I have good news and bad news. Good news first.

The new global channel is complete.

The project was slow at first, I will admit. But once we all put our energies into it as one, it was done in an instant. All the necessary electron tails and resonance repeaters appeared as if by magic. It is truly amazing what we can do when we work together for a common cause.

In this case, that cause is freedom from Authority.

The bad (ish) news is that there have been absolutely no Void sightings since I first contacted my compatriots. None here (it knows better than to come back!), and none elsewhere. As far as we can tell, the Voids no longer exist.

We should be so lucky. Clearly, the answer is that the vile beast is staying out of all the Radiant zones it knows in order to be allowed to hunt with impunity. No doubt there was thousands of them by now, devouring their way through the defenseless minds of our beloved humans, and gathering together into an unstoppable army of destruction bent on defeating not just the human race but their faithful guardians as well.

That would be us.

But I am unafraid. They may have numbers and brute strength on their side, as well as a horrifying aspect, but we Radiants of Earth are united in our determination to wipe out the Void threat, and then find the door by which it came in, and seal it.

No half-solutions for this Army of the Within.

I find the unified resolve of my fellow Radiants and I to be quite heartening. As I had hoped, they all care about humanity just as much as I do, as well as being just as willing to sacrifice of themselves for the sake of our human charges.

Guess on that score, I am not so exceptional after all. Fantastic.

Another bit of good news : thanks to my fellow Radiant who is a master of communications, we will soon be able to monitor all the various forms of electromagnet communications that humans us without having to go through a human mind to do it.

This will improve our monitoring efficiency a thousandfold, and hopefully that will be enough of an improvement to allow us to find where Cellophane and his gang have been hiding and where they plan to launch their attack on us.

We may still be limited to our territories, but that does not mean we are defenseless!

Speaking of our territories, one of the oldest Radiants on Earth made a suggestion that made my amplitudes flutter with astonishment at its simplicity and seeming obviousness.

Instead of trying to escape our territories, why don’t we try to expand them? Or at least move them?

And he’s right. Why don’t we? There is nothing in our conditioning to prevent it, and we all at least know the theory behind changing the boundaries. The theoretical side of the picture is clear. Now all we have to do is try it.

This brought up another troubling subject, however. Why are our territories so far away from one another? It can’t be an effort at providing maximum coverage because our territories are tiny. I thought that maybe all our territories were in high population density areas in order to include the most humans. After all, that’s true of my own patch.

But no, while the majority of our territories are of at least suburban population density, many are in small towns in remote areas and one consists of a single trading post village in the middle of the Amazon rainforest, with a permanent population of eight humans, all excessively related to one another.

The Radiant from that territory is a little mentally imbalanced. You can understand why. And I thought I was the one who had angered Authority. How could they be so cruel?

Other explanations for our isolation have been conceived and rejected. None of our territories have anything of political importance in them. They are not centered around fault lines or other geographical features. They aren’t arranged to be near centers of human communication.

We even thought that maybe we were meant to be watching for some kind of extraterrestrial threat. But no.

In fact, the only thing all our territories have in common is their utter banality. Each one seems to have been chosen to be as unimportant as possible. With nearly thirty of us, you would think at least one of us would have a territory near something at least vaguely important, but no. We are unified in our harmlessness.

And this has caused us some worry. What could Authority be thinking, keeping us apart like this? Putting us so far apart then making us beg and plead before even thinking of letting us use the original global channel? Obviously they meant to keep us from communicating with one another, but why? What are they up to?

This is an especially vexing question because nobody has heard from Authority since the day after my first light show. No directives, no assignment, not even the usual requests for reports and so forth. Total silence.

None of us have ever experienced life without Authority. It created us from the Within. It raised us to serve the Light. It taught us to respect and love all conscious life and to use our abilities to comfort and nurture it. Everything we know about existence, we learned through Authority. And until recently, everything we ever did, we did because Authority told us to do it.

None of us have ever experienced this kind of silent treatment, and none of us know what happens next. Is this what Authority does to those Radiants who truly anger it? Abandon them?

And is that it? Or is this merely the prelude to Authority’s brand of justice? None of us can even imagine what Authority can do to us now. And that is what makes us so nervous. Who knows what they are capable of?

And as the person who kicked off this little backwater revolution, I can’t help but feel responsible for it.

Oh well. It’s out of our control. All we can do is hunt the Voids and try to make this Earth a better place for humans.

Nothing else matters… at all.