The Former Commander of All Living Things—

 —is far too grand a name-title for such an undeserving piece of ruination.

  What should We call her instead?

   The Worst Failure?

    The Apocalypse Pawn?

     The Unelectable? (Because elections no longer exist thanks to her.)

The Former Commander trudged through a chaotic crowd, winding past hovercarts laden with cargo, all heading towards the cracked and damaged spaceport on Grapeland Island. She wasn’t sure which was worse: Ignominy or utter desolation. She had sampled both.

After the Day of Collapse, she had spent a few weeks aboard her own luxury streamship with no one except a few starving slaves for company. But her store of food and drinks was finite. She would eventually run out.

So she had docked at an abandoned space station. The Torth had fled and left a lot of food behind, but they had also left a lot of slaves. Those unowned slaves were a grubby, unruly mob. She could have gassed them to kill them all, but to what end? She would still be alone.

A Torth alone was nothing. Torth needed to be part of a collective. Otherwise? They weren’t people. They might as well be slaves.

With that realization, the Former Commander had scanned for promising minicosms.

Grapeland Island had been a good choice—for a day. But it turned out that having Torth in charge of a city was not enough to ensure safety. The local minicosm was tenuous and riddled with the petty concerns of individuals.

Without access to a galaxy’s worth of knowledge, without instant cooperation, Torth could not achieve greatness. Torth no longer controlled supply chains. They did not own all the manufacturing plants. And so all of the remaining Torth were reliant on dwindling stores of food and ammunition.

And they had to guard those supplies themselves, using surveillance systems or even their own weapons. Even the most pampered of slaves might turn traitor.

Data marbles kept appearing in slave zones, in secret. The Giant and the Imposter might be responsible for some of that campaign, but there was a whisper network among the very slaves themselves. Information dissemination was a rampant and increasingly widespread problem. No matter how strictly slaves were controlled, they found ways to gossip. They talked about freedom as a reality instead of just a myth. They repeated stories of Kessa the Wise.

The Former Commander walked creakily past a group of Red and Brown Ranks. She sensed contempt radiating from their minds.

 How about if We call her the Apostate Of All Ruination?

  How about the Doom Of The Galaxy?

One of the Red Ranks idly considered shooting her in the back. But he was more interested in survival, as he directed a nussian work crew to load crates of nonperishable foods onto a convoy of hovercarts.

StayYoung City was only nine hundred miles away, and the Giant was there right now, in person. The locals here on Grapeland Island were rattled. According to whispers from the StayYoung minicosm, the Giant was unbeatable.

He might actually have immunity to the inhibitor.

Even without that unfair advantage, the enemies were unstoppable. Whenever they showed up with military force, more than half of a local Torth population would instantly kneel. Defiance meant death. The enemies no longer wished to police their penitents. Their message was clear: Join Us or Die.

It was time to abandon all major cities.

The Former Commander saw an extra hoverbike abandoned by the roadside. She was a skilled rider, and she could use it to speed past cargo carts, to get to the spaceport faster.

But she wasn’t sure how many pedestrians would tolerate her flashing past them, self-important.

She no longer wore a mantle of office. No white shroud, no twisting shoulder horns. She had left it aboard her luxury streamship. Yet she still had the sinewy limbs of someone who was mechanically enhanced. The curved scimitar strapped to her side was a champion’s weapon, and although her armor was dented and stained, it was white. On top of that, her hollow cheeks and papery skin made her recognizable. She probably had the most infamous face of any living person in the known universe, aside from the Conqueror.

Look. The Ruined Commander moves like she is arthritic.

 Maybe she ran out of painkillers?

  The Worst Commander? Hm.

   How about if We call her the Disgrace?

    I like it. Simple and to the point.

     What a Disgrace of a leader.

      How did she manage to live to such an old age?

A committee of local Torth in the Grapeland Island minicosm held a vote. To them, the Former Commander of All Living Things became the Disgrace. They ratified her name-title within seconds.

It was not nearly as grand as a vote should be. Because the Disgrace ruined life as We know it. Torth passersby glared at her.

The Disgrace would have liked to defend herself, but there was no denying the fact that her reign had been apocalyptic. She ought to be strung up in the Isolatorium and tortured to death for making so many wrong choices.

Too bad the Isolatorium was destroyed and gone.

She replayed her worst mistake over and over: the moment when she had dismissed the feral boy as a non-threat.

She had been warned. The Upward Governess had told her that the Betrayer could cause unprecedented problems for the Torth Empire. But she had blithely dismissed those warnings. She had thought that no individual could bring the galactic empire to its knees. A mere child? Especially one with a severe physical disability?

He had seemed so powerless.

Instead, the Betrayer had become a burrowing parasite, eating away at the core strengths of the Torth Empire. He had pecked at the trunk until it was hollowed and ready to break at the slightest touch.

Stolen novel; please report.

And then he had transformed into the Conqueror.

Even if the Megacosm reconstituted itself, even if Torth civilization could somehow reemerge and reassert its dominance, future generations would be traumatized by this war. The Conqueror had changed everything.

Wouldn’t a better leader have killed the feral child right away?

The Disgrace had actually wanted to have him killed, even before he became Yellow Thomas. But what sane leader would ignore the most respected scientists in the galaxy plus her own constituents? The top ranks—the Servants of All who secretly ran civilization—had welcomed Yellow Thomas. If she had dared to execute him, then her own secret cabal would have condemned her as a traitorous failure.

So she had let him live.

The Disgrace was not sure what a more competent Commander of All Living Things would have done in her stead.

You were in charge. A fat Yellow Rank narrowed his eyes at her. We (the Majority) elected you (the Disgrace) to make well-considered choices for All of Us. You should have done so even if those choices were personally hard. You should have put the fate of the glorious empire ahead of your own selfish fears and desires.

The Disgrace trudged onward. She supposed she had been selfish, to allow the feral child to live. She should have paid more attention to the threat and less to her own personal concerns.

It was ironic that she still outlived so many of her more cautious peers.

No individual should be permitted to be as wrong as she had been, and live.

Perhaps she should go and sweep trash for the pleasure of enemy runaways? She could kneel before the minions of the Conqueror. An ignoble death as a groveling penitent might be the fate she deserved.

Or, a passerby silently commented to her, you could join forces with the wisest individual in the universe. That’s where I’m headed.

The Disgrace stopped to stare at the Torth who had made the offer. He was a pre-adolescent with dirty clothes and unkempt hair.

Do you have a problem with how I look? The boy-child stared defiantly into her milky white eyes.

His black irises signified no rank. He was technically not even a person. He was just a potentiality who had yet to pass his Adulthood Exam.

Ugh. Whoever was in charge of the Grapeland baby farm must have released all of the unripened individuals into the adult population. It seemed the babies were being permitted to fend for themselves, since no one could guarantee their care and safety anymore.

The same situation must be pervasive in many cities. Helpless infants and fetuses were probably abandoned, left to die and rot. Meanwhile, the mobile children probably had to fight for table scraps and other necessities.

No self-respecting Torth would share meals or other limited items with a bunch of non-people who had not yet passed their Adulthood Exams. How many worthless children were running around, stealing from adults?

I have a right to exist. The child was defensive. I would have passed the Adulthood Exam, if one was given to me. I am a Torth (a person) as much as you are. I miss the Megacosm as much as you do.

He turned away, scanning the local minicosm for a pilot who might be willing to let him hitch a ride to the Araya Moon Belt.

No one ever respects kids, he thought. And she sensed irony beneath his frustration. This adolescent child thought that the Disgrace, of all people, ought to recognize how capable kids could be. She had been outmatched by a kid.

He was right.

The Disgrace fell into step beside the adolescent, putting aside her notions of who counted as a person. An entire generation of prepubescent Torth were going to grow up without rules, without discipline, and without proper exams to weed out the duds.

Roaming children like this boy-child would build the future, whether or not older generations of Torth approved of them.

As she limped into the damaged spaceport, she opened her bottle of painkillers and swallowed one. She was a mess of stress-related ailments. It was reckless to waste her dwindling supply of pills, since she had no idea if she would ever obtain more, but, well, caution was not in her nature.

Ships roared off of launchpads. Down on the lower levels, hovercarts squeezed past each other, laden with cargo.

It was just another planetary evacuation.

Again.

The adolescent scanned the scene and located a passenger streamship. Torth heading towards that ship emanated hope. They were not just fleeing the planet Bountiful. They had somewhere specific to go.

The Death Architect will save Us, they chorused.

 She’s as smart as the Conqueror.

  She promised to restart civilization.

None of these death cultists knew exactly where the Death Architect had hidden herself. She might be on any one of fifty thousand asteroids. A search would likely be fatal, thanks to all the decoys, mirror chambers, and death traps which the little girl had set up on her asteroids.

Nevertheless, the Death Architect was still able to issue cryptic commands to her most ardent followers.

Millions of her cultists floated near temporal stream gateways in deep space, awaiting the right moment to jump to wherever she commanded them to go. Many hurtled past space rocks in unpredictable, patternless trajectories. That way, no one could easily attack them.

Why?

They waited for something. Who could guess what? The Death Architect wasn’t giving any hints.

The adolescent hurried towards the death cultist ship, but the Disgrace hesitated. She scanned the bustling spaceport. Perhaps some other faction would allow her to join them?

Might she still command enough vestiges of respect to get herself invited in with a rogue survivor’s cult? That way, she might end up on some outpost or colony starship full of survivors, where she could…

Die of old age?

She would die in exile, in an isolated fragment of a dying society, among people who blamed her for their many losses.

She would die without any social influence.

Alone.

Like she was no longer a person at all.

She put her skeletal hands on the jutting bones of her hips. Did she really want to settle for fading away? Did she truly wish to die in obscurity?

She felt as if she had been born to please crowds. If she discarded that core part of her identity, then what was left?

A streamship pilot saw her and slammed a mental gate down. He would not allow the Disgrace to join his small band of rogue survivors.

The Disgrace wondered how justified the blame was. Sure, she had caused the Torth Empire to collapse, but she hadn’t been alone, had she?

Shouldn’t others bear some responsibility?

For instance, how about her predecessor in office? That previous Commander of All Living Things had wrongly assumed that Jonathan Stead was a corpse. His arrogant mistake had directly led to the flourishing of the Dovanack family and the existence of the Giant.

The Somehow Nexus had also made a grave error in judgment when he’d illegally inseminated a fellow Servant of All. What a criminal. He had illegally brainwashed his secret romantic partner, wiping away her memory of sex. That selfish, careless act had created an embryo which grew into the Conqueror.

What about the Swift Killer? What if that impulsive freak had not revealed her powers to the public? If she’d had some actual self-control, then maybe the Servants of All as an institution could have retained their authority and their dignity. Then the Conqueror never would have gained enough leverage to make a wager with the Torth Empire.

The Upward Governess had also made a poor decision, recommending that the Majority give the Adulthood Exam to a feral super-genius who had been raised by humans. Oops.

And what about the various generations full of individuals who had elected and promoted those fools?

The Torth Majority itself had welcomed Yellow Thomas. The masses had voted to allow him to determine the execution of the Giant.

They had elected the Disgrace.

They had elected her predecessor in office.

How far back did the mistakes go?

The Disgrace wondered if the Torth Empire had actually doomed itself.

Civilization had broken apart at a touch. An intimate touch, but still. Just a touch. Wasn’t that a sign of deep internal rot?

It must have been rotting for centuries, perhaps for millenniums.

By the time the Conqueror showed up with his “Join Me” invitations, perhaps the whole Empire had already rotted away to nothing but a weak husk, ready to topple.

Hundreds of Torth walked up ramps, into ships. More loaded cargo into holds. The Disgrace looked from ship to ship, and tried to figure out where she ought to flee to next. Was there any hope anywhere in the galaxy?

The Death Architect needs champions. That came from the adolescent boy, who watched her from afar. Are you sure you don’t want to join Us (so-called death cultists)?

The Disgrace recalled her one private visit to the Death Architect. For a moment, she could smell battlebeasts and feel their drool. Her stomach flipped. She never wanted to see that little girl again.

And yet…

Somebody did need to remake the Torth Empire without all the rot and corruption.

Civilization needed a fresh start, without all the hard-packed grime from multiple generations of poor decisions.

The Disgrace hesitated, unwilling to be at the mercy of a child, no matter how smart.

Then she touched her scimitar and reminded herself that she could teleport away in an emergency. She could kill the Death Architect if she had to.

What was life without a risk or two?

She strode towards the death cult ship. If civilization was going to have a future, it needed to start somewhere.