//------------------------------// // Prologue // Story: Cataclysm // by Mythic Void //------------------------------// The Cataclysm Prologue ISD Spatial Research Facility 2343 hours, 29 APR 59 “Hey, Mark, come have a look that this.” “What is it James?” “I’m not sure, but station 13-b is receiving some weird signals from around Jupiter...” “Weird how James? You can’t just tell me something is strange without telling me why.” “Alright alright, it’s just that the gas being picked up by the station’s sensors are apparently comprised of hydrogen and helium. Now before you say anything, I know what the gas giant is made out of, I took the same courses in astrology that you did. But the station is also picking up heavier elements like carbon and iron, you know, the stuff that stars make?” “So… what you’re saying is that a star is forming inside of Jupiter?” “What? No! I said that the signals were coming from around Jupiter, in fact, our cameras can’t even find where they’re originating from. Or rather they can, it’s just that they’re seemingly coming out of nothing, empty space as far as the eye can see.” “...You’re right, that is weird. I’ll go ahead and notify the higher-ups, let them know something is up and see where to go from there. Can you let the crew up at station 13-b know about this too? I wouldn’t want them to unwittingly have front-row seats to a star popping into existence.” “You don’t think that’d actually happen... do you?” “Heh, well… maybe not, but better safe than sorry ri-” --ZZZZT-CRACK “Warning: Spatial Anomaly Detected” ISD Satellite 13-b 11:43 PM IST, 4/29/59 CLANG My boredom-filled grey eyes ventured briefly over to where I assumed the sound originated from. Another slab of space rock impacting the still undamaged white hull, nothing new there really. I was just about to get back to eating the painstakingly bland--but thankfully plentiful--food in front of me before I heard someone speak in a hushed whisper. “What was that?” A blonde-haired caucasian, Michael, asked me. His own green eyes looking up fearfully. He was my space-faring companion for the entire six years we’ve been up here and admittedly quite eccentric in terms of overthinking things--something which is becoming apparent once more--but he ultimately has good intentions and a brilliant mind when concerned with spaceflight. I honestly wouldn’t trust anyone else with keeping this station in orbit. I sighed, “Why are you whispering?” “Because what if there’s something out there?!” he replied, still using the hushed tone that inevitably caused me to roll my eyes. “Michael, we’re in space, orbiting Jupiter. It’s probably just some more asteroids.” I could never understand why he was so paranoid, the chances of something alive out there were pretty slim to begin with, let alone something intelligent and with malicious intent. Plink Of course, the universe liked to make him think otherwise, probably just to fuck with me, “Then what was that? Asteroids don’t come by that often, Karen!” “We're in space, asteroids come by all the time!” Dink “There, see?! Three in a row just isn’t natural!” Well he did have a bit of a point, usually it’s one every couple hours. Still though, “Probably just a meteor shower then, I think Jupiter has a large enough gravity to pull something like that.” “Meteor shower?” I swear, his eyes shrunk to the size of needles, I could hardly see them. “Yup,” I replied simply, What’s his problem? I’ve never seen him this worried. Another asteroid let me know why, creating a resounding clank throughout the station and shaking me slightly. I’ll admit, that one was a bit worrying... “As in the meteor showers that tear into satellites like wild dogs?” He stated pointedly. Despite the mounting evidence for such a thing to happen, I still thought that the whole thing was very unlikely, “Yes, the very same satellites which were made nearly sixty years ago, honestly, you’ve got to stop reading those old newspapers. If we were in danger don’t you think our systems would’ve warned us by now? That I would’ve caught hint of it by now?” “W-well what if they were damaged when the asteroids started hitting? And you aren’t always able to watch the read-outs on our sensors anyways...” “Then we would get a error report of some kind, look, this station is state of the freaking art. The only disturbance we’ve had was a month ago and it was the size of a golf ball. Hell, the alloys used to make these walls are not only lighter, but thirty times stronger than the metals used back when those older models were made. Not only that, but even if something were to happen, we have an escape pod capable of flying all the way back to Earth in under a week at the ready at all times! We’re perfectly safe.” Another chunk of space rock slammed into the hull, to which Michael glanced at fearfully. Once he saw my patented ‘Dude, seriously?’ expression though (Which I worked very hard on by the way thank you very much), he simply sighed and rested his head on his arms, leaning over the table, “Sorry, it’s just… I worry sometimes y’know? It gets so quiet around here that all my mind can think about is when it isn’t quiet… Maybe I just need to distract myself for a little bit, got any ideas?” Ooooh, now that’s what I was waiting for, see space can get really boring after you’ve studied it for more than six years. I honestly think that chronic boredom is a very real problem out here, maybe I should run that by the higher-ups later? That’d make an interesting study project… Shaking my head momentarily to clear it, I allowed a terrible smirk to grace itself upon my face. “Oh I’ve got an idea,” I said as I strode towards my locker, reaching for a deck of cards. Not terribly spectacular, I know, but it doesn’t burn up the oh so important energy like electronic entertainment does, “I just hope that you can handle my-” KRRRRRRZZZZZZZZZZT-CRACK “...What-” “The fuck-” “Was that?!” My belovedly like-minded companion said as he stood up and followed just behind me on the way to the bridge. Red warning lights glowed ominously above us and it wasn’t long before the station’s Virtual Intelligence had determined whatever the hell that was. “Warning: Spatial Anomaly Detected” Spatial anomaly?! What kind of spatial anomaly shakes an entire station like a fucking earthquake?! I thought frantically as we pulled into the bridge, I slammed down on a nearby button as soon as I could, bringing up a large holographic projection of whatever the exterior cameras found. “Holy shit, what is that?” I said, though I couldn’t really hear a response from my friend over the sound of space being fucking torn open. It’s okay though, I doubt he heard my question anyway. There, in the distant space above Saturn, was a… well I would say it’s a crack in space if I were a sci-fi fanatic, which I was, so that’s what it was until further notice. The whole thing was made of this bright blue plasma-like material, it even had these weird smokey swirls coming off of it. And the best part? It was growing wider. Fast. Oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit. Okay, no problem, just gotta remember protocol. I tore my gaze from the viewscreen and moved to open a communications channel with Earth’s Interplanetary Space Defense, or ISD if you’re a simpleton that needs to use acronyms. Anyway, they were the ones who sent us up here, so they must know how to fix this right? Well, that was my thought process at least. I briefly noted a small loading screen appearing in the bottom right-hand corner of the viewscreen, composed simply of Earth with laurels around the edges and the acronym in the center. KRRRRRRZZZZZZZZZZT-CRACK “Warning: Spatial Anomaly Detected” Oh you’ve got to be fucking kidding me… I looked up to confirm that no, the universe was not giving a single fuck about my life right now as I witnessed yet another crack opening up just a slight distance away from Mars. The many cameras on our space station turned our view of the situation into a split-screen and as I looked to the previous crack I could see a fucking planet coming through it. I probably would’ve been pretty happy about having my theory proven right, but naturally the apocalypse put a downer on the whole thing. And it was not five seconds later that shit hit the fan in the worst way possible. Several more of the portals opened up around the solar system, the viewscreen quickly dividing itself to display at least twelve portals of various sizes. There were probably many more just from the sheer amount of sound that tore through the station however, the cameras were just too few in number to see them all. It looked to me like every time a new portal opened, the others would speed up in unison, like some weird buff aura was applied to them with every new portal. It wasn’t long until all of them were open completely and various objects ranging from planets to moons to asteroids much larger than our station poured out of each one, and all of them were moving like they had thrusters strapped to them, which I think one of them actually did have. I couldn’t help but stare at the display, the entirety of my world shaken to its very core by the sight, luckily my friend wasn’t quite yet out of commission. A good man, Michael. Paranoid beyond all belief sure, but when shit went down, he kept his head on straight long enough to deal with it. I felt him grab my shoulders and pull me towards him, jerking me out of my daze, “Karen we need to get the fuck out of here!” he said, pointing towards one of the screens. I followed his hand and saw exactly what had gotten him so worked up. It was a planet by the way. Heading right for Earth. With us in between the two. Fuck I hate space. I snapped my gaze back to him, my terror turned up to eleven as I yelled over the ‘woman’ that kept announcing the already obvious danger. Honestly, once was enough, not how ever many times she was trying to spit the warning out now. Hm? Oh right, I yelled, “Go!” It was a simple command to be sure, but he didn’t need to be told twice. Neither did I really, the fucking universe was ending after all. We both turned and ran out of the room. Our footsteps barely audible over the sounds ringing in our ears from the various alarms going off. I cast a brief thought to the call I had sent out to the ISD but quickly dismissed it, I mean, who couldn’t see what was happening right now? We soon reached the end of the relatively small station, the doors to the diminutive escape pod opening automatically as we ran inside, I didn’t even look as I hit the big red ‘Close’ button that was forever burned into my mind during training, and moved to take the seat beside the pilot’s. Michael sat next to me shortly after and quickly slammed the big red ‘Launch’ button (There were a lot of red buttons), holding onto the controls well enough to make sure the sleek white pod was steady as it shot out of the station on blue flames. Meanwhile, I looked over the various holographic panels in front of us, providing data that I knew he could never hope to understand. I knew because it was intentional for the pod to only be operable by all the crew of the station, Michael was the only one who knew how to fly the thing and I was the only one who knew how to keep the whole thing from blowing up in our faces. It seemed like a pretty decent way to keep us from abandoning each other, albeit by starving me of sweet sweet information, and over the months I suppose it had worked quite well, good thing too considering that there was only one escape pod on this whole thing. It only took a few seconds before the pod offered its full range of controls to my companion and he immediately pushed up on one of the handles, causing the pod to hum slightly as the engines were pushed to max. In just a few seconds we were a good distance away from what would have soon been our graves. I glanced out the side window to see that the planet, which looked surprisingly green and likely habitable, was actually pretty fucking close to us now. Michael also took note of this, and swiftly turned the lifeboat towards the right, ensuring that the planet was directly behind us and not about to T-bone us in the deep black void of space. I was sweating profusely at this point and I shouted over the rumbling of the pod as the planet’s atmosphere started brushing against our hull, “We need to go faster!” “This thing won’t go any faster!” He shouted, the fear in his voice matching up with my own. I didn’t really like that answer however, and a slight amount of annoyance poked its way into my mind before something truly horrifying dawned on me. This is it. We’re going to die. A small wreckage on the surface of this fucking planet right before it destroyed Earth. I cast a quick thought back to my siblings back on Earth, would they even know that I died? Would they themselves even live long enough to think about it? Would humanity even survive this? Sure we were a tenacious bunch of bastards but… I was jolted out of my thoughts by a sudden shift in our pods position. The sheer speed with which we were moving was surprising to say the least and we quickly found ourselves spinning around faster than my eyes could process. It was no surprise that my stomach gave up on me and as soon as our ships thrusters managed to wrestle control back, albeit with several warnings of system malfunctions and unknown interference, I turned my body over to the side and threw up all my lunch on the smooth metal floor beneath me. It took several minutes before my brain had cleared itself enough to form some manner of coherent thought and I turned over to see that my pilot buddy had also lost a handle on his digestive system. I gave him a couple more minutes to calm down before talking to him, “Hey, Michael... are you alright?” My voice croaked slightly as the stomach acid burned along my throat. Vertigo, not even once. I couldn’t help but laugh slightly at my little inside joke, wincing as my body countered my bout of giggles with a sharp pain near the back of my head. Not quite yet wanting to worry about potential injuries to my cranium, I lifted a hand to wipe the sweat and tears off my face as I waited for a response. He slowly turned to look at me, the fear in his moistened eyes visible for just a moment before he relaxed a little. His throat shifted slightly, likely to clear the bile still clinging to the interior, before he spoke to me, “Karen, what the hell was that? I thought we were going to get burned up in the atmosphere or something, but then there was this weird light on the outside and…” He trailed off as his gaze shifted to the viewport at the bow and his body instantly froze, his jaw hanging open even as new tears began to form in his eyes. “Michael? What’s wrong?” I shook him slightly, but after getting no response I apprehensively turned my gaze to look out of the viewscreen. What I saw brought a small amount of confusion. It’s just a bunch of dust and asteroids, why is he so worked up abou- That was what he was so shocked about, what had broken him--and now myself--down to our very cores. Our solar system. Earth. Humanity... My family… It was all… Gone.