Interlude 01


    ***Tirnanog, The Facility***


    ***The Designer***


    The Designer opened one eye and regarded the statistics that reported on the worlds state.


    It filed through the newest reports that the Facilitys systems had generated for the Designer''s guiding touch. Most of the Facility was automated, but there were some problems that needed an actual intellect to make decisions. So the systems automatically brought relevant information to the Designers attention now and then.


    For a long moment, the creature who had no real concept of time thought and weighed the options, then decided that the project was ready to enter the next phase.


    After all, the Creators had given the Designer one single purpose: To contain and find a cure.


    The Creators had been first in many things.


    They had been first to split the atom.


    The first to blow up their sun.


    To spread among the stars and to conquer countless worlds.


    Such was their might and knowledge that none of the younger sentient species could stand against them.


    They were the first andst they would be.


    But there was one they feared.


    One they couldnt conquer.


    One thing they didn''tprehend, nor control.


    A shame that creatures such as them had been defeated by nothing more than a gue. A tiny, insignificant lifeform. One which wasn''t even capable of forming a coherent thought from the Designer''s point of view.


    It had taken the Creators a long time to understand what they were dealing with. To realize what had been killing them. That there was something that their perfect bodies werent immune against.


    The gue evolved too fast for them to prepare countermeasures against. It adapted and changed, taking multifarious forms that would consume and attack, digest and infiltrate, infect and dissolve. The gue followed neither n nor logic and was therefore iprehensible to the creators. It was chaos personified.


    If youe across this story on Amazon, it''s taken without permission from the author. Report it.


    It grew and adapted until it had infested every habitable corner of the worlds it touched. The Creators had made many mistakes in the beginning, allowing it to spread.


    In the end, the Creators could only think of sterilizing entires.


    They threw rocks the size of mountains onto the surface, hoping to exterminate the gue, and for a time they thought they had seeded.


    They were surprised when the gue rose from the worlds'' ashes, taking forms never seen before. Curiously, the gue liked to evolve into bipedal forms, as if it knew how to mock those who had tried to eradicate it.


    Next, the creators tried radiation, and for a while, it seemed like they seeded when most of the gue died off.


    But the gue wasnt defeated and arose anew, this time sporting self-repair sequences that secured its DNA against all but the worst of radiation damage. Some of it even liked to grow on radioactive material now.


    The creators designed new weapons and unleashed flesh-eating bacteria onto the world.


    The gue adapted and incorporated the bacteria into the digestive systems of itstest variations.


    The creators struck back with viruses, simple self-replicating code segments that were based on the gue itself.


    Again, the gue adapted and developed an immune system that made most of its forms resistant to the new weapons. It even reacted by creating new viruses that were especially effective against the creators.


    The creators were horrified.


    Again and again, they struck down and snuffed out any signs of life they could find. Patient as they were, they watched the gue rising again, even if it took millions of years to verify that the newest attempt had failed.


    Until they finally had to admit that it was impossible to extinguish the guepletely.


    The gue was a piece of self-replicating DNA that was capable of recreating itself from almost nothing while it mutated to adapt to the environment. Simple in its most basic form, butplex beyond understanding once it reached one of its final evolutions. Missing even a single strand during the eradication process meant that the gue could develop anew, each time stronger and more resilient to what it had encountered before.


    There was no cleansing the worlds it had touched.


    Worse, there was a chance that eradicating the gue with insufficient means might even cause it to spread. There was no telling what might happen if the gue managed to drift into other systems, carried by sr winds.


    Given their long existence, the Creators weren''t blind to such a possibility and didn''t want to risk it happening.


    Which was why they decided to iste and contain the gue. To keep its evolutionary advance to the barest minimum. For that purpose, they barred anyone from even daring to enter the gue''s home gxy. To do so would draw the wrath of the oldest species in existence.


    But the Creators didn''t abandon all their hope for a cure.


    Hence, the Designer was created with the purpose to forge an ecosystem that would be able to contain and eventually even eradicate the gue. Maybe the solution in defeating the guey in attacking it from so many angles at once that even it couldnt adapt.


    The Designer regarded thetest reports and conferred onest time between its twin-minds before it deemed the preparations to be sufficient.


    It was time to start a controlled experiment and to introduce the gue to a new and hardened ecosystem.


    In the Designer''s mind, there was nothing that could go wrong, and it would finally be able to report to the Creators that it had found a cure.


    With a flick of a tentacle, the Designer rxed the security measures that prevented the newest iteration of the gue from leaving its systems and opened a wormhole to the gue''s homeworld, interested to see what would climb out of it.