The other races didn't comprehend. All they thought about was how to eat, sleep, and breed, as well as how to make those processes more complicated. Prime Node thought of this bitterly as its neighbor's civilization commenced with civil war. The Kluggyns as they named themselves in galactic common, were a tall, limbless species standing four galactic units tall with a mucus membrane that sloughed off of them wherever they went. Border Synapse Node fourteen thousand through sixteen thousand had already forcefully disabled the fourth Klyggyn Refugee fleet.
The refugees were stopped in one of the complex's border star systems, a 'black hole' as the galactic community named them. The fleet was disabled within the minimum safe distance before they fell to the point of no return that the Cognitive Node had expended countless resources and Synapse nodes finding. There would be enough time for the Border Synapse nodes to board the ships, give the refugees a warning that the Complex had no facilities for individual minds, and send them back on their way.
If the Prime node was any other being, all this information would have taken galactic days, if not weeks to reach it, instead, it directed all these actions as the designated prime intelligence that it was. Thoughts drifted through the vast reaches of space instantaneously through processes that the cognitive Node still didn't fully understand despite being the priority research project.
The Prime watched through hundreds of Synapse Nodes as the Complex's Crystalline ships docked with the refugee fleet, hundreds of war forms wandering through the linkages into the fleet and subduing any Kluggyn who tried to resist, tearing automated defenses, of which the Kluggyns installed throughout even their civilian ships, apart.
The Prime watched the Kluggyns antennae wave around in a gesture of fear and anxiety, and The Prime not for the first time wondered what emotions felt like. They seemed to drive organic and synthetic beings alike into either singular purpose, or utter inaction.
Prime Node's musings were halted as ten War Forms suddenly disappeared from the Complex. Requisitioning bandwidth from the Civilian Node and the cognitive Node, The Prime Node looked through all nineteen thousand eight hundred and ninety-nine Synapse Nodes in the border system at once.
Lesser minds would have paused at the disappearance of nearly ninety more Synapses in the few minutes it took to requisition the bandwidth, but the Complex had survived this long on practicality. It had been fifty galactic years since anyone had tried to attack the Complex. The Prime Node had long ago disassembled the Defence Node and the thought of Re-instantiating one flitted through somewhere in the Complex.
Several ships had changed their attitude as the synapse nodes had reached the command stations. three captains, forty-two crewmembers, and Twenty civilians had an ESPO Outbreak.
Despite entirely relying upon it, the Complex still didn't fully understand the field of Psionics, the Complex seemed to run off of different rules than Psionic individuals, as Expressive Superlative Psionic Outbreaks had never occurred within.
The sixty-five Kuggyns had been overwhelmed by emotion, being one of the races who had just begun to delve into their psionic potential, the potential for deescalation was now naught point nine.
The war forms fired back, the ships having very few walls, unfortunately, meant there was no place to shield their hulking forms from the smaller Kluggyns as fire, ice, and other elemental instantiations wreaked havoc throughout the ships. All the Warforms had was standard high-energy laser weapons which Prime Node used to lay down direct fire. Unfortunately, twenty-two more ESPO cases erupted in the chaos, not only replenishing the six panicking Kluggyns that had dropped dead from concentrating fire, but increasing their numbers.
Prime disengaged the ships, it had calculated that the three ships and the three hundred and twenty-seven Synapses were already a lost cause, it left the synapses to perish.
The Prime Node checked where the nearest Complex fleet was, thirty-two systems away, it would take a month to reach the border system, and reinforcement was not an option. Prime watched as one of the ships collapsed in on itself into a ball of mixed metal and biomass sixteen Galactic units in diameter.
The other two ships seemed to have an external gravity well act upon them, slowly drifting into each other in what should have been a cacophony of torn metal, but instead becoming an amalgam of the two ships. Throughout the complex, Synapse Drones twitched, Equivalent to an organic response of pain, the Synapses combining into an amalgamation of organic and crystalline monstrosity in a metallic shell drifting into the accretion disk of the black hole.
A new sensation rippled through the Complex. Synapse drones rushed to and fro throughout the capital and beyond, all transit locked, and the primary nodes began transmitting nonsensical data. Prime couldn't release the amalgam, like an organic tumor it clung to its shared consciousness.
Forcefully propelled towards the event horizon of the black hole, Prime finally understood fear. It was now alone, stuck in the psionically fused body of stone and biomass and metal, hurtling towards what it knew was infinity, and it screamed...
And Adam woke up with a yell, his blankets sticking to his bare chest with sweat. His breathing was disorganised and heavy like he had just run a marathon. His room spun around him as put a hand to his mouth as if that could stave off the nausea building in his stomach.
"Just... Just a bad dream." He spoke to himself before scrambling out of bed. He nearly overslept! It was seven-thirty, school started in 15 minutes, and it was a ten-minute walk! He rushed through his room, putting clothes on and grabbing his backpack only in the way that a seventeen-year-old boy could do, where nothing was organized, but he knew where everything was.
"Your lunch is on the counter, now hurry up, or you'll be late." He heard his mom say as he jumped down the stairs.
"Your Lunch is on the Counter, now hurry up, or you'll be late!" His mother screamed... again? he paused at the bottom of the stairs, about to ask Mom why she had said the same thing twice before she spoke out once more. "Now Mister!"
And he was out the door running with his lunchbox in hand. He soon fell into a fast jog, thankful for mandatory gym classes.
He rushed into his homeroom, breaching the barrier of the hallway as the bell rang, its harsh sound stretching on for longer than Adam thought it needed to. Perhaps the talk of the bell being broken was true. He quickly took his seat next to his best friend Olly, their daily ritual greeting of "hey" to appease the bro lords above and below complete. The teacher walked in, Mr. Bastus, though he preferred students to call him Mr. Andrew.
His presence caused the students still talking amongst themselves to quiet down. It was the end of the fourth year for many of them, Adam Included, and they had already gotten all that high schooler energy in the morning out of them by last month.
"Alright, I'm sure you all are excited for your last PCI Test. I'd like to say a few words about what to expect for finals." Adam felt his chest tighten as he was reminded that finals were next week, and after that was graduation... If he passed.
"As homeroom, the finals will be about the topics of Psionic responsibility, and a short essay on your plans after graduation, no matter what they may be, I expect all of you to pass, as it shouldn't be that hard, and is open book for the first part. Now please pass these forward." Mr Andrew finished saying as he gave a stack of papers to each front desk before they were passed down the columns of desks.
Adam dug into his backpack after he passed the remaining stack behind him. pausing and checking again before turning to Olly. "You uhh, mind if I borrow a pencil?"
"Wow, usually I'm the one who forgets, everything alright?" Olly said before he turned his head and passed Adam a mechanical pencil. "Wow, Usually I'm the one who forgets, everything alright?"
"Why'd you say that twice?" Adam asked, confused as he took the pencil from his friend's hand.
"I.. didn't? Seriously, is everything okay? I didn't want to say anything, but you look pale, You didn't stay up all night with Charlie again, did you?" Olly asked with a worried look. Adam gave him a strained smile.
"Yeah, I just didn't sleep great... and I didn't eat anything because of it."
"Alright, tell me if you still feel bad after lunch, I'll carry you to the nurse's office if I have to." Adam didn't doubt he could do it, Olly was a six-foot giant compared to Adam who was still five foot eight and a twig, and Olly was on the baseball team to boot.
Adam nodded before turning towards his paper.
What was your PCI when the Semester started, and what do you think it is now?
This was the only question that mattered on the sheet. Putting an eleven for the first answer, and a thirteen for the second. Your PCI, or Psionic Chache Index, was a measure of the strength of your Psionic reserves. Psionics, despite appearing over a hundred years ago, were still a relatively poorly understood subject. As his worst subject, it was also poorly understood by Adam as well.
All he understood was that humanity could manifest mind powers, pyrokinesis, cryokinesis, any type of kinesis, telepathy, etc. Of course, as high schoolers, they didn't know how to do any of that. The second fact he remembered was that without training, which wasn't taught until you went to college and selected a major, your PCI only grew naturally, during puberty. Though their generation was also called Generation P, as almost everyone born twenty years ago had twice the PCI of their parents at the same age.
This meant guys were at a disadvantage, as they had longer puberties, and their PCI grew more slowly before gaining a huge boost in their twenties. Most of the girls in the homeroom were already at fifteen PCI. Did Adam think his PCI had grown to thirteen? No, but it was an unspoken rule that you had to put something higher than what you got on your last test. It was unproven, but a lot of the teachers believed that if you thought your mind power was higher than it was, it'd grow faster. If you didn't put a higher number, a teacher would talk to you during lunch, and nobody wanted to waste their lunch being told they should aim higher.
The rest was just identification and medical information, which each student needed to know, even if they just read it from a piece of paper in front of them. Adam was the last to finish writing, whereas the students were quickly ushered back downstairs to the basement from their third-floor classroom.
Blood draws and physical checkups were performed before Adam was escorted by a Nurse to a cold room containing an MRI Machine. Laying down on the cold table he waited patiently before he was escorted to the side room where a doctor was looking at the image of his brain with a skeptical eye.
"Young man, is this a new development?" The old doctor asked him, pointing at a dark spot on an image of the back of his brain, clearly juxtaposed against the rest of his grey matter
"...probably? I feel fine regardless."
"Alright, Please report if you feel any symptoms such as fatigue, headaches, strange dreams or mood shifts in the future, you may commence with the PCI test now." The doctor said, putting the MRI image down and picking up a clipboard as Adam stepped up to a small sack of gel hanging from a pole. Inside the gel was what looked like silly string. These were artificial Nuerons, built to measure PCI.
With practice, he felt the intangible force around his head until it felt like it was bubbling before forcing it towards the gel, like he was pushing it. The Gel didn't move an inch, but on a sense on the side, the number twenty popped up.
...Twenty
His PCI was twenty!