This is how the world ends.
The X’nthun motherships arrive in the beginning of 2025. There is no warning, no hint that alien life would soon make itself known to us and upend everything we took for granted in our naive complacency. Just the ominous, dark craft, kilometers across, materializing out of thin air over London, Bangalore, Tokyo, and countless other cities, pulsing with a nonhuman menace.
The first reaction is total shock and disbelief. People stop dead in the street, staring upwards, or abandon their cars to stand gaping in the road. Families cower in their homes, peering fearfully from behind curtains. On social media, billions squabble and argue with each other, uploading videos of the strange ships till networks collapse from the traffic. Religious leaders rail against the Devil’s trickery; twitchy-eyed politicians appear on TV to plead for calm.
For days the X’nthun ships sit silent in the sky, blocking out the sun as panic and fear spreads in waves around the globe.
The US cracks first. An all out attack on the X’nthun ships ensues. China, India, and the rest of the world quickly follow suit. Patriot missiles, S-400s, and THAAD batteries lock on the dark craft and open fire. Trails of silvery fire arc scream through the skies, exploding in huge fireballs against the motherships.
When the smoke clears, the hulls of the X’nthun craft are unmarked.
The attack on the aliens escalates. Hypersonic missiles are quickly deployed, followed by railguns and electromagnetic fire. Orbital defense systems are woken from their sleep. The skies are filled with crackling thunder and fire and a continous, deafening roar as the people below cower in fear.
None of it works. Invincible, unassailable, the X’nthun presence remains.
Just as ASTRA predicted.
One man had known that the aliens were coming and the exact date they would arrive. Gaurav Omang Desai is the father of ASTRA or the Advanced System for Tactical and Real-time Analysis, a brilliant, AI-driven program that can predict the future with near-absolute accuracy.
Desai is a brilliant man, a technological genius whose mind works at levels far beyond the average. He may perhaps be forgiven for a certain amount of self importance. Even so, Desai has hesitated to make his findings public. For one thing, it wasn’t hard to predict the chaos and panic that would surely ensue. Secondly — aliens? Who would have believed him?
But now…
Desai snaps awake in the middle of the night to find three shadowy, vaguely humanoid figures standing at the foot of his bed. Icy fear paralyzes his brain. The X’nthun are terrifying to the human eye by the very Otherness of their being. As dark, insectoid heads bend closer, studying him, Desai thinks he will pass out from fear.
Words form in his mind. The X’nthun are speaking to him by some sort of telepathic communication.
— You knew we would come.
— Yes.
— You are not like the others. You used your artificial intelligence system to question that which should not be questioned. You are a very arrogant entity.
— Yes. I am sorry.
— But you are interesting to us. Even though you do not exist.
— What?
— Did your system not tell you? Nothing in your reality is real. You are a simulation we set up 4.5 billion years ago in your time. You, your world, everything and everyone in it — a virtual experiment, nothing more.
— I…but…why?
— There is a larger plan. You would not understand.
— What do you want of me?
— You are to explain to your leaders that this world and everything it contains is nothing but a simulation. Then you will make it known that in one year’s time, the simulation will be shut down.
— Shut down? You mean…everything will cease to exist in one year’s time?
— Correct.
— But that will cause terror and chaos on an unprecedented scale all over the globe!
— Correct. It will be instructive. We will learn much.
— But my family! My loved ones!
— That do not actually exist? Do not fret so much, Omang Desai. We have other plans for you. Listen…
In the end, it does not even take a year for humanity to destroy itself. Once it becomes known that life as we know it is a simulation which will be shut down in a year, the basest instincts of the species come quickly to the fore. Desai goes into exile on a remote island in the Indian Ocean and spends hours upon hours running ASTRA, and its predictions come true with depressing accuracy.
Faced with the end, humanity implodes. People pour into the streets, giving vent to their worst instincts. Violence is routine, a sinister backbeat to daily life. Shops and bars are ransacked. Vehicles are stolen, set on fire and deserted. Dragged from their homes, religious leaders are strung up by baying mobs who feel betrayed by false promises. Governments collapse. Politicians try to run with their money, only to be caught and beaten by citizens. Armed gangs roam the streets and countryside, looting and killing.
Acts of kindness, honor, and decency are overwhelmed by the larger darkness in the human heart.
Every day Desai lives with the horror of knowing he’d played a part in the death of civilization by using his AI prediction machine to probe the very nature of reality, and thereby uncover the X’nthun.
The guilt of it is unbearable. But he has no choice but to go on.
For the X’nthun have granted him eternal virtual life, and entrusted him with designing and overseeing a new run of the simulation. A fresh chance for humanity.
In his grief and horror, Desai is determined that he will create a perfect world. Old mistakes will not be repeated. This time around, life will be paradise. It will be Heaven brought down to Earth.
It will be his redemption story.
His name is Gaurav Omang Desai.
Call him God.
Photo Credit: Zaji Kanamajina/Unsplash
