Chapter Text
A drunken old man with blue-gray hair wandered across an alien landscape. His shoulders were hunched and his thoughts were occupied with the barely-sentient mass of flesh and crystal heading toward the Earth. It had been an impressive thing, even beautiful in a sense. A hive-mind, a collective, a creature so large, so powerful, it operated on the scale of entire species across endless worlds. A being that feasted on intelligence itself, experimented on civilizations and consumed planets in an endless dance of shattering and recombining. A multi-dimensional parasite. Impossibly large and yet, insignificant against the enormity of a multiverse it could barely comprehend or exploit.
Oh, the thing certainly knew a great many things and it was certainly capable of accomplishing almost anything it could possibly want. Yet, the creature couldn’t achieve the one thing it actually wanted to achieve. In the grand scheme of things, even the multi-dimensional alien god was a sad little worm, desperately searching for an answer to the one problem it truly cared about.
The man stopped in place and sighed. That was the great irony of it all. The creature would never solve its problem. Not because a solution didn’t exist, mind you. No, there were multiple solutions. But the thing was just too stupid, too focused on the dance to recognize that it already had a solution.
He took out his flask and drank again. He hated the idea that he could be even remotely similar to such a pitiful thing. Yet here he was, straying far away from home – if ‘home’ even meant anything at this point – searching for meaning where there was not a shred of it to be found.
The parasite, – or maybe parasites, though as far as he was concerned the entire thing was a single hive-mind split in two – would arrive at the cradle of humanity sometime in the next few years. He knew for a fact that a significant number of the alternate Earths the parasite could access were inhabited by people. He knew what humanity’s fate would be across those realities. He knew that quadrillions would die. He told himself he didn’t care. That despite the fact that he himself was a human, other humans didn’t hold a particularly special place in his heart. He knew that the multiverse was infinite, that there was always someone suffering somewhere, that even this very event echoed infinitely across endless realities. He knew it would be a futile effort to try to save doomed people for the sake of making a difference. And yet…
He sighed again, “Shit.”
Maybe he was just losing it, maybe it was the combined result of his drunkenness and his newest existential crisis. But he knew he had already made his decision.
Not that it would cost him much anyway.
He took out a strange looking gun and aimed it at the ground. With his other hand he took out a white crystal. He had been saving it for an emergency, but at the end of the day, impulsive decision and urgent need were not that different. And besides, he could always make more.
“One central node, or at least cl-close enough,” he murmured as he calibrated his gun, “A bit of irony.” he chuckled and pressed the trigger. Light flashed on the ground, ripping a hole through reality. An instant later, white flesh spilled out.
He sat down and slowly pushed the crystal into the flesh.
He cleared his throat, “Hellooo, stranger,” he began animatedly, carefully keeping his hand on the crystal, “This is a sim-simulacrum, it’s, ah,” he paused, then rolled his eyes, “You’ll figure it out. Have fu-un.”