“Stop! You’re going to kill them all!” Harper’s shrill voice echoed throughout the corridor.

 

“I. Don’t. Care,” Ian responded, punching in each word as if they were bullets fired from a gun.

 

“Billions, untold billions of conscious, sentient people. Not to mention other living creatures,” Harper pleaded, pulling on her companion’s waistcoat as tears began to form in her eyes. “You’re condemning innocents to death.”

 

“And you’ll be just another added to the pile unless you shut up,” Ian said, pausing a second to turn and look back at the woman. She wore a similarly fashioned long coat, embroidered with the filigree design of the Applied Theories Research Group. Her face was a puffy red mess, tears running down her cheeks. They had worked together on this project, the project Ian had dedicated his entire life to. “They deserve this, Harper.”

 

“Do they? They deserve extinction? For what, teaching us how to exist on a galactic scale? They could have wiped Earth from existence, but they didn’t.”

 

“The Kaizen struck first. They destroyed my home, killed my family,” Ian responded.

 

“And we are fighting this war, Ian. But this,” —she waved her hands in front of her, gesturing at everything— “this is not war. This is slaughter. It’s pure malice.”

 

“Malice has power,” Ian said, turning from Harper and continuing his quest.

 

She was ignorant, he told himself. She hadn’t had to walk through the ruins of her hometown. The place you first learned to walk, to run, to love. Reduced to nothing but a dirt plot that even weeds rejected. It wasn’t a fight, it wasn’t war. That was slaughter. This was too, he knew, but what else could he do.

 

He could end the war. Save his planet, his species, from more pain and suffering. Save them from more death. It would be a return to the days before we knew of extraterrestrial life, humanity would be alone.

 

And if they weren’t? Well, they could defend themselves now. Decisively and definitively. Long gone were the days of the nuclear deterrent, humanity needed something new.

 

The blast doors groaned as the motors worked to slide the heavy metal slab out of the way. Inside were several more researchers hard at work, running data through the AI-assisted programming, formulating defense plans and espionage routes. They barely lifted their heads as Ian entered, followed closely behind by Harper, her composure fragile at best.

 

Ian stalked behind one of the researchers. Clyde was his name. Next to his keyboard was the door control override. Illidan slammed a fist down on it, locking the subsystem and forcing the door behind him to slide back into place and bolt shut. He punched at the tablet display again and shattered it.

 

Clyde nearly toppled over in his chair and screamed out in protest. “Are you crazy? You just locked us in here!”

 

“We’re enacting Project Convergence.”

 

“That was scrapped,” another researcher said. “It’s not reasonable.”

 

In response, Ian withdrew a small pistol from a holster hidden behind his coat. Two shots and the dissident was gunned down. The others screamed; Harper too, but Ian couldn’t hear them over his own inner fury. It was too powerful to resist any longer. In moments, Ian was again alone with only Harper left by his side.

 

“Why are you doing this Il…” she whimpered, afraid to either get close or retreat back from her long-time friend. “You killed them.”

 

“I will do what I must, Harper, and I must save humanity.”

 

“This isn’t the way.”

 

“Isn’t it? Do you think the Kaizen taught us the technology to fight this war out of the goodness of their hearts? Do you think they gave us the strength to honestly have a chance at winning? Do you?” Ian screamed, causing Harper to cry out and collapse, covering her ears. “Of course you don’t. How could you? You haven’t seen what I have, know what I do. They will slaughter us and we would have never stood a chance. But they didn’t understand humans. They didn’t then, they don’t now. We’re built for war, bred for it. We find a way.

 

“I am the way,” Ian said, softly, speaking to himself and him alone.

 

As Harper lay fetal, resigned to her fate, Ian sat at the main control console. His fingers danced over the keys, opening first a direct camera feed to the Kaizen homeworld. The main display showed its orange sky, its seventeen moons hanging just above the planet. Distantly the glare from their sun shone brightly. A few more commands entered and an enormous spaceship, the largest ever built by humanity or the Kaizen, arrived just outside of the sun. Large enough to be visible from such a distance from the planet’s surface. Unseen was the second ship, situated on the opposite side of the sun.

 

Project Convergence, Ian’s greatest work, and the basis for humanity’s wartime deterrents after their entrance on the galactic theatre. Two ships activate an instant lightspeed accelerator, aimed at each other, destined to meet in the heart of the life-bearing star of a solar system. They collide; the combination of speed, mass, and energy creating what was coined a white hole, the antithesis to the black hole.

 

The explosive force is so powerful that light, gravity, and matter are forcibly expelled at such a high speed that everything is broken down into its basest form, erasing all in its blast radius to nothing. The brilliant display will hang in the cosmos for eons, a gravestone for the total eradication of an entire system.

 

When they finally broke through the locked blast door of the researcher’s station they found the grisly scene. Harper was next to the door, no visible signs of violence or distress but clearly dead. Ian was found at the main console, looking at the door. His face was a contorted display of pain and glee, a bullet hole from temple to temple.