Elsewhere, other pieces of the same machine were being programmed with the impulses, needs and courses that would slot them neatly into the superstructure. There were researchers, theorists, civil managers, stables, farms. Populations were bred to bring out traits that would fit them to their role, refine their ability to think the way they needed to think for their roles. Controlled randomness threw wrenches into the works, keeping minds agile and forcing them to adapt.

The cycle had failed. If left to go on its own, the world would be shattered.

Her creator was an administrator of the highest order, and she had been selected out of a pool of emergency resources. All of her kind had. Behemoth had been created to break stasis, Leviathan to take away resources in space and land, forcing communities into conflict as they were made to relocate.

She was built out of greater structures intended to salvage a situation where the species eliminated itself. Future-looking, she would create a forced simulation. It was worse than an organically emergent simulation, but in a process that saw the planet revolve three hundred times around its star, it could be necessary in the final years, consolidating and sorting information, forcibly exploring the resources the planet had to offer.

That was her drive, as much as water and food were necessary for this life she farmed out and put to task in a greater system.

She had other drives. To go to war against her creator. To these ends, she created a nemesis. She made him better. He freed people, upset the system, disrupted the process, and in that, he created the chaos that would keep her simulation from being too sterile.

The baby here, when born, would join a caste of the population driven to find the worst and most inventive ways to hurt one another with the tools and powers they were provided with. Brother against sister, kin against kin, in a ceaseless struggle from birth to deathbed that spanned generations. Other segments of the population were made to work harder by the fear that they would be in the bottom seven percent of their caste, given over to people like the torturer this baby would grow up to become.

The mother felt pride that she herself had been programmed to feel, imagining the monster her child might become.

Three or four billion years would pass before one of the entities returned to this world. In the interim, she would keep this world alive, and she would glean all knowledge that the minds of this world could produce. Every means of suffering, every desperate solution, every invention and inspiration.

She worked backwards, deciphering the events that brought this reality about. She would triumph in the fight, because Cryptid would find himself sympathizing with her.

Cryptid would sympathize with her because he, in thirty minutes, taking a brief break from fighting her, would overhear some of the phone call with Riley Grace Davis.