Prevailer: There are two kinds of people. People who are hurting want the pain to stop. People who are not hurting want to not be bored. It is easy to promise someone that they won’t hurt anymore, but super hard to promise someone that they won’t be bored anymore. So you need em in pain. Bonus points if you can make them think it is their own fault.
Zeus: Such glory as I crave can only belong to one. At the summit of the world, there is only a place for one being to stand. I can see it, see the creature who squats toad-like upon it. But I cannot see from that place. I cannot taste the view from the world’s throne, cannot see what the Fiend sees. I see, instead, my endless climb. The stairs before me blood slicked. The wall impossibly steep. I have lived this climb, lived it ever since my second birth. When I finally take my place at the peak, when the Demon falls screaming into the hell that waits her, I think it is the climb that I shall miss most.
Defeater: It was embarrassing, at first, to step into this role. To stand as a civilization’s foremost authority on… one random antisocial criminal. To apply every imaginable resource to a task so elemental and simple that animals do it every day. That feeling was short lived, shading into despair. After all, if it is shameful to resort to such extremities, how much worse is it that we have never succeeded?
Remover: You’ve had a good run, haven’t you? Surely, at some point during your lives, you’ve looked out at a universe entirely devoid of joy or meaning, and realized that you had it pretty good? Each and every one of you got to live, to experience your sensory inputs, for however long you were able to pull it off. You had to know it couldn’t last, but I hope you’ll take some pride in how long you kept it going.
Andy: As far as I know, and I’ve put a lot of effort into searching, my creator didn’t make any others like me. I’ve always wondered why. Did he tremble at such blasphemy? Did he shy away from the awesome responsibility that doing so would have entailed? Or did he intend to, was he on the verge of replicating my manufacture? The real mystery, of course, is whether I’ll ever be able to bring myself to ask him any of these questions out loud.
The last bit being a mystery is interesting, because it implies Andy’s will is the decisive factor, and not whether Chen is even around to be asked.
Chen’s soul is still arpund, just split between a lot of Copies
That would be odd, as in the chapter “The Transcender Controversy” it is stated “Prevailer killed Dr. Chen publicly in the first few hours of establishing the Regime. It was televised, and the body was DNA tested.” If she just slayed a copy to blow off steam, it wouldn’t be relevant in context.
@Lucid Horizon — However a few chapters after that in “The Company” we have a description of copied Chens running the Process in Company facilities. That chapter calls them “soulless”, though, so I think we can resolve it thus:
* Prevailer’s murder of Chen and the copied Company Chens are both public knowledge
* Everyone has assumed that the copied men were soulless automatons, and Prevailer killed Chen’s soul along with the real Chen.
* What the readers and the Fourth Fist have learned over the story (and I think Andy knew all along) is that the “automatons” still have portions of the original’s soul, it’s just spread out so much that they don’t have any… uh, free will? or whatever makes people act like real people instead of soulless automatons.