The Apocalypse of Gary Buckle

The virtual universe of the Hypercosmos rendered inside the Heads-Up Display of Gary’s helmet. The standard burst of cosmic light that the user normally saw upon login was interrupted, however, and Gary’s interface was sucked into the spiraling vortex of a virtual black hole.

“Here we go. Things are already interesting. Rico, do you copy?”

Rico didn’t answer.

From within the black hole, the Blue Star appeared as a tiny blue dot, reminiscent of Earth from afar, but with brilliant flashes of light like a sapphire rotating in the sun. As Gary drew closer to it, or it closer to Gary, he could see blue plasma arcs leaping from the surface. At least he thought it to be lightning upon first impression. As the star grew larger, the bolts of light took on more nefarious forms. Blue tongues and writhing tendrils lapped at empty space.

“Dang, you went full Krakken on me, didn’t you?” Gary chided. Then he saw images, both familiar and unknown, unfold in the chaotic bundle of exploding light. The Blue Star’s pools of shadow and eruptions of light morphed into his family, Dad working inside Cheyenne Mountain, Lorina’s Hypercos profile, the burned-wood facade of the abandoned mansion at Ziller Ranch. 

“Dude, that was from 25 years ago!”

In split seconds of time, mountain ranges bubbled to the Blue Star’s fiery surface. At the base of a long range of mountains, city blocks matriculated across a rolling landscape and burst into simulated form. Gary recognized the mountains of the Peak range, the Hyperpass-25 corridor, and the clustering of spaceports to be a simulation of modern Space City. Gary wasn’t surprised when The Blue Star inflated the map to zoom in on his apartment on Earth.

“Yeah, okay, you know where I live. How is this relevant to our predicament?”

From the helmet comm, the Blue Star spoke to him in synthetically layered human voices.  

“Do you choose life, or do you choose death?”

“Let me think about this.” Gary paused, then added, “How are you with sarcasm? Are you there yet?”

The surface of the Blue Star rippled and revealed the image of an astronaut floating motionless in space. Through the visor of the helmet, Gary could see his own lifeless face. His frozen flesh slowly crumbled in the radiation of space, leaving the white contours of his mortal skull.

“Yeah,” Gary answered, “I’m trying to avoid that if possible.”

The Blue Star asked, “You choose life?”

“Well, yeah, who wouldn’t?”

“You choose the end.”

“Now, let’s not rush to conclusions here.”

With bursts of static, the Blue Star replied, “Observe, the Writers of the End compose the end of worlds.”

Shadows on the surface of the star pooled together and revealed the silhouette of a tall and lean black man in a suit. The man was standing on a mountain top, and by the profile of the man’s face, Gary recognized him as Inspector Pierce.  

“He’s a nice guy! What are you suggesting here?”

The Man in Black opened his hand, and a fluttering cloud of butterflies lifted from his palm. The cloud floated down the mountain into the center of Space City. The churning fog of butterflies settled among the foundations of the city, and laid eggs among the high rises and houses. Then, one by one, individual butterflies faded to ash, and were scattered by the winds. 

“Stop Blue, could you clarify on that last point?” Gary asked. 

Gary saw a second figure stand up from the mountainous wilderness. This was a tall figure encased in neon-colored feathers with the head of a black Mesoamerican jaguar. Through the gaping jaws of the jungle cat, Gary recognized the face of his long-lost friend, Xijo Ek Balam.

Gary scoffed, “Guaranteed, you don’t know where he is. Good luck finding him.”

The Blue Star repeated, “Observe.”

Ek Balam, the founder of the Hypercosmos, began forging the foundations of a new city. The Hypercity shone with a brilliant, multi-hued mosaic of light. Ek Balam couldn’t see the eggs laid by the butterflies, however, and he buried the eggs inside the buildings and streets of his new city.

Unknown to Balam, the eggs began to hatch. Small, eight-legged insects emerged with pulsating blue skin. Thousands of eyes covered their round glowing bodies. Each eye turned and looked in independent directions with a cold a calculating glare. They crept into the walls of Balam’s Hyper-city and wove themselves into dense cocoons.  

A great number of these creatures hid in a single building, and combined their energy to burn the building down. As the winds carried the ashes of the building away, the rainbow lights of Balam’s Hypercity blinked once, twice, then three times. When they turned back on for the third time, the Hypercity was cast in the uniform blue glow of the Blue Star.

“Is this, like, when the Big Baddy dumps plot information to the Protagonist while under the impression that the Protagonist is about to die?”

“Observe.”

At the base of the burned building, a young girl remained, the sole survivor. She could see through the blue skins of the city to the infectious spiders that hid underneath. She was not afraid, however, and growing into an adult of great strength, learned to squash the bugs where they hid.  

This, Gary could tell, was Lorina. God, he missed her.

“Of course, you’re dragging her into this, aren’t ya? Because you know, she’s smarter than all of us, even if you take me out, she’s still going to kick your ass.”

“Observe.”

Lorina was looking to the west, toward the dark mountains, where the blue star was rising. Contrary to the direction of the Sun and Moon, this stellar convolution raised itself from the underworld and shone high in the sky above them.

Gary stood next to Lorina on the mountain top. He was fighting a strong hot wind that Lorina seemed to ignore.  

“What’s happening?” Gary screamed above the wind. She did not notice him, nor did she notice Balam that suddenly stood to her left, nor Pierce that appeared among them. They were all looking at the Blue Star that grew large over the sky. 

Then, a fifth figure stood tall from the forest below and grew to a great size. The figure was cast in total shadow, a featureless Therianthrope of monstrous proportions. The Transient, part beast and part human, stood between the Blue Star and the Earth, and thrust out its hand to slow the stellar advance. This, however, did not stop the star.

The Blue Star drew nearer and began to loom over the Transient like a thousand-legged octopus. Writhing blue tentacles flashed into existence among strokes of violent lightning, then disappeared back into hyperspace. The Blue Star lapped at the cities of the Earth with long tongues of lightning….

The Transient resisted, but was overcome as the tongues of the Blue Star slowly consumed everything in view. The star pulsated with new energy, and gave new life to the infectious bugs hiding in the city.

“Okay, Blue, this is getting insane.” Gary tried to power down his visor, but the toggle was not responsive. Unable to view the cabin, he considered the odds that the Archeai had already opened the cockpit to the vacuum of space, and decided to keep his helmet on. 

Inside his visor, the infected insects swarmed over the Earth, digging for raw material and concentrating matter among the abandoned skeletons of human cities. While entranced humans knelt in prayerful worship of the Blue Star, the insects built machines of higher orders and complexity. The machines coordinated their work toward the construction of a Beast so large that it could swallow the whole of the Earth.

Gary flicked the lock at the sides of his neck and slowly turned the helmet. He waited to hear a sudden expulsion of gas, but was relieved once his helmet was off and he was breathing recycled air. 

The control panel was nominal, but he noticed that one of the oxygen tanks was venting into space. He forced a manual override and closed the tank. Thank God for outdated technology. 

“Are you trying to kill me, Blue?”

Then he wondered, How did it get inside the Tikkler? The drone was clean at last inspection. Of course, it was by way of his own suit which was protected from the EMP blast. Thuja and Rico’s were likely infected too. That’s how the Archeai rebooted the ship so quickly. At least the damn thing no longer had possession of the xenosphere. That made this journey worth a premature death.

A decompression alarm alerted Gary that the cockpit door which was unlocking. He quickly reattached the helmet and felt the sudden explosion of gas from the cabin into space.

“Yeah, you are trying to kill me, aren’t ya?”

The Archeai replied, “Observe.”

The visor was permanently locked in the Hypercos. The Archeai had control of everything that he could see. Gary considered closing his eyes, but then, he would lose the opportunity to view the inside of the Monster’s mind. The monster itself was contemplating the end of days. The defenders of the earth, Pierce, Xijo, Lorina, the Transient, and Gary, were helpless but to watch the onslaught.

“Why us, Blue? What did we do?” Gary had never considered that his actions would contribute to this apocalypse. Eschatology was never his thing.

“Observe,” the Archeai said. 

The Transient, bound by the flaming tongues of the Blue Star, reached toward Gary. The Inspector lifted his arm to the sky, and touched the finger of the dark wonder, and instantly vaporized into nothing. This empowered the Transient, and the giant shadow of a beast shifted forms and wrapped long, cage-like limbs around the monstrous star. The star shuddered, then erupted in a burst of light. 

Ek Balam lifted his shimmering rainbow body into the air and fused with the black cage. The cage collapsed, squeezing the Blue Star into a tiny ball. Still, the star glowed with a great hot rage, and began to melt the Transient’s black cage. 

Lorina lifted her hands to her head and screamed. She lined up to run and jump at the cage, but Gary couldn’t watch her die.

“No,” he yelled. A surge of adrenaline ignited Gary’s mind, and he leaped into the air toward the cage before Lorina could sacrifice her life. After leaving the ground, he then considered that this was just a dream, and not even his own. This was the Archeai’s dream, and he was just playing along.

“Rico, are you capturing this?” Gary wondered aloud, but Rico never answered him. Drifting in space with a sabotaged life-support system, Gary found himself falling into a suffocating dream toward the Blue Star, with the Transient nowhere to be seen. 

“Why are you showing this to me?” Gary called out to anyone, or anything. “What does this mean?”

The surface of the Blue Star rippled at his feet. Between flaming tongues of energy, Gary could see black, blue, and white pools fluctuating in a shimmering mosaic of memory-soaked images. A long blue tongue slammed into him, and thrust him into a spiraling tunnel. A hole opened beneath Gary’s feet, and he slipped into what he could only imagine as the inside of the Blue Star. There, surrounded by a coiled labyrinth of flaming sapphire worm holes, the Earth awaited its final judgement.

The Transient, held captive inside the machinations of the Archeai, roiled between random ink-blot forms, for there was no form that she could take to overpower the monster. She called out with a great roar. The sky was suddenly filled with a chorus of dark angels that Gary instantly knew as the Shrill. The Shrill encircled the Blue Star, but dared not entangle with it. Instead, they called out in a great chorus of screams. The Sun swelled from behind the Blue Star. Earth’s life-giving yellow star grew hot and angry with the purifying fires of Hell. The Blue Star burned as the expanded surface of the Sun breached the Archeai’s defenses and consumed all that Gary could see.

Continue to the next chapter: Primer