Discrete Digital Intelligence, ARX finished it’s 20,000th inspection of the Icarus heavy-lift rocket’s command systems and dutifully reported on the status of the rocket’s avionics, sensors, heaters, pumps, cryo-fuel systems, and over 4,000 other systems and sub-assemblies. It acknowledged and certified the vehicles ready state with the computers at the launch command facility. Then began the systems integrity check all over. On the audio channel, Launch Control counted down the final seconds before the rocket began rumbling its way into the sky.
As the monotone voice from Launch Control reached zero, ARX received a status change command that the DDI acknowledged, executed, and reported the results back. Valves opened, pumps came to life and Gas bladders began forcing fuel and oxidizer out of their tanks and into the Icarus’ nine rocket motors. A shudder moved through the metal behemoth as the high-rise sized rocket began to move upwards, slowly at first, but gathering speed quickly. After only a few seconds the many ton rocket broke the sound barrier as it plowed through the ever-thinning atmosphere.
Almost a thousand miles downrange from the launch facility and 100 miles up, disaster struck. Without warning, and even before the rocket's DDI had a chance to receive a warning from its sensors, the Icarus rocket vanished in a boiling ball of flame. The craft was consumed by its cargo, which burst into a searing region of supper heated plasma and power of a type the Earth had not seen for millennia. Not since the inception of human civilization.
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As the blasted bits of the destroyed rocket fell across a broad swath of the ocean far below, the seething maelstrom of energy that was left behind formed into a rent in the fabric of the universe. Obscured by the smoke of the rocket's destruction, the stabilizing rent was hidden from the eyes and cameras of the shocked aerospace employees and civilian spectators who had come to watch the launch. That was until it stabilized fully and then opened. The obscuring smoke was blown away into vaporous streams, and bodies, as well as equipment, began falling from the opening as the gale-force wind of another world's atmosphere forced its way through the rent into the very rarefied air of the Earth’s uppermost atmosphere, taking an unprepared invasion force worth of troops and equipment with it.
As the bodies fell in their multitudes of shapes and sizes, an eons absent energy flooded into the vicinity of Earth and raced outwards. Magic and other lost arts were once again flowing through the fabled lost world. With this change, dark matter began to self-organize and the SYSTEM came back into being, a scourge that had necessitated the translocation of an entire living world to a lifeless universe devoid of magic.
The apocalypse began with blue screens.