Declaration of the End

June 2nd, 2037

Jolting awake from the pleasant sleep he had been having Colonel Mateo Ramirez hand lashed out at the phone resting atop a weathered old nightstand. With a groan that was mixed with annoyance and the pain of a fifty year old body he sat up and brought the phone to his ear.

“If the world isn’t ending you’re fired.” His voice was gruff with a fairly heavy Boston that grew even thicker when annoyed.

“Uh, well sir there’s an…there’s an object.” The voice on the other end was not one he immediately recognized, but he could hear the panic in it.

“An object? You’re waking me up over a blip on the-”

“Sir this is not a blip! This is some kind of UAV that will enter out atmosphere within five minutes. But the speeds it’s moving at are too fast for any random celestial body.”

“For Christ’s sake,” was all Mateo could manage before verbally confirming that he was heading to the situation room. He grabbed his uniform and headed out getting halfway dressed while speeding down the road leading from the barracks to base.

Throwing the coat on as he stepped inside the secure military base he was immediately greeted by a young Indian woman with her hair tied up in a loose bun in some vain attempt at keeping hair from falling in her face. She passed him a tablet while they moved briskly toward the situation room.

“Give me everything we know.” He demanded trying to mask a bubbling sense of fear growing in the pit of his stomach.

“Uh, well right now it’s pretty minimal,” the woman frantically responded while keeping pace. “It is moving too fast for us to get a proper scan but the object is incredibly small. Our best guesses right now estimate it as a spherical object with a circumference of 28 inches.”

The Colonel stopped dead at the number before looking down at the tablet to double check. He shook his head as if unable to truly comprehend the information before picking back up the pace.

Crashing through the doors to the Situation Room he was glad to see that every desk was filled and each of the team were working hard to get more information. A cacophony of sound as multiple individuals spoke hurriedly to someone on the other end of a phone, all in different languages.

Turning to the young woman who had been glued to his side he pointed at her.

“Your name.”

“Uh…Usha, sir. Usha Chokhia.” She offered, looking very much like a deer in the headlights.

“Usha. Thank you for the brief. Keep me updated.”

Turning on his heel he moved to the desk at the far back of the room from where he worked. Picking up the dark grey multi-line telephone he punched in the code he’d been given three years ago when he received the job. The code he never hoped he’d have to use.

“Put me through to the President.”

Colonel Mateo had spent most of the day playing the most frustrating and high stakes game of phone tag. After informing the President of the situation he went down the list reaching out to the armed forces of other nations in a vain attempt to work together and discover what the potential threat might be. It was Republic of Korea's Armed Forces who first shared their data along with the theory that the object in question was studying each of the nations in turn.

They had tracked a momentary stream of data being uploaded to the object, it took them several more hours before learning the data in question was a compressed form of all the data stored in the ROK Armed Forces servers.

After that an upload was tracked from Russia, followed by Japan. Mateo was at least thankful that by then most of the governments realized they would need to work in tandem to deal with whatever this was.

An effort was made to try and communicate with the object, in every known linguistic, scientific, and mathematical language known to man.

When communication seemed to be a dead end they were left with no other option but aggression.

-----

June 3rd, 2037

Mi Jae-Hwa had spent most of his life dreaming of one day meeting a being from the stars, if the young boy he once was knew his first interaction would be an attempt to destroy it that boy would have cried. But saving the world would hopefully have to be a close second.

“You daydreaming Jae-Hwa?” The playfully concerned voice of Mae Sung-Yun, one of the officers in the squadron he had been assigned. And as he snapped back to reality he understood why she was asking.

The proximity alert had began to sound. They were closing in on the object currently designated ‘The Orb.’

Flicking the switch to silence the alert he inhaled slowly before hitting the button to speak to the entire squad.

“Just got lost in the clouds for a moment there. Everybody ready to meet Mr. Spock?”

“Which one, Nimoy or Quinto?” Mae Sung-Yun asked, the concern no longer lingering in her voice.

“It’s probably not Spock, he was part of Starfleet and the Prime Directive forbids-” The voice of Ka Min-Soo, newest recruit to the squad but one of the most earnest.

“Stow the nerd talk. Let’s blow up ALF!” The impassioned voice of Ru Ah-Joong echoed through their headsets, she had always been excitable but was one of the most reliable pilots he had ever met.

“Alright squad, keep a tight formation as we close in. Visual confirmation in 5.”

“4.”

“3.”

“2.”

“And contact”

The four of them encircled the target at first, keeping a wide berth of over fifty meters, the object in question barely more than a tiny black dot against the sky. Hard to believe the whole world had gone mad over something no larger than a basketball.

“Maintain current distance from target Azure Squadron. Contact with squads Ruby and Garnet momentarily.”

A coordinated strike with three different national armed forces. Mi Jae-Hwa had done such exercises before of course but those were simple drills, this was something with far greater stakes.

“Sorry to keep you waiting Azure Squad.” The unfamiliar voice of a man came through their radios as the squadrons from the United States and Japan arrived.

“Fashionably late as always.” Mi Jae-Hwa said before arming his machine guns for when they were to strafe the target.

“You know it. We ready to light up Mr. Spock?”

Laughter went through the radio before several requests for engagement were made.

“All squads go for engage!”

The strategy was a simple one. They were to each take turns strafing the target while firing the guns, as two others utilized missiles. As they each carried out their roles as gunner and missileer it was during Ru Ah-Joong’s second pass that they all noticed something was amiss.

The bullets were somehow being repelled.

“Hey Sung-Yun, you seeing this?”

A crackle of the radio Jae-Hwa heard the first syllable of a word before suddenly the line went dead. Outside the window in horror he watched as a trio of jets suddenly crumpled in on themselves before exploding, the explosions themselves somehow contained within a strange bubble.

Hitting the radio to report he hoped they would hear him before whatever just happened happened to him.

“Mayday! Attacks being repell-”

The last thought Jae-Hwa had, was that this alien was definitely not like Spock.

-----

June 4th 2037

Usha Chokhia had not slept in at least forty eight hours, and she doubted she would ever really sleep again. The reports had been coming in nonstop and she had read them all. Twice.

Whatever this object was it was able to absorb, and to some extent even repel certain blasts.

She had been staring at the screen for so long and hearing the buzzing of countless voices that at some point the headache she had been having had become background noise. But as her stomach lurched she knew that she was about to be sick.

Quickly excusing herself she was able to just make it outside the base before dry heaving over the railing. It was as she was in the midst of a dry heave that it dawned on her she hadn’t really eaten or drank much in the past few hours either.

Once she had finished wretching she sat down on the cool metal floor and rested the back of her head against the cold stone walls of the military base. The breeze gently kissing her face and neck was comforting, and for a brief moment she felt human again.

Suddenly she heard a door open and stepping out next to her was her boss, Colonel Mateo Ramirez, who seemed to look even worse than she did if that were possible.

She knew she should stand, be respectful, but she barely had the energy to keep her eyes open.

“Sir?”

He turned to look at her, his eyes bloodshot and red. Tears stained his cheeks which he did not move to wipe away.

“Oh, Usha…you needed a breather too?”

Nodding slowly she pulled a protein bar from her pocket and showed it to the Colonel.

“Have you eaten yet Colonel?”

“Please just call me Mateo. And no, but I’d definitely devour half of that if you’re offering.”

She broke the bar in half and held the one in the wrapper to Mateo, slowly taking a bite as the two breathed in the chill air of early evening. Thing had moved beyond their paygrade now, they were merely messengers and brokers of information.

After several minutes of blissful and calming silence a question nagged at Usha’s tired and slightly frayed mind.

“What’s the word now?”

“They dropped the biggest nuke they could risk on it.”

“Holy crap…I mean, that’s got to have done it right?”

“Seems like it didn’t do jack. Looks almost like the object absorbed the blast and radiation.”

“Shit…”

“Yeah.”

Silence fell again as the pair finished their halves of protein bar. And just as Usha was ready to go back inside there was a buzzing from her smartwatch and a strange and artificial sounding voice echoed out through the tiny speaker.

“After careful evaluation carried out by an envoy of the Sunless Consortium, this world has been judged to be deficient and will hereby cease to exist in precisely 365 days to make way for a new, and more adequate iteration. We appreciate your understanding."

Looking up at Mateo with a stupefied look Usha asked with an incredulous tone.

“Did they just ‘we appreciate your understanding’ the end of the world?”