Humans emanated a ripe, repulsive stench. The Death Architect used open-air cages for her experimental subjects, bars instead of reinforced glass. That way, she absorbed a fuller dataset. Not only did she pick up ripples of terror—she smelled her subjects. She heard every whine and scream they made.

And they could hear her.

That added interaction, a whole other layer of fascinating data.

“Just a little more acid,” the Death Architect said in a tone that approximated how an innocent human child might sound. “Try to be good. Then you can go home.”

Those were lies, of course. The Death Architect rather enjoyed lying. She could not lie to other Torth, but humans and slaves species were very, very gullible. They could be tricked into believing anything.

It was a mystery, to her, why scientists did not use humans for experimentation on a more regular basis. Their physiology was extremely similar to that of their superior brethren. There ought to be farms of savage humans just for laboratory usage. Test every drug on them. Test everything. If nothing else, humans could be used as organ donors. Couldn’t they supplement the supply of organs reaped from adolescent Torth who failed their Adulthood Exams?

The Majority was so short-sighted.

The Death Architect tapped her data tablet, causing an acid shower to rain down on the couple within the cage. They shrieked. They writhed and wedged their arms between the bars, begging for mercy. The Death Architect accepted their noise as data, no matter how offensively loud they were to her delicate young ears.

Data was truth. Truths were always welcome in her laboratory.

Even after five days in horrendous conditions, these test subjects persisted in a foolish notion that the Death Architect was friendly to them. It was fascinating. They refused to credit the overwhelming evidence that the little girl was in charge. Ribbons and bows held back her curls, heightening the impression that she was merely a human girl.

The Death Architect dialed up the acid. She watched electroencephalography readouts on one of her overhead monitors. If mundane humans had a dormant ability to magnify active Yeresunsa powers, then traumatic pain should…

She caught a whiff of feces.

It was just another piece of data. So was the sight of their liquifying skin.

Truths made life worth living.

She might need to refresh her experiments on a fresh pair of human test subjects. These two were just about used up. The Death Architect signaled her slaves. While they prepared for cleanup tasks, she ascended into the Megacosm to scoop up the latest news.

!*!*!*!*!*!

Join Me.

*!*!*!*!*!*

Replays of the Betrayer dominated the most popular news feeds. He showed up in the Megacosm every day, eroding the morale of the Torth Majority like a cancer. No one admitted to admiring him. Not openly. That would be suicide.

Yet billions of minds flocked to his.

Every Torth in the universe should ignore him. Instead, billions orbited his massive mind every time he showed up, as if they were helpless to stop themselves. They understood the risks. They knew that the Betrayer might drill into their core and brainwash them, if he dared.

They listened to him anyway.

I am here for you, he thought to the masses. If you are lonely, join Me. If you bury your sadness? Join Me. If you want love (family) (friends), then you can have that. Join Me.

No one was quite bold enough to take the Betrayer’s bait.

Yet.

But the Death Architect knew it was only a matter of time. Plenty of Torth did hide secret sorrows and despairs. Everyone knew it, even if no one admitted it. Those disgusting emotions streaked the galactic melodies sung by the Majority, marring their grandeur.

There were Torth who would accept a lifetime of hard labor and shame in exchange for the promises that the Betrayer offered.

They might steal a streamship and head towards that reject planet he had taken ownership of, eager to land in the makeshift spaceport of runaway slaves. Or people might go on a solo camping trip, get lost in wilderness, and then cry out in the Megacosm that they wanted “the Conqueror” to send the Giant to come and “rescue” them.

The Betrayer seemed unstoppable. He was healthy, no longer dying. His armies blitzed cities every day. They won every single battle. Torth civilians dropped everything and fled if they so much as suspected that the Giant might invade.

The planet Umdalkdul was conquered. It no longer belonged to the Torth Empire.

And now? The Giant was conquering metropolises on the wealthy hub planet of Verdantia.

Servants and Rosies fled, unwilling to risk becoming zombified puppets.

That was bad for morale, the Death Architect knew. Civilization relied on trust. If Torth ceased to trust each other—if they stopped trusting their own military strength?—then the Megacosm would lose its harmonious cohesion. It would fall into bickering fiefdoms.

That would be the end of civilization.

The Death Architect sensed the cracks.

An eruption was brewing just beneath the surface of all things. No Torth was ready to surrender and kneel before the enemies. Yet. But they would be, if the Torth Empire did not start winning battles very soon.

The Majority sensed it, too. They spun in dizzying circles, begging and clamoring and silently screaming: HOW CAN WE DEFEAT HIM???

That was the question on everyone’s mind.

Desperation reeked, but the Death Architect recognized the widespread collective emotion as a mere symptom of disease, like pus or boils. She wanted to treat the root illness.

The Majority glommed onto the largest minds in existence. One of the unripe super-geniuses hummed with pride, showing her postulations to her orbiters. She wanted to graduate off her baby farm as soon as possible.

But she was merely a six-year-old. Her orbiters were unimpressed.

High ranks led flocks of Torth minds to the elder super-geniuses. Billions orbited the Death Architect, begging for reassurance, as if they were primitives rather than superior beings.

What are You working on?

 Give Us a hint?

  Tell Us?

Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.

(Yes.) Tell Us.

    TELL US.

The nearly identical minds of the Twins flared with annoyance. Encrypted research had been salvaged from the lair of the Upward Governess, and now the Twins were making improvements to that project. Their work necessitated secrecy.

We are busy. The Twins had a distant, cold demeanor.

 We are hard at work.

The Twins were the eldest pair of super-geniuses, now that the Upward Governess was dead. Yet they had displayed an obscene amount of immaturity when the Majority voted to place them in separate ships. It wasn’t as if the Twins needed proximity. They didn’t need to cohabitate. Why had they wanted to do that in the first place? They were fine.

Perhaps they resented the implication that they were untrustworthy?

But really, after the treachery of the Upward Governess, the Colossal Failure, and the Betrayer himself, was it any wonder that the Torth Majority no longer placed blind faith in super-geniuses?

The boy Twin had actually pitched an emotional fit when the Majority replaced all of his slaves. Just how attached had he been to a few dozen ummins and govki?

Every super-genius needed to lose their old slaves. That was due to yet another clever tactic by the Betrayer which could not be easily countered. His favorite runaway minion, Kessa the Wise, had sent drawings to certain slave zones, so slaves could be on the lookout for high value military targets—specifically the Twins and the Death Architect.

He was definitely a strategist.

As soon as the Death Architect had learned that news, she had ordered her Servant of All guardians to eject all of her slaves out an airlock. No big deal. Those slaves had died on the surface of her asteroid, and her new slaves would never leave her lair, and never talk to any others.

But the overwrought emotional reactions of certain super-geniuses bordered on illegal. The boy Twin would have been executed if he were anyone else. A lot of high ranked Torth felt ashamed of having to rely on such mental deviants.

Our projects must remain secret, the Death Architect reminded everyone. She understood those who wished to execute the boy Twin. She wanted to do that, herself. But … well … super-geniuses were vital to civilization. They were like oceanic currents in an ocean, or spiral arms in a galaxy. Without them, the Megacosm wouldn’t be what it was.

We (Torth) will prevail, the Death Architect assured her billions of orbiters. But if I (or the Twins) were to (stupidly) reveal Our work at this premature moment, then Our great and glorious Empire would lose the enormous advantage of surprise. If We lose that advantage, the Betrayer would win. Is that what You want?

Her orbiters echoed her message, disseminating it across the galaxy.

The Majority flattened into calmer swirls. They orbited the Death Architect like ecliptic debris circling a star system.

We (Torth) are mighty. The Death Architect fanned out a mental display of Torth military strength. They had many battleships, swarmships, and dreadnoughts in peak condition, as well as space stations constructing comet-class warheads. The enemies had none of that. The Torth Empire still owned most of the galaxy.

What did the Betrayer have, really? A couple of planets and moons? That was nothing in comparison to tens of thousands of planets, with all the slave farms and factories that entailed.

The fact that the Betrayer is trying (so hard) to lure individuals away from civilization, she thought, only proves that he is more desperate than We are.

??? Her audience was eager to learn her reasoning.

The Death Architect thinned her lips. Ordinary minds could be so slow. His forces are very limited, she explained, with mental illustrations to prove each point. He has fewer than eleven hundred Yeresunsa. He has no armadas. Once he takes over a few more cities, he will reach a critical tipping point, whence he cannot defend the territory he holds. He absolutely needs Torth on his side. That is (obviously) why he keeps trying to lure Torth into joining him.

She let her illustrations evaporate.

He is desperate, she concluded. Meanwhile, We (Myself in particular, and the Twins) are inventing effective super-weapons that will obliterate the Betrayer and his minions.

The Majority buzzed with that good news. Ripples of fear and despair vanished, smoothed away.

I will protect You, the Death Architect assured every Torth orbiting her mind. I will defend You. She let that truth shine. Our enemies will fail, just as all enemies in the past have failed. No one can defeat the Torth. I shall reveal a new (successful) war strategy when I judge the timing to be optimal.

Her assurances were not quite as effective as they should be, unfortunately. People remembered that the Upward Governess and the Commander of All Living Things had made the exact same promise.

The Death Architect was quite a bit younger than the Betrayer. She was not considered a peak super-genius.

The Majority respected her, but not as much as they ought to.

They wanted to trust her, but they were reluctant to do so.

For now, the Death Architect urged her orbiters, harry the enemies. Visit the outskirts of cities or farms the enemies have claimed, and abduct random inhabitants. Re-enslave them. Probe their minds. Learn what You can. Above all, make them paranoid. Make them fearful.

The Majority silently applauded. Many Torth remained discomfited, but the Megacosm felt slightly more confident.

Good.

Or good enough for now.

The Death Architect left them to their chatter. She sank away from the Megacosm. Since she was between experiments, she sank all the way into the dreamy depths of her own mind.

There were, indeed, secrets which the enemies should not gain any chance of learning.

Possibilities spun through her mental depths, as insubstantial as cobwebs. Her musings were unlike the musings of anyone else. Her ideas came not from within, but from something better than pure imagination.

Her dreams came true.

The gift of prophecy entailed execution. Toddlers who unfailingly won games of chance got destroyed. So did toddlers who saw ghostly visions of the past, because that was a sign of prophetic power.

And those who could view the future fate of any person they touched? They were executed right away, their organs ripped out and donated to medical laboratories.

The last time the Death Architect had touched a fellow mind reader, she had been a toddler on a baby farm, just beginning her journey into sentience and self-awareness.

She had immediately buried her prophetic visions beneath mundane data. Even then, at the age of three, she had surmised that her extra special ability was illegal and must remain hidden. Not because she valued her own meager young life, but because she understood, on some level, that she was extra valuable. Civilization might someday need her uniquely powerful mind.

Privacy was overrated. But this was the sort of secret that could save civilization.

Now, in the extreme silence of her own mind, the Death Architect assessed her dreamlike visions.

She studied each vision as if they were scientific data. That was exactly what they were. Everything was data. Every piece of data was truth.

She processed the changes in her own dreams as fast as any supercomputer. Changes in the data stream were important. Those were areas which required focus, or adjustment.

Many variants of the future looked bleak for the Torth Empire.

The Betrayer had a much better chance of winning this war than the Death Architect wanted to admit. He most certainly could conquer the galaxy. He might even enslave all the Torth in the known universe.

Data. Irrelevant. Revealing this data to the public would only guarantee the Betrayer’s victory and ensure the loss of Torth civilization.

But the war did not have to end that way.

The Death Architect knew which future she wanted to nourish. That path was still healthy. She reexamined its length, from its roots to its terminus. She tested its vertices, or pivotal events, searching for any new pitfalls, as well as problems which still required solutions.

Somebody ingenuous needed to guide the Majority out of its own brambles and into a starry victory.

That somebody was her.

Universal serendipity seemed to exist, because the Death Architect had been born in an era in which she was crucial. She understood exactly why the Torth needed to prevail. An ideal Torth had a stark, logical mentality, unclouded by slave impulses such as love or hope. Emotionless rationality was perfection.

As the Death Architect watched her slaves clean up the mess of dead human test subjects, she inhaled the stench. The cages got so bloody.

Most Torth would cope with messes like this by backing away, or by dialing up their tranquility meshes. So sad. So pathetic. Many children on baby farms would even be rude enough to vomit, or have some other disgustingly immature reaction, like tears.

The Death Architect suspected that she was as close to perfection as any living being could get.

Unlike most individuals, she was unaffected by fear. She had never felt afraid. She had never felt anything.

With such a clear head, she fully understood that torment was neither desirable nor undesirable. It was data. The Torth Majority would have to suffer in order to win this war. They would face a lower standard of living. Many would become enslaved, as penitents. Many would die in battles. That was all right. Because afterwards…

The Torth Empire would emerge stronger and leaner.

They could no longer afford to coddle mental deviants. No more mentally unbalanced individuals. Perfection would become a requirement.

That was a truth.

It was a truth which the Death Architect was wise enough to not reveal to the public.

Yet.