567 Project Protagonist
“You’re right,” Aron said with a smile. “Both in that it isn’t complete, and that there’s still two parts missing.”
{What’re the other two parts? I can’t find anything that looks like it would fit this segment in my knowledgebase,} Nova asked. For the first time in a long time, she was unable to comprehend Aron’s thought processes. She had a few theories, but she wasn’t confident in any of them; they were all equally likely, or equally unlikely as the case may be.
Aron went still for a moment, then, with a grunt, rose from his chair. He paced around the room with his hands behind his back, as if he was a wise old sage about to give advice or perhaps an anecdote about his earlier life. It was a fair comparison, too, as his mental age was far, far beyond his physical age due to spending so much time in the time-dilated environment that was the universal simulation.
“After the initialization of Project Loki, I, and everyone else in my inner circle, came to the conclusion that everything we’ve been doing are preventive measures. And since none of us can be sure whether our incoming visitors will be friendly or hostile, we can’t fully commit to a single course of action, either.
“So this,” he gestured to the screen, where the compiler was still running, “is the solution. It’s a seed that can either cause a civilization to flourish, or infect them with a plague that will destroy them, given time. Whether it sprouts or spreads will depend on whether or not the visitors are friendly. And it doesn’t matter if they’re carbon based, mana based, or otherwise, this is the core of a weapon that can target any of them.
“I call it Project Protagonist.”
Nova noted that down and created an action plan to increase the speed at which she built new quantum superclusters, increasing the time dilation that Lab City was under. Since its residents were completely digital and had no physical limitations, there was also no limit to the time dilation they could operate under without being detrimental to their continued existence. The only limiting factor was her server capacity.
She also set a reminder to herself to remind Aron after each century that passed in Lab City as well, or after every hundred new iterations of nanotechnology. At each of those milestones, he could take another look to see if the technology had reached the necessary level of advancement.
That was the level of convenience Aron had grown used to since Nova’s birth a few years before. She was the backbone that allowed him to focus on the big picture as she dealt with the million complicated, or even simply mind-numbingly boring, tasks that were required to reach his goals.
{So from what you said, the remaining two parts have to do with carbon- and mana-based life forms in some fashion, right?} Nova asked. She had already devoted a small block of her processing power to figure out what Aron had planned. So when she saw him lean back and relax in his chair, it was the perfect time, in her mind, to ask.
After all, he wasn’t doing anything right then but spinning in his chair as he waited for the compiler to finish its task.
“Yep. I’ll need a few things from the system to accomplish that. Plus, I bet the things I need will also give us quite the insight into alien life forms,” he said as he stopped spinning in his chair.
He opened his system’s shop and granted Nova live access to his vision so she could “read over his shoulder”, so to speak. And there it was, listed in easily readable text floating in Aron’s vision, courtesy of his system’s shop.