PART FIVE

> “The Torth Empire never understood the concept of soul. It’s an elusive concept. There is no fixed set of properties, no standard for comparison, yet the word does have meaning. A soul has the capacity for love and friendship and an ability to sympathize, plus their own individuality. So it defies definition, even in the language of pure imagination.”

- Cherise Chavez

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She had once led all living Torth in existence, and thus had commanded all living things.

Now she stared into a black void.

Space was as desolate as what remained of the galactic empire she used to rule. Her planets. Her armadas. The slaves her people had owned. All were gone. Even the audience in her head was gone, leaving the disgraced Commander utterly alone and adrift in the escape pod which she had used in order to flee the cataclysm.

She had been aboard a mining rig when it happened. A fellow Servant of All known as the Ever Rascal had suddenly clasped hands with an unranked adolescent. It turned out the adolescent had a terrible power to brainwash everyone in the vicinity. Boosted by the Ever Rascal’s power, that adolescent had…

Well.

The disgraced Commander had fled from all the suddenly docile kneelers, throwing desperate Torth out of her way so she could take the last escape pod and keep her free will.

Now all she had left was the supremacy of being a Torth. She still had her own personal freedom.

That was something.

She retracted her helmet, allowing herself to breath slightly more freely inside the narrow confines of the escape pod. She was free, but she was a corpse. Her bones knew it. The endless silence inside her head confirmed it.

She touched one of the horns of her mantle of office. She had teleported to the city where her political detractors had stored the mantle, and now she wore it again. The Majority had expected to bestow it upon the next Commander they elected, but that was a bygone era. There would be no future Commanders of All Living Things.

She was the last.

The disgraced Commander studied her hands, encased in skintight armored gloves. At one-hundred-and-eighty-eight years old, she was a lanky skeleton, frail and feeble despite many biomimetic enhancements. This escape pod lacked food, it lacked slaves, and there was no way to navigate to the nearest temporal stream.

Like all Torth, she relied on the Megacosm for cosmic maps. The Megacosm was her support system, her emergency backup, her everything.

Without the Megacosm or the Necrocosm? She was no more consequential than a speck of dust.

She supposed she could teleport somewhere. Might she retire to a wilderness planet and live the remainder of her life in miserable seclusion?

No doubt there were former Servants of All copulating with humans on Earth right now, attempting to leave some sort of personal legacy in the form of hybrid offspring. They had lost their audiences and any chance of being remembered for eternity. Their offspring might be powerful enough to wield some sort of influence over the native savages.

But they would not be Torth.

The disgraced Commander was too old to be a gamete donor, anyway. She could not bear children, even if she were willing to endure such a humiliating and disgusting activity. All she could do on Earth was die.

She had no wish to end her life where savages might laugh at her corpse, or bury her in a dirty hole.

There was only one semi-noble ending for her, a superior being who used to rule the galaxy.

The manual switch to open the airlock was bright and obvious. It seemed to whisper that she was a disgrace. She ought to die. That button filled in for all the mental voices that she no longer heard.

She hesitated, reflecting upon the many, many things she should have done differently.

The Conqueror. She should have killed him back when he was weak and she was powerful. That was a frequent lament in her mind, since it was her single biggest point of failure. The Giant as well.

But her more recent failures were just as terrible.

Yeresunsa could boost their powers through linking. Why hadn’t that ever occurred to her? Why hadn’t she ever thought to experiment with intimate connections, no matter how alien intimacy was?

The Conqueror had not hesitated to use the dark magic of friendship in order to destroy her civilization.

He had linked with his friends and then brainwashed her colleagues. Fellow Servants of All had suddenly turned against their peers and low ranks. They might still be rushing through cities and stations and outposts, brainwashing any Torth they came across. A wave of meek imperatives—surrender—had crashed through the remnants of the Torth population like a supernova. There had been no way to stop it.

But there had been a way to prevent it.

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The disgraced Commander should have had all Yeresunsa killed shortly after the cabal revealed itself. The Majority, in its collective wisdom, had known that Yeresunsa were problematic. They had voted to execute all Servants of All.

Rightly so.

But instead of agreeing to lay down and die, the disgraced Commander had foolishly insisted on becoming a champion. She had allowed her own selfish desire for self-preservation to take priority, even above the preservation of Torth civilization. She and her fellow Servants of All had postponed their own executions and influenced the Majority to let them live for a while longer.

Now those same Servants of All had just destroyed the free will of almost all of the surviving superior beings in the galaxy.

They had become weaponized minions of the Conqueror.

The disgraced Commander should have guessed that he would try something like this. She had been shortsighted.

She waited for the audience in her head to concur. But no one cared. The cold, thoughtless universe had no judgment to offer.

She would die alone.

That was terrible. But at the same time, oddly, she felt more free than she ever had before. She did not need to worry about feedback the next time she ascended, because she would never ascend again. She did not have to consider what other Torth thought. Instead of catering to the Majority…

Well. She supposed she was the Majority, now.

She could vote for anything.

If she elected herself Commander of All Living Things? Then that was the will of the current Majority. She would be the Commander.

She was the Commander again.

No one voted against her.

The Commander bent over in the confined space and strapped her sheathed scimitar to her armored back. Perhaps she would pay the Conqueror a visit. Should she try to kill him for all the destruction he had wrought?

She gave it a quick vote. Yes.

Or…

She had another suggestion. She could use her champion’s weapon to chop the head off the abhorrent little girl who had given it to her.

The disgraced Commander instinctively tried to ascend, to share her reaction. The wretched Death Architect must have made some catastrophically wrong calculations! So much for her sunny promises to destroy the enemies!

But there was nowhere to ascend to. No Megacosm, no Necrocosm, no orbiters, no other minds.

Well, she was tempted to kill the Death Architect anyway. After all, she still remembered the convoluted route to that obscure asteroid in the Araya Moon Belt. She might very well be the only surviving person in existence who actually knew how to visit that gloomy lair.

Nah.

The lair was laced with deadly traps, and anyhow, without the Necrocosm, the child was entombed. It wasn’t the Isolatorium, but it was the next best thing. The Death Architect’s cataclysmic failure had earned her a drawn-out death amid her battlebeasts. That was justice.

The Commander sealed the faceplate of her helmet. Invulnerability was always a good idea when one went into enemy territory, and the whole galaxy was now enemy territory. She would teleport to Freedomland and see who she might assassinate.

A message light blinked in the corner of the navigation display.

The Commander frowned at the transmission signal, disbelieving. The Death Architect had enabled ship-to-ship messages, but there were no more Torth left. Were there? The nearest vessel, that mining station, was now full of brainwashed converts who obeyed the Conqueror.

Might this message be a relay from him? Some last cruel jab?

Or…

The Death Architect had relied on the Necrocosm to direct her loyalists. Now that that was wiped out…

Might this message come all the way from the Araya Moon Belt?

The Commander opened her faceplate and activated the message to play it.

It coalesced in a holographic projection, bright against the blackness of space. A womanly figure took shape. To the Commander, any visage so fresh-faced might as well belong to a child, although this person was physically mature. Her braided red hair was recognizable.

It was the silly human with a false leg, the one whom the Giant was emotionally bonded to.

As the Commander watched, the holograph of the one-legged lover suffered a gruesome attack. Something sliced through her neck. Her head came off.

The blood was crudely animated, since it was just a graphical simulation wrought by a single imagination, rather than a detailed transference powered by many hundreds of collective minds.

Another crude holograph took shape. The Giant. The simulated version of him looked overwrought and horrified.

The holographs faded away.

That was the entirety of the message.

The Commander replayed it. Torth used crude glyphs in the absence of a telepathic connection, but this was far more sophisticated. It was like pure imagination transformed into a visual representation. Someone with impressive technological skill had concocted it.

She guessed the Death Architect must have sent this message to every ship, shuttle, and station within her technological purview.

But why?

The Commander compressed her thin lips and forced herself to think.

Clearly, the Death Architect had been working on some grand scheme before her nemesis obliterated the Necrocosm. She had kept her loyalists busy with all kinds of mysterious tasks. They had worked in factories for gravitational carpeting. They had drilled wells into neutron stars in order to extract astronomically dangerous degenerate matter.

In fact, the bombings and other attacks upon enemy troops had almost seemed like a sideshow.

I will destroy the enemies, the Death Architect had promised.

She had radiated confidence.

Was she still confident of victory even now, entombed on her asteroid? Was the Death Architect capable of destroying the Conqueror and reconstituting the actual Megacosm? Was that possible?

The Commander found herself yearning. She kept trying to ascend, to learn more, but the galaxy was lonely and silent.

Perhaps the Death Architect wanted to enrage the Giant, as she had done before, to make him to go charging blindly into a trap? Could he get sucked into an artificially-created black hole? Was that what the Death Architect had been constructing?

The Commander had never studied astrophysics. She wasn’t sure if anything could defeat the seemingly invincible Giant. But the Death Architect had outsmarted him before.

It seemed possible.

Other isolated survivors like herself would receive this message. But how many of them could teleport?

And how many would dare to teleport directly into the Giant’s stronghold and risk attacking his most beloved companion? Especially since the Conqueror must be monitoring Torth equipment, using his minions to watch and listen. He would certainly warn the Giant.

The Commander knew that she was very likely the only person willing and capable of carrying out this mission. It might get her killed—but it might restore the Torth Empire to its glorious heights.

She was the Majority.

She held a quick vote and verified that yes, she was critical to restoring civilization. She mattered.

She represented All.

She adjusted her scimitar, put herself into a clairvoyant trance, and zoomed to Reject-20, the planet of Freedomland. It might take a while to locate the one-legged human. The Commander might need to stalk her prey, ghosting repeatedly until she found the human alone and apart from her ultra powerful protector.

But the Commander was old enough to hunt with patience.

She was no longer just the disgraced Commander. She was also the Majority. She (We) had a lot to live up to.

She (We) dared not fail the Torth Empire again. Not ever again.