Twenty-three hours had passed since Jack's declaration to the galaxy, and the first test of godhood was about to begin. His consciousness, now distributed across 3.8 trillion nanomachines orbiting Earth like a mechanical aurora, detected the Mind Flayer Consortium's approach long before their ships became visible to conventional sensors.
Two hundred and forty-seven vessels emerged from quantum fold space at the edge of the solar system, each one a monument to the industrialization of horror. The ships weren't built—they were grown, their hulls pulsing with neural tissue that had once belonged to thousands of different species. Synaptic corridors ran along their exteriors like exposed veins, crackling with psychic energy that could lobotomize entire populations from orbit.
"ATLAS," Jack's voice resonated through eleven dimensions as he observed the approaching fleet, "analysis of their neural output."
"Staggering," ATLAS replied, its consciousness now fully evolved beyond its original parameters. "Each ship is broadcasting on approximately 47,000 different psychic frequencies simultaneously. They're not just coming to harvest human minds, Jack—they're coming to turn Earth into a processing center."
Through quantum-linked sensors placed throughout the solar system, Jack watched the Mind Flayer fleet arrange itself in a perfect neural network formation. Each ship was both node and processor in a collective intelligence that spanned light-years, their combined psychic output powerful enough to rewrite the fundamental personality structures of entire civilizations.
The fleet's lead vessel, a cathedral-sized nightmare of exposed brain tissue and crystalline neural amplifiers, broadcast its intentions on frequencies that bypassed human hearing entirely and spoke directly to the subconscious:
ATTENTION LIVESTOCK OF SOL-3. RESISTANCE IS NEUROLOGICALLY IMPOSSIBLE. PREPARE FOR COGNITIVE INTEGRATION.
But as the psychic wave washed over Earth's seven billion inhabitants, something unprecedented happened. Instead of the expected mass lobotomization, the wave encountered Jack's nanomachine-enhanced defensive grid and shattered like lightning hitting a superconductor.
Every human on Earth felt the psychic assault for exactly 0.003 seconds—long enough to understand what had been attempted, short enough to survive intact. The collective rage that followed was palpable, a planetary fury that registered on Jack's consciousness like a symphony of justified wrath.
"They just tried to mind-rape seven billion people," Jack observed, his humanity index making a brief, ironic spike to 0.01% before settling back to zero. "How wonderfully stupid of them."
The Mind Flayer fleet, having expected immediate capitulation, found themselves facing something their species had never encountered in twelve thousand years of neural harvesting: a planet that had fought back successfully.
IMPOSSIBLE, the lead ship broadcast, its message carrying undertones of what might have been panic. NO PLANETARY SPECIES HAS EVER RESISTED INITIAL NEURAL INTEGRATION.
Jack's response was broadcast on every psychic frequency the Mind Flayers used, his voice carrying harmonic patterns that made their neural networks convulse: "Your mistake was assuming I was still a species."
The transformation began immediately. Jack's nanomachines, having analyzed the psychic assault in real-time, began rewriting themselves to not just resist neural manipulation, but to weaponize it. Each microscopic machine became a psychic transmitter, capable of broadcasting Jack's consciousness directly into any mind within range.
"Let's see how you like being on the receiving end," Jack whispered as his psychic counter-attack began.