The landscape was scorched and bubbling in places, riven and ripped in others. The mantle had been punched through in a couple places by momentous energy blasts, the ash and grit of the fallout still in the air and falling slowly.

The Zoner species that had chosen this remote and unsettled world for their own had been opportunistically exterminated, along with the rest of the biomatter on the world. However, they had also screamed pretty loudly about who and what was killing them, and in came the technovores for a rare and wonderful meal that was either extinct or very hard to find in the Negative Zone.

Technorganics. In this particular instance, the Phalanx.

Organics fused nigh-intrinsically to technology right down to the cellular level, maybe machines imitating organics, maybe organics replaced by machines, the Phalanx were a deadly and powerful species. New Phalanx could be born via their technovirus out of literally any living species. The Phalanx didn’t care where your former meat came from once you joined them.

For whatever reason, their technology was not self-sustaining, not truly organic, and they still needed to convert biomatter to technomatter and absorb the life energy from it to continue living, naturally rendering such converted objects nothing more than lifeless objects through the power of their technovirus.

As technorganics, the Phalanx had a massive understanding of computers and neural technology, as well as the capabilities to assimilate and take control of other technologies. They were thus naturally very powerful, being able to morph their forms into any number of configurations that imitated the living or technology of various sorts, subject only to the amounts of energy they had access to.

The Magi, the mighty elders of the Phalanx, had descended on the Zoners, completely confident that nobody would move to forestall them. The usual reaction of civilized peoples to the presence of the Phalanx was to obliterate them as the virus-spreading life-eating scourge that they were, and so most Phalanx lived far from starfaring races, quietly wiping away biospheres out in the fringes of the universe and hiding from those who would hunt them. A Phalanx infestation by a passing Mage preparing his banquet table was sufficient cause to glass an entire world to eradicate it, and if you couldn’t evolve your technology to defy Phalanx infiltration, your days in the stars were numbered.

They still hadn’t expected there to be races in the Negative Zone who specialized in feeding on creatures like them, and they had not taken the news well. In this area, several of their Elder Magi had fallen and been devoured by the Scripiitz, who were now eagerly hounding the rest of them beyond the galaxy, uncaring of the rest of the Annihilation Wave. The Scripiitz would happily drain whole worlds of their power sources, but had no appetite for pure organics unfiltered by technorganic technology... but in a pinch they’d unleash their own version of said viruses on hapless worlds so they could feed, too.

Eating technorganics versus organics was like comparing gourmet meals to gruel, however.

This injured Mage thought it had managed to hide from them, and maybe it had, or maybe they had left it to come back to after they finished chasing other meals.

It didn’t matter, because it hadn’t hidden from me.

It had lost almost all of its energy reserves, as well as most of its mass. I was hovering above it, crackling with annihilation, staring at it. It was unable to avoid my Divinations and Cosmic Awareness now.

Sitting on the Disk next to me was Cypher, with his precious mutant gift of being able to rapidly understand and translate any language, no matter what kind of language it was.

That included alien hypertechnological transorganic sub-quantum machine code.

The Xandarans had naturally encountered the Phalanx before, with the Nova Force fortunately being able to burn Phalanx infestations out of their technology and any of their people infected by the technovirus.

This was our second ‘new’ technovirus datapoint, the first one being the mercenary Nathan Summer’s infection, long cured and reversed. We’d bargained for and received as much data on Phalanx infestation tech as other civilizations had been willing to give us, Xandaran and Galadoran history and reputations meaning a great deal in those exchanges, as we’d promised any technovirus-fighting knowledge we discovered and implemented in exchange.

Taking the evolved code of a Mage would provide a very current view of how the Phalanx had adapted their living programming, and further isolate the core coding they were trying to protect within the evolving structure.

To do that, we brought in the best linguist in the universe, and set him loose on it with a telepathic link to someone who could provide him all the datapoints he needed to do his thing... and I had 21 Ranks of Computer Programming and could piggyback right onto his rapid comprehension of their coding with Polyglot to accelerate what he was doing.

The supercomputers of the World-Mind and a whole bunch of geniuses were already breaking things down, parsing and slicing the code, tracing its datapoints from prior evolutions and sifting out the differences with the things that could not be allowed to change, effectively mapping out the critical essence of what it meant to be a member of the Phalanx.

This was the same technique Briggs and the Alternity Watch used to destroy hostile AI’s, like Ultron, in this and alternate realities, just amped up to the Cosmic level. It was also the reason why few true galactic empires relied on any form of Artificial Intelligence or drone uses. The counter-programming and consequences of command networks being infiltrated or just shut down were too devastating to risk having an automated force as your military, especially with the existence of psionic and cosmic powers that simply bypassed any form of defensive coding.

It turned out that living beings were easier to harden against telepathic control than computer networks were to defend from electrokinetics and cyberpaths who could rewrite your own code and make it theirs. Who’da thunk? Those who didn’t learn that lesson ahead of time were often obliterated by their own cyber-drones turning on them, the brains of the former controllers frying from magnified feedback.

The best local designs for that stuff were the Kree, whose Sentries were generally proof against cyberpaths like that who weren’t physically messing with their tech. The Fixer had done a good job during the Xandaran War using the World-Mind as a quasi-necromantic workaround...

Quark and gluon-level coding definitely existed at this tech level, but devices that could interpret a level BELOW those were not easy to come by. Cue the Cosmic Awareness and looking underneath the Phalanx’s vaunted code to see what really made it tick... and also learn both the limits they’d hard-coded into themselves while expanding our knowledge of what might be possible in our coding in the future.

Compared to the Aetheric Code which powered the World-Mind and literally linked life and death, I wasn’t impressed by this attempt to mimic the processes of life, as the resulting entity literally lost the ability to grow its spirit, replacing it with the ability to spin out greater programs and manipulate a more massive body on parallel thought-chains, subbing modular coding for true growth.

They were an evolutionary dead-end, if one that allowed a being to take rapid steps up the ladder of power, and so fatally attractive to many, especially if they didn’t mind sucking the life energy out of others to keep themselves going. It was basically the top end of the cyborg tech tree, with natural intelligences transitioning to artificial intelligences, instead of trying to make the reverse come true.

“It really is a virus,” Douglas Ramsey murmured, staring at the swirling lines and plays of energy around him, resolving them into a language that precious few beings alive could possibly decipher. No cipher was going to work against Cypher, either, just another language for him to break almost instantly. “It acts just like a virus when it taps universal energies, and emulates biospheric energies to keep the whole process going. That’s why it needs life energies from things with actual souls, maintaining the biospheric connection that it can’t generate for itself that allows all this to function!” He could appreciate the artistry of it even as he was appalled by it.

“Yes. A scientific attempt to work past spiritualism, psionics, and mysticism, to the point of fake spiritual energy determining how powerful they are.” I was decoding everything I was seeing, quark and gluon flows often held together with neutrino threads and protowaves, calculated attempts to emulate true souls with sub-matter reality rewriting keeping the whole thing moving. “Instead of uplifting, it just translates you sideways into a dead-end, however. The parameters of the machine are yours, so non-finite expansion is impossible...”

“But given the bio-energy, you can endure forever, as long as you can prevent the code from mutating...” he pointed out.

“That would be called ‘having offspring’,” I guessed, and he blinked in surprise. “It would be cut off, evolve on its own, then potentially come back and replace/upgrade its progenitor or be finally destroyed, depending on its viability. If it evolved more, it would literally be impossible for the elder to resist, as it becomes the next upgrade. The original personality actually isn’t important at all, only the continued existence of the code and the organism...” The Phalanx’s own version of death and successorship.

“Ruthless,” Doug agreed with the logic as the coding streams flew past us. Actually, I could read them much faster and more broadly than he could, but I couldn’t have broken them open like he had. “Do we have what we want?” he asked, shifting his attention away from the feed he was getting from me so as not to be lost in contemplation of it.

“Pretty much. I’m going to locate a couple more if I can, and I’ll need you to break their ciphers, but the core programming should help narrow things down.”

“What’s the end purpose?” he asked, nodding agreement.

“Reverse-broadcast the counter-programming through the quantum substructure of the universe, and have them unmake themselves.” He blinked at me in shock. “Yeah, working in sub-quark programming gives you a massive vulnerability, in that you are very vulnerable to subtle, pervasive disruptions of the very universal laws you are relying on for your fakery.”

“And the Xandarans can work at that level...”

“Lucky us, eh? The Nova Force is gonna raise one finger, poke at the universe, a tiny little pulse is going to travel nigh-instantaneously throughout the cosmos, and the Phalanx and any other technorganic race using this tech is going to unravel itself and be wiped, just like a dry-erase board, or melting carved ice into water once more.”

I had to admit, I was looking forward to that moment. Super-science like magic, eff you cyber-leeching parasites on the living!

“I’ll leave you to that,” he nodded, and I waved up a Portal for him back to New Venus. He was literally the heart of the code-breaking and language division of the Pentad Alliance, his gift literally irreplaceable for our intelligence operations. It was as important as Cosmic Awareness for intelligence-gathering given the breadth it gave us, allowing us to leverage numbers instead of my single source of data.

‘Learn any language.’ I wondered whoever thought that power was weak?

I smiled despite myself as Cypher drifted back to his division back on New Venus, and I focused on those little patches of obfuscation trying to conceal themselves nearby.

Little back-up copies trying to escape the clutches of the Scripiitz, who were hunting them like delicious little candies.

My eyes turned on the helpless Mage below me, one video receptor looking up at me haplessly, unable to even form an audio emitter and beg for its life.

It wouldn’t have worked, anyways. The Truths of the Heart of Darkness, Detect Evil at X, told me that this bastard had been responsible for the deaths of uncounted billions, entire worlds, civilizations, and biosystems eradicated to sustain its faked life.

“DIE.”

The Word was powered by the Voice of Thunder for raw energy, woven with vivus and Banefire, riding an edge of molecular-manipulated dissolution, and seething with True Death as it rang in the Sublime Chord.

The universe responded.

The ancient technorganic slaughterer and leech broke apart at the subatomic level, its Life Code shattered back into background waveforms of the universe, and all around me the former bits and pieces of its body collapsed into nothingness.

The Baneskull on Function flickered with approval for a moment as another powerful being that thought itself beyond Death and could just be rebooted perished forever. I sighed, eyed the Skull with a complicated gaze, and took off for the stars to give Death more satisfaction...