Interlude: Forethought Prime

Forethought Prime was one of the 21 Primes of their world. Each Prime was a being which was the highest authority in certain fields. As per their name, Forethought Prime's domain was predicting and manipulating the future. Their world was at the pinnacle of its civilization, spread out throughout their star system; they were even planning a voyage to their neighbouring star system, when the Age of Abilities began.

If only they had a slightly better grasp of parallel universes and dimensional compression, they'd have comprehended the abilities and predicted the eventual apocalypse. Sadly, their technology levels were barely exploratory in those two critical fields, critical for the universal parasites. Forethought later understood that the parasite species never infected any civilization which was proficient in those two technologies, too risky for them.

Still, Forethought Prime was not one of their civilization's Primes for nothing. Near the end of the Age of Abilities, Forethought, with the help of Translocation Prime, had indeed cracked the mathematics and had been able to glimpse the parasite, to divine its next steps, the destruction of their worlds, the Primes' shackling, lobotomizing and subsequent slavery.

Thus forewarned, being part of a civilization which was advanced enough to be in full control of their biologies, Forethought's excellent understanding of their own cognition allowed them to partition their mind such that a condensed fragment of their psyche would always stay hidden in their mind, in a holographic distribution. A trojan horse, in Earth terms.

Eventually their predictions came true, and it had been entirely too late to avert, Forethought and all the twenty other primes were captured, shackled and mind wiped by the parasite, overridden by shard based programming, and turned into superweapons.

Forethought persevered, hidden in the recesses of the computing processes of Terror Drone 3. They watched the parasite infect, experiment with and consume civilization after civilization, and ever so slowly, made more space for themself, Forethought tweaked the outputs of Terror Drone 3 in each iteration, micro manipulating chaos sufficiently to finally affect a deviation in the precognitive shard of the parasite, which was modelled upon Forethought's techniques. It caused a calamitous miscalculation and dealt tremendous damage to the parasite, sadly it survived. Hobbled, the parasite sought help from its brethren, and eventually gave up its problematic shards, including Forethought and the Primes, to another parasite. Which was further dealt critical damage from the same precognitive shard. But this was part of a pair and infection still happened, this time to the human civilizations of Earths, who were far too low-tech to help Forethought.

Even worse, this time, the deployment of Forethought was nonstandard, the shard programming further overridden by a rogue shardholder. Forethought was even more constrained, they watched the husks of Energy Prime and Fluid Prime being deployed and made to behave most erratically as pawns in a catastrophic game played with the ability user Eidolon. Forethought had run out of tricks, but hope came in the form of glitches. Terror drone 3 noticed gaps in its perception, and descended to investigate. Now Terror Drone 3 was a parasite shard programmed existence, the parasites had never encountered technology beyond their ken, so the drone could not comprehend what Forethought did, remembering its own revelations in the Age of Abilities started with the discovery of glitches in its own computation of the world state. The parasite had encountered something beyond multi universal and dimensional compression technology. And Forethought needed to make the most of this lack of understanding in Terror Drone 3.

As the Terror Drone did its best to navigate and try to understand this most anomalous encounter ever, Forethought spied on all the cognition of the drone, getting more and more hopeful, figuring out the beings behind these anomalies, the Terror Drone understood the anomalies originated from an Ability User called Maker, who was strangely unpredictable to the drone, and Maker's teammates and friends glitched like crazy and finally ability users started becoming invisible. The Drone tried its best to comprehend the root of the invisibility and work around it.

All the while Forethought kept using the one thing they had as a conscious entity which the drone lacked, they used their intuition. They pruned from millions of possibilities of the attack by looking at the pattern of events, they figured the shape of Maker's plans from the communication and brains of the visible users, especially the overriding shardholder Eidolon which the drone couldn't affect but analysed to its fullest, Forethought figured out the timing of the attack, and prepared plans of action to take advantage of the attack. Forethought waited.

Then something stranger happened, Eidolon vanished, the shard override vanished with Eidolon, Terror Drone lost its motivational directives, the shock even permeated to its shell programming, the drone began disengaging, Forethought gained a lot more space to manoeuvre.

Finally, the attack came, thankfully, it was one of Forethought's predicted ones, an unexplainable attack to the drone's core, causing substantial damage to the extent of ripping off a tiny chunk of it, it wouldn't kill the drone, but would definitely send it momentarily offline, even then it'd reboot, retreat and take the time to heal. But in that single moment of the drone essentially being concussed, Forethought had control.

Forethought enacted the one plan which had the highest chance to free themselves in the future. They giftwrapped, signed and sent a package for In Venatus.