[Multiversal Empire] 3 – Growth and Complications

A month has passed since my awakening on this planet, and it has become increasingly clear that this planet was an Ecumenopolis, a planet-wide city covering the surface of this planet. Another example of an Ecumenopolis I knew of was Coruscant from Star Wars. However, Coruscant was a far more developed Ecumenopolis than this planet, as the city did not pierce very far below the planet's surface.

Since the time the Protheans existed, the entire planet has seemingly been taken over by nature and whatever wildlife remained on the planet when the Repears hit.  Therein lies the problem: after some digging, I had only found at most two dozen different species of local Fauna that were not an insect in nature. The lack of genetic diversity has massively slowed down the growth of my swarm. 

Even then, the local flora was only a bit more diverse, not by much. Their essence was not that useful to my Swarm, though I will admit to trying to change that with the samples I had gathered. 

I wanted to see if I could use the samples I had to make semi-Zerg flora that I could use to turn the world into a singular Zerg organism. Still, so far, my experiments have led to mounds of meat similar to trees that died shortly after birth as their cellular structure always seemed to collapse. 

In my experimentation, I also tried to improve the Zergling strain, though my efforts have been unsuccessful. My Zerg showed both the qualities of Primal Zerg and the Zerg modified by Amon to be a perfect army. This led to some problems. For one, my Zerg was relatively empty of potential, meaning they had plenty of room to grow in strength and intelligence if I allowed them.

Still, I lacked something like Abathur, so I had to edit these strains blindly or observe my Zerg naturally assimilate essence from other Fauna. Still, my efforts in recreating what I saw led to me only seeing my creations melt into puddles of flesh and bone, die of shock as their nervous system were not correctly built, and so much more. This did not mean I could not make a copy of a Zergling's essence and use that to make more Zerglings like it; the problem arose from my trying to edit the base Zergling genome without the essence and my attempts at creating new Zerg strains through my 'normal' means, i.e., genetic engineering and natural evolution.

If I did not interfere, my Zerg would become more and more like Dehaka or Zurvan if given enough time and genetic material to assimilate into their forms. Perhaps I would allow a few specific Zerg strains to have sentience in the future, but I was not going to risk the Swarm anytime soon. The Swarm must grow, and I could not risk dissent or rebellion, not that I had much to worry about as I was similar to the Zerg Overmind, just without a physical body, and instead, my collective will and being that of the entire Swarm. I could see and feel all; if I wanted to, I could control everything. 

So, while I could allow for some Zerg to reach sapience, I did not want to risk it until I had the Swarm established and space-faring, but while I would not allow any of my Zerg to reach the intelligence that borders on sapience, I wanted to try making Overminds, essentially they were large masses of flying biomass that should make managing the swarm easier while giving me an aerial view of my surroundings, though Overlords were entirely defenseless in most cases.

There was another reason I wished to develop my own Overlords; I wanted to see if adding more 'processing' power to the Swarm would benefit me. If so, could I fill a room with a brain-like structure that functioned like a mechanical computer, made of flesh instead of metal and precious resources? If I could, perhaps I could use part of my mind to focus solely on combining and evolving new strains of Zerg while the remaining portion of my mind focused on expanding and directing the Swarm.

Such thoughts quickly brought into mind the Flood, specifically, the Graveminds. A Gravemind acted as the 'mind' of the Flood, with all of the assimilated knowledge from a Flood's host being processed and transferred to said Gravemind, where it would be used to strengthen the Flood's grip on the HALO Galaxy.

Pushing the quickly spiraling train of thought aside, I focused on the task at hand: exploring the planet. With the massive expansion of the Swarm network under the surface, I had sent around four thousand individual Zerglings and around six thousand more Zergling 'packs' to explore the surface and every nook and cranny of the Prothean Ecumenopolis.

As I expected, I found next to nothing. The Reapers wiped almost everything of importance, including many signs of battle I initially expected to see. I remember a line stated by Javik, the last remaining uncorrupted Prothean of this cycle, saying that the Protheans resisted the Reapers for centuries, meaning that the Reapers likely took decades or even centuries to hide any evidence of their existence, probably even going as far as to rebuild the damage they did to the cities, erasing all digital tracks, and probably much more.

What little I did find took the form of statues, murals, and other sources of artwork. The Protheans seemed to have been obsessed with whether the number of artworks I saw was any sort of indication. The Reapers dedicated a lot of time and resources to make the disappearance of the Prothean Empire as mysterious as possible and likely erased a lot of data as well. It would explain how Liara, the Asari specialist in Prothean history, was so wrong about the Protheans. She thought they were peaceful when, in reality, Protheans were militaristic warmongers who conquered their galaxy and assimilated all other races to the point they called themselves Protheans as well.

Though now that I remembered Javik, a part of me already wanted to find him first and obtain his essence to obtain his unique racial sensory abilities that allow him to 'feel' the history of his surroundings, as he showcased by telling Shepherd something he should not have known. Javik spoke of the Krogan who lived in the room before him, Grunt.

Focusing back on the task at hand, I sent out a few hundred more baseline Zerglings to scour the surface of the planet in search of caches and anything else of importance that may appear. Every single terminal or other electronic device has been out of commission for a long time as no one was around to maintain these devices; however, in the end, I did find something of note: a bunker that led to an underground complex about half the size of my underground network.