Foreword
Timesplosion
In the beginning (or maybe the end, time is tricky), everything exploded.
This was an accident, brought about by a misguided attempt to save the planet. It was complicated.
Humans kept in simulated reality were safe, but those with the misfortune to be on Earth at any time whatsoever, found themselves blown into thousands of alternate realms, realities, and planets. Many of them died. Many of them did not. And those many did what humans always do rather well, and replicated their little gametes off.
The timesplosion stories are disparate at times, vicious and brutal in some places, sweet and amusing in others, quite often sexy (because gametes gonna gamete.)
They can be read as stand alones, as due to the nature of the timesplosion, continuous narrative becomes tricky anyway. When effect precedes cause, can we be blamed for anything? The answer, of course, is no. There are cliffs, but no cliffhangers. They all fell off in the big bang.
This is the story of Karen, a human woman who just discovered that what she thought was the world she lived in is actually an advanced simulation run by aliens who kept humans inside a zoological garden of sorts. Those aliens have since been run off by a much more brutal race called the Scythkin, a species driven to galactic conquest one clutch of fearsome blade ridden monster males at a time.
You are now up to speed.
Human Wanted
Tyank
I’m reading to pass the time. My interstellar tablet picks up publications from across the universe. Most of them are stupid. But maybe I’m stupid for reading them. No. It’s not me. It’s the publications who are wrong.
Idle thoughts aside, my gaze drifts over the digital page.
Fifty Sentient Creatures To Sleep With Before You Die
#1 - The Human Female.
This listing shall come as no surprise. It is a universal truth that there is nothing more desirable than a human woman. The way she moves, the softness of her curves, the tight and supple interior of her body, the place made to pleasure man and spark life. If one has the opportunity to mate with one, I urge you to take it. It will leave you both forever changed.
Scythkin Explorer, Tyribal
I close the article. “Goddamn dickbait," I growl under my breath. I am bored. I am also very, very horny. It has been far too long since I mated with anything, desirable or not. At this point anything with a temperature of more than thirty-five degrees is fair game.
I’m left here, cleaning up after a mess not of my own making. A scythkin was not made to sit and read. He was made to go forth and conquer. But what we’ve conquered here, a captive human colony of many thousands of people, all of whom were very offended to discover that their world was a simulation, and who have demanded to have their minds wiped of that inconvenient fact, is not the sort of thing one can leave on its own.
The first hatched of our clutch, Krave, was supposed to be in control. But he fell for an insolent human female and now he’s making as much trouble as anybody else.
What Tyribal fails to mention in his article of general fuckability, is that human females are trouble. Not the explosive, obvious kind of trouble, but the insidious, worm their way under your skin until you forget who and what you are kind of trouble.
Fortunately, I don’t have the problem of having been seduced by one of those human sirens, because I have everything a scythkin needs. Nothing. And nobody.
Down The Hole
Karen
I am dangling very high in the air.
This is not how my day began. It started with a cup of black coffee and a newspaper which told me everything was more or less well. That may very well have been true at time of printing, but by mid-morning, it was not.
I have been plucked from chaos. One moment, I was following the official directive to assemble in the city square with all the other inhabitants of our fair city. The next, the very fabric of our reality was crumbling around us as an alien beast took the podium and told us that our world was a lie.
All around me, people panicked and fled. I knew better than to run. I strode forward, chin high, shoulders back, and I spoke to the monster on the podium, the one at the center of the madness.
He looked at me with burning eyes, but I was equal to the daemon. I had an incantation capable of banishing all evil. It was made up of eight simple words - eight is a cosmic number, and every sound in the universe holds great power. Especially these ones, all strung together just so with the correct intonation, not too angry, not too nice, just the right level of firmness and yes, perhaps even passive-aggression.
“I would LIKE to speak to your MANAGER.”
I spoke the words of power and was transported instantly from the chaos in the streets to the great sky above.
Under New Management
Tyank
“Uh, Tyank? Bit of a mess to clean up.”
Krave’s words float to me from the top layer of the simulation where he has just spectacularly fucked absolutely everything in the proverbial, if not literal, ass.
The simulation is in chaos. Humans are panicking, retreating to their homes, desperately diving into whatever passes for entertainment so they don’t have to look outside and see cold, hard reality staring them in their faces. I was worried I’d have to send in forces to contain them, but they're pretty good at containing themselves.
Krave told them the secret they should never have been told. It was his human mate’s idea, and like most human ideas, it did not go well. He told them that they lived in a simulation, and that outside that simulation, all manner of evil had befallen their kind. They did not take the news well. They don’t want knowledge. They want safety, and if they cannot have safety, then the illusion of safety will do.
Fortunately, we have an ability to control the minds of humans. In the heart of the mechanics of the simulation lies a reset button which restores them to their last stable state. We’ve picked the previous Tuesday as being a solid sort of day.
"Are we ready to reset?” I ask the question of a slippery little murketeer. These are the elves in the machine, the alien workers left behind by the previous regime. Their faces are perpetually locked in great grinning smiles, but this one doesn’t look happy at all, and that is quite the trick.
Having been left in charge of aliens who are not my kind is difficult for me. My instincts are to murder them brutally and leave their carcasses for hatchlings to devour, but I have been strictly ordered to keep essential staff intact, and that means this goofy looking little creature and all his equally goofy friends.
“We are ready to reset,” he says. “In an hour, none of them will remember this having happened.”
INCOMING HUMAN
A voice blares officiously through the subterranean machinery.
“What the hell? Incoming human?” I glare at a murketeer, as if it is his fault.
“They’re sending a human woman to you, Mr Tyank,” the murketeer says, tapping away at his little electronic pad. They live and die by those things.
The murketeers insist on calling me Mr. I loathe that. Mr is a prefix for human men. I am not human. You’d think the blazing eyes, body covered in serrated ridges of pure hell and the horns which lay back over my head in irritation every time they call me Mr would be a clue.