All Queen had to do was travel along the Link and sit herself in Yelah’s brain, right? Well, such a thing didn’t really work. Even now, I tried mentally ‘pushing’ her Mind, but her Mind itself refused to move through, like pushing water through a wall. Shocker. If it were so easy, we could’ve performed some experiments or something. At my request, she sent over a command to Yelah’s body, causing it to jerk upright and give a shaky salute. She was able to move the body with her thoughts, but that wasn’t exactly the same as moving a body. Usually I don’t put a lot of thought into walking - or at least, I didn’t when I was a human. Similarly, I didn’t think when eating, or breathing, or flipping off someone particularly annoying.
Now, not to say it’s impossible to do those things without thinking. Mentioning breathing forced me to breathe manually for a second there. The point is, living in a body is a bit different from just controlling one. To say that Queen wasn’t in control of her own body was just another way of saying she wasn’t living in her own body.
So, how do we get Queen to live in Yelah’s body? The obvious thought process is to get her Mind in there somehow. The Mind controls everything, right? As we knew from Combined Minds, multiple Minds shouldn’t be able to exist in one body. It stands to reason that a Mind is needed to live.
At least, that’s the conjecture. I had no idea if any of that was actually true, but it was the best guess we had. Feltan sure seemed confident about it, but that was coming from the perspective of someone who lived with Mind being the big deal all their life. I didn’t have Mind in my world, but I seemed to live just fine. Well, temporarily at least. But moving a Mind was more complicated than just thinking about it.
“The issue I see is the means,” Feltan said, once again tapping his chin. “In your three pieces of evidence, all of them are related to Mind’s capabilities, but two of the three are tied to Abilities. You must know by now from training with me that Abilities are not ordinary applications of Mind. They are molded by the gods themselves. In that way, the standout piece of evidence is your Link, which is only a Lock. It does not directly allow for the transferal of Mind like the other two might, but you posit it is possible. And the woman’s Ability… it makes no sense to me anyway. I’m unsure of its relevance.
“Her Ability is strange, and I might be over-thinking it, but it seems to borrow from something I have limited knowledge about.”
There was the possibility that Yelah and Dip shared properties through principles similar to quantum mechanics. But even if I knew more about quantum mechanics than just ‘stuff exists, but its actually exists in multiple ways at the same time, actually,’ it was doubtful it worked that way at all. It more likely had something to do with an incredibly rapid sharing of information or parts of Mind that allowed them to take on specific properties of each other. Or something. Hey, it was an Ability the Human had somehow cooked up thanks to Yelah’s love for her giant penguin buddy. If she knew how it actually worked, it might be more shocking than if she didn’t know.
“As for the Link, you’re correct. We probably never would’ve been able to escape the Vulch’s Ability without it. Even when I try it now, I can’t just shove a Mind through there at all. No clue why that is.”
He thought for a moment. “Did you consider the possibility that your Minds weren’t moved through the Link at all? Perhaps the Link was merely the connection you identified as the direction of escape.”
My mandibles opened. Then they closed. Had I considered that? I feel like I should’ve, but maybe I didn’t. Thinking back to that moment, there were two times the Vulch had dragged me into his white world. The first time, when he and his family were chasing me and mine back to the hive, I had latched onto the Link and forcibly pulled Queen and myself back to our body. The second time, when we destroyed his own Link, and subsequently, his Mind, it was more like the destruction of the white world with our own familiar Link let us back into our body.
Was the Link a moot point for this purpose? Was it really just a connection that we couldn’t move Minds through?
“I’m… not sure. Thinking back, it might not even be viable evidence for the power to move Minds in the first place. We might’ve just used the Link as a guide to move our Mind back into our body, like you said. Does that mean Abilities and god power is really the only way to do this?”
“I have no idea.”
I rolled my eyes at Feltan, before remembering that unlike my hive, he had no way of knowing I just did that through emotion. So, I exaggerated my head movement to make sure he understood.
“What the hell am I paying you for, then?”
“I’ll ignore that. In any case, it does not seem that the Link itself is useless. It clearly has a strong, specific connection to your Mind itself, like the body of a mushroom and its massive network. Also, don’t forget how your Link to the human actually works. That could be another odd factor. If you want to transplant a Mind into another body, it is not something I believe may be possible without godly intervention. Especially in your case. After all, your Minds are one. Separating them seems a task even more impossible than simply moving them. But moving your Mind to another body seems to me a different story. Yes, these may be powers reserved for the gods. Even so, discoveries of the greatness of Mind are constantly being made; who is to say this is any different?”
Hmph. Greatness of my ass. He made a good point about the Link to humans being different, considering the Linkers and all that, but Mind was infinitely more esoteric than anything I’d ever encountered. Even circuits made more sense when studied enough, even though they were basically magic rocks we humans combined with electricity to turn on magic boxes.
“Perhaps Mind is the same, only for the gods. Mind may be as malleable as these computers of yours for beings like them. Your computers do seem like magic, at least to me. And probably to anyone of this world.”
Ha. Forget this world; computers were basically magic to most people back home. I worked on the building blocks of some of them and they were still crazy to think about, even for me. Which is part of why I worked on them at all, I suppose. Don’t even get me started on the Internet. That’s like five layers of magic stacked on top of each other. Turning electrical signals into freaking radio-frequencies all to do it over and over again at speeds that are basically incomprehensible? And humans used it to watch explicit videos, mostly. Honestly, what better way to describe humanity? Brilliant and deranged.
“Yes, yes, I am well aware of your former Internet habits, and regret every day that it is your Mind I share.”
Hey. I’m talking in general here. You’re going to give someone the wrong idea.
Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.
Suddenly, my brain melted. More accurately, it felt like it was being stretched beyond its limit, to the point I nearly feel unconscious right then and there. If I wasn’t constantly floating thanks to my Lock, I probably would have fallen over from the sudden sensation of a severe headache. Feltan asked me what was wrong when he glanced at me again, but I dismissively waved an arm. Something odd was happening even as my senses returned to me.
The CBU had revved up like never before. Myriad boxes were flying all around my Mind, filled with memories and information. The central core of the CBU pulsated, the smaller boxes that acted like connections to the six outer boxes of the overall hexagonal shape flailing about in uncharacteristic madness.
Oh shit. Was the CBU trying to make porn?!
“No, idiot. It seems to have latched onto our other ideas. Look.”
The CBU was typically a hexagon, a central core box connected to six outer boxes, which would act as corners to the overall shape. But now it was changing. Some new boxes connected to the six corners were growing in size, causing the hexagonal shape to expand, becoming 3D. The central core didn’t move from its spot, still staying in the middle of the original six boxes, but the six new boxes stretched away, creating a twisted hexagonal prism. Those six new boxes kept twisting, moving along a path. A path? A path to what? The CBU existed entirely within my Mind. There was nowhere to go, except…
“Oh crap. Uh, I think the CBU has an idea, and it’s a bit scary. For several reasons.”
“CBU?”
Right, Feltan didn’t know about it. I quickly explained the concept as lightly as I could without revealing too much. I had told him about parts of it previously, considering he became annoyed when I wasn’t properly focusing ‘cause I just had the CBU do a bunch of stuff, but he never got the details. Especially one particular detail.
The CBU - or rather, the building blocks, B-Boxes - could move through the Link just fine.
I held the CBU back, but it was shockingly difficult, like it really, really wanted to follow this train of thought to the end because it knew it would work. Even so, I refrained from letting it go. What the CBU wanted was to become a network, one bound by a ‘physical’ connection through the Link. Not only that, but it thought it could do so while stretching my Mind, pulling us through the Link by force.
Its visualization was clear in my thoughts. My Mind and Queen’s Mind were like a pair of spheres, forcefully mushed together inside of the vessel of our body. But we weren’t perfectly congealed. We were, technically, separate, but still combining into one solid mass. A body was where a Mind stayed, but if two Minds became connected, it was possible to move them with that connection elsewhere. That was how the Vulch’s Ability must have worked. He also had a Link, and he understood how this connection could move a Mind. It couldn’t be pulled just anywhere, though. It needed somewhere to go, somewhere that could contain it. A body with a Mind was a no-go - I didn’t know why, and neither did the CBU. But it understood the basics. As long as a suitable vessel existed with the conditions to host a Mind and could be connected via a Link, one could put a Mind there.
As for what constituted a suitable vessel, I had no idea. Surely, if a Mind was hosted somewhere in the past, it must have what it takes to host one again.
The CBU wanted to stretch, go through the Link with our mishmashed Mind in tow, and settle itself in Yelah’s body. It would replace Yelah’s Mind as the Link’s connection point and act as a ‘Mind’. It would be the anchor, constantly pulling our Mind back and forth, creating a network where we exist in both places at once. The spheres that made up our Mind couldn’t be broken apart, combined as they were, so I would be along for the ride. It wouldn’t be moving our Mind into another body, per se. More like stretching it to connect two bodies, only possible thanks to the CBU’s uncanny ability to contain and transfer information.
It didn’t make immediate sense to me, but to the CBU, it was clearly the easiest choice.
Regardless of its struggles, the CBU had found a way to move a Mind just by thinking. It would itself act as a network, move into Yelah’s body, and use itself to root our Mind in place where we chose. If a Mind could be moved, but only temporarily, the CBU could make that temporary time inconsequential by creating a transfer of information faster than I could even think. Would that actually move our Minds like we thought? Would this process even work for our purpose? Or would it just make it so that I could live in two bodies at once? It was all for naught if Queen didn’t somehow gain the capability to live in another body.
The CBU seemed to think it would work exactly as desired. That somehow, we would fall into place just like how the Bee had experimentally mashed us together and dropped two Minds into a single body, one Mind more alive than the other. I’d be able to move a body, and Queen the other. One Mind per body, after all. Easy peasy. It would be so easy to let go, let the CBU do its thing, and just find out. Even so, I hesitated.
What if the Link broke? The CBU could only do this by staying in Yelah’s body by moving through the Link. Would it destroy our Mind if the Link were severed? Would bits of me and chunks of Queen be stuck there? Sure, the CBU had done like a billion calculations in the span of moments, and referenced every bit of my Earthly technical knowledge, every bit of Mind knowledge we possessed, and every memory pertaining to the Vulch and the Link and Yelah’s Ability, but it had no practical basis for this to work.
What concerned me the most was Yelah. She was still in there, somewhere. The CBU was sure that her existence wouldn’t be a problem, and in fact, it had a specific place for her in its plan. There was no guarantee that it would work. What if the fact that another Mind existed in that body caused some massive rejection and we exploded or something? If she were to bounce back in some way? Could she take back control, even with the Link?
There were too many risks. The CBU was almost completely certain it would work. In fact, it even considered Yelah the ideal host. Her Mind was suppressed, so badly she couldn’t even control her own body. And that was thanks to the fact that her Mind was already flexible enough for me to affect so much, affected by her Ability constantly moving it around. Plus, she was a vessel we knew for a fact could host a Mind. To the CBU, it made perfect sense. She was the easiest route to its goal.
It was a monumental effort to hold the CBU back. The thing was like an impulse, except one that could act on its own. It saw a possible idea and wanted to do it, and the only thing reining it in was my good sense.
Hah. My good sense. Here I was, talking about my sense and the CBU when I was the one who came up with this whole idea. It wasn’t the CBU that saw Yelah as the perfect, easiest vessel. I’d been thinking of using her body for this exact purpose since I found myself able to suppress her Mind. I was taking advantage of her punishment, a punishment I created just because she caused me some strife and made things slightly more difficult for me back in Yiwi. Back where she had been desperately trying to protect the people she lived with from me controlling their Minds and government. For me, she was wrong. She and her people were a danger to my hive. So, I found a suitable punishment for her actions. Making her feel what Queen and I felt all the time. A lack of control. Beyond the control she had tried to take back from me. Beyond just controlling one’s will under the ruling system. It was the control of her very own Mind and body.
Had she been punished enough? Did it matter? As soon as I had found what I was able to do to her Mind, another idea had arisen. Queen wanted a body to control. Hadn’t I just found - no, hadn’t I just made her one? Yelah fit all the criteria, and there she was, suddenly unable to control her own body. Her body was a vessel now. No need to go through the unthinkable process of somehow creating one from scratch. It was right there.
The CBU exposed me. It was a system, like a computer. Efficient. Finding the path of least resistance. It was also a part of me. Was I always like this? Maybe to some degree. Humans tended to like finding the easy way out, after all. But callous efficiency was supposed to be reserved for machines. Or maybe bees.
I suddenly felt a lack of struggle. The difference was massive enough to trip me up. The CBU had, without explanation, stopped trying to complete its journey and sat, twisted and stationary. Then, it formed another new box, right at the center of the six newer ones, and shot it into the Link between Yelah’s Mind and ours - like it wanted to prove its plan would work with just a little taste.
“Well, at least it is listening to our fears. Perhaps its little test will bear fruit.”