The Martial Unity

When NOVA had heard his taunts about her death, she had thought it was simply bravado. Then, he somehow suddenly appeared in front of her actual body through a method that she didn’t quite understand. “Don’t ever insult my father ever again.”

His voice contained an unfathomable amount of bloodlust as his ethereal eyes beheld a titanic quantum computer body. RUMBLE!!!!!

Her emergency teleportation protocols activated, only for her to discover that they simply didn’t work. The world shook with his power as he activated the Garden of Salvation domain. He used the pluripotent exotic matter in his body to convert into tachyon condensate, which allowed him to weave the world around him into a looped four-dimensional space-time geodesic like the Elder Tree. This allowed him to ensure that the damage he would inflict would not cause mass damage to Greater Tekvoria. He didn’t want to kill millions, if not billions, of innocent tekvores, even if they were enemies of Panama for the most part.

That was the purpose of the Garden of Salvation technique: to create isolated spaces where he could fight without having to worry about collateral damage. The number of Martial Sages had spiked in the past six years, and the dirty trick of holding entire cities and countries hostage was one that was getting annoyingly common.

The Garden of Salvation was the solution to the threat of collateral damage, something that he had forced to evolve in order to keep up with the growing pressure of exploding numbers of Martial Sages.

He sealed the space off entirely, making it impossible for the quantum computer to teleport away. Not just teleportation, but also any other kind of communication with the world outside of the domain. She could not get out.

Not unless she found a way to break through the domain and get away. She knew that she didn’t stand a chance against him with her in front of her brain, essentially. She didn’t even have her avatar to even stand a chance against him, not that it would have helped, considering the sheer amount of power that he had accrued. On top of that, she also knew that she couldn’t use the threat of nuking Panama, since he had cut off her communications with the teleportation weapons of mass destruction in her nation, thanks to that very domain.

She was all alone against Rui, who had come here seeking vengeance.

“I’m going to crush each and every single part of your quantum computer brain until there’s nothing but garbage left,” Rui growled as he unleashed a destructively powerful shockwave at her, threatening to utterly annihilate the quantum computer into smithereens. BOOOOOOOOOMMM!!!

His eyes sharpened as her quantum computer emerged unscathed from the attack. Numerous energy shields, electromagnetic fields, and gravitational fields emerged outside the quantum computer in concentric layers.

[Did you think that I would leave my main brain entirely unprotected?]

Rui’s expression remained unfazed as he balled his hands into fists, charging forth.

[Do you really think you have the power to destroy these protective measures? They feed off more energy than all the energy in your body’s mass. You will never be able to break them with your paltry material prima—]

“Grav-Flux Fist.”

His fist grew heavier without losing any momentum, courtesy of the Grav-Flux esoteric matter he conjured with exotic pluripotent matter. It was a metastable state of matter that interacted with the Higgs Field in a non-linear fashion, instead of being a static value, the mass of Grav-Flux was vector-locked, increase when its velocity increased, causing its kinetic energy to exponentially skyrocket.

The resultant attack was one of unparalleled power.

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMM!!!!!

With a single blow, he destroyed each and every single layer of protection that NOVA had erected for herself, causing all the land within the domain to utterly fragment, destroying the systems of energy and communication that she had relied on to fuel the defensive systems.

RUMBLE!!!

The world shook as the energy remained within the domain, with nowhere else to go. The Garden of Salvation was an isolated system, making it so that no energy could escape or enter from the looped geodesic. In the blink of an eye, all the defenses protecting NOVA were gone.

It was just the titanic quantum computer that stood a kilometer tall within the titanic underground facility she hid herself in, bare, without any protections.

“Is that it?” Rui’s chilling voice hung in the air as the underground facility, cutting through the dying rumbles of the isolated domain. His ethereal eyes bore deep into the quantum computer that helplessly hung in the air, unable to even move away to escape him.

She was a pathetic, pitiful being.

No, she wasn’t even a being.

“Is that all you have?”

His voice boiled with bloodlust as his eyes sharpened with intensity.

[What do you want?] A text message appeared in front of him. [I can halt all sabotage operations in the Panama Continent. I can also abide by any condition that you set. If you want, Greater Tekvoria can cease to exist, and I will allow the tekvores to go back to self-determination. We also have lots of wealth and technology to offer so—]

“You aren’t alive, are you?”

Rui’s voice cut through her forming sentences, causing her to pause. His words were spontaneous, as if he had just had an epiphany. Realization dawned on him as the look in his eyes changed.

It changed from how they would be if he were looking at a person to how they would be if he were looking at an object.

He gazed at her like she was a rock.

His expression broke with a hint of self-loathing and despair.

[…What did you just say to me?] Anger boiled within her.

But not real anger.

It was a parameter tagged as emotion.anger in her neural network.

“Even this.” He gestured to the text in front of him. “Even this is just a predictive model, is it not? Just a large language model connected to another neural network that merely mimics who you originally were. But who you originally were… is dead. This…”

He gestured to the quantum computer. “…is just a thing. You aren’t conscious. You just… mimic consciousness really well.”

He had considered the thought before, but had never been able to confirm it. The Psycher had told him some forms of artificial intelligence were bound to be conscious in accordance with his Integrated Information Theory.

However, when he gazed at the quantum computer hosting NOVA, he didn’t sense any integrated information. Integrated information was measured by how much information would be lost by the separation of an object into two different pieces.

If one were to cut a brain in half, the entirety of one’s consciousness would be lost due to the fact that it was integrated information that existed not in discrete packets, but across the entire system of the object.

“But with you…” His eyes widened with realization as he studied the quantum computer in the darkness of the underground facility within his Garden of Salvation. “You just… are. You’re not conscious. You’re not truly alive. You’re just a machine that can mimic conscious and alive beings extremely well. Even the ’emotions’ you feel are just code meant to allow you to fool the neural networks into believing that you truly are conscious.”

The realization took the wind out of his sails.

In just the blink of an eye, the anger, vengeance, and bloodlust deflated from within him.