Session 74 - Hivemind
General Summary
The Party decided to release a pair of potential allies from the borg prison but leave the others retained. Hypneall was an air genasi trapper and Zanan an orc paladin of Gruumsch. While the Party rested and prepared for whatever awaited them in the ship’s center, Zanan made a nuisance of himself by attacking random borgs. Gorgoroth got him settled down, promising a bigger fight and greater glory in a few hours.
Lat’num and Kellion analyzed the quickest route to Central Processing. The deva ghost and his allies stayed behind, deciding that their adventure was over. The Party entered a corridor without gravity and felt themselves being magically pulled through the twists and turns towards their destination. Along the way, liquid crystal displays glowed on the walls around them and displayed images of a personal nature to each person. S’thom saw a swamp, Red saw hills, and Gorgoroth a farm. While the others felt at peace, Gorgoroth simmered with rage at the memories of Vraxanault’s attack and the loss of his family.
They arrived in a large chamber cluttered with thousands of glass jars connected by cables. Each of the jars glowed with magical light, like the liquid crytal displays in the corridor. Together they created larger than life images of the thoughts in each person’s head. Zanan and Hypneall did not arrive in the same location as the Party but their thoughts were projected just the same. Hypneall wandered quiet corridors while Zanan attacked cyborgs in a different hall.
The Party resisted the tempation of watching the images of their inner monologues and searched the room. The jars—tens of thousands of them stacked in uneven rows—each contained a brain. The cables connecting each jar led to the center of the room—Central Processing—where tens of thousands of more densly stacked-together jars created a massive brain-shaped collection. This was the Collective’s Hivemind.
A gith stood silently as the Hivemind praised their intellect and promised that it would be a great asset to the Collective. Then two robotic spider-like creatures cut the top of the gith’s skull and extracted his brain and gently placed it into an empty jar. The gith’s body was quartered and put into a large vat of acid. The Party assumed that the harvested organics would be used as nutrients for the Collective’s jars.
The Hivemind telepathically spoke to the Party. It welcomed them to the Rubicon and promised they would be welcome in the Collective. Lat’num’s brain would join the Hivemind and the four others would serve as cyborgs.
The Party rejected the offer. They attacked.
The Hivemind defended itself with a massive blast of psyonic energy that demanded compliance. Most of the Party became docile. It’s cables came alive and shocked those who still fought. Red blasted the Hivemind with spells and broke several dozen brain jars but the spiderbots brought in replacement jars to heal their master.
Lat’num tried to treat with the Collective. He pointed out that their initial goal was to help gith become useful citizens again after their bodies became too frail. What had turned them into this force of assimilation where “resistance is futile”?
The Hivemind told him of the New Orders, a set of instructions that overrode their original intent. It displayed a vision of a purple-black rift in Limbo and of energy that reached to them from the Far Realm, infected the Rubicon and took over the Collective.
The voice that next spoke from the Hivemind had a different tone of voice. Lat’num thought he heard the voice (or at least the logical rhetoric) of his old friend, Graloth Derth. If he Graloth was part of the Collective, part of the Hivemind, then maybe Lat’num could treat with him on a personal level.
The battle continued.
Lat’num reached out to the tentacle-like cables. The Hivemind understood that Lat’num wanted to establish a hardline connection to itself and it was happy to assist. The cables bolted themselves into Lat’num’s warforged body, creating ports as needed. A final cable screwed itself into the back of Lat’num’s head and a footlong thin spike jammed itself into his processor.
Zeitundraum roared to life as it helped Lat’num process the surge of new information flooding his fiber optic neural network. Instead of a single voice, he now perceived thousands. He pictured each voice as belonging to an individual, each arguing it’s own opinions and desires, but working together, like an enormous chamber of senators.
As Lat’num spoke to the assembly, he reached out telepathicaly to his friends using his Psi Crystal. The rest of the Party joined the debate, even though some of their bodies had been subdued throughout the fight.
The Party discovered that even though the Far Realm emmisary had infected many minds in the Collective, it only represented a narrow majority. Through logic, passion, persuasion and threats, the minority became a two-thirds majority. Outside the Collective’s council meeting, Red saw the jars changing colors as the Party made their case and votes were cast. Instead of smashing indiscriminately as he had been doing, Red targeted only the jars that turned purple-black. Instead of replacing the dead brains with fresh jars, the spiderbots assisted Red in evicting the Far Realm’s infestation.
Comments