II. Gods and Monsters

The Perfect Organism

Gabrielle burst into the control centre. After her visit to earth, which had thankfully gone unnoticed, she had received a message informing her of a development with Metatron.

"What have you found?" she asked the scientists currently crowded around the data banks.

"Metatron outsmarted us," came a simple reply.

"That's not possible. He doesn't have the potential for free will."

Gabrielle was relatively new to her job (she'd only been appointed a few centuries ago), but she knew the tale. After one of Metatron's missions ended in some form of disaster a decision had been made to alter his programming. Once he had been placed into hyper-sleep, the team that catered to his essential upkeep had worked tirelessly for decades tampering with his mind. They kept his incredible tactician's ability and his inventiveness while making it impossible to stray from any aim programmed into him. He could only remove targets given to him by his superiors and any opinions he had had been deleted. They had essentially made him into an unthinking drone. Or so they'd thought.

"That's the thing..." the scientist continued, "He did. He had his entire consciousness on backup in case anything like this happened. He managed to copy his entire being into a code format and store it in a recess of his circuitry where we couldn't find it. When we activated him again this code... came alive. It manifested itself into whatever attached to the computer. It not only became sentient, but it then duplicated itself, storing one copy on here and presumably downloading the other into Metatron himself, thus wiping any changes we made to him."

"Why is the copy of his consciousness still on this hard drive? Destroy it!" She ordered.

"That's our second concern and the genius of all this. We can't. Metatron is his own system now. We enter a command, he rejects it, destroying the code input. We turn the power off, he simply turns it back on. Our entire operation runs on technology he himself created. We blindly followed his orders while he manipulated us into carrying out his every need. The technology was designed for this purpose, not to simply monitor him, but become him if the situation required it."

Gabrielle just stared at the blank console. And as paranoid as it sounded, she felt it stare back. Felt it mocking her and the rest of Heaven for not seeing this. She couldn't fathom it. It made no sense at all. Metatron had done the impossible and cloned the soul. The soul of an angel no less, one of the most complex organisms ever created. He now had complete self-awareness again, even after everything they had done to take it away from him.

"Surely there must be something we can do!"

"You need to remember he is the one who brought us through The Great War. Without him, Heaven would have fallen. He was the greatest tactician that ever lived, even before he adapted himself into his cybernetic body. He saw every outcome, every eventuality and plugged any holes before they even opened. Now he has every tool conceivable and his creative knowledge far outweighs any other scientific mind we have. He has made himself into the perfect merge of Angel and Machine... Into a being that simply cannot be stopped. He will have contingencies for plans neither your or I will ever come up with."

Gabrielle watched as these angels of incredible intellect lost all hope. The energy with which they had approached their work just vanished.

"We have unleashed the perfect organism on a world ill-equipped to stop it..." another scientist muttered.

"And with no way to undo our mistake..." Gabrielle finished. She could only dread to think what plan Metatron had set in motion.