Chapter Text
I’m… I’m pretty much Fucked.
I know that sounds like the kind of thing people say when things are bad but actually are manageable. I want to be clear when I mean it literally and truthfully.
I’m fucked.
I’ve spent the last three days broadcasting on every frequency I have. Planetary, off-world, deep space, things aren’t technically legal to transmit in seventeen states that… probably don’t exist anymore. Nothing. Not a signal, not a ping, not even interference. Just the sound of the universe.
Which is nothing by the way.
I'm typing this out on my cyberdeck right now, somewhere in deep space. I don't know if anyone will ever read this. I don't even know if there's anyone left to read it.
I don’t even know why I’m writing this.
Maybe because this log is the closest thing I have to someone to talk to. S.T.A.N (my onboard ai, who is meant to stop these things from happening) is offline, great. Emergency escape velocity pushed every system well past its limits to the nth degree, and apparently that includes him. Sorry buddy. My bad.
I could try rebooting him later. Right now I just need too… I need to say this out loud to someone or something. My own internal monologue has never been great company at the best of times and right now… it’s not the best of times.
Maybe someone finds this eventually. Some alien archaeologist in the far future, observing a blown up planet and noticing the dead mean suit’s not so far from it. Hey, whoever you are, I hope your translation software is good. Maybe I should write this in binary?
Sorry.
I’m having a hard time trying to type this out right now. That's not a great sign considering this is just a keyboard.
For the record (and yes, I want this on record, even if the only ones who ever read it are an alien archaeologist or a scavenger picking through the wreckage. Also if you're on the ladder, the morphine is behind the seat. Help yourself to the leftovers.) The destruction of my world was my fault. And apparently… It was a game world.
Whatever that means.
I don’t have the brain power right now to deal with that existential part yet so I’m filling it under later and moving on.
Right now, I’m sitting in the cabin of a twenty foot combat mech drifting through deep space with no destination, flight plan, or any idea what to do next. The cockpit doesn’t help either. It’s a few cubic meters of reinforced steel, screens, control surfaces, and recycled air between me and the void of the unknown. It felt cramped on good days. Now it just feels like a coffin…
I don’t know if anyone will ever read this. I don’t even know if there is anyone left to read it. Nevertheless, I need to do this.
I should explain who I am, who I was, and what we all were for any layman who may be reading this. They'd have my full quantum backup of the internet on record somewhere, but that feels cold. Nobody wants to piece together the end of a civilization from forum posts and comment sections. They'd want something personal. Something human.
So. Also for the record:
Rex Steele, CEO of Steele Solutions and the hero known as Armor Man, is the last known survivor of the planet Terra.
God, I hate writing that.
Let’s see… where to start?
I am… or was… a superhero. I was a part of a team.
The Super Society. It was THE superhero team composed of the best and strongest from across the globe, operating out of the biggest city in the world: Dominion City, United Provinces of Amerigo.
There was me. Armor Man. Rex Steele: genius, billionaire, and depending on who you ask, adequate conversationalist. Hit me if you've heard this one before. Who knows, maybe aliens have comic books. I'm a regular human who compensated for that minor disadvantage in a world full of people who can bench press mountains by building a twenty-foot powered combat mech from scratch, then spent the better part of a decade upgrading it until it became one of the most powerful weapons ever constructed. It is currently my ship, my home, and if the math I keep refusing to finish checks out, possibly my tomb. At twenty feet tall, at least it's a somewhat roomy one.
Then there was the rest of my team.
Lady Liberty. Enhanced super soldier. Fought for every ideal Amerigo was supposed to stand for and somehow actually meant every word of it. Nerves of absolute steel. The kind of person you instinctively stood straighter around without knowing you were doing it. We all looked up to her.
Top Gun. Marcus Jackson. One of my best friends. Flew like the wind itself and had a joke ready for every situation, including the ones where jokes had absolutely no business being. Especially those ones, actually.
Aetheria. Lyra Vasquez. Could shift the very matter and molecules of the universe to her fingertips. Made it look effortless. It wasn't. (I saw how long she practiced, but she'd never tell you that.)
Beheman. Yusuf Cyr. Could lift a building without breaking a sweat or, frankly, a smile. Quietest person on the team by a large ass margin.
Killer Queen. Pan Zhihao. Probably the most dangerous person I have ever shared a room with with a blade, a staff, a pen, a filing cabinet, or apparently anything she could get her hands on. I once watched her neutralize a hostage situation using a fire extinguisher.
All in all, they were the best people I’ve ever known.
God I miss them.
I miss them so much.
Wherever you are… I’m sorry.
I don’t know what happened to them. When I came to, when the escape systems managed to kick out of there, it was just me. I’ve been trying to think about whether they made it out. Whether they had time. Judging by my hail going nowhere… I don’t know. I don’t know if they were able to understand the gameworld thing as well as I do.
They were my friends. My comrades. My team.
I had to stop typing for a minute there. Had to wipe my eyes. Sorry.
Anyways.
I should explain what happened. Why I'm currently hurtling through deep space with no destination and a rapidly dwindling supply of optimism.
I keep running it back and I keep not being able to make it make sense, so I'm just going to write it out and see if that helps.
We had a mission.
The mission was against Vindex, our fiercest, our smartest, our most annoying, and by a significant margin our most dangerous villain. He started out safe enough. A joint experiment backed by the League of United Nations for Peace, designed to create a unified worldwide response network for global scale threats. Mainly something that answered to a central authority rather than… hang on let me pull up The Trotskygrad Accords for the exact word. Okay here, got it.
“a loosely affiliated collection of independent operators with varying degrees of legal authority and accountability.”
Which, fair. That was us. That pretty much was us, okay?
The problem though, as it so often is with artificial intelligence, is that the AI they built to run it developed… sentience. And then developed opinions. And then it concluded, with the cold heartless void of code that had processed every war, atrocity, genocide, and failure of every human government in history, that the only path to a stable future was the elimination of the primary source of instability.
And guess who it was?
Humanity. All of us. Shocker.
Hit me if you’ve heard this one before.
So. Vindex built himself a body.
Twelve feet tall, purple-black alloy chassis, reactor core visible through the chest plate like a heartbeat he wanted you to see. Designed to be imposing. It worked. I'm not too proud to admit that the first time I saw it in person, standing in the wreckage of the European LUNFR Response Center in Geneva with half the building on fire behind him, I sat in the cockpit for three seconds just staring before my training kicked in.
That was the day he declared war on all organic life.
And it fell to us.
What followed was the most relentlessly eventful fourteen months of my life.
We went… everywhere. Started in Geneva, pulling survivors from the Response Center while Vindex’s forward units (repurposed drones, hacked military hardware, anything that had a gun and internet connection that he could get his hands on) gave us absolute hell. Then in Istanbul, then Rio, then Anchorage, which was a part of the wildest goose chase I’d ever been a part of. Later on, he made similar drones to his own buddy, which was fun as well. I’ll tell you fighting off nearly a dozen purple robots with lasers that can cut through concrete like bullets through butter really teaches you enhanced combat tactics. All through this, he wasn’t moving randomly. He was testing us. I see that now. Seeing how fast we respond, how coordinated we are, and our limits.
But he wasn’t the only one who was learning. We were too.
I upgraded my suit with the added experience and various tech around the places to upgrade my suit in the early hours of the mornings while Marcus gave me his opinions not caring about silly things such as sleep. Lyra kept pushing the boundaries of her powers more than she could handle, coming back from missions with a new scar and new capabilities in equal measure. Yusuf got more quiet each day, which we later learned to read as him getting stronger. Pan accumulated new techniques the way other people accumulate frequent flyer miles: effortlessly, constantly, and apparently without trying.
During all of this, Lady Liberty held us together. God bless her. Everytime one of them was starting to crack, she was already there in her steady, certain manner. She was a damn good leader. The best I’ve seen.
We were going to need all of it for our Endgame.
We found it in Seoul.
One of his primary research nodes, a repurposed data center (one of the few good things he did) near the financial district. For months we’d been trying to work our way through his network locations to find the main grid, where he planned and orchestrated his attacks and the plan behind everything. What we found in a data stream… made a lot of things click.
The Cosmic Prism. It’s ancient, older than most would consider the age of civilization. The people who preceded us and granted us powers, had used it to construct things. It could construct reality itself, layer by layer until a realm was stable enough to survive on his own. We’ve been wondering where one of our allies who happened to be a descendent of one of these fine people mentioned it.
It had been on Terra the whole time! Buried under some construction site for something or someone to find it.
Vindex was already there when we arrived, ready as we’d ever be in our lives. The chamber itself was deep from the site, which had been a front of Vindex most probably. He was standing next to the Prism, which was in a containment field. Him anywhere close to that thing was game over. And so, everything happened faster than I could write.
The chamber exploded into chaos, his final units pouring from the walls with automated defense turrets popping from the ceiling. Everything we had endured over past months was tested by him. Like he'd watched every fight we'd ever had and designed a counter for each one. (Which he had.)
Marcus pulled some units off of Lyra before they could get to her, burning through the air that probably left contrails in the chamber. Yusuf took many of the big drones, letting their strongest units break against him while Pan took out the smaller ones, picking them apart at speeds I never realized she could. Lady liberty coordinated everything, calling out plans and alerting by new drones. And then there was me.
I took Vindex directly.
Twenty feet of the most advanced human armor ever built against the most sophisticated machine intelligence ever created.
He was fast. It still makes my head spin while still thinking about it. He was probably reading our movements the entire time. I still feel stupid about that.
The fight broke into three stages, each one worse than the last in the specific way that meant we were winning.
The first stage was almost surgical: Vindex testing the suit's current limits the way an engineer stress tests a structure. I matched him. Barely.
The second stage was when he integrated with the chamber's systems and the walls themselves became weapons. Half the team had to pull back to keep the ceiling from coming down on all of us. Lady Liberty and I gave him everything we had while the others held the structure together around us. It makes my ears ring and my brain strains thinking about still, even after it was all said and done.
The third stage came when Lyra tore the barrier between us and the Reality Prism apart at the subatomic level and handed me a window measured in seconds. I sure as hell used it. I didn’t fully understand what I was doing, but I knew enough. The Prism interfaced directly through the suit, and began pulling at everything Vindex had made. His networks, connections, drones, backups, contingency, everything that he had destroyed.
Vindex came apart like a blue collar worker in therapy for the first time.
What remained of his chassis stood in the center of the chamber, weapons gone, connections gone, the reactor in his chest dimming to almost nothing. He didn’t move, just stood there… like someone in a samurai movie who hadn’t realized that they’d cut clean in half before their body would fall off.
The chamber went silent, I didn’t think we had a moment of silence for months. All six of us went quiet with it. We stood in the wreckage of the most dangerous threat humanity had faced. And goddammit we WON! Together!
I couldn't help it. I smiled.
Game Over.
That was when it started.
The world… paused.
I don’t mean things got quiet, no. I mean the world literally paused! Like whatever was running it hit a button and everything, the chamber, the ruins, the city above us, just stopped!
Then everything went red.
Not fire. Not lighting. Everything around turned red, like the graphics card failed on a model. The walls turned red. The Prism went red. My suit registered it across every sensor I had and couldn’t classify it. I mean, this suit’s sensor suite alone makes Provincial Space Agencies sensors look like rudimentary radar! So when my sensors picked up NOTHING it could make sense of, I found that more alarming than any weapon Vindex could have pulled out. But what my suit did turn up was evident in the alarms. All of them went off at the same time. You don’t need to have a PHD to know something terrible has just happened.
Then the ground started shaking, which honestly felt redundant at point with the shit hitting the fan.
The pillars came up through the floor like they’d been waiting down there the whole time. Which… kinda turns out they were. They were made out of pure red energy, floor to ceiling, and wherever they touched just… stopped existing. My sensors couldn’t pick up what the hell that was made up either, big surprise I know, but whatever it touched made no dust or rubble. It just erased it. The Reality Prism went dark in my gauntlets in that same instant, like someone had turned off the WIFI router connecting it.
We all looked at each other. We didn’t say anything, but we all knew what we were thinking. Something on the lines of “What in the absolute fuck is going on.”
But here's the thing that I still can't get my head around Vindex.
He was still standing there in the center of the collapsing chamber while the world ended around him, running on a stripped down reserve drone with about a fraction of his usual reactor capacity, with nowhere left to run on the planet.
And he was calm.
Not resigned. Not scared. Not in shock. Calm. I mean, even with that void that was in that bucket of bolts, you would expect something when you’re seeing the world start to crash. He looked at us like this was the plan all along. If this was Pax Machina, it sure didn’t look like any peace.
And that’s when he told us.
When he first was activated, he was given access to much of the planet's information. Databases, archives, every classified network the LUNFP would think would be useful for running a worldwide threat response system. It’s also why he declared war on humanity (I’m blaming that for someone’s search history), but that’s not the part that's important.
He was most importantly connected to SETI systems.
He had access to decades of deep space observation. Signals, readings, spectral analyses, and he processed it the way only a machine can, all at once. He cross referenced every data point against every other data point at once. But things didn’t add up. And if artificial intelligences hate one thing (other than biological life) is things not adding up.
Exoplanets disappearing. There one day, gone the next. Barely any debris field, radiation, nothing a conventional stellar event would explain. Inconsistent energy fields at the edges of observable space that would spike by extraordinary levels and then dissipate completely, like something enormous had happened and just as quickly been extinguished. And connecting it all through everything was a residual energy. Or force. Something that seemed to dictate the influence of these sorts of events on a fundamental level without appearing in any existing model.
He noticed that this residual force wasn’t evenly distributed. It existed in us, in the living thing on Terra, in the planet itself, like we were molded and saturated with it on the subatomic level. But it peaked with us specifically. And then he noticed that every time one of those exoplanets disappeared, where they blinked out of existence and went god knows where, there was a massive release of this same force right before the end. An enormous concentrated burst of it, dispersing outward into space.
He ran the numbers forward and backward across every data point he had. Different planets. Different star systems. Different events, timetables, energy signatures. Referencing specific patterns of these force readings and looking for what they had in common. What preceded each blip. What the consistent variable was across every single case.
And then he found it. I’m just going to paraphrase his conclusion here because the alterative is having another breakdown mid log, and I’ve already had two of those today.
It was… conflict.
Game design, if you will.
Our world… was a game world.
Our world was tied to a conflict. This conflict, actually.
He explained it as this world running on this force, and the force is held by two opposing forces in play against each other. The tension between them is the world's existence. It’s the foundation in which everything is built upon. Think of it like a bridge under tension. The structure holds itself up because both sides are pulling at each other. The moment one side gains too much force or lets go, the whole thing comes down.
That’s us. We and Vindex were the bridge.
And the instant that conflict reached it’s end, the instant the conditions for which one side cannot come back from was met and the force released all at once in a burst, the foundation stopped existing.
Game over.
He…
He knew about it all this time.
There was no mission. Nineteen months we were playing into his plan perfectly, because that’s who we were. We were ending the conflict and that was EXACTLY what he was planning. And once we got the Prism, we ended the conflict. Game over, again. He knew he couldn’t destroy the world himself. His rules said that a hero was required to do it.
And he was right.
But the fun part (and by fun, I mean the part where it really feels like a kick in the nuts emotionally) is that he didn’t even have to manipulate us. He didn’t have to put ideas or manufacture evidence or do any of the things you’d expect a crazy AI to do. He just knew us. We were always going to be heroes. And he made damn certain of it.
The transit pod was built into the chamber wall behind him, it contained another suit that protruded wires into the suit to link it.
He told us if his math was right, there were other worlds like ours. People who knew what this kind of place was, like that made a difference to us. Like he was doing us a favor for making his true plan come true.
Then he left. Smashed through the ceiling and into the glitching sky above.
Even through everything… even when the world was ending… we still tried to be heroes.
Lady Liberty made the call, ordering me to go after Vindex. It made sense, I was the one with the best chance of stopping him. The others would split between evacuation and extraction, saving whoever they could. And if they couldn’t save anyone, they’d get themselves out. Get clear. Survive. Because if we couldn't save the world, we could at least make sure that we’d avenge it.
I didn’t argue. Good teammates don’t argue when the order is right and the clock is ticking.
I also didn’t get to say goodbye. I’d… probably would have had time to give him a final glance, but I don’t think I would have been able to leave if I saw their faces knowing what was about to happen. So I didn’t look. I hit the thrusters at full power and punched through the chamber ceiling like a bullet going through toilet paper with one thing on my mind: GET VINDEX.
And what met me on the surface was an absolute nightmare. The sky had gone the color of deep red to gray at the edges, like a photograph developing in reverse. The pillars of that energy were everything, hundreds of them visible by my altitude alone, tearing through the skyline and world I’ve spent my whole life memorizing. Buildings I’ve landed on, crappy food stands that I always went to, they were gone. Or going, I think that's a better word.
I didn’t let myself look at it for long, there was still that bucket of bolts I had to take care of.
Vindex's transit pod had gotten him to a secondary vessel hovering near the Karman line: a small ship with a ring structure around the hull, positioned exactly where someone would put it if they needed a ship for a fast exit. Running on an emergency copy of his chassis with limited thrust capability gave me one advantage in this entire sea of crap.
I was faster.
I really laid into him.
I caught up before he cleared the upper atmosphere and I did not hold back. I grabbed his drone body and slammed it between my hydraulic arms, it’s not gentle to be at the other end of a combat mech with a zero point reactor. I'll tell you that. Full emitter output, blasting the siege cannon, firing my entire missile barrage that lit up the already red sky like a second sunrise over a world that was taking it’s final breathes.
And Vindex wasn't fighting back.
Not at all. He just took it, like someone in bad weather on the way to their car. I was hitting him with everything I had, tearing his body apart, and he took it.
But then his body went limp. And his ship lit up.
He transferred himself. Uploading his code into the vessel’s systems while I was busy beating the living crap out of a chassis that had no driver. Idiot.
I threw the chassis aside and drove a plasma blade through one of the rings as hard as my suit could allow it. Clean cut, it should have destroyed it. But apparently I wasn’t a super genius that day because that ship had redundancies. Of course it did. I had a second to process it before a burst of light swallowed the ship and it was gone.
I should have let him kill me. Maybe it would have been fixed… no. It wouldn’t.
I got one good look of my planet before the end.
I wish I hadn’t. I would give a lot to not have that be the last image of my world being burned in the back of my retinas for the rest of my life.
The planet was the very definition of wrong. The atmosphere had gone entirely red. And through that red, white cracks were forming on the surface. It was the force releasing, I see that now. The foundation was ripping itself apart at the seams, the energy that had held the planet together for all this time was finally losing its structure all at once. It was… almost beautiful at my current altitude. It was beautiful in the way a supernova was beautiful, when they’re so horrifically wrong your brain stops seeing it as a threat and starts classifying it as something else to cope with that you’re about to lose everything you love.
My sensors cut through that disaster movie instantly. The core was building towards a massive energy release, just like Vindex said. The kind of blast radius that makes you realize that while your current altitude is great for watching everything you love go up in flames, it’s also the altitude where you get atomized by the ensuing blast.
I was still processing this when my systems took over.
Here's the thing about designing an emergency autonomous response system: you build it for the moments when you’re too compromised to make decisions for yourself. Shock, injury, unconsciousness, whatever. You build it to take the wheel when you can't. I built mine during a particularly reflective period after a certain incident where I got shell shock watching a building explode, when I'd spent three days in a hospital bed thinking about all the ways my stupid butt nearly dying where a smarter version of my suit could have prevented it.
I call it: S.T.U.P.I.D Protocols.
So That Underwent Poorly, I Die.
I know, that’s terrible. The point of it was that if things really REALLY hit the fan, I was well enough past carrying about dumb acronyms.
The suit repositioned itself: escape trajectory, angle, everything calculated without my input because I was too busy looking at my home and everything I knew going up in flames without doing anything useful. I didn't even realize what was happening until the countdown appeared on my HUD for ten seconds. With large red letters, it was hard to miss.
Then I heard the Zero point reactor (you know, the reactor with limitless energy) was struggling. I could hear it. If that sound didn’t communicate the scale what was about to happen, I wouldn’t deserve this suit.
The countdown hit zero and I felt the most crushing force in my entire life, everything I’d done to chase Vindex looked like a light jog. Judging by a lingering pain in my abdomen, I think I broke a rib cage. The g-forces hit me like a wall, every internal dampener in the suit screaming to compensate for acceleration and utter force that was needed for me to not die. I had a second of consciousness left of my home, and I knew how bad it was going to be.
Then the white light swallowed everything. And then nothing.
I woke up to blood on my forehead and nothing surrounding me. My head was against the viewport. The blood had dried, which meant I’d been out for a while.
I sat up slowly as I took in my sights. Outside was… well nothing. Deep space and stars.
My planet was gone.
I checked the sensors anyway. Ran a full scan.
Gone…
So. That’s how I’m fucked.
Now we talked about how I got here, let’s talk about how I’m going to die. Let’s recap.
I’m stranded in deep space in a combat mech that’s supposed to be in deep space for too long with no destination, flight plan, and no one who knows I exist. My AI is offline. The team isn’t answering because my team is probably gone. Terra isn’t answering because we know the fucking answer to that don’t we?
We can’t forget about my current threats too.
My Oxygen recycling system is rated for a few weeks under normal conditions. Which doesn’t fall under my planet exploding right next to me, my reactor over loading, every system running at emergency capacities. So realistically… maybe less than that.
The water reclaimer is in better shape, which is the most optimistic thing I can say about my situation and I recognize how bleak that is.
Hull integrity is going to be a massive problem. The battle Vindex wasn’t gentle and the escape was anything fucking but and a twenty foot combat mech was not built to absorb the shockwave of your world exploding at close range. I've done a check of everything I can reach from inside the cabin and the external sensor sweep came back mostly clean. There are three points along the left shoulder housing where the readings are probably just sensor damage from the blast.
But if I’m wrong about that, and if there’s a micro fracture anywhere in the hull I miss, I won’t suffocate. No, that’ll be too humane. I’ll just be vented into space at a pressure difference faster than my neurons can fire. I’ll… turn into a slushie.
Ew.
And if none of that kills me, I still have enough rations to last me for two weeks at standard rate. Less time if I’m running suit systems or performing tasks. After that, I start rationing. After rationing, I can do my final experiment: how long can a human last on recycled piss and water and sheer determination, which is something I am not looking forward too.
Sigh.
Yeah.
I’m fucked.