WINNING
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We are winning!
! * ! * ! *
!!!!! Yay !!!!!
! * ! * ! * !
The Death Architect had to tune out a lot of jubilation and praise. Evacuees on Bountiful chorused, The Death Architect is the most genius super-genius ever!
(Yes) We owe Her everything! That came from more evacuees, on Visitor Orbital. We will do anything She ever requires!
She has saved civilization! A congregation of Torth on Vagary silently rejoiced.
She is the savior of the known universe! That came from Verdantia.
She is incredible!
She must rule Us!
She is the best!
Death Architect! Death Architect! DEATH ARCHITECT! The victorious chant began with a few hundred thought leaders on various worlds, but they quickly picked up by thousands, then millions, then billions, of Torth throughout the Megacosm. Death Architect! DEATH ARCHITECT!
They loved her.
With nasty, uncouth, slave-like emotions.
The Death Architect would have vomited in disgust at the servile minds squirming all over hers, if she ever felt disgust. This much (praise) (worship) emotion was unbecoming for any self-respecting Torth. How could billions of them lose their collective superiority?
They had better regain their decorum soon. Otherwise she would think of ways to make them stop.
That stray thought shut a few million of them up.
Good enough for now. The Death Architect was too busy directing battles to dedicate her mental resources towards anything petty. Even while she endured the worshipful billions, she peered through the eyes of an ever-shifting panoply of Servants of All and Rosies.
She whispered in their minds.
She guided their hands, instructing them on where to go, what to do, and where to aim.
Her troops shot enemies on sight. They sabotaged enemy equipment. There were headquarters to bomb, battle leaders to assassinate, launchpads to destroy, and enemy consuls who should be terrorized. Her troops waded into slums where temporarily embarrassed Torth—those known as “penitents”—survived in nasty barracks amidst trash heaps. They removed shackles, unlocked slave collars, and broke doors.
Millions of enslaved Torth were set loose.
Rampage! the Death Architect urged the few penitents who dared to ascend and orbit her mind. Remember your Torth dignity? You can have it all back. All you have to do is (discard the enemy’s laws and) pick up weapons. I don’t care what rank you used to be. You are all hereby promoted to Red Rank, the instant you kill an enemy for the great and glorious Torth Empire!
The ones who yearned to become Torth again leaped into action. They spread her offer, making sure that all penitents understood that they were free, and they had a great, albeit undeserved, opportunity.
Why are so few penitents rejoining Us? Red Ranks asked each other.
Why are they hiding?
Instead of rushing out to sow mayhem, most of the so-called penitents cowered inside their barracks or cubby holes. Their minds remained silent beneath the Megacosm. Were they afraid to take a risk?
How shortsighted. Didn’t they value civilization?
Didn’t they have any sense of self-preservation?
They might need some external motivation. Kill any uncooperative penitents, the Death Architect decided.
The Majority quickly ratified that as a decree, and the troops obediently incorporated it into their list of objectives. Reluctant penitents got shot in the face, the chest, or the back. There was no reason to show mercy to traitors.
(!?) !? (!?)
A substantial minority (44.19643%) of Torth protested the elimination (murder) of (flawed ones) penitents. Was it really necessary to massacre fellow mind readers? Wasn’t brutal vengeance a bit premature? After all, the penitents were not shooting at Torth.
The Death Architect ignored the small-minded protesters. They were ignorant of the larger picture.
Her version of the victorious empire would be flawless. In the future, there would be zero tolerance for emotions. Zero tolerance for protesters. She would never allow another Betrayer to arise.
She sent out a new directive in order to distract the unruly masses. Commence the re-conquest of Umdalkdul!
!!!!!! A jubilant cry went up on the Megacosm.
* * *
YAY!!!!!!!!
* * *
Trillions of Torth agreed that they must retake that hub planet. Umdalkdul never should have been snatched so easily. Soon, that embarrassing sequence of losses would be merely an aberrant blip in galactic history.
A space armada surged through various temporal streams and converged towards Umdalkdul. The Death Architect leaped from mind to mind, directing navigation crews, positioning dreadnoughts and swarmships. She never felt anything like triumph. Nevertheless, she understood that she ought to feel triumphant.
Victory was inevitable.
The Giant had decimated his own allies in his drug-crazed efforts to kill anything that looked like the merest hint of Torth. Local fleets pounded him with nuclear bombs. He was still more deadly than a nuclear meltdown, coasting on his massive raw strength. Nobody could get close enough to spray him with inhibitor gas.
Yet.
As soon as he showed signs of losing strength? An extraction crew, operating on covert instructions, would swoop down and airlift the unconscious titan out of irradiated clouds of toxic ash. Then the Torth Empire would own a new sort of weapon.
The Death Architect could not fully rely on that optimistic outcome. Her daydreams of the future blurred with too many possibilities. Every decision made by every military commander bifurcated each second of the battle into a million facets, generating an exponentially expanding number of ever-shifting potentialities.
She didn’t really care. The Giant (that colossal pain) would likely never threaten anyone again, after today.
And netting him was only an afterthought.
She was after the biggest prey.
The Conqueror had blundered straight into the telepathy gas trap which the Death Architect had engineered especially for him. He was supposed to have lashed out in self-defense. He should have accidentally twisted his own gigantic mind.
It had almost happened like that.
Almost.
Oh, the Death Architect had foreseen that future. With the Conqueror dead, all of his runaways would give up and quit. The galaxy would settle into a new regime of peaceful civilization, overseen by her. He should have made that fatal mistake.
Instead?
The Conqueror had stopped short at the last microsecond.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
He had defied probability and made a fateful decision. Somehow—how?—he had deduced the thalamocortical mirroring possibilities engendered by a dark matrix encephalographic distortion zone.
Just how had he made that intellectually intuitive leap?
He was older than the Death Architect, older than any other living super-genius except for the Lone Twin, but his brain was withered from a decade spent on the backwater planet Earth. He shouldn’t be smarter than her.
Perhaps his gross overconsumption of random Torth lives had boosted his intellect above everyone else’s?
Yet that seemed unlikely. He was absorbing trash, not scientific ingenuity.
The Death Architect figured that she had simply made an unfortunate miscalculation. She probably should have piled all of her forces towards her primary target, rather than splitting her invasion across multiple targets. Really, Kessa didn’t matter. Neither did those Earth women, Vy and Cherise.
She sent out mental commands to redirect her champions.
The Conqueror was a wily nemesis. It was a mistake to underestimate him, even by a smidge. Comprehending one’s opponent was often a vital key to winning.
That sort of psychological analysis had empowered the Upward Governess to predict “Yellow Thomas” as a threat. That was why the fat girl had been so eager to research dark matrixes and encephalographic distortion fields. She had put a lot of thought into the best way to defeat her former mentee.
The Death Architect had not foreseen “Yellow Thomas” as a danger. Unlike the Upward Governess, she had not absorbed his mind, and she did not know him. Her lack of firsthand knowledge was a blind spot. It made for potential flaws in her schemes.
It was a good thing she had so many advantages.
She could intuit the future. She created her own luck, whereas the Conqueror could not even fully control the minions whom he called “friends.”
She owned most of the galaxy. Her resources were nearly infinite, and more and more, they were increasingly under her complete and total control. A desperate populace yielded to her whims.
And she had much smarter colleagues than what the Conqueror could muster. His lab assistants were mere runaway slaves. They were probably illiterate, ruled by bestial whims and groveling before their mental superior. Meanwhile? The Death Architect farmed work out to her polymath colleagues. The Lone Twin, the Rind Topographer, the Geodesic Flux, and the Spin Overture were all super-geniuses who had ripened into their full potential.
There was one dud in that age bracket, the Stalled Proofer, but that was to be expected. One out of every four super-geniuses died by suicide. Mental idiosyncrasies were just a part of their bioengineered nature.
The Lone Twin was formidable above and beyond the rest. Sure, her mental twin had betrayed the Empire and gone rogue, but before that, he had helped to provide the winning weaponry. Together, the Twins had improved upon the Upward Governess’s notes. They had zeroed in on antineutrino desorption as a technique for amplifying ambient thalamocortical resonance, and together, they had brought her invention to fruition.
Their collaborative brilliance had also moved the rage-inducing insanity gas beyond a trial phase and into production. The Death Architect wished she could take credit for insanity gas, but most scientists knew that she was less of a chemist and more of an architect.
And the phase-shifting inhibitor gas. What a clever concept. What a paradigm shift! The Torth Empire also owed that battlefield neurotoxin to the Twins.
We never found Kessa, her champions on Reject-20 reported. We cannot even find the Conqueror.
They rushed from room to room, leaking frustration and killing the few living beings they saw. They would have pleased the Majority by taking high-value hostages, but they could not even do that. Laboratories and closets were empty. Much of the city’s populace had disappeared.
The targets are hiding in bunkers (underground), the Death Architect informed her troops. Or in secret passageways. That seemed obvious to her. Any super-genius would design a city full of safe havens.
The champions praised her for her brilliant insight. They began to search the Academy in a more methodical way, tapping on walls and listening for hollow echoes. They leaned their heads against walls here and there, listening for minds that might be hidden from sight. They spread their awareness and searched for concealed spaces.
It was only a matter of time.
I sense life sparks underground. The most powerful champion on Reject-20 stood in a lobby piled with corpses, his awareness spread throughout the Academy. Although the Imposter and the Conqueror are not standing out.
That probably meant that the Imposter was depleted.
As for the Conqueror … no one knew how he received power boosts. That was a mystery. But the Death Architect was fairly certain that he needed to siphon off a minion. Without the Giant, the Shapeshifter, or the Imposter to help him out? He was no more powerful than an average Torth Rosy Rank.
He is highly vulnerable right now. The Death Architect pictured the Conqueror quivering in the dark. Terrified. Cornered. He cannot best Our champions in a fight (and he knows it).
Her orbiters chorused with melodies of fervent bloodlust. The Conqueror dared not use his power to brainwash or twist minds. Not with all the telepathy diffusion zones that their champions had set up.
Conserve your powers, the Death Architect instructed her champions within the Freedomland Academy. Save your strength for when you see the Conqueror. Then? Crush his skull.
The champions reacted with respectful determination. They looked for a way to drill underground, to get to the hidden life sparks.
The Death Architect sank away from the Megacosm and explored her own intuitive sense of the future. Was victory preordained?
Nuss was falling, Umdalkdul was falling, and Freedomland was invaded. Even if the Conqueror surprised her with some unpredictable strategy—which he was likely to do—she just needed to lock down his city for seven days. That was how long it would take for Torth dreadnoughts to arrive and nuke everything on the ground.
The champions had defeated the Giant. Now they only had to kill the Conqueror.
Each champion knew that if they failed, the Majority would force them to take much more deadly missions—if they survived.
Satisfied, the Death Architect made an eye gesture at one of her slaves. There was a bowl full of prune-like fermented fruits on a counter, between scalpels and blood-soaked rags.
She did not care about treats. Yet she wanted some visceral way to celebrate her triumph over the enemies, because the fools beneath her (the Majority) expected such rituals. An influencer had to humor her constituents. For now.
And perhaps … well, perhaps she might feel something like actual satisfaction, once she won?
Soon.
When she ascended again, ready to orchestrate far flung battles, she became peripherally aware of some distant, nearly inconsequential cries of alarm.
!?!?
It was just a handful of mental voices reacting to something in the deep space beyond Vazza. But they got amplified by exponentially larger audiences, and soon the Death Architect sensed her own orbiters tugging her attention.
Whatever this was, it was news.
The Twin!
It seemed the Lone Twin, formerly known as the girl Twin, had done something inexplicable. She had ascended into the Megacosm for a split second—although she had scheduled this time for sleep—and she had emitted a cryptic string of seemingly random symbols, icons, and glyphs, interspersed with numbers.
Then?
She had promptly dropped out of the Megacosm.
Hm.
The Death Architect did not waste time trying to parse the code. She could guess that it was a subversive signal, and she could guess who it was meant for. The Twins had earned their shared name-title. Thanks to their long-time cohabitation plus their super-genius processing speeds, their minds were nearly identical. They were grossly obsessed with each other.
The pertinent question was: How could the other Twin receive the mental code?
Super-genius minds were too enormous to hide amidst the normal ebb and flow of conversations. Ripe super-geniuses in particular—those who were as old as the Twins—could not hide. If the boy Twin ascended into the Megacosm, even for a nanosecond, someone would notice, which meant it would become public knowledge.
Quite a mystery.
The Twins must be conspiring with someone. One of the rogue Servants of All, perhaps? Someone who could blend in with Megacosm choruses, like the Imposter?
It was not a code meant for Me, the Death Architect confirmed for her billions of orbiters. Or for anyone loyal to (civilization) the Empire.
Nuclear launchers swiveled to lock onto the Lone Twin’s scientific vessel.
Ever since the boy Twin had disappeared, the Empire had taken extra precautions with his erstwhile other half. The Lone Twin was under constant, unbroken surveillance. Camera drones monitored her at all times. Three Servants of All had devoted themselves to round-the-clock watchfulness over her, in person.
The Lone Twin must be defecting, the Majority chorused in a crescendo of agreement.
DESTROY HER!
NUKE HER!
The Death Architect emitted a small sigh. She would regret losing her smartest work partner, but… well, neither Twin showed up in her daydreams from this point forward.
They had served their purpose.
Go ahead. The Death Architect turned her focus to her invasion force on Umdalkdul.
How had the Conqueror trained so many slaves, in such a short time, to pilot military swarm shuttles? And where did they get such bravery? Slaves were usually cowards.
Before she could immerse herself in the firestorm that was one fleet pounding another, her orbiters interrupted her again.
!!!!!!!
The Servants of All who were supposed to kill the Lone Twin were gone.
It seemed they had died quite suddenly.
The nuclear warheads, although launched, remained undetonated. Something had gone awry. The Majority seethed in confused disquiet.
A mechanical failure? That was an investigating Green Rank. But We were very thorough with our daily checks. How could all nine guidance matrices have failed simultaneously?
SABOTAGE! the Majority chorused.
There could be no other explanation. The scientific vessel which had also been a prison was gone. During the excitement of glorious wins over the enemies, during the short window of time in which the Death Architect had absented herself from the Megacosm, the Lone Twin had enacted some sort of plan.
And escaped.
Given the evidence, the Death Architect suspected that someone close to the Twins had secretly done their bidding. Perhaps that someone was the instigator? Had someone persuaded—or brainwashed?—the brilliant scientists into turning away from civilized progress and towards primitive sympathies?
The saboteur needed to be rooted out.
Launch an investigation, the Death Architect urged the highest ranks who were close to the situation. Report your findings directly to Me, in person. Make it a private report. Do not share your findings in the Megacosm.
One could never be too careful when dealing with enemy super-geniuses.
Trace routes which the Lone Twin is likely to choose, the Death Architect added. Double the watchdog forces at all temporal stream gates. Prepare to nuke either Twin, if their vessels show up.
The Majority relayed her commands. Military ranks set out, eager to outdo each other in their race to prove their loyalty to the Empire. They would obey any command given by the Death Architect, who was the unequivocal ruler of the known universe.
The Majority agreed that she had proven her loyalty and her capabilities beyond any doubt. They had already held a quick election to ratify her rule.
As they should.
The Death Architect turned her attention to Reject-20. The Twins were irrelevant. The planet Umdalkdul was irrelevant. The Conqueror was her true enemy, the only nemesis that mattered, and he must be hidden somewhere inside that ridiculously eclectic city.
When her troops dragged him out of hiding, would he weep like a slave? Would he bravely try to protect his slavish friends? What was he most likely to do?
She wished she had insight into his mind, the way the Upward Governess had.
Find him, she urged her underlings. And show the enemies that the Torth Empire cannot be defeated.