Chapter 42: Crunch Time

The pressure was on.

Delta’s solution was as daring as it was dangerous at a glance. She had to nudge the planet closer to the system’s star: the very thing that always threatened to ruin her Paradise! Worse still, she’d have to cut back to do it and get the needed energy for her plan.

Delta sat down on a giant throne within the Nexus realm. She manifested the city and its population down by her feet. Her bare right ped moved over the metropolis and pressed down. The buildings collapsed, and the people fell to the ground below, but she didn’t let them squish. Instead, they were all stuck underneath her miles-long foot, no matter how hard she pressed. She wanted them to wiggle, alive. As usual, their suffering soothed her; their panicked motions reminded her of how much power she had here.

Out in the real world the nanobots got to work. She had to dismantle some of her computer farms and associated tubes and wires in order to reclaim materials for her plan. The energy injector was what she worked on first. It looked like a giant needle surrounded by clear donut-shaped toroidal constructs connected via complex and macabre looking pipes and tubes. She built it where the North Pole used to be, and it stretched taller than the Misstep satellites floated in space. Delta had to adjust the orbits of the satellites, in fact, to remove the risk of any collision.

She also needed more power: lots more. She diverted energy from her vast computer-farms that spanned the globe to free it up for her needs. Yet, it wouldn’t be enough. She needed to more than quadruple the amount of solar panels and thermal absorbers. Even more of her computers were dismantled: sacrificed to help make her dreams of true divinity a reality.

The thought stressed Delta, and she pressed down on all those people even harder. No matter how much they wiggled, screamed or begged it didn’t soothe her enough to relax: not nearly enough.

There were more machines she had to build: engines. In order to get closer to the sun, she had to turn the entire planet into a ship of sorts. The nanomachines dismantled almost everything Delta had made thus far. She had only a continent’s worth of computer farms at her disposal now. In exchange, she was able to build massive thrusters jutting out of the planet’s sun-far side. Less enormous thrusters were dotted here and there for turning, and some strange ‘collector’ machines were interspersed all along the globe as well.

With a deep sigh, Delta put her plan in motion.

The fusion ramjets roared to life and unleashed nuclear flames from their thrusters. The special collectors she made sucked up ambient hydrogen, helium, and alpha particles from the void of space and fed it into the engines. There, intense magnetic fields compressed it all to the point of a fusion reaction with the resulting energy being used to propel the entire planet forward like a spaceship. Though the sun was over 91 million miles away, it’d be only about 3 hours to run into the star.

For Delta to get as close as she needed to be, it’d be less than half that time.

Her hyper-intelligent mind perceived time differently than a mundane one, but she lacked the usual augmentations extra continents worth of computers gave her. Delta even had to cut back the storage space for her consciousness-clone-processors as well. Still, the closer she got to the sun, the more accurate her predictions became. She had to fire the energy injector at just the right moment.

The heat hitting the planet was scorching, but she still needed more energy. The amount reaching her solar and thermal collectors was not nearly enough. She realized she had to cut back on Paradise itself.

The realm around Delta dissolved into a black void, and she reduced all the realistic buildings to simple polygons. She dissolved the floor beneath her and flooded it with empty space. The city she was stepping on found itself in her hand again, and she held it tight to help manage her worries.

The planet was nearly at the planned spot after just a few minutes. She pumped more and more energy into the injector device, but it still wasn’t enough. The converted world she piloted was approaching the point where even it would heat up and burn. Her computers would be irreparably fried, as would the energy collectors. Even if she survived at that point to reverse course, she would have lost matter to energy as the components burned. She’d be downgraded.

As she gathered more real world data for her plan, it became clear she had underestimated the energy demands. Delta had no choice anymore. She ordered the nanomachines to make even more energy collection devices. The gray swarm flew over what used to be Africa and converted even more of her computers to power generators. She stopped just short of decreasing her hyper-intelligence by even the slightest amount, but she still needed more.

In Paradise, Delta cut back as much as possible. Her realm shrunk to a small cube’s worth of empty void focused on herself. She completely dissolved the city. Her processors were using mere fractions of the power she used to use, but it was still too much. She didn’t dare reduce the nature of her being, even temporarily, so she had to look elsewhere.

Delta looked to the population of humanity, cloned from the safely stored original consciousnesses. Those, she’d protect as well so as to preserve the ‘mint-condition’ of her toy. These clones, however, she could probably figure something out with.

The tan woman squeezed all those people to a fine red mist, then remade them, only with far less resources devoted to their beings. They were just clones, after all, and for now they were barely sapient. Their minds in this moment were reduced to just a fraction of their usual intelligence as she lowered the resources devoted to them and repurposed it towards more processors. Their effective intelligence reduced to just being barely aware. In exchange, she was able to dismantle just a bit more storage space for consciousness-clone-processors and make just a bit more energy collectors.

Delta squeezed her hand again and they all popped. She smiled, as their low awareness was still enough for them to suffer. That’d suffice for now. She squeezed them tightly as an undying stress-ball clenched to her chest.

She had given up the last bit of energy she was willing to give, and into the injector it went. If her predictions were accurate as she thought they were, this would be it.

Atop the planetary-ship, the giant-needle like device stirred to life. The donut-shaped rings around its needle tip were alight and crackling with energy. The tip shimmered brighter than a star as it pierced the very fabric of the cosmos.

The energy injector fired, and the universe collapsed.