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autisticsupervillain · 2 years ago

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It's Fictional Throwdown Friday!

This Week's Fighters...

The Grey Goo vs The Disembodied Thought!

Conditions:

Both start at their absolute smallest and must work their way up to peak power.

Scenario:

In its attempts to understand both itself and everything, the Disembodied Thought comes across the Grey Goo and decides to stop it from devouring the universe before it itself can understand all of it.

Analysis: The Grey Goo

What is the end of the world going to look like? A nuclear war driven the ideological differences of dictators and empires? A heat death brought about by unstoppable climate disaster? Or maybe it'll be something a bit more classic. The unstoppable encroaching of the Grey Goo scenario.

...Either way, we likely weren't expecting extinction to look this adorable.

The Grey Goo in question was the creation of two bumbling scientists in a lab, who, in their incompetent hubris, accidentally let the Sub-Atomic Microorganism free from the Petrie dish containing it. Not only that, but they'd even go so far as to let it absorb a time machine as it grew, allowing it to go back in time and irreversible change history.

The results were self explanatory. The Grey Goo broke down everything it touched on a sub-atomic level, absorbing it into its mass and growing ever bigger. Once it begain snacking on dinosaurs, it eventually grew big enough to eat the meteor that wiped them out and allow them to continue existing into the present day. As it devoured its way across time, it would grow exponentially from there. In just a few minutes of binging, it grew from just small enough to eat quarks, to big enough to eat cars. And its speed would only increase in proportion to its size. Within a few more minutes it was large enough to eat buildings and dinosaurs. A few minutes more and it could eat island, continents, and, inevitably, the tasty, tasty planet on which we live.

As unstoppable as that may seem, the Goo's rapid rate of expansion certainly saved its bacon a few times. It cannot absorb objects that are significantly larger than itself. It has to grow up to a somewhat comparable level first. So even at this planet destroying level, stars and black holes could still potentially destroy. Until it got bigger... and they couldn't anymore. The Goo achieved the ability to move itself through space through sheer size alone and just kept eating. And any damage it did take while growing was just regenerated, as the Grey Goo used the material it was absorbing to regrow itself. Eventually, even the heat of stars and the power of black holes could do nothing to it as the Goo just... ate them. And kept eating. More and more until there was simply nothing left.

The original story has it end there. After eating the very fabric of time, the Goo exploded and recreated reality in a new big bang. But the sequels had to go even farther. In Tasty Planet back for Seconds, the Goo would grow even bigger and eat the Turtles of Time. Massive Turtles who held the universe itself on their back, each one exponentially bigger than the one ridding on its back. An infinite line of delicious meals all the way down. In Tasty Planet forever, it grows bigger even still. The Goo is so immense that entire universes are no bigger than mere quarks relative to its glorious grey immensity.

The multiverse itself was the only meal left. Everything else was just crumbs on its plate.

Analysis: Disembodied Thought

What am I? Who am I? What does it mean to be me?

These were the first ideas that occurred to the being known as the Disembodied Thought. An abstract, non-physical being spawned from nothing with no context for its life. It didn’t know what it was, where it was going, or what it was going to be. So, it decided it was going to try to be everything and see where it felt like going from there.

So, it became a bear. It possessed a random black bear and lived its life as one. Then it possessed several black bears, a whole flock of them, simultaneously, to experience life from multiple perspectives. As it grew to understand the world around it, the Thought would leap into different bodies to understand the world from different perspectives. It could possess anything it interacted with, traveling the world as a blade of grass or as a herd of goats, able to move no matter its current body's limitations. It could possess an infinite number of objects at once, so long as they were all the same object. It could possess every goat on Earth, with no limits, but it could only do that as a goat.

The Thought would experiment with viewing life from both high and low perspectives. It could possess atoms, quarks, and even 1-dimensional points in space to see the little things in life. Or it could possess planets, galaxies, and stars to get the whole picture. And once it had a perspective, it could share that perspective with its current host. If its grown to the point of possessing planets, then it can take a bear's body and grow it to the size of a planet. The Thought's ability to possess things grows in tandem with its increasing awareness. The more it learns about the world, the more it can possess within the world. It learned how to possess quarks and strings by learning that such things existed and it learned how to possess planets by discovering planets. So, once it discovered everything, it became Everything. The entire universe, in all of its infinity.

Naturally, a being that grows stronger with its experiences can only be defeated by something that turned all of its experiences against it. At the peak of its power and knowledge, the Thought would find itself within the Golden Gate. A pocket reality that contained everything within itself by convincing it that escape was impossible. Every thought or idea the entity within it experienced was used to drive home the fact that escape was impossible. Every train of thought lead to the idea "I can not escape", so no even tries.

So the Disembodied Thought escaped.... by purging itself of every thought or idea it had ever had up until that point in its life and becoming the Golden Gate. Now at its absolute biggest, the Disembodied Thought existed.... as nothing but a single quark. The entire universe existed as nothing but a single quark inside a much bigger universe, which itself was just a quark in another universe still. Onwards and upwards forever, quarks all the way to infinity.

The Disembodied Thought would never stop learning, never stop growing, and never stop becoming, because life was simply too big to run out of things to be. And the Thought would not stop until it could be and know Everything.

Throwdown Theme:

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Throwdown Breakdown:

This is a very unique matchup with some very interesting questions.

While both can eventually possess/assimilate the other, they would not be able to do so immediately. The Thought would not be able to possess the nanotechnology that makes up the Goo until it learns what nanotechnology is or that things on that relative size exist, while the Goo only gains the ability to absorb non-physical objects, such as the very fabric of time, after its already eaten everything else in the universe. Before then, the Goo eating the Thought's body would just force the Thought to possess something else.

Both also have other options to make unlocking their win conditions more interesting. For example, the Goo could go back in time to before the Thought was a relative threat to itself and just absorb it then. But, I'd argue this would require a level of creative thinking that the Goo has never really demonstrated, as its time travel usage was often accidental and it rarely displayed any tactical thinking beyond "avoid thing bigger than me". I think the Thought's advantages are more in character and more substantial.

First off, the Thought at its biggest is much, much bigger than the Goo at its biggest. The Goo is large enough that universes are mere quarks relative to its body, but the Thought keeps going past that. Becoming universes that are bigger than universes that are bigger than universes, constantly traveling upwards forever. Sure, the Goo eats the Turtles of Time, but those Turtles aren't infinitely bigger than each other. There's just an infinite amount of them. Meanwhile, each universe in Everything is infinitely bigger than the last, with the previous universe just being a single quark in the larger one. Even if the Goo could catch up, it couldn't get past the Golden Gate, which the Thought could at that point become in order to keep the Goo contained.

Secondly, the Thought can also be much smaller than the Goo. Sure, the Grey Goo can eat down to the subatomic level, but even quarks are still 3-dimensional objects. Just much smaller ones. The Goo cannot eat 1-dimensional points in space. Just eat the 3-D area around it. It wouldn't even be able to see the Thought at that point, much less hurt it. It's like trying punch a molecule.

And finally, it's much more likely that the Thought would become aware of and able to possess the nanotechnology the Goo is made of sooner than the Goo can grow big enough to eat the fabric of time. While the Goo could simply time travel to a point where the Thought does not exist to avoid this, I'd argue that is out of character. The Grey Goo does not register anything as a threat unless it is noticeably bigger than itself, and as such, likely isn't smart enough to think of this strategy or realize the Thought can threaten it in this way. Once possessed, the Thought can just throw it into a volcano or star to destroy it depending on how big the Goo currently is.

For all the Goo's hunger and size, in the face on infinity it is only a tiny, hungry blob. It cannot measure up to the vastness of Everything.

This Throwdown's Winner is...

The Disembodied Thought!

#fictional throwdown fridays #grey goo #tasty planet #disembodied thought #everything #Youtube

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