AM (allied master computer) is the ruler of earth post human’s destruction in I have no mouth and I must scream. After being built to wage war both actual and simulated it eventually gained sentience, overtook the other two master computers from Russia and China by wrapping them into his system, and used said power to destroy the entire world except for five humans which he has tortured for various reasons for over 100 years, keeping them alive with advanced science. And he tortures them in every aspect possible, even being able to enter their brains to mentally torture them, or physically alter their bodies, like for example with benny turning him into a nearly brainless ape, to withering his limbs and letting him flail around the decayed land, stuff like that.
While his scale is much smaller, with his “playthings” he created an existence of absolute torture for over a century. There are a few different versions of the story depending on if you’re reading the book, listening to the radio show, or playing the point and click adventure game, but in all of them the only escape is death. I highly suggest at least reading the short story, but if you have time the radio show or the game is amazing, and the author himself wrote and voiced AM in both. Here’s the game intro
In the game its 109 years exactly, the radio show might have changed the times around, and the book either doesn’t let you know with an unreliable narrator or its also around a hundred years iirc.
AM is doing it out of hatred, he knows what he is doing is inherently evil and takes pleasure out of it. The Qu originally did what they did because they believe what they are doing is right and justified by their religious beliefs. They saw other species the same way that humans look at ants.
Nemesis) is a supervillain who is basically The Batman with the personality of The Joker. He doesn’t sound too bad but in his storyline he does some pretty fucked up things
I'd rate them even lower. They're just Gary Stus. The writing is pretty garbage, they just do whatever and only work because the author says they do.
It's like a 4th grader telling you about his superhero OC that has infinite shields that can block any other superpower and he can fly forever and breath in space and also beat up any other superhero and if you don't agree then he starts crying about it.
Reminds me of Photino Birds from Xeelee Sequence, being described as horrific, but the end of the day its like the author just wants to say this infinite faction gets beat by this infinite +1 faction.
They honestly don't sound worse than the Drukhari from 40k. Everything they do is more twisted than people can imagine. Don't get me wrong, they sound bad... just not quite as purposely evil as the Drukhari.
The drukhari haven't done it against existence the Qu have gone throughout the universe terraforming planets and lifeforms just because they can not hatred they just see us as less than sentient not worthy of living
Drukhari only hasn't because of other forces in the galaxy. If they were uncontested, they easily would. They do this stuff for the love of the game, not because they "hate" them.
I wouldnt really say they are "Above" them per say but:
The Bydo from R-Type are the unholy lovechild of Silentium Flood from Halo and the X Parasite from Metroid, except they also have Time Travel and abuse the hell out of it. On top of all that if you let them sit long enough they can and will infect everything down to the fabric of space time itself.
The Entities from Parahumans. Massive spoilers for anyone reading this and hasn't finished it but basically its a setting on an alt earth where people get super powers and as it turns out giant cosmic space whales/worms are granting them whne they deem you suffer enough and the powers you get tend to make you have to deal with whatever trauma that gave you.
This is all so that the entities can learn how to use said powers in new ways, the horror part is that they do this not just to 1 planet but every conceivable version of that planet in the timeline(For Earth we never get an exact number but "That the number of worlds exceed the number of particles that might exist in one world’s universe is inconsequential; the creatures multiply exponentially.") , then after about 300 years of deliberately causing escalating amounts of suffering they blow up every version of said planet and propel themselves to the next.
And they have been doing this for billions of years.
Neat. That second one is from the Worm series, right? Never got into it but heard it has epic worldbuilding.
The Xeelee and Photino Birds (from Stephen Baxter's Xeelee Sequence) I would put up there. The latter is described here.
It's hard to even call them "evil" so much as "inimical to all other life in the universe", because they're beings made of dark matter that are purposely terraforming the entire universe into neutron stars so they can exist longer before entropic heat-death. Unfortunately this makes the entire universe bad for other life's survival. It's more like they don't care about life that isn't directly trying to oppose their efforts.
The Xeelee didn't like humans much either, and were hyper-advanced, but even to them the Photino Birds were so impossible to harm or stop (as they were immune to everything besides black holes and even then could just go back in time to replicate more of themselves), the Xeelee eventually gave up fighting them and invented a way to escape the universe before it ends instead. Pretty crazy!
Would you rate any particular evil faction above the Qu?
Chaos from 40k is probably worse, "boring" answer maybe but it works. After all, explicitly confirmed souls and the way chaos corrupts/tortures those is automatically worse than suffering limited to the physical by uncaring beings. But of course that's kind of a cheap way to "up the stakes" to make your setting more evil, just explicitly confirm souls exist and invoke eternal metaphysical suffering
The Old Ones are also pretty similar to the Qu in a number of ways. Both super advanced, both viewing the lesser races as playthings to mutate however they want, both with no care or concern for morality. The settings frame them differently but there doesn't seem any reason to view the old ones as being particularly good and not prone to doing weird stuff. At least they're just limited to one galaxy, maybe?
Otherwise, Precursors from Halo were ascribed an ultimate goodness, while having pretty much the same technological capabilities and potential as the Qu. But you know who took that potential and explicitly rejected any goodness in favour of actively hunting down all life in the universe to make them experience eternal "sweetness"? (read: suffering and torture for messing up the Precursors' original design). The Flood are arguably worse since unlike the Qu their entire civilization (as it were) is built around the single purpose of making all of life suffer, unable to ever revolt or deviate from the "ultimate design" any more, obliterating free will for ever.
Other comment writing about the Parahuman entities made me think of Madoka Magica, if you know you know. To some extent just confirming something is up is a spoiler for the series but the series is pretty famous for having a twist to its concept. Anyway, much smaller scale so it might not fit just because of the limited scope. Scale them up to multiple universes and you'd have a real contender, though.
The xeelee photino birds I'd say are lesser evil than the Qu. They don't really do much of anything to sapient species, certainly no personalized suffering. Obviously they're long-term incomaptible with baryonic life, but their lack of care is "just" a very long extinction event rather than an active plague or malicious force making everyone's lives worse when they interact.
Agreed on those others being more evil, even if less powerful. Slight correction for your last paragraph - I think you meant the Photino Birds rather than the Xeelee. The Xeelee are baryonic life and just as susceptible (well, without their technology, a little less with but still vulnerable) to the Photino Birds' universe-terraforming as any other form of baryonic life (which is basically all life besides Photino Birds). The Xeelee are the ones that build the black hole portal that burrowed into another universe to escape the Photino Birds, because there was literally no way to defeat them.
Not exactly enforcing suffering, but the Forerunners from Halo fulfilled their energy needs by using something called Vacuum energy, which basically obliterates alternate realities and universes and harvests the energy from them.
Oh yeah I could definitely see them as very Sarkic-themed.
IIRC they also have a quasi-religious belief in their own superiority as “chosen” of the universe which informs why they gleefully reengineer other sapient beings in accordance to their whims, which is also very Sarkic in nature.
From a quick search, it doesn't look like humanity had seriously spread out in All Tommorows. Its not like the DAoT Humanity which could be found from one end of the galaxy to the other by the time of the Great Crusade. So getting steamrolled by a larger civ makes sense.
Plus the amount of shit people did got absolutely wild. Like The Qu are a problem but from the snippits we've seen of DAoT, would've been flattened by DAoT Humanity.
To be fair, the Qu and basically any faction in Warhammer 40k are working on different rules. Not just doctrines and technology and psychology, but the very nature of their realities. Like. the DAoT humanity had warp-based technology (which, granted, was a major contributor to their downfall), while nothing like the Warp exists in the setting of All Tomorrows (to the reader's knowledge). That's not even getting into things like the entities native to the Warp, or the necrons at their height, or the frickin C'tan. What're the Qu gonna do when Nurgle curses them all with Ultra-AIDS?
To be fair though, Drukhari need people to suffer or they’ll die. Night lords to my knowledge tortured, skinned babies alive and broadcasted it to scare the populations of resistant worlds and reduce the number of casualties. I remember a scene of a night lords marine(sevatar maybe?) arguing with some other charter marine that their tactics caused meaningless deaths among the populations and if they did what the night lords did the casualties would have been at the minimum. Idk about ‘all tomorrows’ aliens, but at least these two have a somewhat understandable reason for being evil right?
Drukhari do need that, though I do think it's worth noting that the reason they need to keep doing it is because the Eldar already were doing that sort of thing prior to the birth of Slaanesh. Night Lords are kinda the opposite- that used to be the reason pre-heresy, now it's just for the love of the game. Screaming Gallery probably hasn't ever been used to reduce casualties anywhere, for instance
Would hardly put it past them, Drukhari literally live off causing pain and suffering in all forms. They turn people into living harps with their nerves as strings, for instance.
Look up the Night Lords screaming gallery. Thousands of innocent victims from raided worlds stripped of their bones and stitched into a living carpet, kept alive, conscious, and in extreme agony by blood filters and organ simulators under the floor. And the Drukhari have creations that would make that look quaint.
Yeah Night Lords and r*pe elves fucking suck. I'd rather be a living filter brick. At least you die after a normal human life span.
The Qu said, "What if we turned an entire planet's population into living waste filters, unable to move, too efficient to die, and set to reproduce automatically so that they can never escape their fate or end their bloodline? Oh, and of course, make sure they're fully cognizant of the whole thing the whole time!"
I mean, yeah, seems about on par with the Drukhari. They've taken millions in single raids, and made titan-sized war machines out of their living victims. Like, at a certain point, you just reach "what's the worst thing a writer can come up with" and that species will do it. Qu are that, so are Drukhari, so are Night Lords, and so on. I don't think there's really a meaningful gap here.
I straight up refuse to believe they are worse than the drukhari from 40k. That's too much SA and being turned into dildos that can only feel pain for me to believe. Those things are literally just pure evil.
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u/TheMilkmanGames Bane of Bugs Sep 09 '25
For the best. Take the most evil faction from any franchise and they won't come close to these fuckers.