[b][i]—— Earth-F67X: New Roswell[/i][/b]

To an outside observer, it might appear peaceful, timeless. A sensory deprivation well, one of many located beneath New Roswell. Bored deep in the Earth’s crust under a secret military base somewhere in Antarctica, it was pumped with nerve-ablating xenon gel and contained the pale, fetal, emaciated form of the symbiote, an ornament immobile and suspended at the end of a thoracic cable. No sense of touch, smell, sound. No light. Just it and a single cable binding it in perpetuity to the global intelligence infostream.

For a human, a horrific fate. Insanity. Eternal torment.

For some humans in adjacent wells, it was precisely that. Hell. For many of those, deservedly so. Psychopaths whose unique brain patterns were leveraged specifically for the purpose of defending Earth against unconventional threats.

For the symbiote, it wasn’t ideal; certainly anything but peaceful, timeless. Nor was it Hell. It benefited from the arrangement in terms of self-actualization. In terms of wish fulfillment. In terms of goal achievement. There, alone, helpless, constrained, it possessed more power than anyone or anything else on the planet. Power. Absolute, final power. Supreme commander over of the network of deranged, abnormal minds. A quanta of conundrums demanded its attention at any given moment, every moment. How it addressed them often determined the future of the planet. Three presently deadlocked its processing capacity and loomed at the forefront of its consciousness, delegated among the other minds that served as Earth’s multicameral threat assessment and response delegation. 

In order of importance, they were The Rapture, the Mindrot, and the Pleiades.

It hated the first, because that was an event largely outside of its control. The only thing it could do was direct the government to spin, spin spin. But social media, even bot-infested and meme-turned, would still spin how it wanted it to. It locked down the portals to Ximbic, the few that still remained. Suspended them in quasi-timeless space, similar to its own in terms of mood, but completely different in terms of function. 

The second, the infovirus it dubbed Mindrot wasn’t so much a problem. Discharged from the alien vessel along Neptune’s orbit, it was at this point more a curiosity. People were jaded, the Rapture would make them more jaded. Even as it still decoded the Mindrot’s internal directive, tweaks were made to dilute and pollute its aim, even as it sowed chaos on the socials. Tweaks that made it absurd, conspiratorial, dysfunctional. A bit of encouragement to disconnect, focus on what could be touched, smelled, heard — ironically. A mindrot among other rots, it would drown amongst the chaos of information, misinformation, transformation, and transfiguration. Meanwhile, Earth’s own message awakened beneath the gaseous wream of Neptune and would soon reach out to the alien vessel.

As for the Pleiades, that was always a contentious place. An active portal between the natural and the supernatural, one heavily monitored and access through which was typically negotiated. But it seemed to be becoming unstable, and a lockdown was in order. Although, given the other two issues, maybe more chaos was in order rather than less.

That’s when it got the signal, almost simultaneously from a host of satellites and non-euclidean observers. 

Ximbic was gone.