The Game Master

Chapter 5

Alex stood up, quickly pulling on the ends of his shorts to straighten them. One of his many quirks was the OCD he had towards wrinkled clothing. "Com'on! Lets see if we can get the holosystems up. You need to send some messages to our princess, Robert."

Shit, he called me Robert. Something's gonna go down... Rob still could care less about his comment to Alex, the zit-faced computer prodigy had never explicitly put "always respect me" on the wanted ad. (Knowing him as Robert did now, that actually wasn't out of the question for this kid.) Robert was slightly worried about the little horse-things half a galaxy away. If Mr. 'Game Master' got what he wanted, those marshmallow creatures would probably wind up roasted over a campfire, then made into pastel-colored s'mores.

Reaching a what appeared to be a railway maintenance shack, Alex flung open the door to reveal an elevator shaft. At the bottom was a small underground room with a rack of computer servers, some screens, and what looked like the cockpit of an F-18 B. Under the glass dome was an outline shaped into the contours of Robert's bulky torso. Alex didn't really need Robert's strength to operate what was ultimately a glorified smoke-and-mirror machine, but the years of highly structured procedure and training which "renders obedience instinctive under all conditions" that had been crammed into the military man's head.

"It appears the Princess can only block what I am directly in control of. This means that I can only give you verbal instructions, or she will jam this station as well. Now, listen closely, for you must tell her exactly this..." Alex quietly spoke a series of rapid sentences off in a hushed voice, acting as if the room was tapped.

"Got it?"

"Affirmative."

Robert didn't necessarily agree, but an order was an order.

~~

"Hmmm. It appears he's stopped broadcasting. I think we shall be safe for the time being." Celestia's horn was glowing brightly as she concentrated on feeling the energy waves sent across space. "He appears to be the same race as the legendary, but his technology is much more primitive than what we were warned of..."

"Who warned what?" Twilight was sitting at the side of her mentor in the Canterlot archives, where they had retired to be out of the way of Luna and her duties.

"Oh, my student. You never stop being curious, do you? To be short, creatures similar to the one attacking us came nearly half a millenium ago to this land. They left a series of cryptic warnings about our future, as they claimed to be from a time many years from even now. A contact with these creatures on Sol 3 was predicted, but not in this way. The real threat has not shown itself yet." Celestia wished she could explain in more detail, but every time she stopped to communicate some piece of her knowledge, the power she placed into tracking the young human slipped, and required all the more concentration to keep a lock on him.

It was during this period of concentration that Celestia felt a piece of paper flutter down past her head. Only twilight's dragon had been given the connection to send messages like this. However, as she opened her eyes, Celestia found that Twilight was carefully studying a peice of parchment that looked much whiter and cleaner than the usual equestrian stock. On the front of the paper was shown a picture of a blue sphere with green blotches on it, in turn surrounded by three rings: One gold, one red, and one blue. Underneath this was one word.

"What does GAIA mean?" Twilight asked softly to no one in particular. The Princess, having forgotten the boy for the moment, enveloped the parchment in her magic and slowly unfolded it.

"What does it say, Princess?"

"I'm not sure... the symbols are complete gibberi-" Celestia's words were stopped, as the paper glowed and the letters shifted. She noticed an odd watermark at the bottom which read 'CERTIFIED GRADE SEVEN PSYCHIC PAPER'.

"Ah, its a letter. Ahem!" Celestia began to read out loud, glad to have a second set of hooves to process the information with her. "To the creatures inhabiting exoplanet 57 Pegasi D, please take note of the following information..."

~~

Director Q sat behind his desk, quietly listening to a muffled conversation through an earpiece in his left ear. The letter of warning, with enough necessary information, had been sent through a very new device; the lab-coats were only giving about 60% chance of success. Of course, GAIA never used early tech such as this unless and extreme emergency occurred. Alex had been a constant state of emergency for five years, and the director was done with it. Alex had merely been a young boy who got lucky, and GAIA wrote him off as an outlier. Interestingly, the boy had also been lucky enough to recover a foreign artifact before the containment squads were alerted. And finally, he had hit the motherload, finding a Type II civilization Virtual Intelligence, promptly moving the elementary-school child to the number 1 most advanced human, in the entirety of known history. Fate was fickle sometimes, and when fate had dealt its hand in this saga, the previous director was "fired". Director Q's first, and so far only, directive was to find, stop, and harvest the technology of Alex2315. Director Q was picked because he had ignored what fate wanted to do on many occasions, and went ahead and did what GAIA wanted to do. In the words of Q himself:

"Don't tell me about chance, luck, or fate. Those are defunct concepts in this line of work; people who still subscribe to that train of thought are wrong, and I really would like to convince them otherwise. If they don't want my help, they can go FUCK themselves, because chance, luck, or fate will fuck them eventually anyway."

Director Q, who was called DQ by most, had finally made contact with the other side of the equation. Now, fate was useless. He had just won the game.