Work Text:
Kenzie was no longer a girl, but eyes. Hundreds of thousands of them, strewn across every dark corner of the multiverse like starseeds, constantly looking out-wards at billions of unique and special human lives. She had been thinking too small, too Kenzie-like, when she had limited herself merely to her friends on Earth Gimel. What was the life of the average peasant living under the theocratic government of Earth Cheit like? The mating songs of the mermen of Earth Tau-He, Sveta’s home-world? Even the constant drone of Earth Bet’s Machine Army was in her grasp, one of the most beautifully self-destructive things parahumanity had produced as of yet!
Not only could she observe and document these characters in real time, she could simulate them using machine-learning algorithms with 95% accuracy, hijacking her Shard’s processing power to run them. What was a Shard except a very very very big computer, anyway? They weren’t the same as one of her camera-boxes, but they were similar enough that she could understand them as intuitively as any other thinker tech. Simulations could be color-coded like the boxes of memory sticks she had at home: purple for action scenes, red for hurt, green for comfort, white for endings, and so on and so forth.
But Shards weren’t limited to the spectrum of visible light. She could be even finer-grained in her categorization of the scenes she produced. Radio waves and infrared could be used to encode scenes of unspoiled nature and overgrown ruins made of gargantuan stone slabs, built by alien civilizations whose names had long passed in the microwave background of the universe. Higher frequencies like ultraviolet could be used to catalogue all the stars and planets in the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies, including all their various satellites like the Smaller and Greater Magellanic clouds, in every universe available to her.
And think of how many people she could create! Like the goddess Yemọja pouring out the healing waters of the river Ogun from her broken pot, she would intermix her clay-essence with that of her creations, making them part of herself, so that they would never know the loneliness which she felt. She would love them like she had been loved, mold them like she had been molded by her parents and teachers and friends and family: stirring them all into one big pot of love and life-everlasting.
Her people would be better than humans because they would never have to know the heartbreak of being an eleven-year-old girl.
--
“Kenzie! Please, Kenzie! Are you listening?” A white light in the periphery of her vision begged. It had the voice of a girl she had loved wrongly, sickly-sweet on the tongue. “I’m sorry! I’m so sorry!”
“You don’t mean that,” Lookout replied, almost automatically. “You’re just saying whatever it takes to make me stop.”
“I can feel it through Darlene’s connection to you. Your heart is racing, your brain is going too fast. You’re going to become a Titan!”
Her eyes, which now numbered in the millions, didn’t stop their work to look at the light. It could be a hallucination—for all Lookout knew. A roadblock on the path to completing her masterpiece: a world in which she was happy.
“Fuck it. I like you back, Kenzie! I just don’t like like you,” Candy shouted, voice so raw and imperfect. A manufacturing defect made into a girl. “Maybe? I don’t know! I need time to think about it. We can make this work, I promise!”
“Hmm,” Lookout said, turning a fraction of a percentage of her eyes towards the white light, curiosity gleaming through. “Prove it.”
“What do you mean prove it?” cried the other girl hysterically. “I’ve put my life on the line for you! I’ve shared Aiden with you! You’re my best friend in the whole wide world! I’d do anything for you!”
“Anything but share my feelings, for even a single second,” Lookout snapped back, pushing into Candy’s mind with her cameras. She zapped her with visions of when Candy turned her back on Lookout, prized other people’s emotions over hers. All of them were true-ish, colored by the pink-tinted goggles of an agonizingly unrequited crush.
“Calisse de fuck de merde, Kenz’!” The white light said with far too much sympathy, getting dangerously close to the squishy core of Lookout’s newly divine being. “Was that what it was like the entire time?”
“Yeah! It was, actually! Thanks for noticing, Candy!”
Lookout zapped her again with even more scenes: ones where the truth was so blended with fiction that even Lookout couldn’t distinguish between the two anymore. Had she dreamt the scornful look Candy had given her when she had hugged Aiden too tightly that one time? Or the anger in her voice when she had told Lookout off for ‘getting on her turf’? Did it even matter anymore?
“I’m sorry,” Candy said, finally, intent to keep on going. “I don’t know what else to say but I’m sorry that I hurt you.”
“Who cares!” Lookout replied, extremely petty. “I’m gonna be a Titan in point zero three milliseconds, and everyone I love is going to try to stop me, and I’ll have to put them in tiny little padded cages for the rest of time so they stop hurting each other!”
The white light pressed further and further into her dense network of cameras, burning them up with her fury.
“What do you think is going to happen if you go Titan while hooked up to Darlene’s network, dummy!? We’re going to become Titans with you, a network just like Fortuna’s or Eve’s!”
The idea sent an electric thrill up whatever remained of Lookout’s spine. Think of how much data she’d be able to collect on her friends if they were a part of a Titan network! Every neuron, no—every atom of their being would be under her command, to replicate and play with her to her heart's content. What would ten million mass-produced Candies be like? Or a planet full of Darlenes and Aidens?
“Would that really be so bad?” Lookout laughed, weakly. “Being with me forever?”
“We’re already friends forever. There’s nothing you could do to get rid of me. I promise.”
“You promise?”
And the white light laughed, gleaming forth with all the colors of the rainbow, hidden inside her core.
“I super-duper-uper pinky-promise, Kenzie.”
And Kenzie, who with just a single press of the enter key could become Titan Yemọja the All-Seeing, stopped smiling, and stepped away from her computer.