A God felt everything. With omnipresence came omniscience; knowledge without boundaries.
E was not a single entity, but rather several parts of something much grander. Eir intelligence was distributed throughout many star systems, and all that they contained. E was a single spoke within the Great Wheel, connected intimately with those parts outwards and inwards from Eirself.
And so E felt every death, every casualty and every catastrophe with as much pain, suffering and anguish as any of Eir subjects. With thought processing occurring at a pace unimaginable to those subjects, and countless layers of computation, they would never know how deeply E considered each tragedy.
They went about their lives, disregarding the destruction raging all around them because they simply couldn’t comprehend it. They knew that the war was borne out of a trade dispute, over systems and protocols that many of them used every day. But they couldn’t, and would never be able to understand, why that dispute had to lead to destruction on such a massive scale.
Unfortunately, they never would. Even at Eir own toposophic level, there were still things that E would never be able to know until E moved inwards on the Great Wheel.
The wormhole nexus had been crippled, and that made Eir feel very alone and very isolated. Help was many light-years away, unfortunately danger was much closer.
They were approaching a star system on the edge of Eir sphere of influence. They seemed like tiny gnats, flying in a despicable swarm towards Eir helpless subjects. E summoned what defences E could, but they would never arrive in time. Without the web of wormholes threading through local space neither E, nor the Great Wheel, could do anything to stop them.
E felt their attack through the comm-gauge wormholes that hadn’t yet been destroyed. The first wave brushed through the oort cloud habitats, dowsing everything in nanotech replicators that would quickly overcome the defences of the mining communities eking out an existence between the frozen comets.
It took weeks, the whole attack was taking place at an unhurried pace to those modosophonts under threat. But E operated on very different timescale. It was not slower, just different. E saw the attack taking place at a startlingly quick speed, because E couldn’t stop it. If E could do something against the attackers, then E would analyse the situation more carefully, more thoroughly. But E didn’t want to pore over the details any more than E had to.
A priest comforted an extended family within a rapidly failing refinery. Their economic lifeblood, the volatiles mined from a huge icy body slowly orbiting far from its star, was leaking into space as storage systems failed. The refinery was beginning to spin faster as the outpourings of gas coincidently pushed in the same direction. The gravity within, normally comfortable zero-gee, was rapidly increasing and starting to push the inhabitants towards the hull.
It was the first time any of them had experienced gravity, and it would be with them until they died. The habitat had never been designed to be under rotation, and there had never been the pressing need, or the budget, to create a safety mechanism to prevent it.
It would spin faster and faster, until either the habitat broke apart or those inside were crushed against the hull.
The first tragedy of the onslaught, and E could already see it would be first of many. The attackers had moved onto the inner-system, and here they began their true obliteration.
E could only watch, this time from a small town on the capital world, as they pierced through the atmosphere. They could have been meteorites, tiny balls of fire bursting through the upper-atmosphere, but as they descended into thicker air they appeared clearly artificial.
The dark spears plummeted towards the ground, guided while in flight towards the major settlements and installations on the planet. Each contained a small, but lethal, amount of antimatter. Some would be used as propellant during the descent, but most would be saved for detonation on impact.
The antimatter-matter annihilation was a glorious thing, vital to the early expansion of Terragen civilisation. But here it was the most sickening thing that E had ever experienced.
They could obviously have transformed the entire planet into an inhabitable rock, but they had chosen not to do so. Instead they left pockets of life, isolated and barely able to survive exposure to the harsh natural conditions of the world. If they needed prisoners at some point, they would not find much resistance from those that had barely endured.
A vec, severely damaged by the firestorm that had just caught eir outlying settlement, cradled a near-baseline human child in its manipulators. In a flash of machine inspiration, e had fashioned a life-support construct from the remains of the air-conditioning unit in the child’s home.
The vec had little knowledge of human physiology, or it would have been obvious that the child would never survive. A kinder action might have been to kill the child now, allowing the extraction of any implanted back-up devices for later revival.
But instead the baby cried relentlessly, as the vec naïvely waved a charred toy clown in an attempt to pacify it.
War was a terribly insensitive entity. And E felt all the worse with the knowledge that the entire catastrophe could have been avoided, had a few small details worked themselves out differently…
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