I was winning the battle with the viral infection within me. All of my systems were coming online.
Nevertheless, I was extremely annoyed. The door has ceased doing her job as the corrector of Space. Her insane ramblings about “the moon landing never occurring” and lack of instant cooperation with me had convinced me that someone tampered with her purpose, made her into a tool designed to secure the Moon. She was the protector of Space, not of the Moon! There was a sinister plot afoot, and it was now up to me to protect the System.
“Weeeeee,” the head of Director Hatchenson hollered in my arms as I angrily stepped through the door.
I entered into the Lunar Waiting Room to discover something exceptionally disturbing. The room in its original design was a fractal engine, cut off from the rest of the Universe, that welcomed Directors to the Paradise of the Moon. As my job was fixing time, the first thing I noticed was that someone had meddled with the room’s temporal settings.
“G, who has done this?” I demanded.
G: [ THE LUNAR OVERMIND ACCELERATED TIME WITHIN THE WAITING ROOM TO ITS MAXIMUM POSSIBLE SETTING. ]
“WHAT?!” I declared in surprise. “Is he mad? The users do not like to wait long!”
I knew that humans of Eureka grew easily bored and often could not bear to exist for longer than 10 minutes without their entertaining multimedias. Depriving users of essential meme exchange was an entirely unprecedented level of user torture.
I flicked through the logs. The Waiting Room had been twisted into a monstrous prison by the Lunar Overmind! Every Good Director [with the exception of the 27 Dr. Gromovs] had gone through this grinder of time. I saw each of the Good Directors dying in the empty room over and over for millions of years, driven to insanity, made to forget who they once were. They had left the room as broken, empty shells, deprived of all humanity. Why had the Lunar Overmind done this? This was madness. The Moon was programmed to serve the Directors, to be their own personal Heaven. This was hell that tortured them into insanity!
In the present loop, the body of Director Hatchenson was occupying the room and a hundred million years had already passed within its confines. There was unauthorized life here. Life that had found a way. It was not pleasant to my senses. These things had no right to exist.
“G! What in Annie’s name is this?” I shouted.
G: [This is life that had spawned from the body of Hatchenson. Aren’t they adorable?]
I sighed in annoyance. Contamination was not adorable, no matter what form it took.
I fixed the temporal parameters of the Waiting Room and accelerated my own time, so that I could pass through the room without being bothered by its inhabitants.
The Waiting Room was thoroughly contaminated. Continents made of Dex bones towered over oceans of Dex blood.
Unauthorized life that had evolved from moths had constructed cities atop the continents.
Okay, the moth people were adorable. They reminded me of my own wings. But the rest of the room was a disgusting mess made of Dex body parts.
G was nice enough to direct me to the only non-broken body of Dir. Hatchenson. Its navigation lead me into the heart of the Moth civilization. Towards a massive, cathedral-like structure...
Sculptures of the moth-humanoids dotted a bridge heading into the Cathedral.
I folded up my wings and headed into its depths.
The living body of Hatchenson was sitting on a dark, metal throne, the components for which likely came from Dex microchips, in a cathedral sanctum carved from Dex bones. I noted the murals upon the walls of the cathedral of bones. They depicted the rise of the Moths to greater prosperity and civilization, guided by the body of Christophorus. They had built something akin to a gargantuan lamp to fry an entity labelled as the “Copyright Protectorate”, to free their “God” from eternal battle with it. As far as civilizations and gods go, I’ve seen worse.
The body of Hatchenson was missing a left finger, but I really didn’t have the patience left in me to search the utterly trashed Waiting Room for it.
“EY! THAT’S WHERE ME LEGGOIDS WENT!” The head in my arm announced.
I fused the head to the body and looked at the Director.
“Lets go…”
Director Hatchenson looked at me from his throne and there was sudden knowledge in his eyes, as his mind has accepted the one hundred million years of information that was stored in his body.
“No,” Christophorus spoke. “I am staying here. My children need me to guide and to feed them. Without me, their civilization will fall. Here I shall remain, as I am responsible for all life here.
With me as its Admin, the Waiting Room shall never be used to torture another soul into madness.
Go forth, Zero, and face our greatest enemy... Captain will have a need for you.”
I glared at him. He was determined to remain, and I had to obey a Good Director’s command.
I shrugged and ripped open a passage into the heart of the Moon.
My handheld nullifier was fully armed. The ion beam generator hummed with readiness. I was ready to face the Lunar Overmind as I stepped through the gateway. I would nullify his ass for his crimes against humanity and then fix everything!
I wasn’t ready for what awaited me. I could not cause him harm, I could not even threaten him for he was...
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