***Tirnanog, The Facility***

***The Designer***

The Designer opened one eye and regarded the statistics that reported on the world’s state.

It filed through the newest reports that the Facility’s systems had generated for the Designer's guiding touch. Most of the Facility was automated, but there were some problems that needed an actual intellect to make decisions. So the systems automatically brought relevant information to the Designer’s attention now and then.

For a long moment, the creature who had no real concept of time thought and weighed the options, then decided that the project was ready to enter the next phase.

After all, the Creators had given the Designer one single purpose: “To contain and find a cure.”

The Creators had been first in many things.

They had been first to split the atom.

The first to blow up their sun.

To spread among the stars and to conquer countless worlds.

Such was their might and knowledge that none of the younger sentient species could stand against them.

They were the first and last they would be.

But there was one they feared.

One planet they couldn’t conquer.

One thing they didn't comprehend, nor control.

A shame that creatures such as them had been defeated by nothing more than a plague. A tiny, insignificant lifeform. One which wasn't even capable of forming a coherent thought from the Designer's point of view.

It had taken the Creators a long time to understand what they were dealing with. To realize what had been killing them. That there was something that their perfect bodies weren’t immune against.

The Plague evolved too fast for them to prepare countermeasures against. It adapted and changed, taking multifarious forms that would consume and attack, digest and infiltrate, infect and dissolve. The Plague followed neither plan nor logic and was therefore incomprehensible to the creators. It was chaos personified.

It grew and adapted until it had infested every habitable corner of the worlds it touched. The Creators had made many mistakes in the beginning, allowing it to spread.

In the end, the Creators could only think of sterilizing entire planets.

They threw rocks the size of mountains onto the surface, hoping to exterminate the Plague, and for a time they thought they had succeeded.

They were surprised when the Plague rose from the worlds' ashes, taking forms never seen before. Curiously, the plague liked to evolve into bipedal forms, as if it knew how to mock those who had tried to eradicate it.

Next, the creators tried radiation, and for a while, it seemed like they succeeded when most of the Plague died off.

But the Plague wasn’t defeated and arose anew, this time sporting self-repair sequences that secured its DNA against all but the worst of radiation damage. Some of it even liked to grow on radioactive material now.

The creators designed new weapons and unleashed flesh-eating bacteria onto the world.

The Plague adapted and incorporated the bacteria into the digestive systems of its latest variations.

The creators struck back with viruses, simple self-replicating code segments that were based on the Plague itself.

Again, the Plague adapted and developed an immune system that made most of its forms resistant to the new weapons. It even reacted by creating new viruses that were especially effective against the creators.

The creators were horrified.

Again and again, they struck down and snuffed out any signs of life they could find. Patient as they were, they watched the Plague rising again, even if it took millions of years to verify that the newest attempt had failed.

Until they finally had to admit that it was impossible to extinguish the Plague completely.

The Plague was a piece of self-replicating DNA that was capable of recreating itself from almost nothing while it mutated to adapt to the environment. Simple in its most basic form, but complex beyond understanding once it reached one of its final evolutions. Missing even a single strand during the eradication process meant that the Plague could develop anew, each time stronger and more resilient to what it had encountered before.

There was no cleansing the worlds it had touched.

Worse, there was a chance that eradicating the Plague with insufficient means might even cause it to spread. There was no telling what might happen if the Plague managed to drift into other systems, carried by solar winds.

Given their long existence, the Creators weren't blind to such a possibility and didn't want to risk it happening.

Which was why they decided to isolate and contain the Plague. To keep its evolutionary advance to the barest minimum. For that purpose, they barred anyone from even daring to enter the Plague's home galaxy. To do so would draw the wrath of the oldest species in existence.

But the Creators didn't abandon all their hope for a cure.

Hence, the Designer was created with the purpose to forge an ecosystem that would be able to contain and eventually even eradicate the Plague. Maybe the solution in defeating the Plague lay in attacking it from so many angles at once that even it couldn’t adapt.

The Designer regarded the latest reports and conferred one last time between its twin-minds before it deemed the preparations to be sufficient.

It was time to start a controlled experiment and to introduce the Plague to a new and hardened ecosystem.

In the Designer's mind, there was nothing that could go wrong, and it would finally be able to report to the Creators that it had found a cure.

With a flick of a tentacle, the Designer relaxed the security measures that prevented the newest iteration of the Plague from leaving its systems and opened a wormhole to the Plague's homeworld, interested to see what would climb out of it.