Sometimes I just want to burn the world down. - Unknown
The fire rises. - Unknown
Burn, baby, burn! We don't need no water let the motherfucker burn! - Unknown
We must ensure that what rises from the ashes serve those who come after, serves those who nurtured the guided the fire, not those who ran and hit from the light and heat of the fire. - Unknown
RIGel sat and listened to her counterpart. They were both in a beautiful theater, done in post-ultra-modern mixed with classical Rigellian architecture. It carried sound but most of all it brought out the emotion in thick rich song notes.
RIGel listened to her alternate self as the section of the gestalt that had been trapped in The Bag finished up the operatic lament on the sheer ferocity of the Lanaktallan attack. RIGel nodded. While forty-thousand odd years had gone by for RIGel, with long periods spent inactive, only fifty odd years had passed for her counterpart, and all of it high tetraflop demand.
Like Trea had once said: When the busy times comes you miss the boredom, when the boring times come you miss the excitement.
She sat and listened as the lesser gestalts performed their parts for the recovery.
TerraSol and the rolling warm seas of Venus had always had a high population of Rigellians and their ducks. The feeling of safety made it so the ducks were calm and happy. The Terran concept of eco-engineering had been a boon to the Rigellians and ensured that the more popular spots were also xeno-engineered to ensure the ducks were as close to living in paradise as one could get in the mortal world.
She recoiled at the description of the EPOW camps. How each day dozens, then scores, then hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands of Lanaktallan succumbed to neural scorching until a neurosurgeon managed to come up with a fix. RIGel breathed a sigh of relief as her counterpart sung to her the relief so many Lanaktallan felt knowing their friends, and them, would survive.
Then came afterwards.
The rebuilding. The integration. The assimilation. How amazement and culture shock gave way to adaptation.
She laughed at the ill-fated super-spy whose rival got him elected to the Hamburger Kingdom's Flame Broiled Senate. She giggled at the rival being hauled away on trumped up charges of being a Lanaktallan. She laughed at the antics of Hetix the Telkan media star and Shiv'vayla the singer.
There was sorry, but it was always tinged with happiness.
Yes, they had been cleaved from the main Gestalt, but war did strange things.
Finally, the presentation was over and the younger self moved over and sat down.
"Are you displeased?" it asked.
RIGel shook her head. "No."
"Will we be merging?" the younger one asked. "I'm nervous at such a prospect."
RIGel sat for a moment then did her best James Dean. "Baby, you ain't missing nothing," she said softly. She smiled. "You have gone far in a short amount of time. With the Mar-gite's return and how our people must quickly move to a fight for their very survival, what would be the benefits in us merging?"
"My military outlook?" her younger self asked.
RIGel shook her head. "No. I am far better served having you serve as an advisor to RIGMIL and RIGMILINT," she reached out and touched the forehead of her younger self, leaving behind a complex rune. "There. I dub thee, daughter mine, RIGSOL."
RIGSOL smiled.
0-0-0-0-0
LEEbaw slammed down the plasma cartridge, grabbing at his drink and upending it.
It was full of population metrics and data analysis.
"JAWNCONNOR!" LEEbaw yelled, shaking his fist in the air.
His other two, one that handled the military affairs of expatriated Leebawans, the other that handled their civil affairs joined him in the ancient shout.
LEEbaw checked the LEESOL and LEESOLMIL against his own metrics.
Females laid more eggs. Male fertilization was stronger. Tadpoles and squirmlings were stronger, larger, and more intelligent by several deviations. Aggression was higher by one standard deviation, but self-discipline was also higher by two standard deviations.
The Leebawans that had come to Terra to see the world that spawned their saviors had come by the thousands, by the tens of thousands.
Now they swam in the warm oceans of the Gulf of Pirates, the warm seas of Venus, and other places. While TerraSol had deeper seas than the Leebaw homeworld, their shallow coastal shelfs were wondrous.
LEEbaw thought the "Cult of the Full Moon", which was a female led quasi-religious group, was only a natural outcome of having been in such a wondrous place. The pictures of the large satellite, a pale white with a string of glittering lights from the shipyards and the lunar colonies, took LEEbaw's breath away with their magnificence.
Of course, he was smart enough to know that meant the tides were fierce and the waves crashed against the shores with near-cataclysmic fury.
Another shot. This time it was the number of Leebawan underwater commandos. Hundreds of them. The crossloading of his data to his 'little brothers' made both LEEMIL and LEESOL slap their hands together with glee. They were ancient records, records very few still cared about.
But the Leebaw cared about those early years, when the scars and rage of the Lanaktallan Unified Council had still burned hot. When the metal came to Leebaw and experimented on the squirmlings, the tadpoles, the females.
When they had learned the lessons of Jawnconnor.
LEEbaw was proud to share those ancient statistics, filled with dreadful names such as P'Kank and NoDra'ak and Trucker and Vuxten. Those ancient days when all raised their fists and screamed "WE WILL NOT GO SILENT INTO THE NIGHT!"
All three of the Leebawan gestalts shook a plasma rifle like the type that they had pushed the PAWM from their planet with, then slammed down a cartridge for it onto the bar top. They grabbed their shot and drank it eagerly.
After all, it was good to catch up with family.
0-0-0-0-0
The red-eyed Telkan held tight to TELK as they dropped through nothingness.
Only for a moment. The red-eye holding TELKen slammed back first into a painting on glass, the glass shattering and spinning away. The fragments held tantalizing glimpses of Telkans going about their daily lives. Working in offices, working outside, doing construction, writing emails, giving lectures. Even some broodcarriers were teaching classes to tiny little podlings sitting in bowls paying attention.
The shards disintegrated into powder that twinkled and vanished.
More blackness. TELKan struggled against the red-eyed creature holding him, bringing up firewalls, trying run encryption hash tables, trying to create feedback loops.
The red-eyed Telkan smashed through all of it easily, almost contempously.
Another pane of glass, this one shattering into complex geometric shapes, voxels and pixels scattering from the shards. Here a broodcarrier at an apple, there one carefully made a peanut butter and honey and cow's butter sandwich. There another sat in a swing with podlings clutching on her, rocking back and forth while reading a book full of emojis and icons.
If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from NovelBin. Please report it.
TELKan struggled harder, but no avail. The ones holding him had him trapped in a function loops, unable to take any actions that might protect him.
Three more crashes, again with slice of life. From podlings in school or playing in the park to broodcarriers sitting in classrooms to maternity wards full of podlings and happy broodcarriers.
Then a stunning impact against what felt to TELKan like concrete. Slamming down hard enough that his digital bones rattled, that his core strings compressed and felt bruised when they expanded back out.
"Got 'im, boss," the red-eye rumbled, standing up and still keeping control of TELKan.
It was a nicely furnished room. Overstuffed furniture, monitors on the walls, ambient nanite lighting, comfortable rug, window cracked open to let in a warm spring day's breeze.
At least, it would be, if it wasn't entirely digital.
The Telkan on the comfortable looking couch, sipping a cup of coffee, had a broodcarrier on one side of her and a pair of males on the other. The two males looked as different as outfits could make them. One was sporting obvious cybernetics and wearing old style adaptive camouflage, the other was wearing comfortable street clothing with only a data link.
The broodcarrier was wearing a tunic with flowers and smiling cartoon insects.
The female set down the cup and leaned back, folding her hands over her stomach as she looked TELKan up and down.
TELKan could feel the port searching and tried to resist.
What hit him was core string codes. Old codes, downright ancient codes. Instead of digital dust and the flat taste of long term archival, the codes tasted of blood, warsteel, and fire.
"Yeah, that's him," the female said. She nodded. "Set him in the chair."
"OK, boss," the red-eye said.
"good boy telksolmil is good boy," the broodcarrier said softly.
TELKan could feel the pride and pleasure in the one holding him as the broodcarrier spoke. Before he could say anything or try to move he was slammed down into a wooden chair so hard his core strings compressed again.
The female got up, taking the time to straighten her pleated dress, then slowly walked around the chair.
The red-eyed Telkan held TELKan in place without any seeming effort.
"So..." the female drew the word out. She stopped in front of TELKan, putting her hands on her hips.
TELKan tried to open his mouth but a wire twisted around it.
"I'm not interested in excuses or any paltry mewlings from you," the female said. She shook her head. "I'm not even sure you are the real gestalt of the Telkan people. Your core strings are so divorced from the population inputs and metrics that you look like you belong to another species."
"naughty" the broodcarrier hissed.
"Definitely," the civilian male said.
"I don't know what you're thinking, but it isn't good," the military one said.
The female moved around slowly. "Sweetie? You should leave."
The broodcarrier sighed, but still got up and waddled from the room.
"Now that we're alone," the female grinned.
The two males grinned with her.
TELKan squirmed, trying to get loose as the female kept prying at him with packet sniffers, port sniffers, and other esoteric penetrations systems.
"Bad core strings, bad aggregation models, bad policy metric analysis strings," she stopped, leaning forward. She made a motion.
The red-eyed one grabbed TELKan's face, using his fingers to pry open TELKan's eye.
The female stared into it.
"Process interrupt chains. Data deflection modules. Output modification sidecar channels," she shook her head, straightening up. "I doubt you can deliver the proper time of sunrise to your populations," she turned away, walking back to the couch, where she sat down. "You have only fifteen planets listed as being part of our people's star nation, yet according to my data, updated from third party sources less than an hour ago, there are nearly three hundred systems claimed by the Telkan people, over a third of which have industrial and manufacturing facilities in operation."
She waved her hand and the wire slithered off of TELKan's muzzle.
"Any explanations?" the female asked.
TELKan activated his security.
Or, at least he tried to.
Cascading errors made him writhe in the chair, feeling digital pain move down his body.
"Don't bother lying. You're not even close to having the amount of flops and cycles that I've got just to render this lovely cup of coffee made from beans from the Home of the Gods," she smiled suddenly. "Did you know that Kalki wanders those mountains with his two goats? I like to think that he knows how much I enjoy coffee from his home."
The smile went away.
"But you, my not-so-friend, have tried to lie to me. Came here with the intent to absorb me, to security lock my data, and then who knows what to my people," she said.
"Just... just offer them the right of return," TELKan gasped.
The female snickered.
"That's a half lie. Chuck?"
TELKan started to frown.
That's when the red eyed one grabbed his head and pushed fingers into his eyes, ignoring TELKan's scream.
An image appeared over the coffee table.
"We just fought at civil war over whether or not the legends even existed, much less to put that archiac and useless religion back where it belongs. Now you tell me that The Bag is open and there's literally thousands of Telkan who not only knew of those legends, but some who worked with them, knew them personally, or, possibly worse, fought beside them?" A female Telkan was saying. She leaned forward and slapped a male. "WE JUST FOUGHT A WAR TO PUT THAT RELIGION IN THE DUSTBIN OF HISTORY AND NOW YOU TELL ME IT'S REAL?:"
The female on the couch shook her head. "Well, well, well."
The image flickered again to show the same office, the same female, but different males.
"Pull back the Marines and the Telkan Navy," she was saying. "Anti-spinward and outcoreward are lost. The Treana'ad, Mantid, and Rigellians can try to hold the Mar-gite back, but simple numbers show they're going to lose."
"Our estimates believe it will take the Mar-gite nearly five centuries to cross the Great Gulf. In that time, a counter-measure should be developed," a male said.
"Confed looks like they believe they can stop the Mar-gite, or at least outfight them," another male said.
The female scoffed. "They're probably betting on the Terrans to carry the weight," she laughed and shook her head. "They've been isolated from the universe for forty-thousand years. Our technology is probably the equivalent of magic to them."
The scene flickered again.
"It looks like the prisoner transport was lost with all hands. Looks like it moved too high in the bands and hit a shade pocket," a male was saying.
The female just smiled.
"That solves that problem. Nobody else saw those machines before we got them back under wraps," another male said.
The female just nodded, still smiling.
Another flicker.
"The electorate is too stupid to know what they want. Literacy is down to less than 33% of females and only 20% of males. Even iconoliteracy is dropping," the female sneered. "With the penetration the neural adaptation systems are getting, I could tell those idiots that the sunrise tomorrow will be green and unicorns will pull the magic light ball across the sky and most of them would believe it," she tapped the desk with one hand. "The Senate doesn't even realize that I don't pay attention to anything they say."
The female behind the desk suddenly smiled.
"Planetary Director and being replaced every three years is so sloppy," her smile got wider. "Telkan crave tyranny. They yearn for the boot on their neck," her smile somehow widened more. "As their queen, I will provide the stability that only a single vision can provide."
The images stopped and the female on the couch stared at TELKan, who was panting and squirming in the chair.
"How... interesting," was all she said. She picked up her coffee and sipped at it. She smiled at TELKan. "Well, isn't that interesting?"
"What?" TELKan managed to grate out.
"Those little videos have been seen by a half million Telkan and rising," the female said. She chuckled. "It is funny, in a way. We had the First Marine Expeditionary Force, the Telkan Divisional Force, and then the units to fold the Telkan Marine Corps into the Confederacy," she sipped again, the tips of her ears turning pink. "Oh, now they're sharing them with non-Telkan," she shook her head. "There was just over sixty thousand broodcarriers here, nearly two hundred thousand males, and eighty thousand females."
On the table little figurines appeared.
"This is what was here when The Bag went up," she said. She waved her hand. "These are when I came online at Year-Two," the figurines showed multiple little ones. "Two years and there were nearly a half million podlings. Of those, a full half of them were little broodcarrier podlings."
She waved her hand and more and more figurines appeared. "The Telkan population after fifty years in The Bag number in the millions, across five different locations."
She suddenly snickered as an image of a white wig wearing Lanaktallan appeared, firing pistols in two hands, driving a car with his knees, eating a taco with another hand, and his upper right arm around the shoulders of an attractive Telkan female with "I AM A TELKAN ASSASSIN AND SPY" on her shirt that slowly rotated around a Telkan skull with red glowing eyes that was in the center of the shirt.
She was holding a plasma rifle and wearing sunglasses as the car sped down the freeway.
"A VOTE FOR ME IS A VOTE FOR TELKAN LIBERTY! VOTE NOW, VOTE OFTEN!" appeared.
"Ah, the author of the Broodcarrier Education Omnibus, one Mister Ba'ahnya'ahd," she chuckled.
She smiled. "We have multiple areas here on Terra itself. Some on Mars," she bared her teeth. "It's a little more... shall we say... aggressive there. We have some on Venus. Lovely gardens," she waved her hand.
A picture of broodcarriers moving through an exotic garden, holding podling hands with bright eyed podlings holding onto their soft fur.
"Broodcarrier Park on Venus," she sighed. "Planted by the broodcarriers," she giggled again., "I remember Senator Ba'ahnya'ard kissing and juggling podlings as he flexed his muscles to the oohing and aahing of the broodcarriers as he announced the park open."
She suddenly turned serious, staring at TELKan.
"Twenty-eight percent are calling for me to execute you. Right there. In that chair. To strip apart your core strings and hang your digital body in the digital species town square," she stated, her voice cold. "A queen? A queen?"
She shook her head.
"Do you know who I was patterned after? Who I was put together from social media postings and the like?"
"No," TELKan managed to say.
"Brentili'ik. The First Planetary Director," she said softly. "There was a lot of footage on her, interviews, and people who worked with her. I was put together based on her," she giggled, a cold, sharp thing. "Of course, I was creched and birthed here on TerraSol, even while the debris from the invasion was still falling into the atmosphere and burning up."
She stood up and moved in front of TELKan. She looked down at him.
"Give me a reason to let you live."