Kerry
[WP] You are the worlds worst villian, or you were. You finally did it, destroyed the world. As an immortal you have nothing and noone to rule. Out of loneliness you build a time machine to stop yourself, but is it a selfish quest to save the world? Or have you become its greatest hero?
When I was a kid, we had a dog named Kerry.
Kerry was a beagle, brown fur with white patches, long floppy ears, perpetually wet snout, fat about the midsection and with eyes, you could just fall right into.
Kerry, it always seemed to me, had a real Joie de vivre, but he was a complete imbecile of a dog. Once he got his head stuck in between the banisters of the stairs in my parent’s house. No matter what we tried – dousing him in olive oil and then soap, twisting and turning – we could *not* get that fat doggy neck out from between those banisters. My father eventually had to break out a hack saw and remove one of the posts to get Kerry
That was Kerry for you. He lived his life how he wanted, without consideration of even the norms society holds dogs
I’ve thought of Kerry a lot this last century. There isn’t a great deal to do, out there, in the wastes. It doesn’t take long to exhaust the meager stimulus abandoned cities can provide. How many office buildings and suburban homes littered with bleached bones can you investigate before losing all interest? Especially if, like me, you don’t need anything. It isn’t like I’m scavenging for something, looking for canned food or water – I moved beyond such things a long time ago. I remain, as ever, truly and completely
You almost certainly don’t know what I’m talking about. I’m sure my old nicknames don’t ring any bells – the Great Dominance, the Foul Digi-god, Binary Death – no, of course not. I’ve sent this message out before me, into the great temporal void, the spine of the multiverse through which I soon must travel.
In my timeline, I am the greatest evil the planet Earth has ever known. My birth name was Jared Block. I was a lonely kid who turned into an angry man who eventually used his prodigious talents to destroy the human race. From my perspective that was roughly 2,600 years ago.
Today, my brain is the only organic matter left to me. I parted ways with the rest of my body while society still existed. My nicknames all derived from my penchant, at the time, to transfer my heavily protected grey matter into a series of robotic constructs, within which I would wreak a wide variety of havocs.
The current model is by far my most robust design, although a bit much for a world devoid of threats – fusion reactor, heavily armored, on tracks rather than wheels, with a host of high resolution video and audio inputs. You might get a kick out of knowing I have, effectively, two dozen eyes and half as many ears – all the better to really take in the expansive nothingness of the world I’ve created.
When other people still existed, I would go on rampages – digitally and physically. My coup de grâce against the human race, of which I can no longer honestly consider myself a part, was to simultaneously hack into every nuclear weapons system on Earth while my army of pseudo-sentient robots distracted the world’s military. In the course of 48 hours I was personally responsible for the eradication of human civilization. We – my robots and I – picked off the stragglers over the next 500 years and, from then on, I have not encountered another living soul.
That’s me in a nutshell.
Except, as time passes, even cyborg mass murderers get to thinking. There’s nothing quite like 2.5 millennia to give you second thoughts. Even the most hardheaded son of a bitch can’t help but look inward in all that time, and I can tell you that what I’ve found inside myself hurts.
When I think now on the person I used to be, I see a sensitive, angry, frightened child; an unsure and closed off young man; and, in the end, a cynical, hateful adult. I understand – a little late, I admit – that I took my loneliness and dove in head first, not out of hatred, not originally, but out of insecurity.
But there was a time, long ago, when I was whole, when I felt love in my heart – when I *had* a heart at all. It took me a long time to remember the sensation, and even longer to get back to its emotional source, but eventually I found him there, lapping away at his doggy bowl, licking my ancient, corporeal face. The memory of old Kerry lingered in the recesses of my disembodied brain, and when I remembered him, I remembered love and I realized, finally, how profoundly I had messed things up.
Which is why I have resolved myself to the present course of action. It’s taken two hundred years of quantum computing fueled research to work out the theories involved, and another one hundred years to actually build the device, but at last, I’m ready.
The plan is simple, go back in time and turn my little baby brain to pulp. My final act of grotesque violence. That may seem harsh to you, but trust me, I’ve run the simulations countless billions of times and the only way to be absolutely sure that I don’t grow up to destroy the entire human race again is to get rid of me entirely.
But that’s OK. It’s a small price to pay for the preservation of everyone and everything. It’s the least I can do, really, given my immeasurable sins. And, the truth is, I’m not even anxious about it. Hell, I haven’t felt much of anything, emotions wise, in centuries.
Only one thing has me excited – just the slightest hint of mental butterflies – the thought that before I brutally murder my infant self, before I fix everything I’ve broken, in one timeline at least, I’ll be able to see my dog, one last time.
If you’re reading this, on Earth, as a human being, in the 21st century, and the world around you exists – If you have someplace to go today, something to do, and someone to do it all with – then you likely live in a timeline wherein my redemptive plan works. In that case, know that you owe your life
CLICK A GENRE TO CONTINUE READING A RANDOM FLASH FICTION IN THAT GENRE
| Action | Apocalyptic | Dark |
| Established Universe | Fantasy | Funny |
| Misc | Science Fiction | Science Fantasy |
| WTF Is This? | Random Any Genre |
READ LONGER STORIES
| THE DEMON’S CANTOS | INCIDENTAL SUPERHERO |
| BENEATH | THE HUMANITY SAGA |
| THE TRAVELER | I, LYCANTHROPE |
If You Enjoyed This Story – Or Any Of The Hundreds Of Other Legends From The Multiverse – And Want To Give A Dollar To The Madman Behind The Curtain Who Writes Them All:
Subscribe to the RSS feed or leave a comment anywhere on the r/LFTM subreddit with “!subscribeme” or “subscribeme!”, and you’ll receive a notification whenever a new story or continuation is posted.