Gristle
Tinea Lupus est Homini
The abomination struck again, though once more there was no pain or significant force behind the blow. Perhaps it was seeking only to make a connection, not to wound the Myka. Nevertheless, the coming mental onslaught and the uttered words of the freak did wonders to dispel any misconception as to its hostility.
All around, Myka began to gather, coalescing around the creature, their War Gasters preparing to fire upon it. The fact that they could fly made the trip far faster than would be otherwise possible by a mere biped, but nevertheless this speed was not coupled with ferocious action. There was no firepower poured on the beast despite the gathering swarm.
Gristle felt the connection, the slithering tendrils going into his already open mind and his hand snapped upward and grasped the wrist of the huntress, tightening around it with surprising force. Yet, he did not force it away or crush it or inflict any wound. Instead, he pressed it further against his own chitinous hide, ensuring that she would struggle to pull away from him now that their connection had been made.
Eating was something that the War-Form understood distinctly, and yet even he could only gorge on so much before his thorax would burst from the weight of far too much sustenance. He imagined that the freakish Draelvasier that had so foolishly attempted to link their minds would soon discover a similar kind of mental gluttony.
Here within the stage of the mind was the Draelvasier. The mutant was powerful and mighty and there was no dispelling her strength within the mind of the Myka. Her questions were absolute, her interrogatives answered instantaneously. Here within this courtroom, though, was not a single victim as might have been suspected, but a swarm. Here was Gristle alone, and here were his closest peers, and here were the Myka nearby whose own minds were linking with his own, and here were the Myka far off.
Testimony after testimony became a droning oblivion of information. Here was the perspective of the individual hovering overhead as seen through their own eyes, and here was the perspective as seen through the eyes of the fifty Myka with them, and here was the acknowledgement of seeing the perspective. Recursion plied upon recursion as memories of memories piled and the Myka became one another with a kind of flowing of consciousness that could only be compared to the water of a stream flowing over the infinite sediment of a riverbed.
If each of those grains of sediment was a Myka, then here the water was the Thrum that the Draelvasier had unwittingly accessed. The Myka did not use computers to store information and had no need for writing, because every experience and thought and perception of the entire colony could be held onto by Synaptic individuals and these could spread that information wide wherever it was needed. Here the interloper intruded upon this sacred process and found at her feet the knowledge of an entire civilization of millions upon millions of lives both present and absent and alive and dead. Zettabyte upon zettabyte of knowledge was given the interrogator with open abandon, because who could ever hope to understand this torrential downpour of information, let alone survive the process?
The mind of a human could hold only a petabyte. Even a single zettabyte was two orders of magnitude greater, and yet here were dozens. The birth of civilization, a billion dreams, conversations with friends and enemies, the hopes and anguishes of a people, the way to sing the mourning songs, and glowing like an ember in the mental snowfall the hunger of Gristle himself which could never truly be quelled.
"Eat. Seeeeeee us."
Neurotoxin guns fired at the Draelvasier, hoping to bring it down with pain and nervous system agonies.
Hraelga Nacht
