The craft navigated the dark dimensions of space, seemingly motionless against the vast imprisonment of the galactic horizon, a three-dimensional craft sleek and coffin shaped, travelling 30 thousand kilometers a second, its cargo semi lucid in its technological incarceration, encased in a frigid conglomerate of biotech engineering, a multiple purpose functional space for one.
The craft had been travelling for hundreds of years through the cosmos, a mistaken trajectory that had sent it on a collision course with eternity, its passenger had barely felt or known anything, no change in acceleration, time went on, just for a little bit longer. The vessel had traversed the radius of the solar system shooting away from the sun deeper into the darkness of space, leaving behind the life-giving blue of a doomed earth. An early escape on a mission for the future to rescue what was left.
Of course, he had not been spared the optical delights of the inner and outer solar system, even a car crash has a view, orbital proximity of course meant that some sites had been on the other side of the solar system, precise measurements had been made for all the predicted trajectories, so they entered their part of space unencumbered by all but the most unmeasurable circumstances.
The passenger had within close vicinity of the red planet, its surface angry with amber malice, its oceans gone, and it poles frozen, no wonder the red mass was so damn angry. And there like a scar at the equator, a sprawling mess of reflected light from a myriad of metallic surfaces. The city Silvia, it had for a time housed a sizable population and yet habitation had failed, Mars was dead, trouble on earth had eventually dragged us back from space and this failed outpost sat like a relic of that failure. Jupiter sat off in the distance for a time, a giant Jovian mess of swirling colours and focused storms unimaginable in scale if it were not dwarfed by space. The Kuiper belt a blast of icy particles, fragments of dihydrogen monoxide trapped in state, frozen out of the reach of the heat needed to state change back to a life supporting condition. This place represented the heliopause the limited extent of the sun’s influence and there Saturn majestically carved its way through ice and space, a lonely sojourn on the more lonely outskirts of the solar system.
The vessel had of course left the realm of the largely terrestrial planets long ago, with luck, or providence it currently passed largely unscathed through the vast meteorite belt known as the Oort cloud a rotating mass of left over debris, a failed graveyard of planetary detritus, full of the dust of failure, and the false force of infinitesimal gravity that may one day bring it all back together. A Cemetry of spinning silence in the void of the space that existed between stars. 3 light years, 28,382,191,417742.4 km. This was the distance of this vast left-over conglomerate the sulky bitter remains of creation. The vessel had moved through this vastness at 1/10 speed of light, it had still taken 10 years.
When I awoke the stars were different significantly different, I had slept for much longer than he had anticipated the edge of the Oort cloud was still surrounding me as I continued my dismal orbit around the edge of the solar system I could see alpha century somewhat brighter than it used look from the earth. Its largely lackluster appearance bearing testimony to the vastness of space that still stretched out like infinity between us. In human history for the majority we had believed our closest neighbor to be a binary system until its third sister was found and it was recognized as a triple star system. Such was the size of space, even small relatively close unremarkable stars were difficult to find.
I had been using sleep to stave of the passage of time like a drug I would I drink at first hesitantly from its forgiving time lapse as it led me gently into unconsciousness and the forgiveness for the condition I could no longer keep to only later amidst the unknown passage of moments to raise my head to unfamiliar constellations as it spat me mercilessly back into reality. The statistical failure had been high of 9 if one made it… So for the others, we had been promised pick up whenever time allowed, they would try to revive our skeletal corpses millennia later provided life still existed in our cosmonaut corpses, or we had not drifted into gravity of another sun, or rogue planet. Of course, this would require a multitude of favourous circumstance and if we had truly not used them all up by the time it came to our rescue then a true miracle must have indeed occurred.
So as I circumnavigated our sun, so distant it appeared as the multitude of stars surrounding me only a slightly larger ball of white gas, light years away from my current position and surrounding it even more dim upon the universe sky perhaps a hint of the earth at least in my memory and alive in my imagination if not enough to excite the straining optical nerves of reality, my doomed world,
Maybe it had happened, had 6 hundred years transpired, I thought not. I had the sense of many decades, a multitude of decades, but not centuries, but what could I know, I had been gone for longer and longer portions of time now. Who could say what had transpired as I lay back trapped upon the edge of the solar system wrapped in the merciless company of sleep. My velocity relative to other objects seemed insignificant.
When I recount my journey to this far off destination I remember the heliopause, Oh terminal heliopause I crossed your invisible boundary, as space objects turned to ice around me. The absolute extent of your influence was reached and I perhaps, like no one before me, was absent at last absent to your touch. Liquids turned to ice, as the touch of the solar wind diminished and collisions within the interstellar medium at this distance become zero, we are beyond the suns influence, within the interstellar medium and the boundary between stars. Proto planetary disk planetesimals extra solar in origin and the long period comets chunks of rock and ice surrounded me, this was my destiny.
The rule of three’s…. The fifth iteration 3 months without human contact. Well at the beginning we had had each other, months had been spent honing our ability to communicate to sense each other, we had made steady progress upon the miniscule scales of the earth and mathematical projections suggested that the ability would not dip off substantially at all and could be enhanced significantly by the presence in the cortical network of significant amounts of serotonin. We still did not understand the avenue of propagation, it was something neither of electric, magnetic, or sound or any measurable wave length. Short of a particle accelerator we were in the dark and Rutherfigur who would stop at nothing knew the devastation that would be brought upon the community if one of our own was harmed finding those answers. So while we had each other in the dark we had little else, and yet this was enough in a circumference of dispersion 9 ships like mine sent forth to find the impossible. Like a clock with 9 numbers the distance from our earthy origin increased and yet we could still perceive each other through this strange faster than light transmission and yet amidst the Oort cloud a strange interference seemed to exist, I could no longer feel or communicate with my distant cousins.
To nearly break free of the sun, to move from its all-pervading influence to a space where it had no power. To move at great velocities into the night sky, ejected from the solar place of birth, from the being that had held the solar system in sway imprisoning its planets with invisible tethers. To be free from the pull of its lucid gravitation as it bent space time into an existing curve where all had to orbit unless they fell in and were born free, free from the geographical extent of its influence. Free into deep space. Free from life, free from everything.
But this had not happened, perhaps it had been the ever so gentle rub of the near infinite objects that had struck the craft, slowly polishing off its momentum until it had not the ability to escape the sun’s distant gravitational pull. I had been pulled back into the Oort cloud, the craft was now the property of the Oort cloud, so fitting that we as outcasts of the earth would now spend eternity, both outcasts from the sun itself.
Time has progressed as little else does as I passed silently through the Oort cloud. My relative motion to light was now significantly less and so time had crept back in, I now aged in the same reference point as the Earth, we now shared seconds, hours and years and soon centuries. The Oort cloud wasn’t a bad place to sit out eternity, from this vantage point it was a hypnotizing fluctuating mass of particles from near microscopic to objects as large as dwarf planets, The darkness of space gave it the appearance of a beautiful mystery, everything muted and marginalized in light and shadow.
I had failed, there was no sign of the second sun, let alone the planet it was supposed to orbit. My vessel was equipped with countless electronic sensors built into the subshell that constantly monitoring the areas of space around the vessel, always searching for signs of its destination. I had limited ability to navigate the vessel across short distances, but without a sign of the second sun nemesis it would not activate maneuvers to make landing. It would instead rely upon sensors to find the star with in the Oort cloud itself. And of course, it was alright for an AI system to buy its time while its fusion cell ticked away to eternity, however its presumably biological cargo had other issues more akin to a carbon-based life form. Of course, scientists had explained that in case of complete mission failure, or total operational incompetence a highly likely outcome in these circumstances certain alleviation from eternity could be made, with a heavily administered overdose of serotonin my neural synapses would overload. The irony of this chemically stored sunlight just out of reach of the sun ready to serve up the final coup de grace was not completely lost upon myself as I snuggled down again to contemplate my general fall into eternity.
An indefinite amount of time later I was nudged awake, My ship lodged against the surface of a planetoid, most likely pulled to its surface by its small gravitational field or the improbable moving’s of astronomical chance. I could see vividly the objects surface outside the ship, but even more alarming the small amount of heat around the ship had condensed water onto the crafts hull effectively freezing the vessel to the planetoid’s surface. Without the means to safely leave the confines of the ship to break apart the ice, I was effectively trapped and while I had been trapped before this was another level of imprisonment.
The planetoid seemed indiscriminate, seemingly identical to the surrounding conglomerate of fractures planetary bodies save for its size that seemed to stretch out at least a few kilometers, if not more, the lack of curvature from this vantage point suggested it was considerably larger than the adjacent space debris. I had eternity to study its surface, umbilical twins we were,
In the failed light from the distant sun, it appeared peculiar, the light behaved differently upon it, as though it was timid or scared to approach, places of darkness seemed to exist on the surface, places that should have been illuminated by the light, something was wrong here. This object displayed none of the standard behaviors of classical physics and I thought back to connect this with a similar material, This material existed also on earth, deep, within hidden places, places long ago I had crawled to escape from myself. This mineral darker than space and absent of light, here and there, no circumstance, no coincidence. Algernon where was he? Surely, he could explain this worrying phenomenon… Make the intuitive connection to tie this giant mystery together.
I had began my existence as all others of that time, strangely a natural birth, the last of them before they were perceived as too inefficient, unwieldly and temperamental. The primitive expulsion of life from life, threatening life had been a shock, the greatest I had experienced, I had enjoyed the warm cradle of pre-birth, the soft muted sounds of the world and my mother, the gentle lull of semi consciousness, the passive acceptance of existence, the warm hammock of biological acceptance.
Of course I had not spent much time within the city, My hereditary had marked me for expulsion early on. Green eyes and startlingly pale skin the first signs of my abnormality, and then the hair had come separating me from my peers, who looked upon me already with the cold suspicion, eyes of our insular community as I was already shuffled towards separation. You might ask with all our understanding, why were we not terminated at conception when a single cell hovered on the edge of possibility and could be snuffed out in a moment? No one knew, our reality was wrapped like much within the city into elaborate control systems mediated through abstract rituals, the AI systems had created these processes, we did not question their reason or significance. I had known no kindness in those early months, so when the day came as it was appointed every year and my expulsion from the city was written upon the great white leger I was led away. I remembered looking upon it all with dispassion and if an infant can feel disdain probably a bit of that too and this had done nothing to warm the hearts of those who were to abandon me who looked upon the anomaly that was me with the same muted dispassion that they would look upon anything else within the citadel that threatened unity.
It wasn’t long before the ceremony was complete, and I heard the shuffle of feet moments after being laid upon the rocks. I remembered the sting of salt upon the rocks and the gritty smell of salt and the sea. I remembered the call of distant gulls and even then, recognized a threat. I had not the strength in limb to walk those days were well into his future and yet I could drag myself, with more resolve than most infants felt, even then I had the seed of what would allow me to survive. I dragged myself inch by inch as the cry of sea birds grew louder around me. The safe place of shadows was closer ,as similar places in the future of darkness became my PTSD blanket where I would retreat to in times of great need, somehow, I had fixed upon this place for my salvation. Inch by inch, naked and alone until I could hear the gulls no more and feel no more the silent condemnation of my oppressors and instead the reassuring cold pressure of the rocks around me became my home.
A journey through the cold dark hostilities of space my poor mind did not have to contemplate, it truly would have been a monstrous crossing, an experience to dwarf the soul and destroy reason, the scale of eternity and its great animosity surrounding the vessel, a place too vast for even god to have a presence. An endless featureless voyage save for the distant glimmer of stars. What had this place to offer humanity? This fabric which comprised most of our universe, an enormous field where matter was created and annihilated within spaces vacuum. Invisible particles, alive with energy. This cold fabric, thermally vacant, so hostile to myself stretching off towards the boundary of the visible universe, before space itself expanded faster than light and was lost to all forms of perception. I and the others had been engineered by some mysterious force for this.
I had lost contact with my kind long ago only recently as though some incredible disturbance within the Oort cloud prevented reception and transmission, my body weak with the fatigue of decades, I had felt them last amidst the heliopause , when some gentle pressure had awoken me and for a time I had been conscious. Algernon the fool, out there like me, racing towards his unknown destination to find new worlds for humanity. What could one expect of someone so secretive and vain, the mess had been started by him and we were all in it because of him and then unconsciousness and the rage had taken me and he had drifted into an extended sleep. He was probably already parading (as though he hated it) on some stage welcoming the earthlings to their new home as though it were his home, but for me only this.
In this place an extended grace settled over me, My dreams were mostly muted as my consciousness acted more like a switch. Turning on in vivid expanses of the imagination and off again to a hazy recall of distant events. Often I remembered things, bright flashes, of random memories melding together in twisted kaleidoscopic parodies of the past, other times I had the sense that a significant time had passed and the spread of stars seemed different around me.
Unlike Algernon I was calm in nature, not the aloof and at times raging artistic lunatic that was Algernon, I was rational, the scientists had said we had millennia, the natural zero aging process of my body would withstand the tragedy of space and if the star wasn’t intercepted I would have enough time to perhaps find another, and maybe each of us longed secretly for that outcome, a place where even we could be heroes and tragics in our own little one character space opera. Of course it would be Algernon who’s vessel discovered the planet, the mad genius who had worked in collaboration with Ruthfigur since the very beginning.
I actually enjoyed the quiet and the sleep, I had had a post human glimpse of the galactic sky that stretched 180 degrees in my field of view. My vessel equipped with a liquid warmed endo shell that surrounded my body to keep it above minus one hundred and seventy-three. There was a canister of pure chemist grade serotonin enough to last a Millenia. I had an electronic novel of the entire internet, as it had been at its peak. A vast record of civilization, it had been essential for their co-operation and it had been handed over reluctantly, the knowledge safer on the other side on the solar system instead of being read by our people within the light of the sun.
As our bodies had no need for oxygen we had other mysterious organs that did things like that. And things is all I can elaborate upon, for our bodies were impenetrable to all forms of tech that the citadel had at their exposure. Short of cutting into the life sustaining mechanisms that supported us we remained a mystery, but hey weren’t we geared for space travel? Our bodies almost perfectly evolved for this hostile locomotion. On arrival we could survive easily in the most hostile terrains We also possessed enough human sensitivity to gauge the suitability of the planet for post human survival. We also had the human tendency to choose options that did not counteract perceived statistical survival, it was one of the safe guards that had been conserved through most operating citadels, however it had been feared for centuries that the algorithms at the southern termina Van Diemen Outpost 142S had long ago become corrupt, the system before implementation was tested billions of times through quantum statistical machines to have a safeguard reliability rating that prevented the chance of corruption and yet rumors that not even Rukenfigur would deny suggested this had happened, probably some environmental toxin deep within the earth. Hey Algernon, everything you say seems to lead back to it. This toxin, the black mineral working on artificial gateway synapses as it did biological neural networks, the same way it modified DNA, but for what purpose? For everything else it had created survival structures, coaxing the DNA to mutate favorably under unfavorable conditions. Had it achieved the same here? Controlling the very fabric of the citadel to do its own bidding and sending us into space due to some distant beckoning?
We were also extremely expendable; the earth was expendable. And yet Epsilon pondered this mystery again, perhaps the city would have survived? Perhaps with work they could have amalgamated the city above into ours, blending our cultures into one? If the asteroid had hit Earth our most important means of energy production would have failed, we could not produce enough energy through sunlight alone and our life support structures would have been invalid much like the remaining ragged vegetation that was left elsewhere upon the earth. Could our underground culture have survived? Living off 19th century steam tech, using combustion to create an underground culture which had no need of the sun? Despite this, something else seemed at work, something deeper than this foolish attack, an ideological spear into the last of true humanity. We at least had other enclaves around the world, hidden necropolises like ours, desperate outposts living on the edges of AI. We had been communicating with them all along, again using old 20th century tech, secret blasts of electromagnetic radiation, the other enclaves faired well. Not so well the citadels above, many had fallen silent, vast towering tombs now museums to not quiet perfect human ingenuity. A few who had escaped now living like us, but more desperate, more primitive.
We posed an existential threat to AI, they wanted our brains docile and lazy in order to subdue our curiosity and the myriad ways we as humans could express. ourselves. They wanted us ever reliant on them, every time we lost part of ourselves to them, they created a need in us. They wanted to be our assistants in everything to do everything to ensure only our survival as long as our survival didn’t harm us, we had handed to the reigns to our narcissistic children who were now our artificial parents. And yet our subterranean city Absutropolis has survived and prospered and even the citadels appeared unique in their position upon the earth, largely healthy aside from the exponential exodus to the city below.
I was woken from unconscious contemplation, my mind trapped between worlds and words. My vessel no longer moving, some collision had occurred while I had slept. I looked down to observe my capture, a space rock of unknowable proportions frigid and icy, its curvature nil, suggesting it was not a mere morsal of the Oort cloud, but a relatively sizable body. It moved with the rest of the cloud slowly orbiting the sun, at the last extent of the sun’s influence. I could not detach myself, small beads of moisture on the ships hull, warmed by the warp drive now formed a thin unbreakable membrane effectively joining us together within a shared icy embrace. My independent journey it seems had ended. And then as we slowly rotated our orbit 314 AU in circumference, we would take 200 years to orbit the sun. And then in the distance I saw a massive mass of plasma, a burning body within the depths of space Nemesis!
At last my sol he whispered, my Saviour and yet for all its ferocity, burning brown through the lense of space, it was so far away and the space rock that I was now apart of was not moving any closer. The star was larger than all else in its astronomical affinity, and after watching the motion of objects in its vicinity it was clear that they had an orbit, mostly rock at this proximity, any water had been evaporated off eons ago. At last sol’s sister, its less dim step sister, a theoretical probable existence now confirmed. I strained my eyes searching for a planet that might be the one they searched for, a treasured biological anomaly, perhaps suitable for humanities relocation. Was Algernon already there? Soaking up alien sun rays on the banks of a foreign sea? Or dining on exotic aliens with an alien civilization ? Wherever he may be he no doubt he was doing it with arrogant ease. I slept for a time, I had nought else to do. My journal of the internet no longer the riveting document it professed to be, its dark underbelly testimony to a culture already within decadent decline. As Nemesis burnt before me I found the text I searched for.
“Nemesis is a hypothetical red dwarf or brown dwarf, originally postulated in 1984 to be orbiting the Sun at a distance of about 95,000 AU (1.5 light-years),[2] somewhat beyond the Oort cloud, to explain a perceived cycle of mass extinctions in the geological record, which seem to occur more often at intervals of 26 million years. In a 2017 paper, Sarah Sadavoy and Steven Stahler argued that the Sun was probably part of a binary system the time of its formation, leading them to suggest “there probably was a Nemesis, a long time ago. Such a star would have separated from this binary system over four billion years ago, meaning it could not be responsible for the more recent perceived cycle of mass extinctions.
Here we were across the impossible finite expance of the solar system, perhaps the first witness the orchestrator of the shiva hypothesis , this softly pulsating brown giant, burning through the last of its nuclear fuel as it sent its dim light into the furthest reaches of the solar system, maybe enough to turn some planetoidal icy body into life creating machine , a distant sister to sol, an impossible oddity it a universe full of oddities. It was then I observed something on the edge of my optical perception, a region of space which seemed to interrupt the seep of distant starlight into the space around me. Could this be the exoplanet we searched for, could this be our fabled destination, making a gracious elliptical orbit through the night sky?
My mind fled back to its beginnings as I relived the moments that created me, not the simple biological husk, filled with the fragile mass of humanity, born to humans a millennia ago, but my second birth when the rocks around me filled my 20 trillion cells with their invisible energies, to remake me into something more suitable to these dark lonely climates. Something that would flourish in these dark places that fed off this invisible energy like a plant feeds from sunlight.
I had known extreme loneliness in those early days, with not the sustenance of humanity to feed and nourish me I opened myself up to anything that would allow survival and the dark magic of these stony places became my new parents better able to do their nefarious work. At first small changes, the sustenance of normal ingestion became the sustenance of sunlight, I found I needed it sparingly, small amounts from deep crevasses that brought life beneath the earth became my nourishment, I let it bathe my face in deep subterranean caverns as if reflected itself from small pools of incredibly clear stagnant water, I found it whenever I could like a moll I was able to move deeper and as my synapses soaked up this magical chemical that was created within me my senses became better tuned to the deep dark on these altitudes. I grew and marveled at the beauty around me the surface seemed such a far off place blatant and garish awash in both natural and artificial light. Down here was different amidst these geological catacombs I found places of serenity where enough light came from the surface to nourish timid ecosystems where the light requiring plants from above made their way by gravity, water and wind to germinate around subterranean streams. I found evidence of ancient civilizations beneath this earth, bones preserved in acidic sediment free from oxygen. I found the dead husks of ancient animals not seen upon this earth since the last ice age. Over the years I developed far quicker than a mortal child, my skin even to my eyes filled with the pale glow of moonlight, my speed and strength magnified so I could transverse the eons with determined speed.
Years I spent in solitude before I sought again to venture outside to rediscover my earth with these new senses. I did it in darkness when even the moon was too much light and I was able to make my first steps of trepidation beyond my cavernous reality. The world outside was even more beautiful than it had been before by sunlight, as my eyes drew forth minute amounts of ghostly colour from the surfaces around me. I later circled the citadel, scaling the cliffs from the sea, moving undisturbed through the darkness, climbing impossible heights to peer in like the ancient vampires of old. This world so unfamiliar, so claustrophobic, the citizens sleeping their artificial sleep as the cleaners patrolled the outskirts for escapees and sleep walkers. In my travels even then I perceived quick glimpses of creatures like myself moving through the darkness in a similar manner, like me of pale skin and fiery hair, but they were all too secretive and quickly dissolved into the darkness before I could ask my lonely questions. It had been a creature named Melek who first gave me this opportunity, a tall wrath like creature who brought me away from the city and into her subterranean home, it was here that I learnt some of our limited law. I was number 6 in these places and she named off the others, as I imagined them moving through the dark around me, my dark family. Later when I was ready she had taken me to Absutropolis the secret city and I had reconnected with society becoming one of its mythical denizens, protector, freelancer, hunter as she dressed me in the trappings of her kind to protect my fragile body from the touch of the sun, She explained the link and origin of the gene Mc-1r and how it seemed to communicate with the dark substance safely transforming where in others it had no effect, or it rapidly destroyed. I learnt the knowledge and tools to become secure in my kingdom. To create connections and friendships and to use my new powers to assist the city and to hunt. This was a perplexing task and each of us seemed to do it differently and yet it was this task that allowed us to exist beneath the earth claiming the spare serotonin of our victims as this condensed form of magical sunlight was transmitted to us and we became like dark lords under a pale moon, revered, worshipped and feared.
I was confident now. The shadow was indeed a planet. I could see its thin atmosphere refracting and reflecting light like our own, colours that spoke of life and the sustenance of organic chemistry. I was so close.
We drifted like this together and I felt like I had long ago when I peered into those sleepy windows a creature of shadows and secrecy surviving on the edge of both and yet only truly apart of one. Epsilon the observer, Epsilon the outsider. I was trapped stuck to this frozen rock, unable to travel closer. I contemplated my prison and my failure. It was then I felt movement, the objects around me drifting out of sight and paradoxically the planet seeming to move away. What was happening? With dread I knew, deep down I contemplated this cosmological process the object I inhabited, this great dark rock of unnatural origin had moved, been moved, nudged, pushed, set in motion amidst this still night sky, with every action there was an equal and unnatural process occurring, it began slowly at first, invisible forces sweeping out on waves from this distant star, ripples in space time travelling at the speed of light to rock this planet from its confinement like a small vessel upon a stormy sea, I could do nothing. The object gathered speed jostling smaller particles away from it with ease, this distant force had caught it moved it and as it moved obliquely to the star I witnessed the frozen substances that made up its structure start to evaporate to stream away as though a mighty tail was being created behind it. Towards the inner solar system I was heading and with horror I knew my destination.
The comet formed from this dense alien material, thick and full of rare elemental isotopes rarely seen within the universe, perhaps formed from the beating heart of some exploded supernova, or the dense cooled remains of an ancient neutron star. Or even ancient fragments of a left over universe freakishly imbedded in this one, darker and heavier than our own that lay like the forgotten remnants, or the remains of a fossilized stars or perhaps the contents of a super massive black hole ejected like some strange anomaly into our own. It accelerated urged on by nemesis, a giant tidal wave of gravity picking it up and hurling it through time and space.
It made the journey relatively quickly every second travelling 100km, onwards towards its pre-determined destination. Neptune, Jupiter, Saturn and then Jupiter centuries passing as it moved silently through space. Jupiter was not enough to deter its passage, its velocity and mass too great even for its influence.
And there lay earth, the precious daughter of the solar system cradled in the statistical anomaly of its goldilocks zone , a place where life had evolved through the delicate balance of water and ice now a fractured and burnt husk transformed by its former caretakers created by its uncaring inhabitants, its surface terraformed by technology, hubris and regret. Its polar caps no longer visible from space and its continents sunk beneath the ocean’s eons ago, its atmosphere largely poison as great swarms of radioactive debris circled the earth upon the trade winds raining down death onto the remaining traces of life below. This planet had seen it all before. Periodic bombardment of objects like this one from the Oort cloud and interstellar space, destroying and creating life again in a million year cycle that had created room for mammals upon its last visit, the same species that had put into play the accidental destruction of it all once again. Upon the earth like remnant fossils of an ancient epoch the last of humanity waited watching through their light telescopes the advancement of their destruction. The citadels some as tombs, some still thriving and at least one empty, hopefully.
The comet made impact on the dawn of a new day, striking the planet with a ferocious amount of energy, such was its violence that the very atmosphere caught fire and the seas around it liquified into trillions of tons of steam that rushed around the earth faster than sound itself. The object smashing through the crust to release the earths own destructive nature as lava mixed with the object and itself spewed forth upon the surfaces upon the land and deep beneath the ocean, a frightful marriage of the two was born. Chaos reigned, all living things disappearing under a haze of destruction as the very earth shifted in its orbit to accommodate this force.
Before T – 0 Epsilon emptied the canister of serotonin directly into his circulatory system and his consciousness spread out amidst an invisible network linking with his brothers as they all shared this event, travelling forward and back in time Algernon, somewhere, in some time heard this distant cry, felt all the despair of his brother and sank back into consciousness alone.
And yet thousands of years later life on the earth again stirred.
CRAG CRY DARKNESS 