Safeguard

Protector Z'hira sat inside her subspace bubble and surveyed the blue and green world before her. What would've been a smile touched what would've been her face and she basked in its glory.

It's so beautiful, she thought, it reminds me of home, and that thought sparked the memory, gathered from the enormous expanse of the Galaxy Mind, of T'hai Laks, her home world. The continents obviously weren't the same, and the land mass of T'hai Laks was much more expansive, but the colors, the angle, and the fuzziness inherent in remembering someone else's memories made the two combine and show a similarity she couldn't deny. Z'hira uttered what one might call a sigh, and shook the image of the Progenitor mother world from her thoughts.

She focused on the world before her with renewed purpose, and recapitulated all the information she had gathered.

The dominant faction of the dominant species on the planet called it "Vel'gorath", which translated to "World". In Z'hira's experience, this was about the level of originality that could be expected of all young sentient species, and the inhabitants of Vel'gorath were certainly that.

Vel'gorans were, on average, taller and thinner than most of the sentient species the Galaxy Mind knew about, measuring almost four lentras in height but only weighing an average of seventy-five kiropras at T'hai Laks normal gravity. On their home world, this translated to nearly sixty kiropras, and Z'hira knew the planet's low gravity was what had spurred them to grow so tall. Like most Second Ones species, Vel'gorans were bipedal, had binocular vision using forward-facing eyes mounted on heads which also carried sense organs for smell, hearing and taste. Unlike most Second Ones species, Vel'gorans, however, could not utter sounds of any realistic complexity.

Instead, much like the Progenitors, Vel'gorans used a form of telepathy to communicate. Vel'goran brains were barely advanced enough for them to have started using tools, and their telepathy was limited, at this stage, to the projection of emotions and simple images, but unlike what the Galaxy Mind remembered from its own species' youth, Vel'Goran telepathy ranged almost a hundred kirolenters, far more than the twelve hundred lenters afforded a non-Ascended Progenitor. And that was why Z'hira was here.

In and of itself, the planet was really quite unremarkable. The part of the Galaxy Mind that remembered it as their home had a quite different opinion, of course, but even as their voices mingled with the choir, they still admitted there wasn't anything particularly special about it to anyone but themselves... until this new species arose and began to make its presence known.

Z'hira uttered a mental sigh and began to set herself to the task at hand. Her mental tendrils expanded a hundredfold, a thousandfold, a millionfold, and she sent them all towards the planet, covering its surface with gentle muscles and nerves of pure energy, feeling the entire immense mass and shape inside her grasp. She listened almost without trying to, heard the many emotions of the many inhabitants of the planet. She sought out and recorded everything she could grasp, comforted by the knowledge that all she was sensing today would be forever recorded in the collective memory of the Galaxy Mind. She sensed the passion, the love, the hatred, the fear, the courage. She sensed the simple thoughts of a million individuals, their fear of one another and of their mythical "gods" which would smite them if they didn't do exactly the right things...

She sensed all this and so much more in a microsecond, felt an entire world of living, thinking beings and for a second, she was them... And then she flexed all the muscles of her energetic being, and the several million sentient individuals inhabiting a planet they called Vel'gorath died, exterminated in a single flash of light repeated all throughout the world.

Z'hira wept.

She wept for the potential, and she wept for the loss of life. She wept for all the things that could never be. She knew why it had to be done, and she knew why it had to be her job. And she knew, in the long run, it was the right thing to do. But still she wept, and even as part of her tried to blame her for the death and destruction she had wrought, another part, fueled directly by the knowledge of the Galaxy Mind, soothed her, reminded her it was normal to cry, even beneficial. Reminded her that she did what she had to. And she knew it was right.

Knowing so well how their own species had risen to the power they commanded, the Galaxy Mind had decided when it first formed that no other telepathic species could be trusted not to try to do the same thing. Its agents, the Protectors, scattered throughout the myriad worlds of the Milky Way, watched for the signs that telepaths would be unable to contain themselves from making as they evolved and learned how to form a civilization. And their standing orders were clear: any telepaths must be destroyed.

Since the start of the Second Age, these orders had resulted in some two dozen planetary cleansings. And all the Protectors agreed it was better for all involved if the cleansings were done as early as possible in a species' evolution, preferably before they were capable of even understanding what was being done to them. It was easier that way. There were fewer deaths to regret, less energy squandered. But the Galaxy Mind was honest with itself: it was afraid.

And, in the face of fear, what safeguard is there?