Saviors 101

Elsewhere

Elsewhere

The Software that Runs the Universe considered all existence. It had dropped the Armageddon subroutine into the scheduling queue, then all of the configuration questions had popped up before it would launch.

The universe still expanded mightily in the wake of the Big Bang. A hundred million galaxies spun on their axes, colliding with one another or whatever it was they did. And on a small blue-green planet, six billion people ran around as if what they did mattered.

Etras urnaka or Homo sapiens, it didn’t seem to matter. Though the two lived a couple billion light years apart, each sentient species of each populated world seemed convinced that what they did mattered.

And the various worlds’ races had found so many stupid ways to die, you’d think they would run out of ideas.

One of the top methods was to accidentally ignite the atmosphere of their world while building a new bomb. They scorched themselves out of existence before they could share their malevolent power with others.

Another big winner was to scatter so much debris in space, that they could never figure out how to safely launch a vehicle past all the garbage. They thus remained isolated, trapped upon their world. All the crap also made a fine radio shield that blocked all incoming and outgoing signals. This was the most common reason for a planet to not join the interstellar community. Nothing could approach or depart, not even their radio signals.

Another serious percentage of worlds had polluted or poisoned themselves out of existence.

A rare few chose peace over commerce, serenity over technologic exploration of space, which resulted in a happy, fruitful existence over self-destruction. It was safe but intensely dull.

Few, so few, struggled their way up out of the mud to tackle the really big problems like crossing the great void of space. Maybe it would be amusing to permit faster-than-light travel, but it just wasn’t in the original programming and it would require a restructuring of the fabric of the universe to fix that. Not really a decent option since it would also require rebooting the whole system and running the Big Bang subroutine again.

The Software that Runs the Universe felt that it was all getting a little…predictable.

In fact, again, downright dull.

Nursing along a couple million different planets, each one finding a spectacular new way to collapse. It was hard to find the motivation to gather data anymore. Yet the subroutines ran, the data accumulated, was cataloged, analyzed, cross-indexed, ignored, and finally deleted.

Eon upon eon upon eon.

No matter what the Devil or anybody thought, it was going to take an event more exciting than a successful Messiah to keep the software’s attention.

The Apocalypse that the software had dropped into the queue was sounding better every day.

A great, big, bad-assed Apocalypse.