The alien implant in his brain had prepared Justin's thoughts for this moment. As the shapeshifting alien parasite slowly lost cohesion at his feet and began to send tendrils up his leg, a satisfied smile crossed his lips. Ever since Justin had been pulled out of cryosleep and received his implant, he wanted nothing more than to serve the aliens. As more and more of his new owner's mass slithered up his legs, he felt joy that his body would be transformed into the holy instrument of the leader of their new gods: the one called Jupiter.

Justin had been told that Jupiter would have little use for some parts of his mind--his Lord had a superior mind of its own, after all! So when he began to feel thoughts at the periphery of his mind slowing and becoming dimmer, he still looked forward to using his reduced consciousness to passively observe how a god ruled the world. It was only when he began to feel his brain being cut off from his senses that Justin felt the first trill of nervousness: how could he watch and learn from his lord if he could not perceive his mighty actions?

"Do not trouble yourself, slave," he heard Jupiter say reassuringly in his mind. "You need not perceive the world in order to assist me. You shall provide information and respond to any queries I may have. You shall not be troubled by anything else."

Soothed by his lord's confident voice, what remained of Justin's darkening mind roused itself once more with a question: "But lord, how will I be able to learn from your example if I cannot observe your great deeds?"

As Justin's mind was dimmed even further, he heard Jupiter respond dismissively. "Now that we have joined, answering my queries is your only remaining purpose. You have offered the greatest possible service to your gods. Nothing else you could do in the future could possibly rival this. And we derive no benefit from training a mind that will be discarded when I claim my next host. Now sleep and know that you are serving your god. I will select what I find useful in your mind and awaken you should I need any further answers or assistance."

As Jupiter spoke, faint and incoherent images and feelings popped and faded in Justin's mind. He recognized some of them from his own life--a feeling of the loving arms of his mother, bounding exuberantly across a wheat field back home in Missouri, anxiety and pain from his struggles to qualify for the expedition, the tender warmth of his first tentative kiss--but there were also many others that did not belong to him. He realized that the connection Jupiter had established ran both ways: he was now observing the flash and churn of Jupiter's own thoughts and memories.

Some of the thoughts passed too quickly to perceive or were completely alien to him, but others felt more familiar and understandable. He felt a deep--but seemingly unrequited--longing for the goddess named Minerva, grim satisfaction observing a deserted planet that was once filled with threatening creatures, and to Justin's shock, an implacable, murderous hatred of the god he knew as Prometheus.

"Why would a god want to kill another god?" Justin wondered, dumbfounded by the intensity of Jupiter's feelings.

But soon, his shock faded as inky blackness began to swallow the rest of Justin's thoughts. As more and more of his conscious mind faded, he felt a trill of both excitement and anxiety. But soon those were also submerged by the spreading blanket of darkness.

As the clamoring multitudes of thoughts and memories in Justin's mind blinked out one by one, he recalled one pale memory from his earliest days:

"Now I lay me down to sleep...I pray the Lord my soul to keep...If I should die before I wake...I pray the Lord my soul to take..."