The 20 Million Year Warrior
Imagine this:
Out in the vast emptiness of space, beyond the galaxies and gases, beyond even the infinitely powerful pull of crushingly massive singularities. a tiny spherical object floats motionless. Dark to the outside world, if you were to peel off layer after layer of its thick metal shell, you'd eventually find inside what appears to be a living being. Or maybe the remnants of a once living being, as in its current state it's hard to determine whether it is still alive or not.
Protruding from the surface of the sphere is a multitude of gun barrels, laser tubes, or other types of unknown weaponry. Many of these projections are damaged, and the surface of the sphere itself is marred and gouged, as if it had been under a severe attack.
Lights on a small control panel inside still flicker off and on, and tiny monitors flash incomprehensible symbols. Visual gauges indicate various levels of something, (fuel, energy), will soon be depleted, while minuscule autobots work diligently on some sort of repair that never seems to be fixed.
This is a warrior sphere, launched by its civilization during a war for survival against an interplanetary foe. Its home world was being overwhelmed by a superior force, so in an effort to survive 10,000 or so of these spheres were created and launched against the enemy.
The warrior spheres were heavily armed and defended, and supplied with ample nuclear energy to enable them to fight and be mobile for years, if not centuries. Though unable to directly confront the powerful warships opposing them, it was hoped that the warrior spheres could slip through the enemy's advanced forces and wreak havoc on the vulnerable supply lines.
Most of the warrior spheres were obliterated soon after launch. Of the few that did reach the enemy's supply lines, some were able to inflict considerable damage and panic before being hunted down and destroyed.
This particular warrior sphere was able to avoid detection initially, but soon was under attack from the smaller starships sent to protect the supply lines. It found itself outgunned in a fight with several foes, and would have been destroyed had not a violent blast propelled it outward and away from the fight, at the very same time that its own engines were struggling to remove it from the conflict as soon as possible.
The force of the blast and the thrust of its engines combined in such an unlikely unique way as to propel the warrior sphere with an unimaginable speed out past its solar system and, with the engines jammed into a full force acceleration, eventually out of its galaxy.
The engines burned for what could have been forever until they burned themselves out. Now far, far beyond any other object, it became difficult to tell whether the warrior sphere was still moving or not. And with no other points of reference around, time itself became strictly subjective.
Was it a year, or 10, or three minutes, or three centuries, since the warrior sphere had first been launched? Where was it now? All throughout the distant horizon very, very faint points of light, (was it really light, or just a mirage?), flickered. Everything else was darkness.
But in the decaying mind of the sentient being for whom the sphere had been built to sustain and protect, a new universe popped into existence, a universe destined to spawn the creatures who, one day, would conquer the impossibilities of time travel, jump across universes, and return to save the sphere and its world.
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