Apollo sighed. He should have felt relieved that Autun was here to help them, but he couldn’t shed the feeling of dread that pitted in his stomach. Standing up from his table in the stark room, he nodded in the direction of the nudist. The desperation of the situation excused Autun’s wardrobe (or lack thereof) faux pas. There was nothing he could do, despite his deep pockets. The turn of events were beyond any mere human’s control. “I suppose this means we’re at your mercy. Better, I suppose, than being blindsided by it all.” Autun smiled, a mischievous twinkle in his eye, “Keep everyone planetside. You’ll avoid a lot of trouble this way,” he said, and in that same twinkle disappeared. Though he appreciated the art that developed from it, Apollo never really considered himself a man of faith. So when he had to put his faith in a being he had only just met to avoid a dire catastrophe, he was admittedly uncomfortable. His shoulders jolted when one of his aides called him out of his apprehension. The aide a pretty, young, synthetic nodded at him. Its soft features and blonde hair belied rigid programming that did not suffer impromptu deviation from schedule. “You’re due to your five thirty address to the public,” it punctiliously reminded him. Apollo stared at it for a moment, doing his best to gather his thoughts. “Yes… Yes, of course,” He rasped, nodding. “Is everything ready?” The aide nodded quietly. [i]An hour later[/i] “Earlier today, some unverified information was released to the public, in which we are conducting a full and thorough investigation to ascertain the legitimacy of such claims. As of this moment, we have been unable to prove the veracity of such claims. We take matters like this very seriously and will continue to conduct our investigation, in which the national aeronautics and space administration has pledged full cooperation.” Apollo stood outside the plaza of the Discorporate Building, listening to General Heinzemann. The complex was rife with memories. Spirits from the past. Apollo recalled delivering the grand news of his presidency, how the people cheered leaning from the upper balustrades behind him. He remembered the speech he delivered when he bailed out the financially stagnant and failed North American government. He remembered announcing the evolution of Earth to Earth F67X, and their integration into the United Earth Confederation. He had one more dialog to deliver to the public since the impending catastrophe had been leaked—a reassurance. “We would like everyone to please be patient as the investigation continues, and we assure you that everyone’s mutual safety is of the utmost concern. And now, we have a few words from President Amon.” Heinzemann passed Apollo as the politician approached the pedestal, gripping its lacquered corners. As the setting anti-sun’s crepuscular rays filtered through the various office complexes and edifices, Apollo squinted. He blinked back the light as his contacts polarized, and saw the sea of people who stood before him, fear buried under their stark expressions. A thousand faces stared back at him in anticipation of his words. The president cleared his throat and spoke, “We have experienced our share of hardship. Twenty years ago, a trail of devastation was carved through the gut of our nation. Many of us still feel that loss to this very day. Then, not even a handful of years ago, an attack on this tower claimed the lives of many citizens, first responders, and family members. While these experiences still hurt us and haunt us, they’ve also tempered us. We’ve grown closer, and learned to lean on one another.” Apollo took a moment, scanning the crowd and uncharacteristically demurely admitted, “I, myself, have learned much, as well.” “I’ve learned that the people of Earth—from the Zaibatsu’s of East Asia to the Royal European Union, from the South American Federation to the South-West Asia Group—are one people. I’ve learned that our power comes from each other. I’ve learned that we can never be buried. Not by terrorist attacks, foreign invasions, or least of all misinformation.” Apollo raised his arms, “I’ve learned that, as long as we trust one another, protect one another, and care for one another that we will be well. I am a part of ‘we’, and I’m not afraid to lead by example. So know this when I tell you all… that noth-” As Apollo delivered his final assurances to his audience, he could see the lens of a sun dog’s parhelic circle. The center of it detonated in a distant, silent, amber conflagration. Wispy clouds of volcanic orange and blinding alabaster fulminated from its center mass as the holocaust spread. President Amon cut himself off for a moment as his mouth hung slack. The blinding rays of light scoured through the city streets as a tredecillion other distant plumes of flame intervened through the universe, joining the sun’s dirge. Power to the block went out, but the star’s vivid coruscation kept the streets ablaze. For once, the people and their politicians were aligned in their outrage. Apollo’s last thoughts broke his stately demeanor to betrayed fury and outright horror. “He lied! He fucking lied!” [b]Darkness[/b] [center]***[/center] [b]The Shattered Realm, formerly known as the anti-plane[/b] A thousand eons had passed since the inception of the Shattered Realm. This universe, born from conflict, sat wholly abandoned since the Fault’s death throes consumed it. Longer still past had the escalating concatenation of hubris and bravado occurred. The blighted and forsaken universe was a medal of shame for those who retreated defeated so long ago. However, even from the desolate carcass of the Shattered Realm, purpose could be found anew. The shattered husk of the Milky Way, or what remained of its constituents, would endure another displeasure upon its ravaged corpse. Events occurring within a contiguous universe “bent” space into what could be conceived as a supercluster sized white hole far outside the galaxy, dwelling within the blackness of space. As this swell in space grew, its apergent-inspired trajectory dismantled the Local Group and sent its components racing across the Virgo Supercluster where they were sure to cause untold devastation some time millions of years into the future. Not the Milky Way, though. There were special plans for this galaxy. A careful balance of gravitational forces, psychic energy, and bioforce manipulation kept the Milky Way in place, unmarred and unbothered. Within the spiral galaxy, the solar system sat, spinning abound a dead star. The Sun, a victim long since ravaged by an ancient catastrophe. Earth, or anti-earth as it was called in this case, orbited as a frozen tundra. Searching past its frozen oceans, its blasted geography, or the fragments of its shattered moon that buried deep within it's cold dead mantle, the hoary rind of a city stood like a cenotaph marking a casket. The debris, moon rocks, and shattered remnants of the Appalachian buried the outer suburbs in a cairn. At the epicenter of this city, unperturbed by time, or nature, or outside forces stood a stage without an audience. The empty courtyard was cleaner than the rest of the devastated city. The dereliction of the rest of the city shrouded the malice that was present here long ago. A Sun rose once again on this world, warming its long-dead cockles. Not the dead neutron star that sat at the center of the system, but a red ocular marred with a pit of black floated over the midnight sky, lighting the world in a hue of cardinal. Below this lens, a dripping silver smile emerged and a nondescript mannequin-like figure bursting from its protoplasmic membrane. To speak his name was to invite him in. Upon the rubble’s surface a black miasma of shadows leaked out of the wound heralding the sign of something sinister, and taking shape is what appeared to be a man. Wreathed in burning darkness he stepped down the hillock of blasted stone and upon the crumbled champaign that sat buried between ranges of concrete and rebar. The cold being in the burning cloak knowingly smiled upon his accursed creation. They had called upon the wrong god. [center]***[/center] [b]Universe UI32[/b] Apollo sighed. He should have felt relieved that Keichii was here to help them, but he couldn’t shed the feeling of dread that pitted in his stomach. He stood up from his table in the bleach-white interrogation room and nodded with resigned acceptance. There was nothing he could do and though his influence on the planet was deep, the universe bore no respect for politics nor clout. “Things could be worse, I suppose. We could be without you,” he rasped, with a nod. Keichii bowed shallowly, “I implore you to keep our people here. It is the only way I can save them,” he said, wisping away. Apollo was a man of devout faith, and when the teenage japanese boy showed up the first time, many years ago to save their world from an encroaching asteroid he took it as a sign of God’s favor. So if putting his faith in this emissary was nigh natural for him, then why did he have such a bad feeling about this? A test, to be sure. One of his aides interrupted his ruminations with a call. The aide, a middle-aged, somewhat haggard looking woman who perpetually had several strands of grey hair springing to freedom from her otherwise tightly bound ponytail, waved him down. “Mr. Amon! Mr. Amon! Your five thirty public address is now! It’s five thirty!” She quailed. President Amon blinked a few times as he rubbed his stubble, beginning to make his way out of the room and down the hall. “Yes, of course.” The hurried shuffle of his secretary following behind echoed through the hallway. “Is everything ready?” “Yes, but we have to hurry.” She said, picking up pace as the two passed by wide bay windows that overlooked a courtyard in the complex. Apollo stopped by the window as he looked outside. The benches, trees, and shrubbery all awash in coral light. The world outside his office, inundated in an otherworldly hue that not even the deepest sunset could match. The president of Earth UI32 looked up and beheld the scarlet Sun. “...What is that?” [b]Darkness[/b] [center]***[/center] [b]The Faultiverse, Val’gara[/b] The bead that was Earth became a pinprick of light in the distance as Brobdingnag folded space and jumped Val’garan civilization nearly two astronomical units to the awaiting reality-tear, just past Neptune. Anathema linked with the surrounding hive for the first time in a very long time. A flurry of events and emotions flooded into the herald. The Herald saw the omniversal basement shattered by a mad being, and the Val’garan will fractured with their god’s multiversal dispensation. The memories assailed him relentlessly, instantaneously, but also transiently. Colossus created a peacekeeper, and the spawn of Anathema revolted against a smattered front. The unthinkable, previously linked Val’gara killing other Val’gara, a breakdown of their way of life. The images devolved with the sight of Colossus, their home, bereft of life. The multiverse spat upon Colossus a final time when an improbable gestation resulted in an uncanny birth, and its crowing infant, Caorthannach, rent the corpse of their home. Anathema witnessed a mélange of memories as the Val’gara auto-cannibalized their civilization. These scenes gave perspective to what the Val’gara were with their psi-link, and what they were without. The images should have filled the Herald with despair, but instead, he felt powerful. Anathema roared out with a trillion other battlecries as the Val’garan swarm blitzed forth to the object of their desire: a circle of pitch surrounded by a radiant accretion disc. The flotilla’s internal compass pointed to their Polaris—a metaphysical celestial body that flared in their mind’s eye with intermittent verdant lucency. Sal’Chazzar, cogent of the need of their children, wavered as a trillion captive races waged internal war upon each other. Their lamentations frothed in violent revolution, yet even scarce vestiges of the dead god’s authoritative will could suppress them… for now. The Val’garan flotilla passed through the nebula revitalized as they approached their destination. The euphoria that surged over Anathema wiped from his mind the taint of the species’ past sins. The unity that accompanied that psi-link eradicated any frustrations about Jack’s weakness. Despite the silence of space, the psi-link was ablaze with activity. From the elephantine war-bellow of Gattusk in the vanguard to the annoyed grunts of the billies on the fringe, the Herald joined his brethren as a statistic in an unyielding and unending swarm of starving, rabid creatures, who ventured forth to feast, each bubble of subspace a bubble in a flowing river of hungry mass. The creatures entered the accretion disks light, passing blindly through the ergosphere into the darkness that lies beyond where they would exodus to their promised land. [center]***[/center] [b]Universe T767[/b] 5:20 [i]Five minutes.[/i] A haggard old Apollo Amon thought as he stole a glance from his wristwatch. As he crawled on elbows and knees through a dingy ventilation shaft, his joints cracked. If only he’d the chance to do this twenty years ago. But the Remnants entrusted him with this task: to save the world, perhaps even all worlds. The haggard wastelanders put their faith in him, but more importantly he put his faith in the science behind their plan. [i]In five minutes I’ll lose my only chance.[/i] Apollo had many tense moments through his lifetime in politics, but the stakes of this moment culminating forty years of preparation were beyond anything he could have ever dreamed. Were things different, he’d scoff at the irony of the situation. A seventy-five year old with bad hips crawling through a ventilation shaft purposed to save the universe. His knees ached as he plowed the briefcase onward ahead of him. An uncomfortable thirty foot crawl through consistently cramped spaces led him to the vent that overhung an interrogation room he found entirely familiar. Before long, he was there, just moments before the group filtered into the room. The party below spent a few moments talking before another appeared whose reputation, through whatever austere inculcations of the past, required everyone present to greet him by name. As everyone in the room deferred to Lysander, the aged Apollo saw himself and swallowed a lump in his throat, clicking open the briefcase as silently as he could. The fact that everyone below groveled led credence to his mantra. [i]He’s not me, and this will be better for everyone.[/i] He repeated his aphorism over and over again, as the machine in front of him adjusted in a series metallic clicks. Sweat trickled down Apollo’s temples and forehead alternating his glance from his watch to the whirring machine as its wheels and pinions unfurled the rest of the apparatus. Below he could hear their conversation and a continuity that paralleled his own, many years ago. “We owe you a great deal, Lysander. A debt that we will repay in-” “-Pabst and ham hocks.” Lysander interrupted, prompting an eye roll from the Apollo above. “You know my price, and they better be better than last time. Make sure everyone sits tight. This shit’s complicated stuff—saving worlds’n all.” “Of course. After my speech to the public, we’ll throw a celebration in your honor.” [i]Maybe I should just allow the Fault to rupture.[/i] Apollo thought to himself. With a few final clicks the machine was ready. Apollo looked down, his veins running icy. [i]To a better world. To new life.[/i] Then flipped a copper switch. [b]Darkness.[/b] [center]***[/center] [b]Universe QXU8[/b] Here, at the edge of the rising action of his life, Asclepius thought back to the teachings of his father. At the time, the man seemed hellbent. The only time he would truly show passion towards anything was when he discussed physics, and ranted about this ‘cycle’. The boy spent many of his early days cowering behind his mother, Trina. However, in time he saw wisdom in his father’s words, credited by the ranter’s Nostradamus-like predictions of events that happened far after his death. Nostalgia was a powerful tool. Maybe it was Apollo’s rhetoric gleaned from his years in the political schema that convinced Asclepius, or maybe it was fate that made him take it seriously. The universe had a cruel sense of humor. His profession dictated he was to save lives, not end them. Irony would have the last laugh this day. Asclepius didn’t share in the sense of amusement; deathbed promises do strange things to human rationale. As Asclepius passed through the checkpoints he raised his badge to the security guard. The guard nodded, “Thank you, Dr. Amon.” He nodded, and paced towards the west wing. He’d gone over the scenario a thousand times over, and yet his hands trembled like palsy. This would be his end, but in doing so he’d save the world from becoming like his father. He’d seen enough in his lifetime to understand the veracity of his father’s claims. Dr. Amon checked his watch, a leather-strapped hand-me-down that looked like it was no less than a thousand years old, but somehow still functioned. 5:20 He had less than five minutes before the meeting. Asclepius entered the stark interrogation chamber and surveyed his surroundings. Two guards one that the doctor didn’t recognize, and Apollo remained in the chamber. The president took a moment to regard the doctor, “I’m glad you’re here, and while hopefully your services won't be needed. Our guest can be a bit.. Unpredictable.” Asclepius nodded once, meeting the younger version of his father always pretzeled his insides. It was strange seeing a version of him without a liquor bottle in his hand and a five o’clock shadow. A few seconds past and with a violent distortion a man appeared. Still dressed in his kevlar body armor, Forge looked at the assembled diplomats and guards as if he were regarding ants scuttling about an anthill. “What.” He growled. Asclepius surreptitiously positioned himself next to an individual on the security detail, a non-operative. His vision bounced from the vent, to his watch, and then the guard next to him. [i]One minute,[/i] the doctor thought to himself, wringing his sweaty palms. His attention snapped back into the present as he head Forge’s assent to help Apollo and Earth, prompting an unburdened sigh from Amon. “Everyone needs to remain planetbound for the duration of the event. No teleporting, no travel, no-” Burying his anxiety, Asclepius interrupted Forge’s demands when he shouldered the unsuspecting guard and drew his hip-holstered firearm, but was only able to raise it to the vent before he could feel his wrist being crushed by one of the operatives present in the room. The doctor wildly squeezed the trigger, lighting the ceiling up as he was almost instantly overpowered and smashed into the wall. The shocked shouts from Apollo were distant murmurs as pain flashed through Asclepius’s body and his ears rang, but the last thing he could see before he blacked out was the pooling accumulation of red that puddled on the ceiling. [i]I did it,[/i] he thought, [i]he was right. He was right..[/i] [b]Darkness[/b] [center]***[/center] [b]GalaXelas[/b] The presence of Val’garan entities empowered Sal’Chazzar with purpose and focus amidst the mental storm that eddied within. Amplifying their abilities, spacetime curved, bubbling and warping to the point of nearly creating a pocket dimension of its own. Gone was the Val’gara, the supermassive black hole, and the accretion disk. All that remained was an apparitional nebula of condensate, shrouding the wormhole within an off-white ectoplasmic mist. As ominous as a maritime yellow flag, a faint crimson diffused through the mist, illuminating its bowels. The aurora, like vessels upon the Atlantic Graveyard, entered into the nebula and disappeared completely. In actuality, even GalaXelas didn’t understand the aurora Ender used to cow the rest of the Faultiverse, and instead opted to store it away, using the nebula as a battery. The arcane project experienced a breakdown parallel to the Faultiverse itself as it’s will was eroded away by countless other gnashing teeth and screaming consciousness within the infinite myriad of the Val’gara. As the supercomputer allocated more and more resources to retain its identity and primary function, it relegated other tasks, some which would affect all of creation. As Ender bent and twisted the structure of the multiverse, splitting away coterminous plains to seclude the Faultiverse, one such reality acted upon its own accord. In a macrocosmic metaphor for granular convection this universe, despite all the shaking, oriented itself in an exact distance and exact angle to the Faultiverse like it was magnetically guided, directed by intelligence or unexplained attraction to the center of reality. These universes, the Faultiverse and the other verse, inevitably, invariably became juxtaposed. This became the lone access and its toll, passing through gravitational flux even light could not escape. Between two universes, bridged over the subtended chaos of pre-scalar field entropy, was an Einstein-Rosenberg bridge, hardly hospitable, with its crushing reality warping tidal forces. A conduit between universes wherein its nexus sat solid mass that pulled two universes together. A black hole existed in one and another astronomical object formed within the other. The primary black hole’s accretion disk radiated a flaring red iris upon its blackened pupil. A chain of hypernovae exploded heralding infinite levels of energy that erupted, following the mold of Hawking’s Radiation from the center mass, osmosed polluted Twardzik Thought Radiation of a very dark realm. The particles of the energy/gas clouds alighted in a prismatic array as the gamma-ray bursters carried with them not electromagnetic radiation, but instead raw bioforce—energy to feed Sal’Chazzar’s starving children. The alluvion transuded from the poles of the supermassive black hole metastasizing within the space of the Faultiverse as new space that would supplant the current void, beset with its own realities. The oblivion of the Shattered Realm hungered with the advent of its godhead, alternate universes experiencing armageddon exsiccated, and with alarming celerity vanished as their collective energy was used to pay Ender’s orange-faced energy tax. Truly, Ender had built the wall, and universes UI32, T767, QXU8, and endless others paid for it.