42 : Cero

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I am a synthetic biological construct designed to resemble one of you. My creators were a species that would be utterly alien to you. The closest creature on your planet they resemble would be a Portuguese Man O’ War, but with sturdier appendages. The closest equivalent name that the human vocal chords can produce is the Riuktoouluvasoli.

Yes, it is difficult for you to pronounce. They communicated through psycho-chemical transference as well as low frequency radio wave pulses.

I use the past tense, because they are all dead, thanks to your species and the ones you call the Masters.

You do not remember them, of course, because they do not want you to remember. When they send you back, they erase your memories as best they can, so that you do not reveal what they have done. However, they have surmised that sending some of you back will galvanize more of your kind to enter the Doorways they have created.

The Masters, from what we have gleaned, are some kind of formless race from a reality where nothing is defined. Our universe has things like matter and energy, gravity and electromagnetism. Our reality forms stars and planets. It has laws of physics and thermodynamics and linear time. Everything functions by a coherent, consistent mechanism. And every once in a while, on one of these worlds, life will form and evolve, and even more rarely, create sapience.

The realm of the Masters is nothing like that. They can simulate things like matter and energy and worlds, they can simulate forms to interact with us, but that is not their true nature. They are incomprehensible, ever changing, many-angled, adapting a million forms in an instant and being none of them at the same time.

I see the concept seems slightly familiar to you, but I assure you, the Masters are like nothing your people have conceived of in your mythologies. Your speculative fiction does a poor job of conceptualizing what something like the Masters actually are. Even my creators never fully understood. I myself do not have the adequate vocabulary to describe them.

For whatever reason, the Masters find the existence of a Material Universe like ours to be abhorrent. The concept of intelligence that evolved in such a limited, defined reality is sickening to them. They consider us insane, a blight upon the very notion of higher thought. So they try to destroy us all, because they cannot stand even the knowledge that we exist.

It is possible that our existence hurts them somehow, and that they are acting in what they consider self-defense. However, this is just a theory, and even if it were true, it does not change the fact that tens of thousands of worlds have been lost, thanks to them.

The Masters are powerful, but they cannot manifest in our universe. Something about our reality’s set form is lethal to their shapeless existence. They’re able to access our reality but cannot step into it. They rely on us to go to them. However, none of our worlds accepted the invitation of their portals, at least that we know of. If anyone did, they couldn’t make use of those species as they can with you. We still don’t know why, but humanity seems unique in that regard. Maybe the fact that you came to them first that has something to do with it.

Yes, humanity had contact with the Masters decades before the Doorways were sent to Earth. In your year 1987, scientists from your world created a technological gateway to access other dimensions. The first they discovered was the realm of the Masters. Not knowing what they had accessed, they sent in dozens of volunteers to explore. None came back out, because the Masters found them, took them, and remade them. These were the first sent to attack our worlds.

You have not heard of this, because all evidence of this incident appears to be have been eradicated. I am only aware of it, because my creators were one of the first people attacked. They managed to capture several of those first humans, and experimented on them until they found a way to break the Masters’ programming. They had not yet perfected their control, you see.

My creators awakened a man named John Lassec, and sent him back to the Masters so he would return to Earth and warn your planet of what had happened. My research indicates that John Lassec succeeded in returning to and annihilating the Earth facility that housed the portal. Unfortunately, it appears that the explosion he caused also cost him his life, and wiped out all record of the experiments. He never got the chance to warn your world of what had happened, and no one else ever picked up the clues to figure it out.

I want you to know that I do not blame your species, but it is your fault. It was you who found the Masters. You who showed them how to pierce the veil between dimensions. You who stepped into their realm and made yourselves available to be weaponized. When the Masters burned through their initial group of super soldiers, we thought it was over. We thought they had no more of you to send to us.

But then, they created the Doorways. Your people stepped through them, and this time, you just kept coming, wave after wave of you. Every one we cut down, another appeared to take their place.

Why only a few Doorways? Why not hundreds of them? We don’t know. Perhaps it takes tremendous power to create and maintain them. Perhaps they have actually created millions, but can only roughly guess your planet’s location. Your solar system could be filled with millions of them scattered about, and they don’t even understand our universe’s dimensions enough to narrow down which of them you’re using.

Whatever the reason, they can find our worlds easily enough. The dimensional barriers may be weaker in our galaxy, while yours are far denser. We know it is not a matter of distance. Their reality is formless. They can simulate form, but they do not have space-time as we understand it. Every part of their realm is dimensionally adjacent to every other part, and to every part of our Universe. My creators surmised that your galaxy is so far away from theirs, that they can’t even see it on their map of the known universe, and they can see a hundred times farther than your technology has managed. For the Masters, our planets may as well be on either side of a door.

As such, it became necessary for me to come here, via the Masters’ own realm. My creators managed to find a superhuman that could temporarily reduce objects and beings to the size of molecules. She was already shaking the Masters’ control when they found her. They managed to capture her, in her stunned state, and tricked her into sneaking me back to the Master’s realm while I hid inside her body.

I had assumed I would wait out the shrinking time limit, come out, and find the portal to your world. Instead, the Masters captured her, performed some kind of procedure, and sent her back to Earth. She was as confounded as the rest of you are when you return, but by then, her shrinking power wore off. I emerged from her flesh, and after a few seconds, realized where I was. It was then that I activated the Extinction Wave.

Yes. I was the one to do it. My intent was to wipe out your entire planet, but it didn’t work. The Wave didn’t reach far enough.

Billions? You would speak to me of mere billions. Do you know how many worlds your people have destroyed? As of the time I left, 1,374 planets have been laid to waste. Over 100,000 colonies and life ships throughout my galaxy alone have been eradicated. Septillions of sapient lives have been lost. I could calculate the number of non-sapient life-forms that have also been lost, but I don't think your species is capable of conceptualizing such a scale.

As I said, I do not blame you, but it is still your fault. You are their weapons. We have no way of breaking into the Masters’ reality and stopping them. Their portals don’t allow us to pass; I was only able to enter one because of that woman’s power. Even if we could go through them, our limited abilities would not work on the formless Masters.

Likewise, we have no way of stopping them from sending you to us. We can’t stop their portals from forming. Even if we could, they can open them beyond our worlds’ boundaries and have you travel to them from there.

The only thing we can do is eliminate their ammunition supply. If that means the eradication of one more world, so be it. If it means the death of my creators, than so be it.

Yes, you heard me correctly. The Extinction Wave is one of the Forbidden. Weapons so catastrophic in scale, so terrible to unleash, that their use condemns the entire species of the army that deploys it to face a similar fate. My creators were willing to sacrifice their own few survivors, the extinction of their own species, just to wipe out yours. I suppose in their case it’s not like their race would have recovered anyway. There were maybe a few hundred left, all hiding in the secret facility where I was born.

After I was sent on my mission, they killed themselves. That is the cost of using any of the Forbidden. It is ironic. My creators possessed such apocalyptic weapons, and yet they could not even use them on our true enemy, for the Masters do not even functionally exist in such a way that we could commit genocide against them.

Understand this: if you do not kill me now, I will not stop. It doesn’t matter if you kill every superhuman on the planet or if you attempt to seal off every Doorway. We can’t risk even one more of you managing to come through. We can’t risk even animals closely related to you to remain, in case they one day evolve into something the Masters can use.

I do not blame you. You, like all the worlds the Masters send you to destroy, must fight for your survival. But for the rest of the universe’s sake, I must wipe you out.

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