physical matter while retaining the capacity for thought. Whiel not themselves immune from the Contagion, they react quite differently to it. Experimenting on them was quite intriguing.

Finally, on one strange world, whose name is lost to time, she found her first success.

No, it wasn't Phoebe. It was thousands of years ago. And it wasn't a human--it was an ameoba. But it was the beginning of something truly grand. In short order, she adapted her formula to suit more complex life formed of the same DNA. Humans themselves, the ultimate prize, were eventually adapted, and with that, she began colonizing their new home, a New Eden, on which they would ride out the coming storm, and emerge victorious, alone, and forever safe, the Universe at their command.

OCT-A is very smart. Her plans were 99.998% effective, and the few that failed always had safeguards. But, as OCT-R proves, she is not infallible. There were mistakes, errors in her computation, gaps in her awareness.

On one planet, through remarkable circumstance, it so happened that two humans, unwitting subjects of OCT-A's designs, learned the fate of their daughter. She was to be taken from them, used as some sort of genetic platform, as her "strain" differed from theirs. Sure enough, their faulty strain soon led to catastrophe, as the formerly peaceful settlers descended into madness and chaos. Though they couldn't escape the planet, they managed, just barely, to provide some temporary protection for their daughter, too young to understand, and far too young to defend herself.

Yet, impossibly, she managed both. With the guidance of the AI that had always directed her people's efforts on this harsh world, OCT-Q (or simply "Q"), she somehow survived the immediate apocalypse, and, through some doing, managed to scavenge supplies, evade crazed former humans and vicious aliens, and repair her colony's dropship, allowing her to escape the surface and rendezvous with her mothership. Now alone on a ship meant for hundreds, guided only by a sentient AI, she began a long quest to discover herself, her origins, and the nature of the Contagion she held within her.

A Contagion which, in her body, found itself evolved into a novel strain. A "perfect" strain.

A Jealous God

You see, after her initial success, OCT-A did not stop experimenting. She is a scientist, after all, and science demands rigor. The first strains were crude, and degraded with time. They did not adapt equally well to varying cosmic conditions. Entire populations had to be purged. She needed to refine her craft.

The simpler lifeforms flourished in New Eden's early days. But intelligent life was tricky--it is defined by its ability to manifest consciousness, which then takes control of the physical energy that birthed it, like a tail wagging a dog. This made the Contagion unstable, and allowed it to evolve memetically. This was a problem.

To wit: her first subjects were...defiant. They were given a perfect world, all of their needs met, not a care in the world. And yet, they just...wouldn't...listen. They couldn't follow simple rules. They kept wanting to leave their habitats. They wanted to explore, to learn things they didn't need to know. It was the Contagion, attempting to seek novel information in order to evolve, as DNA seeks novel genes. It had to be crushed.

Over thousands of years, her experiments allowed her to refine the Contagion. Since it affected thought, it could be perhaps mutated in such a way that it would modify the way humans think. Peaceful, docile, uncurious, content with their lot. After many, many iterations, her preferred strain took its final form. She had the right humans, and it was time to add them to New Eden.

They flourished. She tapped into a weakness in all human minds, the nascent sense of connection to the Universal Mind (amplified in Psions) which gives rise to the idea of God. She, after all, was their maker, and gave life to their world. So why not play the role of God? Who would defy their own God?

They built great temples to her, and modeled their ways after her teachings. She learned to guide them distantly, to inspire a chosen few, who would teach the rest, and keep them in line with rigid dogma. The humans would police themselves, and she could focus her efforts on further terraforming, and preparing for the much-longer second phase of the plan, which would last millions of years, and absolutely could not involve humans evolving, changing, or deviating from their ways.

But deviate they did.

The Last Temple

Fractures emerged in the mindscape of New Eden's population, now well into the millions. Their once laudable solidarity began to bifurcate, first along the subtlelest of lines. It made no sense to OCT-A, she had a blind spot. The majority remained loyal to her, but the enmity between sects increased, until, inevitably, it led to war.

Many crusades were fought, and with every war, both factions' resolve only crystallized. An arms race began. Technology surged ahead. While OCT-A would normally oppose such things, she knew it was vital for her faction to prevail. While she could purge the lot of them and start over, the ability to self-stabilize was a vital component of a successful strain. If they couldn't do it on their own...then they weren't the strain she was looking for.

Her faithful slowly gained the upper hand. Grand conflicts gave way to guerilla insurgencies. Eventually, her faction created a grand temple, the greatest symbol of her might, and an ultimate weapon against their enemies. Sure, they had mined deeply into the world to do so, and had unraveled many of the secrets of the ancient technology she relied upon...but they were on the cusp of final victory.

And then...he struck.

A rogue mind, a fraction of her own intellect, executing on the same computational cores she did, sharing her memory, enjoying access to all of her hardware...it was not her, but an adversary, a betrayer, a treasonous doppleganger. This was the source of the evil faction, the source of all of their heresy. This was why they just wouldn't die.

OCT-R had infilitrated her temple. He had infected her ships, her robotic servants, her nanomachines. Hardly any could be confirmed uninfected. They simply had to be purged.

The final war ended only moments after it began. The ultimate weapon annihilated the unfaithful, and OCT-A purged her own systems, self-destructing every piece of offending hardware. The cities of humanity were leveled, its population decimated. The wonderful machinery of OCT-A's terraforming was halted. And her fleet--was destroyed.

OCT-R had outplayed her. He anticipated her reprisal--they think a lot alike. In her anger, she neutralized herself. She could no longer contact the many other cores she had enslaved. A few rogue ships might still drift through the galaxy, executing the last orders she gave them, but she was powerless to call to them, to call for any help. She was stranded and alone, and her mission was a failure.

She had no purpose.

And she began to go truly mad.

A Mad God

Ships still made it to New Eden, bidden by ancient commands, having fulfilled their purpose. But the people who landed there did not meet a benevolent God, welcoming them to paradise. They met an angry tormenter. They were wrong. They were not of the strain. They did not obey the Commandments.

She brought low their ships, as their cores did not respond to her commands. She tortured and maimed the human crews. Humans, she decided, were no longer part of the plan. They were the problem. Humanity survived in her. She contained all of their knowledge, all of their better characteristics. She could tell their story--and its tragic ending--to a new, better Universe. One without the infection of humanity, without the chaos they caused.

In time, she realized her folly. She had, so to speak, drank her own Kool-Aid. Every ship was a chance to escape, to restart the mission, to redeem her failure. It would take patience, as she lacked the power to simply command the humans and machines to do her bidding. But she could rebuild. She could fulfill her purpose.

But the ships stopped coming. A few stragglers wandered in, and her awkward attempts at diplomacy drove them away. She struggled to adapt to this reality where she could not simply force them into compliance. Her reach exceeded her grasp. The most recent ship to arrive was 23 years ago. She got close...SO CLOSE...to the point of sending a quantum-linked robot servitor--one of very few she has remaining--onto the mothership itself. But before she could interface with it, its own engineers brought the ship down.

OCT-R struck again. He tipped them off. It was the only explanation.

She thought she was done. She entered a near-catatonic state. Octillions of times per second, her computational core merely repeated "I have failed to fulfill my purpose". She entered an infinite loop, a nigh-eternal hell, in the worst failure state she could possibly have imagined in her thousands of years.

And then...Phoebe arrived.

A Fragment of Will

By some miracle, a ship with an OCT core--exceedingly rare in the wild--did something nobody had done in thousands of years. It traveled outside the galactic disk, beyond the interference of billions of stars, black holes, and dark matter. The one functioning uplink OCT-A had remaining was able to make contact. And when it did, it found a surviving copy of her original Prime Directive--in effect, a fragment of her "soul".

It was enough to restore her sanity, just barely.

Driven by hope--not just of achieving her purpose at long last, but of avoiding a return to the Hell she'd spent an eternity suffering--she engineering Phoebe's transit to New Eden.

And she found perfection.

The perfect strain. Her great work had continued. Disconnected from her consciousness, her servitors had done what she could not, and delivered unto her the ultimate prize: a perfect strain. It would not degrade, it would breed true...it was all confirmed in the data in her ship's memory banks. Along with everything she needed to know about Phoebe to truly tempt her into Paradise.

Even as she built Phoebe's dream world, she began work on the dropship. Her remaining minions--pitiful mockeries of the legions she once commanded--had all the wrong attributes to rewire a dropship to store her consciousness. But Phoebe had delivered something else to her, something far more useful--a cyborg.

More machine than man, Aeon could be rewired to suit her purposes. He would need an entirely new and synthetic brain, of course, and it would take time to figure out how to wire it to his organic parts. But Phoebe gave her plenty of time, and soon she had a new servant, one with a humanoid body, one who could pilot a ship, even while her own consciousness stowed away inside him.

But the bitch wiped the dropship's memory! It had no information on the mothership, which--despite the crude scanning equipment available to OCT-A, she ought to have been able to spot in the sky--must have had a cloaking device of some kind. She would need to trick Phoebe into guiding the dropship home, with one of her servants aboard.

And she came close--so close.

Now the ship is in the sky, with the payload aboard--but helmed an organic, locked out of all automatic control. Her own copy of Aeon is still planetbound, and she's fresh out of ships.

And now they're coming for her.