Super[pos|st]ition

Jinmi Quantakill (4972-5001): A massively-parallel killer native to the tholisarn homeworld, Dasarn (Secor Spire), in 5001 the sophont later known as Jinmi Quantakill took remote control of a drone ore freighter approaching Dasarn, overrode its navigational safeties, and commanded it to accelerate at full thrust into the surface of the planet – specifically, to his own location in the city of Askaran. The ore freighter struck the city with the force of a 31 megaton bomb, levelling the city and severely damaging its outlying suburbs, causing over seven million deaths and nearly three million other casualties.

Their real name is unknown (“Jinmi Quantakill” being a name attributed to them by the local press), many records and all chance of identifying them having been lost in the destruction of Askaran. Their motives, too, are unclear, being reconstructed from fragments recovered from surviving data storage near the fringe of the blast. While these fragments (diaries, literature consumption and other media, purchase records, and so forth) suggested a deep-seated fascination with death from an early age, and while some further derangement can be inferred from their final entry, “I will at last [feel like|become] a god”, little more is known.

What has survived, however, is a single extended, euphoric text on the subject of physics. While the scientific understanding of the tholisarn was at the time limited, their grasp of quantum mechanics was both sufficient to give rise to the many-worlds hypothesis, and yet insufficient to dismiss it; and while some have found the futility of choice implicit in the playing out of all outcomes a cause for despair, in Quantakill it became a source of delight, a freedom from all constraint. Why, they evidently reasoned, when all choices are made, should they not be the one to indulge their desires, and another suffer from their restraint? From the ecstasy of relief made evident in this raving, it was a short step from this realization to carrying forth his plan.

Historical effects of the strange case of Jinmi Quantakill include several modifications to common tachydidactic physics courses, the still-extant tholisarn law banning the operation of drone freighters without a sophont aboard capable of overriding the automated systems, the foundation of the “Lowbone” political faction favoring enforced public ignorance in the Tholisarn Domain, and a short-lived attempt to ban the amateur practice of metaphysics.

– Worlds of Infamy, Bad Stuff Press, 6005