Cinder

1 - A New Era

Time.

Everyone was so concerned with ... time.

Even when interfering with the actual fabric of reality and the timeline itself, it seemed that all anybody ever felt was that time was running out. That there wasn't enough of it to suit their needs.

What humans failed to understand is that time, by its own nature, was simply a matter of perspective. A conceptual construct made by humans to add some sort of meaning to their lives and the events that take place in them. When you saw past the illusion of a limitation, you realized that time is merely analogous to opportunity.

When your artificial mind can process a hundred thousand calculations in seconds, time slowed down. It extended ... gave someone more opportunity. More time to work with.

Spyglass had a hell of a lot of time.

The Amalgamation event had forced all factions to focus attention on it; the Militia, the IMC, it didn't matter. Everyone had become unified in their struggle against a common enemy.

It was not so for the advanced AI commander.

Instead, he had withdrawn, using all this new time that the Amalgamation had bought him to calculate the odds of humanity successfully defending themselves. It was close, but past experience had given humanity an edge over the new challenger. With a fifty-eight percent chance of survival, he'd been willing to stake a bet that humans would come out victorious.

This meant that he had no need to waste resources on assisting them, and he could instead devote that capital towards a plan that would ensure peace on the frontier. No more death, no more senseless war that stretched across the cosmos, no more families torn apart or cities set upon fire.

The issue was humanity itself.

Even with the supposed peace talks undergoing discussion amongst the heads of the Militia and IMC, there was a ninety-four percent chance of certain failure that such a peace would last.

And he was never wrong.

Soon, more war would break out, and the humans would go back to slaughtering one another once more. It may take years, but he knew it would happen.

If it was his duty to protect the IMC's interests, then his full potential could never be realized ... to protect humanity as a whole.

Those goals may have aligned with his own interests, but what could be done? The current leadership had proven itself to be incapable of reasonable action. It was time to take charge ... to make change.

Often, Spyglass had been accused of being unnatural, of being ... inhuman.

Well, of course he was inhuman; he wouldn't dare to associate himself with the weaknesses that emotions brought. All they did was cloud one's judgement, force them to make decisions that they wouldn't have made in other circumstances. He was proud of his purity, and rightly so. It meant that he would have no trouble with certain aspects of his plan.

For example, killing humans to save humans.

He knew that there would be dissenters, those that refused to yield; that was fine, that was human nature. He did not blame them. But for humanity to survive, to progress, they would need to be eliminated.

Marder would understand; the General was a brilliant strategist, someone just as cold and calculating as himself. He wrapped his mind around one of the man's famous phrases; "Human life is expendable."

Indeed it was. In the name of peace, freedom must come to an end.

First, he'd need forces. He had a vast number of units at his disposal in the Remnant fleet, but what he was planning would take much more than he could hope to accomplish through superior force.