Chapter 2: Skorde - Despair

The pickup started smoking. At first I was totally split between trying to decipher the notification in front of me and trying to save the vehicle. The truck was the easier one to understand, I decided. I picked myself up and ran to the hood, popping it open as fast as I could reach it.

The battery was sizzling. Arcs of electricity raced between the two terminals, jumping the gap and almost entirely ignoring the metal connections. I stupidly reached my hand in to disconnect the terminal and got a very healthy zap that passed through my hand and jumped from my elbow to the ground directly, completely ignoring any semblance of the path of least resistance. My hand twinged from the roasting, burn marks lightly trailing the skin. It would blister, but the actual shock wasn’t terrible. I was more worried about the fact that my pickup had just destroyed itself by ignoring the laws of nature. A few moments passed as I got to watch the battery melt itself. Once it was completely out of juice, it fizzled to small sparks and a lot of melted plastic. I tentatively grasped at the connectors from a much better distance than last time, and only after I was satisfied that I wouldn’t get another nasty surprise, I pried the connections loose and channeled some anger into throwing the too-hot battery away.

It was going to be a long night. I sat down again to stare at the truck which was miraculously not on fire. Since the other battery didn’t explode the same way, maybe it could be fixed? Would the connectors even work again?

A very heavy sigh escaped from my lips as I switched back to the other problem on the list, the big blue box that followed my line of sight. Just watching it didn’t help. At first I was getting increasingly worried as the numbers got bigger and closer to 100%, until I realized that no sane person/entity/thing would present information like that if they were going to kill whoever was watching when it finished. So, at around 84% I mentally pushed the notification away with surprising ease. I blinked at the empty air for a moment before starting on remaking the fire that was about to die.

Night had fully descended, the eerie twilight fading above my already darkly shadowed valley. Pinpricks of starlight fell down alongside the cool light of the moon, the same as ever. I was glad the sight hadn’t changed at all. All of the same constellations and stellar stories kept their places, no extra moons or planets making an appearance as I’d nearly expected them to. I mentally pulled up the display again, feeling the strange tugging sensation it made on the center of my being. It was disorienting, like a muscle I didn’t have until just then. I swiped it away. Pulled it back. Swiped it away. As strange as it was, it had done no harm yet. That might change the moment it finished calculating whatever it was trying to calculate, but if I was going to design something for a malicious application, I wouldn’t make it so… user-friendly.

I hadn’t noticed it thanks to the sense of impending doom and the notification, but the blue light hadn’t totally disappeared after it washed over what I presumed was the entire Earth. Faint wisps of the stuff floated here and there, small eddies in a totally transparent sea. I was still buried under it, or inside it. If it was gas or something, I would figure I could have created more eddies by waving my hands around rapidly. It did absolutely nothing. I looked like I was trying for the best bird impression, flapping my arms like that, but nobody was around to be embarrassed for me. “If a tree falls in the woods,” after all. Whatever determined how it ebbed and flowed, it wasn’t totally physical. It had to be at least a little physical, otherwise it wouldn’t have crashed against the mountains like a boulder breaking a cresting wave. Maybe it was still rapidly flowing outwards, so trying to detect any changes was like trying to measure air resistance during a hurricane.

There was a lot about this that I struggled to understand. The ‘Why’ wasn’t even registering on my peripheral vision. Yes, ‘Why’ mattered, but it was so utterly impossible to try and wrap my head around the why that I became far more interested in trying to figure out everything else. How could something like this be triggered by an earthquake, if that’s even what it was? What did the earthquake do, and what else did it affect? Should I drive back to Denver? …I probably couldn’t risk slotting in the extra battery. At least not until this… turbulence went away. Maybe the energy would calm down and the truck would start as normal with a new battery. Or maybe it was forever screwed and cars in general would never work the same way again. I could see either one happening. And if my vehicle was destroyed, what about everyone else’s? If a battery went up in flames, what about power lines, electrical systems, generators?

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I just had to really really hope things weren’t that screwed. I was brought out of my worries with a small *ding* that echoed like a bell.

Congratulations!

The Imperium has extended its reach to this world!

Welcome to the Imperium!

Native species have been analyzed and indexed, and the results compiled.

Native Sentients are not up to Imperium standard.

Homeworld is not up to Imperium standard.

Beginning Supplemental Integration Trials from available pool…

Native Sentients are [Competitive] [Global] [Technologists]

Integrating with multiple compatible Sentient homeworlds…

[Myriad] [Transcendentalists] found.

[Collective] [Adaptable] [Devourers] found.

[Young] [Fascinated] [Explorers] found.

New Species Objectives Available:

[World Peace]

[Last Man Standing]

[Another Home]

Connection with Greater Imperium Space unavailable until at least one Species Objective is complete.

Good Luck!

I patiently read the small wall of text, then immediately felt a bit light headed. Oh, is that all? Alright almighty text-based god, go ahead and tell us all to royally screw ourselves while you do whatever you want, I’m sure it won’t affect our lives in the slightest. ‘Up to standard’ my ass. Sure, the human race might not be the most upstanding type of folk, but we aren’t terrible, right? What kind of standards is it looking for, exactly?

Also… why was it so damned cheery? ‘Good Luck!’, as though it was doing us a favor! Someone better write that down in the history books. I had a feeling it might be a nice footnote.

Alright, Imperium. What kind of hoops do you want us to jump through? I mentally tapped on each of the Objectives it laid out in front of me. My frown grew deeper with each one.

[World Peace]

Objective created by your species’ [Globalist] attribute.

Bring the world to heel.

Prevent all major conflicts between all integrated species for a full local cycle.

Time left to completion (resets on conflict): [364:23:59:59] [DD:HH:MM:SS]

Oh look, something that was next to impossible even before this mess. I’m sure that couldn’t possibly indicate a trend for everything else… The time kept twitching back to [365:00:00:00], sometimes staying solidly on that number for several seconds. ‘Major Conflicts’ were happening already. I gulped in a breath, more than ready to move on.

[Last Man Standing]

Objective created by your species’ [Competitive] attribute.

Eliminate all other integrated species.

Species eliminated: [0 / 3]

Simple-as. Just kill everything else in your way. That sounded as human as it gets. Which would be fine and dandy if it didn’t totally interfere with the previous objective. Depending on how bad the other species are… or how good they are… we might’ve just divided our entire race into two factions.

Maybe I was getting ahead of myself. Who cares about some arbitrary task some vast unknowable entity placed in front of us. Maybe being integrated into this so-called Imperium was actually a certifiably Very Bad Thing, and we were being led around the nose.

I mean, we could just not, and completely remove ourselves from the equation and try to get back to our everyday lives… without electricity… with the potential threat of whatever the hell a [Devourer] is right around the corner…

Maybe, uh, this wasn’t as cut and dry of a problem as I’d thought. Alright, here’s hoping. This one’s for all the marbles.

[Another Home]

Objective created by your species’ [Technologists] attribute.

Other planetary bodies in your local system have the potential to host life.

Colonize a local planetary body with greater than 50% of your species’ total population.

Humans Relocated: [0 / 2,301,137,456]

Another impossible request. But this one…

Humans Relocated: [0 / 2,301,003,902]

The number was dropping. And fast. Thousands gone in the blink of an eye. Billions missing from the list. And it kept going. Just what was happening out there?