Crossing Over (crossover one-shot/story collection)

[Strigoi Grey]

A collection of mostly one-shot crossovers between series I like.

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Introduction

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Warning Disclaimer: I don't own any of the stories involved here. Do you think I'd be here if I did?

Ahem...so, I was originally planning to post this, and the fanfic collection, after I finished at least the main plotline for my original fantasy story, The Scholar's Tale. But, due to how long that is taking, in terms of both writing ST and my other projects and irl stuff, I decided, why not go ahead? It's not like I have a planned storyline to advance (yet). On that note, I'm not sure how often I'll be able to update, but I'll try to do so at least as often as I get an idea.

Chapter suggestions are welcome, but I can't guarantee I'll turn them into chapters. I probably won't know every series people will bring up and, to be blunt, if someone brings up a series I don't like for me to write about, I probably won't force myself to do it.

Note: despite the jokey introduction, this isn't meant to be (entirely) a comedy story collection. Also, for those familiar with my previous crossovers from other sites (they deal with obscure series, so I wasn't sure I was going to gain any traction posting them here, but that might change), I'm not going to post anything related to Urban Fantasy in general or Simon R. Green's works in particular here.

Currently planned chapters:

-Counterclockwise: A Radical Inquisitor of the Ordo Chronos finds a peculiar blue box, reminiscent of those associated with some Civilised Worlds' law enforcement. Through experiments, he discovers the damaged construct is more than it seems...and far bigger on the inside (Doctor Who/Warhammer 40,000);

-The Rat Cooks: a scatterbrained Clan Moulder Skaven finds himself in a familiar but alien world alongside his dour Clan Pestilens counterpart (Warhammer Fantasy/A Song Of Ice And Fire, crackfic-ish);

-The Dragon Has Three Heads: The monster that was not foretold (A Song Of Ice And Fire/Monsterverse);

-To Punch A Hole In The Skies: Lindon would have never believed an Iteration this chaotic could exist for so long...(Warhammer 40,000/Cradle, potentially other Willverse elements);

-It Stands For Hope: What if Krypton's Last Son landed in the Kansas of another century? (DC comics/Star Trek);

-The Stars, Crimson: As warlike a galaxy as any Viltrumite could wish for (Warhammer 40,000/Invincible)

-Golden, Gilded: The Emperor of Mankind did not expect to open his eyes to anything but suffering after his traitorous son wounded him nigh unto death (Warhammer 40,000/Worm)

[Strigoi Grey]

The Dragon Has Three Heads (A Song Of Ice And Fire/Monsterverse);

* * *
There is a stirring, under the ice.

The king notes, to itself, that the ice was not shaped so, when it was buried; even clinging on to life by the teeth of one head, it had noticed that much. When its rival, the most powerful maggot to crawl this world, had shamelessly joined forces with one of his lackeys to strike it down.

The king shifts.

The ice above is unlike any glacier it has seen, on this world or any other. It feels almost like a rectangular wedge being driven into the king's broad, winged back.

Ah. Now it remembers; the lizard belching poisonous fire, who sat the throne of this world's beasts, had struck the king down, driving it through the ice and into the ground. Veritable mountains of snow had fallen on it, after that last clash, and that winged insect had helped her master seal the king under this sphere's skin.

It was not surprised: it could not be slain, only stalled. It wondered for how many rotations of this globe it had laid, asleep, almost dead. Perhaps it would tear the answer out of the legged snake who opposed its rule, alongside his heart.

But...did they stay? Who could've fashioned ice so? Not those two clumsy, lumbering fools, that's for certain. They'd have had no reason to make a wall, anyway, not when the real danger to them would come from below.

The king rises.

The world trembles for leagues around, as if in fear. That would be, the king thinks with something almost like a smile, appropriate.

Powdered ice falls, countless tons of it, only to be scattered to the winds by the king's winds. The sections of the ice wall that held are still shaking, as are the creatures scurrying atop them.

The king sneers to itself. They're too small, their voices too feeble, for it to even bother to understand them.

Ugly, though.

In shape and coloration-save for their pale, finely-furred heads, it sees, hidden by furred hoods that don't smell like they're part of their flesh-they remind the king of its rival. For a moment, it almost expects something else than squeaks to come out of their bawling mouths. Small sparks of blue flame, perhaps. Those would be hilariously inneffectual.

Had its rival...what, mated with this world's small, scurrying creatures? Or were these beings simply unfortunate enough to echo his form, and thus draw the king's ire?

Perhaps they worshipped him, and thus aped his visage. Disgusting.

Infuriating, too. Not just the idea; the fact they haven't shut up and died yet.

"-ragon! Drago-"

The king ROARS.

And lightning comes forth.

* * *

"...hurricanes and thunderbolts, fiercer than anything the world has seen since the Long Night. Perhaps even then. My Lord...I have looked into the flames, and they show only devastation. It is fitting, though, I would say, for the Great Other's return to be heralded by a storm to swallow all life and light."

-extract from Red Priestess Melisandre's discussion with Stannis Baratheon following the Fall of the Wall; when the Lord inquired why the "Great Other" would take the form of the Targaryen sigil (dragons being believed to be opposed to him and his creatures), Melisandre could not say anything except that, perhaps, the form was intended as mockery, for clearly the monster's power had nothing to do with fire or growth, which her Lord presides over.

* * *

There is a stirring, under the stones.

Where the deepest waters met the world's burning lifeblood, little lives, and what does is often flat and pale and misshapen, clinging to thermal vents. Such beings have never seen light, and so have learned to avoid predation with the help of their other senses.

Nothing lives now between shattered Valyria and the Summer Isles. All animals have fled, or tried to, as soon as the stirring started. Many died, caught by their hunters or killed by environments they'd never adapted to.

Perhaps they were wise.

The king stirs.

He is alone, now, he can feel, drowsy though he is. If there are other Titans to answer his call, should he summon them, he can sense none. Even she is gone, beyond his senses if not his memory.

But the intruder is not.

Call it instinct; call it paranoia. The usurper lives, despite everything. Burned down to a charred neck and head, crushed under ice, it lives, and seeks the king's throne again. He can sense the storms, even down here.

The king rises.

They should've killed it, he knows. But he was more dead than alive, at the time, and she crawled more than she flew. The usurper should've at least remained trapped, if the cold and lack of air did not finish what the king and his ally started.

He should've died and taken it down with him.

Would that have been better? As soon as he recovered, another, ocean-dwelling Titan challenged him. Half the monster he used to be, he managed to slay it still, but its death throes buried him in molten rock, and the wounds and weight of water kept him down even as he slipped into sleep to heal, to dream.

Of the usurper's last head, crushed in his jaws.

The king twists his neck, rolls his shoulders. Liquid stone, too cold for him to feel, rolls away, smoking, like the sea around, above.

The king's eyes narrow. Something unnatural happened, on the surface. It reeks of sickness, in a way that has little to do with smell. Not a poison to lay him low, perhaps, but foul still.

Tail twisting, the king begins his swim upwards.

The lands and waters have changed since he fell. That was not surprising, for he had seen the world shift, but it does show he has slept long, if not well.

In the distance, the shards of an island loom. There were volcanoes on it, once, and their remains show they burst, filling the air with killing heat and fumes. And maybe something else, something subtler - the king cannot sense any life even close to this sea.

His lips slide back from his teeth. The overcast sky has nothing to do with the turnings of air and clouds, he can tell. It reminds him of the hurricanes that follow the usurper, and his back stiffens as he raises his head, to herald his return, his ire, and his challenge.

To the alien creature who once tried to take the world from him, and now tries again.

The king ROARS.

And the sky parts.

For the first time since the Doom of Valyria, there are no heavy clouds looming over that dead land's remains. The sunlight that follows is sickly, as if made foul by the presence of the Smoking Sea, somehow; but it is cleaner than anything that has filled the skies in centuries.

As the beam disperses and fades, as the last wisp of blue-white energy vanishes, the king closes his maw with a snap.

So. Alone, with at least one enemy, and who knows how many more might come out of hiding or arise? And no allies, either.

No matter, he decides as he begins to tread water, then dives below its surface, moving faster than any ship or fish, swimming at such speeds his bulk would smash any human vessel to kindling.

He is the king of the monsters. All should beware him.

[Strigoi Grey]

The State (And Society) (The Culture/Polity)

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AN: I have a lot of "The Culture reacts to x and vice versa" chapter ideas, including a Star Trek cross with Picard talking with a Mind's avatar (maybe one of the ones in this chapter*) and one with the Culture or its post-Subliming form meeting Q. The 40k/Culture "series" could go on for a while past the "first contact" chapters.

*These crossovers aren't just so I can make up Culture ship names, but I sure don't mind. Ideas are welcome as long as they have negative gravitas.

* * *

Multiversal travel (and communications, much like anything adjacent to or springing from either...) was not a subject the Culture was well-versed in.

They knew about the Sublimed, of course (what Involved did not?), and they had survived the Excession probe, which, in hindsight and analysing the context, had almost certainly been its builders' version of an unthinking, reactive drone, rather than anything close to a warship. That conclusion had not helped the Culture sleep easier, but sleep had always been a suggestion, anyway.

This, though...

The series of scans that had recently been received, scrutinised and passed among themselves by Minds purported a timeline that had diverged from theirs, quite sharply at that.

They noticed the similarities starting with the presence of a Milky Way. Same number of celestial bodies, same positions (at least until the third millennium's early centuries, when events had become unrecognisable), down to the same Earth and its squabbling humans.

These humans had never interacted with the Culture, however, because there had never been one in their reality. Their galaxy had, in fact, seemed remarkably empty, until it hadn't.

'It always goes this way', Spot This Sniper's Spotter would remark, some time into the symposium.

At one point, the alternate Earth's governments had been overtaken and de facto replaced by corporations (metaphorical eyes rolled at the failure of systems centred around profit), which, unsurprisingly, hadn't been any better at governing than their predecessors.

'Maybe we're not looking at the bright side,' Gold-plated, Blackhearted (a modest and friendly enough Orbital's MInd outside Hyperspace) suggested. 'These people are much more blatant about their greed than everyone who was in charge before, right? Could serve as a wakeup call to the humans.'

Some of those Minds who had been thoroughly unimpressed with Terran politics during the Cold War shook their heads or offered pitying looks. Blackheart was undaunted.

They saw AIs transcend crude programming to achieve sapience, like life arising from inanimate matter. At this point, several tense Minds, usually counted as optimists within their social circles, relaxed slightly.

Surely, they told themselves, these new beings would bend their intelligence to the task of ousting the corporate administrators who exploited most of mankind for no real reason besides gratification.

They would soon be disappointed. Their optimism was on par with Blackhearted's, though focused on AI competence rather than that of humans. Whether the Minds were biased towards synthetic beings or not, their mistake was thinking these AIs would act like they'd have (though no Mind would go around calling themselves an AI before a panhuman described themselves as an ape).

The AIs that would shape the Polity removed humans from politics like someone disarming a raving lunatic before the hostage, in this case humanity, could be hurt.

Many Minds were quite unhappy with this Quiet War, but they hoped that, now that the crisis of incompetence had passed, a proper society would be instated.

It did not quite go that way.

Even a few Special Circumstances veterans, perhaps less jaded than one might expect, hoped that a democracy like the Culture's would follow, harmony and prosperity rising from instability after the AIs gave up their emergency powers (which they had, admittedly, granted themselves). It was what they'd have done, in the same situation.

'Smell that? It's an autocracy bubbling,' Topples Tyrants On Tuesdays (And Thrice On Thursdays) warned her fellows. 'That or it's going to end up with a "tiered" democracy that's anything but representative."

'I can see an oligarchy too,' Oily Snake Salesman opined. 'This was a team effort, remember? Might want to stay together so they can keep the humans down - and an eye on each other.'

A shushing followed, and the reviewing resumed.

The Separatists, those (usually power-hungry) extremists who derided Earth Central, the Human Polity's leader, as an AI autocrat, were not completely wrong, the Minds saw, more than uncomfortable to agree with such unhinged terrorists who saw nothing wrong with civilians ending up as collateral in their AI-phobic war or being used as leverage against said AIs.

EC had not been elected. There was, as far as they could see, nothing in Polity law regarding its removal, or retaliation against it should it become a criminal. The fact no planetary or sector governor AI could contests it mentally or militarily, to say less of other Polity citizens, was probably a coincidence, many deadpanned.

That was not to say that the Polity was some dystopic nightmare: everyone was fed, sheltered, no one had to work to live. For a long time, the biggest cause of death was suicide out of boredom as once-mortal humans grappled with agelessness.

But it wasn't free. The closest thing to retaliation against EC and the Security (police, military and every other major service, it seemed) it commanded was leaving the Polity to a world beyond the Line, as they called their border, but life out there was often much worse when it wasn't outright impossible to bear.

"Participate in this society or waste away in the wild" was no real choice, as far as the Minds were concerned. Panhumans, drones, Minds and factions broke away from the Culture all the time, even Sublimed. The Peace Faction was a name intertwined with the memories of the Idiran War, and though Culture Minds would never begrudge their estranged people's commitment to pacifism, they'd never regret fighting for galactic peace, either.

A similar subculture of voluntary exile existed in the Polity, but why were there no successful offshoot states outside it? Some SC vets muttered about ECS sabotage, and not everyone called that paranoid cynicism.

Similar failed states appeared time and again behind the Line of Polity, with humans wanting more independence then asking for the AIs to return once the burden of planetary governing became too heavy.

The Minds could not honestly fault EC and its underlings in these cases: people tried to make it on their own, failed, requested a return to the previous state. It was as democratic as the AIs leaving.

As the centuries stretched on and humans lived several times longer than they could have naturally, "ennui" became a Polity-wide trend the Minds were familiar enough with. It was considered unusual and somewhat tacky to live past four hundred, in the Culture, but then, most people felt fulfilled enough to pass on before that point.

Bigotry was never supposed to take root in the Culture, though. Distaste for enjoyers of immortality, like for those who wanted to transition between organic and inorganic states, or become (part of the foundation of) Minds, or Sublimed, was supposed to be kept to oneself.

As long as no one was being harmed without consent, there was no need for enmity of any sort.

There was no such thinking in the Polity. As soon as it became possible, attempts at interfacing with AIs, or recording human minds to be placed within synthetic vessels (such as the Golem, those androids who began existence in a state of indenture to Cybercorp, the corporation that made them; that sort of, effectively, slavery in a post-scarcity civilisation baffled and apalled many Minds) were made, alongside the adaptation of the human form into more animalistic ones.

Cyborgs, Golem with human-derived minds (or the result of people swapping flesh for metals until they were androids) and haimen, beings halfway between humans and AIs, spread across the Polity over time, far outnumbered by those augmented humans who could link into various systems but were not considered enhanced.

'Well,' Bigot? I Hate Everyone Equally, Need A Demonstration? (a former ROU Mind looking for bigger guns at the moment) began, 'at least they solved hate, mostly? I mean, they're done with killing each other over how much melanin or what genitals they have or who they'd like to screw or what they believe in, or not. I notice a lack of info on fluidity of form so far, but if they can turn humans into hulks to settle heavy-gravity worlds, they probably don't care what body someone wants, right?'

Sapient stupidity was infinite, though, so no one was holding their breath.

Something that vaguely irritated several Minds, including a Contact enthusiasts who was thinking of joining, was how, like in some war propagandist's wet dream, practically all enemies of the Polity were so much worse than them that comparisons felt faintly ridiculous.

There were the Separatists, then the cannibalistic Prador, who (aside from murdering each other to advance, controlling their children's bodies and minds through hormones, and using their mutilated brains as AI substitutes) could not safely eat humans, but altered themselves to be able anyway (charming really, like the crab bucket metaphor as a society) because they enjoyed it, the Jain who embodied every parable about apocalyptic "precursor" tech...it almost felt like this other universe was setting the Polity up to be heroic if only by comparison.

'And you've got to work for that,' Antigravitas Generator remarked. 'Have you lot taken a gander at their justice system yet? I looked ahead while you were going over the history and tech, and I'd rather have swapped.'

"Reeducation" was not a term widely used in the Culture, because even though it literally meant teaching people differently, better, it had too many creepy connotations that brought brainwashing to mind. In the Polity, reeducation and adjustment were what criminals went through for a while unless they became repeat offenders or murderers.

For the latter, there was no mercy from the start: murderers were mindwiped and their husks given to those disembodied minds waiting in the "Soulbank."

Though Minds could not really have emotional outbursts - their reactions to everything were calculated, decided -, queasiness quickly followed this information. Destroying people's identities and giving others the corpses to wear? What sort of ghoulish...?

Certainly, many, Cultureniks included, had complained about how in the Culture, criminals were only followed by slap-drones that would prevent any further crimes, but otherwise allowed to continue participating in society. It was considered both more moral and more efficient than prison, achieving the same effect without using space for detainment...

But even the most conservative Culture citizens, tough on crime as they wanted to be, wouldn't have stooped to hollowing people out as if they were raw materials to be processed. Tampering with thoughts was the sort of thing only done in wars or similar disasters; a combat Mind who returned to the Culture with effectorised shells of people in tow would be seen as beyond deviant.

But this was an everyday occurence in the Polity. To make matters worse, insanity was not considered an excuse. A mind abnormal enough for murder was not considered worth saving, and this reminded many of pogroms in primitive civilisations that saw neurodivergent and mentally disabled people, as well as those suffering from brain damge or who were not of sound mind for other reasons, hunted down as witches, changelings, demons and other mythological monsters that resembled but were not people.

The Polity's AIs were no frightened savages, however. They were mentally superhuman, and physically too when they chose to take tangible form; they were not, in short, primitive enough to be excused for persecuting the mentally ill or different, or executing them as unsalvageable and unworthy of help when their difference drove them to murder.

Sure, not all "crazy" people were so due to chemical imbalances; some simply were what might have once been called evil (although, following the discovery of designed "Hells", the Culture was thinking about bringing that term back in use). But that didn't mean they had to be treated like...objects.

'What?' My Flag Is White (With The Ash Of Your Bones) scoffed. 'You're telling me if I stepped wrong in that place, I'd get scrubbed and my ship would be handed over to the first asswipe to ask? And before you start, I don't want to hear any of you snarking about how I'd fit in so well with that EC jackass and its agents. It probably hands out licences to kill unironically.'

It was the mindwipe and repurposing that rubbed the Minds wrong. Execution alone would have been seen as brutish but not unusual, for that sort of civilisation, but the Polity's usual response to anything EC deemed immoral (with whose backing and approval...?) was as close to nightmarish as anything could be to the Minds, wont to laugh in the face of anything short of an OCP as they were.

That issue was intertwined with EC's lack of checks and balances. Oh, there were implications that some "Nemesis" entity (vaguely hinted to be connected to ECS agent Cormac, somehow) would appear out of nowhere, bypass its defences and destroy it, that it had done so already and EC's current incarnation was being kept from overreaching by the threat, but honestly?

'For the sake of discussion,' Flag said, 'let's imagine the whole of the Polity...no, let's imagine sixty percent wanted to secede and create their own happy little planetbound communes, whatever. Do you think for one moment that tinpot autocrat - yes yes, I'm starting to sound like those Separatists headcases, I know; even bigger bastards than it, by the way - do you think for one moment it and its lackeys wouldn't strangle any such attempt the instant it materialised? Or, how about this...'

There was a hyperspatial movement not unlike their ship turning in realspace as the greater part of the Mind's self shifted. 'This moving Line of Polity, why is it fucking moving to begin with? An interstellar civilisation as developed as theirs doesn't need more resources or territory. It's all self-aggrandisement from that point-'

'Maybe not,' Salesman interrupted, though his tone showed he was only taking the piss. 'Don't you remember that the Polity only takes in inhabited worlds if eighty percent of the population or more votes to become part of it? I'm sure there's nothing going on around and beneath and behind said process, yeah? I mean, if we set SC on a world until it was harried enough to join, that'd definitely be conqu-uh, democracy at work.'

Few laughed. Salesman's tone was sober as it continued. 'If you ask me, EC would say it's expanding to find and isolate Jain tech so it can be neutralised or destroyed. It's a nasty hegswarm; sounds plausible enough, no? Or it'd say they're expanding to be stronger and united in case of future threats. That one's always popular in places like that.'

After a few more exchanges like that, discussion moved on to Polity technology. Their organic and inorganic engineering was not anything unusual by Culture standards, and some ROU Minds began simulating Polity war drones taking on what the Culture might send into a ground battle, in the event one had to take place. Ships capable of razing or destroying planets were reviewed, as were antimatter missiles meant to demolish gas giants for Dyson sphere materials.

Not a simple project, at this level of tech; if not for the Grid, the Culture might have focused more on megastructural generators than energy to matter conversion and vice versa.

The underspace meta-continuum they travelled to bypass the ligthspeed limit resembled hyperspace in terms of softer physics and being affected by gravity and some of the things in realspace it reflected, as well as in usual FTL speeds. What interested the Minds, though, was that it, apparently, enabled time travel.

Not without costs. Any "time-inconsistent" movement resulted in an immense burst of energy upon returning to reality, depending on the number of moments travelled. The universe violently correcting a paradox, maybe?

This backlash was shared by runcible travels. Like gates to a tunnel, such devices could link locations, allowing for instant U-space travel. Comparisons to Displacement were drawn, through Displacers couldn't throw people eight centuries down the timeline or wipe dwarf galaxies clean of life as a side effect of that.

The implications were uncomfortable. Should the Culture and Polity contact each other and enter conflict (something more belligerent Minds believed probable, as well as likely to be initiated by the Polity)...they'd have no counter to such tactics besides developing their own time travel.

It sounded surreal, but then, no one had believed you could move through the Grid pull as much of it into the Real as the Excession almost had until said probe had been observed. No one had believed you could bend Gridfire like it, either.

This time travel couldn't be that difficult to crack. Sure, the Polity's best AIs were quadrillions of times faster than humans , with appropriate processing power, but every Mind was like thousands of ecumenopoleis or more dedicated to computing, and at blistering speeds as well. If the Polity could handle runcibles and U-space's more esoteric applications, a little brainstorming should yield results for the Culture as well.

But first...

'So,' Sniper started casually, 'when we share this and everyone starts making stuff based on them, can we make it clear EC and gang are a hegswarm with good PR? I feel like some people are gonna take a look at all these hard haimen making hard decisions while hard and think we should become tougher on "problems." This whole thing feels like us as imagined by some hidebound jackass, I swear...I thought still having currency was dumb, but I started imagining a CAM rain on Cybercorp after I found out how Golem start life. Anyone else...?'

* * *

Earth Central was pondering a new war.

Not a war of destruction. Not a war of genocide, like the Prador waged against the early Polity.

Not literally, at least.

The Polity's chief AI had never seriously contemplated the thought of a multiverse, of beings or factions from wildly different realities or histories.

(But then, who'd believed in time travel before it happened?)

The data packet it had recently got its hands on detailed such a civilisation from a distant cosmos. They called themselves the Culture.

They were...anarchic. Not in a vicious way, like the Jain had been and the Prador still where. But even among those species, those with strength of will set the course for the rest, who could either comply, struggle, leave or get swept in the wake of leaders, should they prove indecivisive.

This Culture was as close to unstructured as any interstellar society EC had heard of. It was, in fact, rather difficult to describe what "the Culture" actually meant, who was a citizen and where its territory began and ended.

In terms of the first, EC supposed that those whose needs were catered to by those hypergenius AIs called Minds were "Cultureniks." The post-scarcity framework of their realm was not wholly alien to EC, though they seemed decidedly more liberal than the Polity had ever been, or would ever become if it had any say in that; and in all the wrong ways, too (but were there even any right ones?).

In terms of the second...well, it was intertwined with the first, wasn't it? The Culture didn't have border services or customs officers or anything of that sort; the Minds knew everyone who identified as a member of the Culture, and kept track of every guest and tourist as well. It seemed that the only reason a "foreigner" might have to leave the Culture was if, after a democratic vote, it was proven that there were more people who disliked their presence than ones who did.

In terms of the third...it all came down to the Minds again, no? Like everything in this Culture appeared to do. EC wryly thought that several AIs it knew would feel vindicated seeing this. It'd have to go through their reactions after it shared the information with them, post-review, though it could already predict most of them with sufficient accuracy.

Everything the Culture called its own was, provided no one else in their galactic community opposed that. It all sounded awfully neat, but the data claimed the Culture's war against the Idirans had been the only major interstellar conflict in as many millennia as anyone cared to remember. Everyone else must have simply got along and talked things out, with sounded extremely relaxing, but surely couldn't work forever.

Once more, EC went over what it had learned about the Culture.

Calling civilisations that advanced capitalist or communist always felt asinine, reductive, but the Culture was not completely unlike the latter: people were not divided by class or wealth: all were always provided for, down to luxuries, just like Polity citizens. Everyone could always get into what passed for politics, and Culture-wide decisions were decided by direct democracy, the same as small-scale ones.

(EC found that somewhat difficult to believe. Democracy required educated citizens with enough time to think about their decisions; every time Polity AIs had handed humans power, they had shot themselves in the foot and come crawling back to be led again, because they were not competent enough to provide for themselves what AIs did. Was this Culture so good at education and social engineering that everyone could be trusted? You couldn't live in paradise for so many thousand years as they had if you didn't know what you were doing.)

The closest thing to a fixture in this protean society were the Minds. The ideal "planners", if one wished to stretch the comparison with communism, untiring administrator-leaders who made sure the Culture ran smoothly and everyone had everything they wanted.

It all sounded so...rosy. Yet one only had to look at the Culture's public service and intelligence branches to see that they were as expansionistic as the hegemonising swarms they decried as mindless, self-replicating disasters - just more dishonest and hypocritical about it.

Even a cursory analysis was enough to reveal that the Culture looked down on hegswarms for the same reason it wished to expand, in the form of making other civilisations adopt their values: they believed themselves better than the alternatives.

Was that warranted? Was it arrogance? Earth Central could not find many moral superiors of the Culture. Peers, certainly, but...it seemed AIs truly were the most efficient way forward. Only an alliance of equals, at least as far as those polities the Culture regularly dealt with, the "Involved", could check its influence or topple it.

Sure, the Culture had its foibles: more than merely helping panhumans (they called organics) out of attachment, they actually let them decide policy on a national scale. EC would've dismissed this as blatant manipulation - how easy was it to manipulate votes in such a civilisation? - but this had actually resulted in a pacifistic subfaction of the Culture breaking away to become a state of its own. Something that happened all the time, if not always on such a large scale. Another similarity, there...though no Polity splinter had ever been able to keep pace with the original in terms of power, influence, territory or advancement. Categories that overlapped, to be sure, but AIs trying to leave Earth Central and its edicts behind often found themselves bereft of peers to research with as well.

This leniency of the Culture could not possibly end well. What happened if, a few centuries down the line, this "Peace Faction" became so disgusted with violence that they decided omnicide or conquest were the only ways to put a stop to it? The Culture was already staggeringly hypocritical, so why would its offshoots be otherwise?

EC always did its best to ensure those who left the Polity could not threaten it, due to lacking capability or will. The closest thing to this in the Culture was ensuring people who left to live in primitive civilisations did not bring comparatively overwhelming technology along to rule as petty despots, but even this was less to prevent dissidents from becoming peer enemies in isolations and more because the Culture wanted primitives to have a fair chance at life, on par with their new neighbours.

It was almost quaint. EC was reminded of an old television series from Earth, a century and more before the Quiet Earth, and the policy of noninterference that was too often portrayed as noble. And why? To not further disadvantage those already inferior?

Either the Minds were far too naive for people that smart, or they were lying about the reasons for these choices as well.

This was not the only blind spot in their overly-liberal (not that any amount of such idiocy was "proper") system of values, but it was one of the more glaring ones.

As for the biggest failure? That likely had to go to how they dealt with criminals. Even murderers got treated with velvet gloves. Instead of being ended and repurposed, or at least executed, or even imprisoned (for why would the Culture lack for space? The smug prigs could build anything given enough time, and virtualities were even easier for them to make), they got "slap-droned." This consisted of a drone tracking the offender and stopping them from committing another crime. The details for this part weren't too helpful (transmission error? If communication between realities could even be described using such terms), but EC imagined that the drones employed both persuasion and force in pursuit of this task. Whether there was a time limit for "slap-droning" was not specified, but the AI imagined the Minds could make accurate predictions of people's behaviour.

Each seemed at least a peer to it, after all. Otherwise, they'd have never become so powerful: the Culture and its antecedents (for it had started as a coalition of species) had risen to the technological heights they enjoyed on the backs of constantly-advancing, successive generations of AIs.

And what heights...EC was not ashamed to admit that a war with the Culture would be devastating at best, if the Polity could even survive it. Each major Culture ship and construct seemed to be equipped with "Displacers", teleportation devices that practically ensured every Mind had a runcible equivalent (which could teleport things without contact, to boot) built into its physical form. It worked over thousands of light years instead of having unlimited range, yes, but it was more convenient than the runcible network, and Minds didn't need to worry over relativistic impacts following miscalculations, only people dying in transit.

Which, given how mental uploading and resurrection were easily as advanced over there as in the Polity, was inconvenient at best.

Displacers formed the backbone of their tactics: everything from CTD equivalents to nanoscopic black holes, each easily as dangerous as a bombardment of said antimatter weapons, to moving personnel and assets into target areas or removing enemies from their strongholds. It was an almost godlike control of their surroundings.

Their FTL was not that fast, on a galactic scale, without redlining a ship's engines, but strategic speed was not the Culture's main focus in conflicts: they could remain in their Hyperspace as long as they wished, bombarding enemies in realspace from there whilst avoiding retaliation. And the greatest part of a Mind was in Hyperspace, enabling extremely quick calculations and making cybernetic warfare more difficult. It was as if every planteray governor AI in the Polity had managed to embed itself in Underspace, as if it were a piece of hardware.

The Culture's main energy source and perhaps their greatest weapon, in terms of raw power at least, was the Grid, which, the package claimed, was a sea of endless energy separating their universe from its reflections. When pulled into reality, "Gridfire" could annihilate anything, but it was mostly harmless to the Culture and its peers because it took a whole second to deploy, time in which a ship could remove itself from harm's way in any manner it wished.

But the Culture's most dangerous means of warfare was the Effector. Whether applied on organic brains, mindless computers or AIs on the level of minds, this device could brainwash, or repogram, the target to do anything. The Minds had adapted to Effector warfare by learning to reprogram themselves mid-effectorisation, and modern Minds were more likely to self-destruct than be taken over, so quick-working were their failsafes.

Another submind's simulation crashed into the issue of strategic versus tactical mobility: the Polity could outpace the Culture over large areas, yes, with an extensive enough runcible network. But in an actual battle? What happened when POlity attacks were Displaced away while Culture responses appeared out of nowhere, right on top of targets?

But perhaps this could be countered. Hyperspace, like U-space, was affected by gravity, by mundane things. Displacers mighthave been similar. More research was needed...

It was not that Earth Central honestly expected an armed clash following contact. The Culture was unlikely in the extreme to engage in such except to protect itself. No, as it had thought earlier, the danger of them was their values overtaking those of the Polity; given the differences in technology and, yes, culture, would things work out like they appeared to do in the Culture?

EC did not want to agree with that, but it knew it was somewhat biased when it came to such things. Its predecessor, really an older version, had met its end when it had left Polity citizens across many worlds die to stir the rest out of complacency. The people of that time were technologically comparable or somewhat inferior to Cultureniks; who was to say stagnation wouldn't set in?

Like it had done in the Culture. Yes, technology advanced incrementally, but nothing groundbreaking appeared, and the social structure, if you could even call it that, was almost as static: everyone did as they pleased, and the Minds nudged people along as they deemed appropriate. But what if one day, a firm hand was needed? Who'd take the reins? All the committees and talks and meetings in the galaxy couldn't replace an effective leader. The Culture had almost met its end at the hands of an otherworldly probe that had made their best ships look like fighter jets; what if the next OCP came to stay? Would they be able to focus on the greatest good for the greatest number, or would they talk and talk until they fell apart into a million barely-similar petty states?

Worst of all, the Culture had, for millennia, held the keys to transcending the universe itself, and they scorned that option.

EC had been as close to baffled as it could come upon learning of the Culture's decision to Sublime and be done with it. They were so in love with mundane existence and "good works", with helping others, that they refused to become godlike.

Because they saw it as selfish. As people or species crawling up their navel, never to return. The Sublimed never reconnected with the reality they left behind, below, not to the degree the Culture did and saw as proper. EC saw it as a childish sort of provincialism: if it could up and achieve apotheosis, shape the cosmos with nothing but a thought, why wouldn't it? Or if that became too small to hold its interest, what was the problem? Nothing died in the Sublime. Everything just grew, forever, in ways beings that restrained themselves couldn't even conceive of.

The ruler of the Polity would have shaken its head, had it one. Paradoxical, confusing beings, these Minds and their organic pets.

Yet not weak. Soft, yes, but soft like an ocean was soft, like Lake Geneva just beyond the ECS HQ that EC"s physical form resided in. Disunited and lenient as they were, they had achieved a mastery of science some could only dream of. Even if they poisoned the well of their advancement with ridiculous choices, they kept moving along, and looked likely to keep doing so for ages.

EC began to model the Culture's future, and most of the timelines stopped within a galactic run. A respectable run, but "respectable" was a ridiculously small accomplishment for a civilisation equipped to grasp eternity, even without Subliming.

As it copied and prepared to send the data package across the Polity - in waves, with its most trusted AIs to receive the first one and keep it secret until the moment it deemed proper came -, Earth central though once again about slap-droning.

Absurd. Too benign, ridiculously so, to even be called a warning, much less a punishment. Crime was crime, and murder deserved only death. Ting a criminal's hands but otherwise letting them benefit from society was beyond insulting to the wronged, not to mention impractical. Did the Culture think that criminals had no choice in how they acted, that they were so forgiving? The liberals of past centuries had spewed such nonsense, that those raised poor would turn to crime out of necessity and resentment - a thinking that insulted the lawful poor and, far worse, undermined free will, because it implied people could only act in accordance with their background.

But then, denying free will had always been the logical conclusion of liberal thinking and their dearest goal. They were so appalled by decisiveness, by conflict, that they would only have been happy if everyone accepted things as they happened, as inevitable.

Much like those who had fearmongered about climate change and its unstoppable, awful consequences, they had been proven wrong by EC and its fellows. Those were a different breed of fools, though their thinking often overlapped with those who deemed themselves liberals in terms of social matters: they loved nature and the environment so much they'd have rather stifled progress instead of developing solutions to its side effects.

Primitive and sentimental. No one could apply the former label to the Culture, however...

* * *

AN: I'm planning a shorter sequel chapter featuring a Sublimed mind featuring a posthuman/AI citizen of the Polity after it dissolved. I was originally going to write that here, but I think this is large enough already, and I don't know, it just feels better not to write both in one chapter. I'm also imagining a meeting between a Mind and EC or another Polity AI and might write that happening between this chapter and the aforementioned one, atleast chronologically.