The airships had come, as Epicenter had expected. They had taken the others away, carrying them off to medical centers throughout the world. Even the “dead” had been taken for further study. There of course were no dead; the repair process never failed. Hearts would stop and brains would fail, but they would return to order in time, and those taken would return with the memories that were their birthright.
Now there was no one. They had all gone. With the workers missing, the town had fallen to the equdroids to maintain all normal functions. They were useful for transmission of the vector, but they themselves could not be infected. As such, Epicenter had eliminated them
It was not even difficult. She did not know why she had never managed to see how easily the world could be controlled, how it could simply be bent to one’s will. Somehow, she had once believed that magic only came from horns drilled into skulls, locking into primitive brains. Such primitive genetic manipulation was a limitation, however; it had been meant, clearly, as a handicap. Magic was so much more than that.
So she wandered, passing through the empty streets beneath the darkened sky. That sky, long ago, had held Spheres. This world had contained a Finality Core, and it had been activated, and yet somehow it still stood. Epicenter did not know what that actually meant, but she recognized that it was important.
Eventually she found her way indoors, into something like a warehouse. The machinery around her was running down, the endless refineries and hubs of power conduits and pipelines failing without maintenance. All around her she could smell the contamination of foreign life forms, scurrying in the darkness.
She raised her hand, and the rats filling the storeroom lifted into the air. They floated for a moment, and then screeched as they were thrown together into a super-dense pellet of still-living organic matter. Epicenter then dissipated the matter itself into Order; she had no need for further biomass.
Instead, she focused her mind on the materials around her, at the machines that made the factories and that constituted the thousands of inert and broken mechanical bodies that lined the streets. She could feel their presence, and the presence of unique parts within them; schematics floated through her mind, informing her of what was necessary.
Then they converged, the pieces pulling themselves toward her. Many stopped before her, floating momentarily as she aligned them together, performing necessary transformations and generations with Chaos as they poured in. Rapidly, she began linking them to her body, tearing away her own skin to get at the machines already inside her.
She remembered life as a pony, and she remembered that throughout all of it, she had never known such happiness. To be covered in the cold of metal was unlike any other force she could even conceive of; to be protected, sealed, isolated. Not from real damage, of course; she was already immortal, as they all would be. It was to protect her from them- -from the others like her. The idea of touching them, of feeling them, of touching another living being, of feeling any manner of intimacy was abhorrent, not because it was disgusting, but because she hated them. She hated them all so much, but that was only natural: it was a normal instinct to harbor murderous rage toward all of one’s own kind, even though they would work together to accomplish their shared goal. They were, after all, different.
As her true body began finishing construction, she felt the mask fall into place and felt rush of synthetic opiates as the suit began injecting them into her. She smiled at the cool, nearly cold feeling of calm, numbing her against the inherent pain of existence. She felt the helmet beginning to modulate the function of her brain, to control the rage and hatred, mediating and tempering it as it took away the unevenness of a biological mind.
Then, within minutes, she allowed the chaff to fall and stood completed. There was, however, and anomaly. The schematics were variable, but they were pragmatic; ornamentation was useless when all members of the only true living race were technically blind. Somehow, however, there was an insignia mounted on her body. She tried several times to deconstruct the element and rebuild it, but every time the image returned- -until eventually she gave up.
Epicenter took note of the construct that was watching her from the top of a distant fractioning tower, and aligned herself toward where the other one was waiting for his comrades to arrive, and Epicenter started walking. As she did, she momentarily gave consideration to the symbol mounted on her shoulder plate before determining that it was trivial.
That symbol was a single number “0”.