Ready Room or Not

Six hours later he left the Ready Room, mentally and physically exhausted. Mother had shown him no mercy. She had forced him to replay the apocalypse event over and over; which had surprisingly drained his physical stamina. Very clearly, his physical health was tied to his initiation of the apocalypse process. He noticed that every time that he had ordered his specific apocalypses that he became a little more tired. The other process was mentally exhausting. Trying to come up with a new way to wipe out an entire planet's worth of people taxed him mentally. He knew that the mental stress was not connected to the apocalypse process, it was a matter of pure and simple mental exhaustion; which came from using brain cells that hadn't been fired in years. Declan knew he wasn't stupid, but his job didn't exactly require a lot of imagination or creativity. He attributed his mission failure to his not really need to think about what he was doing. He just did each assignment and moved on to the next when he finished his work. He never had to think about anything, he just crunched raw data, applied it to his assignment, and handed his work in at the end of the day. If he was honest with himself, it was his HUD that did most of the work; he had just guided the device in the necessary direction that was required.

Thanks to Mother's generous uploading of information he now knew the ins and outs of moving to each planet, returning home, how to scan animals that he wanted to populate his planet with, an how to retrieve artifacts for his own personal edification. The only restriction that he could find in that aspect was that snow globes were off limits. He could live with that.

To leave his home planet he had to go to a launch bay, which would open a portal directly to the world he was to destroy. To return he had to be at his entry point, and nowhere else would suffice. As far as he could understand it, it had something to do with the portal tech. He had what he needed on Homeworld. He had assigned a temporary name of Homeworld to his new planet. He would come up with something later on, but for now that was good enough. He had already decided that he was going to make his entry point in to each world at the geolocation that would correspond to his world’s Bucky Starr. If he was going to find Sarah anywhere, it would be there.

Declan had made up his mind that he was going to rescue every Sarah that he could. He realized that they would not be his Sarah, but that didn’t matter. Every one of them that died due to his inaction would be a small piece of his soul that he would never get back. He had already checked with Mother. The Invigilator would permit him to save some people from each world if he so desired it, but that there would be a filter that would not allow him to bring everyone. The Invigilator had a profile that he would not allow to move about the cosmos. From what little Declan could glean from Mother was that those people were what triggered the giant alien to want the world wiped out. Beyond that she could not be more specific, and would not reveal more.

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Declan put on a fresh blue suit and a red tie. He liked the red tie, it made him feel stronger and more alert. It was foolish, he knew, but the fact was that the power tie image worked for him. He also picked up a large leather bound book with gold gothic font trimming that read HOW TO APOCALYPSE in bold letters across the front cover. He’d had mother create a manual for him. Yes, he could have simply downloaded the information via HNet, but it felt good to have the guidelines right in his hands. It made it more real for him. Headnet was great for playing games, experiencing old movies and TV shows, music, and a million other forms of entertainment but he far preferred actual learning over instant learning.

He walked out to the Launch Bay and stared into space. It was disconcerting to realize that the bay was actually a telepad that would send him to the dimension of the Earth that he needed to destroy. He was still on Homeworld, but through some sort of wobbly whimey space tesseract physics he was also on a vessel floating just outside of his target world. He watched as the world turned, oblivious to its imminent demise. It was ironic that as powerful as he now was, holding the fate of this planet in the palm of his hand, that he felt so helpless. He had no choice in what was to come. Mother had seen to that. She had run psych programs that made him more amenable to doing what needed to be done. He knew this, because while he hated the concept and his inability to not go apocalyptic he was eerily at peace with the notion of wiping out a few billion humans at a go.

Mother’s voice broke his concentration. “Have you decided on how you wish to destroy this planet?” Declan shook his head. He had scanned the requirements. It was a simple wipe the whole bloody planet’s human population off the map job. It was a fairly simple and very easy to accomplish assignment. He could have just run his final scenario for GPA and been done with it, but he wanted to do this right, and actually tailor the apocalypse to what the people deserved. Right bastards would have a hard time of it; while good people would get it quick and clean. Hopefully, they would never see it coming. He owed it to them to at least try to be fair.

“No, Mother,” he surprised himself how calm and resolute his voice was, “I thought that I’d reconnoiter the place, get a feel for the people and see what I could come up with.” He paused, licked his lips and asked, “There aren’t any astronauts or space stations that I need to worry about are there?”

She gave him a reassuring , “No.”

“Anything else I need to be aware of?”

“Nothing that wasn’t in the briefing profile,” she stated. Then she decided to add, “Although you are behind schedule. You wasted two days practicing on how to properly destroy a planet, and now you only have twenty two hours, ten minutes, and fifty three seconds to end this world. So, you might want to move quickly.”

Declan sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose, of course he was late. He was always late. His timing sucked. “Send me,” was the last thing he said before everything went white.