I’m going to take this opportunity unprompted to talk about the Alpha Legion, because it’s an idea that I really love.
So you have this guy, Alpharius. And he is super tricksy. Absolute strategic genius, complete black box. No one knows his true motivations or plans, but he can pull off stunts of dizzying complexity to achieve fantastic results. And he has a massive army of Space Marines, all under his direct command and who will follow his command without question. A guy like Alpharius could really get a lot done with these guys.
So when a colossal civil war breaks out, Alpharius obviously with his giant brain saw it coming a mile away and has been positioning his forces carefully. The entire army is broken up into thousands of independently operating cells, with information hygiene. Each cell and each person knows only what they need to do to perform their purpose. And ostensibly, they all appear to be working at cross purposes. Half the cells are fighting for the rebellion, half against the rebellion, and even more are doing strange things for seemingly no reason at all, like fighting very hard to take control of barren moons in the middle of nowhere. There’s no real contradiction though because they are all obeying Alpharius’ direct orders and they trust in his plan. Every single cell is just a cog in his grand plan, and when it comes to fruition it will be glorious. And of course Alpharius has told hundreds of people what the goal of the plan is, and of course he told them all contradictory things. But it’s ok, because he’s a genius.
And then Alpharius dies in what seems to be a genuine blunder. He tries his enigmatic friend/foe schtick on a guy who doesn’t appreciate it and gets executed. And obviously, the first thing you would think is that he faked it. He does have hundreds of identical body doubles. So the soldiers aren’t bothered and they just keep going with their orders. But the war finishes, and there’s still no sign. Millenia pass, and with every century that passes it becomes more likely that he is actually straight up dead. And now there is no one orchestrating the grand plan and no one who even knows more than 10% of the picture. You just have thousands of fractured independent warbands who are all fighting fervently to do whatever their last orders were, based on whatever justifications they imagine Alpharius was thinking. And they are all still doing very tricky bullshit. You end up with stuff like two cells both meet trying to infiltrate a planets government. The rebellion side almost wins, but their commander turns around and reveals that he was secretly a loyalist this whole time under secret orders, but the loyalist cell were actually just hypnotically reprogrammed sleeper agents set to activate at the sound of a key phrase that only the commanders second knows, because the commanders second was actually the real commander this whole time. Et cetera. And all these wheels on the grand plan are spinning, and all these incredibly intelligent and well armed soldiers are scheming, and the net effect of the universe is basically zero. Cancels out. It’s good stuff
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