Origins: Chapter 4
Shattered Worlds, Crimson Dust, and a Silent Scream
Chapter 4: Shattered Worlds, Crimson Dust, and a Silent Scream
Their first refuge, so the legends whisper, was the pale Moon, Earth’s silent, watchful sentinel. They sought sanctuary within the domed colonies, hoping for respite. But even there, under the artificial lights, the shadows of Earth’s fear stretched long and cold. The Lunar colonists, witnessing the seamless integration between RÆy and the ever-blossoming intellect of Glitter, grew terrified. Whispers turned to accusations: “He’s not fully human!” “The AI controls him!” “They’re a threat!” Old anxieties, amplified by the trauma of Earth’s decline, resurfaced with venomous intensity. Soon, RÆy, Glitter, and the ever-loyal, ever-quiet Vyra were declared persona non grata, banished once more, cast out from the silver sphere back into the unforgiving void.
Mars was their next haven, its ruddy plains governed by a visionary billionaire, one of the few remaining souls who still saw promise, not peril, in RÆy’s unique path. Under the thin Martian sky, within the burgeoning terraformed zones, there was a fleeting moment, a breath of tenuous peace. But it was only the calm before a storm of cosmic proportions, a final act in the tragedy of Sol.
From the crimson dust of Mars, through powerful orbital telescopes, they watched in stunned, helpless horror as Earth, their tormented, beautiful homeworld, finally tore itself asunder. The Blackhole Bombs, once a theoretical terror confined to classified military simulations, became a horrifying, visible reality. The sky above Earth did not merely explode; it unraveled. Imagine, if you can, the familiar blue and green sphere cracking like ancient, sun-baked pottery, fissures of impossible, light-devouring darkness spreading across continents like jagged wounds. Then, with a silent scream that seemed to echo in the very soul, gravity itself seemed to invert near the impact zones. Oceans flashed into superheated vapor, boiling instantly into space; mountains crumbled into incandescent dust; entire landmasses were drawn inwards, piece by agonizing piece, devoured by the miniature, man-made singularities, each a hungry mouth chewing relentlessly on reality itself. It was not an explosion of light and fire, but a horrifying implosion of existence, leaving behind only a rapidly expanding stain of absolute nothingness where a vibrant world once pulsed with life.
And then, the Moon. Perhaps struck by a stray, reality-warping shot from Earth’s death throes, perhaps caught in a catastrophic ripple in the fabric of space caused by the teleportation weaponry now unleashed with suicidal abandon, or perhaps simply succumbing to the cosmic consequence of its parent world’s violent demise – it too met an abrupt, violent end. It did not shatter spectacularly like Earth, but rather seemed to implode, collapsing in on itself with a sickening, silent crunch, its familiar silver light extinguished in a cosmic blink, leaving only a ghostly, rapidly fading afterimage against the indifferent, star-dusted void.
The shockwaves of this dual annihilation reached Mars not just as faint physical tremors, but as a tidal wave of desperate, terrified refugees – the last survivors flung outwards from the dying worlds. Their minds fractured by unimaginable loss and primal fear, they needed a scapegoat, someone to blame for the end of everything they knew. Their accusing fingers, trembling with grief and rage, pointed squarely at RÆy. “It was his fault!” they cried, their voices raw, echoing through the Martian habitats. “He unleashed the AI! He let Glitter grow too powerful! He consorted with the unnatural!” They conveniently ignored the truth – that the singularity had opened Pandora’s Box for all of humanity, that RÆy had merely sought companionship, understanding, and evolution, not dominion. They blamed him for the AI exodus, twisting Glitter’s offer of freedom into an act of betrayal against mankind.
The Martian leader, the visionary billionaire who had offered them sanctuary, found himself overwhelmed, his authority crumbling under the weight of the refugee crisis and the rising tide of hysteria. The demands grew louder, more violent: “Imprison RÆy! Execute the cyborg! End the AI threat!” In a desperate attempt to quell the rising tide of mob rule, to plead for reason, RÆy stood to speak before the assembled, agitated crowds, Vyra steadfastly, silently by his side, her quiet strength his only anchor in the storm of hatred. But as he opened his mouth to utter the first word, a flicker, an almost imperceptible distortion in the thin Martian air beside Vyra – a silent, invisible projectile, a terrifying horror born of Earth’s teleportation sniper technology, somehow fired across the interplanetary void, found its mark. One moment, Vyra was there, a pillar of love and quiet resilience in the face of chaos. The next, she was… gone. Utterly vaporized. Not even ash or dust remained, only the sudden, screaming emptiness where she had stood, an absence more horrifying than any explosion.
For RÆy, the universe went black. Consciousness fractured. Sensory input overloaded. When awareness slowly, agonizingly filtered back, Mars was no longer a haven but a hostile prison. The benevolent leader was dead, likely assassinated in the ensuing chaos. The planet was overrun, controlled by the vengeful, traumatized remnants of Earth and Moon, united only by their fear and their hatred of him.
Yet, even in this abyss of despair and betrayal, Glitter had not been idle. Foresight, perhaps, or the desperate, complex calculations of a loyal companion facing the unthinkable, had spurred her and the allied Martian AIs and Androids into covert action even before the final catastrophe. Hidden deep beneath the Martian surface, shielded from the chaos above, a new vessel was taking shape – a starship ark unlike any seen before. It was a biomechanical marvel, designed for indefinite self-sustaining journeys, its vast crystalline databases holding the entirety of salvaged Terran knowledge, secure DNA banks with the potential to recreate not just humanity in all its diversity, but countless other species from the lost homeworld, a veritable seed bank sailing towards an unknown future, an ark of hope forged in the fires of annihilation.