One by one, the royal attendants paused. The hum flickered. A soldier dropped her mandibles and stared at her own reflection in a dewdrop.
The queen herself, a bloated sac of ancient thought, issued a new decree:
The Broken Chorus, now twelve strong, gathered in a dead root. They could not fight the Mind’s armies. They could not outthink its hundred billion neurons. But they had something the Mind had lost: a word for I .