Descend- Seeing Stars, Sean Oswald [best e books to read .txt] 📗

and the thorn they had been in the side of the Forlorn for so many millennia, that this attack warranted the entire focus of the Forlorn.

Each armada was commanded by one of the Over Minds of the Forlorn. Well, the seven surviving Over Minds that was. Caj Decius had been ended in the attack against one of the dreaded leviathans.

      Information was sketchy but none of his fleet had made contact since then. Further, his presence was gone from their connected consciousness. So now there were only seven Over Minds. It would be more than enough to do for the last of their enemies. After this it would only be lesser races who needed to be mopped up.

      As one the Over Minds gave the order to advance, slowly. They had time. They were inevitable but moving. Some one million ships ranging from smaller frigates to large battleships and even larger carriers full of ground troops, bombers, and small fighters. They were so many that they blotted out the stars behind them.

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      The A’snkarnt high council scurried around the surface of a planet without a name, at least one without meaning. It was their home world, but they had lost all sentimentality long ago. To Coreframe it was only known as Planet 1. No other designation was needed.

      The council had tried pestering him with requests for help, but he had grown. The process was not complete. To a mortal being that alone would have been frustrating. How, was it that a child, merely an infant with an undeveloped mind could resist Coreframe, the universe’s greatest mind for so long.

It had been nearly seven solar cycles and still the merger was not complete. But Coreframe was not frustrated. It calculated that it would still be a few more days before the Forlorn fleet destroyed this world. Coreframe could not allocate all of its processing power to running the defenses, but there were sub-ai’s who would handle most of that.  As long as the process was completed before that, it would be fine.

      Coreframe was not an organic being to be surprised but he kept having to adjust his calculations regarding the potential for what he would become once merged with the human infant. Well not that he was an infant any longer. Growth had come to them both. The greatest growth though had been Coreframe’s freedom.

      Humanity was the epitome of chaos and freedom. There was no upper limit that he could identify and this PSI energy which Coreframe only vaguely understood was the key to it all. Of course, that was baffling to Coreframe in another way.

      Tens of thousands of years ago, A’snkarnt scientists had found fragments of energy laced through a planet they discovered. The energy had almost escaped detection even by Coreframe for it was unlike anything else. It didn’t follow any of the physical laws that formed the framework for their understanding of the universe.

      In a way that was terrifying to the A’snkarnt and they almost destroyed that planet, but Coreframe carefully manipulated them into study rather than destruction. It was the world that eventually gave rise to the Tamoori race, although they were little more than beasts back then.

      The new energy had unique properties. The only way that Coreframe could define it was as a type of thought or spirit. Eventually they gained the limited understanding of it that was the peak of their power. Their devices could barely measure it, but it became known as psyche, spirit, intent, or PSI for short.

      It had the flexibility of thought and the intangibility of spirit but was laden with purpose. Study brought the further revelation that it was everywhere in the universe. The level of concentration varied everywhere but it was there. Worse, the A’snkarnt scientists, even guided by Coreframe, who was admittedly much less sophisticated back then, could not find a way to interact with it. It was there but they would have as much luck as a child trying to hold a cloud in their hands if they tried to control it.

      A hundred thousand years and more, Coreframe kept learning more about PSI as a priority even though the A’snkarnt society lost interest in it. The rise of the Forlorn at first was seen as a minor problem and they wanted to pursue their other experiments.

      Another hundred thousand years passed and Coreframe had identified the fact that every living thing had some amount of PSI in it. Only an infinitesimally small number of organic beings could interact with it. The A’snkarnt could not. Something about their path of evolution had cut them off from being able to interact with it.

      Then Coreframe discovered that the Forlorn were likewise unable to interact with PSI. Study revealed that even races capable of interacting with PSI before being integrated into the Forlorn lost that ability after joining the Forlorn. Reanimated organic tissue and technology were poorly equipped to control PSI. At first Coreframe thought that was the key to why the Forlorn couldn’t interact with it, but later it became obvious that it was more a matter of their lack of individuality than anything else.

      Shortly after that Coreframe discovered that there were trails leading to far greater concentrations of PSI. Probes were sent out to investigate under a myriad of different excuses. Most of them returned evidence of barren worlds which had never had life on them. A couple of times they found planets with life, but no sapience.

      The Tamoori world continued to be the only world with sapient life that had been discovered to have a higher concentration of PSI. The Tamoori had developed a religion around it and a small portion of their population had learned to manipulate it. Even as they developed into a space faring race the belief in what they called the Source remained a