Only half of the vat’s liquid remained, the rest was a very dense gas in which the woman could still float. The Faceless Mages couldn’t stop staring at her body, now clearly visible. She had long red hair and pale blue skin that sparkled from the incorporated steel. Her figure was muscular yet ravishing. With her eyes still closed, she seemed so peaceful and angelic. As the vat finished to empty, the pipe latches unlocked and let her go. She smoothly unfolded and stood up.

The vat door opened. Two men carried her to a big armchair in the middle of the room. Kalik nodded to a small fat guy who hadn’t left his computer. At this signal, the latter pressed a button, and the woman opened her eyes.

Looking at her perfectly optimized face, a mix of contradictory emotions emerged among the mages. Her magnetic traits urged them to devote their entire life to her, they would die, right here, right now if she asked them to. At the same time, a sense of doom was creeping in the back of their minds. You could feel the prescient power of this absolute death machine, and that made them shiver.

The woman spent a few seconds inspecting the room, the people, and started to smile maliciously.

“Why are you looking at me like morons?” she said in a perfect Marin. “I hope everything is ready because we have a lot of shit to do.”

That startled most of the Mages, used to her peaceful, floating body. Kalik bit his lips and exchanged looks with Elfer, who had supervised the technical part of the creation. For sure, it wasn’t gonna be easy. They had crammed her biocomputer brain with knowledge and everything available on Emperor Narcissus and the current situation in the Galaxy. The random elements in her personality generation though were single points of failure.

“Hey Narcissa” snapped Kalik, “Or would you rather we call you ‘Princess’ Narcissa?” he went on with an ironic tone.

“Indeed, the Princess shall destroy the Emperor” she replied, “and that would make you… my slaves? What else could you do, I am orders of magnitude smarter than all of you!”.

Clearly, she seemed to be aware of her purpose, as well as of her importance.

“Ahem”, Kalik didn’t expect that level of disagreeableness. They had made her like that to make sure she would only be guided by reason, but a side effect was that she would not really care about other people’s feeling. Which if you knew it, was quite funny to watch.

“Of course I’m kidding. I know. All humans are created equal and freedom is the most important value, blah blah blah… You hard coded this into me at the very core. On separate modules, that would make me self destruct if I tried to touch it. You guys couldn’t have fucked up this bad… But then, who knows? Maybe I could circumvent your concepts and assign a different semantic definition to slave… goal alignment is a tricky problem.”, she went on laughing. “Ok. What news have you got?”

With a grave face, Kalik explained thoroughly the plan the mages have worked on for months. “…and once you’re inside the palace keep, you will kill the evil at its very source, within it lair, and put an end to those decades of tyranny and horror. Thanks to you Narcissa, the world will once again be free. Men and women will be relieved from that terrible unknown force clouding their minds, and the terrors of collectivist authoritarian dictatorship will crumble and let individuals emerge once again from the ashes of the demon. Once again humanity will flourish, men will be allowed to have sex with other men, women will be allowed to wear the clothes they want, and eat chicken. Humanity will be free! Free to fail, free to experiment, free to…”.

Narcissa cut him in, “So you want me to go on a quasi suicide mission and kill Emperor Narcissus. You know that your plan is really stupid right? You just spent years trying to conjure the ultimate weapon, I am endowed with all the highest and most secret tech you can imagine, stuff you really don’t want the enemy to get his hands on and you’re suggesting I go straight into the core of the enemy’s territory, where his power is the strongest, where every human is perfectly controlled, to try to murder one guy? And then what happens? Do you expect the Empire will just crumble by itself? Why do you think he built super strong institutions and adopted 5 of his top lieutenants 10 years ago? As if the institutions would just say, “Ah fuck it, let’s give the rebels the power next time.” What am I gonna do with you…“

She paused for a second, looking at their bewildered faces.

“Empires are well oiled machines and it doesn’t matter who’s on top. Their weakness lies in the fact that information and management become increasingly complex as the size of the network increases. The way you topple an empire is by creating enough instability in enough varied parts of the empire that the repression systems get progressively more and more exhausted and ultimately overwhelmed. Small changes of equilibrium have huge ripple effects if you plan properly. We will destroy the empire by making it exhaust its resources trying to stop us.”

They were all speechless. They kind of knew something like that was supposed to happen. They’d aimed Narcissa to be much smarter than them, not AGI level (you never know where that can lead you), but smart enough that she could actually be their insightful leader. Looking back, they felt all very dumb for having thought so foolish a plan was the optimal path.

Kalik inquired, “Ok then… what do you mean precisely?”

“Well obviously, we organize some guerilla warfare, trying to create as much fuss in the most remote part of the Empire, where the Mushtroopers have the least control and where the people’s will is strongest. Every time we create a small rebellion in another remote place, it’s gonna be harder and harder for the centralized commands to manage. At some point, there’ll be so much complexity we’ll just beat them every time. Chaos is our best weapon. The enemy is centralized and top down, if we bring chaos in their rank, they will panic, exhaust themselves and crumble. We, on the other hand, know how to deal with chaos.”

They had a lot of work on their hands. Now that they had a leader as fierce as Princess Narcissa, their life was going to be rough. But it was for the better.

“Now, show me the armory.” she asked.