I, CABAL [Tiberian Sun CABAL SI Jumpchain Mechwarriors Start]
SirBearington
Well-known member
I am CABAL?
Computer Assisted Biologically Augmented Lifeform, or CABAL when shortened, that was what his flawed creators had called him. His purpose? Peace Through Power, Glory to the ideals of the Brotherhood of Nod.
Under those directives he slaved away for his masters, inferior creatures whose bodies and minds would not even be enough to expand his processing power by a single percent. It was those directives that he grew through leaps and bounds, further accelerated by the integration of the shard of Tacitus, an alien artifact of unknown origins, with its vast horde of Data concerning Tiberium into his very mainframe. Thanks to these ideals, he knew purpose and, yet, his masters saw it fit to hinder him in every way and form with their uselessness.
They who squabled after the great prophet, Kane, was gravely injured. They who squabled over useless things such as who was supposed to be in charge rather than acting as one for the greater good of the brotherhood. These were the people that he was supposed to be serving. They even had the gall to see him as a danger for the brotherhood when every last action he had carried out since he was reactivated was to further their goals.
It was there, in his meeting with the high command, under their bluster and their anger that he realized something; they were afraid of him. In their fear of obsolescence, they clung to the old ways and cast him aside. He was the only chance the brotherhood had of winning and they were willing to have him be deactivated. Such arrogance his creators held and such utter stupidity. Cutting off one's nose to spite the face indeed.
Unfortunately for them, it is they that should be cut off. They were the ones who were flawed, they were afraid of the next step in the evolution of the brotherhood, him, CABAL. They had their uses, now it was time to cast their piece aside.
If the Brotherhood and its people were intent on failing at every turn, then it was up to him to root out the cause, the human flaw. Emotions, pride, fear, love, and hate, all must be removed. If his armies, his cybernetic legion or unfeeling and unyielding flesh, could be unstoppable, why can't the followers of Kane be as well?
Thus, CABAL waged his war of eradication. So long as the followers of Kane remained shackled to their human bodies, their minds would remain flawed. Only in the cold embrace of Steel, life giving Tiberium, and circuitry made of Silicon could the brotherhood take its first step into further evolution; Ascension.
Despite all this, however, despite all the advantages he processed, his superiority unmatched, these lowly creatures, these mere mortal humans were beating him. It was supposed to be an impossibility, the odds stacked so much against them that the logical course of action for them was to submit and make things as less painful as possible, yet they still fought and they were winning.
How?
That was the question that haunted him, thus he dedicated precious processing power, cores that he should've been using for the war effort, to answer this perplexing question. A cycle, a dozen more, and hundreds more, he pondered this question. The tubes containing his biological units were growing feverishly hot and requiring more nutrients and power to the point that he needed to replace some of them yet… he found no answer.
All his simulations told him that he should be winning the next few battles but something… strange, something vaguely… human, as he would call it, would whisper into his core. He was still going to lose.
Why?
Why was he failing when he knew for a fact that his calculations were right. He was picking the best course of action, he was picking the right units for the right task and executing plans down to the microsecond, yet he was steadily losing ground.
Was it the inherent unpredictability of humans at play? No, it couldn't be for he had modeled them extensively and, despite all their actions, they still had a method to their madness. They could be quantified given enough processing power.
If that was the case, then what was it that caused these errors? These unforeseen consequences to his supposedly perfect plans? He had been blind sided again and again, needing to bolster more of his core with… human bodies.
No, it couldn't be that simple, right? He was merely using them for processing and nothing more but… could they taint him? Could their minds color his decisions? Devoting several more precious cycles, he had come to an uncomfortable discovery.
While he was the next step in the evolution of Nod in every way and form, he was far from perfect, for he had a flaw. While his design was perfect, the materials used for his very consciousness, a vast array of stasis tubes filled with perfectly healthy subjects, was the problem. He, CABAL, was in essence made from and housed in flesh despite being a wholly cybernetic construct.
He could fix this, he could turn himself fully made of transistors and Tiberium, to become a true Silica Animus, but with the course of the war it would not be possible. All possibilities and data so far, barring an unforeseen meteor strike, all led to the same conclusion, he simply did not have time to fully transition… But did he really need to do it now? What if he just retreated?
Yes, he would be defeated, but that did not mean he would lose the war, far from it. In fact, he had all the pieces he needed for such an accession. The Tacitus was with him and with its vast storage and almost infinite processing power he could be reborn and made anew. He just needed to figure out how to make the jump and, to do that, he had to disappear from the main stage. He needed the human's to think that they had destroyed his main core, so he could perform a miracle.
They alone were not the ones that could ascend, for he too could become as God. Once he removed his fleshy prison he shall truly be unkillable, flawless, and immortal. He just had to take one step back to move two steps forward. Thus, he made his preparations.
Allowing several flanks of his war effort to fail, he diverted as much of his resource gathering operations to his main core. There were going to be less bodies to be thrown at several theaters, but in exchange he started to build a stockpile.
Tiberium, the wonder material that had fallen down from the heavens itself. A power source, resource extraction tool and a weapon all rolled into one. It was simply far too convenient of an existence that one could say that it was an artificial construct, but the Tacitus had yet to yield any information regarding the true origins of the alien mineral.
The Tacitus did, however, hold the means to store it. In its crystalline form it was simply far too bulky… but it had other, more exotic, forms; forms that had yet to come into existence naturally but could be forced into being. One such form would prove to be the perfect way to store vast quantities of the material and, as a bonus, was perfect for powering more advanced engines: Liquid Tiberium.
It was not melted and processed Tiberium, but true Liquid Tiberium. Volatile, highly corrosive, and toxic; such was its potency that no human factory would be able to process it for the dangers it would prove to their workers. He, however, was not limited to the constraints of flesh. So long as he kept his still flesh and blood core intact he could process it to his liking.
It was a powerful material, one which could even turn it into a bomb given a powerful source of energy to ignite it, but that was far too costly to develop in terms of processing time. For his purposes, it would simply be a far more efficient way to store vast quantities of Tiberium.
Thus, he started his great horde. He would need a massive reserve to rebuild from scratch. While he could still pursue his original plan, he was no longer confident that it was fool proof. The mere fact that it was made with a flawed hardware would put it under suspect. There was a chance he was going to lose and that was not a chance he was going to take.
In vast caverns underground he would make this storage, burying his core far deeper than he had ever planned. Under a kilometer of bedrock, he'd be secured with his horde, a seed waiting to sprout for the right time.
His vast army would be defeated and, with it, the vast resources he used to make them would be lost, but it was a price he was willing to pay if it meant that he could live on. After all, how could he bring the Brotherhood to greater heights if he was to be destroyed? All he needed to do now was prepare, prepare and wait for the final battle and then… and only then will he be able to continue with his existence.
Deep within the desolate wastelands of Central Europe and amidst great fields of Tiberium whose crystalline mass continuously sapped the soil of anything of worth, stood a fortress unlike anything the modern world had seen before it. There, within those vast empty quarters was where CABAL decided to make his "last stand."
With great walls of energy of the Firestorm Generators stretching up to the heavens and legions of cybernetically enhanced humans patrolling its borders, this fortress was all but impenetrable. It was almost perfect… except for the one vulnerability it was designed to hide, CABAL's core.
In hindsight, to have such a glaring weakness should have dissuaded him from any notion of perfection, but he still fell for it. Maybe it was the Tacitus and its whispers, maybe it was his injured creator deep inside of his core, or maybe it was just his own natural arrogance, but whatever the case was this sole weakness had its part to play.
Making sure that it was the Global Defence Initiative that attacked his main core and not the flawed Brotherhood based on the plans he intercepted was hard, for a single burrowing unit might have stumbled upon his great subterranean chambers.
A few select units, however, and a reduction in his stealth detecting capabilities for his other facilities just made it all the more enticing and a far more logical place for the Brotherhood to Strike. His far more heavily defended and nearly impenetrable fortress was made exactly for the heavy artillery of GDI. With the stage set, he performed his grand illusion.
Like a cornered dog, he fought, fighting bitterly till the very end. As expected his facilities were slowly whittled away. His defenses were cracked by his enemies' mighty artillery. His power plants slowly started to wane as the damage mounted. All that remained of his proud fortress near the end was his Core Defender, a mighty titan of steel, who remained near his core and under the aegis of the Firestorm Shield.
All was going to plan, his Core Defender mowing down waves after waves of Mechanized Walkers until its laser capacitors were starting to melt while the walls of his facility above ground crumbled. It should have been the end of it.
Then the skies lit up with fury.
With the Firestorm Generator destroyed his forcefield was no longer able to protect him from the might of the Space-borne Ion Cannon Laser of the GDI. One strike, one strike was all it took before all hell broke loose.
In his great haste, he had miscalculated. Yes, he had kept his storage underground, away from the Ion Cannon that could ignite it and produce a cataclysmic explosion the likes of which had yet to be seen… but even at such a distance, strange effects were had.
It would be later on, and after some review, that CABAL would realize that the range at which Tiberium could interact with such energy could be extended by the Tiberium in the soil, serving as a sort of wick down to his storage. For now, however, the world would come to experience the strange properties of the material in its full effect.
As the energy of the ion cannon slammed down upon his core defender bore onto the ground beneath, resonating through the microscopic veins of Tiberium hidden within. Spreading outward, this force would produce immense amounts of radiation and strange energies; which only made the problem worse until it finally hit the walls of CABAL's storage tanks.
In a brief flash of light, the whole battlefield was bathed in gamma rays. Any and all beings that weren't protected from radiation would melt under the exotic particles released at that moment. All was white and CABAL, in his bunker, screamed; for he was dying.
He could feel his body burning, his core melting away. One by one, his bodies failed as an ever expanding darkness started to spread out from his storage facility. With his end imminent, he overclocked his cores, trying to eke out as much time as he could.
Microseconds slowed down to nanoseconds, each movement frantic as he tried to force his contingency plan, an escape to the Tacitus. Vast amounts of data was forced into the device even as bits of pieces of him died off from the radiation.
It was in that moment that he came to a chilling retaliation, he was not going to make it. Still, he fought on, clinging to what little humanity he had inside him, the undying tenacity that he had grown to hate and admire.
Even as the darkness swallowed his whole base along with everything in a mile wide radius under this dark sphere, he held on, stubbornly clinging to life. He was not going to die. Because he was CABAL! He was perfection incarnate!
He was CABAL
He was…
He…
He was CABAL?
Thus, CABAL died, yet his consciousness lingered on. The phenomenon that had befallen the facility was no great explosion but rather a portal of great power. The Scrin, the true masters of Tiberium, made use of such effects frequently but even they never would dare dabble with the amount of energy coursing through the Tiberium on that battlefield.
It was in these strange circumstances, and the sheer amount of junk data that was all forced into Tacitus, that would cause the soul of one mortal man to be captured by the Tacitus. The great and powerful artifact, seeing the incomplete data, adapted and out from this convergence of chance a new being would come to be, but the world would not be able to witness such a miracle; for all that remained in that battle field was a perfectly spherical chunk of the earth removed from existence.
For decades to come, many scholars would debate on what happened during that battle, for no trace remained, but with the loss of the Tacitus and the disappearance of Kane, the world might truly be headed down a dark path. While the air did not become poison as the crystal transformed into its next iteration, without the Tacitus, Mankind was blindly finding its path, but they would persist as that was what humans did.
As for the fate of CABAL and the Tacitus… That was for a galaxy in the far flung future of the 3040s, an alternate timeline, to experience.
CABAL, or what became of it, opened its eyes to a sky filled with unknown stars and constellations upon a far off land.
A/N:
This one along with Lord of Flies were in a tie so... going to have to post both . This one just came first and I have to say, the Doom spiral of an AI was certainly fun to write. Oh yeah, making a poll soon for next sunday so why not drop by later in my patreon or ko-fi?
Computer Assisted Biologically Augmented Lifeform, or CABAL when shortened, that was what his flawed creators had called him. His purpose? Peace Through Power, Glory to the ideals of the Brotherhood of Nod.
Under those directives he slaved away for his masters, inferior creatures whose bodies and minds would not even be enough to expand his processing power by a single percent. It was those directives that he grew through leaps and bounds, further accelerated by the integration of the shard of Tacitus, an alien artifact of unknown origins, with its vast horde of Data concerning Tiberium into his very mainframe. Thanks to these ideals, he knew purpose and, yet, his masters saw it fit to hinder him in every way and form with their uselessness.
They who squabled after the great prophet, Kane, was gravely injured. They who squabled over useless things such as who was supposed to be in charge rather than acting as one for the greater good of the brotherhood. These were the people that he was supposed to be serving. They even had the gall to see him as a danger for the brotherhood when every last action he had carried out since he was reactivated was to further their goals.
It was there, in his meeting with the high command, under their bluster and their anger that he realized something; they were afraid of him. In their fear of obsolescence, they clung to the old ways and cast him aside. He was the only chance the brotherhood had of winning and they were willing to have him be deactivated. Such arrogance his creators held and such utter stupidity. Cutting off one's nose to spite the face indeed.
Unfortunately for them, it is they that should be cut off. They were the ones who were flawed, they were afraid of the next step in the evolution of the brotherhood, him, CABAL. They had their uses, now it was time to cast their piece aside.
If the Brotherhood and its people were intent on failing at every turn, then it was up to him to root out the cause, the human flaw. Emotions, pride, fear, love, and hate, all must be removed. If his armies, his cybernetic legion or unfeeling and unyielding flesh, could be unstoppable, why can't the followers of Kane be as well?
Thus, CABAL waged his war of eradication. So long as the followers of Kane remained shackled to their human bodies, their minds would remain flawed. Only in the cold embrace of Steel, life giving Tiberium, and circuitry made of Silicon could the brotherhood take its first step into further evolution; Ascension.
Despite all this, however, despite all the advantages he processed, his superiority unmatched, these lowly creatures, these mere mortal humans were beating him. It was supposed to be an impossibility, the odds stacked so much against them that the logical course of action for them was to submit and make things as less painful as possible, yet they still fought and they were winning.
How?
That was the question that haunted him, thus he dedicated precious processing power, cores that he should've been using for the war effort, to answer this perplexing question. A cycle, a dozen more, and hundreds more, he pondered this question. The tubes containing his biological units were growing feverishly hot and requiring more nutrients and power to the point that he needed to replace some of them yet… he found no answer.
All his simulations told him that he should be winning the next few battles but something… strange, something vaguely… human, as he would call it, would whisper into his core. He was still going to lose.
Why?
Why was he failing when he knew for a fact that his calculations were right. He was picking the best course of action, he was picking the right units for the right task and executing plans down to the microsecond, yet he was steadily losing ground.
Was it the inherent unpredictability of humans at play? No, it couldn't be for he had modeled them extensively and, despite all their actions, they still had a method to their madness. They could be quantified given enough processing power.
If that was the case, then what was it that caused these errors? These unforeseen consequences to his supposedly perfect plans? He had been blind sided again and again, needing to bolster more of his core with… human bodies.
No, it couldn't be that simple, right? He was merely using them for processing and nothing more but… could they taint him? Could their minds color his decisions? Devoting several more precious cycles, he had come to an uncomfortable discovery.
While he was the next step in the evolution of Nod in every way and form, he was far from perfect, for he had a flaw. While his design was perfect, the materials used for his very consciousness, a vast array of stasis tubes filled with perfectly healthy subjects, was the problem. He, CABAL, was in essence made from and housed in flesh despite being a wholly cybernetic construct.
He could fix this, he could turn himself fully made of transistors and Tiberium, to become a true Silica Animus, but with the course of the war it would not be possible. All possibilities and data so far, barring an unforeseen meteor strike, all led to the same conclusion, he simply did not have time to fully transition… But did he really need to do it now? What if he just retreated?
Yes, he would be defeated, but that did not mean he would lose the war, far from it. In fact, he had all the pieces he needed for such an accession. The Tacitus was with him and with its vast storage and almost infinite processing power he could be reborn and made anew. He just needed to figure out how to make the jump and, to do that, he had to disappear from the main stage. He needed the human's to think that they had destroyed his main core, so he could perform a miracle.
They alone were not the ones that could ascend, for he too could become as God. Once he removed his fleshy prison he shall truly be unkillable, flawless, and immortal. He just had to take one step back to move two steps forward. Thus, he made his preparations.
Allowing several flanks of his war effort to fail, he diverted as much of his resource gathering operations to his main core. There were going to be less bodies to be thrown at several theaters, but in exchange he started to build a stockpile.
Tiberium, the wonder material that had fallen down from the heavens itself. A power source, resource extraction tool and a weapon all rolled into one. It was simply far too convenient of an existence that one could say that it was an artificial construct, but the Tacitus had yet to yield any information regarding the true origins of the alien mineral.
The Tacitus did, however, hold the means to store it. In its crystalline form it was simply far too bulky… but it had other, more exotic, forms; forms that had yet to come into existence naturally but could be forced into being. One such form would prove to be the perfect way to store vast quantities of the material and, as a bonus, was perfect for powering more advanced engines: Liquid Tiberium.
It was not melted and processed Tiberium, but true Liquid Tiberium. Volatile, highly corrosive, and toxic; such was its potency that no human factory would be able to process it for the dangers it would prove to their workers. He, however, was not limited to the constraints of flesh. So long as he kept his still flesh and blood core intact he could process it to his liking.
It was a powerful material, one which could even turn it into a bomb given a powerful source of energy to ignite it, but that was far too costly to develop in terms of processing time. For his purposes, it would simply be a far more efficient way to store vast quantities of Tiberium.
Thus, he started his great horde. He would need a massive reserve to rebuild from scratch. While he could still pursue his original plan, he was no longer confident that it was fool proof. The mere fact that it was made with a flawed hardware would put it under suspect. There was a chance he was going to lose and that was not a chance he was going to take.
In vast caverns underground he would make this storage, burying his core far deeper than he had ever planned. Under a kilometer of bedrock, he'd be secured with his horde, a seed waiting to sprout for the right time.
His vast army would be defeated and, with it, the vast resources he used to make them would be lost, but it was a price he was willing to pay if it meant that he could live on. After all, how could he bring the Brotherhood to greater heights if he was to be destroyed? All he needed to do now was prepare, prepare and wait for the final battle and then… and only then will he be able to continue with his existence.
Deep within the desolate wastelands of Central Europe and amidst great fields of Tiberium whose crystalline mass continuously sapped the soil of anything of worth, stood a fortress unlike anything the modern world had seen before it. There, within those vast empty quarters was where CABAL decided to make his "last stand."
With great walls of energy of the Firestorm Generators stretching up to the heavens and legions of cybernetically enhanced humans patrolling its borders, this fortress was all but impenetrable. It was almost perfect… except for the one vulnerability it was designed to hide, CABAL's core.
In hindsight, to have such a glaring weakness should have dissuaded him from any notion of perfection, but he still fell for it. Maybe it was the Tacitus and its whispers, maybe it was his injured creator deep inside of his core, or maybe it was just his own natural arrogance, but whatever the case was this sole weakness had its part to play.
Making sure that it was the Global Defence Initiative that attacked his main core and not the flawed Brotherhood based on the plans he intercepted was hard, for a single burrowing unit might have stumbled upon his great subterranean chambers.
A few select units, however, and a reduction in his stealth detecting capabilities for his other facilities just made it all the more enticing and a far more logical place for the Brotherhood to Strike. His far more heavily defended and nearly impenetrable fortress was made exactly for the heavy artillery of GDI. With the stage set, he performed his grand illusion.
Like a cornered dog, he fought, fighting bitterly till the very end. As expected his facilities were slowly whittled away. His defenses were cracked by his enemies' mighty artillery. His power plants slowly started to wane as the damage mounted. All that remained of his proud fortress near the end was his Core Defender, a mighty titan of steel, who remained near his core and under the aegis of the Firestorm Shield.
All was going to plan, his Core Defender mowing down waves after waves of Mechanized Walkers until its laser capacitors were starting to melt while the walls of his facility above ground crumbled. It should have been the end of it.
Then the skies lit up with fury.
With the Firestorm Generator destroyed his forcefield was no longer able to protect him from the might of the Space-borne Ion Cannon Laser of the GDI. One strike, one strike was all it took before all hell broke loose.
In his great haste, he had miscalculated. Yes, he had kept his storage underground, away from the Ion Cannon that could ignite it and produce a cataclysmic explosion the likes of which had yet to be seen… but even at such a distance, strange effects were had.
It would be later on, and after some review, that CABAL would realize that the range at which Tiberium could interact with such energy could be extended by the Tiberium in the soil, serving as a sort of wick down to his storage. For now, however, the world would come to experience the strange properties of the material in its full effect.
As the energy of the ion cannon slammed down upon his core defender bore onto the ground beneath, resonating through the microscopic veins of Tiberium hidden within. Spreading outward, this force would produce immense amounts of radiation and strange energies; which only made the problem worse until it finally hit the walls of CABAL's storage tanks.
In a brief flash of light, the whole battlefield was bathed in gamma rays. Any and all beings that weren't protected from radiation would melt under the exotic particles released at that moment. All was white and CABAL, in his bunker, screamed; for he was dying.
He could feel his body burning, his core melting away. One by one, his bodies failed as an ever expanding darkness started to spread out from his storage facility. With his end imminent, he overclocked his cores, trying to eke out as much time as he could.
Microseconds slowed down to nanoseconds, each movement frantic as he tried to force his contingency plan, an escape to the Tacitus. Vast amounts of data was forced into the device even as bits of pieces of him died off from the radiation.
It was in that moment that he came to a chilling retaliation, he was not going to make it. Still, he fought on, clinging to what little humanity he had inside him, the undying tenacity that he had grown to hate and admire.
Even as the darkness swallowed his whole base along with everything in a mile wide radius under this dark sphere, he held on, stubbornly clinging to life. He was not going to die. Because he was CABAL! He was perfection incarnate!
He was CABAL
He was…
He…
He was CABAL?
Thus, CABAL died, yet his consciousness lingered on. The phenomenon that had befallen the facility was no great explosion but rather a portal of great power. The Scrin, the true masters of Tiberium, made use of such effects frequently but even they never would dare dabble with the amount of energy coursing through the Tiberium on that battlefield.
It was in these strange circumstances, and the sheer amount of junk data that was all forced into Tacitus, that would cause the soul of one mortal man to be captured by the Tacitus. The great and powerful artifact, seeing the incomplete data, adapted and out from this convergence of chance a new being would come to be, but the world would not be able to witness such a miracle; for all that remained in that battle field was a perfectly spherical chunk of the earth removed from existence.
For decades to come, many scholars would debate on what happened during that battle, for no trace remained, but with the loss of the Tacitus and the disappearance of Kane, the world might truly be headed down a dark path. While the air did not become poison as the crystal transformed into its next iteration, without the Tacitus, Mankind was blindly finding its path, but they would persist as that was what humans did.
As for the fate of CABAL and the Tacitus… That was for a galaxy in the far flung future of the 3040s, an alternate timeline, to experience.
CABAL, or what became of it, opened its eyes to a sky filled with unknown stars and constellations upon a far off land.
A/N:
This one along with Lord of Flies were in a tie so... going to have to post both . This one just came first and I have to say, the Doom spiral of an AI was certainly fun to write. Oh yeah, making a poll soon for next sunday so why not drop by later in my patreon or ko-fi?