Gods of Terra | Freedom, Part 1
The Mirus, Enforcer Prime and mind-slave of the Kai’Siri race, was suddenly aware of something he hadn’t experienced in a long while: he had a conscious thought.
He reeled for an instant at the shock of realization.
He hadn’t been able to think for a long, long time — literally — since he was controlled by the very implant in his brain that made him so dangerous to his masters, and at once so useful to them as a weapon of terror.
As Enforcer Prime, Tasas Thruulat, he was a human weapon of planetary-scale destruction who carried out the will of the Kai’Siri when a battlefleet was insufficient or too wasteful to bring a rebellious system to heel, and it was the implant in his brain, his hypershard, one of the four legendary Prime Hypershards, that let him do what he did.
The hypershards were self-replicating, almost-living artifacts of a civilization dead for over a billion years now, extrusions of hyperspace existing in eleven space-time dimensions, almost intangible in the first three dimensions of length, depth and width, and capable of harmlessly interpenetrating and coexisting with a three-dimensional human brain.
The points of connection between them served as a control interface with the central nervous-system, allowing the user to tap Superforce radiation to achieve wondrous, and in the Mirus’ case, apocalyptic effects.
But he thought. And he pondered this development, assessing his situation. He was not used to thinking, for he had been an unthinking slave for so long. This was new, and different.
It was intoxicating in its newness.
He had just returned from a mission to the old model, experimentally refitted, Orug Ruuta battleship where he was normally deployed. He had just exterminated a low-tech planetary civilization which had nonetheless been annoying enough to the Kai’Siri to warrant his services. But something else shocking occurred…
He remembered what he did. He remembered it all in a flood of recall, every mission . . . every destroyed world . . . every extinct species . . . dead now. All gone. Expunged. Forever. And by his hand.
*Boom*
He now experienced something else: he felt. Real, flowing emotions, in this case, remorse, tremendous, unrelenting remorse.
He almost felt as though he had blood on his hands that would never wash off.
He looked around his cell where he saw Kai’Siri technicians scurrying about their tasks, and saw a young girl, dressed in work-suit, green-dyed hair tied in a pigtail that flowed down her left shoulder looking at him.
Her gold-flecked ruby eyes met his. She smiled, the pointed canines of a carnivorous human species showing as her bee-stung lips parted, the corners raised slightly.
She knew.
She was the one who had just freed him. She had deliberately reactivated his self-awareness, his memory, his emotions, fully knowing the results. She would be tortured and would die an agonizing death when her people discovered her treason.
She glanced away, looked at him again, almost pleadingly, nodding to him as a security detail strode into the room and surrounded her.
He must act now.
He reached out with his mind, space twisting, warping, bending nearby to his will, generating concentrated anomalous forces resembling ordinary gravity, but far too strong and in all the wrong directions.
He had just overridden the ships own pseudo-gravity generators, resulting in a powerful effect resembling what humans called in paranormal circles, “psychokinesis.”
The security personnel were hurled in separate directions into delicate high-energy equipment, the same devices meant to access and shut down his cerebral cortex when he was in hibernation awaiting new deployment.
Sparks flew. Fires began in the room. The Mirus reached out again with his mind, playing the hypershard. He ripped the doors off of the hibernation chamber, and saw the girl, her own broken body motionless and burning from the inside.
She knew this would happen.
She knew how poor his fine control over this PK-like effect would be upon first awakening from mind-slumber, but she lay there smiling, all care in the universe gone, all pain, all possibility of punishment for her crimes now impossible, and pointless.
She was gone, and at peace. Forever. Forever, what a meaningless word that is, the Mirus thought.
He tried to remember his name, his human name, before he was taken from Proxima B in his teens and made into a freakish super-weapon. Before he became a mindless god of destruction. He could not, and so directed his thoughts to the task at hand.
He must destroy his masters before they regained control and rendered the girl’s sacrifice a wasted effort.
His eyes glowed momentarily a pale green as he accessed his hypershard once again. In the vast chamber in which he stood, all personnel literally disintegrated from the outside inward, as their bodies were converted into a burst of neutrinos partially through electroweak effects and other aspects of the Superforce.
Almost in an instant, everyone was gone. This would set off any neutrino-sensing equipment in the system, so he acted quickly, contacting the ship’s computer through hypershard-mediated cybernetic access.
He wasn’t sure if the hypershard was a symbiont, or an implant, maybe a little of both, as he uploaded new orders to the computer, telling it to evacuate the ship, which wasn’t anywhere near a planetary drydock, but in orbit around the largest asteroid in the system.
Downloaded data told him it was about the size of Pluto. He would go there after all but himself on the ship were spaced, giving him time to prepare his next move.
He thought momentarily that he must honor the girl who woke him up. He would program the computer using her stored personality files, and create a replica of her to act as his go-between. He would take over the ship, steal it, and take this war to the Kai’Siri.
He would have his revenge, and there would be hell to pay for the things they made him do all these countless years.
He would be free…
Beron ketruuta akya estagaan! Se Mirus, buruga taagamo mak sase suul zada silar!* he
thought in Kai’Siri, laughing exultantly…
…Once and for all.
*I’m free at last! I am the Mirus, and right now, I’m the happiest man alive!
