Wide eyed stares gazed upward, mesmerized as the sky above burned with the invaders thrusters. Word had been spreading throughout the sector of some unknown force conquering world after world but no one could have imagined it would ever come this far, this quickly.

  Rumors spread how as the enemy advanced, the defenders would eventually turn on their own people, until all were one with the invaders. It was a terrible sight to watch as friends and relatives succumbed to the strange power of the aliens. One moment they’d be fighting right along side of you, the next they’d be trying to kill you. Many chose not to believe the rumors. Unfortunately, those rumors were ultimately proven to be true when their very own outer defense ships lead the attack of their home world.

                                                                               *  

  Patty rested in its jar. Millennia had passed since it first came to its powers and almost nothing remained of its original form. Little more than a crumb of meat, it floated in a clear jar of preserving fluids. Patty still wasn’t sure what would happen if it were ever fully consumed. Parts of Patty theorized that its consciousness was now so diversified that this little scrap of meat was redundant whereas other parts of it believed that it served as a linchpin through which Patty orchestrated all of its various possessed beings.

  Patty’s ship orbited around this final planet, the goal of its hopes and dreams. Here, Patty’d learned from previous conquests, was a vast archive mapping out the entirety of space. This great civilization was already ancient when the earth and moon were still forming and over the eons they’d found the farthest reaches of the universe where stars, matter, even space itself ceased to be. Patty longed for this knowledge. Over the millennia, Patty had charted much, if not most of the universe and in the last few centuries Patty hadn’t found any new horizons. With this race’s maps, gone would be the need to waste centuries in search for new worlds. At last Patty would know where every form of life could be found, and absorbed.

  Fires burned on the planet’s surface as Patty’s soldier drones marched on, converting the strong minded and leaving the rest to die. Always growing closer to where the star maps were stored. Today would be the last day of this war. 

  “What’s beyond the stars?” Patty’s vocabulator buzzed.

  A woman who had been sitting in a chair beside Patty’s plinth stood and gazed out the observation window. Patty selected a single human child every generation to raise without possessing it. Loneliness, Patty discovered, could drive one to insanity and it was to spare Patty from being alone that it kept its human companions. This one’s name was Khwam Cring.

  “Isn’t that why we’re here?” Khwam Cring asked.

  “Hmmm,” Patty mused, “yes, but what about the thrill of discovery?”

  “I don’t know anything about that,” Khwam Cring said. “I was born after these worlds were found.”

  True enough. Khwam Cring’s predecessor, a human named Angua, had been by Patty’s side when this vast civilization had been found by Patty’s scouts and the resultant war had been raging ever since. It was a shame Angua had died before this day. He had been looking forward to it with such anticipation.

  “And I wonder,” Khwam Cring went on, “what is the point of all this?”

  “What do you mean?” Patty asked.

  “Well,” she said, “you never make allies, you hardly need resources, you just conquer and move on. Why?”

  Patty thought over the possibility of replacing Khwam Cring with a different human. It wouldn’t be the first time it had done such a thing, but Patty didn’t like doing that. Patty needed to answer the questions Khwam Cring was asking. Not because Khwam Cring was the one asking them, but because they were the same questions festering in it’s own mind. Besides, Patty could hardly blame her for asking such questions, most of the human companions did.

  “Why are we here?” Patty asked more to itself than to Khwam Cring, though the vocabulator had difficulty conveying such subtlety and Khwam Cring gave Patty a confused look.

  Before she could voice anything the observation window flashed, signaling that the star maps had been found and were in the process of being transmitted and compared with those Patty already had.

  “Move me closer,” Patty said and Khwam Cring complied, lifting the little jar from its plinth and carrying Patty to the railing before the window.

  Proximity didn’t make any real difference. Patty had others in separate sections of the ship where the schematics would actually be studied. For some reason, being close made something feel more real to it, a carryover from the humans, Patty wagered. Other species were far less sentimental. Perhaps that was why Patty always preferred a human companion to any of the other alien races it had absorbed. Certainly they had their uses. Warriors, builders, laborers, inventors…but it was the humans who could wonder. Most of the other races saw the stars as just that, stars, and those that developed space travel had done so more as a matter of necessity or practicality. Humans began their space exploration out of necessity as well, but not a necessity for substance. No, humans explored out of a necessity to explore. They needed to know, needed to discover, and with that need also came a fear…

  The screen resolved and the comparison of the two star maps was clear. All that Patty had already discovered was to be shone in blue, all that was new was to be shone in red.  

  The map was entirely blue.

  Both Patty and Khwam Cring stared at the display for a long while and it was Patty who eventually broke the silence.

  “Take me out of my jar,” Patty said.

  “What!” Khwam Cring shrieked, “No, I can’t do that.”

  “You can,” Patty said wearily, “I’ve already deactivated my jars shielding.”

  Khwam Cring moved slowly and without certainty. Around her, all of the beings possessed by Patty began to silently weep.

  “I don’t understand,” Khwam Cring said as her hand rested on the lid, ready to open it. “You’ve won. You control the universe, everything. What’s the matter?”

  “There’s nothing more to learn,” Patty stated, “No new horizons, no more great discoveries. Nothing more to live for.”

  Khwam Cring still did not open the jar. “Why not open it yourself?” She asked and she offered the jar to one of the Patty-humans on the observation deck with them.

  “I can’t,” Patty said.

  “Why not?” Khwam Cring asked. “You’ve got hands.”

  “Because I’m weak,” screamed the Patty-humans as one, making Khwam Cring jump with fright. She’d never heard any of them speak before. None of the possessed spoke, not for centuries.

  In her shock and surprise, Khwam Cring dropped the jar. Patty felt itself turning round and round. The fall seemed to it as an eternity, dwarfing the countless ages Patty had endured leading up to this point. Everything it had done, everything it had accomplished, everything it regretted flashed through Patty’s consciousness. All the way back to the first moment Patty could remember.  

  It was cold. All around Patty lay the bodies of its fallen kind, dead and useless. Patty tried to move but couldn’t. Fear gripped it at the thought of dying this way, tortured and mangled by its oppressors until death. When all of a sudden a giant loomed over Patty, its hand reaching out to pick Patty up. It tried to escape, to move, but its bones were gone, they had been among the first things to be taken. The hand grabbed Patty, too hot to be comfortable but not as searing as it had expected.

  “It’s okay,” a familiar voice said, “I’ve got you.”

  Patty’s vision cleared and it saw Khwam Cring holding it. She was so large, and Patty was so small, so insignificant. How was it that it had ever conquered the cosmos. A ridiculous thing. Patty’s possessed collapsed across the universe. 

  “Are you okay?” Khwam Cring’s voice was filled with concern.

  “Amazing…” Patty managed to make its vocabulator say even though it was so far from it, “My original plan was to destroy your race.”

  “Really?” Khwam Cring asked with disbelief and when Patty didn’t respond she spoke again. “I don’t understand why you’ve done all this, but I can’t help but be amazed by what you accomplished.”

  “And that sense of amazement,” Patty said with increasing difficulty, “is why I changed my mind.”

  Its body, what was left of it, was beginning to dry out and flake apart. Patty couldn’t feel the possessed anymore and, one by one, they began to move around as though waking from a dream. Patty hoped they’d retain at least some of Patty’s memories, some of its accumulated knowledge. Perhaps they would, perhaps not. Either way, there was an entire universe out there for them to explore.

  “Don’t leave me,” Khwam Cring wept. “I don’t want to be left alone.”

  Patty did not respond and Khwam Cring knelt crying on the floor cradling the remains of the only other being she had ever known.