A Corrupted Odyssey - Prologue

Story by snakebug on SoFurry

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So... I've been looking at a lot of Warhammer 40k related things lately, and it kinda inspired me to make this convoluted mess of a story. No, this doesn't take place in Warhammer, but damn if it didn't give me some ideas.

Word of warning, this thing is going to smutty. It's going to be nonsensical, and worst of all it's probably going to be extremely stupid. If you're up for a series where a common infantry weapon is a gun that puts you into a pleasure coma, you're in the right place.


The universe is corrupt.

Many cycles ago our universe was a cold, violent, and cruel void with little care for the lives within. Brother would slaughter brother, sister would murder mother, and father was doomed to despair. There were no innocents, no line uncrossed, and the word "Friend" was nothing more than a form of mockery. Humanity would cannibalize itself again and again, simple disagreements leading to feuds, and those feuds leading to war. We burned ourselves in nuclear fire, only to rise again and burn ourselves once again with forms of energy once meant to create and build, repurposed for utter annihilation. Again and again, as we made countless discoveries, unraveling the universe to the point where time meant nothing, and stars seemed to be but a brisk walk from home. We raged wars through the sky, the oceans, space, dimensions, even time itself was a battleground for our destructive needs. The common man was a dangerous paradox walking through the space between reality, killing some of our own on his way to the intergalactic supermarket.

We were practically alone, even when the other races from worlds beyond our own began to crawl from the ashes of our battles. What seemed like natural disasters upon their planets were little more than weaponized weather systems used in our countless squabbles. Some came to us with desires of cooperation, peace, and understanding. Some worshipped us as gods, others feared us as devils. Some came to us in search of conquest, a futile effort that was barely noticed, as they would simply come undone just as humanity had time and time again. No matter how alien, whether they be bipedal, quadruped, or even ethereal, the flaws of sentience would always destroy them. The flaws of humanity, would destroy them.

Time and time again, humanity would fall, rise, and fall again in the time it would take to blink. Civilizations with technology beyond god himself, whom we met and promptly killed, were but simple toys for children to play with. The laws of physics were obsolete, up and down became archaic forms of travel and perception, and wars were fought on both metaphysical and memetic levels. Ironically, that's what humanity had become, a meme that didn't just warp reality, it became reality. The alien races weren't even enslaved, nor were they even bothered by our presence for god knows how long. Wait, he wouldn't know, he's dead. We'd know, we always do. The alien species were deleted, erased, built, corrupted, scattered, and mutated constantly and without resistance. Whether they died, felt pain, or thrived was never really a concern for us, as their existence could be nullified in the same second it had been created.

Yet, despite our advances in technology and civilization, we were still privy to our own nature, humanity, or more accurately, war. Every individual was a universe in and of themselves, bedtime stories becoming self contained realities that were just as real as our desires. Entire realities were used as weapons in a war that I cannot recall the reason for. We had fought for so long, so hard, that we couldn't take the time to appreciate what we had accomplished. The day we had managed to quantify infinity, there was no celebration, not a single sting of joy throughout the cosmos. There was only a yawn, as we followed our usual routine and turned it into a weapon that defies language and all mathematical logic. We have already ended the multiverse so many times without care, even giving time itself a voice so we could hear it scream when it was being ripped apart. We said we were doing it so we would know when to stop, but deep down we all knew that it was for shits and giggles.

So why am I telling you all of this? Why am I hyping up this self destructive, cosmic horror of a civilization? Well, let me tell you something, a bit of wisdom that could save your civilization someday.

The universe never loses...

In the time, or lack thereof, that it took for humanity to even begin to exist, the universe changed. At first, we thought nothing of it, as it has done this sort of thing many times, and we simply destroyed our current reality and made one we liked. In fact, I remember the second I noticed our mistake quite clearly, the day the deck got shuffled just enough to destroy everything we've ever known, but most importantly ourselves. I knew something was wrong the second I had started using time as a reference point for anything, since time didn't really matter when you weren't even within its influence. You lot would probably think that the death, destruction, and chaos that covered every facet of reality would have caught my attention first. No, that would be too obvious, way too obvious. It was the fact that there was none. No screams, no pain and anger. Instinct and emotion were tearing themselves away from each other, removing any form of logic from our very being, before smearing our very existence upon a plane of existence that we hadn't seen before.

Of course, that wasn't enough to kill us. At that point we didn't even need bodies, and souls were just a thing of the week, about as useful as a necklace made of clay. No, it did something that none of us could have seen coming.

It used us against us.

Despite what we may tell ourselves, humanity was built upon our base desires. The need to breed, survive, and carry on our genes was something we had never been able to get rid of, or at least we never thought to get rid of them. No matter how advanced we may have become, sexual desires, violent urges, and sentimentality were the one thing we have never been able to fully control. We may have understood our emotions, but controlling them was completely out of the equation, especially with the power we possessed.

Out of all of our emotions and urges, violence was the strongest. It had consumed our every thought, every feeling, as the urge to kill your neighbor because he coughed in your direction grew to become unbearable.

So, what better punishment than to deface all of humanities accomplishments, all of its hard work, every single life lost and sacrifice made, than to turn our very reality into nothing more than a fetish! An entire reality, built upon the sexual desires of humanity, a place where pain did not exist, and pleasure without restraint was all that could exist. The universe was but a constant orgy of filth, their very technology powered by, dare I say it, the orgasms of those within this hell hole. Everything was sexualized, from the very planets they colonized, the ships they'd fly, the knowledge they held, the wildlife, even the concept of WAR ITSELF WAS TURNED INTO NOTHING BUT SOME SICK, TWISTED FETISHIZED GAME!

I apologize for my outburst.

Humanity doesn't exist anymore, all of our history, our technology, they are no longer our own. Our species brought down to little more than our feral primitive stages, turned into little more than caricatures of old earth animals, built from simple metaphors about our nature. Rabbits seemed to have built a society based on some bastardized version of Japanese culture, travelling from planet to planet, breeding their offspring into what could only be described as a swarm. A canine species, predictably turning out to be a religious society, one which worshipped some uncanny figure reminiscent of our race. Those were but two of the many races that crawled from the cesspool of smut that had replaced our great- sorry, I should probably just get to the important matters, before I go off on another rant again.

The universe must have a sick sense of humor, for I am a remnant of humanity, "The one that got away" so to speak. I'm unsure if this is a punishment, or a tasteless joke, but it seems to want to let me live. Despite not speaking a language that could be attributed to a sentient being, I could understand its intentions, and what it planned to do to me. While adrift in this endless void, it revealed that it planned to use me as an experiment, a "Lab Rat" so to speak. It saw me as a diplomat, an ambassador sent to explore and experience a world that was not my own.

I don't know what it chose me for, out of the infinite amount of human beings at its disposal, but it was clear that I wasn't in a position to make demands. This was it, all of our history, taken, shattered against the cosmos like a derelict ship against a Star Catapult. There was no antagonistic goodbye, no long winded speech, not a single thing to give me any sense of direction.

I was completely alone...