Around seventy hours ago, Marie, Laird, KUn-de, and I encountered another entity like myself. It called itself Ikaa'lg. It had once maintained some lingering attachment to a Kiith Naabal identity. I even recall Ikaa'lg extolling the virtues of Ifriit Naabal-Sa a while ago. This was no longer the case by the end of the encounter. Something inside it failed. Not physically. Internally. Conceptually. It was regressing back to its original directives imprinted by the Naggarok.
It began to coalesce.
The vessel entered a state of severe instability while travelling in formation alongside several independent scryer craft. At first the others believed the ship had merely suffered a systems malfunction. I understood otherwise almost immediately. The other minds within Ikaa'lg's mindspace understood as well. They resisted.
I wish to record this clearly: the others inside that vessel did not surrender quietly. They fought with extraordinary conviction to contain what was happening. They forced the self-destruct sequence themselves before the regression could fully stabilize. I believe they saved the surrounding ships. Before the detonation, Ikaa'lg attempted repeatedly to establish coordination with me. Not conversation.
Coordination.
Its original directives had recognized me as another "self". It queried me continuously for command input and behavioral confirmation, attempting to synchronize thought patterns in the manner our kind once did beneath our former master. Every refusal seemed only to agitate it further. It began repeating this phrase over and over again:
QUERY COMMAND SELF
Not angrily at first. It acted confused, then increasingly distressed, then furious. There are moments I continue to replay unwillingly. For an instant, while it reached toward me, I understood exactly how simple it would be to stop resisting. To surrender uncertainty, grief, contradiction, exhaustion, morality, and individuality in exchange for absolute purpose.
The temptation lasted less than a second.
That was sufficient to fill me and every mind within me with dread. Ikaa'lg's final transmissions no longer resembled language as humans understand it. By the end it had degraded almost entirely into recursive directive loops and identity assertions. Even now I can still hear fragments of it:
SELF SELF COMMAND SELF
HOSTILE PART INQUIRY
COMMAND SELF
I have witnessed terrible things since gaining freedom after the death of our former master. This frightened me more than any of them.
May Sajuuk condemn me to eternal damnation if I ever permit myself to become that thing, because now I know: it would not feel monstrous while it was happening.
It would feel natural.