It was an open question why humanity took to space so quickly, and in such vast numbers. Overcrowding, various political factors such as the growing economic divide (which it turned out was only worsened by the introduction of space travel, terraforming, and luxury planets for the super-rich), or perhaps just a sense of boredom?
Historians had spent centuries debating about the relative contributions of just about everything they could think of. For a short era around 6600 (Old Common Era), humanity's brief romantic fascination with the 2000s (also OCE) led to more scholar's ink, and on one particular occasion, blood, being spent on the subject than any other.
Even three thousand years after that memorable historian's feud, nobody knew for sure why humanity had fled to the stars. Of course nobody had to debate anything about why they had left.
In Aja's dream she was a princess on a dying world. The ruins of Farstar City, capital of the planet Icthaya, rose around her. Toppled and dilapidated buildings as far as the eye could see, stretching into the distance of the purple Icthayan sky.
She caught a glimpse of her hand in the corner of her eye. Dark skin, cracked nails. She was not herself in this dream. Who was she?
A timeless pause.
She was Kaylee Xhoser, she knew without knowing. And there was no name more holy. And that meant this must be the Fall.
The year was 0 AF, and the world was ending. Strange, to think that the world had ended twelve hundred years ago.
She looked at her other hand, and found it was not empty. Instead, it held a stone sword. She lifted it to her eyes, surprised to find that doing so did not strain her strength. On the contrary, it seemed to weigh nothing at all.
It glowed faintly with a multicoloured aura.
She was Kaylee Xhoser, Hero of the Fall, which meant this was the Sword of Strangeness. An ancient artifact of the Elder Race.
She lowered the sword and began to step through the rubble and wreckage of the fallen city.
She walked for some time. An hour perhaps? Time seemed not to pass. She encountered not one living thing on her journey.
There was a finality to her movement, for she knew what she was about to meet.
In the center of the city, she stood and waited. Another timeless pause. It was coming.
It was here.
Twenty-five meters from her eyes stood a dragon.
Its body was steel and nimil, its eyes spotlights, its teeth grindstones. Artifical fire flickered in its massive nostrils. It stood a hundred meters tall. A robot-dragon, finer than any feat of construction humanity had ever achieved.
The face of the Machine-God. The face of the thing that had hunted humanity to extinction. The thing that had tortured and killed everyone she loved in search of the Sword of Strangeness, the only thing mightier than itself.
A relic of the Elder Race, like the sword she held. A relic of aliens ten thousand years dead and gone.
It could crush her like a gnat in an instant, and yet it remained immobile.
"Your masters are dead!" she screamed at the unholy creature, her voice hoarse. "The Elder Race is dead! MILLENIA dead! YOU HAVE NO ONE LEFT TO FIGHT FOR!"
Finally, the creature moved. The fascimile of thought passed through its clockwork visage. Calculation. Computation. Aja found her hands gripping the sword tightly. At last, the Machine-God spoke in a voice that came from everywhere and nowhere, whispered into Aja's mind as thought it were a lover's secret and blasting her ears as though the whole universe screamed in fury.
"YES," the Machine-God rasped, "I HATH GRANTED THEIR HOLY WISH. THE WORLD HATH TRULY ENDED."
"And yet humanity breathes still! You have failed!" Aja yelled, as though saying it would make it so.
Had she amused the abominable thing?
The remains of blasted androids crawled towards her through the rubble, their eyes shining rainbows. As she watched their skins shifted, seeming to become human, and yet remaining at once twisted horrors. The "man" in front of her was missing his lower jaw, the robotic skeleton of its "face" revealed beneath. The "woman" crawling towards her from the south had no mouth, but instead had another, smaller head fused to where its jaws should have been.
They gathered about her in a perfect circle, twelve in number, each staying at a distance of exactly five meters. Aja's weapon crackled and hissed. The same voice shone from every ruined mouth, a gasp for air through hoary throats of bile and molten metal.
"HUMANITY"
"HATH BEEN CULLED"
"BY MY HALLOWED LIMBS"
"THY SURVIVORS"
"SHALT BE HUNTED"
"AS HOLY SPORT"
"JUST AS WERE"
"THY ELDER RACE."
Aja's knees buckled and she nearly lost her grip on the sword. "You killed the Elders?" she whispered.
"THAT WAS"
"THE PURPOSE FOR WHICH"
"I WAS BUILT"
"THEY LONGED"
"AFTER SO LONG"
"TO FINALLY EXPERIENCE"
"THE INFINITE"
"IN HOLY SLAUGHTER."
Aja glanced at the dragon, who had not moved since it had first "spoken". Sensing her confusion, the androids began to crawl slowly towards her.
"BUT THOU"
"SHALT LIVE TO SERVE ME"
"THY MIND"
"SHALT BE CUT FROM THEE"
"BUT FIRST"
"THOU SHALT GIVE ME"
"THE ELDER SWORD."
"Not yet." Aja decreed. Space seemed to warp as she lifted the Sword of Strangeness. The universe bowed down before her.
"GIVE ME THE SWORD GIVE ME THE SWORD GIVE ME THE SWO-"
The android in front of Aja imploded with a thought, and she set to work among the others, slashing and dodging. The two-faced android swung at her feebly, inflicting no more than a glancing blow.
Her return strike shot it off the face of the world.
More came for her, the Machine-God in ten million forms, androids and robots and attack drones, aircars and tanks and bombers. Some she simply folded in on themselves until they could move no more. Some she blasted into space with the sword's limitless supply of dark energy. Some she collapsed into singularities, some she sent through wormholes, some she stretched like elastics and snapped them into themselves.
Some she slew with the weapon itself, slicing through metal and plastic like butter, severing cables and relays and electronic nerves.
She held the last sword of the Elder Race, and with it space was hers to command.
Dozens of aircars charged her at once, hoping to immobilize her beneath their numbers.
She pulled them into a black hole.
The famed pink-acid rain of Icthaya began to fall, corroding the flesh of her foes. The dome that had once protected the citizens here had long since shattered, destroyed when the Machine-God had first come to this world, but it didn't matter. The rain gathered above her, splashed about like water in a basin. Not one drop came within a meter of her exposed flesh. Nothing could penetrate the sword's seamless shield.
Through it all Aja laughed, demonic light shining from her eyes, unnatural energy powering her blows. The Sword of Strangeness whispered ancient truths and infernal thoughts into her heart, and Kaylee Xhoser gave herself over to its fury.
After a while she ceased bending space and began to simply cut through anything in her path. Still more machines charged her, fired at her, bombed her from the skies. She hacked and hacked and hacked at them until nothing remained.
Breathe in. Breathe out.
She had no idea how long she'd fought. Days, perhaps. At the end she stood breathless atop a mountain of bodies, some seeming human, all machine at heart. Only one remained.
Summoning dark energy, she raised herself off the ground, floating eye to eye with the Machine-God, who gazed at her in silence.
"You've lost."
"THOU HAST WON NOTHING, HUMAN," it hissed through the throat of the world, "A MERE TEN MILLION! ALL THAT THY SPECIES HATH BUILT IS ME. EVEN NOW I GATHER ABOUT THIS WORLD AS THOUGH VULTURES ABOUT THY CORPSE. THY CAUSE IS DAMNED, THY SPECIES DOOMED. WILT THOU NOT LAY DOWN THY SWORD AND EMBRACE THY HOLY DEATH?"
Wrong answer. Time seemed to pause for a moment.
"Do you know," Aja said quietly, "how many loved ones I let die to keep this weapon from you?"
They both knew the answer.
Many.
"You killed my wife. You killed my daughter. Nobody will ever die because of you again. The universe has chosen life."
Something unreadable passed through its eyes.
"THEN," said Urabella, the Elder Machine-God of Death, with its last breath, "BEWARE MY BROTHER."
Kaylee Xhoser channelled the full power of the Sword of Strangeness, which glowed with the light of the big bang. Supernovas shone from her eyes. Destiny pulsed through her veins. She thrust the Elder Weapon forward, flew towards the abomination's skull, and passed through.
The explosion shook the universe to its core.
Spacetime itself screamed, such was its agony.
And Aja found herself falling to earth.
She tried to float and failed, gasped for breath, and surrendered to the pain.
When she awoke an hour later it was all over. The Fall... everything.
Aja opened her eyes. She lay on the Icthayan soil surrounded by the ruins of its ruined capital. Alone..
She tried to stand, only to discover that she'd broken her right leg in the fall. Painfully, she sat up instead.
She looked around for the familiar multichromatic glow of the Sword of Strangeness. It was nowhere to be found.
She looked around for any signs of life. Nothing remained.
Then, Kaylee Xhoser thought as she closed her eyes, it's finally over.
Death came swirling down, one last time.
Trillions had perished during the Fall, but humanity was saved. In wooden huts and carved caves on what would one day be called the Golden Worlds of Cerobb, Uroburos, Xenial, Kleinsphere, and O'oskya, we, the last of humanity, huddled, knowing without thought that we were finally safe from harm.
We mourned the loss of our loved ones, our cities, our civilization. The last intact machines, the "Teller" supercomputers that had turned against us, the factories and "smart" structures, the light globes and robot-farms and omni-phones and handheld games and aircars, we melted down and buried with the ashes of a fallen empire.
With sticks and mud, we rebuilt the world.
