Finding the motivation

So I've created this really cool villain. He's the ultimate Bigger Bad in my Verse. A being who can actually count his age in Big Bangs and Crunches. If I were to give an accurate description it would be if Hal:9000 and the Monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey had Brainiac for a child, who was raised by Cthulhu, but grew up idolizing Darkseid. Natch, he wants to rule all of creation. But why?

I have his entry to the verse set up and everything, yet for the life of me I can't understand why a supercomputer with a 7 digit IQ would do it. Think you guys could help me out.

edited 4th Jan '11 9:38:48 PM by AtomJames

7 digit IQ

Because anything that has that inaccurate of an intelligence measuring-thing would greatly overestimate what the hell it actually is like.

touche though in my defence, that was a case of hyperbole in order to demonstrate how malevolently intelligent this character is.

Don't make it the villain. Make it a powerful being capable of great good or evil, with the strings being used by someone else who actually does have the motivation.

edited 4th Jan '11 11:05:49 PM by Slan

He finds every reality he's been through to be exceedingly flawed and finds that he can make the perfect universe. Simple as that.

If not, there's always the Brainiac reason.

Life is a challenge. For us puny humans, finishing school, getting a job, and raising kids seems like a challenge. For a being so infinitely more powerful than us, an appropriate challenge would be to take over the universe. Life is about affecting your surroundings, remember Irenicus: "You live, you affect your world." For a being as powerful as you describe, controlling the entire universe would seem like the only natural behavior.

Besides, how can you be sure that a being that mighty even has a concept similar to human "motivation"? You mentioned Cthulhu, but has Lovecraft ever explained the motivations of his Great Old Ones, Outer Gods, etc.? Or did he just label them inscrutable and left it at that?

edited 5th Jan '11 12:25:12 AM by Koveras

Hmmm. I like that idea but I don't know if a supercomputer, which is what the villain essentially is, can operate without some form logic. Would it be possible that he couldve evolved to possess that kind of thought process, considering how old it is?

Modern computers are mostly built with binary logic at their core. You said, however, that it was also influenced by aliens, who not necessarily share our Terran preference for binary symmetry. A logic that operates with more than just true, false, and stuff in-between (cf. fuzzy logic) would be utterly confusing to modern humans IMO, but may be a more efficient way to analyze reality. As a self-correcting and evolving system, your computer villain may have at some point realized the restrictiveness of binary logic and moved on to more complex stuff (if its computational capacities suffice for that), making it inscrutable by human standards, yet still possessing a logic infinitely more complex that ours.

edited 5th Jan '11 2:54:07 AM by Koveras

So it could reach the same conclusions an ordinary "take over the world villain" would but approach it from an entirely different angle with a greater scope?

Stupid Double Post! Oh well, I'll take this time to say that the villain's name is Ixthulith and its a shout-out to H.P Lovecraft.

edited 5th Jan '11 3:09:53 AM by AtomJames

Effectively, yes. This may also result in Ixthulith having a Blue-and-Orange Morality.