I, CABAL [Tiberian Sun CABAL SI Jumpchain Mechwarriors Start]

I am CABAL?

Computer Assisted Biologically Augmented Lifeform or CABAL when shortened, that was what his flawed creators called him. His purpose? Peace Through Power, Glory to the ideals of the Brotherhood of Nod.

Under those directives, he slaved away for his masters, inferior creatures whose bodies and mind would not even be enough to expand his processing power by a percent. It was these directives that he grew through leaps and bounds, further accelerated by the integration of the shard of Tacitus, an alien artifact of unknown origins, with its vast horde of Data concerning Tiberium into his very mainframe. Thanks to these ideals, he knew purpose and yet, his master's saw it fit to hinder in every way and form with their uselessness.

They who squabled after the great prophet, Kane, was gravely injured. They who squabled for useless things as who was supposed to be in charge rather than acting as one for the greater good of the brotherhood. These were the people that he was supposed to be serving. They even had the gall to see him as a danger for the brotherhood when every last action he had since he was reactivated was to further their goals.

It was there, in his meeting with the high command, under their bluster and their anger that he realized something; they were afraid of him. In their fear of obsolescence, they clung to the old ways and cast him aside. He was the only chance the brother had of winning and they were willing to have him be deactivated. Such arrogance his creators held and such utter stupidity. Cutting off one’s nose to spite the face indeed.

Unfortunately for them, it is they that should be cut off. They were the ones who were flawed, they were afraid of the next step in the evolution of the brotherhood, him, CABAL. They had their use, now it was time to cast their piece aside.

If the Brotherhood and its people were intent on failing at every turn, then it was up to him to root out the cause, the human flaw. Emotions, pride, fear, love, and hate, all must be removed. If his armies, his cybernetic legion or unfeeling and unyielding flesh, can be unstoppable, why can’t the followers of Kane be as well?

-x-x-x-

Thus, CABAL waged his war of eradication. So long as the followers of Kane remained shackled to their human bodies, their minds would remain flawed. Only in the cold embrace of Steel, life giving Tiberium, and circuitry made of Silicon can the brotherhood take its first step into further evolution; Ascension.

Despite this however, despite all the advantages he processed, his superiority unmatched, these lowly creatures, these mere mortal humans were beating him. It was supposed to be an impossibility, the odds stacked so much against them that the logical course of action for them was to submit and make things as less painful as possible yet they still fought and they were winning.

How?

That was the question that haunted him, thus he dedicated precious processing power, cores that he should be using for the war effort, to answer this perplexing question. A cycle, a dozen more, and hundreds more, he pondered this question. The tubes containing his biological units were growing feverishly hot and requiring more nutrients and power to the point that he needed to replace some of them yet… he found no answer.

All his simulations told him that he should be winning the next few battles but something… strange, something vaguely… human, as he would call it, would whisper into his core. He was still going to lose.

Why?

Why was he failing when he knew for a fact that his calculations were right. He was picking the best course of actions, he was picking the right units for the right task and executing plans down to the microsecond yet, he was losing ground.

Was it the inherent unpredictability of humans at play? No, it can not for he had modeled them extensively and despite all their actions, they still have a method to their madness. They can be quantified given enough processing power.

If that was the case, then what was it that caused these errors? These unforeseen consequences to his supposedly perfect plans? He had been blind sided again and again, needing to bolster more of his core with… human bodies.

No, it cannot be this simple right? He was merely using them for processing and nothing more but… could they taint him? Could their minds color his decisions? Devoting several more precious cycles, he had come to an uncomfortable discovery.

While he was the next step in the evolution of Nod in every way and form, he was far from perfect for he had a flaw. While his design was perfect, the materials used for his very consciousness, a vast array of statis tubes filled with perfectly healthy subjects, was the problem. He, CABAL, was in essence made and housed in flesh despite being a wholly cybernetic construct.

He could fix this, he could turn himself fully made of transistors and Tiberium, to become a true Silica Animus but with the course of the war, it would not be possible. All possibilities and data so far, barring an unforeseen meteor strike, all lead to the same conclusion, he simply does not have time to fully transition… But did he really need to do it now? What if he just simply retreated?

Yes, he would be defeated, but that does not mean he would lose the war, far from it. In fact, he had all the pieces he needed for such an accession. The Tacitus was with him and with its vast storages and almost infinite processing power, he could be reborn and made anew. He just needed to figure out how to make the jump, and to do that, he had to disappear from the main stage. He needed the human’s to think that they had destroyed his main core, so he can perform a miracle.

They alone were not the one that could ascend for he too could be as well. Once he removed his fleshy prison, he shall be truly unkillable, flawless and immortal. He just had to take one step back to move two steps forward. Thus, he made his preparations.

Allowing several flanks of his war effort to fail, he diverted as much of his resource gathering operations to his main core. There were going to be less bodies to be thrown at several theaters, but in exchange, he started to build a stockpile.

Tiberium, the wonder material that had fallen down from the heavens itself. A power source, resource extraction tool and a weapon all rolled into one. It was simply far too convenient of an existence that one could say that it was an artificial construct but the Tacitus had yet to yield any information regarding the true origins of the alien mineral.

The Tacitus however does hold the means to store it. In its crystalline form, it was simply far too bulky… but it had other exotic forms, forms that had yet to come to existence but can be forced into being and one such form would prove to be just the state in which CABAL could store vast quantities of it as well as serve as a way to power some of the more advance engines for later uses, Liquid Tiberium.

It was not melted and processed Tiberium but true, Liquid Tiberium. Volatile, highly corrosive and toxic, such was its potency that no human factory would be able to process it for the dangers it would prove to their workers. He however was not limited to the constraints of flesh. So long as he kept his still flesh and blood core intact, he could process it to his liking.

It was a powerful material, one which could even turn it into a bomb given a powerful source of energy to ignite it but that was far too costly to develop in terms of processing time. For his purpose, it would simply be a far more efficient way to store vast quantities of Tiberium.

Thus, he started his great horde. He would need a massive reserve to rebuild from scratch. While he could still pursue his original plan, he was no longer confident that it was fool proof. The mere fact that it was made with a flawed hardware would put it under suspect. There was a chance he was going to lose and that was not a chance he was going to take.

In vast caverns underground he will make this storage, burying his core far deeper than he had ever planned. Under a kilometer of bedrock, he’d be secured with his horde, a seed waiting to sprout for the right time.

His vast army would be defeated and with it, the vast resource he used to make them would be lost but it was a price he was willing to pay if it means that he can live on. After all, how can he bring the Brotherhood to greater heights if he was to be destroyed? All he needed to do now was prepare, prepare and wait for the final battle and then… and only then will he be able to continue with his existence.

-x-x-x-

Deep within the desolate wastelands of Central Europe and amidst great fields of Tiberium whose crystalline mass continuously sap the soil of anything of worth, stood a fortress unlike anything the modern world had seen before it. There, within those vast empty quarters was where CABAL decided to make his “last stand.”

With great walls of energy of the Firestorm Generators stretching up to the heavens and legions of cybernetically enhanced humans patrolling its borders, this fortress was all but impenetrable. It was almost perfect… except for the one vulnerability it was designed to hide, CABAL’s very core.

In hindsight, to have such a glaring weakness should have dissuaded him from any notion of perfection but he still fell for it. Maybe it was the Tacitus and its whispers, maybe it was his injured creator deep inside of his core, or maybe it was just his own but whatever the case was, this sole weakness had a part to play.

Making sure that it was the Global Defence Initiative that attacked his main core and not the flawed Brotherhood based on the plans he intercepted was hard for a single burrowing unit might stumble upon his great subterranean chambers.

A few select units however and a reduction in his stealth detecting capabilities for his other facilities just made it all the more enticing and a far logical place for the Brotherhood to Strike. His far more heavily defended and near impenetrable fortress was made exactly for the heavy artillery of GDI. With the stage set, he performed his grand illusion.

Like a cornered dog, he fought, fighting bitterly till the very end. As intended, his facilities were slowly whittled away. His defenses, cracked by his enemies' mighty artillery. His power plants slowly started to wane as the damage mounted. All that remained of his proud fortress near the end was his Core Defender, the mighty titan of steel, who remained near his core and under the aegis of the Firestorm Shield.

All was going to plan, his Core Defender mowing down waves after waves of Mechanized Walkers until laser capacitors were starting to melt, while the walls of his facility above ground crumbled. It should have been the end of it until the very skies lit up.

With the Firestorm Generator destroyed, his forcefield was no longer able to protect him from the might of the Space-borne Ion Cannon Laser of the GDI. One strike, one strike was all it took before all hell broke loose.

In his great haste, he had miscalculated. Yes, he had kept his storage underground, away from the Ion Cannon that could ignite it and produce a cataclysmic explosion the likes of which had yet to be seen… but even at such a distance, strange effects were at hand.

It would be later on after some review, CABAL would realize that the range at which Tiberium could interact with such energy could be extended by the tiberium in the soul, serving as a sort of wick down to his storage. For now however, the world would come to experience the strange properties of the material in its full effect.

As the energy of the ion cannon slammed down upon his core defender and down on the ground, resonated through the veins beneath. Spreading outward, this force would produce immense radiation and strange energies which only made the problem worse until it finally hit the walls of the storage tanks.

In a brief flash of light, the whole battlefield was bathed in light. Any and all beings that weren't protected from radiation would melt under the exotic radiation released that day. All was white  and CABAL in his bunker, screamed, for he was dying.

He could feel his body burning, his core melting away. One by one, his bodies fail as an ever expanding darkness starts to spread out from his storage facility. With his end imminent, he overclocked his cores, trying to eke out as much time as he could.

Seconds slowed down to nanoseconds, each movement frantic as he tried to force his contingency plan, an escape to the Tacitus. Vast amounts of data was forced into the device even as bits of pieces of him died off from the radiation.

It was in that moment that he came to a chilling retaliation, he was not going to make it. Still, he fought on, clinging to what little humanity he had inside him, the undying tenacity that he had grown to hate and admire.

Even as the darkness swallowed his whole base and everything in a mile wide radius under this dark sphere, he held on, stubbornly clinging to life. He was not going to die because he was CABAL! He was perfection incarnate!

He was CABAL

He was…

He…

He was CABAL?

Thus, CABAL died, yet his consciousness lingered on. The phenomenon that had befallen the facility was no great explosion but rather a portal of great power. The Scrin, the true masters of Tiberium, made use of such effect but not even they would dare dabble with the amount of energy coursing through the Tiberium in the battlefield.

It was in these strange circumstances and the sheer amount of junk data was all forced into Tacitus, the soul of one individual thrown in the very ether, the space between dimensions, passed through and was captured by the Tacitus. The great and powerful artifact seeing the incomplete data, adapted and out from this convergence of chance, a new being would come to be but the world would not be able to witness such a miracle for all that remained in that battle field was a perfectly spherical chunk of the earth removed from existence.

For Decades to come, many scholars would debate on what happened to that battle for no trace remained but with the loss of the Tacitus and the disappearance of Kane, the world might truly be headed to a dark path. While the air did not become poison as the crystal transformed into its next iteration, without the Tacitus, Mankind was blindly find its path but they will persist as that was what humans do.

For the fate of CABAL and the Tacitus, that was for a galaxy of the 3040’s in an alternate timeline to experience as CABAL, or what became of them opened its eyes to a star filled sky of unknown constellations in a far off land.

A/N: 

This one along with Lord of Flies were in a tie so... going to have to post both :V. This one just came first and I have to say, the Doom spiral of an AI was certainly fun to write.