The Teacher was gone, so Varktezo looked towards the other mind readers for clues about what might be happening in the Megacosm. Garrett, Serette, Mondoyo wore expressions like gods watching a cosmic event.

Could they be persuaded to share?

In fact, they ought to share. They were penitents, or the equivalent of penitents.

“I want to see the Torth Empire collapse,” Varktezo announced.

His lab technicians and other acquaintances looked startled and worried, but a few clicked their beaks in agreement.

“Where do you keep the telepathy gas emitters?” Kessa asked.

Varktezo bounded to his feet. “Upstairs!” He considered using his wristwatch to call on an assistant, but the city must be recovering from the invasion. It would be rude to ask someone to drop what they were doing in order to fetch the devices. Varktezo figured he could grab a few emitters pretty quickly, without bothering anyone else.

He darted through the vault door, and nearly ran into the Teacher in the rocky tunnel.

The air smelled of ozone. The Teacher wore gleaming black armor instead of his colorful woolen outfit. Behind him, the Bringer of Hope was an overwhelmingly large presence in bulky armor. He blocked the passageway, along with a shocked-looking govki who cradled a very small hatchling Torth—a Torthling?—in its uppermost pair of arms.

“You succeeded?” Varktezo guessed.

The trembling govki wore a slave collar that still glowed in active mode. The alien looked so stunned, it might drop the Torthling it was holding.

“Welcome to Freedomland,” Varktezo said, for the benefit of the newly liberated slave. “Slaves are free here.”

The Torthling looked almost as amazed as the govki, her eyes round and dark. A crowd was gathering behind Varktezo. Ummins, govki, and a few other species padded into the tunnel.

“I’m a penitent!” The Torthling had a tiny, squeaky voice. “I am not a Torth. I surrender.” She gummed some words, as if her teeth were too few or too small.

Kessa stepped out of the crowd. She seemed to evaluate the Torthling, even as she aimed warmth and welcome towards the liberated slave.

“You can put the little one down,” Thomas said to the govki. “You are no longer a slave.”

“Right, Nuzzy!” the Torthling said urgently. “You don’t need to obey me. Torth are not in charge here. My name…” She hesitated, then seemed to reach a decision. “My name is Nea.”

Ariock gently took Nea from the amazed govki.

“Welcome to Freedomland, Nuzzy,” Kessa said with a warm grin. “And Nea.”

Varktezo studied the immature super-genius with curiosity. Nea was disabled, like the Twins. Her limbs were bony and underdeveloped. Those eyes, though. She had the bright curiosity of a hatchling, yet also more knowledge than any child should have. That was creepy.

He looked forward to getting to know her better.

While his colleagues exclaimed over the new arrivals, Varktezo darted past the hubbub and rushed up ramps. He made his way into the research annex. Invaders had ransacked some of the labs. Other rooms looked undisturbed.

He gathered several emitters, then rushed back down to the bunker.

“…killed at least a million kneelers,” Garrett was saying. “They’re activating nukes. If you go, you’ve got to be careful.”

Lights and monitors throughout the bunker brightened, then dimmed. It was as if their batteries were supercharged for a moment.

“Just show me where it is,” Ariock rumbled.

“The planet is called Saytsay Lal.” The Teacher leaned on the countertop, projecting a glowing holograph. Varktezo recognized it as a galactic route. Those were always complex, with dozens of zoom-ins.

“Your supercom won’t work there,” the Teacher warned Ariock. “We could watch you in the Megacosm, but if you run into trouble, we’d have to find someone trustworthy there who can help you.”

That might actually be possible, Varktezo realized. Billions of Torth had surrendered to the heroes.

“A planet needs saving,” Ariock said with magnificent stoicism. “I’m the only one who can do it. It would be wrong not to go.”

While the Teacher taught Ariock the cosmic route, Varktezo arranged the emitters around the bunker. He warned people that the place would soon be inundated with telepathy gas. Anyone who was uncomfortable with that should leave.

Dozens of people exited. They took Nuzzy with them, no doubt eager to introduce the liberated slave to shopping centers or fun neighborhoods in Freedomland. Nea asked to go with them, and Nuzzy agreed. They carried the Torthling out.

A few people stayed. Vy sat at the table, looking determined. She probably wanted to keep an eye on her boyfriend while he took risks. Evenjos looked composed, the only sign of apprehension the fact that her slender hands were clasped together in her lap. Kessa had that mildly curious look she often wore.

“Do you really want to share minds with me and Serette?” Mondoyo sounded very skeptical. His partner looked unmoved.

Varktezo considered it for a moment. Then he shrugged. “Sure, why not?”

A few more people hurried out of the bunker.

Ariock vanished with a thunderclap and a scent of ozone.

The Teacher stood clumsily, banging his leg on the counter. “I’ll be upstairs in my lab if anyone needs me.” He hurried towards the vault door.

Hmm.

A handful of the remaining people rushed away with the Teacher, exiting the bunker.

“Hey, Thomas!” Garrett called. “If Ariock returns, he might need you for another galactic route.”

“Then send him to my lab upstairs!” Thomas hollered through the doorway.

And he was gone. The vault door rolled closed and sealed the bunker.

“Ready?” Varktezo asked everyone else.

No one objected, so Varktezo ran around the room, dialing the emitters into active mode. Garrett closed his eyes. He was probably already soaring through the Megacosm, seeking glimpses of his great-grandson in the chaos.

Varktezo headed towards an empty chair, eager to… to…

Oh no. He was treading on oceans of thought instead of the burnished floor.

The bunker all but vanished from his senses, subsumed by war.

Millions of wars.

A cosmic infinity of wars.

Torth aggressed on Torth in more locations than Varktezo could process. Death cultists ran through hallways, shooting every kneeler they came across. Nussian bodyguards were commanded to barrel through forums and kill everyone in sight. Liberated guards did the opposite, saving everyone in sight. The monsters in prison arenas were set free to rampage. Newly converted penitents did whatever they could in order to give newly freed slaves a fighting chance to survive. Others grappled with death cultists or rogue maniacs for control of governance tablets, or they tried to barricade themselves inside governance lounges.

Individuals took over cities. Life support systems. Guided missiles.

Violence was the main theme, but there was even more going on.

Torth minds whipped from one terrified mob to the next, seeking stability, seeking anything that resembled the Megacosm they knew and trusted. Any location where penitents or death cultists won a decisive victory became solid hummocks in the collapsing swamp.

But these were hardly unified. Their cooperation was tenuous and fleeting. And the more self-aware they were of the galactic scope of the problem, the more apart they grew.

There was no hope of reunification. Every mind reader had to make life-or-death decisions, and those had to be specific to their own cohort or habitat. An airship with the air being sucked out of it had different problems than a baby farm dominated by death cultists.

So individuals splintered away from the Megacosm.

They splintered again and again.

Varktezo flailed. He was carried along by thoughts not his own, sensations foreign and painful, and utter chaos.

There he is.

The grandfatherly mental voice was like a buoy on a storm-tossed sea. Varktezo knew this mind! It was his teacher! Not the Teacher—not Thomas—but it was (Garrett) (Jonathan Stead) the one who taught telepathy lessons.

Something familiar.

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

Varktezo wanted to seize Garrett’s mind and cling to it. Minds were metaphysical, yet somehow, he did stay with Garrett’s mind, following it. Orbiting it. They moved in a certain direction, towards a specific battle zone.

A titan of steel, stone, and storm clouds grabbed a launching streamship full of death cultists.

Ariock?

Well, this was the Bringer of Hope the way Torth saw him, not the way friends saw him. The Giant wasn’t holding back. He had fully manifested as a titan, with thunderhead shoulders and eyes that glowed with lightning. The stormbringer moved with the violent energy of a tornado.

Varktezo watched in open-beaked awe as Ariock smashed the ship onto a steel plaza. Hundreds of cultists screamed without words.

 !!!!!!!!!! * ( ) * !!!!!!! * ( ) * !!!! * ( ) * ! * ( ) * ! * ( ) * !

Their lives winked out within a second.

Elsewhere, other minds cheered.

 !!!!!!!!!!!!! ^ ^ !!!! ^ ^ !!!!!!!!!! ^ ^ !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ^ ^ !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The Bringer of Hope must not be worried about accidentally hurting his own people. At all. Varktezo had never seen him like this, towering and savage.

Garrett’s mind warmed with pride. That’s my boy, he thought, referring to the titan who was even now seizing a second ship full of enemies.

Varktezo gathered that the ships had been launching towards a space-based military factory. They had plotted to hammer Saytsay Lal with nuclear missiles and escape. Presumably, they wanted to throw themselves on the mercy of the Death Architect. They were trying to impress her, to prove their worthiness as “true Torth.”

Some (misguided) Torth still have faith in Our uncaring colleague, Mondoyo explained without words. Even now.

Fools, Serette put in.

The minds of the Twins were at once overwhelming and hard to comprehend. Varktezo felt like someone glimpsing a galactic disk through scudding clouds. He sensed a never-ending figure-eight whirlwind beneath their basic perceptions; an infinity symbol that was also a Möbius loop and twinned whirlpools of data and a diatomic molecule and a binary star system.

Intellectually, Varktezo knew that Serette and Mondoyo were adolescent children who relied on regular injections of a medicine manufactured by humans in order to survive. They were slowly dying from their congenital illnesses. He knew that they worked in a lab and obeyed his directives. They were technically under his command.

But they were also a galaxy.

Together, they contained the empire.

As foreign Torth cried to the Twins for help, one conveyed the data, one processed it, one collated it into decision trees, one did checksums, one spun a final answer, the other edited it, and then they responded together.

There was no cessation to their thoughts. They never rested, never mentally blinked, never wondered. They absorbed the thrashing Megacosm and they becalmed many of the minds that they observed.

SAVE US? Countless Torth begged. They mentally reached upward towards the great binary mega-mind.

 PLEASE

  PLEASE

   PLEASE???

The Twins made no promises, as the Conqueror and the Death Architect were known to do. They were just taking it all in so that the event would be recorded. Mondoyo believed that such recording would have historical value, whereas Serette wanted to harvest rare scientific knowledge before it died. They were not here to rescue anyone, or to condemn anyone.

Save yourselves, Serette suggested.

Kneel before your former slaves, Mondoyo suggested.

Side with the one whom many of you call Conqueror.

 The opposing side is death.

Varktezo mentally recoiled from their huge, chilly binary mind. He was glad not to be a Torth right now.

A much smaller mind—Garrett—offered to show him around. Garrett might be impressive when he was teaching telepathy lessons, but now? Varktezo was suddenly aware that in most ways, Garrett Dovanack was ordinary.

He wasn’t even that old. There were quite a lot of Torth who were older.

He was well-traveled, but so were a lot of Torth.

He was a powerful sorcerer, but he wasn’t the only Yeresunsa in the galaxy. Far from it.

Ah, but I chose the right side of this war before anyone else, Garrett thought with satisfaction. He soared over the minds of countless newly converted penitents who cried for guidance, or who just wanted to shout praise for the hero whom they used to think of as the Imposter.

Jonathan Stead, many thought.

 The first renegade.

  The best of Us.

Garrett grinned. Varktezo felt it more than he saw it.

In that alien city on Saytsay Lal, the storm titan dissipated and fell apart as Ariock downsized. Varktezo saw the Bringer of Hope vanish through the shifting perceptions of kneelers who watched from a nearby building with glass domes.

A vault door rolled open and ozone wafted past Varktezo. The sound and smell felt a bit more real than the war torn points of views that saturated his vision. It felt unfiltered and firsthand.

“Where—” Ariock began to say.

“Thomas is upstairs in his lab,” Garrett interrupted. Every word resonated with telepathy. “Go talk to him about where to go next.”

Ariock’s point of view felt big. He was taller than everyone, but excessive in other ways, too. Keyed up. Alive. Increasingly overwhelmed.

We don’t want to overwhelm him (the Giant) (the Bringer of Hope) (the Son of Storms), the godlike mind of Mondoyo thought.

Serette’s godlike mind agreed. With all that we know.

Ariock left in a hurry. The door rolled shut faster than usual.

Varktezo wondered if he should feel intimidated, like everyone else. He sensed that Evenjos, Kessa, Vy, and the lab technicians were near a breaking point. The nonstop bombardment of war experiences was getting to be too much for them. There were only so many times they could watch Torth get blasted to death, stabbed, rammed with spikes, run over by hovercarts, trampled to death, kicked out of towers, or sucked out of airlocks and into space. They were also experiencing the points of view of children and elders and kneelers, hiding or struggling to make survival plans or wresting weapons away from enemies. It was a lot. It was across countless worlds and in alien landscapes. Varktezo’s colleagues wanted to take a breather.

Yet he liked omniscience.

He liked the Megacosm.

This is a broken Megacosm, Serette corrected him.

It is not as We knew it, Mondoyo agreed.

? Since Varktezo was their overseer, he demanded a fuller explanation.

So the Twins showed him.

Varktezo sensed their gentle guidance, like towering clouds holding him aloft so he could have a fuller view of the upheaval spreading to infinity in all directions.

Those knots, Serette pointed out.

Those gaps, Mondoyo pointed out.

 The violence has not peaked yet—

  —because not all Torth are yet awake.

 At any given moment of present time, approximately one fourth of the Empire is collectively asleep.

  They are waking up now—

 —to chaos.

Varktezo felt it. Trailing populations of Torth piled onto the already astronomical numbers of penitents and rogues and refugees and opportunists and cultists. Each of those groups was composed of sub-groups. The sub-groups had cliques and factions. The collective was a fractured mess of sprawling chaos.

Even as he watched, they broke apart further still.

And the Death Architect? Serette wondered. Is she taking defeat with her usual aplomb?

The Twins sought the massive mind of the Death Architect. Only a few thousand orbiters were currently paying attention to her, which made her seem as harmless as a distant storm on the horizon. She might as well be in a corner.

Let’s get a better view, Mondoyo suggested.

The Twins zoomed in closer. Varktezo sensed that it used to be very easy to navigate the Megacosm. Now? It was entirely impossible for ordinary mind readers. Many factions barely clung together by a thread: one single mind. Some were entirely disconnected from each other. The Twins had to gingerly hop from one unstable minicosm to the next.

And in between each minicosm…

There was silence.

Vast silence, as grave as a tomb, as unending as space-time.

It’s coming undone, Serette explained with sadness. All of it.

The Twins guided Varktezo through knots of chaos, past stray thoughts hurled at them and their ummin satellite. Many Torth struggled to comprehend why their civilization was undergoing collapse. They had not paid attention to politics or faraway warfronts. Or they had just woken up.

The Twins brushed off pleas for salvation or random questions. They specifically sought “true Torth,” otherwise known as death cultists. Those were Torth with unshakable faith in the Death Architect.

How could they still trust her?

The mental voice of their leader muttered across gossamer threads, from one mind to another. I will fix all problems. I am germinating a Solution.

The Death Architect didn’t actually care about the mayhem or any of her loyalists. Varktezo sensed her uncaring attitude. The only reason she was in the Megacosm at all right now was so that she could tally her losses and take stock.

Soon she would be left without an empire to command.

Her uncaring attitude is not due to circumstances, Mondoyo gently explained.

She has always been perfectly emotionless, Serette agreed.

Varktezo marveled that anyone would worship such an uncaring being.

Then again, as he thought about it, plenty of slaves and shani worshipped deities who offered just as little. His own parents—one dead, one given a place of honor in Freedomland—used to offer aromatic incense or pretty stones to the sand spirits. Varktezo used to wonder why they honored spirits who chose not to intervene in people’s misery.

Why were the spirits so aloof? It was because they worked in “mysterious ways” that no mere slave could comprehend.

That was what adults told hatchlings like Varktezo. Also, they told him that he should stop demanding to know the unknowable. He was supposed to trust that the intentions of the gods were good.

That non-answer had comforted his fellow hatchlings. Not him.

Perhaps some Torth were like those hatchlings, trusting that the mysterious ways of the Death Architect were intrinsically, unquestionably benign. They assumed that their own lesser minds could never comprehend her gargantuan mind. They assumed that she must be aligned with their best interests.

Perhaps her bland disinterest could actually be seen as proof that the civilizational collapse was just a blip; an historical aberration that she would soon correct?

She did have a track record of success. She was self-assured. She might have grand plans. It made sense that some Torth would trust in all that.

Well, Varktezo didn’t trust her.

They hit another pocket of silent nothingness. In contrast to all the action, all the pleas and worship and plans and war zone mayhem, it was jarring.

Varktezo sensed the Twins questing for other minds—any other minds. They were reaching, twisting, seeking.

There was no one else.

Soon Serette found another minicosm, and they zoomed there, to acrid smoke and people dying aboard a wrecked space vessel. There was no way to help them, so the Twins moved on. Back to nothingness.

Then another minicosm; a city where newly converted penitents were trying to establish law and order while the local slaves thought everything was topsy turvy.

The Twins followed a tenuous thread to another colony, where former slaves were armed and in charge. But that minicosm was losing cohesion.

It wobbled and vanished like a soap bubble.

Back to the overwhelming nothingness.

The early beginnings of the Megacosm must have been like this, Mondoyo mentally remarked inside the vast nothingness.

Indeed, Serette mentally chorused. When it first formed, there would have been a lot of nothingness to overcome.

It probably required constant mental discipline, Mondoyo elaborated.

Serette agreed. They would have had to train themselves to seek during every waking hour.

  It probably felt unnatural to the early Torth, at first.

 But the network of minds accreted, like space dust accreting into a planet,

  until it became eternal.

 Boundless.

  Endless.

 And now it is coming to an end.

Varktezo appreciated their sad commentary on the collapse of their civilization. He was just grateful for the busy size of their binary mind. If he were alone in this vast nothingness with just his own mind, or even with companions such as Garrett or Kessa, he would feel crazy; small and lost. The Twins were a mobile galaxy. They contained multitudes, even if it was all refined and condensed inside two agreeable personalities.

They even cooperated like Torth. They were in sync. They could seek and find minicosms about a hundred times faster than an ordinary mind.

And they loved each other. A lot.

Varktezo sensed that, too, and it enhanced his sense of security with them. The Twins would never let each other down. Trust was rock-solid to them. They had mutually agreed to guide Varktezo, so there was no faltering. That was what they did.

He traveled with them long after Kessa and everyone else had left the bunker.

He watched the Torth Megacosm evaporate into asteroids, into puddles, into dust, and finally … to nothing.