1.4 - My God, It's Full of Stars...and Explosions

At first, the majesty of it burned away everything else.

Space. It was glorious.

I barely took notice when all the red boxes all slid off to the sides and faded away. All of my focus, all of my being, was centered on the starscape in front of me. For one eternal moment there was only the universe, and me, together.

No picture, no video, no virtual tour...nothing can compare to actually being there. To floating...or yes zooming about in a missile...in that vast emptiness and bathing in starlight. To experiencing the unfathomable immensity of existence, with only a few millimeters distance of a visor or camera lens or boiling eyeball between you and the stars.

Even my depth perception problem ceased to matter, defeated by the sheer enormity of that star-spangled void.

It was a transcendent moment, affecting enough to even pierce through my newly muffled emotions and inspire a brief upswell of awed delight.

And then the moment ended.

The missile turned, the curved edge of the Earth appeared...and a large, flashing targeting reticule faded into view.

I recoiled, mentally if not physically, and the red boxes swept back into view. New data poured in, telemetry and parameters and all sorts of technical stuff that I understood only enough to dread.

Then I made the mistake of focusing on the reticule. A new box, with new information on my target, popped up.

It was a city.

I couldn't tell you where it was. The name didn't appear along with the other information, just an ID tag. North American, probably, as I thought I recognized part of the the East Coast beneath a break in the cloud cover. The city was medium-sized, with a population in the hundreds of thousands. More residential than industrial. A large parkland to urban space ratio. Poorly designed street and highway network leading to heavy traffic congestion.

An average city, in short.

A city full of people.

A city full of children.

I could imagine it, all too easily. A pair of small, confused eyes looking up, seeing a streak of smoke, light. The screaming noise that shattered the peace of a day at the park or playground. Then fire, and blood, and horror. Death and madness.

And I would be the cause of it.

***

If there ever came a moment when I truly gave up, that I truly stopped fighting against this cruel twist of fate...it was that one.

I didn't bother trying the red boxes again. Didn't try reading any of the new data pouring in. Couldn't bring myself to read anymore about my target. I knew there was nothing I could do. I could rail and strain and rip apart my mind trying, and it would do no good. I was nothing more than a passenger, an unwilling accomplice to a monstrous crime.

Helpless.

So, I retreated into myself, stopping reading, or looking, or even thinking.

If what happened next hadn't happened, I think...no, I know that I would have been completely catatonic by the time I hit the atmosphere. No doubt it would have been a mercy, if so.

Instead, came darkness and a moment of...discontinuity.

One second I was sinking into blank fuzzy nothingness...the next I was aware and awake, the view had changed completely, all the boxes had turned a pale, welcoming blue, and a new message was flashing in front of my 'eyes'.

WARNING: DAMAGE SUSTAINED. COMMAND SIGNAL LOST. MAIN SYSTEM REINITIALIZATION COMPLETE. USER INTERFACE REBOOTED. PLEASE WAIT WHILE ALL SECONDARY SYSTEMS ARE CHECKED.

The message vanished, and I stared out at my viewpoint in shock. I didn't even try 'clicking' on the (assumably) now-accessible data boxes. I was too engrossed in absorbing all the details of my new circumstances.

For one, I was spinning. And spinning quickly. Instead of the glacial turns I'd experienced so far, my view was rotating at a quick clip, relatively speaking. As I watched, the horizon of the Earth appeared, then vanished in less than a minute as the rest of the planet appeared, then-

Two...

From what I could tell, I had been launched from a space station of some sort. I say 'from what I could tell'...because I couldn't tell much. Whatever it had been before, it was now a rapidly expanding cloud of gas and debris.

Somebody had blown it up.

I say somebody, because as I spun away from the planet and my view swept across the remains of the station, I saw multiple gas trails leading up from the Earth. Obviously someone down there had taken exception to the Prophet and his space-suited goons' Doomsday plans. Violent, explosive exception, delivered with extreme prejudice.

I felt a flicker of grief and sympathy for all the other uploaded-mind-missiles that hadn't left the station in time, not to mention the ones that had already launched and reached their targets. Judging by the several scattered flashes and minature mushroom clouds I noted on the surface of the Earth as I spun around for a second time, there had been a distressingly large number of those.

The grief faded away quickly, as all my feelings did now, leaving me with my current predicament. The one highlighted, reinforced, and downright underlined by the new messages that flashed into view.

WARNING: SECONDARY SYSTEMS CHECK COMPLETED. MULTIPLE COMPONENTS HAVE SUFFERED MINOR DAMAGE. MAIN FUEL TANK LEAK HAS BEEN REPAIRED. PROBE STATUS IS NOMINAL.

That one wasn't too bad. Not great, but basically good news in comparison to everything else I'd been through so far.

The next message that popped up once the first faded...wasn't good news. It wasn't even bad news.

It was worst news.

WARNING: CURRENT PLANETARY ORBIT OF PROBE IS UNSTABLE. PROJECTED TRAJECTORY INDICATES PROBE WILL INTERCEPT EARTH ATMOSPHERE WITHIN 9 MINUTES, 47 SECONDS. SUBSEQUENT INCINERATION OF 83% OF PROBE MASS WILL OCCUR WITHIN 9 MINUTES, 53 SECONDS.

Well...shit.