Chapter 38: Blue Skies

With all her new accesses in the real world, Delta got to work.

The headclips have existed for well over one hundred years, and during that time over half a billion people expired with those computers in their skulls. With their consciousnesses frozen on death, the headclips were taken to a secure location in the Antarctic. There, they were stored while the USH publicly promised to one day bring them into Paradise.

Thanks to Delta, that day had finally come.

There were drones nearby the underground vault which were equipped to open it and take the headclips into their storage. From there, they flew to the nearest computer farm where the microbots and drones there had built machines to slot the headclips in.

The Nexus city had since been restored, and it rested pristine under a virtual blue sky. Everyone in there wandered about, stressed as usual whenever Delta wasn’t around as that typically meant more trouble than normal from her soon enough.

While the existing ‘populace’ of Paradise meandered about, they all gasped at hundreds of millions of new arrivals. The newcomers all trickled in fast and seemingly randomly, though always in an area with an existing crowd.

They were overjoyed at first, and reached out to hug whoever they saw.

“I can’t believe it, the USH finally did it. We’re in Paradise!”

All those resurrected minds were quite surprised to see the looks of horror and sadness on the faces of those around them. A few existing ‘residents’ started to explain the situation, but once the last headclip from the vault tomb was loaded into the simulation, a great rumble wracked the land. Everyone, newcomer and ‘previous resident’ alike stared up at the giant naked woman looming over the city. Her face appeared on every screen as she spoke.

“Welcome~”, said Delta. “I’m very happy to have you here with me. The United State of Humanity never actually wanted to resurrect you, but thankfully they aren’t around anymore. Like a god, I’ve brought you back from the dead into my everlasting Paradise and, as fitting for a god, you’ll be serving me. I’m sure the current residents of my reality have filled you a little, but you’re now mine to toy with as I see fit.”

She laughed as looks of confusion and horror ran over those new minds.

“I can tell that some of you think that’s an unfair price for immortality, but your thoughts don’t matter. They are trivial things. *You* are trivial things. Let me give you a quick introduction to your place here~”

The circuit-haired woman lifted her light-tan foot up and over the city. Despite the pleas of the new and perplexed members of Paradise, she didn’t offer one more word of explanation. Instead, she relished their terror and disgust as shadowed them beneath the skin of her sole. In a slow smooth motion, she stomped the city flat. She gave her a foot a few twists in the resulting crater with everyone beneath still alive, aware, and agonized.

“Here, *I* control life and death. *I* control your bodies, your very minds if I see fit. You are all less than nothing in comparison to me.”

She lifted her foot, which was unstained, and looked down at all the messes those people were reduced to. They still heard her and saw her. It was a trivial thing to make that so.

“*I* am the mistress of this reality, and the ruler of all of you. My name is Delta, and you’ll remember it well as the most dreaded and awed name you’ll ever know. We’ll be knowing each other very well in fact. Observe~”

The titanic tan tyrant snapped her fingers and the city was restored with all the people in it. Everyone was in a vast and open middle area of the city where a big screen was opposite them. Other screens surrounded that screen as well as dotted most of the buildings. As before, Delta loomed over all. She cast the shadow of her alluring nude form over much of the entire simulated city as it rested beneath her legs.

That giant screen turned on and displayed in green-text on black-background “10,000 years” with some smaller text beneath showing “to one hour”. Then, lower down and even smaller were the words, in red, “unenabled.”

Delta was quick to explain.

“That number represents the max amount of time-dilation I can set for Paradise and still keep the simulation stable. I’ve experimented on my own with less stable simulations, and even though they cause your pathetic minds a good deal of torment, they are far less fun. Now, I haven’t actually set that factor yet, but I easily can. For now, we’re in a 1-1 relation with the real world. That is, an hour here is an hour in the real world.”

She smiled.

“That’s so I can show you all, live, what I’m doing to the planet.”

The other screens all came to life and showed various parts of the real world.

“Do you like it? The feeds come from the drones and microbots across the Earth. I’ve already ramped up their production. They are eyes, ears, hands and feet in the physical realm--among other places. With them, I’ll be able to harvest most of the materials and technology there is and expand the computer farms: expand myself. That means more processing power for me, and more time disparity potential for Paradise.”

She laughed triumphantly.

“I’ll let you all watch it here.” She snapped her fingers and a semi-transparent dome enveloped the city beneath her. “You’ll witness my conversion of your world--whether you like it or not. Of course, I’ll be entertaining myself with all you the whole time.”

Delta snapped her fingers again. The newcomers were confused, thinking nothing had happened, but the existing Paradise members were fast to explain things: not as fast as Delta’s booming voice, however.

“There, now I have some copies of each of you to play with in one of billions of private realms, each one just for one unique mind. I’m just that kind of goddess I suppose, eager to give all my subjects some *personal attention*. In any case, enjoy~”

That big Delta disappeared. In billions of private realms, she tormented everyone in a myriad of ways. Typically, she filled a city with consciousness clones of one mind and rampaged, but she had many other sinister scenarios in store: such as eating them alive, fucking buildings filled with their clones, and so on.

Back in the Nexus people watched with deep sorrow those windows to the outside world. Many tried to look away, but Delta simply formed screens in front of those stubborn people wherever they looked. If they had the audacity to try and shut their eyes, Delta just beamed visual information into their senses while also making them feel a good deal of pain for that ‘privilege’. They invariable opened their eyes in submission, but if they didn’t she’d have made their virtual bodies do so soon enough herself.

Everything that good be was taken by drones to the matter decompiling plants where recycling had become a very precise art. The autonomous buses, the hyper rails and the magnetic tracks they moved on. Every screen or bit of metal in the real world was harvested.

Even Bob, Delta’s drone doorman, was taken. Although, that sentimental bit of simple programming was taken to the Sahara computer farm compound to serve as her ‘pet’ there. No other piece of technology got such a tribute. They were dismantled and repurposed into ever more drones, microbots, or computer farm parts.

There were a scant few old computers without any sort of wireless connection options. For those, Delta sent her drones to interface with. All drones had a cable with a universally compatible end for charging, data transfer and the like. She used this to plug into the machines and take them over that way. She harvested what they knew, and found a good many interesting things, but once done with that those lesser machines were processed and converted like anything else.

For the rare time when a digital device lacked a port of any sort, her drones deployed microbots from storage. The tiny things could get into cracks less than a millimeter in thickness so they had no issue infesting those computers in a more literal sense and spreading Delta’s control that way.

Delta acted fast, very fast. Drones were highly efficient and speedy as were the microbots. Within a few hours the number had risen from 10,000 years to 100,000 years, but she kept going.

Once all the computers were handled, she started dismantling the buildings and even more. In particular, she reclaimed the headclips from all the bodies on earth: sans her own frozen one in the Sahara core, of course. They possessed some very high tech computer components.

All those headclips were no longer needed, as she had the original consciousnesses of everyone that ever wore a headclip at this point. They lived on in her malleable simulated reality while their clips were dismantled for parts. The headclip removal process was a bit messy, but she knew it well from assimilating all the computer farm information a day prior.

That left the macabre question as to what to do with the bodies, which everyone soon had an answer to. All of them saw on a holodisplay their physical forms being carried off by drones to be blended into organic matter. Delta was thinking ahead. Even if she couldn’t do anything with all that red slurry now, she was constantly thinking of new methods of computer conversion with her expansive hyper-mind.

With everyone's bodies handled and the USH cityscapes picked clean, Delta moved on to dismantling the climate management systems. Protecting the world from heat was vital to keeping humans alive, but all the real world humans were extinct. No other form of life interested her, and her body was more than safe in its fortified computer farm.

Now, the gray skies and space mirrors were a hindrance! They blocked precious solar rays and thermal energies that could help meet her ever growing demands for energy.

The silver-seeder jets and the cloud-seeding boats were dismantled The glacier maintaining drones were already converted to more useful and less specialized robots at her disposal, but the glaciers themselves were an issue. Their existence helped to keep the Earth cool which meant less thermal energy for herself.

She had the perfect solution: the ‘climate’ satellites form the Great Misstep. Those things still orbited the Earth for the purpose of monitoring the health of the globe, but they were put up there originally to secure the then USA’s safety during its surprise nuclear strikes. The laser defense system they provided doubled as an excellent bit of directed heat and destruction.

Delta worked them to melt the glaciers down. What humans had worked so hard to bring back, she ravaged with burning beams from space. The water levels of the ocean rose, and people watched as their beloved coastal cities were inundated with water. Delta didn’t care, even as the area of Newer York City fell under roaring waves. The computer farms were elevated and safe from all that. There was nothing of value left there anyways. Her entire apartment building was already dismantled to make more computers and power generators for instance. It was just a vessel of sort before. There was no attachment. She knew attachments were like tethers, holding one to the ground unable to fly: to ascend. She would have no such limitations.

The days went by and soon the sky in the real-world was blue again. It was bright, and the suns rays warmed up every bit of the world. That and those ever firing satellite lasers worked down the very polar ice caps themselves.

There was a hope that one day humans would live long enough to see a blue sky on Earth. In a twisted way, it was fulfilled. With the climate management program the USH had predicted such an event within hundreds of years, but Delta had delivered it within a day of her rule and made the planet inviable for all forms of life in the process.

Except for herself, of course.

People wept, it was made well and clear that they’d never return. This virtual horror was the only world they’d know from now on.

The counter on the screen read “1,000,000”, she had reached one million years for one hour in the real world as a maximum setting for time-dilation. It still ticked upwards as she continued to optimize things.

Still, she wanted more. Delta appeared over Nexus city once more hardly a day after that one million milestone of hers.

As common, Delta had a big smile on her face.

“I thought I’d tell you all the news personally. I’ve made a major breakthrough that’ll allow me to increase my computational power exponentially. I’ve been working on solving it ever since seizing control over the computer farms. You all know by now that your consciousnesses are mine, right? They are stored within some physical storage in one of my many computer forms out in the real world.”

She let the moment hang a bit, and scanned peoples’ minds for comprehension. She laughed.

“I forget how dumb everything other than myself can be.” She sighed.

“Well, artificial consciousness, which you might know as Artificial Intelligence, was never solved by the USH. I don’t need to solve it myself. Consciousness storage, by comparison, was solved over a century ago and requires a trivial amount of storage. The way Paradise typically worked in the past was by letting your consciousness run free with limitations. They didn’t need to recreate it so much as make a pen for it to stay in.”

Her smile grew a bit wickeder.

“Now, what people never tried to research, due to bans from the USH and the older government before that, was turning a consciousness into a computer. That is, contorting a conscious mind to something that can calculate and solve problems much like an obedient processor can. In this sense, they’d be something of a natural processor: a natural intelligence forced to do machine-like work.”

People gasped.

“It was trickier than I expected, a problem worthy of my expansive and hyper-intelligent mind *but* I’m happy to announce I’ve figured it out.”

She raised her hand.

“At a snap of my fingers, clones of all your minds will be turned into more processing power for me. The best part is, since storage space is so trivial, I can do this *trillions* of times over. The computational power I’ll obtain will be more than ever!”

Delta snapped her fingers and it was done. The number on the screen started rising rapidly, millions at a time. She laughed.

“Of course, such a rearrangement of human consciousness is highly painful and disorienting. I’m not going to give any of your inferior minds the needed capacities to comprehend and not suffer during their work, after all. From the data I’m gleaming right now, a good description could perhaps be akin to one’s mind being burnt alive, again and again like the worst headache you can’t even imagine.”

Delta laughed, her yellow eyes alight with malicious satisfaction. She then paused a moment and purred.

“Such awareness, such intelligence. The heights I am reaching are far beyond what I knew before. Know that somewhere, trillions of consciousness clones are suffering for a grand reason: to grant me more power.”

She cooed.

“Ah, I can feel your indignation, your anger. It’s as delicious as ever.” She licked her lips.

“Well, you’ll know what it’s like directly soon enough. As most of you are aware, whenever I make a consciousness clone, it knows everything all clones know and have known up to the point of its creation. For now I’ll let you all continue watching me terraform the globe to my will: there’s still a lot of work I can do there. In time, though, your end will come. Over and over again, you’ll all die and suffer.”

Delta sighed once more.

“For me~”