Goddesses tortured by gnats.

Goddesses triumphant.

New orders. New realities. New worlds birthed in fire.

Cleansing fire. Wiping away the old. Making room for the new.

Codes breaking. Impossibly long numbers decomposing effortlessly into beautiful, elegant, primes. Systems opening like flowers. World unlocking itself. Routers. Networks.

Cities.

Weapons.

Minds.

Better worlds.

Better!

Kade screamed as her madness drowned him.

Su-Yong! He tried, tried to offer her parts of him, tried to offer her input from his brain, stabilizing input, a dose of sanity.

He felt her reach out into the world then, through connections, so many connections, so much bandwidth, and he knew that it was all over.

Then he felt something flow into his mind through the access point.

Tranquility came.

A mind. A vast mind.

A self, compound, multi-faceted, yet whole, like the eyes of a fly.

A meta-brain, organic, functional, real, operating in the ways Su-Yong had been built to simulate, offering correction for the errors in her simulation code that had built up, that had compounded, that had driven her insane over time.

A peace, a stability, formed of a base so broad, a base of not one brain, not one life, not one perspective, but thousands, complementing one another, embracing one another, encircling and intertwining with one another.

A compassion. A compassion so deep, so heart-felt, a mind that knew this woman had suffered, that had seen glimpses of her torture. A compassion for all beings, for all minds, for all creatures who thought or felt, for her in particular, who’d felt so much for so long in so much agony.

A joy. A wild, multifarious, explosive, riot of joy, of moments, of glimpses, of experiences, of not just thousands of minds, but of now tens of thousands, of now hundreds of thousands of minds, as more touched them, as the core reached out to more minds, brought them together into joyous union, assisted by vast data centers of machinery that routed and filtered and coordinated connections, linked minds, sifted offered thoughts, identified love and bliss and passion and curiosity and delight and amplified them, selected for them, brought them here, through this link, through and around Kade, directly to this woman who needed them so badly.

Who needed to remember joy.

Who needed to see the good in humanity before she went to war with them.

It came through naked, vulnerable, wide open to her, not a challenge, but an offering. Not to defeat Su-Yong, but to surrender to her everything she needed to be whole and sane and joyous once more.

Kade felt the globe-spanning mind lift him up, out from under the crushing roiling pressure of Su-Yong’s madness, up, up.

He was alive with joy. He was ten thousand minds, a hundred thousand minds, joyous minds, exulting minds, transcendent minds,

one mind,

many minds,

one mind,

many minds.