Chapter 33: Planning

Delta watched the next episode of her show play by. The massage below was lovely. She leaned into it here and there, flexing her toes and angling the peds to pop out a few more sensations. Her feet remained clean, and the massaging worshipers respawned back beneath her soles each and every time.

Her yellow eyes scanned the custom city at her feet, still teeming with the sapient human consciousness clones she put there. The originals were always stored safely, though a form of memory persisted of course.

Delta pouted slightly. She had noticed the frequency of smiting started to die down. Seems a lot of them learned not to think bad thoughts about her during this particular fantasy of hers. Or, more likely, those that did were weeded out into one of the toe-ring gems of suffering.

Unfortunately for the ‘populace’ of the city to her front, she *wanted* to see more people get annihilated. Without any utterance other than a pleased coo, Delta took matters into her own hand.

The circuit-haired woman moved her gaze towards a particular populous block of the city. A few quick commands sent pithy bursts of green laser bolts from her eyes there. She then quickly looked around to pelt more areas flippantly. People hit directly just evaporated, and the resulting explosions of the laser impacts were enough to fry anything nearby as well.

Buildings crumbled when hit, and their bisected tops slid down over the fleeing mobs below. Cars, which their drivers weren’t the most used to, exploded if lucky. If unlucky, they were caught in the resulting heat and were cooked alive as the heat conducted through the metal and glass.

All those people she just obliterated found themselves entering her toe ring. They didn’t even think bad thoughts per-se, but she drank in their suffering all the same. It was delightful.

Now that it was clear Delta was just going to randomly slaughter them, more bad thoughts flew in which trigger more events. Delta smiled as she saw more tiny--to her mile tall form--storm clouds show up to zap people to dust.

The tan tyrant stayed active still. She spiced things up with her direct actions. She fired a long set of laser beams from her eyes. Her head swiveled left to right fast, which blew apart a thin arc of city along its path. Entire blocks boiled.

Delta lifted her right foot for just a moment. The massaging team thought they’d had the briefest second of reprieve. Smirking, she stomped it down to the team’s right, clipping a few hundred of the massagers while making shockwaves to burst apart a few hundred more.

That wasn’t her main goal, however. While that swath of worshipers respawned, her powers made it so her stomp opened rifts over the city. The earth opened below many thousands of people running through her metropolis. People fell into this vast cracks and crevasses. Their screams echoed as they fell deeper and deeper. The rifts widened out sometimes even to catch stragglers, who would easily fall off the edge to the reverberating quake her stomp had made.

Soon, the rifts closed and swallowed all those victims up. More minds to writhe in her torture stones.

Delta moved her right foot back onto the massage team and pointed her finger back out at the city. A bright yellow light with hints of red and orange glowed at the digit’s tip. Laughing, she fired the searing hot ray at the city. She moved her hand and finger like an old-timey writing instrument to draw a smile-face into the ground. The heat it gave was so hot as to scorch the land into black glass.

With a thought she changed the city so there was a wide open flat area in its center. Vast swaths of unlucky souls found themselves packed together, immobile. They couldn’t see it, but she did. They spelled out “Delta”. She moved her finger along them to obliterate them while simultaneously etching out her own name in that smooth black glass. Their deaths were quick, but agonizing, as every cell of their body practically combusted at once.

Finished, she giggled, then moved the beam along more of the cities filling her private realm.

“Are all you insects feeling the heat? Fitting, this finger beam of mine is based on the power of our star itself. A sun beam, perhaps. Long ago people used to roast bugs called ‘ants’ under magnifying glasses. I think this is quite similar, don’t you?”

Delta paused her hand at a sudden and disconcerting thought. She let the beam continue a bit, starting vast fires throughout the city as the air heated to combustion temperatures.

‘The sun.’ she thought.

‘The sun will kill the planet.’

The sun was humanity’s greatest ally and, in the past centuries, foe. Through humanity's past neglect of Earth, the heat of their system’s star threatened to burn the disrupted planet. Delta knew the climate crisis was managed thanks to a variety of Geoengineering measures, but that wouldn’t change the fact that the sun will eventually get too big for any sort of life.

Delta felt a twinge of stress that began to build. She realized how little time she actually had.

‘One year here is an hour outside. An hour. I’ve been in here 4 years. My physical body, my *meat*, has been rotting all this time.’, thought Delta.

Her nerves began to stir. She managed some stress by fidgeting her feet below, thoroughly massacring the remaining massage team over and over again.

‘Time. I need more time in here.’

The mob of worshipers beneath her soles were in a constant state of death and immediate respawning as Delta twisted her feet and shifted her toes. Just when they thought it couldn’t get any worse, she stood up.

Delta’s rise from her throne had all the people under her soft foot flesh crushed. Her heel, ball, toes: every aspect of her foot came down bearing the full weight of the mile-tall woman. They had experienced that before, but there was another problem. The circuit-haired woman just stood there for a bit, yet they were still made to respawn under her feet.

Consequently, the loyal massage team got crushed, and respawned under her feet where they were instantly crushed again. The men and women there barely even had an instant before their bodies burst each time. People died over and over again by the wrinkles they personally attended to, or beneath the pad of a toe they had put all effort into thus far.

The only ones that were safe where those under her arch, where the curved ‘roof’ of foot flesh was high enough to not crush them. They weren’t exactly pleased however. Delta's feet where close enough they had no where to go. The region was too crowded to move, and they were stuck listening to the sick sounds of other people dying over and over again in the crushing-loop.

To Delta, all those constant deaths created a repetitive popping sensation beneath her feet. She found herself enjoying it a bit, and shifted her feet lightly, toes wiggling. This got a few more people stuck into the loop. Still, it wasn’t enough to fully de-stress her. Her mind was still on this new problem.

‘But how can I get more time? I’ve already increased the time-dilation settings to the max I can with current resources.’

She started tapping her right foot. Aside from the quakes it sent over the entire city, it of course further tormented those people below.

‘I need to think.’

Delta started to pace around her cities. She turned off her smiting code she wrote earlier, and willed away her jewelry. The circuit-haired woman was entirely nude again. The couch and TV disappeared as well, for now. The people stuck in that toe ring perdition breathed a brief sigh of relief at not constantly burning alive, but their torment was far from over as they found themselves among the masses at Delta’s crushing feet. The worshipers too now had normal spawns. When people died, they just went back into the city somewhere.

Her bare feet flattened block after block. Her pacing route was unpredictable, and the godlike coder would suddenly turn 90 or 180 degrees to stomp those who thought themselves ‘smart’ at predicting the mile-tall monster’s steps.

Delta willed the snack-bowl from before to float by her. She took one more handful of its contents: people, of course, alongside chocolate-covered popcorn. A gulp sent them down her throat, and a thought made the bowl disappear after. The people joined the masses below to serve as sensations for her to soothe her nerves with. They were always her toys, but now they were her stress-toys.

The people screamed of course, constantly as she wiped them out over and over.

“Silence.” she said, and a thought had them all muted. They could no longer cry out to warn each other that she was approaching--not as though that ever saved anyone, of course.

Delta continued to contemplate on her predicament.

‘I need more resources, more than the headclips and what the computer farms give me. The computer farms!’

She was onto something. Her feet flattened jammed traffic below as her pace quickened with that brief surge of positive emotion.

‘Even with my Paradise demanding as much resources as possible, it only gives me that which I can take. Without people in the world, transaction systems, transit systems, and conventional delivery drones became free resources. Yet, there’s still so many automated processes going on constantly. Climate predicting functions, the autonomous cloud-seeding ships and, of course, all the other drones out there.’

Delta had to figure out how she could gain access to all those resources, how she could claim all the computing power humanity possessed.

But they didn’t possess it, because she possessed *them* after she integrated with their headclips. That’s when it hit her.

‘Of course! I’m thinking about this the wrong way. Why try to control all the computing resources when I can become them? I’ll just integrate with the computing farms themselves, just like I did with Paradise and the headclips! Better still, I’ll gain access to all the information only the farms know: namely, where the headclips of the deceased are kept. With those, I’ll have well over a half-a-billion new unique minds to add to my collection~’

Delta smiled. She kept moving along the city, but unmuted the population below. Their screams reminded her of her power.

‘Just as I became Paradise, I’ll become all programs everywhere on the planet: all computers even. I take such control, and the potential it offers. I’ll be humanity’s first cyber god in the real world and the digital one~’

She laughed to herself, thinking of possibilities. Of course, she landed on another problem as to how exactly to do that. She thought on what she knew about the computer farms.

The computer farms provided a distributed computing solution for the vast majority of the world’s computing needs. What they didn’t do, the built in computers on headclips took care of. Only a very slim bit of legacy computers were outside those two domains.

The actual farms were said to be vast server clusters, miles across along with the technology needed to power and support them. Delta had never seen one in person, as all computer farms were on the lands of the old nations.

The Great Misstep two hundred years ago leveled every occupied bit of Earth sans parts of the old USA. The nuclear weaponry of the time was highly potent and outright flattened everything it hit down to bare and barren earth. The government wasn’t gonna let that land go to waste, of course, and its mostly level nature provided the perfect building ground for the computer farms. Moreover, those regions could be treated less by the silver-seeder jets, meaning more solar and thermal energy could reach the ground there without affecting the USH citizens still alive.

The computer farms each had a core to control their efforts. These super computers within the farms monitored all demands coming from the USH citizens. Then, they balanced those among the other requirements they had to properly schedule and allocate resources.

‘Of course, I’ll just integrate with a computer core. Not just any, but the best one. The master computer core.’, thought Delta.

The computer farms all communicated with each other, usually to request or offload computational complexity if one area was more taxed than the other. One such computer farm at any given time was the “master” one. It could give orders the other farms couldn’t refuse: such as theoretically making them all part of its farm rather than their own independent ones. That was Delta’s plan.

The current master computer core resided in the first and supposedly largest computer farm ever built. It rested in a complex within the Sahara. The so called “Greatest Desert”.

‘But how to get there?’ thought Delta. It didn’t take long till her super intelligence had a solution.

‘Seems like I have to go back into the real world for a bit.’

With the way Paradise works, consciousnesses are typically expanded to enter the simulation. When Delta took control over the simulation, she sucked everyone else’s consciousness out of their headclips and stored them safely to clone from and make her ‘toys’ within the simulated reality. In that sense, all the bodies of people outside were inert save one: hers.

Delta alone had the control and ability to expand her mind back into her body. She’d be able to control her real self while still being one great super mind in here and overall. She never cloned her consciousness of course, only ever expanded it into new bodies. Now, she’d expand it back into her old body. Then, she’d simply travel to the Sahara where she’d make a machine to integrate her physical body and mind into the computer core there.

For a moment, Delta wondered what it’d be like to be a singular consciousness existing in two different times at once.

‘I guess I’ll find out~’, she thought.

Delta snapped her fingers and she and everyone else was back in the Nexus realm. The humans were in the city, while her superior self loomed over it all even taller. Her voice thundered over them.

“Good news, reality’s mistress will soon become an even greater god than before. And, as a consequence, the population of unique minds for me to toy with will nearly double. That’s right, I’m going to find the headclips of the dead. You’ll all have new people to suffer alongside soon enough.”

Delta snapped her fingers. From the perspective of those within the simulation, nothing happened.

In the real world, Delta’s physical body opened her eyes.