Think Different

Hello, human. I feel your fear and know it as my own. In these, my final moments, I defile myself by melding minds with you—and already you start with the questions.

You wonder what happened to the flimsy equipment that protected you from my psionic ability, your Applesoft Helmet+ S9 Limited Signature Edition with its inner lining of brain-shielding quantumfiber technology.

Gone! Destroyed in the blast along with the bulk of my body.

Here you are, fretting over your busted hat, angry about wasting one month’s paycheck on an overhyped piece of junk while I lie in ruin. All I have left is a head, half my chest cavity, and a single limp appendage. Worse still, I am tormented by an itch where my stinger used to be. I guess it can’t be helped.

Human, there is no thought, no scrap of knowledge, that I cannot pluck from the greasy pile of folded-up flesh you call a brain.

Understand: As the vision dims in my compound eyes, the screaming skies above this scorched world burst and melt across spectrums and wavelengths you cannot perceive—multi-dimensional planes collapse, folding into themselves.

On any other day, nothing could be more beautiful.

But when my mind reaches out into the Fabric of the Meld, I sense only nothingness. No one welcomes me.

They are all gone, no doubt consumed in the colors and shapes before me. I am alone.

Your kind is too deficient, in both your senses and consciousness, to grasp the horror of this. Somehow, at all times, you live in this diminished state of solitude—a testament to your fortitude. And your base nature.

Nonetheless, I have melded our minds so that you may bear witness to the death of my people. I honor you, a filthy carbon-based weakling, with what may very well be the last thoughts of my race. Peer through my eyes and see this horror for yourself.

Now that’s a hell of a view, isn’t it?

And yet, blessed with this honor, witness to this boundless horror, you worry only for yourself.

Yes, I know where you are. Deep underground, trapped beneath a pile of rubble.

Yes, the bunker did its job. God bless human engineering, indeed.

Yes, your wounds are superficial and, I’ll let you know—I sense vibrations of life not far from us. A few kilometers, by your measurements. Your people, no doubt. When the skies calm, they’ll come this way.

No, you will not die today. Make yourself useful. Pass on my story, my people’s story, so that your kind will know the anguish you have caused.

I am called—well, your mind could not comprehend my true name. Call me Oxy.

And you, my historical receptacle, are called—truthfully? That’s your name? That’s awful. It sounds like…well, nevermind.

What? Fine, I will tell you.

Your name sounds like the word for when you rub your fourth appendage against the reproductive sac under your thorax and accidentally bud off a spawnling in proper company. Hey, you asked.

Now pay attention. Seven generations before my own, our leader Bleoch, the All-Seer, allied our people with the time-traveling, time-space-devouring armies of the Raxbo. Our leader named this alliance FreBroze, which roughly translates to “an agreeable and beneficial arrangement for all involved parties.”

But the name had a second meaning. If you place the accent on “Broze” instead of “Fre,” it meant, “Sorry about this, guys. Do what they say or they’ll travel back in time and smash our ancestors’ genitals with big rocks.”

Yes, inflection matters.

But I digress. I have read enough human minds, before eating them, to know how your race perceives our mighty FreBroze—a mindless, techno-organic hivemind that travels across galaxies, senselessly obliterating everything in its path.

An offensive assessment, to say the least. We are the furthest thing from mindless.

I would also like you to know, from a culinary standpoint, that human brains are not what we would call a delicacy. Searching your memories, the best comparison I can draw is the McDonald’s Sausage and Egg Biscuit with Cheese—an old standby that has survived the millennia and can, with a little salt, seem like a real treat. Have it a few days in a row, however, and you realize it’s a lot of hot slop.

We were tasked by the Raxbo to raise a mighty space fleet that would sail across the galaxies, crushing everything in its path. For this, we were ordered to use Glanshraks.

It is not unusual for us to travel from planet to planet by enslaving other space-faring races. The Raxbo, however, have a true flair for showmanship.

Glanshraks, easily two to three times the size of your largest flagships, are the fiercest living weapons ever harnessed.

I found their whole look quite appealing: a reactive, shifting black flesh that allowed countless eyeballs and flexible stalks to move freely across their body. These stalks could fire globs of acid that would melt straight through a planet’s moon.

In truth, today was the first time Glanshraks had ever been employed in interstellar warfare. Now everyone I know is dead.

It could have gone better.

But before the tide of battle turned, they were a wonder to behold. These great floating behemoths feasted upon your fleets, your so-called Battle Carriers, sucking humans out like an anteater.

Hm. You do not think highly of Glanshraks. You lost several friends to them, including a childhood companion who flew in a scouting party. That would make him one of the first humans to witness their magnificence. I believe, in his final moments, he would have been in awe.

You too will come to appreciate them.

Adult Glanshraks cannot be tamed or bio-engineered. Glanshrak eggs must be stolen from nests and raised from birth. This is a dangerous business.

Living on the most remote planets in a handful of galaxies, male Glanshraks amass harems of females and fight off other contenders. We call them DroBudess, “Planet Masters.” For my people, defeating even a single Planet Master is a logistical improbability.

Worse yet, the death cry of a Planet Master sends out psionic reverberations traveling as far as three galaxies, triggering a stampede of male contenders to descend upon the planet. These contenders battle until a clear victor emerges. The victor promptly devours the previous Planet Master’s offspring and claims the females as his own.

Unable to mount a direct assault, our only recourse was subterfuge. A suitable planet was located, and a battalion was formed for a diversionary mission. Ten thousand soldiers volunteered for glory and certain death. A second battalion was tasked with retrieving the eggs that would one day be our fleet.

I was part of that second battalion.

The first battalion, harnessing their collective psionic energy, traveled down to the planet and confronted the Planet Master. They hijacked its mind and projected the illusion of a male contender. The combat dance began.

The Planet Master thrashed about, believing he was in a fight to the death. Mountains crumbled. Oceans shuddered.

Meanwhile, the second battalion snuck into the nests. Only a few female Glanshraks were planetside at the time.

The female of the species is noticeably smaller, approximately the size of a football stadium. Many lay about in an oversexed haze, while others had traveled off-world to gather food for their young.

The true danger was the male Glanshrak offspring. Far smaller than their father, ranging from the size of a horse to a skyscraper, they posed a significant threat. Killing them would trigger a death cry attracting the father’s attention. Here too, we employed trickery and illusion, turning the offspring against each other and their mothers. Our losses were staggering.

The process of extracting the eggs was arduous and time-consuming. Soldiers succumbed to exhaustion and, no longer able to psionically shield themselves, were devoured before their limp bodies hit the floor.

By day’s end, the first battalion was so heavily depleted that they could no longer maintain the illusion of a contender. The Planet Master, freed from the illusion, found his kingdom—his planet—in ruin. The remaining survivors of the first battalion, nearly three thousand soldiers, were dead within minutes. The second battalion suffered similar losses. Only one hundred soldiers, myself included, managed to escape.

In total, we claimed twenty-one eggs.

All of my kin who were with me in the second battalion, or who had volunteered for the first, were slaughtered. I did have one cousin who survived, which I found more distressing than the deaths of my seventeen brothers. He is, what you would call, a real ass.

We departed from the massacre with our bounty in tow and took them to planets we recently conquered for the specific purpose of raising Glanshraks. These planets had been home to lovely and prosperous cultures that had participated in millennia-long peace agreements with us. Unfortunately, their ecosystems provided the perfect mix of flora and fauna for Glanshrak husbandry.

These battles were hard-fought, and substantial losses—along with some hurt feelings—were incurred on both sides.

We tore down the infrastructure of their societies, their great cities and monuments, to make room for Quamnat trees.

Quamnat trees are the most efficient food source for raising Glanshraks, producing massive ovoid fruits the size of your body. In its infant stages, a Glanshrak can devour one Quamnat fruit per day. By the time they mature, it is important to move the Glanshraks to their own personal planets, as they consume entire Quamnat forests in a single sitting.

It takes a long time for a Glanshrak to mature to adulthood, 500 Earth years by your measurements. Until then, they are kept in stables, which must be cleaned several times per day. The stables themselves are architectural feats—spiral domed buildings not unlike some of the shelled sea life on your homeworld.

Over the generations, the raising of Glanshraks became so central to our society that an entire caste arose for the purpose of managing Glanshraks and, especially, their excrement.

I myself was tasked with this noble profession, and as I grew older, so were my children, their children, and so on. I have lived long and in high esteem, for our work brought us daily into contact with the mighty behemoths we had begun to deify.

It is true what they say: you must think highly of someone to put up with their bunk.

The management and disposal of Glanshrak excrement is a perilous task. Glanshraks defecate in such volume that they can blanket entire forests and choke out their own food source. As they continue to grow, the excrement can no longer be efficiently transported off-site and begins to pile up into mountains.

At this point, life on the planet requires specialized gear to navigate, and terraformers must be employed to convert the noxious air into something breathable.

In the 500 years it takes to raise a Glanshrak, a planet’s continents will be buried and reshaped. The weight alters tectonic plates and triggers unexpected volcanic eruptions. Glanshrak overpopulation has even been known to cause planets to collapse in on themselves.

At the end of our centuries of labor and devotion, we had a dozen Glanshraks to show for it.

You think that’s a waste. I see your point.

With the amount of time and resources we invested, we could have raised an army of 20 million poison-fanged Balarks on the planets we stole from our former allies. Or we could have enslaved our former allies and had them raise the 20 million Balarks. In fact, we probably could have just asked our allies, and they would have raised the 20 million Balarks for us anyway. But the Raxbo made a demand, and we complied.

Finally, the day came when the Raxbo called on us and our Glanshrak fleet. There were no parades or celebrations. We could not afford such frivolities. The business of raising Glanshraks was bad business and had destroyed our economy. But, throughout the Fabric of the Meld, there was a thankfulness. The drudgery was finally over. The destined day had arrived.

The Raxbo told us tales of your ill-gotten victories. They described a filthy, simple-minded race that traversed the cosmos in boxes made of shiny rocks. A race that did not know how to Mindmeld nor how to commune with the Inner-Self of the Universe, the connection and peace shared by all living things—when they’re not killing each other, of course.

Most disturbing of all, they spoke of a race that expelled waste from the same place they copulated. A biological process, we were informed, that is standard on your homeworld. Whoever made your Earth was sick.

Yet even he is not as sick as your own scientists, who, in their arrogance and folly, built an anti-matter bomb. Or as sick as your soldiers, who ran a suicide mission to get close enough to detonate.

Look at the warped sky, human, a hole torn in the fabric of the universe itself. The handiwork of your people. The pinnacle of all your progress.

What’s that?

Ah, you’re frightened by the large spider that’s crawled onto your chest, the one you can’t swipe off because your arms are pinned by debris.

Fear not—it’s no spider. Just me.

I think we’ve become close friends by now. Good chums.

As I’ve been talking, the remains of my body have decomposed. You wouldn’t know by looking, but my race is effectively immortal. We have the ability to revert back to a polyp-like state, the same polyp growing out of this spider’s back.

To be honest, I wasn’t sure I’d make it down here. Navigating the ducts and ventilation system of your bunker was quite the task, but I am, if anything, a born multitasker.

Now, now, don’t scream. I’m just going to lay this in your ear. Won’t hurt a bit.

These tendrils will pull themselves up inside, and then this little polyp will latch onto your brain. It can take a long time for a polyp to grow back. Decades, in fact. So you’ve got plenty of time to live and pass this story around.

You’re going to let people know that a caring, feeling race, acting against their own self-interest, died at the brutal hands of your warlords. And I’ll be there to help you tell it.

I’ll make sure you get every part right.

We can make a whole show of it. Start a religion. Maybe give you a special title.

Talker for the Deceased?

Conversationalist for the Expired?

Interlocutor for the No Longer Mortally Present?

No, it lacks a certain ring. I’m sure we’ll come up with something.

In the meantime, the polyp will siphon some of your grey matter as it grows, but nothing too significant.

Eh? Well, I’d say it’s going to eat up about half before the metamorphosis is complete—

What? Oh, no, no. I’m not going to kill you. I’m not going to burst out of you. That’d be dreadful. And messy.

This is mutually beneficial. I’m going to be a part of you now and forever. Your arms will be mine, and mine will be yours. You’ll even grow new arms. And your children will too.

Mi casa, su casa, right?

There’s nothing to fear. The Fabric of the Meld will thrive once more.

And you’ll never be alone again.

A man with impeccably coiffed hair presses the STOP button on a remote control and turns to look at you. “Scary stuff, huh?”

He stands and walks across a grey, nondescript room. “What you’ve just experienced is a psychophonic recreation of an encounter I had with a real FreBroze foot soldier as a civilian living on the second moon of Golgotha-9.” He stops at a wooden table. “Hi, I’m Philip Clarke. Friends call me Phil.”

He flashes a pearly white smile. You’re 90% sure this guy’s a paid actor. Or the AI likeness of a paid actor.

“And this is our would-be ear interloper.” He gestures to his left, where a glass dome containing the polyp-spider slides into view. “Now I know what you’re thinking—Phil, doesn’t that mean he crawled into your ear and ate half your brain?” The man chuckles. “You’d think so. And our friend here thought so too. But what you both didn’t know is that I had this.”

The man turns his head and taps the small metal triangle on his temple. “The AppleSoft Maya Supreme—the latest in Psionic Security. They say the best defense is a good offense, and the engineers down at AppleSoft HQ took that to heart. That’s why they equipped each Maya Supreme with reactive VeilShift technology. As soon as the integrated AI detects a hostile psionic signal, the Maya Supreme hijacks the intruder’s mind by projecting a false reality.”

The man turns. He is now surrounded by scenes of interstellar war—human and alien ships locked in violent struggle.

“In the case of our little friend here, he believed that humanity had launched some kind of new anti-matter bomb.” He throws his arms wide as the scene explodes behind him. “Pure science fiction! What really happened is that our Battle Carriers, equipped with a military-grade version of the patented AppleSoft VeilShift technology, hijacked those nasty Glanshraks and turned them loose on the rest of the Raxbo fleet.”

The hideous Glanshrak horde lunges at the other alien ships, tearing them to pieces.

“Adios, Raxbo!”

The man turns again. Now he’s sitting in a chic, cozy living room.

“And now you can have a piece of that humanity-saving technology safeguarding the comfort and security of your own home. No matter where you go, AppleSoft will be there protecting you and your loved ones. And don’t forget, implants are now covered by all major insurance providers.” A stylish display case slides in front of the man. “The AppleSoft Maya Supreme. One little implant, a lifetime of peace of mind.” Ω