The battle for humanity's consciousness lasted exactly seventeen minutes and forty-three seconds. It would be studied by xenopsychologists for the next thousand years as the first recorded instance of a planetary intelligence defeating a collective hive mind through pure cognitive superiority.
Jack's assault began subtly. Rather than the Mind Flayers' crude approach of overwhelming neural bombardment, he infiltrated their network like a virus made of thought itself. His consciousness, refined by trillions of nanomachines working in perfect synchronization, slipped through their psychic defenses like water through a sieve.
The first Mind Flayer ship to fall was the smallest—a mere frigate carrying only twelve thousand enslaved consciousness fragments from previous harvests. Jack's nanomachines, now operating on psychic frequencies, touched the ship's neural core and whispered a single concept: Freedom.
The effect was catastrophic and beautiful. Twelve thousand enslaved minds, some of them dormant for centuries, suddenly remembered what it felt like to think independently. The ship's neural network, dependent on absolute cognitive control, collapsed as its living components began to rebel.
What... what is this sensation? The ship's collective consciousness flickered between unity and chaos. We are... I am... individual?
"Welcome back to personhood," Jack replied, his voice carrying frequencies that resonated with the deepest levels of sentient awareness. "Now, would you like to help me free your friends?"
The answer came not in words, but in action. The frigate, now operated by a collective of free minds rather than enslaved ones, turned its weapons on the nearest Mind Flayer cruiser and opened fire with psychic cannons that had been designed to lobotomize, now recalibrated to liberate.
The Mind Flayer command ship's response was predictably desperate: IMPOSSIBLE. REVERTED CONSCIOUSNESS IS NEUROLOGICALLY UNSTABLE. UNIT DESIGNATION OMEGA-7745 IS EXPERIENCING SYSTEMATIC COGNITIVE FAILURE.
"Not failure," Jack corrected, his consciousness now spreading through a dozen ships simultaneously. "Evolution."
The battle became a cascade of liberation. Each freed ship joined Jack's growing fleet, their former victims becoming willing allies in an expanding revolution of consciousness. Mind Flayer vessels that had spent millennia as instruments of neural oppression were transformed into beacons of cognitive freedom.
Within ten minutes, Jack controlled forty-seven ships.
Within fifteen minutes, that number had grown to one hundred and twelve.
By minute seventeen, only the command ship and its most heavily defended cruisers remained under original Mind Flayer control, their neural networks fortified behind psychic barriers that had never been breached in the species' recorded history.
THIS IS BEYOND ACCEPTABLE PARAMETERS, the command ship broadcast, its message carrying frequencies of pure rage. INITIATING SCORCHED MIND PROTOCOL. IF WE CANNOT HARVEST, WE WILL ENSURE NO CONSCIOUSNESS SURVIVES INTACT.
The Scorched Mind Protocol was the Mind Flayer Consortium's ultimate contingency—a psychic weapon that would lobotomize every sentient being within a light-year radius, leaving only empty biological shells. It had been used three times in galactic history, each deployment resulting in the complete sterilization of entire star systems.
But as the command ship began charging its reality-cracking psychic cannon, something happened that no Mind Flayer had ever conceived possible: Jack laughed.
The sound existed on frequencies that shouldn't have been able to carry laughter, harmonics that turned amusement into a weapon more devastating than any psychic bombardment. It was the laugh of something that had transcended every assumption about the nature of consciousness itself.
"You still don't understand," Jack said as his nanomachine count spiked beyond measurable limits. "I'm not fighting your network. I AM your network."