System Supervillain, Chapter 190 (Patreon)

Chapter 190 – Data Collection

The assistant decided that trying to fight an entire team of supervillains on her own was a poor life choice. The group of scientists I’d bypassed in favor of taking on the Sentinels were of a similar mindset. Especially when they saw that their creations were thoroughly destroyed, beyond any hope of their self-repair systems reactivating them.

And yes, it turned out that they did have self-repair systems. Robust ones. The kind where you had to so thoroughly destroy the Sentinel that you brought it to negative 40 BODY, like you’d have to do with a living creature to keep it dead, and then you needed to break the power core, just to make sure. For something that didn’t bleed, that was an impressively tenacious form of regeneration.

From what Web Mistress was able to rip out of the computers, these Sentinels were still in the prototyping and design stages. They were kept intentionally ‘dumb’, because the scientists found that doing that made them immune to many types of attacks. Encryption was laid into their robotic brains to keep them from being easily controlled, and they had no wireless or radio connectivity on purpose. They could receive voice commands from registered sources, but they could only be reprogrammed with direct connections.

Even Web Mistress had to admit that it was a beautifully simple way of keeping her from meddling with the machines. If they’d had even a simple radio connection, then getting into one and controlling it would have been simple. The encryption protocols would have only slowed her down, and not by much. However, there was no way that she’d be able to get to the access port just below the thing’s neck, and stay safe long enough to reprogram one while it was actively trying to kill her. Like the air-gapping that they used with the computers inside the base, it was a low-tech counter to her powers that worked precisely because it was low-tech.

It was a good reminder that the minds behind the SDI were not idiots, and they weren’t so foolish as to believe that things couldn’t go wrong. I’d run across a lot of very powerful people (superpowered or not) in my career, and it was truly astonishing how rare that attitude was. Most people with power, whether it was governmental, financial, or of the super variety, seemed to believe that there was no way that things could go against their projections. Whether it was naïve optimism, simple refusal to accept the idea that they could be wrong, or the kind of blind zealotry that causes people to ignore all the warning signs, because Deus Vult (or whatever their slogan happened to be), it was a sad truth that most powerful individuals assumed that, in the end, they would be victorious.

That was even true of the ones who had contingencies for failure. Actually, those ones often had even more of that special kind of delusion of eventual victory. For every ten individuals that believed that their contingencies meant that a setback in one area would advance two other plans, only one of them had the intellect and resources to make that happen, and the other nine were just dealing with varying degrees of cope, trying to soothe battered egos by saying that everything was still within their designs. How much of that was fact, and how much was self-delusion, depended on the nature of their plans, and how badly different sections failed.

Such people tended to fall into two main camps, not counting the one in ten that actually pulled it off. One side, when defeated, simply pulled back, and launched a new scheme, telling themselves that the setback was simply gathering data or moving pieces into place for the next strike. They were actually the least delusional of the two groups, which meant I had slightly more respect for them.

The other ones? Well, they kept throwing things at the wall, and seeing what stuck. It wasn’t that they were master planners or strategists, but they were simply using a shotgun approach. But their ego demanded they believe that the reason why one project succeeded while eight others were foiled was because those eight were all diversions or alternatives from their real plan. And some of them actually believed it, which was even sadder.

The SDI director and his minions were not like that, which was refreshing, in its way. Instead of being certain that every defeat would lead to eventual victory, they were the different kind of fanatic, the kind that stubbornly refused to give up, no matter how badly they were beaten on any given day. They were like kudzu. You could rip it up, burn it, poison it, starve it, and more, but if you left any trace behind, it would return, and grow, and cover everything, unless you had constant vigilance over years. Short of glassing the earth it grew in, there was no way to instantly remove it, and ensure that the problem was gone for good.

That kind of fanatical tenacity was respectable, in its own way. However, it was also really, really annoying. I preferred my problems to remain dead when I killed them. That was the whole point of killing them, after all. It was why I went to such lengths to make examples of the people who attacked me, to make it so I didn’t have to repeat those examples more than necessary.

Which is why I had Web Mistress edit the disadvantages of our captured SDI employees, starting with the director, and continuing on with his assistant and the scientists. They were all at the ‘Competent Normal’ level, like the troopers, but with different skill sets, and no power armor. That meant they had a maximum of 50 points of disadvantages, normally, and we couldn’t add more than that, even with our System Administrator access, without causing their files to be flagged. Since I still had no idea who might be above us, reviewing those flags, I didn’t want to risk drawing attention.

Disadvantages

Cost

Disadvantage

25

Physical Limitation – Must always tell the full truth (All the Time, Fully Impairing)

This individual is physically incapable of saying anything they know is untrue, and cannot lie, even by omission or misdirection. They must always tell the full and complete truth, and cannot refuse to answer questions.

25

Psychological Limitation – Protector of Superhumans (Very Common, Total)

This individual has a complete and overriding compulsion to always do their best to protect and promote the welfare of all individuals with superhuman abilities, always striving to do their best to make the lives of superhumans better.

That did not, however, mean I couldn’t be a petty bastard about how I had Web Mistress punish them. To be perfectly clear, Web Mistress did not alter their personality, memories, skills, or desires in any way. Everything that made them ‘them’ was still there. However, we made it so they were going to find being part of the SDI completely impossible from now on.

The first disadvantage basically made them physically incapable of telling lies, even through omission or by telling incomplete truths. No misleading statements or not telling the full truth. No refusing to answer a question, either. If someone asked them a question, they physically had to answer as completely and honestly as possible. The System would not let them do otherwise.

This, naturally, was a wonderful gift for anyone who wanted to interrogate them about the SDI and whatever resources they had. I expected that the people who helped fund and support the organization were going to be very unhappy when the Director, especially, started talking and literally could not stop himself from naming names. There was a good chance that whoever was behind the organization would try to silence him, as soon as they found out the truth.

The second disadvantage, though, was like a knife to the gut. It would hurt, and keep hurting, and I wouldn’t be surprised if a couple of them decided to eat a bullet to end it. While the Psychological Limitation did not technically force them to act a certain way, best case scenario for trying to act against that limitation required them to make an EGO roll at a -5 minimum penalty. So, for Competent Normal people, who usually had an EGO of 15 or under, that meant they would need to roll a 7 or under on a 3d6, minimum in order to do anything that would harm superhumans. And that was the best-case scenario.

Considering that their entire careers, up until this point, had been focused around containing or killing superhumans, that was going to be rough on them. In fact, some would say that simply rewriting their minds so that they liked supers would be a kinder, more ethical course. Couldn’t really say I disagreed, but, well, I was a supervillain for a reason. I didn’t do ‘kind and ethical’. I did ‘effective and educational’. Anyone who learned about what happened to this group would think long and hard about crossing me, which was the entire point of the cruelty.

Turning Web Mistress loose on the base computers (the ones that hadn’t been damaged in the fighting, at least) revealed that the Sentinel program wasn’t the only ‘containment’ program that the SDI’s research budget was being funneled to. Sure, the Sentinel program was the only one that had reached the prototyping stage, but giant robots were less of a threat than some of the other programs. Sure, giant robots designed to overwhelm and outlast supers were a problem, but they were a big, obvious problem. Nothing about an eight-meter-tall robot was subtle, after all.

Project Chlorine was a nasty piece of work, and a far more insidious one. It entailed inserting people into the medical system, specifically in hospital maternity wards. The files explained that the goal of the project was to ‘chlorinate the gene pool’. Eugenics, basically. Not using retroviruses or the like, as the Gel-Nak had done to themselves, and others, but doing it in a subtler, crueler fashion.

The people who joined Project Chlorine would do genetic testing of unborn fetuses, running checks for mutations or other superhuman indicators before the child was even born. When they found them, they would work to induce miscarriages and use nanites to sterilize the mothers, thus ensuring that the ‘deviant’ genes were permanently removed from the gene pool, with little to no evidence, especially after project members in the hospital administration ‘managed’ the records.

That… that was evil and cruelty on a level that I couldn’t even imagine. And I had done plenty of horrible things in my time. But my atrocities always had a point to them, and they always came after someone had attacked me and mine. That was the line I set myself. Yes, I was, fairly directly, responsible for the deaths of billions on Thraxl Prime alone, since I’d put the planet into an ice age. Oh, sure, the Gel-Nak civil war hadn’t helped, but it was obvious that the main cause of death for the billions on the planet was from the ice age I’d thrown at the world.

However, that was part of an action against a species that had threatened the wholesale enslavement and ‘ordering’ of Earth. That was an entirely different scenario than deliberately inserting people into the medical system to target mothers and unborn children, killing the children and sterilizing the mothers, simply to prevent the genetics from spreading. One was a response to an attack, designed to shock an interstellar empire into inaction while Earth’s defenses could be built. The other was premeditated murder and medical mutilation because they weren’t the right type of person to you. That put the SDI firmly into the ‘unreasonable villain’ category.

Project Colonial, on the other hand, was both better, and worse. Better, because it did not involve the kind of medical malpractice that Project Chlorine demanded. Worse, because it was even more subtle, and much harder to argue against, since it was based, in large part, on certain realities that were hard to ignore.

Project Colonial had two main parts. The first part was to ensure that the UN Space Command, and any successor military groups that came about, were pure human. Since most superpowers were either useless or active hinderances on a spaceship (especially the combat powers), I couldn’t even really argue against this. The whole time we’d been flying around the Gel-Nak Empire, breaking heads and unmaking the Empire at its very core, the only ones out of all of us who was able to do anything other than just sitting and watching were Nemesis Spark and Web Mistress. And Web Mistress was mostly just using the time to infiltrate data networks in the system, to find targets and ensure that any ground resistance would be scattered, at best. The space battles were entirely Nemesis’s show.

The second part was to encourage superhumans to move to newborn space colonies, starting with the Moon, but eventually including Mars, the asteroid belt, and so on. Because superhumans were, well, more capable than humans, they made the obvious choice for going into areas that were less settled, and taming new worlds. And, eventually, you could arrange for laws to have all superhumans automatically migrate to the outer colonies.

That was the reason why Colonial was worse than Chlorine. Colonial was a generational plan, intending to eventually make Earth pure human only, and dumping supers in the colonies. And if anyone objected? Well, the navy would be pure human, and taking orders from Earth. Even most supers had trouble dealing with orbital bombardment.

And it could run side-by-side with Chlorine, too. In fact, the files referenced Chlorine in the set-up stage, while turning Earth into a human-only ‘utopia’. This was designed to make the systematic elimination of supers a matter of bureaucracy, invisibly and efficiently going along the path of least resistance until it was too late for anyone to do anything about it. It was one of the nastiest plans I’d ever seen, and I was a professional supervillain.

I kept my tone as even as possible. “Web Mistress, I need you to set up a meeting with Silver Knight so we can give him our prisoners, and then I want you to get us a meeting with the Guild. Prepare copies of everything. I have a feeling that the Guild is going to be very interested in this.”

Web Mistress chuckled. “By which you mean that they are going to be actively sponsoring jobs to eliminate the SDI as an organization, piece by piece. This is a direct threat to both sides, after all, eliminating the Guild’s need for neutrality.”

“Yes, and the SDI is about to find out just how bad it can be when the Guild takes the gloves off.”