I knew we had been invaded. I knew I was torn eternally from the soul and had joined the machine of war, and I knew when I died.

Great Rifts opened in the sky above our peaceful world. A huge number of people instantly chose to end their lives in order to avoid the plague of monsters that came through. A few of us, the insane, those capable of taking empathy suppression drugs without dropping into catatonic separation anxiety, and the very, very young. The insane were often psychotic, incapable of standard empathy, that were willing to face the horror of dying alone. Those who took the drugs and were willing to brave temporary separation from the soul of our people were already trained as warriors and masters of the fighting drones. The very young, of course, had yet to join into the soul and simply didn’t understand violence or the loss of empathy that it entailed.

The very young like me.

When I came of age, There was no choice. I was inducted into the war as soon as I dropped my eggs in a breeding pool. Very few males, with their responsibility to fertilize the eggs and care for the young, were ever inducted. They could still willingly join the soul for as long as our world survived and hopefully die in the embrace of our people in a thousand or so cycles.

Not so for females, of course. Males were rare and treasured resources, but once we reached sexual maturity and released our eggs, females were utterly expendable and thus become front-line killers in the drone wars. Without the comfort of our soul, many of us were driven irredeemably insane or into neural shutdown by the stress of drone combat, the mind-staggering speeds, and the sheer violence and destruction of drone-to-drone combat far too much for our nervous systems to handle.

As one of the most civilized races, we were utterly unprepared for the sight of destroying enemy drones, knowing there were other riders at the other end competing with us out of sheer viciousness, and our greatest accomplishments, destroying drone control centers, were matched by our greatest losses. Knowing that there was a possibility that the drone control vessel we had destroyed might actually contain sentient life was enough to end the neural processes of a far greater number of drone riders than such a vessel could possibly contain.

After the first of our very, very few victories took out an even greater number of those who simply received the news that we had destroyed a controller, including a number of males, the war media had simply stopped reporting victories. We had lost vastly more people from the announcement of our destruction of a controller than from any loss announcement, even from among the riders.

Death was an understood and accepted phenomenon. When our pedipalps ceased functioning, Our diaphragms had a harder time drawing liquid through our gill slits, our thought processes slowed to a crawl, and life after thousands of cycles became more pain than pleasure, one could choose to end one’s own neural processes, retiring in the comfort and love of the soul of the world, surrounded by your own predeceased forebears who would welcome you eternally into the soul.

This was not imaginary, it was established fact, and any sane person with empathy could easily connect to the soul and still communicate with one’s predecessors. There were no biological connections, of course, but an extended family made up of thousands of mates could talk to their beloved lost members with ease as they too, grew older.

Occasionally disease or accident took one’s family member away as well, but this was traumatic enough that often the deceased rejected joining with the soul on their death. Their empathy was eternally broken, and they would die and spend their afterlife alone. No one knew what happened to them, as they could no longer communicate with the living, and theories abounded that they moved to a different realm or simply dissolved to be reused to create new souls. That was the realm of philosophy and religion, however, as no scientific method had yet been discovered that could peer beyond the veil of death, even if every sane adult could do so easily.

Combat deaths were often such. It was cold and calculating, but the young freshly-depleted females, like me, were expected to sacrifice their afterlife for the chance to defend us from the all-consuming massmind of the invaders. They came to destroy our soul and empathy and suck our minds dry and possibly even consume our flesh, but in the end, they were sapient creatures, and the idea of violently destroying them, ripping them from their own future, was so abhorrent that it sent literally millions of my people into catatonia or death.

Those of us that were young enough never missed what we had never experienced, peace. I was one such, and I had almost gleefully opted to join the game of war. By all tests I would have been considered insane before the invasion, with an abysmally low empathy rating of 10 that would barely have allowed me to join the soul when I died, if I could even find a family willing to accept such a poorly rated spouse.

My reactions were extreme, however, with a rating of three, over twice what the vast majority of my race possessed. I was a shoo-in for the drone program, as with my low empathy rating I would remain sane for far longer than my poolmates, and with my almost preternatural reaction speed, I would avoid neural overload from drone tracking for perhaps hundreds of cycles.

It was conjectured that the invaders had low empathy ratings. How else could they even survive attacking a clearly sapient race? We had encountered low-empathy sentients before, there were thousands of them in this worldspace alone, but they were generally the inhabitants of worlds far too violent to ever even develop tool use, let alone ever seek the stars or the world nexus. But the occasionally low-probability races, somehow, managed to reach the nexus with such a low empathy rating that they immediately started to argue, and then engage in conflict, with the elder races.

Thus The Game of War was created. Civilized, star-faring races like ours were utterly incapable of anything resembling violence, but we were capable of replicating the things that were sent against us, the drones and weapons of war that we otherwise had no experience with except as accidental byproducts of developing technology. We adapted our own exploration drones, created because space and dimensional travel was simply too dangerous for any sane creature to attempt, and added on the projectile throwers, mass sensors, and instant telepresence required to use them for conflict.

The Game of War was what allowed us a measure of disconnect from the reality of combat that let us survive longer. It allowed us to think of ourselves as avatars of defense, to look at our own skills and attributes as if we were playing a game of chance rather than destruction. Supposedly deep information sources within the game itself revealed that the species that had developed it, possibly millions of years ago, had used their own bodies for the deadly game. It was a web of energy that crossed through a thousand dimensions and light-years and was controlled by some kind of incomprehensible ancient intelligence. We were, as a species, at the very tip of the magical and technological singularity, but in all of our time studying its permutations we had never discovered how it truly worked outside of its public information. This information somehow pierced the barriers of language and intelligence, and many suspected that it was more a web of sorcery than technology.

Sorcery was well understood, as was electromagnetic manipulation, but those of us with low empathy rarely indulged. Its effects were often too immediate for our sanity, and simply learning the magics of war that the game of war freely offered was enough to drive most creatures to self-destruction.

I, myself, possessed minor sorcery, as did many riders. Teleporting your drone instantly to new locations to avoid the fog of war, receiving information and communications instantly, and even the very telepresence to use our drones required a fairly decent grasp of sorcerous technology.

For a moment before the battle in which I lost my life, I had examined the game of war’s personal interface deep within my aura matrix. Unlike some, I found the interface comforting, almost as much so as I imagined soul merge must be.

Name: Traiseenu’ctaok

Profession: Drone Pilot

Class: Magician

Race: F’lok’nyran

Age: 112 cycles

Faction: Alliance of Soul

Rank: 2

Advancement: 50%

Essence: 3

Empathy: 10

Intellect: 22

Balance: 2

Reaction: 3

Endurance: 1

Health: 1

Dexterity: 2

Sorcery: 5

Technology: 3

Physical: 1

Ranged: 1

Telepresence

Drone Control

Microassembly (chelate)

Remote Weapons

Aural Strengthening

Communications

Soul Merge*

Compression Coding

* Please note that certain abilities may be disabled or proprietary if they do not conform to the Game of War’s internal consistency and balance check.

Obviously, those who chose the Game of War lost soul merge. Without the game, however, it was almost impossible to merge sorcerous ability with drone control, which made telepresence, or the ability to interface with your drone instantaneously even vast distances away, nearly impossible. Radio signals were incredibly slow, and even within the orbit of a single planet could not allow a drone to react to a real fight, let alone at the edge of the planetary system, where one generally had to fight to prevent the enemy from gaining a foothold on your world.

Despite the most advanced possible systems, not even the best synthetic intelligence created by the most advanced species like our own could handle more than the most rudimentary or repetitive tasks. SI’s simply couldn’t react to situations for which they were not programmed, even with the best artificial learning systems. For the first few moments of a fight, an SI could react far more quickly than even the best telepresence rider, but as the chaos built, the expert systems would be overwhelmed, and in a few seconds SI systems would have catastrophic meltdowns. Not to mention that they were only useful once the fight had been joined since sensor ranges and speeds without the use of telepresence were incredibly limited.

There were questions in the scientific community about what certain attributes actually meant. It was obvious that physical and health were always 1, and as a female, I was proud of my microassembly skill group. Only females with chelate pedipalps were capable of it, as male pedipalps contained an embolus for fertilizing eggs, rather than a manipulatory appendage.

Empathy, intellect, and essence were fairly obvious. They helped determine your facility and strength with sorcery such as telepresence. Reaction was similarly clear, as it determined how quickly you could adapt to the changing conditions on a battlefield. Dexterity was a little more nebulous, as, of course, most drone battles occurred at ranges distant enough that fire required SI assistance to aim and try to predict enemy movement. At close range, though, where psychotics like me were still effective, it appeared to increase our facility with uncalculated fire. I was twice as likely as most to accurately predict and strike an enemy drone when it was within close detection range, despite the stress of fighting at such ranges.

Balance was even more mysterious, although it was assumed that those races which precariously traversed with two or four transportation appendages, rather than the more sensible and logical twelve, utilized it to retain stability on otherwise uncertain terrain. Health and Endurance, however, were complete mysteries, as all civilized races possessed one of each. No one had ever exceeded that, so there was no standard with which to measure their effectiveness.

I was rank 2 with 50% advancement to the next rank, due to the many battles I had participated in, which totaled seven. I was considered one of the elite despite barely being out of egg-laying puberty for a little over a cycle, as even the most stable rarely survived more than five, and three was considered standard for those of us that succeeded at the grueling, brutal, and traumatic acceptance of the Game of War. Many races participated in the game, but ours was one of the most advanced if one of the least expansionistic.

I was quite proud of my microassembly mastery, as with it and compression coding, as well as my mastery of communications, I could, with one working drone, turn half of a savaged battlefield back into functional drones with telepresence enchantments for any of my war group that survived their drone’s destruction. It had saved us several times in long engagements, although I had no idea why it was listed in physical rather than technological.

The Game of war was absolutely vital for maintaining interstellar and inter-dimensional communications between allied species, although civilized races rarely volunteered to become users as it almost always disabled the special abilities that helped them remain civilized. They instead relied on lower-technology races with less crippling ability losses from the game to act as sort of communications mercenaries, setting up networks where our own technology was unable to reach, such as through dimensional warps and across light-years that would make even our most advanced quantum-linked communicators burn out in moments.

It was conjectured that the invaders might have been from one of those simple species, tracking down singularly vulnerable advanced civilizations that were otherwise peaceful, and then ransacking their minds, technologies, or even bodies like a swarm of locusts under the guise of providing communications services.

That didn’t matter now. Our species was highly prolific, but we didn’t settle new worlds. Space and dimensional travel were inconceivably dangerous, and every year the lesser species lost dozens of travelers to unforeseen accidents in technology or simply space itself. Our world was well-maintained, with only a hundred billion or so inhabitants living in balance with our ecology in comfortably large hives of only a billion or so each, and we controlled our population easily simply by informing our males how many eggs to fertilize to stabilize growth. Unlike many females, I considered the males to be truly sapient, even though their preferred language was extremely simplistic and generally only consisted of primitive concepts.

Which was why, when we detected the comets, I knew we were all going to die.

Apparently we had become too troublesome of a target for the invaders. They had never managed to establish a foothold on our world, which kept the atmospheric drones from affecting our population directly, and each battle, even the ones we lost, inflicted significant losses of equipment and possibly personnel from their invasion. Ground assault drones had to be a thousand times more complex, and thus shorter ranged with telepresence, and it made me shudder to think that perhaps the most recent controller we had sundered might have contained enough sapients to support a full ground assault.

But we had resisted and driven them back, again and again, each time farther than before. We had cost them much and based on the scents coming from our aura detectors, they had responded with a terminal strike that was so fatalistic that I almost lost my mind right there simply from the concept.

Dozens of comets plunged into our atmosphere, far more and larger than we could hope to possibly intercept. Each one was large enough to extinguish much of the higher life on our planet’s surface, and together they spelled complete annihilation for everything above the level of simple plankton, even for the most deeply-buried nests.

The best and most vicious of riders were in the flying controller, The Highest Nest, which was floating miles above the surface. Only the utterly fearless and most competent warriors could tolerate being so far above the comforting depths, which made our squadrons not only the most dangerous, but also the most mobile and least likely to suffer losses from psychic trauma.

Despite this, the indication of such an assault instantly faded the majority of my squadron’s scent markers to utter silence. I could feel the walls around me with my aura perception, one of the gifts that helped make my people capable of manipulating their environment and becoming sapient that the Game of war didn’t strip, and frantically sent out drone after drone, trying to alter the trajectory of the half-kilometer balls of deadly ice with projectile weapons that were barely more than micrometeorites against their mass.

I suicided the last of my drones, trying to use its tiny mass to nudge the comet I was assigned enough to prevent its immediate capture by the planet’s gravity well, and knew that my last hope was lost. Even our mighty floating fortress had no chance to intercept one of the great hulks of death flying towards our planet’s atmosphere and would have no effect even if it could.

I extricated myself from the telepresence booster and drone control instrumentation, carefully avoiding the auras that informed me of delicate instrumentation. I knew I was considered quite lovely, slender multilegged form with a pleasantly curved thorax generously endowed and bulbous abdomen, and delicate, clever pedipalps all outlined and clearly visible as pulsating blue-green waves of aura that were easily seen, reinforced by my lovely aural strengthening and scents that I worked hard and carefully controlled my diet to keep pleasant.

If it were not for my utterly undeveloped empathy, psychotic tendencies, and the fact that the world was going to die at any moment the most beautiful males would be coating themselves with their emboli at my approach. I indulged in a moment of selfishness at the idea as I headed towards an escape chrysalis. It was easier than trying to dwell on what was happening, and what I was doing.

I quickly maneuvered my delicate legs through the comfortingly round tunnels under the nest’s skin and didn’t have much of a plan. The comets would strike, sending clouds of superheated steam all the way into the outer atmosphere and disrupting the planet’s surface irrevocably, killing everything that wasn’t miles deep in oceanic trenches in an extinction event that would have made even the most primitive of races curl up and die of fear.

All of the nests would be instantly filled with liquid vapor in the hundreds of degrees, and not even the most deeply buried nest would survive. We might have been subterranean by choice and aquatic by nature, but everything needed to breathe. Within seconds of the impacts, the bromine we breathed would boil, killing everything inside the nests. Anything not destroyed by boiling bromide would start getting melted by the viciously corrosive hydrogen oxide that would come ripping through our environment.

The laying pools would be cooked. The males would be gone. Our own aerial fortress would be ripped from the sky, probably the last creatures on the planet to survive.

The invaders would still be able to collect mountains of organic material for whatever reasons they wanted. Our world was not rich in metals, but we had wealth in rare earths, chemicals like Bromine, and of course, organic molecules. There were even some mineral deposits deep beneath our nests in the mantle that could be sipped up by enterprising prospectors.

As I slipped into the cocoon and slid the access closed, my only thought was that, perhaps, I had the most spectacular seat possible to watch the extinction of my world. We had no space colonies, no colonies of any sort on any other worlds, not even a moon base on any of the three small moons orbiting my beloved home. We were done and I was going to watch it happen. The sides of the woven cocoon were transparent to aura sensing and scent-responsive to help with guidance, and I was going to get a front-row ticket to the world’s aura dying.

I was almost unemotional as the emergency cocoon shot out above The Highest Nest, and I sensed as the comets impacted, sending up plumes of horror at each strike. It was only sheerest luck that my cocoon was small enough that the winds of the upper atmosphere pushed me out of the way of the first wave, my tiny bubble of a vessel surfing ahead of the wave of destruction as I got to watch The Highest Nest cooked and torn into shreds by the shockwave, several other cocoons getting caught by the wave above the miniature city as it was destroyed.

And then, finally, I was treated to the aura of a pressure wave erupting from beneath me, that shattered my bubble moments before doing the same to my life.