Chapter 1.

The Arcadia slid into the dimension, calmly reasserting its existence in the plane of existence from which it had first launched sixty-eight thousand years ago. It quietly and calmly scanned its source planet, a blue-green jewel. And it paused to find the world not only inhabited, for that had been theorized as likely, but inhabited by billions of souls living in semi-advanced societies.

With a quiet methodical nature, it spent six days in orbit, noting that it was being bombarded with radar and other measurements from the objects that the primitives had launched into orbit. It had no doubt that it was being observed by the people on the surface.

It had never had any intention of hiding from them.

Finally, it reached the end of its investigation and pulled from his cryosleep the captain of the Arcadia. The Titan Erandius awoke, pulled himself out of the cryostasis pod, and began to dress.

“What is it?” the titan asked the ship.

“An inhabited world is in the path of the antithesis,” the Arcadia answered. “We are being called to service to ensure that as many of the population survives as possible.”

“Average level of the current population?” Erandius asked.

“Zero. Non-system integrated.”

“Primitives then,” he muttered. “Do they at least—”

“Not quite primitives,” Arcadia corrected, and began showing him holographic data of the cities that it had been observing, of the media that it had been pulling from the airwaves showing a high level of sophistication.

“Oh,” Erandius said as he processed the data, entire databases streaming by in seconds as he absorbed days of observation in moments. “Well then, that complicates things. I recognize this world.”

“You should. You were born here,” Arcadia said. “So was I.”

“The Antithesis left survivors of the first wave,” Erandius said, “And they were abandoned by the fleet for millennia. But no longer. Come, Arcadia. Let us welcome our cousins back into the light. Even if the only purpose of the act is to show them the terrors that have been hiding just out of sight. I shall act as Prometheus this time, and with the fire of the gods shall these poor souls push back the night.”

“Stop pretending to be poetic,” Arcadia scolded.

Erandius grinned, and he sat in the command cradle as he pulled up a mug of stimulants and began to go to work.

~~~~~~~

“The object’s presence has been confirmed by amateur and professional astronomers alike,” the reporter on television was saying in the background as Eli chewed his cereal. He suddenly froze and looked at the television, then pulled out his phone.

“Wait, it’s mainstream now?” he asked as he searched the major news networks. He was one of those amateurs who had pointed the telescope his father had given him up at the flashing object just to confirm that it wasn’t a satellite.

It was too big. Eli had nerded out with a few other geeks online and done the measurements and calculations to figure out how big it was, and the answer was “it’s the size of one of the greek islands.”

Now, this was a pretty big screwup for NASA and other organizations for something to get through their monitoring system, but then again the thing was also clearly manmade, or at least it would appear that way to anyone with a telescope.

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

But when he had checked whether school was canceled, or whether there were any emergency measures being issued, all he had found was that airplanes were being grounded and a general travel advisory. School and daily life wasn’t supposed to be interrupted by the aliens showing up, he guessed.

So he’d gotten dressed like normal, but now as he searched for new articles on the object which had captured his imagination he was tempted to skip.

Eli’s relationship with school was … complicated.

He wasn’t a delinquent. He didn’t do or sell drugs. His grades were pretty good, although he didn’t try hard enough to make them really good. He just had trouble connecting with most of his classmates. His mother had sent him to counseling for it in middle school because she’d thought he should have more friends, and his counselor had taken her money and effectively told him that if he wanted to be a social butterfly that he’d have to put the effort into it.

Eli had decided that he didn’t want to be a social butterfly, and so he hadn’t put the effort into it. That was fine by the therapist’s way of thinking, she got paid by the hour. But his mother had been expecting a teen more like what she remembered from her own days.

Instead she got the sort of kid who joined the astronomy club. Which hadn’t been a thing, but was now. Because she had insisted that he join at least one club, so he’d photoshoped a flier for a fake club and it had gotten stuck in the printer and a teacher had seen it and now it was a real thing.

Eli sighed and checked the texts from that friend group, but he was the only one with an actual telescope that could be used to look at near-earth objects. Not very well, of course, but he’d used it for satellite spotting before. And general astronomy, of course.

His mother swooped into the kitchen, grabbed a granola bar, kissed him on the cheek, and was gone in three minutes. He glanced at the clock. She was running behind. He had plenty of time, however, the bus wasn’t due for fifteen minutes.

But he still finished eating and went to go wait like a good high school student because he didn’t have anything else to do except let his phone rot his brain. When he arrived, he dropped his bag and went back to looking at his phone.

Until a literal meteor struck in the woods behind his house.

Jerking in shock, Eli made a split second decision, and he ran off to investigate the smoking crater that had manifested in the acreage where he’d played as a younger boy.

He found the object in minutes; it was hard to miss. A massive orange obelisk that was, even as he recorded it with his phone, rapidly cooling from its reentry. He posted it to one of his astronomy networks without thinking it rather than a major social media network, but he posted it all the same.

He was talking to himself, or the phone, or the stone, he wasn’t sure which one. Saying things like “This isn’t fake, it wasn’t here before this morning. This isn’t fake, this crater is new. I’m not crazy, I’m not faking something, I—”

And then the stone attacked him, with a small burst of energy zapping him. The surge destroyed his phone, knocked Eli unconscious, and began doing a dozen other little things.

Such as sinking into the ground and causing the forest floor to regenerate itself like nothing had ever happened.

~~~~~~~~

Erandius viewed the report of the initial Cores landing. There was very little that he needed to do at this point. The details collected by the Arcadia had shown that the mortals on the surface would easily be wiped out by the Antithesis, even with their global society and ‘advanced technology.’ So the standard methods of giving a race the chance to fight back were being initiated.

That they had been developed on, and for, this world initially was an irony that was not lost on the titan.

That was so long ago that only other titans like him remembered, and he had spent most of the intervening time in cryosleep.

He examined the initial reports of the humans who came into contact with the Cores, examining the physical data that was collected as they were weighed and measured in ways with measurements that their current technology could not understand.

He was pleased. Even without a system to guide their evolution, the humans of the home world retained a 99.8% compatibility with the system. That would save a lot of time, and, perhaps, a few of the lives of the native inhabitants, as one of the side effects of the integration was occasionally the violent discorporatement of some of the very species that the Titans were trying to save.

It hadn’t happened to Erandius, but there were worlds which had literally been forced into a state of ‘pick your own apocalypse’ as the Titans had tried to encourage the inhabitants to volunteer for a process which would kill them five times out of six.

Even the 0.2% incompatibility of the humans, however, wasn’t a death sentence. It could be resolved with further attunement of the personal system to the greater systems provided by the core.

Still, Erandius thought, sipping on his mug of hot stimulant liquid. Getting zapped by a system, after being born without one, probably felt like hell for the first in the line.

So many of them were holding small plastic devices as they approached the Core, Erandius noted. There, a teenage boy was zapped by an orange Core. Here, a woman in her twenties. There, an old man.

The system didn’t care how old a subject was. It’s goal was optimization of body, mind and soul. It was a shame that Erandius couldn’t ask these people for more explicit permission for subjecting them to this process, he thought to himself, but it was all or nothing.

Because the system was contagious, and it would jump from one human to the next until everyone had been infected.