T -16d, 4h, 12 m, 15s

.

Sha’bu’da will come for us all!

Time, life, entropy, none will be safe.

Repent.

I stared at my paltry attempt of mimicking an insane person. Grabbing it from the desk in front of me, I thought: “Too grandiose, makes it sound like I’m worshipping some star-spawn from beyond the void between universes.” I folded the paper, ripped it into eight pieces and dumped it in the trash. The small bin was already overflowing with drafts I had rejected. Different types of red herring, none satisfactory.

“Not even my Shard can help me with this mess.” I concentrated, then watched a fractured kaleidoscope of paper snippets slowly drift down into the bin. Eventually the final snippet of paper merged into a new layer on the growing heap, quiet and innocently sitting in the dim lightning.

I sighed, rubbed my aching head and stood up to change the room into a more liveable state. Drawing back the curtains made the orange glow from the rising sun flood my office.

For a moment I got lost enjoying the natural beauty of a silent spectacle that played out every day, but few people had a desire to witness.

Turning away, I took in the mess that used to be my neat and tidy office. A large table at the far wall, filled with wires, metal rods, speakers, heat-sinks and crude transformers. The bulky generator standing in front of my old bookshelf. A spread of hand-held radios strewn randomly across the room and two large electric fans, ready to circulate air throughout the room.

It still felt a bit surreal, reaching this point without getting caught was bordering on incompetence. Maybe they knew, maybe not. It just made things more exciting. Uncertainty, I enjoyed it, the only thing between humanity and a bland, deterministic existence, yet so few people could appreciate it.

I quietly closed the door behind me and stepped into my bedroom. Undressed, threw my pajamas onto the bed and grabbed a towel from the dresser. Starting my morning I got cleaned up.

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When I was presentable I decided to go for a walk before breakfast. I grabbed an innocuous plastic shopping bag from my office and went outside into the fresh morning.

My stroll took me closer to the heart of the metropolis I lived in. Coming from the suburbs, it felt claustrophobic, but optimal for my purpose. I noted a few more homeless people slowly starting their day. Liabilities, how exciting. Not that the city had done a good job to get them invested in society. Modern economies are weird like that.

A lot of people seemed to enjoy having them around. Someone to always look at and think: “At least I’m not THAT guy.” Funnily enough, a lot of homeless people ended up living richer lives than the owners of those thoughts.

Many of the Shards thrown my way had been from people struggling to find a place to stay at some point in their lives. Maybe an important experience that helped them generate one in the first place, maybe just a coincidence or confirmation bias. I did not know and I accepted that I never would.

I dumped the shopping bag with my payload at the bottom of a heap of trash, stacked up in the far corner of a dead end between two soulless apartment buildings. Then I walked through the bottom of the building to make it look like I had business in the area.

At first these small things had taken conscious effort, now they happened whether I needed them or not. Just enough to convince an aware observer that nothing was wrong, just a drug deal in the making. Nothing to get involved in.

Even if my package was found, the worst that could initially happen would be getting a few druggies annoyed. Following that it could end up on the desk of a federal agent through a string of unfortunate coincidences. A miniscule risk, but still thrilling to think about.

I sighed and rubbed my forehead in annoyance, “Given different circumstances, I would’ve had a serious gambling problem, wouldn’t I?” A small shrug later, I was already thinking about more important things.

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T -2d, 18h, 19m, 52 s

.

I sat in the dim lightning of my office, quietly looking at the six different manifestos I had created as red herrings for people searching for meaning in violence.

One had a standard, boring white supremacist narrative. “Brown, black, yellow people are evil and trying to wipe us out, yadda, yadda.” It had been the easiest to create. Enough material had been floating around to create a million strawmen. Creating just one? Easy.

Second from the left, was occupied by the mandatory Jihad-based manifesto. All it had taken was to copypasta the declaration of the long-dead Ali-babba or whatever his name was. The guy planned an operation that managed to destroy two skyscrapers in New York. They were holding the economic heartbeat of the country at the time. I assumed he had known what this stuff was about, I had gotten bored just correcting the inconsistencies.

Next we had another mandatory contender. Ye ol’ Ted Kaczynski, the king of manifestos. I added a few things I had spotted in modern society. Sprinkled it liberally with socialism, added a few autistic quirks and dialled his raving against the industrial revolution up to eleven. This one would be like sweets for fake intellectuals.

The fourth one I felt a bit bad about, I was basically laying the entire blame at the feet of some random sociology professor in minnesota. I had liberally interpreted one of his papers and stretched it to the extreme. Using it to justify violence had been a majestic feat of mental gymnastics. I was kinda proud, it might even stand up to initial scrutiny.

I was running out of ideas by number five. Eventually I came up with some kind of home-cooked transhumanism baloney, I had already drizzled my batch of socialism on my ripoff of Kaczynski. Instead I added a mixture of ‘might makes right’, ‘apes strong together’ and ended up with some kind of malformed fascism. I slapped Mussolini’s bald head on the cover, added a radio-telescope in the background and called it a day.

The final one was a masterpiece. Every single sentence was used to rail against neutrality. No matter which subject someone had no strong opinion about, I had shamed them. From french food to the great attractor. No stone was left unturned, no toe left untrodden. King Solomon was spinning in his grave.

I had added insider information to the manifestos that would make it easy to verify every single one as genuine. People would be at each other's throats for weeks afterwards. Both on the internet and in real life. Shaming, excluding, weaving intrigue, beating each other in the street and much more. An easy excuse to mistreat people you dislike. Humanity would do what they always did… and life would move on.

I stretched my stiffened limbs and started creating final versions of them on my ancient computer without internet access.

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T -0d, 0h, 10m, 38 s

.

Pushing open the door to the rooftop of the apartment building, I glanced down at my watch. An assortment of emails had started being sent from six different addresses. There was no reason to go through much more effort than that. Investigative agencies would know who had done it almost immediately, but a lie travels around the world before the truth even gets out of bed. In a world where revenue was generated by easily manipulated people’s rage… who would even care to tell the truth?

I took a swig from the bottle I had carried up the stairs and immediately started coughing. Tasted like shit, maybe it had gone bad in the heat, not like I could tell. I pulled out a pack of cigarettes and looked at my watch again.

Time was up.

I lit my cigarette and watched a thin trail of smoke rise from the glowing tip, equally, around the city numerous small trails of smoke would soon become visible. Nothing serious, just a bit of low explosive. Easy to make, easy to store and generally harmless.

I leaned on the railing and looked out over the city which was being baked by the light of the sun and my meddling. It took less than three minutes before the first sirens became audible. Blue light reflected off dark windows, as prudent firefighters drove past below.

An explosion shook the building, I looked down and watched the oscillation travel down the building again. “Huh, it missed. Must’ve been wrong with my guesstimation.” I strolled to the opposite side of the building.

An entire highrise of apartments had collapsed into itself. The site was burning hot enough that I felt the heat on my face, even at this distance.

A destroyed commercial jet engine was clearly visible, having sheared off from the main crash and thrust into an apartment below me. “Huh, neat. Building’s probably on fire now.”

I started slowly walking back to my original spot, another plane flew by overhead. My eyes tracked it across the sky, bits seemed to fall off the right wing. The commercial airliner instantly rolled to the right, almost inverted, it raced towards the city. “0:2, that’s pretty good.”

A plume of black smoke became visible, even before the sound of the crash reached me.

Seconds later, two massive objects appeared quietly hanging in the sky. “Metal, rough spheres, lots of antennas, no markings. Also, what the fuck?” I waited for them to fall. They just hung in the air, mocking physics. “Why was there no pressure wave, how far away are they?” A massive amount of something erupted from the spheres, darkening the sky before I heard the third explosion in the distance.

Dots eventually began singeling themselves out of the dark mass above. Seemingly hanging quietly in the air between our city and those unknown objects.

It became horrifyingly clear that the small dot seemingly hanging between the city and the UFO’s was neither small, still or quiet. It had been racing towards the city at unimaginable speed, so far outside of my ability to comprehend that it looked cartoonish in the moment before it exploded into millions of even smaller dots.

The entire city fell quiet as we collectively watched our approaching doom, the only thing breaking the silence was the popping of the fire and sirens of the firefights.

What felt like hours later, small spherical objects with shifting geometrical patterns streamed down into the gap between my building and the surrounding ones. I expected an explosion, maybe the end of life as we knew it, but nothing happened.

Nothing at all, just a dense blanket of silence over the sounds of catastrophe.

Then sounds of fear erupted, screaming, crying, running, a car crashed into something. I looked down, expecting flying metal balls to be chasing people. Yes, some did, but most just hung quietly over a nervously fidgeting person. The chasing ones just seemed to try and keep pace with their subject running away in fear.

Two spheres for each person, I looked up expecting to see them over my head as well, but there was nothing, only an increasingly blue sky.

Getting singled out made me more nervous than having two alien brass-balls hanging over my head.

Going back to observing the rest of humanity, I gradually noted that each sphere had a tendency towards more or less round geometric objects being displayed on its shifting surface.

“Maybe they communicate using geometric shapes, it’s adjacent to math, I guess it would make sense for aliens to use something like that?”

That hypothesis instantly got blown out of the water when my first sphere arrived. In a booming voice it intoned:

“Sapient being of planet, designation; Dirt, you are now a probational citizen of the [string of metallic sounds].”

Seconds later, my other pain in the ass arrived, at least it had the decency to use a normal volume: “Sapient of earth, you will shortly begin integration into [string of suspiciously slurpy sounds].”

I stood in silence, confused.

My late arrival explained: “Your species odds of survival dropped below acceptable margins, you are now subject to our guidance.”

“Conflict detected, querying request to central processor, 2 billion identical queries reported. Designated civilian diplomatic conflict, estimated resolution; 1.5 galactic rotations. Unacceptable timeframe. Querying the opposing party’s central processing unit for details on possible resolution.”

“... as such, you will now be subject to the laws of [squishy sounds]-.”

“Stonewall protocol detected, negotiations designated; failed. Exploring avenues for conflict resolution within acceptable timeframe. Civilian; impossible. Military diplomatic resolution allows for outcome within 0.00000000041 of a galactic rotation. Timeframe; Acceptable.”

“... for carrying out the premeditated murder of 729 sapients you will be-”

“Military diplomatic conflict requires belligerent party, querying opposing party to become belligerent; Rejected. Moving forward as belligerent. Optimal diplomatic incident; Attack on sapient subject in state of civilian conflict. Searching for suitable target…”

Sweat ran down into my ears. “Aliens are here and I’m going to die before I learn anything about them, fuck this!” I tried to glimpse a little ahead, any possible future that let me survive, even in a crippled state would be fine.

“Begging didn’t work, my prediction ended in a bright light. Explaining the merits of my existence, resulted in an even faster termination, for some reason the other one shot me? Jumping off the roof ends in the same bright light. I’m out of time. I need to do something unpredictable.”

I grabbed for the ball that was still busy explaining the punishment for murdering an ever-increasing number of sapients. Surprisingly it let me. Then I jumped for the other ball, with the former one painfully shifting in my hand. I had less than a second left, before the no-bullshit-ball figured out that I was the best subject for his search.

I smashed them together.

The world vanished.

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