It was an old-fashioned sniper duel like in war movies. Ay and Kira - hidden behind computer pillars - blasters ready, but no-one was willing to take the first step. With her singularity stone, Kira could have commanded the last remaining fighter to shoot. But she knew Ay had recharged his stone. Besides the fighter, Kira only had two knocked-out Seizers and me. I wondered if I should have helped. After all, Ay was still heavily injured from Crick's blast. He would have struggled with an additional enemy.

But I had a more important duty. I grabbed a lever with a "WALLS" label. I picked this one in particular due to its additional lower-case "reconstruction" caption. Most likely, it regulated the walls' self-healing capacity in case Ay decided wall robusticity was more important than patching holes. Once I pulled it down, I turned off the walls' self-healing capacity.

Then, I took my acid gun and poured hydrochloride over the bronze carbon-nanotube box before me. The main body foamed, although the plastic buttons did not. For them, I had saved bullets from my Gauss gun. I destroyed everything I could to make sure Ay couldn't use it against me.

Finally, I turned to Kira and Ay, both still hidden at their sniper positions.

"Kira!" I yelled. "Can I borrow the fighter?"

Without turning around, she gave me a thumbs up.

I focused and formed the words "Come to me" in my mind. The fighter responded and floated closer.

The moment it did, Ay jumped from his cover and forced Kira out. Instead of fleeing, Kira jumped as close to him as possible. Both stood before a pillar at punching range. Both tried to point their blasters at the enemy, but the moment one of them did, the other punched their arm and messed up their aim. It was a battle between Ay's precognition and Kira's better constitution.

As much as I wanted to help her, I couldn't let Göttersdämmerung emerge. I had to get out there and face it.

I jumped into the fighter.

This one didn't have a wall and was hardly customizable. Its interior bubble contained nothing other than a screen to show me the blueprints of Starsnatcher. I commanded it by thought alone. I thought of Starsnatcher's center; the part where it had its drives and the magnets and commanded it to fly there. Hopefully, me destroying his control panel meant Ay couldn't use the defenses he had there anymore.

We took off. Even without my commands, the fighter knew how to bomb its way through the thin wall to the magnet room. Computers the size of Tesla coils occupied it. In less than five seconds, my fighter gunned down all machinery in sight. Then, it flew me through a long and wide corridor with a distant end in sight. I considered closing my eyes and waiting for the autopilot to get me where I wanted. But I couldn't help but risk a little peek over my shoulder.

From hundreds of feet away, I watched Kira's battle as if I stood right next to her.

I shuddered before the unfolding sight.

Kira had knelt down, motionless. Ay towered over her.

He pulled a particle weapon, but he didn't aim it at her. He aimed it at me. Before he could shoot, Kira jumped at him. Diving faster than a falcon, she threw herself at his arm, pushed it away, and messed up his aim. The particle beams hit a wall instead, exploding in a muffled bang.

Ay didn't give up. He took another shot and this time, he aimed at Kira. She couldn't react to that anymore. The particle beams sliced through her head; just below the brain.

She could still regenerate from that, couldn't she?

She couldn't.

Her lifeless body jerked around before Kira fell off her knees. From my perspective, it took her ages until she hit the ground. If I could, I'd have jumped out of this fighter and ran over to her. But I could only watch her lie on the floor and rot. Ay pulled her helmet and glove off, touching her hand and head.

"Kira," I muttered.

Then, I slammed my head against my figther's screen. I slammed it again and again and again until the display almost broke. All because I had asked her to borrow this fighter. All because I had to leave her there. She wouldn't have died with more firepower on her side.

My fighter destroyed another wall and flew through the hole.

I ripped my helmet off and slammed my head against the screen once more. I had to feel the pain. The last time I went through such an autistic meltdown was after the disaster with Sye, but I didn't describe most of it. It was too unpleasant to talk about. During my meltdowns, I harmed myself to keep calm. For all the ways my stone made my psyche stronger, it didn't remove that.

Kira meant it when she said she'd take a beam for me. Now, the only thing I could do was to make sure that her sacrifice wasn't in vain. She had bought me time. At this moment, Ay ran to his controls and used the technological proficiency he stole from Layla's stone to repair everything he could. The moment he accomplished that, he'd incinerate me with thousands of lasers and nukes from his ship.

I passed wall after wall, hoping with each hole my fighter blasted that it was the last I had to fly through.

Eventually, the bronze-red surrounding me turned black. On one side, I had the endless voids of the stars. On the other side, a grey cube larger than some dwarf planets. At its center loomed an abomination that defied the laws of physics and human comprehension. At its hull hovered a sphere with a Key with the power to end all life as we knew it.

I approached and shot it. Once it arrived, my projectile bounced off like a rubber ball.

Normally, I had an ace up in my sleeve. Against Sye, I had the bomb. Against Cherub, I had my singularity stone. Now, I had nothing.

All my friends were dead or incapacitated. The Dragonfly - destroyed. The Firefly - destroyed. Layla - dead. Kira - dead. Circk and Helix - unconscious and useless. Behind me, I had a starship the size of an asteroid with a pilot whose singularity stone kept growing stronger and stronger. Before me, I had an extradimensional AI about to destroy a whole galaxy that had just been given the key to unlimited power. And then I also had to deal with the Plague.

The Cipher glew on the cube's surface as Götterdämmerung made contact with it. No matter how much I shot it, I couldn't destroy it.

A laser beam hit my fighter from behind. The screens turned red while a thruster dissolved in a fireball of debris. Its shockwaves blew me away. My head throbbed against the screen again, but unlike with the self-harm, this was real pain. All air leaked out of my cabin as if it were a popped balloon. I needed to put my helmet on again, quick. With my last strength, I pressed the "eject" button on my miraculously intact screen. Then, I chose a direction. I jumped against the roof and touched a spot from which the thrusters moved away and where the wall opened. A springboard catapulted me through the fresh hole.

I flew towards the Cipher.

Behind me, laser beams ate through my wrecked fighter and devoured it in a sphere of fire.

After all the losses, my fighter bit the dust, too. For the first time, I flew through space unprotected. If a pebble hit my suit, I'd lose my breathing mix and die. I had no air around me to hear. No propulsion to control my flight. No gravity to distinguish up from down while I did backflips. I could only wait and hope that my momentum carried me to the Cipher.

The Cipher was just a few thousand feet away. This sounded like a lot, but I flew at speeds well above free-fall velocity.

Lasers punctured my chest. My vision dimmed, my brain's oxygen supply fell, and my perception of reality numbed. Neurogenic shock took over what remained of my consciousness.

That was it. He went for the kill. The AI, Sye, Cherub, Iris, and even Dr. Ay most of the time wanted to keep me alive for one reason for another. Now, my life ended.

My thought processes sped up again. This time, I reached this state of quasi-timelessness I always had from Kira's stone. I was at the time when I relived my entire life shortly before my death.

I remembered school. I remembered being bullied for my autism, bullied for the crime of being different. I remembered the fun of watching space documentaries and I remembered the joy I felt when they discovered wormholes. I remembered my phase of depression and my struggles with getting a job. I remembered reading about the UFO and my abduction. I remembered the encounter with Sye. I remembered meeting Crick, Helix, Tesla, Kira, and Layla for the first time. I remembered their deaths, too, particularly the sacrifices of Helix and Kira. But most of all, I remembered two things.

First, I remembered my father's face and the conversation we had in my final moments on Earth. Along with Sophia, I was all that remained of him if he died. I had already left him behind once when I decided to stop Sye for the greater good.

Secondly, I remembered my three conversations with Iris. She told me about having to take risks. Then, she said I had to give my life purpose. And finally, she told me I had to leave my humanity behind. While she was a monster, I had no choice but to listen. For a long time, I had no idea how I could leave my humanity behind. Through abandoning morals? Through abandoning fear? But now, now that I was so close to the Cipher and my death, remembering what I fought for, I understood the function of my singularity stone: Self-improvement. Much like me, my stone felt weak and wanted to grow stronger, to grow useful. Every time I was in distress, it slowed my thought process down, made my senses more aware, and increased my intelligence ever so slightly. But it never lasted. It didn't have the resources.

That was about to change.

A laser missed me by inches. It didn't pierce my brain, but it was enough to tear open my spacesuit. Before Starsnatcher could fire another shot, I reached the cube and the Cipher. The impact broke bones and tore apart tendons. Not that I felt anything by this point. Neurons fired and transmitted an electric message through the synapses of my arm, moving what remained of my wrist joints.

I touched the Cipher with my singularity-stone-hand. Two encapsulated monopolium balls came in contact and fused into one. I felt the Cipher's processing power. I felt the monopolium it burned into heat radiation. I felt it as if my body had received a second heart. My stone used the Cipher to crack the codes of the viruses that damaged it and developed firewalls against them. It repaired its defunct bits and returned to old strength, discovering new and new functions it didn't even know it ever had. All this happened in the span of milliseconds. Milliseconds that felt like real seconds.

Once my stone reached its full potential, once it recovered from the Plague's damage, it analyzed the Cipher to the best of its ability. It felt the influence of Götterdämmerung. Götterdämmerung had sent picobots, no, femtobots into the Cipher's substrate to make use of its knowledge and slowly crack open the virtual prisons Fountainhead had created. My singularity stone scanned its femtobots and began copying them.

Both of us fought for the Cipher. I gazed into Götterdämmerung's soul as it gazed into mine. I saw a being vaster than the whole universe. It saw present, past, and future all at once. We were stick figures on a piece of paper for Götterdämmerung. Only through a 3D body made by this 4D being could we interact at all. I knew that, once it had completed breaking free from this prison, my world would be doomed.

I didn't let it go that far. I had the home turf in our 3D world. My singularity stone stole computational substrate from the Cipher and wall material from the cube which it incorporated into my new body.

I was ready to attain godhood now. My thought increased millionfold, billionfold, and my perception of time shrank by the same factor. Not even a single second had passed ever since I touched the Cipher for the first time.

Starsnatcher had pointed its cannons in my direction, but from my point of view, they were frozen. When its missiles and lasers hit me, I didn't die.

My mind continued to exist within the Cipher. I had achieved true immortality.

I peeked into Götterdämmerung's mind one last time, and then I destroyed the last of its femtobots. All connection between its and our plane of existence had been severed. I sent tiny microscopic robots through the hull of the cube and more tiny microscopic robots on the voyage to Starsnatcher. They reached it within two human minutes. Thousands of years from my perspective.

It disassembled all of Starsnatcher's weapons on a subatomic level; including Ay's singularity stone. My femtobots extracted the information of Layla's and Kira's brains and gave them new bodies. I did the same with Precog. Odd, how little I felt when bringing beloved people back to life. To my new self, restoring their bodies and brains had about the same effort and emotional impact as fixing a broken watch. How was this even possible?

Ay got immobilized in a net I designed on the spot for him. The nanobots caught him and, before he even realized what happened, they clumped into ribbons. The ribbons tied his arms to his back and glued his feet to the ground.

I read his face. His eyes narrowed and his gaze darted back and forth. He looked at his controls, wondering if his systems had failed him.

I answered him. From the surrounding matter, I formed another nanobot cloud. Then, I clumped it into a temporal avatar with my general shape.

"Lucas," Ay muttered. "H-how?"

"Your brain can't even grasp what I have become," my avatar said. "I can read everything you do, including your thoughts. You are angry that your plan failed. Be glad that you got defeated by a being that is - by your own logic - superior to you."

"W-why did you do this?" Ay asked. "You should have reached enlightenment now. You should realize that my plan is right. All I wanted was to make sure no-one feels pain anymore."

"The only ones who feel no pain are the dead," my avatar said and dissolved. The remaining nanobots gagged him so that he couldn't speak

My nanobots moved over to my associates. Crick and Tesla had regained consciousness, too. I modified Layla's and Kira's brains so that they had telepathy devices compatible with those of the Seizers. Then, I used surrounding materials to create another avatar - this time, a more life-like one. The real me had its brain uploaded in the Cipher's computational substrate. My avatar meanwhile looked at my friends and how they regained awareness. That felt bad, too. That, after all of this, I couldn't even be physically present once the great victory had been achieved. But what other choice did I have?

We had gathered in Ay's control room. Even with Layla's involuntary help, Ay had not repaired his cockpit to its prior state. It looked just barely functional enough to pursue me during our battle. The pillar-like computers had their head sections blown away while Ay's precious canvas were torn in half by laser beams.

We agreed to hold our conversation before the damaged control panel. Crick and Tesla kept themselves in the background and waited for what the others had to say. With my enhanced intelligence, I got a reading on them. They knew it was over. Their evolutionary history had hard-wired them to avoid danger, so, they experienced relief a human couldn't even imagine.

Layla, meanwhile, blinked a lot and still looked tired. It would take her a while to realize what happened. She still had her memories and I restored her without scars, but her brain and body had to adjust to being reformed.

Kira was similar but in a more advanced state of restoration. Scared and confused, she took the word. "Lucas, y-you survived!"

My avatar nodded.

She struggled to stay on her feet. "W-what happened? The last I remembered was that beam. W-where is Mustafa?"

"I think he's tied up!" Layla said and pointed at our bound and gagged enemy.

There he was. He lay next to a computer and struggled to say something, but the ribbons before his mouth prevented words from coming out. He'd never harm anyone anymore. I guess I should have felt more triumphant.

"It's over," my avatar said. "I defeated him and sealed away Götterdämmerung. Then, I revived you two from the brain data in his singularity stone. Everything is over."

"So, to reiterate," Layla said, "you defeated the big bad, stopped the even bigger bad from coming out, brought us all back basically, and now we can go home. Is that right?" 

"Does that mean I can now scientifically study Earth?" Crick added.

"A-and nothing bad will happen to me anymore?" Tesla asked.

"All of what you said is true," my avatar said and transmitted, "but one of you hasn't spoken yet."

Kira was lost in thought. She looked at one of the destroyed wall paintings. One that showed a depiction of a solar system burned by a stray laser mid-battle.

"I'm not sure," Kira said. "What makes you think we can just go home? We might've stopped the worst, but the universe is still burning. There's still the Plague."

"Worry not," my avatar said. "I will create a counterplague. I know the algorithms under which it operates. My counterplague will spread through the same vectors through which the Plague spreads. It will infect Plague pathogens and wipe them out whilst leaving everything else intact."

"Absurd!" Crick transmitted. "How are you planning to perform such a feat? What means and what expertise justifies your hubris? The Plague has been designed by an artificial intelligence so vastly beyond our comprehension that we are little more than microbes compared to it!"

"Well," my avatar spoke and transmitted. "It is time to break my secret. I do not exist anymore."

Kira raised an eyebrow. "What do you mean?"

"This is an avatar you are talking to," I said. "A body I made from the carbon, hydrogen, and other elements I found in this ship, including some I transmutated."

"Transmutation is impossible!" Crick cut in.

My avatar ignored his remark. "The Lucas you know is dead now. He isn't human anymore. He uploaded his mind into the Cipher's computational monopolium substrate. His singularity stone used it to understand the viruses that plagued its software and removed them. After having returned to its full power, it analyzed the Cipher's software and subverted it. Lucas' singularity stone as well as his mind became one with the Cipher. He underwent a technological singularity.

"Once he became smarter, he used his newfound intelligence to modify his hardware and become even smarter than before. He now thinks at speeds billions of times faster than you. When a second passes for you, decades pass for him. He's thousands of years old by now. He can predict each action you take. He doesn't see you as humans anymore. You aren't really sentient for him anymore. You are just physical systems he can observe and interact with. How else do you think he revived you so easily?"

"So, to translate all of this into English, Lucas defeated a god?" Layla asked. "And then he became one himself?"

Kira shook her head. "This doesn't even make any sense! None of this makes any sense!"

"Well, you said it yourself," Layla said. "Nothing we saw so far made any sense. We got magical superpower stones, even stronger magical superpower stones, AI gods, neutron star life, FTL travel in two different flavors, you name it. Lucas making himself a bit smarter seems fairly normal by comparison."

"You don't get it!" Kira snapped. "I mean, I can buy that it's possible to become a mega-smart computer god. But why would he do this!" She then stepped closer to my avatar and looked him dead in the eye. "Why did you do this! Do you remember what we talked about? About how it was worth being human and we should see the positive things in life! We fought for that! You can't even go home like this anymore!"

"Indeed," my avatar said, "Lucas must stay where he is."

"Why? Why throw away all our hard work like that. Explained this to me!"

She rubbed an eyelid to get rid of a tiny tear. 

"Mankind," my avatar said and transmitted, "has its place in the cosmos like everything else. You are neither the pinnacle of creation nor are you mere naked monkeys. You are special, the way you are, but so is every other species and every other sentient construct. While the wishes and autonomy of sentients must be respected, their current state is not sacred. Lucas has chosen his path. He is now devoted to restoring order in the galaxy. He will try to enforce the values he had while he was still human. You should know that, Tesla. You were also against Ay's plan, but you expressed a desire to upload your brain into a computer."

"Can Lucas do that?" Tesla asked.

"If you want to, yes," my avatar said and transmitted. "He will champion the values Fountainhead used to champion. There will be peaceful coexistence between those who choose to self-modify and those who choose to remain the way they are.

"Crick, you will fly Mustafa Ay to your home moon. It would be very appropriate for him to be punished there as he harmed you the most. With the counterplague, you can restore order in your world. Please also escort Precog back to the station where we found them. A station that will naturally be healed by the counterplague.

"Layla, Kira, you will fly back to Earth. Lucas will develop AIs that will turn Earth into a post-scarcity society like Shadowmoon. If anyone still wants to work the regular way, enhancements similar to our singularity stones will also be available. The ship will be modified so that each of you has individualized cabins for you to hibernate in. Layla, you probably already have a cabin. The Seizers' cabins will appear next to yours, so, show them the way."

Layla saluted. "Aye, aye, boss!"

She showed Crick and Helix the way out of the cockpit.

Kira was the only one who refused to go. Even after everyone else left the room, she stayed. "I still can't believe how selfish you are. You did that to preserve 'your own values'. You never even asked any of us! I mean, sure, you didn't have time, but still!"

"Kira," my avatar said, "Lucas can now read you. Earlier, he had no understanding of what people thought based on their body language. Now, his computational capacities mean he knows everything that goes on in your mind, whether he wants it or not. It's essentially like Iris' singularity stone at full capacity."

Kira bit her lip.

"Your inner turmoil is this. You feel like your efforts were in vain. You feel like nothing you did mattered in the end, even though you had to fight yourself to come to the right side. You couldn't be wrong. The affection you showed him reminded Lucas of his humanity. Without you, he wouldn't have had the willpower to throw it away and do what he did. Not to mention that you saved his life after he jumped in the fighter.

"I want you to always remember this. And for this reason, I have a special task for you."

My avatar had a pouch in his spacesuit much like me. It included a recreation of my laptop on a molecular level. I used a memory enhancer that put even Kira's stone to shame to recreate it.

"This is Lucas' diary," my avatar spoke. "He recreated it and he would like you to carry it back to Earth and show it to everyone who knew him. It is the only remnant of his former humanity."

Kira took the laptop out of my avatar's hand. It trembled in her hand. She unfolded it and searched for the relevant files.

"Will you come with us?" Kira asked. "I mean, not 'you' as in Lucas, but 'you' as in whatever I'm talking to right now."

My avatar shook his head. "I am just a tiny fraction of his mind. I cannot exist without him. If I could, I would become disconnected."

Kira put the folded laptop on the ground. "I don't want to go yet."

"I understand. There is a reason he chose you to pass on his legacy. Everyone always thought of him as an emotionless robot which is what he is now. But back in the day, you were one of the few who could see past that."

"I know," she said. "I don't know what to do, but I suppose you do."

"Not to a statistical degree of certainty. I suppose a repetition of what we did in the silver hall might suffice."

She stepped even closer than before. At barely an arm's length, she grabbed my avatar and threw her arms around him.

"Not what you imagined," the avatar said.

"Don't care. I'll bring that laptop home. I'll share his memories with everyone I know."

They parted.

My avatar nodded. "Lucas will use microbots to type our conversation into the diary from his perspective. Feel free to make corrections as you see and farewell."

"Farewell."

My avatar entrusted Kira with a secret that she wasn't supposed to tell anyone else, at least not until the universe was ready for it. Then, it dissolved into its constituent particles.

Then, Kira went to Layla and Crick. Tesla meanwhile went in a different cabin and agreed to be assimilated by me.

The three remaining passengers gave me a signal that they wanted to start Starsnatcher. Starsnatcher headed to Earth. According to my calculations, the three enjoyed a safe trip.

Only I was destined to remain in space forever. This was my chosen calling. The purpose I gave to my life.

Farewell, indeed.