Chapter 1
Humanity was on the brink of extinction. As usual. But this time…it wasn’t from an asteroid that would rend the sky to trembling shreds, from a second sun as brilliant and beautiful as it was terrifying and devastating. It wasn’t from the unforgiving, freezing onslaught of a wintry hell, from an icy inferno that slowly strangled and burned the life within its searching grasp. It wasn’t even from a super-illness, or—and this is what gives this story away as fiction—as a result of the species’ own illimitable capacity for greed and hatefulness. It was because of aliens.
The defining curse and blessing of humanity is its existential self-awareness. This Promethean spark of lucidity drives humans to constantly ask questions.
An ancient philosopher asked: “What if I use a falling stone to break those shells apart and obtain a surplus in my caloric resources?”
An ancient Don Quixote asked: “What’s across this vast sea? Could it be a fountain of water that for no conceivable reason whatsoever has the power to grant me eternal youth?”
And of course, modern philosophers ask: “Mommy, where do babies come from?”
More pertinently, however, humans have always asked: “Are we alone in the universe?” This has led them to their telescopes, star charts, and space shuttles. And ever since modern humans saw a photograph of their universe, a blue marble drifting meaninglessly in the murky sea of space, they’ve been on edge. Unsettled.
“What does it mean,” they ask in anguish, “to be a speck of dust on a speck of dust, but to understand the rules that govern every single speck of dust in eternity?”
Out of fear, loneliness, and curiosity, the human imagination conjured all sorts of images of intelligent extraterrestrial life. From green-skinned, bug-eyed cartoons, to monstrous colonies of worms, and everything in between, humans strove to envisage the features of self-aware creatures imprisoned in this bewildering universe alongside them, like a lonely child daydreaming about a future best-friend. But, in their blindness, what humans failed—or maybe chose—not to imagine, were aliens in their own image, creatures from across the looking glass. And so, humans were completely unprepared when the alien humans began their invasion.
You don’t know why you’re reading this, why I’m saying this. But humour me, please. When you get tired, your brain comes up with all sorts of wild chains of thought. Even more so when you’re dying. Or, at least, I think so…I’ve never really died before. Not until now of course. It hurts. It really, really hurts.
This whole “extinction by alien invasion” thing started happening a month ago. As you’d expect, everyone took the mass deaths as an opportunity to fight against each other. Human grudges, and jealousy, and greed die hard, after all. But when about a third of the population was wiped out in exchange for 4,000 alien casualties, people started thinking that maybe they could loot their friends and enemies a bit better if they stayed alive (they themselves, not their friends and enemies, of course). Maybe, just maybe, it was time for countries to team up with other countries, rather than to keep trying to save their nuclear reserves in the hopes that the others would exhaust theirs first. That idea won someone a Nobel Peace Prize.
Anyway, by the time half of the globe was ashes, dust, acidified water, and nuclear waste, the ever-industrious humans had come up with a genius idea: artificial intelligence. And this particular artificial intelligence model had come up with a genius idea: freezing time so humans could come up with a strategy, any strategy, that could defeat the aliens.
How do you freeze time? You just need to move faster.
So, humans created the “Atrimax,” a super-program that combined immensely capable computational engines, immensely realistic simulations, cutting-edge brain implantation techniques, and biochemical cocktails, and allowed the humans placed in it to run through “training round” after “training round,” “trial” after “trial,” “game level” after “game level,” in accelerated consciousness-space, so as to provide an optimal strategy for humans to combat the aliens.
Big words aside, they basically hook you up to this machine that puts you in a dream where time moves a thousand times faster than in reality. In that dream, your consciousness is synchronised with the consciousnesses of everyone else who’s hooked up to the Atrimax, so you essentially all experience a simulation-world that allows you to live out a full human life in a month.
Anyway, there’s stuff that can happen in the simulation that’ll get you killed in real life. And that’s why I’m dying.
But, at the very least, she isn’t.
So it’s okay.
