Prologue
>Jack awoke somewhere, he appeared to be in a jungle, much more the pleasant environment without the bodies of nano soldiers littering the floor. Rays of Light swept down diagonally from the canopy as he looked around the crater.
>Jack eventually swept his gaze to his left, where he saw her. She was looking down at him with a gentle smile, her eyes, held all the love in the world, their glowing orbs rotating in circles as her pupils dilated.
>He looked to his body, finding no trace of clothing, only himself, lying naked on the jungle floor. He looked up to the woman, reaching a hand down and caressing his cheek as his eyes met hers. At this moment, his mind was quiet and blank save for one question.
"Are you Pitra?" He asked like an excited child.
>She looked at him, starting, "Jack..." pausing to wipe a forming tear from her eye, "Why, yes. I am." She said, taking him in a warm embrace.

>Thirty seconds passed as Pitra pulled back from him, pausing in place as she stared it him. The mutual feeling of struggling to recognize each other setting in as they absorbed the new features of the person they loved so much.
>Jack's sense of ill recognition being more severe than Pitra's, they both looked themselves and the other up and down. Pitra struck by jack's blue irises, resembling a camera shutter of old with each flap adorned by a blue LED, having only changed there, retaining his brown hair and physical characteristics.
>Jack on the other hand, struggled to place together the idea that this woman before him was Pitra, her pale white skin and blue eyes, much like those of the merged post human warriors a stark contrast to the mild blue and red eyes he was used to seeing, even a contrast to the pale blue rings the suits had induced with their mechanical yet somehow expressive quality.
>Jack's problem with the sight before him lay entirely in the fact that he could not easily reconcile the face, the body, the hair and eyes before him with that of Pitra. While he had retained almost all of his physical traits, save for his eye color, hers were almost entirely absent. Jacks face remained stone he stared at her.
>"Jack? Jack? Are you okay?" she said, confounded by his lack of expression.
"Huh? Oh. Yeah. I'm okay, I just need some time to get used to your new look." He answered
>"What about my new look?" She asked impetuously, apparently reacting.. rather unlike herself, only to the word 'look.'
"It's just... you look nothing like you did up until now. It looks like you got taller by about five inches... you have looked at yourself, haven't you?"
>"I- No, it never crossed my mind." She said as Jack thrust an arm forward, pulling the brown hair forward for her to see, then holding her hand in front of her face, to which she took notice of the strange fact that it seemed to be the same color as the one holding it.
"By the way, there's a large number of people with primitive weapons nearby, I think they've been watching us for about three minutes... How long were you up before I came to?"
>Pitra began scanning the jungle around them before answering "About an hour. How do you know they're there?"
"I'm sensing them. Our bodies aren't quite our own. We're merged with the suits, though I can't speculate why you turned white, but there's a nearby data nav beacon. Within the solar system. At the very least, we're near a quarantined planet and no other colonized planets are in the system."
>"Does that mean we're on the planet then?" Pitra asked.
"Probably, it's been quarantined for twenty years, and was settled in 2190. It seems we might not have been asleep for the centuries or millennia I was expecting."
>Figures emerged from the Jungle as they rose to their feet.
>one of them let out a scream of surprisingly an English word.
>"PATRIARCHY!!!"
>The other figures seemed to become agitated at the yelling of the word, raising their spears to Jack and Pitra as they stared on. Jack noticing some apprehension in Pitra.
"Relax, Pitra, they're quarantined for societal degeneration. They're hapless retards in aftermath of their own effects on society, just judging by the fact that they probably are the ones who got the whole planet quarantined."
>"It's not that I'm worried about, how are we supposed to take them in a fight?" she whispered in response.
"Our skin is somewhere between flesh and titanium cobalt matrix. We're Schrodinger's robots. They can't stab us and we have all the abilities of the suits." Jack communicated to her, which seemed wrong because at no point in the statement did his voice stimulate her ears.
"Let me handle this." Jack commanded as he stepped forward to the horde of figures, now apparently human females. One of them screamed.
>"Stay there! PATRIARCHY!!!"
>Jack looked back to Pitra with a look that said "I'm breaking this whole planet's will today." more so than his actual statement of those words
>Jack stepped forward even more as he began speaking.
"Why, yes..." He began with a grin on his face that could make even the greatest of predators cower in fear "... this IS a patriarchy. As such, I'm very proud of you all for recognizing YOUR place in MY world, if there is anything you can do for me, do not hesitate to inform me." He said as the figures, now easily defined as a large number of women began backing away, keeping their distance as he strolled toward them rather leisurely.
>Two of them charged him with spears, breaking them on his stomach as they met his fist, crushing their skulls with all the leisure in the world before tossing the remaining halves of their spears into two of the figures and throwing the corpses of those who charged at the others at a rate that must've been ninety miles an hour.

Chapter One: The Once and Future King.
October 10, 2556
>The diplomatic shuttle set down from the Terran alliance. Jack looked on in abject indifference at the diplomatic appointment that he'd agreed to, now questioning if it was a mistake after half a month.
>The diplomat emerged from earth, a black man with those same blue eyes, a face that finally shook the indifference to earth's attempted diplomatic interference away from him and a heavy degree of surprise came to him.
>The diplomat of earth finally stopped, recognizing the face of the Patriarch that earth had sent him to "persuade" with threats of sanctions or even subversive action, and losing all intent as he finally said the name of a man he hadn't seen in three-hundred and eighty-three years.
>"Jack?! Is that YOU?" He said, as he warmly approached the Patriach of the planet.
"Well, well, well. If it isn't Hank Barnes. Or should I be calling you moon man?"
>"You know, Herman, when they told me that there was a literal Patriarchy out in the sky that I needed to negotiate with, I thought of you, maybe something you would do, particularly what used to be in this particular territory, but not in a million years did I expect it to actually BE you." 
"Well... what actually happened here? I woke up after what I could surmise to be a hundred and thirteen years, and there were a bunch of women in animal skin loincloths attacking me with spears. You can guess how that turned out. In fact, if you go up into the palace, there's a tapestry of me skinning their 'queen' alive about twelve hours after I woke up."
>"Damn. Hell of a story. I was recovered on site by Pitra's team. Speaking of Pitra, what happened to her?" Hank asked before glancing at the brunette nearing them, taking John's arm.
>"Oh, I didn't think you'd have moved on, I'm Hank Barnes, and you must be the queen of this planet?" He amended.
>The brunette opened her eyes wider as she greeted Hank, almost making him ask how another nano soldier arrived before she spoke.
>"Eh, one for two. I'm the queen of this planet. Pitra Herman." She answered, catching Barnes as he was put all the available information together.
>"Pitra? I didn't recognize you without... the everything."
>"It took Jack a while to get used to it as well."
>"So, I take it you two are as strong as ever?" Barnes inquired.
"Easily. Should we head inside? The rain's coming and we'll be in it if we stay out another minute."
>"Sure, lead the way." Barnes said, walking in line with his newly rediscovered friends. 
"So what's the deal with Earth anyway? Ever since we came into contact with them they've been REALLY into me with this business about me being a tyrant and a this and that."
>"Oh, that. You know I was supposed to threaten you when I got here, but I think it'll be a good day for cooperation between earth and your own domain."
"With what are you going to threaten two people who're immortal? Sanctions? Ooh, so scary. War? Ooh, so scary. They know I'm a god here. It's not like you can put me up against a firing squad and expect results other than impotence, and it's not like you can subvert me when these people actually believe in me, feel the benefits of my rule, and know from account after account from their ancestors that I've ruled this planet, occasionally appearing before them, same as always and before for two hundred seventy years. You can't subvert the almighty, let alone when he can take any subversive movements you can try to muster with his bare hands."
>"Yup. Suppose that makes threatening you pointless." Barnes stated.
"So the question is, what dealings does earth care to make with me, and what does earth intend to exchange in order to make those dealings mutually favorable?"

Hours later.
>Jack and Pitra took their new ambassador to the main hall in the palace, and sat down for dinner. Jack had some questions that came before anything else.
"Hank. Is it REALLY 2556 on earth already?"
>Barnes stopped eating and looked over to him with a look that could pass for serious or just rueful before speaking. "It is. It's been three hundred and eighty three years since we last met. In earth years, that is."
"Hard to believe. You know, as powerful as I am, near invincible even, There are still things I can't do. To think, that was the last time anyone I knew saw me. Aside from you, maybe some of the other post humans if they haven't been destroyed to the cell yet. What does that make me? I suppose even as the ruler of my own planet for so long, I still can't recall many things I wanted more than to reconnect with the family... now I guess they're all dead, save for maybe some descendants of my older sister."
>"Yeah. Being out of time is too high of a price on morality. Want me to fill you in on what happened after you two went missing?"
"Sure. I'm a few centuries out of touch."
>"Okay, so you remember how the print publications used to always be obsessed about John and Jackie Kennedy? How this conspiracy or that happened for a hundred and ten years?"
"... Yes?" Jack said with a concerned look on his face.
>Hank continued "Well, you two became the next Jack and Jackie Kennedy. Even today it's all theories about what happened to Jack Herman and his alien extramarital companion."
"Come to think of it I remember seeing some of the magazines back in the day in Rhodesia. Funny thing about their assumption about my relationship with Pitra, I was never married."
>"Adds a certain dark humor to it, don't it?"
"Sure does. So it's still a thing?"
>"Even now there are multiple documentaries being made, and even theoretical dramatizations of the events based on interviews we gave. You'd be surprised how much the actor in the last one, about two years ago looked like you."
"Maybe one of my big sister's descendants? Once there's a waffengeist in the family, their traits are super dominant. My mother, sister and I both had great great great great grandma Emily's Eyes and hair color. So, what's the historical consensus on that?"
>"Well, if you wanted to take a trip to earth with Pitra on your arm again, you could set it straight, but until that day, you're responsible for the peaceful coexistence of the Acra and humans, your extra marital affair with Pitra may have had something to do with your disappearance and your comrades strong advocacy for the annihilation of the ic'rah yielded fantastic results. Altogether, you're a martyr for the peaceful existence of humanity, hell, even the kino organization has acknowledged your good judgement and supreme, if brief statesmanship in bringing the Acra to the fold, being a civilization that is essentially like our own."
>"So what happens on earth after we went to sleep?" Pitra inquired, her face signaling a subtle discomfort. a suspicion that the world has since done nothing but degenerate, maybe?
>Barnes looked over to her with a face as non committal as a stone wall before he started "Well, it's an interesting bit of history between your disappearance and me being dispatched to this world. A few powers that you wouldn't recognize took control of a good bit of the eastern world, namely the Philippines and Malaysia for the better part." 
>Pitra looked on in discomfort, while I couldn't tell what face I was making, though awe was definitely a prominent reaction.
>"Brazil took over half of south america, and Canada was annexed." Barnes continued, "And I was part of it all."
>Silence took over the table as a hint of smugness crossed Hank's face.
"Hank? Have you forgotten what I've told you about superstates? Can't really talk seeing as I have my own entire world, but on earth? That hasn't worked out well in the past, and I don't suppose people will ever realize they can just colonize other planets."
>"Well, if it's any consolation they leave a lot to the local authorities. The three responsibilities of government are really the only things that they have their hands in, local governments take care of the rest."
>Jack looked over before nodding.
"And what do you know of accrassas? What's their state of affairs... if you happen to be privy to such information."
>Barnes furrowed his brow before starting to speak again. "It's... well, I'll beg your pardon, but it's boring. Nothing's really changed in the time since you were the ambassador, save for a couple new bearers of the crown."
"Better boring than unstable. Suppose you could say I fought to make this place boring and keep it that way all those years ago."
>"I haven't been around long enough to judge your efforts, but how do you think you did?"
>Jack looks at Barnes for a moment and then lapses for a moment into thought before turning to Pitra, who was following the conversation contentedly with a subtly rueful smile that told Jack that she was caught in memory, though she wanted to follow the conversation.
"Pitra, should I show him?" Jack asked as Pitra snapped back into the present for a moment before a look of attention fell upon her face, disappearing quickly as she simply gave a solemn nod.
>Jack stood up from the table and motioned toward Barnes to get up, and began proceeding onto the veranda of the palace, on the way, pointing to a large tapestry depicting a man skinning a large woman alive.
>"What the fuck are you doing in that GHASTLY rug?" Barnes asked, apparently shocked that he'd failed to notice such a prominently displayed decoration.
"That's me, skinning a tribal leader in what used to be a large encampment, you wouldn't guess it easily, but that was two hundred and seventy years ago." Jack explained as he walked Barnes out to the terrace. "For two hundred and seventy years have I ruled this planet. There's no room for deviation from the god that they made me early in my rule. While my original disciples have all died off, I have not aged. I will not die. They know this, and several generations have told their children accounts of the man who's ruled the planet since they were born and their parents before them. To them, I am god, and there's no deviation from me, because unlike the gods of earth, I am very much tangible. My presence is not only felt, but seen and heard, my form similar to their own has outlasted generations and more. To be laid bare and simple, I'm the patriarch of this world. They all know me when I make my presence known, they all see me, for you see, I'm no king laying claim to the divinity of my rule on the faith of those I claim to rule alone. I'm a king who shows the divinity of his rule with feats unachieveable to mere man, and bare handed force unachieveable to them on only a few occasions during the first years of my rule. The great secret to my civilization is that there is no need of faith for these people to believe in me. They've seen it firsthand and passed the knowledge down the generations. For two hundred and seventy years have I ruled this planet, And I'm proud of what these people have become. What they've done."
>Barnes looked on at Jack, apparently no less sharp at making agrandizing speech over the past three centuries as he formed the question. "What's this about? What were you going to show me?"
>Jack found himself at the outtermost end of the terrace, looking up at the night sky while he rested his hands on the rail.
"Look at the moon. Closely." Jack said, a tone somewhat odd in his voice, as though it carried importance.
>Barnes looked at the moon in the night sky briefly, seeing nothing. He magnified the moon and continued to see nothing particularly off or remarkable about it. Just a round rock orbiting a bigger round rock. 
>"What am I looking at here, Jack? Of what importance is the moon?"
>Jack smirked before he continued, diverting his own gaze to the city in the distance.
"Notice anything odd? Lack of craters? Color?"
>It slowly dawned on Hank that something about the moon seemed to be off, starting with its perfect roundness and lack of craters. "Wait... is it new?" He said aloud as he began searching for any information on moons in this system
"I'm proud of this one. It wasn't there when I started my reign. In fact, it wasn't there a mere fifty years ago."
>"Then... how did it come to be?"
"It's a resource depository, one resource in particular, one of our less cutting edge weapons we designed for the purpose of destroying whole worlds when it came down to it, but one whose effectiveness we can guarantee."
>"What madness have you conceived?"
"It's a spherical shell for storage of a drug that became popular in the late twentieth century called methamphetamine. We've had few conflicts to test it, but a great deal of methamphetamine disolving into the ecosystems of worlds as it is dropped by the fleet loads into the atmosphere of the planet time and time again has an undeniable and brutal effect."
>"What kind of things do you fight to come up with such madness and then manifest it on such a grandiose scale?"
"You know? I had to tell them to build that. I had to tell them to build all their warlike capabilities. Thing is, if they deviated from my guidance by quite the large margin, everything would still be fine. This happened on earth, after all. What makes the difference however is that deviation will never stop at far enough. The line between benign and malignant is not one that deviants will ever respect. That's what went wrong in the early twentyfirst century. Here, I set the envelope where it needs to be and I've made it undeniable, the line uncrossable. They didn't need to be told to build these cities, they needed only the slightest nudge in the right general direction, and now the planet's denizens have achieved so much. They don't need much management to maintain a non degenerate society."
>"Makes sense. You know you talk a lot?" 
"Self aggrandizing speeches are fun. More so in the dramatic tone. Truth be told and kept curt, it's THEM who should be giving these speeches." Jack said, pointing to the city. "They're the ones who did most of this. I just contributed the occasional bit of knowledge when progress came to a plateau here or there. And the most vague of principles. Having your brain merged with a supercomputer is the BEST perk."
>Barnes looked at Jack for a moment before chuckling and replying. "Yeah. No argument here. Wanna come to earth and I don't know, adjust to acting like a normal human without fully realized megalomania for a bit?"
"Yeah... I'll see if I can book some time and the empress and I can sneak away."

Chapter Two: Running Free
>A smiling emperor walks to the diplomatic ship as he follows an old friend to the ship, the crew returning from what were likely some humble accommodations in the hospitality of the emperor's people, more than happy to share their rather gregarious culture with only a few friendly strangers.
>As they reached the ship, the emperor observes gleefully, the crew returning to their stations, taking a minute to wave goodbye to the strange world as they cast off. One of them even sang a centuries old song of the life of a mass driver engineer while doing it, much to the delight of the emperor boarding for a visit to earth.
>"So... Odd after so long, isn't it?"
"What do you mean? Casting off? leaving planetside?"
>"Yes. This has been our world for almost two and three quarter centuries."
"I don't know. I simply don't know."
>"Come on, now, human. It must be some degree of odd. You've been ruling the world, literally. A fully realized case of megalo, and now you're going home, where you're just a plain old historical figure, maybe even as obscure as... I don't know, who's an obscure figure on your planet who did something important?"
"Colonel Prescott."
>"What did he do?" Pitra asked with what appeared to be genuine curiousity.
"He commanded part of the colonial army during the american revolutionary war about seven hundred and eighty years ago. He disappeared not too long later and his whereabouts afterward have been a mystery ever since."
>"Well. I'll say one thing. It's just like old times."
"Hey, you're right. Lets get settled in for the ride. Try not to break my shoulder this time."

EDF NS359 Theodore Jackson, Kilundi Orbit.
Altitude: 876-982 KM periapsis-apoapsis.
Earth date: July 27, 2171
>A carbon black suit stands at ease, connected with the bridge of the ship on which he stands, an ic'rah infested planet below and one of two of their ships found in formation from the ship's observatory.
>"To sum it up, outcast, the situation is that we have contacts on our radar receivers and we're reading that they have radiation on us."
"Warning receiver's picking it up?"
>"Yes."
"Humor me, get ALL the radars running and run'em in flood mode. Point them DIRECTLY at the enemy ships."
>"Do they have radiation warning receivers?"
"Don't know, but we'll find out. If nothing else, we can increase the odds of any survivors from their side getting cancer."
>"Wilco."
>Jack looked out of the ship as railguns began firing their projectiles at two thirds the speed of light toward the ships, now so far out that he could only see them by patching his visor into the ship observatory.
"It's getting pretty sporty up here. And I can't imagine it'll be any lighter on the ground."
>A couple rays began blinking in and out of existence as he looked on, proceeding casually to the launch bays, the ship's sensor suite feeding casually the tumult in the space around him, so boring, yet so stressful.
"You know? They suck ass at any level of micro level warfare, their infantry tends to be ineffective, they're soldiers don't seem to ever use projectile or energy weapons... but you have to hand it to them, they're pretty good at the strategic stuff. Makes life in space hell, should one of their cruisers look upon you." He thought to himself as he passed crewmen buzzing about in the hallway. If he wanted to, he could have listened to, and understood in real time all of their conversations and tasks from contextual clues alone, alas, he held no interest for such things.
>Main corridors
>Hanger bays
>Ready room.
>"So anyway, it looks like there's some kind of advanced ic'rah troops planetside that actually have the brains to use things like infantry tactics and energy weapons. It'd be a shame if all they could do is excite us for a brief moment and then let us down as though we don't represent even a slight threat to their continued existence should they continue their... Hey! Outcast! How long have you been there?"
"Long enough to know you've come a long way since joining us Azar."
>Jack stared at Azar, the situation so clear that everyone around knew the faces under the masks without the ability to see them. Azar's attention peaked as Jack looked through him into his psyche.
"You've become callous, uncaring, and above all, unwound."
>The air of the room practically reeks, even gains the weight of the assessment as Azar's face invisibly shifts and contorts, his body posturing, the very essence of his being bending to the terror of a merciless assessment.
"...Given a few more weeks you'd get sloppy, undisciplined, and in another month I'll be incinerating a suit that once had a magneto-tag that said "Azar" on it while I go about the business of sending your tag to your family. I've seen it happen, I've been on my side of the process Stop with the megalomaniacal BULLSHIT until you've at least WON. THEN you can have your assessment. Until then, prepare for the task at fucking HAND. In mere seconds we've wasted several times over in just this exchange we could've been ordered to the pods, which would be launching just a few seconds ago without you on it while you end out in the wreckage, or worse, you miss your combat drop and we're a man short dealing with the hordes down there. GET YOUR ASS IN GEAR."
>Silence filled the air as several suited nanosoldiers looked on at the scolding that had just taken place. Jack could feel them beginning to form objections in their minds, though he knew they'd never be voiced. In three years he'd learned that much. 
>Just as he figured it would play out, Azar got back to his task, securing the last of his kit, as the voices in the other's heads grew louder in volume until they were almost to a vocal pressure when the order came about.
>" 8th Brigade, Teams 2-1 through 9-6 to drop canisters, Priority: Case 3 planetary deployment imminent. Specialty launch, Overweight cat 5 drop profile."
>With that, the voices that would have been insubordination we quelled, turning instead into rapid advances toward the launch bays and eventually into standard case three pre-deployment procedures.
"Like. I. FUCKING. SAID." Jack thought as he began securing himself into the drop canister for the planetside drop.
>The orders come over net that the soldiers are to take a mountain and as Jack looks at them, he skips the tactical jargon and condenses it in his suit, sending updates of the plan to all members of Jackal team.
>Orders such as secure hill #984 and land details such as orders regarding the landing zone replaced with "Go here, then There." with an embedded image of an ic'rah horde attached with the annotation "kill that." 
>As chuckles began filling the air of the canister while various clanking sounds filtered their vibrations through the cruiser and into the canisters, alerting those on board that launch was imminent, Jack thought over the present launch profile, noting that special equipment was present, as he saw it to be the only way to justify the weight of a cat four, let alone and overweight cat five launch, noting that a case three drop profile would mean a steep and rapid rate descent.
>As the gravitational forces began to shudder through the secured suits and all equipment in the canister, outcast prayed that no one else aboard was thinking the same thoughts he was about this exceptional and... dangerous drop profile.
>What were they thinking?
>Why would you perform such a drop?
>was this a uniform profile?
>What was the ripple timing?
>Would today be his day?

October 13, 2556
>Jack stands aboard the now empty bridge of the diplomatic ship. He alone stares into the abyss of space, passing by at speeds once unimaginable to the human eye, and now through technological innovation, possibly commonplace. 
>In some time, Jack would be home for the first time in centuries. What had changed? What had stayed the same? 
>To Jack, all questions would have to be answered the same way they were when he really WAS twenty eight years old. They would have to come in due time.
>"You ever think of our home on acrassas?"
"Occasionally. Yes."
>"Do you miss it?" Pitra's voice asked, coming forward to his shoulder. 
"Do I miss it?" He mutters derisively and half under his voice before he comes back to answer "Yes. I had just gotten used to the idea that I might live out the rest of my life there when the orders came."
>"You thought you might live out the rest of your life there... and you were okay with it?" Pitra asked, one hand now on Jacks arm and another on his shoulder.
"Well. Yeah.It was a small house, it had a fridge, it reminded me of africa in the nineties...two centuries earlier. But it had everything I really needed when you were there. It almost felt like it WAS home."
>"It was... home?"
"Yeah. As near to it as it had been since I joined the EDF."
>Pitra's face became cold with a frown of concentration as her mind was drawn within when Jack decided it was his turn to make her talk.
"So. Did you ever miss your home? Acrassas?"
>Pitra's face opened up with a start and an expression of confusion as her mind came back to the present.
>"Huh?"
"You ever miss acrassas? You must've spent a similar portion of your life there to my own life on earth."
>"Yeah. I miss it, It was home, it was culture. It was... my people. I felt like I belonged."
"You traded belonging for me? That's a hell of a trade."
>"Would you do the same?"
"If you'd known what you were getting into at the time, would YOU still have made the choice?"
>"How do you mean?" Pitra inquired.
"Well, you couldn't have known what you were getting into picking me up that day. No military of any customs I'm familiar with would let you justify my rescue on the idea that I was some novel new pet or curiosity, then expend the resources to nurse me back to health. I'd honestly assumed you were picking me out because you wanted some sort of information from me, or because your military would want a specimen for some kind of threat assessment."
>"Now that you frame it like that, you're right. I didn't know. How could I have known that by picking you up, I'd end up living something close to... oh my, it must be eight hundred years on acrassas. I couldn't have conceived that I'd live with you. Or that once we DID live together, we'd end up living anywhere but acrassas. Looking back, I'd certainly pick you up out of the woods again, carry you back to the ship and do it all over. Looking forward, though, I don't know that you'd survive me picking you up that fast. What choice did you make that put you near me?"
"I suppose it wasn't a choice to be near you, it was the choice to participate in a bar fight going further than I could conceive of. Five whole years further. It put me on the path to our meeting. Knowing what would come, I suppose I'd break the officer's jaw for good measure." Jack answered, smiling at the woman lightly tucked into his body.
>"You know, we still had some unfinished business before that ship exploded." Pitra grinned before tugging on Jack's arm. "come with me."

October 15, 2556
>"In 1906, the second world war had broken out, it was a death match between the united states of america, headed by president Erwin Rommel, the united Kingdom, by prime minister Peter J Hoover, and The seventh Reich, headed by Catherine Romanov against the lizard people of planet Zebulon. By making agressive advances into the fulda belt, the earthly coalition was able to drive the lizard people back, but came to a standstill in the falcon nebula, resulting in the stalemate of 1978, which was only broken when Chinese statesman Manfred Von Ricktoffen exteneded aid to the coalition, breaking the defenses of zebulon and resulting in a coalition victory. This has been your history minute, brought to you by the terran news network."
>The holographic projection at the spaceport flashed away from the history minute to the daily news broadcast as Jack looked on in confusing and astonishment, and Pitra looked on in suspicion while Hank's face had merely been blank.
"Hey, Hank?"
>"Yeah?" Hank answered, retaining his stoic expression.
"What the unholy fuck did I just hear?"
>"What do you mean?" 
"Was that some kind of a sketch?"
>"Oh, the history minute. Umm. History's been a little rewritten since we were in school."
"Did someone win a war?"
>"Yup."
"And they took the history being written by the victor thing to a whole new level?"
>"Yep."
"China?"
>"Nope."
"Seventh Reich?"
>"Nope."
"Don't tell me it was india!"
>"Guess again."
"Kenya."
>"Argentina."
"What?"
>"Remember that thing about Argentina losing the war in the Falklands in the early nineteen eighties?"
"Yeah. Go on."
>"Well, they got really uppity about that in the twenty-two thirties and... They won this time."
"How much of a power are they?"
>"With the exception of the United States, they're the sole country in the Americas. They went to mexico's southern border, and the US annexed Mexico and Canada."
"Damn. I've been gone a long time."
>"Well, Jack, Pitra, if you'll follow me, I'll deliver you straight away to the statesmen hotel."
>Jack extended his arm to Pitra, who hooked onto it before commanding "Lead the way."
>Jack and Pitra walked along with Hank as he led them down the streets of Washington DC, having changed somewhat, yet still remained more or less in the three hundred years that had passed since their last visit.
>A song starts blaring from the speakers in the streets as they walk, sounding like something Jack would have listened to back in the old days.
>"Got on a plane in 'frisco and got off in vietnam..."
>As the song continued, Jack couldn't help but think that some of the grandeur of the great capital had been violated by the installation of such technology into these streets, which had gone back something like seven hundred years now.
>"...Now if you look to the left you should see the monument to the United states victory in the war of 2142, the Zebulon memorial, and off in the distance is the monument to you, erected about three months after your disappearance."
"Wait, that thing about zebulon was real?"
>"Obviously not the same timeframe as in the history minute, but yeah, back in the twenty-three-seventies it happened."
"So what distorted history so much?"
>"Ever heard of the Mandela effect?"
"Something about collective memory recalling falsehoods as a result of a supposed crossing of universes, timelines or even dimensions?"
>"Yeah... something like that. Only it HAPPENED. and earth's been a bit temporally displaced in this fashion for about a century or more now. There's even been some groups recently who swear up and down that, to use an example you might be familiar with, Manfred Von Ricktoffen survived the first world war.... in eighteen seventy-three."
"So... we're in some fucked up timeline?"
>"While we're on earth, yes. Once you get away, the gravitational fields that dictate our erratic flow of time normalize."
"Not a comforting thought."
>"What? We're immortal, also the flow of time is only so erratic. Occasional provable crossovers occur. Ever heard of the double standards theory? Proven by the Berenstain bears timeline. and a tape from an alternate universe in which it's BerenSTEIN?"
"Okay, fucker, I'm gonna need something MUCH more relevant and recent than a VHS tape from the nineteen eighties and nineties era that could have just been a miss-print, factory typo or an outright fabrication before I start to believe that we're in some kind of alternate universe time warp, I mean... you DO realize that's like a hundred and fifty years before I was born, right?"
>"How... How far do these fields stretch?" Pitra asked
>"A good question. It's estimated that they stretch into the asteroid belt between earth and mars."
"Damn...so that means unless the sun is causing it, the whole system passes through it at some point. WAIT, How erratic is the flow of time?"
>"Oh, not too bad, the fastest we've ever seen is about double time."
"What's the slowest?"
>"Quarter time, and for about six weeks at a time usually. Though it's rare it gets that bad."
"Okay, so we're not gonna return to our planet and find that we've been gone for centuries, then."
>"Unless something we haven't seen yet happens."
"Shutup, don't jinx us. That'd be all we need."
>"Well, if you two don't need anything further, I've got business to attend to. Just another half block up the street is the statesmen hotel. I trust you can get there sans my guidance."
"Well, further on up the road, then."
>Jack and Pitra walked down the street another half block before they checked into the hotel where they'd stay until they left the planet again. It wasn't the imperial palace, but it would have to do for the time until they got back to their own domain.

October 16, 2556
>Jack woke in the morning to the sensation of Pitra nestled up against his side, her brown hair cascading down her shoulders and spilling over the in a puddle on the bed. Gentle breaths came from her mouth as her chest rhythmically rose and fell, expanding and contracting as the faint hiss of breath entered and escaped from the her maw.
>Jack smiled at the seemingly idyllic image in which he'd found himself, thinking to himself that he'd wondered into some sort of advertisement from the early twenty first century. Something about it just seemed pure.
>After watching her spellbound by her stillness for a while, Jack decided it was time to get up, and slowly maneuvered himself out of the bed and out from under her hold as he stood and began to prepare for his meeting with the governing powers of the planet.
>As Jack dressed, he lamented that he hadn't brought the most flamboyant and ridiculous robes he'd worn when addressing his people for the ic'rah invasion of the solar system as "the tribal warfather."
>Jack pondered how he would introduce himself to elicit the greatest degree of laughter, though with his assessment of the planets technical and military prowess, he felt he could easily dictate his position with earth as a kindred world which would retain its sovereignty against the powers of the history minute and the oh so fancy hologram projector. On the other hand, it would still be fun to introduce himself as the tribal warfather, unfortunately he still had to think of a name for the planet, which of course he couldn't have been bothered to think of in a time of two hundred and seventy years.
>"What are you doing up so early? Come back to bed!" a voice, halfway sultry and halfway cotton mouthed under the strain of a burst of lucidity fired off against the weight of only half shed unconsciousness seemed to almost sing out from behind him.
"No honey, I have to address the governments of the world. I don't know if it's the unga now or what, but I think it still works the same. Anyway, I'll be back when it's time to go out for breakfast."
>With that, Jack walked out of the room and began making his way to the diplomatic transport that he was told would be on site in just a couple minutes.
"It's been so long." Jack thought, looking on at the familiar streets.
>To Jack, save for few people, just about everyone he knew was dead. In all familiar places of this world he was now alien, a relic from a different time, an anachronism with little remaining tie to even this planet. And as he thought of this, he wondered just how none of it had occurred to him until just then. For what it was truly worth, he wished only to visit his family home, to see what had become of it before returning to his world, not to return for another three centuries. His thoughts were interrupted as the roar of the transport's engines pierced his ears and it began to slowly hover down on a cushion of air to the ground.

>As the first hour passed, Jack would soon find himself addressing a meeting of world governments... Being addressed as "The Tribal Warfather John Herman of planet Strauss 54."
>As he walked onto the stage and took up the podium, he decided to channel one of his favorite speakers of the twentieth and twenty-first century and layed out on the line how his planet and its relationship to earth could be expected to play out.
>Jack looked around, delayed speaking for a couple seconds to harden his already solid composure, and began speaking.
"Gentlemen, governors, heads of state, leaders of nation, of Earth, of other planets, and of other systems, I would like to take a moment, if only for the comfort of doing it myself, to introduce myself. I am Tribal Warfather John Herman. I lead my planet in a fairly effective manner. As the result of this, we have acquired many technical disciplines and a great deal of prowess in the ways of making war and devising technologies directed toward all aspects of life, like those that can mean life and death for our planet, and even those that can mean the extermination of the minor inconveniences of humanity, such as ants, or moths. In these trying centuries we have watched our planet rise to a status of civilization. We watched quite eagerly as the Ic'rah closed in, coming to discover a planet they expected to be easily conquered had recently developed the technology to twist their cruisers into decrepit wrecks floating in space long before they even reached our orbit. In another year, what would have been named "the Ic'rah question" back when I was on this planet as a nano soldier in the 2170's, had been largely resolved through out the galaxy, in fact, the last of the Ic'rah live on a quarantined world making a very specific, and fairly primitive example of the weaponry that we developed specifically for the purposes of interplanetary and intergalactic war on a strategic scale. I state these facts because quite frankly, I would like to lay out exactly the relationship I hope to have. I hope that in the grander scheme of things, I hope that we have a respectful and mutual relationship. However, do not take my good will for weakness. I will not tolerate abuse.  I earnestly hope you will accept our hospitality when offered, respect our boundaries and receive the mutual respect that will entail. I hope we can be men of kindred nations and planets. If my good will is taken with malice, however, I can only promise that in your lifetime you will witness the effects of the weapons we've developed. In fact, I can promise in such a case that earth will get two that we've already disclosed the existence of. One, is a meth bombardment, and it's exactly what it sounds like. The other, is also a simple one, a bell shaped ball of metal, energized with neutron radiation and restructured. If you're wondering what that exactly means, we made a three hundred foot wide and solid bell shaped slug of metal which is irradiated and treated in such a process as to render its grain structure without boundaries, and making it a single metallic grain. It is by old metal working standards, "brittle" in the most literal sense. It's launched in a magnetic field that is neutralized upon hitting a planets magnetosphere. I wish I had the archival footage from the Ic'rah homeworld, however I don't have the hardware to play it here. I pray that the need for this course of action is never needed, however, I am prepared only to do what I must. I demand nothing of you, and will take no demand from you. With that, I think it's time to adjourn this meeting's formal capacity, and hopefully soon, we can begin a peaceful, but honorable relationship as leaders of worlds."
>With that, and an uprise in stead low murmurs from the crowd, Jack departed the stage.
>Altogether Jack felt that his speech had gone very well, as though he had articulated to them, his point. And to some extent, he felt that his speech was even received VERY well, if not as well as a "don't fuck with me" speech could be expected to be taken, anyway.
>With that, Jack went to the bar for a drink of something that he hadn't tasted in over three hundred years... Whiskey.

May 7, 2557
>Jack Herman, or Tribal warfather, or Emperor or "Daddy" depending whether one asked Earth, Pitra, Friends of old, Alien delegates, or his own people, and in an order which might surprise one, walked with Pitra down a hallway through a facility containing various weapons, most of which had never been deployed, and many of which would be permanently sealed into a soon to be fused solid facility should they leave their containment devices.
>"Do you ever regret making any of these things? I know you've on no less than ten occasions gone two or more years working on these things."
"You're keeping track?" Jack said curiously.
>"You remember when we met? What was the thing we seemed to do a lot?"
"Injure me after the suit made you crazy?"
>"The other thing."
"Right. Fucking. So you were counting my absences from the chamber."
>"It's not like I can forget things anymore."
"That's weird. I can forget things pretty easily."
>"Well yeah, but I don't have petabytes of workload to help me forget things. I haven't made what you made here. How many vaults like this are there anyway?"
"Six."
>"Anything you regret in here?"
"Follow me." Jack commanded, leading Pitra to a single box.
"Ahhhh, 1024. This. Pitra. This is the only thing in my life I regret other than never getting to say goodbye to my family."
>"...What is it?"
>Jack looked at her, his expression tired and depressive as he began to explain the monstrosity he had created.
"THIS, is the most disgusting thing I've ever done. I took some nanites, a disgust reflex that hadn't come back yet, and a couple hundred years ago, I made a bio weapon, THIS bio weapon, out of nanites. They don't decay, they take any organic matter they come across and put in a certain gene that scientists a hundred thirty years before I was born had believed they could cure in the near future. Scientists at the time of my birth thought they'd soon be able to find ANOTHER way to deal with it, and delete this particular gene from humanity altogether."
>"Come on! What does it do already?"
"It gives any life form it comes across stoneman syndtrome."
>"What is..." Pitra began asking before trailing off, searching the databanks of the computer integrated into her brain for data on stoneman syndrome.
>"I wish I was still in the suit. I'd get some help with not vomiting." Pitra informed Jack as he watched her face close into a wincing grimace.
>Jack himself made the mistake of imagining stoneman syndrome taking effect and found himself briefly shuttering from disgust.
>"I'm going to vomit." Pitra said, clearly growing queasy, despite her body itself having no proper organs left to expel matter, or even give the impulse of vomiting, as an artifice made solely of nanites.
"I don't blame you." Jack said as his disgust reflex kicked in.
"Stoneman syndrome is fucking disgusting..."

>"Anything else in here that'll make me vomit? I know I physically can't, but I still feel like retching."
"Not unless you vomit nervously." Jack said as he pointed to box number 1023.
>"What's that?"
"It's a nanite bomb. It nullifies the magnetic fields between atoms."
>"...What?"
"Well, basically it means that when I do this..." Jack trailed off momentarily as he placed his hand on Pitra's breast "... on the atomic level, we aren't really touching. Even though your tit feels pretty damn nice."
>"Okay."
"As such, we don't fuse into a single nucleus with everything we touch, and as such, everything that touches doesn't turn into a single new atomic element. As such, I can take my hand off your tit." Jack explained, trailing off for a minute or so.
>"So you can take your hand off my tit."
"Not that I'm going to, but yeah, I can. Anyway, the reason the atoms themselves don't touch is because magnetic fields keep them one or two hundred millionths or so of an inch from each other. With the magnetic fields neutralized, however, the atoms will just fuse. I think. That or shit's going to disintegrate and we're going to discover some new type of ionizing particle. Being that they are infinitely self replicating however, it's one of the only weapons in here that can kill US and there is no way to contain the contents of 1023 if it gets loose in here. Really I need to get this transferred somewhere."
>"Oh... wait, what's in that box can KILL us?" Pitra demanded, her eyes bulging, one of her breasts still lightly compressed in Jack's hand.
"Don't worry about it. It's a very stable containment."
>"Jack... What contains that shit?"
"It's hard to explain, but basically because quantum mechanics works backwards, there's an inverted gravitational environment in the center of the canister that forces them toward the fringes of the container. Naturally, since it's backwards, it forces them all into the center and locks them there immovably until the container breaks."
>"That makes no fucking sense."
"If the word 'quantum' is mentioned at all, get ready to just disregard any sense of general logic you might have about you."
>Jack's gaze snapped to an intense glare, from eye contact with Pitra to, and perhaps through the ceiling of the facility.
>Pitra slowly traced his gaze, from his eye to the ceiling, then back.
>"Jack? What's going on?"
"1023 or 1024?" Jack asked, a stone face of determinate rage having molded itself and set itself onto him.
>"What's going on?"
"War were declared."
>"By WHO?"
"It seems Earth just realized we're not a democratic system and never will be, so they can't spread their cancer back here."
>"What?" Pitra asked, her mind flooding with information about the history of earth for several moments before a buzzing sensation at the top of her head occurred, informing her of a declaration of war made on earth.
>Pitra sighed as her head sank.
>"You're fighting your own." she observed.
"They lost the very planet on which we stand to twentieth century third wave feminism. They can't preserve themselves against alien influences but to meekly say 'bu-but that's not insert thing here' and send their kids off to the government that funds the alien to raise them and hope with no action that they don't fill their heads with heresy and encourage them to take or embrace evermore repellent and deviant action. There's hardly a power on that entire planet worthy of mercy let alone imposition over us."
>"Uh... Jack? I'm sensing some animosity here... also you're squeezing my tit."
>Jack pulled his hand away and waved a biometric authorization chip, initially a bypass for biometric security systems, as the nano suit didn't have fingerprints, over the lock of container number 1023.
>The look on Pitra's face of "Oh, dear blue fuck." could not have been more prominently displayed.
>"Jack, please reconsider this." Pitra asked of Jack.
"NOooooope! Come on, Hon' we're throwing this shit at Earth." Jack said as he picked up a spherical canister from the strong box.
>"Come on! Maybe democracy isn't so bad, maybe we can retire and-"
"I'm sorry, but I cannot let this stand. If we compromise and morph with them we'll only be half what we are. Again and we'll be a quarter, an eighth and eventually nothing of what we are. If we don't maintain our DOMINANCE to our sphere of influence, Pitra, we will be yet another Rhodesia the FIRST time around. First they decided to let slip their dominance, then infiltrators came and like leeches they sucked away their will to even preserve themselves until they were reduced from the status of a fiercely independent nation to a nation in tumult, and then finally to a nation that succumbed to foreign influence."
>"But think of all the struggle we and the people around us could avoid-"
"And replace with WHAT?" Jack demanded.
>"Leisure!" Pitra answered.
>Jack stopped. He stared at Pitra. For the first time in at least a decade, he even glared at her.
"Tell me Pitra. Have you ever KNOWN leisure? LIVED... Leisure?"
>"No! I grew up a farmer."
"I have. You wanna know why I lost so much sanity that I walked right past my sister like nothing was up, joined the EDF and then started dating what could only be described as my service rifle, the got into a barfight, told, again, MY RIFLE to fuck off, and got myself sentenced to a fucking nanosuit? You wanna know why I'm around four hundred years old right now? Pray you never know it. If you have labor, you have at the very least, some purpose. Even if a poor one. If you have not but leisure, you have listlessness. Malaise. Despair. It doesn't start immediately, but slowly, and only after you've been weakened too much to do anything other, does the realization of emptiness set in."
>"You... seem to feel... very strongly about this." 
>Jack came to, recovering from his rant to see that Pitra had to some extent shrunk from him. It seemed that his voice had risen just short of a shout.
>"Are you okay?" Pitra asked hesitantly.
"Better now."
>Jack took a deep breath and exhaled sharply. He held his right hand out to Pitra.
"Shall we?"
>"Y-Yeah. Let's go." Pitra said, slowly coming toward Jack and taking his hand.
>Jack walked Pitra out of the bunker, passing through an airlock, and by the two guards who stood in front of the facility's blast doors, clad in nanotube armor, and walked on toward their own guard detail as the guards of the facility faded into thin air.
>Jack opened a communication channel to his planetary defense officer.
>"Emperor! What is your bidding?" Came the question.
"Straight to the point as ever, Dixon. I want a fleet together in four days, centerpiece of a vapor class assault ship, I want a hybrid load out for chemicals and physical devices."
>"I'll have it ready in eighty four hours, my lord."
"Carry on, Commander."
>Pitra looked at him.
>"This is gonna be a long one, isn't it?" she asked in a somewhat irritated tone.
"Nah. It's gonna be quick and brutal. And our kill counts about to spike from the hundreds of millions to the billions."

May 20, orbital hold.
>Jack Stood upon the bridge of the Feather, a capital ship of his fleet.
>Pitra stood with him, their thoughts, secretly between them, bouncing back and forth, silently issuing forth between the two of them.
>"So, where do we stand? Are you just going to throw the vial out into the orbit and see if it hits the planet?"
"I'm going to drop it in a torpedo."
>"Are you sure you want to do this? I mean, down there is your blood and soil. You can't take it back."
"And what if my sister's descendants are still down there?"
>"Well...."
"I have a planet of descendants. And besides, she was a cat lady in waiting. There haven't been any known descendants."
>"Even SO..."
"Even so, Ever so slightly, ever so highly. I've made my mind up. These people would give in to ANY invading force if it just tugged their dicks a few times before it FUCKED them."
>"Then why don't we try THAT strategy? Worked pretty well on you."
"I have high time preference. I want to destroy them for deciding to interfere in my affairs NOW."
>"They just wanted us to."
"Enough. You heard the speech and so did I. Denial will not help at all. Read the writing on the wall."
>Jack Looked at Pitra, as if he'd just had the conversation aloud, and watched her shrink slightly.
+"Damn, it's pretty hot in here. Ooh! Who's the new brunette?" a voice belonging to neither one of them commented.
>Both Jack and Pitra were aghast that one of their crew had the nerve to comment about her in such a fashion so far above their station.
"WHO SAID THAT?" Jack demanded to the entire bridge.
+"Up here, dumbass."
>"Who's saying that?" Pitra demanded in turn.
+"In the man's head."
"WHAT?"
+"So, why is my favorite disappointment of a descendant turned Great conqueror so angry that I can feel it in THAT part of your brain?"
"Who the fuck are you?"
+"Oooooooo, nigger, I'm a ghost! You don't want to live in this neighborhood! It's haunted!"
"What?"
+"I'm... I'm your great great great great grandfather Anon Mous. And don't try anything with me sonny! I've got enough mountain dew in here to get YOU drunk, matter of fact, if you give me enough time, I might be able to get HER drunk, since you seem to be sharing a mind together."
>"Wait... The one who fought in the refounding?"
+"That's right, lady. And, now get this, I'm floating around in the afterlife and decide to check up on my grandson five or six generations down the line and you know what I see?"
"Oh, dear god... Alright, Grandpa. What particular compromising moment did you see?"
>Jack braced for the voice to screech out something.
+"I look in on my grandson generations down the road, and suddenly I see a blue V, and I'm thinking 'Wait is that a blue V shape like on a pair of hi- OH GOD, HE'S CHARGING TONGUE FIRST INTO XENOPUSSY.' And that was the last time I looked in on him, he seemed like he could make his own decisions. Didn't need my guidance at all. NOW, For some reason I'm in his head, and it's a bit like living wherever I want but at the same time living in the old virus drive that used to be goggle dot com."
>Jack and Pitra looked at eachother, and extremely to Jack's surprise, half way through the statement of the voice now in both of their heads, Pitra had began to, over the entirety of her body, turn red.
+"HEY! Johnny! Why's the cute brunette turning red... is she okay? that's not right."
"She's... the... blue... girl...." Jack slowly thought out as he froze in embarrassment.
>Jack was dumbstruck.
+"Ohhhh... Why's her hair brown now? It was white last time, right? And her skin was blue, and... Jesus, John, did you give a fucking xeno a nanosuit?"
>"Yeah. Boy's got the discipline of a guardsman."
>The cackling of the voice in his head continued on for several minutes while Jack regained his bearings and slowly continued on, walking from the bridge and thinking to Pitra.
"I'll just get this to the magazine... This guy's not gonna stop laughing anytime soon, is he?"
+"AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHA-Give me a minute, what's in the Vial, boy? AHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHA."

>Jack entered the weapons room and was greeted with a call of "EMPEROR ON DECK!"
"As you were. Officer on duty report." Jack called, in a few seconds, seeing an officer appear before him.
>"What is your bidding, sir?" He inquired with a salute.
"Stand easy, officer. I want this vial loaded into the M90 torpedo we brought with us."
>"Right away." The officer replied, Accepting the vial of a material that could only be described as the gray cancer.
>With it, the weapons officer began removing bolts from fixtures around the special attachment manifold of the torpedo, affixing the vial into the warhead and overriding its conventional Thermobaric charge, which the M90 would typically use for orbital bombardments on the Ic'rah.
>The officer gave the order to bring the torpedo to its tube, which was promptly met by the whirring of machinery, carrying the torpedo to the tube, finding the tube's port orientation, and finally, orienting the torpedo to insert into the tube, where the breach would seal, the computer would synchronize its position relative to the planet by gravitational data, plant its target orientation, and then launch it.
>In five seconds after the breach had closed, the sound of the torpedo jettisoning into space, which reverberated through the ship couldn't have been more distinct.
>Jack stuck his head to the viewing port and watched the pod as it slowly began to vanish into the distances of the low orbital gravity well, into which he could not view even with the magnification bestowed unto him by the augmentations that had once been his eyes.
>He decided to do some very quick math regarding the M90 torpedo's dispersal of the gray cancer into the planet. If he figured it dispersed the material in a shape a meter wide and many deep, and it'd double in size every one second, within a minute and forty seconds, he'd see the planet reduced to gray within for certain, a minute of impact.
>Something like several minutes seemed to pass as he waited for the spot of gray to begin consuming earth. At first, he knew it would be only a few meters deep and a single meter wide, but doubling in size every second, he'd be able to see the destruction of the planet in real time.
>Jack opened a channel to the sensors officer.
"Begin recording."
>"Affirmative."
>In moments. Jack could see that a very small spot of gray formed on the planet, then expanded slowly and then... FLASH. In a now swift motion, the planet was soon swallowed up in a growing stain of gray.
-"Aaaaaahhhhh, FUCK!" a new voice screeched out, possibly in his head.
+"What the... Emily?" The voice of Anon questioned
+"Emily? Is that... YOU?"
-"Anon? ANON!" Jack heard.
-"It's been SO LONG! I was trapped in that rifle for SO LONG!"
+"Emily? What happened?"
-"What is this place? Why am I seeing... what planet is that?"
+"It's earth. Our most curious of descendants here, just gray goo'd the whole planet."
-"Wait, HE did this? WHY?"
+"Best I can tell, he's not human anymore, he's a few hundred years old, and Earth declared war on him for some reason or another, and he's absolutely unphased by the prospect of turning his own home planet into a new element."
"Hey, you know you can go into the part of my processors where I can't hear you, right?"
-"YOU SHUT THE FUCK UP, Ya cunt! I was minding my own business and then everything was gray! Do YOU KNOW HOW THAT FEELS?"
"Ziiip" Jack thought as he had finished seeking out the entities that made up the two disembodied voices and forced them from his frontal functions where both he and they would have privacy.

>"Who was that woman?" Pitra asked.
"Grandmother five or so generations upstream. Basically.. remember that one day when you'd cut me out of the suit about a week before and my eyes turned green? Well, she's the reason my entire family AND our entire line on the placid planet had brown hair and green eyes for about a hundred fifty years."
>"What?"
"Once you get geist in your genepool, it's not a dye, it's a deep fucking stain."
>"Come to think of it, I guess that's a pretty quick evolution for eye and hair colors besides emerald green and chestnut brown to come about. Actually... Hey, Jack, the population is descended from a pool of combined clones of the both of us... why don't any of MY genes show up?"
"Some of them show up in the Genotype, but..."
>"What?"
"Mostly non coding in the phenotype. Too many chromosomes. It's mostly filler and the ones I could get to code were mutagenic, and had to be scrapped, because they would have caused super rapid aging and birth defects. OR. They were recessive. I'm sure the... Actually, that shit was rewritten by the nanosuit, so I don't know if it is or isn't."
>"Oh... So... No red eyes?"
"Nope. That gene was written out when the suit merged with your body."
>Jack opened the channel to the bridge.
"Tell comms to send the transmission."
>"What's the transmission?"
"It just says 'don't fuck with me.' and shows the video of earth being destroyed."
>"So what's the next world we're going to attack when they inevitably decide that we've adiquately provoked them to fuck with us?"
"I don't know, but they're all gonna have strong bones."

June 10
>"D-Fens was the bad guy, no doubt about it."
"No, fuck you."
>"That an offer?"
"Prendergast is the passive man who will not STAND UP FOR HIMSELF! Prendergast would do ANYTHING his fucking morals tell him to. He's the faggot who gets off on being '~Thsooo Printhipled!~' and can't recognize that his principles DON'T. MEAN. SHIT! D-Fens responds to the one thing that matters without conceit or self deception. Incentive."
>"I think you're being cynical, Jack."
-"I think Prendergast is just a faggot."
"Thank you, Grandma."
>"How did you get in his head again?"
-"Pfft. I'uh'noh."
>Anon's voice faded in with a long sigh, the sound of which conveyed a deep disappointment, and brought to mind the image of a man placing his hand on his head.
+"They're both morally neutral. It's just how fucking gay the nineties were, believe me, I could get into the racial narrative until both of you have neuro-chemical imbalance and start punching the walls, but basically, Prendergast and D-Fens are both doomed and are going to take the beating. Regardless of the fact that Prendergast didn't help SHIT, and D-Fens actually degraded his civilization by participating in the defense industry, making missiles for bombing other countries so the globohomo gayplex occupied government can invite the entire fucking population of the country in on 'humanitarian' grounds, and distribute them into population centers, they BOTH are taking the brunt, and BOTH are doomed and dispossessed of their civilization. They BOTH live in north Mexico now. The distinction between the two, is that Prendergast is the indulgent old fuck who gave up, rolled over and passed the buck, whereas D-fens did something about it. Prendergast is the lobster dooming the lobster that would live on by pulling it back down into the bucket."
"So basically you're saying Prendergast is gonna ride the fence until the end of the line and let the rot continue, while D-Fens will pick his own side and act on it."
+"Yup."
>Beep beep beee beep.
>"Oh boy, war were declared."
"Okay, we can talk movies later, you guys, go to the back of the brain and have a party. The adults have some administration to do."
>"Yawn. The KZ system's declared war on us."
>Jack opened a channel to the Planetary defense network.
"Fifth planetary invasion regiment, prepare to mount, Standby to board Gladius, and dagger."
+"So. What kind of sick twisted superweapons are you planning to unleash on them?"
"They're gonna have strong bones. VERY. STRONG. BONES."
-"Well, we'll see what that looks like in a month. Maybe. Tell me. You ever seen footage of people dying, John?"
"Ma'am. I've seen far worse. I've been around for four hundred years. I partook in planetary defense, minor surface skirmishes, I got put into a nanosuit, took part in planetary invasions and I've been subject to the use of bioweapons, corrosive chemicals, heavy weapons, extreme temperatures and I've seen things in person far more shocking than even the video of that ambush. Hell, there used to be strictly human inhabitants on this planet. I pulled their skins off with my bare hands and their screams would be the only sound I'd hear for a couple months."
>Silence enveloped the room.
-"Jesus. When did my sweet little grandson, who I watched over for nineteen years become so... Edgy?"
"'Bout two or three hundred years ago. Hell, now that I think of it, the ones I sent out as diplomats, who came back with human wives, never seemed to have any kids. Maybe they're genetically incompatible. I should really take another look at the Genome, it's been a whole couple centuries."
>"We're getting off track. Jack, come on. It's time to get on the ship."

KZ SYSTEM.
PLANETARY ENCOUNTER, SET TO PASS.
LOCAL TIME, 34:45 ZULU, ESTIMATED BASED ON SENSOR COMPUTATION.
"You know, Zach, there was a time when I would have shown mercy."
>"When was that?"
"Before I destroyed Earth."
>"You're LYING! You didn't destroy Earth. Do you really think we're ignorant of the fact that Earth has been modeled as being destroyed for centuries and centuries over."
"All you have to do is look. This time it's no shit."
>"So here's the question. What the fuck are you calling me for?"
"Oh I just wanted to tell you that I'm invading your planet."
>"WHY?"
"Hey. YOU declared war on ME Buckley."
>"So I did."
>As the transmission came across, Jack disengaged himself from the side of the ship.
>The ship separated from him. And across the channel, suddenly an alarm could be heard blaring across the open comms.
>"Oh what the fuck is that? IS THAT YOU?"
"Yup."
>"We WILL shoot your ship, turn back, fucker."
"No, no, no, no, you misunderstand. It's not my ship. It's literally me. Get the telescopes on it there, bucko."
>"O'Neil! Get the telescopes on that contact!"
>"Yessir!........."
.........
.........
>"IT'S! IT'S A  MAN! HE'S NOT IN A SUIT OR ANYTHING!"
>"WHAT?
"HEY BUCKLEY! CHECK THIS OUT!" Jack said before raising the finger toward the planet.
>"Oh, you smug son of a bitch..." Buckley muttered in awe before Jack cut comms
>"So... This is what the end of Alien looked like from the xenomorph's perspective..." A sedate male voice mused.
>"Yeah..." A much more lively female voice started before continuing "... But I doubt WE are going to inspire people about thirty five years on to start getting off with the splorch."
"Grandma, it's a little weird to hear you talking about people getting off...  Never mind, however, WHAT THE FUCK... Is the splorch? It sounds weird and grotesque."
>"Oh, my sweet innocent grandson, you just stay so wholesome and endearing... Ever seen the movie 'Alien?'"
"...Eeeyeeeees?" Jack said, becoming increasingly uncomfortable.
>"Ever seen the face hugers?"
"Oh I don't like where this is going..." Jack exhaled in exasperation before continuing. "...They were... They were the little crab things that shoved eggs down people's throats."
>"Okay, now imagine they made a functioning replica of that into a sex toy."
"Hey... why is grandpa being quiet?"
>"He cut the channel and he's off in the corner laughing."
"Please tell me this isn't a real thing." Jack said as he stared noncommittally at the planet closing in.
>"No, it was real. Very popular around the time your great grandfather and I met."
"Please stop."
>"Relax. We didn't do any of that shit. In fact we took part in an operation to purge them from California. Place still sucked because there were too many people left over. Shitty geography for how many people it had."
>He watched as The planet finally closed enough distance that plasma heating had begun to envelop him.
"Cannon ball." Jack declares as though he'd done so a thousand times before, curling himself up into a ball.
"You know? You'd think such a lovely dive would at least merit exclamation, but I just can't muster it."
>"Have you done this before?"
"Only a couple times."
>"How much do you weigh?"
"I don't know, depends on gravity. But I got a couple tones out on mass"
>"How far are you going to have to walk to get out of the crater?"
"Wait ten seconds and we'll find out."
>Jack paused and waited.
>IMPACT.
>Force recording in his computer indicated that he'd impacted at several thousand miles per hour, and after a couple seconds, he got up and looked to see that he couldn't get any light from the edge of the crater. Instead, what he saw was that a gargantuan cloud had enveloped his position from which he stood and wondered just how much he'd fucked up the planet. But, for the time being, he started an odometer, and cloaked before beginning to jog toward the edge of the crater, recording distance traveled as he made a line for the lip atop the rim.

>Hours would pass at the full sprint before he eventually made his way to the rim of the crater.
>The dust hadn't settled. It was nowhere near settled. As Jack looked on toward the center of the crater, he couldn't help but feel a deep and unsuppressible dread.
>Why was he feeling this? What was this sense? Why did it so eat away at him? Something... Something not connected to the vast quantities of red clay atomized into a fine powder suspended in the air.
>He felt a stirring... somewhere, though he couldn't tell where.
>"Jack... Are you okay? What's the mortal disgust?"
"I... Don't... Know..."
>Something in Jack's mind was straining to absorb the degree of disgust... When he was a young man, this level of disgust may have been achieved if he'd seen someone fucking an animal, but... He'd seen far more disgusting things even before the nanosuit. Somehow... ALL he could feel was mortal disgust.
>"I feel strange. I feel really strange."
>"I feel it too. There's a signal... coming from... Earth... Something about... What is it, Jack?"
"I don't know. It's like I just shook hands with dogshit that just tried to french me."
>"Heeeeyyy Jack! I'm still in encounter and I'm fucking DISGUSTED!"
"I know, Pitra! I'm not even supposed to be able to FEEL THAT EMOTION!"

>"WHAT IS THAT FUCKING SIGNAL?"
>Jack looked to the stars and viewed into the orbits of star systems far removed, his view visibly obscured by the planet's surface, now permanently altered and floating into the atmosphere and most likely being sufficient to of its own right devastate the planet itself, and yet, not thick enough to block that signal, to which Jack was now viewing in ultra blue vision for minutes before deciding to issue an order to the ship in what was likely now in departing encounter state.
"Dagger capital, signal located at Alpha November seven one two. Galaxy cluster Mike Papa Three One. Fire That on full commitment package. Specified coordinates inline."
>"Sir, those coordinates are nowhere near our area of operation or even any assets, are you sure of this?"
"Whatever that signal is, it's fucking disgusting! Package EIGHT, FULL COMMITMENT."
>"With haste, sir."
>The channel between Jack and Pitra came to life once more.
>"Jack, what the fuck are you firing at? I just saw some capital ship fire three devices at the edge of the gravity wel-"
>A flash lit the sky, Jack seeing a dull sky rendered in a brilliant flash of crimson for a split moment. Around him, he felt the presence of a strange radiation that didn't FEEL like it was electro-magnetic. Though, as far as that signal had come from, it more than likely altered the structure of a few atoms around him.
"Well. The signal's not going away for about thirty years, but I still got a job to do, even if it makes me rip skins off people that much slower."
>Jack began walking away from the crater and looked on at the faint suggestion of a major city, the planetary capital of Klondike, named quite ironically to start, and now HORRIBLY ironically, after a region in the American arctic northwest in which it was always daytime.
>Jack could just barely make out the outline of some skyrise buildings before a transmission began coming though, seeming to be calling to him.
>"WAS THAT YOU? HOLY FUCK! We just looked outside and a big ffffFFFFUCKING CRATER A FEW HUNDRED MILES WIDE APPEARED IN THE FUCKING VALLEY WHERE ALL THE WILDLIFE PRESERVES WERE! WHAT THE FUCK!"
"Yeah. Say, do you feel odd?"
>"A little after the crater exploded into existence I started to feel really fucking disgusted, not at you! I don't know, it's like I just-"
"Shook hands with dogshit?"
>"It doesn't even begin to cover it, but yeah. Like forty minutes after it happened."
"Well, don't worry about that too much longer, Zach. Pitra feels it too. She'll be in your office shortly."
>"Wait, WHA-
>A streak of orange burst seemingly in a slow motion, lasting maybe a couple of seconds AFTER slowing, down into a point JUST a tad too far to be visible from its impact point, coldly calculated to be the building with the Greek motif at the edge of a nature preserve that served as the public commons in the center of the city.
>The thunder of the impact could briefly be heard over the line before the actual blast wave and further blast of sediment reached Jack.
>With the head of state knocked out in the opening portion of the invasion, it would fall to his next in succession to begin coordination of planetary defenses, however the factor that would most determine the outcome of the landing of troops, who'd be departing the gladius and dagger at the very moment in their drop pods, was the fact that the sky was now obscured by a strong layer of dust floating in the air for thousands of miles. For thousands of miles, the dust in the air would be circulated, even by the planet's own trade winds, expanding the envelope of optimum landing sites beyond the now already idealized envelope of a massive blindspot in planetary defenses RIGHT on the capital. IN a day, he'd have the military FULLY decapitated. In a week, the planet would be devastated enough to leave alone, struggling to define a new power structure among the now uncoordinated masses and struggling to find their way forward among the new, unnatural powers that be, who'd have no hope to ever match the power, albeit relatively small, of the Zach Buckly regime.
>For now, though. All Jack would do is wait. Watch as the flames began falling from the sky. The munitions from orbit would begin softening cities for ground assaults within the minute, and the pods would begin coming into their positions.
He didn't know what to make of it... but he STILL felt seething disgust. A seething... rotting, incoherent disgust.

>Jack began issuing instructions, much like some kind of hivemind, to the entire army before it'd even landed. While he was busy with that, he began a sprint for the next city and throttled himself to the fullest capacity of his shell. He was about as fast as a cheetah with his ability to sprint seventy miles per hour, but, unlike the fragile cat animal, he could keep this pace almost indefinitely, slowing or speeding as needed to accommodate more rugged terrain, however, not much of any such capacity was needed when crossing through the center of the crater that'd once been the capital city of the planetary government.
>Jack rendezvoused with Pitra just beyond the center as she began picking up speed heading to the same place he did. Soon the sky would be lit by dull blazes sinking through the sky like drops of blood descending onto the floor where they'd dissolve into puddles and then into troopers. From there, into tracers.
>In a time, Jack would reach the city of Kalthrax, strangely named, well defended by fortifications that spanned the size and span of the city, Lights cut and buildings dyed reddish brown by the dust that hung in the air like a specter of doom.
>"Troops departed. LZ ETA EIGHT MINUTES"
>For the time being, Jack would have to settle for chewing on commanders.
>In minutes, Jack was bounding quietly, through personnel, and leaving of course, minimal traces as he began slipping into a bunker.
>As he came to a bunker, and stopped a rather large ventilation fan by going straight through it, he began to hear shouts of panic from inside. Not that it particularly mattered to him. It was simply what it was. Personnel who'd have a vague idea as he tore through them limb by limb.
>Jack tore through another vent and into the bunker to a crowd of screaming infantrymen as he swapped power from his refractors to his skin and arranged the outermost shell to high density.
>For a couple seconds, when the shouts of anger gave way to the flurry of noise that was the firing of assorted kinetic and energy weapons ranging from ballistic, to gauss rifles, to actual directed energy types, Jack stood still sneering at the gestures of the men, which continued until smoke filled the air, and then, as soon as it wafted from the muzzles of their weapons toward the roof they realized the ineffectual nature of their weapons.
>As they began to recoil in fear, he began his cutting through them, punching through the near sides of heads and shaking them off, grabbing exposed spines on men whose backs were turned as they attempted to retreat, and simply gripping inward with tons of force, pushing through tissues until he gripped the spinal column in the neck intelf, and then crushing it and snatching it free from anatomical position.
>Another man tried to punch him, only to have his radius and ulna crushed and then two thirds of his forearm simply torn from the stump, his screams quickly silenced by the jagged ends of his arm bones being jammed through his throat, and pushing out a vertibrae his spine as it emerged from the back of his throat.
>About six seconds had passed when Jack had swiped through some dozen men's heads and limbs, reducing once combat ready soldiers to blood soaked, appalling parodies of human form.
>A flash, an explosion, a conflagration occurred. In a moment Jack looked to see that the room he'd been isolated into was marked with walls that seemed to have been misted with a welter of gore. Many of the men he'd killed seemed to have undergone a rapid disassembly further than he'd performed, that was, the solid pieces of them at least. The rest, the parts that didn't seem to be whole, solid body parts, but partially liquefied and scattered parts of parts, seemed to be deposited, congealing about the room's moderately sized interior in a red and various colored soup on the floor and splattered congealed mist across the walls.
>Whichever one of the bodies did this, had managed to create what would be a particularly brutal sight for the average human.
>Jack looked to the bulkhead that seemed to be the only way further into the bunker, and watched a spark traveling across it. Seemingly someone felt the need to seal the door with a weld.
>Jack looked over the door. Two halves, locked by steel lugs at the center, weighed a few times what he did.
>Hell of a blast door, but being that it didn't really have the size of something that might have been at the old Cheyanne Mountain complex, could've been maybe four inches thick on protection, which was formidable for a security door its size, he decided he'd give it a go.
>Jack ran to the other side of the room, packed the nanites densely, and made an accelerated run at the door and jumped, straight legged into the door at what would be a decent pace for a car. The door dented, he fell into the ground, chipping the concrete below him, and he noted that the weld had been broken in the center, as well as the fact that the crossbars had become bent out of shape and the door was now inoperable save for a full breach.
>Jack got up, and repeated, this time hearing a couple metallic cracks as the bar's grain structure was subjected to beyond its maximum tensile and yield strength.
>Again, and this time he could see air on the other side.
>And a last time, the last crossbar snapped with a crack that could've been mistaken for a gunshot by the casual observer.
>Jack got up and was met by a corridor about twenty feet wide full of two squads of men in covered positions.
>He quickly identified and charged the nearest one, his presence failing to stall fire due to arkane concepts like "fire discipline."
>Jack caught the laser rifle from the insulated jacket of the diode and gripped the soldier's arm, crushing his bones as the fire came on at him, throwing the man being pelted by friendly fire to the ground in a heap and directing the laser rifle to the hallway, hosing down the soldiers with a hyper intense beam of photons that burned and singed their bodies to cauterized pieces in a matter of less than ten seconds.
>One or two more men poked their heads out, to be caught before they'd leveled weapons by a photon beam that cut them to ribbons.
>Jack looked down to the man gasped and seizing onto the most basic tendrils of life, which were slipping from his body.
>He swiftly lowered the laser to his face and pulled the trigger, the beam quickly burning the man's medulla and cerebellum cortex to ash before almost immediately burning through the back of his neck and starting work on the floor.
>Jack dropped the laser and started down the hall and began down the hall where he believed he'd find the commander and rip his throat out.

Chapter. The last Battle of Lieutenant John Herman.
RCDR: DEGD
MEM: DEGD
RD SNSR: DEGD
NEUR: DEGD
MS NV: DEGD
DNA E: GO
ENR CON: NO GO
OPT ILLUM: NO GO
RCS: NOGO
VIS OPT: GO
NMS ENDO: GO
NMS EXO: NO GO/NON RSP
>The information flashed before the mind of the man who found himself standing between to victor lathes, performing a task he couldn't remember starting. He was... turning these... Thermo-coupler stops?
>Something in his mind was drawing a blank. 
>A man about five inches shorter than he was approached him.
>"Hey Anon, you alright? Have you been drinking enough water?"
"Huh?-Yeah."
>"Alright, feel free to take a break ten if you need it, man."
"Ok."
>The man turned and walked away, attending to a machine that needed a small repair.
...Who's that lounging... in my, chaiiirrr, Who's that casting... dev-ious stares in my direction
mama this surely is a dreeeam, yeah.
>He heard, as sex and candy played for the third or fourth time today.
>He looked down to the stock, spinning in the collet, noticing pits and burs resulting from turning over the hole in the center and then taking the pliers and pulling the burs off before turning a chamfer on the end.
>It didn't solve the pits, nor did it make the part pretty, being that it was made of cold rolled steel, which was something of a pain to machine.
>The world around him, seemingly a tableau that could be resolved with some thought, disappeared in seconds.

Somewhere... Else.
Somewhere entirely else...
>He looked around, in a dropship filled with men. All men. Clad in the distinctive EDF armor of the years twenty-one sixty and twenty-one sixty nine.
>He'd worn the armor before, though the Blue tab on his shoulder was unfamiliar.
>The carbon nanofiber scaling that the armor was made of rendered a very comfortable and breathable set of armor in which a soldier could move and expect flexibility more unhindered than he might achieve wearing nothing but a skintight layer of spandex.
>Jack looked at the faces of the men before him, destined to put themselves at risk for the next several days among a hostile landscape of jungle and felt not a thing. For his years of fighting on and off world, he'd suffered the consequence. Everytime he returned home, he'd returned to nothing happening, nothing going on, and nothing to do.
>He'd grown cold. The only place he'd find companionship was with his rifle, among hundreds of other men who like him, could only find their companions among their rifles and the hundreds of men who like them, were cannon fodder.
>"Lieutenant! Touchdown in forty seconds, get ready to get your men out the Kite!"
"Roger that! Good luck!. ALRIGHT MEN!! FORTY SECONDS!"

>Those seconds passed, and soon the passenger restraints released, Finding Jack waving his men after him while he charged onto the battlefield out from the ramp at the back of the VTOL that was dropping him.
>Jack looked around and he noted that he'd found himself among thousands of men at the rally point just a cunthair behind the frontlines of the battle.
>Short range artillery items, particularly energy mortars, jolted down as the shells, designed to disperse plasma, began to glow as pieces fell off and allowed the shell integrity to fail on impact.
>Men huddled, Listening to their leaders explaining not what it should be, but what it WILL be that they do.
>Active defense systems zapped away at incoming artillery shells.
"Lovely things, If something MUST go through, it'll be a smaller mortar rather than a larger artillery shell." Jack thought to himself as he watched shells explode several hundred feet in the air.
>"LT! What are your orders?" A young sergeant asked
"I just got here, let's get up to speed." Jack answered, his face animated only barely by a focus that shaped his face just short of a scowl, the lacking feature being the eyes, opened no more than a groggy man might hold them throughout the day.
>"Okay!-" The sergeant began to reply before Jack's head whipped around, a millisecond later, a large blue plume appearing, and a quarter second later, the sound reached the two men.
>The sergeant had been struck by the simple details of the thing, which had been right in front of him, and only partly apparent to him as they happened.
>Looking first, at the scene that had began unfolding before him, what he'd only recognized about two seconds afterward, was that the active defense on the fennec tanks, which had shielded the men, had to have momentarily faltered in targeting munitions and frying them.
>The second thing that struck him was that Jack's face hadn't changed. In a second, the sergeant had jumped, looked to the source and prepared to react, while Lieutenant Herman had in the third second afterward, turned his attention back to the sergeant.
"SERGEANT! I reckon we better get up to speed fast."  Herman said, turning himself away and advancing toward the wreckage that had occured.
>The sergeant locked for five seconds, but ultimately decided he'd like to have information as current as possible, and willed himself to run after Herman toward the wreckage and the dozens of dead, mangled and burned bodies of soldiers.
>The sergeant paused as he reached the bodies, strongly desiring to render aid to the wounded, but then looked up after two seconds when he noted that the Lieutenant was still moving.
>Jack stuck his head over the ridge that saw him about three hundred yards beyond the front, with rounds that both were and weren't tracers, some energy weapons, some artillery... things were looking bloody as hell.
>Jack brought up his binocular system, and powered it on, bringing light to the screen inside and powering up the networking systems inside.
>He looked around the edges of the valley where the fighting had taken place. Among vines, trees and vegitation he began optically measuring the distances to points at which he saw flashes, disurbances in trees, and began painting those positions where the trees seemed worn and tattered by bullets. He began scanning on thermal and soon after, designation of thermal signatures for energy mortars began.
>Jack began advancing to the front lines after calling his men to follow him, cresting the ridge and advancing down the face of it.
>"John, I want to sit down and have a chat with you when this is over... if that's okay." a female voice in his head asked timmidly.
"That's fine, Jenny, but we'll talk later." He stated under his breath.
>Jack reached the rear of the line, winded and huffing air. He paused for a minute to catch his breath.
>The time had come for Jack to enter the fray.
>Jack began a sprint toward the lower front line approaching the center of the valley.
>He jumped the depot trench filled with ammo and munitions that ranged from energy, plasma and even traditional munitions, which hadn't changed all that much in about two hundred and fifty years.
>He ended his sprint with a drop into a trench, the blank expression of a lone nanosuit staring at him, to which he could FEEL the facial expression under the mask.
>A voice filtered through a speaker met him from the suit.
>"It's been a long time since I've seen an LT with balls THAT big. You DO realize you can't take a hit, right?"
"Yeah, that's why I did it quick!" Jack shot back, his face turning to a grin of malice. "So, here's the thing. I've marked a bunch of targets before I came down here."
>"Oh, that was YOU! Thanks for the spot!"
"So, anyway, there's some priority orders for support that MIGHT break their fucking lines ahead of us, I'm sending out the order to go over and start the charge in my visor. I want you to go over as the blast wave passes!" Jack yelled over the sounds of gunfire and bombardments.
>Jack joined the line, his standard issue M-20 coming over the trench to bare on the enemy positions as he looked down his optic and surveyed for targets.
>However they were firing on this trench, they were doing it very well, seeing as positions that had been obvious from the ridge, were heavily obscured if not invisible from the trench.
>Four minutes passed and he decided it was time to step down and wait.
>Forty-five more seconds would bring a slight hiss among the winds of the the planet.
>in another twenty it would grow from an almost imperceptible hiss, like that of a leaky hose filled with pressurized air, to one not all that dissimilar to tearing paper.
>In another five it'd become a thunderous roar.
>Several small objects could be seen falling in clusters that gave the illusion of a small horde of locusts making for the ground.
>An imperceptible time after that, he could see the explosions, a couple seconds later, all in the trench felt the shockwave as the nanosuit patched himself into the broader network and screamed into everyone's comms.
>"CHAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRGE!"
"ADVANCE! ADVANCE! ADVANCE!" Lieutenant Herman shouted as he, probably due to the filling of his blood with adrenaline and the yearning to attack the situation that endangered his life and conquer it while he still could, bounded out of the trench, even jumping higher than he anticipated for the amount of force he'd thought he'd put into the jump.
>He'd effortlessly conquered the jump, and like all the other men, he began the advance, though somewhat forward of the other men, and firing his M-20 in automatic, blindly into the positions and general direction of what may be left of the enemy.
>Hundreds of men just like him, though ranked lower, were doing the same with their M-20s and expected to send three magazines down range by the time they got to the target, most likely shocking into combat ineffectiveness or killing the possible few remaining "pachka" militants who'd been holding their advance.
>As Jack reloaded, and fired half his fresh magazine, something happened, though he couldn't identify it.
>He only knew he'd experienced something unknown.
>Unknown to him, and impossible to articulate in the instant, was the feeling that his forward foot hadn't made contact with the ground and propelled him, as though he'd stepped into a hole. Also impossible to articulate or comprehend was why he seemed to be tilting, the ground before him disappearing in a blur and shifting JUST in front of him.
>Jack experienced a split instant flash.
>Confused, he fell forward disoriented from his position, and tumbled down into a bowl feature in the surface, which he could've sworn was not there prior.
"auuuugh." Jack moaned in disorientation, recovering his mere senses.
>Jack used his right forearm to try to force himself upright, failing as his muscles gave out.
>A huge foot clad in a titanium cobalt matrix stopped near him.
>"Lieutenant! Are you- Ohfuck." the suit said as it picked up the man and assessed him.
>Herman looked down at his hands, finding that his fingers didn't exist beyond the closest knuckle to the hand on the right, and that his whole left hand up past the wrist did not any longer exist.
>Jenny, his issued M-20, would never have that conversation, as she'd been cleanly vivisected, or, maybe if he met her in the afterlife, they would be having that conversation REAL soon, as his chest plate was absent, so too was his nose, his abs, his whole belly and chest a few inches deep, and as he was just beginning to feel, the end of his chin.
>Lietenant Herman could only thing to do one thing.
"Soldier! What day is it?" He rasped, feeling himself become heavier, harder to move, and less energetic.
>"It's October twelfth Twenty-one sixty-nine, LT."
"Finish them." Jack stated before things first went black, then he relaxed his neck, and the remainder of his body followed.

NOW
>"Lord! My lord! Are you well?"
>Jack found himself staring at the wall of the palace where he'd found the note, or rather wall carving, scribed in acra.
>For a moment, Jack struggled to comprehend what he'd just seen, the same BIT information detailing suit failures, degradations and passing BIT perameters passing before his eyes.
COMMENCING BIT
RCDR: DEGD
MEM: DEGD
RD SNSR: DEGD
NEUR: DEGD
MS NV: DEGD
DNA E: GO
ENR CON: NO GO
OPT ILLUM: NO GO
RCS: NOGO
VIS OPT: GO
NMS ENDO: GO
NMS EXO: NO GO/NON RSP
BIT COMPLETE.
LOADING /CIRICE.AI/
>"My lord, are you ill?" A small woman asked.
>Jack turned to her, looking her demure persona over, and deciding she was friendly.
"I'm... I'm well, what is it you desire, young one?"
>"Only your well being, my lord. I saw you walk here and then simply stop and stare at the wall... I feared you might be ill."
"How long have I been here?"
>"Five days, lord."
"Does anyone know what this writing means?" Jack asked, pointing to the wall.
>"It is a matter of debate, but the consensus among the oracles is that it was a message left you by queen Pitra when she left for a purpose unknown."
"When did she leave?"
>"It has been a matter of centuries my lord."
"Young one, I thank you."
>"May I ask something?"
"Ask."
>"What is it that so transfixed you?" the young woman asked.
"I saw something... something that didn't happen, but might have. It was like I... never..." Jack trailed off.
>"Is something the matter?"
"Pit... Pitra... PITRA! WHAT YEAR IS IT?" Jack screamed.
>"I-it's Thirty-eight Fifty-six!" The young one answered.
"Leave me. I need to read this. Alone."

>The note scrawled on the wall had a signature on the bottom. PIT--
>Slowly, the incomprehensible scripture on the wall, starting from the signature, finally after some time he'd not perceived yielded its secrets.
>To Jacks mind, symbols he'd not seen in a millennium or more, not that he'd remembered more than five or so of the centuries between then and now.
>The light waxed and waned three times while he stared at the wall of the palace, feeling a great realization that must've carried the weight of a building hanging over him, knowing that the moment he finally caught it, that weight would come falling over him like an anvil.
"Huh. Kilundi... LK-439."
"Dear, Jack.
After eighty years of what could only be described as near full absence, I just can't hold onto you anymore. All those years ago, five centuries or more, when we invaded the KZ system, when that... presence came over us... and when we first squared off against your... well, I'm not sure that qualification applies anymore. I KNOW that somewhere in there you must feel it. Maybe that's the reason for your absence. Nonetheless, you never had trouble running the planet, but with nothing of you seemingly left, I can only seek satisfactions elsewhere. Maybe when I was fifty years old on the Acra calendar I could have sought some physical satisfaction that would mean nothing in a week. But That presence... In your absence, the presence has given me naught but endless vexation for centuries, and so, I embark with my personal fleet, manned only by nanosoldiers, and seek to search out whatever it is that makes point in space toward which I can only scowl, and snuff it from the universe. I pray that one day whatever makes you wander so distantly from me as to be further from my grasp than even our home worlds. If you one day come to the front again, please search me out, and if somehow I'm destroyed in the attempt to snuff that burning presence in the sky, please carry my undertaking forward and finish my final labor. Pitra."
>Jack suddenly realized that he'd made not of very little. As though his life had been empty and devoid of light for... How many?
>Jack looked to the sky and he saw a single spot, seemingly a little more dim than most.
>Kilundi... an ice planet, lay in the center of the zone. Jack's mind, for seemingly if not truthfully, went back for the first time in centuries to massacres. Heavy artillery, impacts in the snow, suit's lost and trapped under hidden crevasses, caves, energy weapons, cruise missiles and many further heavy weapons, some of whose presence had been outlawed on Earth. He saw scenes of missiles landing feet in front of him, being blown around by tactical nukes and conventional missiles. Beams hitting suits, friends dying, whose faces he'd never seen. Some of them becoming condemned to eternity or death in the suit.
"There's something out there."

June 16, 3856.
>Jack sat at the yoke of his personal cruiser, Beginning a start up procedure while the computer calculated rough warp factors and speeds.
>Soon enough, he found himself plowing through the atmosphere into an orbit, lining up to the computed orbital trajectory, minimizing eccentricity, waiting for a jump profile to build... All would come in time.
>Soon enough that last factor was calculated, the engines fired, space in front of Jack got smaller and space behind him grew larger. An undisclosed time spent in warp later, he'd come out of the jump in a deteriorating orbit that he'd turn to a ballistic trajectory.
>In dozens of minutes, he'd be upon the surface, investigating one of only two functioning nav beacons on the planet, whose signal was weak and seemed to flutter in and out.
MST-27
Nothing
MST-27
Nothing
MST-27
Nothing
MST-27
>Soon Jack slowed the cruiser to a hover. Touching down near the platform. Adjusting the hybrid fuel mix to be lean, and burning over the snow and ice that'd buried much of the station to free it up for exploration.
>While he waited for the ice to melt, he noted that something must've rendered the planet void of humanity, as the intensive effort which need be done to keep the roads of Kilundi from the rapid freezing over that would occur in a month's time with neglect, had not been done. Only, in fact, did the top third of MST-27's spire itself tower over the triumphant ice sheet.
>This particular ice sheet has become dozens of meters tall. A cave seemed to have developed in it, but... Across the universe and away from his imperium, with not a single trooper accompanying him, he couldn't be bothered to send someone down the cave. Maybe it'd lead to the platform, maybe not.

>Hours passed. Soon the platform emerged.
>Jack set the cruiser down on it and dropped out of the hatch, leaving the engines to their automated shutoff while he walked to a sealed bulkhead, which seemed to have been welded shut.
>Jack felt no compunction about bracing himself against the metal walls of the platform and yanking the bulkhead free, breaking the locking rotor in the process.
>The bulkhead's hinges warped away as the welds snapped. The metal tearing away as feet made divots in the wall. The actual door snapped from the wall as Jack fell to the ground.
>Jack got up and began walking down the hallway, darkened, but not entirely, seemingly lit by the emergency lights of the mining platform.
>If memory served, they mined a substance poor in energy, but super efficient in releasing it compared to many of the energetic compounds of the day.
>But it was good for burning through space, so needed it was, and worth the lives of millions of soldiers... worth the lives of, perhaps slightly more costly, a couple hundred thousand men who HADN'T been condemned to the nano suit.
>As Jack continued down the hallway, descending into the platform's inner workings, he noticed a distinct sense that everything, despite what was obviously an extended period of abandon, was in perfect order.
>Was this place abandoned?
>Surely it had been!
>This place looked fucked! The roads were buried, the platform was buried dozens of feet above. Only the main sensor spires had stayed above hard ice.
>As he reached the end of the hallway, he saw the militia bays, which were empty and abandoned save for the materials lining them, to create a more pleasurable aesthetic, destroyed by what could only have been one thing. Age.
>As Jack looked at the materials, he made short work of identifying them. Accessing integrated databases and gaining material information. 
>Something about one of the bays called to him.
>He knew this place.
>He'd been here.
>One of the bays called his attention.
>He approached. The sign that would've identified the bay was blackened beyond recognition. Nothing could have done it. But for that sign to have been decayed enough to be in this state... That time would have only been possible to live through for him... And Pitra.
>As Eric walked into the portal he was greeted with the sight of ten, No DOZENS of grayed beings, whose form resembled the living in the flesh, but in whom no life seemed to dwell.
>Eyes that might have searched him out at one point with a searing intensity continued looking only to their chosen point of concentration. Eternally staring into the point of inert material, decaying in its due time.
>Hundreds maybe.
>Grayed faces that sat blank, eyes grayed, bloodshot, shadowed by grayed eyesockets.
>Hair colors ranged from jet black to bleach blonde, scars could be seen on the more battle marked of the beings.
>Jack knew from a very early age what these were.
>It shocked him to realize that these were geists. Just as his grandmother many generations upstream had been.
>The fact of what they were didn't surprise him... But the contrast from the geists he'd known was shocking.
>Lifeless. Resigned. Forsaken.
>Suddenly Jack realized the absence of reports on human activity meant something.
>There was an absence of reports because there was an absence of activity.
>An absence of humans.
>It was striking.
>Jack suddenly felt several sets of eyes on him.
>The drowned colors of the eyes surrounding him became incredibly apparent.
>Stares that made him crawl were upon him.
>Jack looked around. He scanned for even a single set of eyes now that were not upon him.
>He found none. He turned around.
>Again. And again.
>Something was closing.
>He scanned upward, all around him.
"Is something on the roof?" Jack asked to himself.
>"I-I'm insane!" a voice from low and in front of him uttered.
".... Jenny?" Jack inquired before finally, a few seconds later, dropping his eyes to a deathly figure with a lifeless paler about her, who stood before him in a stare.
>"I thought the hallucinations weren't supposed to talk back."
"I'm not a hallucination. I'm the real article."
>"BULLSHIT! The real article was last seen over fifteen hundred years ago! My mind may not work, but my EYES do! YOU CAN'T BE JACK!" the geist shouted angrily.
>Tears begin streaming down her cheeks.
"What the fuck happened here?"
>"THEY'RE ALL DEAD! THEY ALL DIED AND THEN THEIR CHILDREN STARTED FUCKING THOSE ALIENS THEY! ALL! DIED! BEHAVIOR SINK! GONE!"

"Collect yourself. Regain your composure."
>Jenny sank. She was visibly deflated by having someone speak to her, controlled, authoritative. She was stricken to hear someone not echo her mind, even if this might have been what she believed a hallucination of Jack would do.
>Jenny couldn't decide whether this apparition was just that, or had proven itself real after all these centuries.
>Slowly, her emotions fell away, and in their place, a grudging obedience took hold for the first time in over a millennium. Her breathing, though purely ornamental, slowed.
>Gradually, she came to grips, assessing the world around her. This platform's armory bay, this room full of geists, drained of energy, with no humans to put it into them. No one to serve. No sense of purpose, and here, seemed to have been the one person she would have served willingly, had she the capacity to go back in time.
>Even if he was a hallucination, at least she'd have the delusion of purpose.
>While Jenny quickly fell back into composure, Jack searched the known records in his computer for the term, "Behavior sink," which turned up the term "behavioral sink," and showed him, at great speed, video footage of "the rat utopia" experiment, undertaken in the mid twentieth century. In a fraction of a second, Jack became aware of the principle of a "behavioral sink."
>"Okay. I'm ready. What can I do?" she asked in a sedate voice.
"Tell me what happened. Where are all the people, Jenny?" Jack asked, sobered to his core.
>"The people are all dead. ALL people."
"What happened to them?"
>"They stopped taking caution toward Aliens. Then they started integrating with them. Well, one day, they met the second race of Aliens since they'd adopted the policy. Hell if I can remember the name. The Kilklih or something. They came from proxima, they were like blue women made of sentient gelatin, and slowly, little by little they infected more and more planets, and it wouldn't have been what it became if anyone had any fucking RESTRAINT. You know. The kind of people who used to call sector five 'The Night Reich.'"
>"It just couldn't be stopped. 'Oh, what do YOU care?' and 'How does it effect YOU?' The same shitty rhetoric over time until all standards of decency eroded into 'I'm gonna go stick my dick in this sentient puddle of liquid.' And 'Oh, I'm gonna let this puddle of sentient liquid crawl up INSIDE me.' And just like that, in a few generations, planet after planet would become barren. With no new humans being born, they'd go extinct."
"All of them?"
>"ALL. Not a single planet existed whose inhabitants couldn't be signaled into self destruction. Not after What happened to Earth."
"Was this all... my fault?"
>"Was it you who destroyed earth?"
"It was... Entirely on my hands." Jack uttered.
>Jack sank into the realization that HE had killed humanity. His eyes widened. His mind, was for a rare moment, caught in surprise.
"Do you think these geists could bond with something... Not quite human, but close?"
>"No. They could bond with you, but it would be an incredibly weak one."
"I see."
>"The only thing you can do for them is to leave them to their listlessness. They won't rot. They'll sit forever. One day, maybe they'll move on to their own world. Take over the worlds that they once defended. Maybe they'll even develop their own will again. But for now, and for millennia, they'll only lie in wait."
"I have to go somewhere. It calls to me."
>"Jack... Can I come with you?"
"Yes. Come on. We've got somewhere to be together. If only for a while."
>With that, Jack set about leaving the platform in order to follow the next thing that called to him.
>Jenny, following in tow, decided to grab onto his hand and clutch onto it.

Strange facility. Seven hours later.
>Jack landed on a station that appeared... not to have been made by humans.
>He carried Jenny with him as he walked through the surprising area that made up the landing pad.
"The more species differ, the more their shit stays the same, huh?" Jack thought to himself.
>Slowly, he approached a portal.
>inside, he could see a glowing blue orb, floating near the center of the dome that made the core of the station.
>A pile of ash sat in the middle.
>Jenny morphed to her human form and held onto Jack's hand as he approached the center.
>Jack came to a stop as he stared at the orb.
>From an arms distance, it seemed so tempting. Strangely, it was as if it could be touched and one would unleash something. Something powerful. But easy to incite.
>While Jenny clasped onto his right arm as though she'd never let go, Jack reached with his left hand, and touched the sphere.
"Jenny?"
>"Fffffffffffffffffffffffffinally..." she uttered as though it were with her last breath.
>Jack felt a strange sensation, as though a cast were finally coming off a healing arm, he felt a weight falling against his right arm.
>Jack looked down to see Jenny had collapsed, and in slipping down his arm, had torn away one eighth of an inch thick chunks, revealing not muscle as could be expected of peeling skin, but instead pure white skin, of the hue of fresh milk.
>Jack reached to Jenny with his right hand, seeing chunks of what must've been the merged inner layer of the nanosuit and the interaction suit fall off onto her and the floor around her before disintegrating like ash.
>as his facial expression changed, he saw similar chunks fall from his head before he fell on top of her.
>He wondered just what form of poetic destruction had befallen him for five seconds before he felt Jenny's hand reach his face, and rub across it, around his head, and then finally settle back to his chin.
>Jenny's face became a faint smile, and she began to speak.
>"It seems the suit stopped producing the sanitary preservative for your eyes some time ago. That's good. I want to see your real face. Your eyes."
"What's happening?" Jack asked, almost redundantly.
>"Shhhhhhh." Jenny answered, placing a finger to his lips.
>"Just let it happen"
>Two hands found their way around his head before pulling it down, hanging limp, ear to ear, jaw to jaw.
>The pearlescent floor of this place, faded from view.

Somewhere.
>Jack stood, a monolith among a flat ground that stretched, seemingly forever.
>A fog up to the knees, like a tuly fog, blanketed the ground, giving the place an uncanny tone which immediately struck Jack.
>He looked about himself. Naked, he wasn't an apparently weak man, in fact, many would have rated him a superlative specimen of humanity, had they still been around to do so. Such was one of the reasons he hadn't spent his youth in prison. However, somehow he felt he should be clothed.
>In the reflection of the ground on which he stood, a pair of green eyes sat atop a face full of classical sharp features and topped with brown hair that turned blonde before they eyes turned to a greenish blue.
>Something was not right.
>From where nothing had been for miles, a man suddenly called to him.
>"Jack! Good to see you. I'd say it's terrible that you're here, but you're long overdue for this place."
>The voice of the man, clad in a strange camouflage, sounded familiar.
"Dad?" He asked in surprise.
>"Close enough, but not nearly." the man said.
>Looking closely at the man, he realized that he'd morphed to match.
>The hair. The eyes... they weren't his own, they were... his.
>"I know, I know. You weren't expecting it to be like this. But the truth is, you weren't a sacred being. From generations before your inception, John, you were bound to be deffective and misbegotten." He stated before he paused for a moment. "Not that it stopped you from achieving great things. Rule a planet, start a species, live longer than any human outside of a geist ever would. Human's don't go through life cyclically. That's what separates us from the geists. They're ghosts. And with us gone, they'll forever haunt the places we inhabited until they're destroyed in cellestial events and in another run, they replace humans, or until they find their peace and finally come home."
"..."
>"I know. You spent a lot of time lost in the wilderness. Lifetimes more than any of us ever have. But, you take as much time as you need."
"What about-"
>The man turned to him, giving him a stern eye, and silencing him from his word to his thought.
>"SHE won't be coming along."
"But why?"
>"Not human."
"Where do I go from here?"
>"You already know. But before you go on that trip, woud, you like to come on a short tour with me?"
"Yes."
>"Follow me, John."
>The man led him to a place that was much different from any place he truly knew. It was like the place he grew uo, but with more trees, grass, the area around had more greenery and the trees were of a different type altogether.
>"This is where Anon Mous grew up. California. A pretty place, but a bad one. There I am now, leaving on my first adventures."
"You... You're Anon?"
>"Yes."
>In a few steps Anon had led Jack, seemingly across many miles and years
>Here's my moment at the armory.
>Jack looked on toward a young man being issued and M-16, and then, with no real coherent progression, a man being approached by a larger man, bearing a more intricate rank pin, accompanied by a green eyed brunette girl.
>"This is where your defect starts. That's Emily."
"How am I defective?"
>"Well, you're only mostly real in the strictest sense. For a good long while the fabric of reality has been tearing around humans. Truth be told, this moment you see before you, is already an advanced and decrepit state of reality decaying."
>Jack watched as a routine rifle cleaning and lubrication occurred.
>A rifle was put back together, a woman appeared from nowhere, but this time, unlike before, she had a deep red blush on her face.
>Moments later, Jack found himself at a familiar scene. He was once more viewing, from a new perspective, his farewell to Jenny.
>He watched this time, from afar as a man, seemed to callously dismissed a crying woman, who he was hurting.
>Everything turned gray.
>And like that, he was back in the mire, but this time, the buildings of Salisbury sprouted from the ground.
>"Tell me, John. If you could do it all again, would you?"
"All? Or none?"
>"No. But at what point?"
"The barfight. I wouldn't repeat the bar fight."
>"You saw what happened then in a dream."
"I did."
>"A worthy death for a soldier. Not an emperor, nor a superman, but then again, we all have to die. Even super humans. Even those that gave up being human. But... You can't escape the feeling that THIS." Anon said with outstretched arms "... was an anticlimactic way to go for someone with about fifteen hundred years of rule under their belt."
>Suddenly, all the buildings in the mire fell, and John was looking down on the bodies of Jenny and himself piled up in a rather strange pose for two who were wearing clothes.
>"It's fitting, but boring. Much like you, John, it just does." Anon stated while a grassy meadow appeared under the men.
>Anon faced John.
>"You aren't sisyphus You only need to do it once, and I suspect you just do. We can talk more later, but for now, take as much time as you need... he said with a smile "... she's waiting over there, we'll be waiting too." He said while pointing toward a figure on top of a hill.
>John turned to look where Anon pointed.
>"Come home."
>John looked to the  hill, and then to the air where Anon had stood.
>John smiled, confused, but knowing what he needed to do.
>He heard the figure calling to him.
>And he started walking.