An O5's Sleepless Night

I open my eyes and look right to see my clock, 2:10 AM. Damnit, looks like I won’t be sleeping any more than this tonight.

Throwing the covers to the side, I get up and pour myself a fresh glass of bourbon from the bottle sitting next to my bed. I exit the room and sit on a brown couch facing a blank white wall with one screen, displaying one thing, in neon green lettering: 70,910. My favorite number.

I take a sip and wait in silence for a couple of seconds before the thoughts come.

If someone fucks up, I will see the consequences. The thing I wish I was told when I got this job is I remember every apocalypse, every cosmic retcon, and the drugs I take every morning, evening, and night make them impossible to forget.

Earlier today we discovered hell, or at least something close to what we thought it was, and the moment I looked into it to oversee the findings myself I stared into the portal for ten seconds and yawned.

The horror story I was told nearly every Sunday until I was thirteen, the place I was told I’d go to for the death and mutilation of an unimaginable number of souls, was a bore. I guess I won’t have to worry if it’s real or not since I’m not going there anyway, maybe I have a chance at one of the non-human afterlives with the amount of “deities” I’ve angered.

This is my life, this is the person I’ve chosen to be. Staring at atrocities comparatively making a nuclear wasteland look like a beach resort, and only lamenting that the immortality doesn’t come along with the ability to disregard sleep.

A nuclear wasteland, humanity’s very own hell created by the most devastating non-anomalous weapons that they’ve… we’ve ever made. What was that famous quote? Two enemies standing in gasoline, one with three matches, the other with five? Well I don’t know if fire or gas explosions can kill me, but it’s guaranteed that old age won’t, so I’ll be here as long as the earth still is and I still have a job to do.

There are things that might not be damaged by fire, or gas explosions, or maybe even anything humanity has ever built in the past thousand years combined, but if there’s one thing I believe, that I will never stop believing until every neuron in my brain stops firing, is that it’s my duty as an O5, as a… human, to try anyway.

One of the main jobs we’re supposed to do here is make sure nothing kills us all, and other humans seem to be high up on that list of worries in the past century. The cold war… the cold war was a damn shitshow. So many debates over if we should stop every side forcibly or let humanity chose its own destiny, and they almost started a cold war of our own, right here in the foundation.

The cold war ended, and after so many close calls humanity deemed itself worthy of continued survival without our interference. So many of those bombs were built, so many gone unused.

Three matches, five matches, there’s more than enough to ignite the fuel of everyone’s doomsday paranoia, so they started to get dismantled.

What very few know is a lot less get deactivated than they thought. Someone had the idea that a nuke set to be dismantled or stored away to be forgotten would be the perfect time to steal it, so we did it first and payed lip service to the many countries we have infiltrated long before the first nuke was built.

Every W.M.D. that we took, that I took, I made sure there was use for it, even if few of the other twelve would approve. I don’t feel much fear anymore, probably due to it being constant. There are very few things in this broken universe that I can say truly scare me, and they’re the things the others believe they can do nothing about. I don’t believe that. I will never. Believe. That.

If they’re something we can’t contain, can’t kill, can’t stop, then I will personally guarantee they will remember us. What we can’t kill, we might maim. What we can’t maim, we’ll at least leave a lasting scorch mark.

Every warhead humanity discards for the sake of peace I shove inside that door, and the first thing that fat bastard eats when he breaks out is my wrath.

Tick.

70,911. My new favorite number.