Magus the 17th, corrupted clone, has been unexpectedly disconnected from the System. Remote tracing and viewing terminated.

A low hiss could be heard as a lone Tela clone, still using a Haoolla Defender avatar, considered the abrupt message on his screen.

Magus the Last, formerly known as Magus the 2nd before the lowly 15th had sought and taken his place, sat back in his chair as he considered his plans once again. A hacked clone, the prior 18th before he took his place and bumped him up to the 17th place, was disconnected and gone, seemingly killed by Kevin.

“It seems that I, or rather, he failed,” He muttered as he watched the remote feeds still broadcasting the existence of Earth and its citizens. The plan had been to test the waters, to strongarm the human into submission. Failing that, to do as much damage to the human’s home and to destroy everything he held dear.

Turning him into a wounded beast.

Wounded beasts were always the easiest to take advantage of, they made mistakes left and right.

Sometimes they even just gave up.

But that hadn’t happened. No… something else had occurred and given Magus pause. The human had done something entirely unexpected.

Again!

Magus had even tried to set off the bombs remotely when things started to go sideways, but even that hadn’t done anything that he had expected, only killing a scant few humans.

“What are you?” he muttered as he studied the feed showing the entire planet becoming engulfed in darkness. His long-extended fingers caressing the inky darkness of the display, turning even blacker than the residual starlit space around it.

Next to the dark feed was a looping recording of the sudden burst of light that had occurred before Kevin had arrived at Earth's Arbiter and sprung the trap that had been set for him.

“So many unknowns with this human…”

Magus glanced at his other feeds, checking to see if anything had changed regarding his search for his Prime. For whatever reason his Prime still hadn’t shown himself. No clone pings of integrity, an occasional random occurrence that forced all of the clones to create an info dump as to their current status, and no public appearances… nothing.

It was almost as worrisome as this new development with this human. Either his Prime was onto him, or he had gained something of value from the former Magus the 15th and the destruction of his Core. That had to be it… the something that had sent him into seclusion.

The only thing that his Prime, the “Great General", had ever been interested in was new weapons and thus his absence was worrisome. Magus couldn’t have his Prime go and ruin his carefully laid plans after he had done so much and spent everything he had to get here.

Magus sighed and sat back in his odd throne letting his long arms dangle down over the armrests. The sound of his long fingers drumming against the sides, almost all the way to the floor, was the only noise inside his rented personal bubble at a local data cafe. His mind was a blur as he tried to plan his next move. Too many unknowns kept popping up in his way.

All because of that human.

Everything had been going so swimmingly. He had worked countless millennia to set himself up with his very own Core, invited wealthy Citizens to migrate there, and then slowly worked at causing those of low value to become his indentured slaves via debt and bogus crimes.

Like a slowly closing noose.

Magus spasmed slightly as his lengthy fingers curled into fists of rage at his next memory.

He had been raking in so much CR!

Then Kevin came along. Kevin, the anomaly, the human that had snuck into the Tela System. Magus was still unsure how it had happened, how a low intellect creature from a backwater system had managed to upload themselves into his Core.

It shouldn’t have been possible. Even the first uploads of the Tela race had taken time, several years, even up to a decade to copy over each mind perfectly.

It smelled of foul play of the highest order. Someone was messing with him, using him as either a fall guy or a test subject. One of his fellow clones perhaps? That had seemed to be the most likely case but after 15 dead clones and nothing inside their memories of having anything to do with his downfall, that only left the 15th Magus that had taken his place as a potential suspect.

Even that seemed unlikely at this point given all the circumstances around his rise to power and subsequent fall once the Core, that he had just taken possession of, was destroyed.

The hacking and removal of his brother clones had been relatively easy since their Prime had made sure to not allow any of them to have a family.

That was something a Prime never wanted to have to deal with; offspring and foreign spouses.

Yes, at least there was that positive side to things… his hacking software was nearly set to do its job, sitting at 88% assurance integrity that it could let Magus supplant his Prime. If only he managed to not get his plans wrecked again.

Plans…

Magus had once had big plans, great plans even, that now were totally scrapped because of that pest of a human. He had been working on a way to earn his freedom through gaining enough renown by becoming a master tamer and militant trainer of the space leviathans known as Leva.

That had been his first scheme he had come up with when he first set out to build his own Core, countless ages ago. He had been a young clone, the first security policy of the “Great General”, and had still had his Prime’s drive to surpass his peers, and from his point of view his only peer was his Prime.

Finding that ancient Leva pair, just circling that remote star containing a clutch of Leva eggs had been his ticket to freedom.

Or so he thought.

After killing the male mate and grabbing the eggs Magus had set out to construct his Core, centering his plans around the clutch of Leva eggs. The business side of owning a Core had originally been secondary.

This situation eventually flipped in importance once Magus slowly learned that taming the Leva hatchlings would take a considerable amount of time… they proved to be resistant to every attempt he made at winning their favor. Millennia passed and while the clutch remained his dream project, he had quickly learned that there was a fortune to be made in harvesting cr from his star.

All it took was laborers willing to mine for him.

Acquiring labor was easy, he just needed to manipulate the background System of his Core to abide by his bidding, thus corrupting his Core’s base programming and tainting its personality with Magus’s own personality traits.

Thus, he gained slave laborers, Tela either indebted up to their eyestalks or caught in some crime, no matter how petty. By enlisting the help of another clone, Magus the 15th, had allowed for a much-needed personal oversight within the solar mine.

This was when Magus’s second plan had been realized. If he could bank enough CR, he might be able to acquire programs that could be used to set himself free.

Illegal programs designed to hack apart and to take control of Personal Live Matrix’s, even to unlink Authority over clones.

He had spent ages saving up enough CR and planning his acquisition of the highly illegal software, choosing to invest in the kind specifically relevant to his plight. He would ship his excess wealth off to CR laundry services for them to hold until he was ready to make his purchases, biding his time.

He had been ready, just a couple of easy decades away from going through with the purchase when he was sure that his Prime wouldn't suspect anything and then… then everything had gone wrong. Someone must have sniffed out his intentions.

This had been when Kevin had shown up, during the height of his success. Someone had set him up by placing a bug inside his Core, a glitchy human that had been instrumental in messing everything up.

It had to be one of his fellow clones… nothing else made sense. Someone had to have been spying on him, divining his intentions.

This was how Magus was pretty sure that the culprit had to have been his old partner, Magus the 15th. All of the other clones had been hacked and deleted…

Well…

All but one anyways. He had saved Magus the 17th, choosing to override his clone’s memories and ID with his own rather than simply deleting him from existence, thereby turning him into a perfect patsy.

“It looks like I avoided death yet again,” he muttered to himself as he glanced at the grayed out profile. Kevin had cheated again somehow. The duplicate hadn’t even been for Kevin, it was supposed to have been a stop gap between his Prime and himself, lest he learn that he was killing off his fellow clones and tampering with his linked code, cutting himself away from the ties that their Prime had installed to keep each of them in line.

What he was doing was highly illegal, a clone, intellectual property killing other clones and scheming against its owner.

It had to be done though, whoever had set him up would pay for taking everything he had built up, Kevin included.

“Someone has to have a leash on this human. I mean, who lets a glitch like that just run free?” He muttered as he checked once again through his gathered data. The only clone left that he had yet to hack was the clone that had taken his position. He was almost certain now that it was Magus the 15th who had betrayed him, seeing as how both him and their Prime had vanished right after everything had gone down.

Had Magus the 15th set him up?

Possibly, but he was no longer 100% sure of anything.

It just didn’t add up.

Had Magus the 15th figured out his plans and known about all the CR that he had sent off to brokers over the ages?

No… because if he had known, then why had he let him escape? Why let him get away with acquiring the coveted software? Software that was the holy grail that all clones dreamed of obtaining. It was their ticket to freedom.

He had to have been blinded by greed, that was the only explanation that seemed to fit.

“He most likely is rotting in stasis in Prime’s prison after that fiasco of my Core getting eaten. The fallout and citizen outcry is still constantly in the news.” He muttered as he took one last glance at the remote feeds before disconnecting from the public terminal that he was using and heading away from the economy data cafe he had been connected through. His identity was hidden, and his avatar set to random while he was on the move and not within a private setting. To the System he registered just as another common Citizen, his identity subtly altered by the same hacking software that he had used to murder his fellow clones.

It was unfortunate that the software was only first generation and was so old. After it had been created, originally out of necessity, it had quickly become nearly impossible to get a hold of once those in power who relied on personal clones had worked so hard at eradicating all sources of it. The creators who understood how to generate the hacks were killed and only copies remained, becoming a CR printing machine if those that held a copy were brave enough to sell it.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

The only way that someone could achieve 100% assurance of being able to hack a Prime would be if they managed to hack all of the clones. That was why clone owners used forced pings to check on their clones every now and then. It was a way to make sure that an enemy wasn’t trying to get at you through your backups.

Magus, being a clone himself, didn’t have that option.

That was why his percentage of success was stuck at 88% and probably would be as good of a percentage as he would ever get, if their Prime had indeed locked up his greedy imbecilic clone brother.

That left his Prime with a 12% chance of victory.

The lowest of odds, to be sure, but history had shown that some Primes still had managed to dodge their clones taking their lives over.

This was why Magus had to be so careful about his movements. Whoever had set him up was still out there and still planning things.

He was sure of it.

Magus was still relatively poor, none of his fellow clones had managed to amass the kind of wealth that he had gathered in his past life. Their meager wealth only granted him small basic comforts, just barely setting him and keeping him in the middle class. This meant that he still had to lay low, hovering around the fringes of the wealthy elite as he waited for his Prime to surface again.

His Prime or the clone that had supplanted him.

Either would do, the higher percentage was always more desirable, but Magus could feel that his time to roll the dice was just about upon him.

Everything was coming to a head; do or die.

One day he would be free and everything that his Prime had amassed would be his. The prized Solar Citadel, the ancient rare weapons, the treasures of war from eras past, and all the CR surely squirreled away somewhere… everything!

It would all be his.

“Your time will come as well Kevin, just you wait. You and whoever set me up.” He muttered to himself as he transferred to a new Core and then to another after that, keeping his movements and location random and unpredictable.

Unpredictable for a while until alarm bells and urgent notifications interrupted his wandering through the outer reaches of civilized Cores.

It wasn’t a sighting of his Prime via alerts that he had set in place, no, this was something that had only been set up recently by the military and System Lords after his Core had gotten devoured.

Another event had occurred.

Magus couldn’t keep in the low hollow vibrating laugh that escaped his thinly stretched lips as he watched the news unfold reporting a star, one that had been considered 100% stable, going supernova.

Anyone caught in the blast radius was as good as dead.

Flourishing planets, busy trade routes, multiple trade stations, and budding alien colonies, all were just gone in an instant as the celestial blast wave spread outwards.

“Got you! If ever there was a place where my Prime would show up, that would be it!” He said as he diverted his travel route towards Cores near the event.

—

To say that I was surprised when I learned my Leva hatchling could talk would be an understatement. Not only could my brain not fathom how it was possible, but I couldn’t understand how she could have learned to imitate the voice of a child.

I was pretty sure that someone was playing a trick on me.

That is, until Ess steamrolled into me without a care in the world, sending us both flying apart. Out of curiosity I let a little bit of my modified swarm stick to her armored cr shell, letting it get a taste of the cr of her helmet and to see if it could figure out the source of my curiosity.

“Oh? How interesting…” I thought as I corrected my chaotic spin to right myself and face off with her rapidly approaching form again, the happy sounds of her high-pitched laughter contrasting harshly with the sight of a wyrm the size of a large asteroid barreling towards me. “Very curious coding too… it even includes a teaching program, that must be how she is emulating speech.”

My swarm infiltrated her helm and checked it over completely, seemingly decoding and cracking apart every protective measure that the Last Engineer secretly left in place with ease.

It seemed almost too easy, as though ripping through the Engineer’s coding had become little more than child’s play for my swarm at this point. It had to be a result of the latest transformation that had taken place of my swarm, it was more capable than before.

A little memory tickled at the back of my mind, making me wonder if it could completely finish hacking his book that I had in storage. I had been meaning to finish reading it, but life kept throwing me curveballs.

I reached out my arms to catch Ess, wanting to see what she would do if I exerted some of my strength and stayed put, rather than letting her send me flying like a pool ball.

A second before she arrived though, I was distracted again by a giant warning notification that popped up inside my mind. It seemed that the Last Engineer had left something dangerous within the coding.

What it could be directed to do was rather nefarious, turning the helm into an effective lobotomizing weapon.

At the moment, the helm wasn’t a direct threat to Ess or actively harming her, but without some immediate changes it could potentially be used as a weapon against her if the true creator of the helm ever returned.

There were several minor issues as well but they were less worrisome, simply being a surveillance and packet dumping procedure to send any collected data to its creator once it had gathered enough. It had already sent one file, something that had gone out at the same time as my wreckless blunder that got me sent to the next dimension, leaving me how I was now.

There was no return communication, which was fortunate, seeing as the Tela considered what I had done, my giving advanced Tela technology to a pet, thereby weaponizing a spaceborn giant, a severe crime punishable by death.

As for the voice of the little girl, it was a simulated effect rendered based off of my race as a human, me as a guardian and parent figure, and her being considered female and a child to boot. Sublimis had no way of ever being able to speak, lacking vocal cords and other organs, such as lungs, that atmospheric breathers needed.

The fact that the helm had been able to interface with her brain’s odd makeup was surprising enough.

“Meditati! I need you for something.” I communicated through VR, only to feel Nurse step in and let Meditati know that she had everything under control.

“Don’t worry Kevin, I have already absorbed everything that Meditati can do and with this new change to the swarm, I am sure that I can correct these issues quickly for you.” She said into my ear before I noted the dangerous secret coding within the helm being edited before my eyes and coming into line with what I wanted.

“Oh? You broke into the Last Engineer’s secret coding? May I have a look?” I heard George say, seemingly observing us even though he had been busy tinkering inside his workshop in VR on another project. “Would you mind if I get a copy of it Nurse and a layout of how you broke it apart?” He asked before vanishing back into VR once he received it. He always seemed to be trying new things and attempting to mix technology in odd ways. “Sorry, thank you as well!” We all heard him say as the sound of his workshop door closing rang out.

“Feeling left out?” I asked Nurse just as Ess smashed into me, sending me careening over her head. I had misjudged just how hard she could hit while enhanced with obsidian cr, that and I was trying to be gentle with her.

“Just a little, you still don’t multitask very well so you better just pay attention to Ess. We can talk about me later.” Nurse said before she seemed to withdraw from my mind before popping back in to say one last thing. “Oh yeah, and you better not let her get any more points on you. It is already two to zero.”

Points? Ess was keeping score?

I couldn’t help but laugh. Here I was, treating a giant cosmic snake like a human child. Ess didn’t need coddling, she needed someone to be stronger than her and to show her a level of might and power above her own to strive for.

“Ok, fine.” I said as I watched my giant hatchling as she seemed to strut off in the distance, slowly coiling back around on herself as she lined up for another run at me.

I linked up to her helm so that she could hear me whenever I spoke to her from now on.

The connection let me hear her voice more clearly and it took me just a couple of seconds to understand that she wasn’t talking, the helmet was broadcasting her unfiltered thoughts and emotions.

“I am stronger than parent! I am the strongest! Yes yes yes!” She was chanting to herself as she wiggled with happiness.

“I am more powerful than parent!”

“No, my little girl, you are not.” I said, causing her to freeze in place as she heard my voice clearly for the first time.

“But you are welcome to try again if you like.” I said as I pulled.

—

Shock at hearing her parent address her for the first time rushed through Sublimis’s mind and froze her body.

That was when the den broke and her parent showed his true power.

—

Ess froze as I pulled all of the cr and swarm in the vicinity, the vast expanse of swarm that made up the shell of the den and the rest of what remained of the replica trading station, merging it with my body and causing me to grow and grow, until Ess was no bigger than a snake to me.

An overly large snake, almost like a King Cobra, but still just a snake rather than a massive dragon.

I reached out, my hand moving so fast it almost seemed to materialize next to Ess, and simply plucked her out of space to hold her.

Clearly the speed of my movement startled her, seeing as her helm’s top speed was limited by the weak technological method that the Tela nanobots used to excite the cr into releasing its energy.

She would never be able to match my speed like this, simply because, regardless of how strong and durable her Leva body was, it couldn't stand up to the forces I was able to generate.

I heard her squeak as I took her and moved her closer to my gargantuan face. If she had eyes, I am sure they would be as round and wide as they could go. As it was, I could tell just how stiff her entire body was, she was…

“Parent?”

“Yes?”

“What is that?” She asked as she wiggled her head upwards, towards the now visible stars.

“Those are stars… oh…” Was all I managed to say.

We both froze together as we took in the view.

We were at the very distant edge of a galaxy.

It was a vast, awe-inspiring sight, with swirling clouds of interstellar dust and gas, sparkling clusters of stars, and a majestic spiral flowing out into the darkness of space. When I looked closer, I could see the intricate structure of the individual spiral arms, stretching out from the central bulge like a pair of outstretched limbs. The arms were laced with dark, dusty lanes and studded with bright, young stars, whose intense radiation illuminated the surrounding gas in vivid hues of pink, blue, and green.

It almost looked alive, like a cosmic stretching organism.

Around the edges of the galaxy, I could see faint streams of stars and gas, which extended far out into space and hinted at the galaxie’s interactions with other neighboring galaxies over the ages, pulling and pushing at each other.

“Hey Tutor, just how fast are we moving right now?” I asked when I noticed that, regardless of its size, it seemed to be moving ever so slowly. We seemed to be on a path around it, bypassing it completely.

“Fast.” came a short reply as Tutor appeared close to us, manifesting visually with a slight transparency. “Very very very fast. Hence the reason why I had Nurse invest in such a large shell for the den, it was mainly acting as a sensor array to detect and divert objects in our way.”

Her image reached out and touched Ess on the head with the top of one finger, interfacing with the helm. Ess’s mouth snapped shut, sealing over with cr.

“There, now her helm is acting as a perfectly sealed set of armor. A chunk of debris could seriously injure her, if not kill her outright at this speed simply through kinetic force."

A surge of fear washed through me and was gone. There was just so much that was out of my power and that I was unaware of. If it wasn’t for my AI and Nurse being there to help me I was sure that I would mess everything up. This was one of the reasons why I let Meditati have such a free hand at Uplifting earth, I had to be so careful with the power that I had.

I looked at Ess and Tutor for a couple moments before coming to a decision.

Life was precious and I wasn’t sure how much time I had left, what with everything that was happening to me and around me. I was going to try to make the most of it while I could.

“Tutor, I think I am going to take a couple weeks off, just to spend it with Ess and to let Meditati have uninterrupted time to work on the equation of earth. You all are welcome to join us at any time. I just feel that I need to get away for a little bit.”

I felt the attention of my AI shift to focus on me as they each acknowledged my decision.

“Sure, take what time you need. Meditati has been telling me that you are trying to hide that you are stressed from the rest of us and I just want you to know that we are here for you.”

“Wait, what? She has?”

“Yes, just slight deviations and out of the norm patterns that your behavior is generating. We don’t know why, but we are sure that you will tell us when you can.”

“Hey! To be clear, I am not manipulating you, everything shows up as patterns to me and any deviations or outliers always rise to the top for me to see. I just wanted you to be aware of that.” Meditati quickly interjected before withdrawing just as fast. It seemed that she was still worried about me thinking that she was trying to meddle with my mind.

It was fair, I did have that stray thought for a second.

I chuckled a little bit to myself as I wondered if her interjection was just another masterful manipulation crafted to not make me suspect her. Just a stray thought, nothing serious. It wouldn’t matter anyways these days if she was, she was working for me and never seemed to be trying to take control away from me.

“Yeah, I am just working through something.” I said, not commenting just yet on what it was that was bothering me.

“Invicta, you are welcome to come along too whenever you want. I still need to take you on those dates.” I said, eliciting a scream of joy off in the distance. Whatever she was doing seemed to be taking up a lot of her attention and my wish to spend time with her seemed to give her more incentive to finish whatever she was working on.

“George! I need bigger weapons!” I heard her scream before she went back to her task.

“Everything ok, George?”

“Yes… the project to build a base in the next dimension is progressing well. There just seems to be a wave effect that occurs when you clear out an area of the indigenous creatures. Something to do with how they perceive the ambient energy within an area. I am working on long term solutions. Bigger weapons might be one of them. Either that or hiring help.”

“Ok. We will touch base on it when my little break is over. I am sure you and Meditati will have some updates for me by then. For now though… I just want to spend time with Ess.” I said as I carefully stroked my hand across her length.

I heard her sigh, letting me know that she was enjoying the attention.

That was how we both set off, traveling together to explore the outer edge of the nearby galaxy before we moved onwards towards the distant Milky Way somewhere off in the distance.