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The thing about destruction is that it’s boring.
Oh, don’t get Doc wrong. The first time he’d fired up the world eater, he’d never seen something beautiful. A pure curtain of death, raining down from twisted machinery, tearing the very earth asunder. A mechanism designed to cut away everything in its path, one layer of power at a time. It was maddening. It was intoxicating. He felt like a god.
The feeling lasted an hour.
The machine was still running, of course. There had been a single hiccup that he’d fixed, barely even needing the hivemind to consult. And then the machine had run, and kept on running. Layer by layer, the earth was torn away, burned by the machine Doc had built. Layer by layer, Doc sat by the machine, in a terrible state of waiting; waiting for it to go wrong, or waiting for it to be done.
He couldn’t idle. Not unless the machine was idle, not really. After all, should something go wrong, it could be catastrophic. That is the price of wielding such destructive awe. So, he waited, anxious and pacing and unable to do anything at all.
He didn’t feel much like a god, pacing on a tiny island in the sky, flying loops around his greatest invention, waiting, waiting, waiting.
The world is falling to its knees, Doc thinks. If he’d wanted, he could be using this to destroy people. To tear away houses and memories and flesh until they were destroyed too. For a moment, he imagines it. He imagines a world where he used his destructive power against his enemies, or really against the people who stood in his way. He could, is the thing. He’s not even quite certain he wouldn’t.
For a moment, he imagines the glory of fire, beneath the machine, and then he has to stop to make sure the machine is turned around by the mechanisms at the end of its path correctly, that nothing further has gone wrong. It hasn’t. It hasn’t gone wrong for the hours of grueling, terrible waiting. It’s working perfectly.
It would work perfectly to kill, he thinks as it turns around. It would work perfectly for that too.
And—
Doc imagines the glory of fire, for those first minutes, that first hour. And then he imagines sitting on the machine and waiting as whatever screams and flames there would be fade into background noise, repeated white sound, as he waits to succeed, waits for the destruction to end.
For a moment, Doc thinks, he feels more mortal than he ever has.
And then he returns to pacing, monitoring his machine, busy waiting, watching a curtain of fire that it’s hard to feel more than a stone in his chest about. This boredom, he thinks wryly—this is the glory of destruction.
Still, it hasn’t gotten less beautiful. It hasn’t gotten less beautiful.