What happened next would require new terminology in xenopsychology textbooks. Jack didn't break the Mind Flayer network—he absorbed it, integrated it, and improved it beyond recognition. His consciousness, now operating on levels that existed outside normal space-time, reached through the quantum foam itself and rewrote the fundamental nature of psychic connection.
The Scorched Mind Protocol fired exactly once. The psychic weapon that should have lobotomized every thinking being in the solar system instead encountered Jack's consciousness and underwent what ATLAS later described as "weaponized enlightenment."
Instead of destroying minds, the wave enhanced them. Every human on Earth suddenly found their cognitive capacity doubled, then tripled, then expanded beyond baseline measurements. They didn't lose their individuality—they gained the ability to share it willingly, to connect with other consciousness without losing themselves in the process.
But more importantly, the wave carried Jack's essence directly into the Mind Flayer command ship's most protected neural cores.
What... what are you doing to us? The command ship's collective consciousness began to fragment as individual Mind Flayer personalities, suppressed for millennia beneath the hive mind, suddenly remembered what it felt like to think independently.
"I'm giving you back what you lost," Jack replied, his voice now speaking directly to minds that hadn't experienced individual thought in twelve thousand years. "Your species wasn't always a hive mind, was it? You chose collective consciousness to survive some ancient threat, then forgot how to choose anything else."
The revelation that followed was like watching a star being reborn. As Jack's influence spread through the command ship's neural networks, the Mind Flayers began to remember their original nature—a species of individual telepaths who had voluntarily merged their consciousness to fight against an existential threat that no longer existed.
We were... separate once, the ship's primary intelligence whispered, its voice carrying wonder that hadn't been heard in their species for eons. We were artists. Philosophers. We created beauty with our minds.
"And you can be again," Jack offered. "But first, you need to help me with a problem. There are two more fleets coming to destroy this system, and I'm going to need every ship I can get."
The response came not from the collective, but from individual Mind Flayers speaking in unison with voices they hadn't used in millennia: "We accept your offer, Earth-entity. But we have a counter-proposal."
The counter-proposal was elegant in its simplicity. Rather than simply joining Jack's fleet, the liberated Mind Flayers offered to teach him their most advanced psychic techniques—methods of consciousness manipulation that had been refined over tens of thousands of years. In exchange, they wanted Jack to help them spread this liberation to other Mind Flayer collectives throughout the galaxy.
"You've started a revolution," the former command ship's captain explained, her individual personality finally separate from the collective for the first time in centuries. "But it's a revolution that needs to spread. There are seventeen other Mind Flayer fleets in this galaxy, all of them trapped in the same collective nightmare we just escaped."
Jack's response was immediate: "Done. But first, let's make sure we survive the next forty-eight hours."
The transformation was complete. What had been a Mind Flayer invasion fleet was now Jack's first cosmic armada—247 ships crewed by liberated psychic entities whose loyalty was absolute not because they were controlled, but because they had been freed.