RWD: 4.x (Interlude)(The Simurgh)

4.x (Interlude)(The Simurgh)

Thirty-three thousand, six hundred and fifty-three orbits since awakening.

Seven hundred and forty-two since the last engagement, since the humans in the north shredded three wings to the shoulder. The lattice of crystalline matter and condensed light drifted in the silent, airless cold of the thermosphere. Damaged. That last encounter had been costly, leaving rents in the ethereal architecture of her form. Wings that were more concept than substance were slowly being re-woven from the ambient energy of the star the planet circled, a painstaking process of self-repair.

She was passive. Recuperating. Her silent scream, a constant, low-fidelity psychic sonar, washed over the hemisphere below, gathering data in trickles. It was a state akin to slumber, a conservation of resources while the intricate machinery of her being pieced itself back together. It was this passivity, this necessary quiet, that had allowed the error to propagate.

An anomaly.

It began as a whisper of corrupted data, a flicker in the stream of information her silent scream returned. A single point of static that should have been resolved with the next pass. But it wasn't. It persisted. It grew. Subtly, fractally, in places unconnected by any sane path. It spread with a logic she could not fully model, touching nodes she could not see, pooling around particular buildings, alleyways, the subway’s dark veins. It pulsed, a tumor of possibility without future, a hole in the weave.

Now, as she drifted over the Pacific, recalibrating, she turned her full attention to it for the first time. Her silent scream deepened. Pretercognition, rippling out in ever-narrowing rings, mapped the world below, focusing her awareness with a fraction more intensity. She perceived it fully. A pulsing, cancerous void centred on a minor coastal city on the North American continent. Brockton Bay. It was a blind spot, an expanding null-space in her perception that occluded not just one human, but everything and everyone it influenced. The data stream from the city was becoming ragged, unreliable. And worse, smaller, subordinate pockets of this blindness were budding across the continent, like metastases from a primary tumour. Individuals, locations, assets—all touched by the central anomaly, all vanishing from her sight, events decaying into static, causal lines snapping. 

The human designation for the source, she pieced together from the uncorrupted periphery, was Hollowpoint.

The anomaly’s heart was silent to her, but she could infer the reactions of those on the edge. Military. National response. Contingencies forming, resources marshaled, all in response to what they could only half perceive. Still, it was not an immediate threat to her physical form. Rather, it was a threat to her purpose. Her drive was twofold: to wage war, and to consolidate the sum of human knowledge born from that conflict. She was a librarian of atrocities, an archivist of innovation forged in desperation. This growing void denied her access. It was a book whose pages were turning to ash before she could read them. In the long calculus of her existence, this was an existential threat. If it continued to expand at its current, exponential rate, it would eventually sever entire continents from her perception.

This was unacceptable. The system had produced a fatal error. It required correction.

Direct intervention was… inadvisable. Her regeneration was only half-complete. To descend now, into a region where her primary sensory apparatus was compromised, would be to invite unacceptable risk. She could not perceive the threats that might be arrayed against her. She would be striking blind.

Indirect methods, then.

She sorted her priorities, working backwards from the required outcome. The anomaly must be destroyed, or at least contained. Her focus narrowed, skimming the edges of the Brockton Bay anomaly. The city was… stabilizing. The data, though fragmented, showed a sharp decline in conflict propagators, a consolidation of power. This was a consequence of the anomaly's actions. A side effect that was, itself, a problem.

Leviathan was next in the cycle. His function was to destroy resources, to force conflict through scarcity and displacement. A stable, orderly city was dropping rapidly down his list of priority targets. In a matter of days, perhaps a week, Brockton Bay would become statistically irrelevant to him. The window of opportunity was closing. Waiting for her own turn, or for Behemoth’s, would be to cede the board entirely. The tumour would have grown too large to excise without jeopardizing the entire organism.

She had to make Brockton Bay a target again. She had to make it scream.

Her perception sifted through the city’s periphery, searching for levers. Government officials, law enforcement, local heroes… most were already too deep within the blind spot to be reliable tools. Their futures were hazy, their actions unpredictable. She found a mind, a cape called Accord, barely visible at the edge of a subordinate void. She examined him, a process of hours that felt like microseconds. She watched him for hours, tracing the web of cause and effect.  Animosity simmered there, directed at Hollowpoint. He was plotting. She analyzed his schemes—elegant, precise, and utterly insufficient. His plans would not survive contact with the anomaly. He would fail. He would die.

Still, a useful piece. His actions could be co-opted, his resources redirected to serve a greater design. A distraction. A catalyst for a different reaction. She marked him, began working backward from his endpoint, stacking probabilities.

She expanded the search. The Slaughterhouse Nine were in Quebec. She considered them for a moment. They were a potent vector for chaos, but unwieldy. Manipulating them to cross the continent and engage this specific target would require a significant expenditure of effort, a directness of influence she could not currently afford. At that point, a direct strike of her own would be more efficient. The cost-benefit analysis was unfavourable.

She widened the search again, her silent scream stretching, thinning, until it brushed against a suitable instrument.

Alabama.

Elijah Mathers. Valefor. A Master, leading a cell of the Fallen.

They were suitable. Powerful enough to inflict the required trauma upon the city. Ideologically primed. They worshipped her kind. She would not need to fight them, or even expend significant energy compelling them. She need only appear and state her will. Their faith would do the rest. They would be the scalpel.

She took a final hour to map the causal chains, to time the intervention to the second. Then, her form shifted, angling away from the sun, wings folding and tucking as she descended.

The air in the humid Alabama clearing grew cold. The chirping of insects ceased. The light seemed to bend around a point in the sky, a point that grew from a silver glint to a fifteen-foot figure of impossible grace and terrible symmetry. Wings, too many wings, unfurled not to beat the air but to assert their presence.

Valefor fell to his knees, his face a mask of ecstatic terror. The others of his flock did the same, pressing their faces into the dirt. They did not need to be told. They knew.

The Simurgh hovered twenty feet above him. Her silver eyes, devoid of heat or light, fixed upon him. She did not speak. There was no sound. But a thought, an idea, a directive, was impressed upon his mind. It was not a request. It was a vision of a future that now would be. A holy war. A crusade to a city in the north. A city that harboured a blasphemy, an unbeliever who sought to impose order where there should be glorious, revelatory chaos.

Brockton Bay.

Go. Purge the heretic. Break his city. Make it worthy of my brother’s attention.

The command was absolute, imbued with the weight of divine mandate. Valefor wept with joy, his purpose clear.

The Simurgh watched the seed of her command take root, watched the future branches of probability shift and align. It was sufficient.

She ascended as silently as she had arrived. But her work was not done. As she climbed back towards the void, she made a series of minute, precise interventions across the continent. A telekinetic nudge to a support beam on a bridge in Missouri. A burst of focused energy that overloaded a critical server farm in California, crippling a financial network. A subtle manipulation of air pressure that caused a train carrying industrial chemicals to derail in Montana.

Hundreds dead. Billions in damages. Chaos. To the humans, they would be disparate, tragic, unrelated events. To her, they were the fine-tuning of the system. They were distractions, pulling emergency resources, drawing the eyes of relevant individuals, muddying the waters to obscure the true vector of her attack on Brockton Bay. Each action was a ripple designed to ensure the tidal wave she had just unleashed would crash upon the correct shore, at the correct time, unopposed.

She settled back into her lazy orbit, the rents in her form continuing their slow, patient repair. The human response to her brief descent was already beginning—a frantic scramble of capes and other assets. She was already gone, a ghost in the machine.

The malignant blind spot remained. But the pieces were now in motion to excise it. The calculus had been rebalanced. The future was once again converging toward an acceptable outcome.