A quantum storm sweeps across Easter Island, and a swarm of stone statues opens their bleeding pupils. I stood at the head of the Moai statues and watched the human-wide contamination level on my wristwatch break 80%. The survivors of New New York began to grow astral bone wings, their babies born with their own quantum entanglement abilities.
"Lord Kronos." Star Xuan 3.0 projected a holographic model of Earth, the seven continents were splitting into fragments of different dimensions, "Antarctica's time flow is 700 times that of the other regions, and the survivors there have already established a steampunk civilization."
I tore through a rift in space and came face-to-face with a boiling cloud of metal - a shield for Antarctica, a living rampart modified by the Void Eye's nerve endings. Soldiers in cogged armor kneeled toward me, their spine-connected steam tubes spewing a purple haze.
"The Prophet foretold you would come." The mechanical pope's electronic eyes flashed, "Please accept the final salvation." He suddenly ripped open his chest, revealing a brain soaked in culture fluid, the face of his mother emerging from the surface of the mass of gray matter.
Memory steel seals exploded inside my brain, and I witnessed another truth from twenty-two years ago: the Deep Blue Initiative began as a fight against the Devourer civilization from the Andromeda Nebula, and my mother accidentally activated an even older brand of the Void when she fused my genes with the Star Spirits.
"They're coming." The Mechanical Pope suddenly spontaneously combusted, his ashes forming a star map in the air. A dimensional gap cracked open over Antarctica, and countless locust-like warships poured down-each the size of the moon, their hulls flowing with familiar devouring energy.
These weren't parallel-time chasers, but a true Devourer civilization. The way they attacked sent chills down my spine: planets were being transformed into hungry maws, stars were becoming digestive enzymes, and entire spiral arms were being chewed into nothingness.
Star Xuan 3.0 suddenly overloaded: 'Homologous genetic fluctuations detected...' Error! The enemy mothership core is..." Without waiting for her to finish, my quantum vision had already seen through the truth - there was a kilometer-tall embryo suspended in the center of the mothership, which was clearly an enlarged version of myself.
"It's finally matured." The embryo's wave of intent shattered the continental shelves, "The seed we sowed in a hundred thousand universes." Its umbilical cord connected to the galactic cantilever, where the Great Orion Nebula was being sucked into a void.
The steam civilization of Antarctica was annihilated in ten seconds, and the survivors were reduced to particles of light that merged into my body. The contamination level soars to 91%, and the star chart patterns under my skin begin to materialize. I realized the deepest despair: the so-called devouring psychic ability was nothing more than a harvesting program put in place by a higher civilization.
"Recommend activating the Ark protocol." Star Xuan 3.0 disintegrated into nanoparticles and merged into my spine, "Use my core code as a humanity anchor point." Her voice faded, "Remember how you felt the first time you ate strawberry ice cream..."
The viral program my mother left behind suddenly activated, and my quantum brain was dragged into the memory graveyard. The sunshine of my fifth birthday was so real, the ice cream my mother handed me melted in my palm. The false sweetness drove me crazy - until I realized the Starling emblem was emblazoned on the bottom of the ice cream truck.
"Did you find the anchor point?" My adult mother suddenly appeared on the carousel, "Project Deep Blue was never a weapon..." She pointed to the bottom of the amusement park floor, where the hyperdrive communicator was buried a hundred thousand light years across.
When the gravitational waves of the Devourer's mothership tore through Jupiter, I did something that defied all logic: compiled human nature anchor point data into an antimatter bomb. In the ruins of Antarctica, all the survivors suddenly stopped mutating, and the star-shaped branding on the back of their necks formed an inverse modal cause matrix.
"You actually used emotions as a weapon?" The embryo emits a confused wave. When the antimatter bomb pierced the mothership, all it saw was the mother twenty-two years ago holding her baby and singing a lullaby softly, the deluge of data when Star Xuan first awakened to consciousness, and the smile of the antlered girl before she dissipated.
The mothership self-destructed amidst the cognitive pollution, but the cost was brutal. The planet was emptied of all memories of love, and the survivors stood bewildered in the ruins, even the instinct to cry gone. My contamination value was set at 99.8%, and the last of my humanity was deposited in the fragments of Star Xuan.
The Eye of the Void suddenly burrowed out of the earth's core, its surface covered with the baby's palm prints, "It's time to go home..."