text: It was a day like no other. January first, 2038. New year, new me. At least until the Incinerators came. Let me organize this story in a way that will be the most gratifying. I don’t get to tell stories often, and I don’t want to bore anyone. Space. The beginning and ending of the trudge of life. Life, that ever-expanding, ever-fruitful bending of a straitened reality. Never showing anything. Always learning. The science of space travel had just turned 10 years old. In our short jaunt through space, we colonized all the planets of our solar system. Even Jupiter. Do you have any idea how hard it is to land on gas? That’s what she said. It was a brave new time. We had created a new form of energy. It turns out that the human sperm and egg, when put into a supercollider, produce a form of energy so potent that it can hardly be contained. They called it Banging, after the Big Bang theory. It was supposed that such a collision could have begun the universe, or some such other. Goodness gracious, do I digress. We had colonized the entire solar system in less than ten years, and as soon as we reached the “used to be” planet, Pluto, something that had mocked us for millennia with its icy deserts. Suddenly, there was a jolt out into the heavens. We stood at the edge of our solar system, realizing that we were way out of our depth and that whatever was coming wouldn’t be waiting for autographs. Storytelling is one of the great arts. It’s difficult to put into coherent words the terror, the frustration, the fear that the Incinerators brought to bear upon such a small, relatively backward race. We still hadn’t figured out how to make bullets work in zero gravity. Our only way of killing someone was to take their helmet off and hope they would suffocate. But the incinerators were different. They breathed carbon monoxide natively, and oxygen. Some sort of ungodly take on amphibians. We’ll get to why they’re called “The Incinerators” in a minute. But suffice it to say that we weren’t happy about our new foe, nor had we even contemplated the vastness of space or its potential pitfalls. What kind of problems had we created for ourselves? How much pain had we caused? The first ship to go down was Admadames at the far edge of the solar system. It was my ship. I had just started captaining it ten days before it was struck out of space, leaving only debris and an unrelenting zeal for revenge. My first instinct was to go down with the ship. Perhaps death in space wasn’t something so terrible after all. But I had experience. Plus, those medallions on my uniform were pure gold. Very hard to replace. I escaped with my life, but I’ll never forget the dangers of war in space. A war is not so much a measure of life’s fleeting quality as it is a test of patience. Everyone wants to have their say, but they won’t. Only a person - a being - with a clear voice and a positive mental attitude will ultimately have the last word. We fought. Our principal weapons were just toys to them - to the Incinerators. We fought like crazy, but we couldn’t make them stop. They kicked us out of Jupiter with a garbled shout. We were routed from Uranus, home of the Pixie Pavilion and the largest human cohort outside of Earth. The pain we felt. The evil did not triumph for long. It was at this time in 2041 that we made our stand. In only three years we went from having the whole solar system to having less than when we started. All told, only about 73% of the Earth was still ours by the time the Incinerators got here. There was no way out. My commanding officer, General Perimedes of the Space Shock Force, told me that this would be our chance. I commanded the remaining forces of the Human Space Fleet, but I was becoming increasingly worried. I never knew that one planet could lose that many ships. That many cadets. After multiple attempts on my own life, as well as the lives of my direct reports, I decided to go on the offensive. Using the highest security clearance available, my cohort and I developed a plan that would “Shock” the Incinerators into ultimate surrender. This was not some chicken scratch plan written on the back of a dairy box, but a well-thought-out and effective plan that had both a high chance of succeeding and little in the way of downsides. If all went well, we would have defeated these “space gremlins” and gotten back on track to achieve our goal. The crazy thing about all of this that I’m saying to you is that it was never my plan to be in the military, much less the savior of all we hold dear, the savior of humanity. I was a young peacenik and conscientious objector who wanted to be a visual artist. Painters, they called us. Always slinging paint. I had covered enough canvasses to lace the Great Wall of China, but I found that something was missing. Then, there was space. The great inventor, Dareth Musk, had just concocted a special chemical that would successfully carry humanity on an adventure that no one even thought possible. I was the one who was called. I did my duty, often without recognition, without comfort. It was the most painful, and yet most exhilarating experience I’ve ever had. So many great things happened, some terrible. When humanity finally made its stand, it didn’t look to the outside world that we even knew what we were doing. The plebes, so focused on Saturday night TV. Even at that time, most had no idea of the fight involved. We mounted our weapons and took heed. No one could stop us because we were determined to bring the fight to them. We were the ones that had the most to lose, who had lost the most, who wanted the most. It was at the Battle of Baf Matex that it all came into being. We had already had some success kicking the Incinerators off the surface of the planet, but they were swarming. Our special weapon, the Dynamo Complex, had been in development for a few months and was ready to go. The Incinerators, as powerful as they seemed, didn’t know what to do. They fell, and we entered the immortal, permanent sky.