Thanos Receives a Visit (Fanfiction)

Thanos leans back in his porch chair looking across his recently harvested crops, in his hand is a large glass filled with pressed juices from said crop.  His face sports a lazy smile of victory and contentment however his brow shows a slight frown.  A little distance away behind Thanos sits a golden gauntlet perched upon a pole, it is covered in different coloured stones.

Just a couple of feet away from him the air starts to glimmer and twist before him.  The twist in the air resolves itself into a humanoid shape with dark blue skin wearing a grey suit.  Thanos is reminded of the Galactic Bank's staff, very nondescript and easy to forget.  The humanoid is carrying a black device in its hand, it looks down at it and taps it with one of this fingers.

"You are Thanos is that correct?" says the blue alien to Thanos, "Yes, and who might you be?" Thanos replies with slight rumble in his voice. "You can call me C9, I best get comfortable."  C9 taps the device in his hand and a chair appears in front of Thanos, C9 sits down. "Do you mind if we have a 3D transcription made of our conversation?" C9 says. Thanos just nods in agreement.

Transcription Between C9 & Thanos

Universe: LarveM-27 CQ

C9: I am here to inform you of the consequences of your recent action within this particular universe.  Would you like to disown your involvement and use of the UTs to wipe out half the sentient races in this universe?

Thanos:  I do not wish disown anything, I stand by my actions!

C9: Are you aware that the UTs were never meant to be used in such a fashion?

Thanos: UT?

C9: Excuse me I tend forget when dealing with lower races, UT stands for Universal Tool. When a universe is created UTs are used in its construction.  They are designed purely for the purpose of a creating a particular universe and cannot be used externally to that universe.

Thanos: We call them Infinity Stones and they seemed to work just fine to me.

C9: If you look really closely you will see their outer skins has become cracked which will only get worse.  However we can discuss that later, first we must cover the consequences.

Thanos: What consequences I have saved a universe of limited resources by removing half of its population.  Balance is key to any successful civilisation.

C9: My colleagues completely agree unfortunately in your arrogance you have not considered the large picture of your universe.

Thanos: Arrogance!

C9:  Yes, lower races always think they know best when in fact you know so little about the environment you live in .  Admittedly you are the first being to cause this level damage to a universe which why it was agreed you be informed personally.

Thanos: Who are you to tell me what I should and should not do?!

C9: Well this is the reason I was sent because I was contracted to create this particular universe, normally I do not returned to completed jobs but it was felt that this was a unique situation.

Thanos: Have you come to kill me then?

C9: Definitely not that is would be unthinkable, I just here to tell you what your universe's potential future is.  Let us start with something small first, just a single planet.  Let me bring it it up on the Holovision, there you go.  This planet was known to its natives simply as Mmm.  Planet Mmm was a perfectly balanced environment for its sentient race, flora, fauna and lower animals.  Each species on the planet lived in a symbiotic relationship with each other, the planet was literally paradise.

C9: Then you clicked your fingers and within nine days the planet was a barren wasteland with a few microbes living beneath its surface.  Their populations were perfectly balanced, you killed off half and the planet fell into a chaotic spiral never to recover.

Thanos: One planet means nothing in the larger scheme of the universe.

C9: Okay then lets goes larger then, have you been to the Steller-9 galaxy?

Thanos: Never heard of it.

C9: Not that surprising, it is one of the oldest galaxies in this universe.  Long before you were born, the sentient race that evolved there invented technologies that allowed them to maintain all the stars in their galaxy.  Stellar engineers of the first order, eventually each star in the galaxy became permanent homes to a single engineer.  They kept the stars is perfect balance, they added or removed matter to keep a star from exploding.

C9: Before you snapped your fingers, that galaxy was home to several trillion different sentient races, the Stellar engineers helped create conditions so that more sentient races evolved.  Without the engineers to maintain the stars well let me show you what the galaxy looks like now.  You see that dark patch in the right hand quadrant, that's a black hole created by multiple exploding stars about thirty days after you did your thing.  We have calculated it will consume the rest of galaxy in less than a galactic year.

Thanos: These are just isolated examples.

C9: I have a few billion other isolated examples and they are increasing in number.

Thanos: What will happen then?

C9: Well actually remember I told you about the cracks in the UTs?

Thanos: I thought the stones were intelligent, can't they repair themselves?

C9: Yes they are, in order to do their individual jobs they had to have a high level of intelligence.  Thing is they do not work well together your misuse of them and the fact you placed them together is a very dangerous thing to do, hence the cracks in their outer skin.  They are likely to be very unhappy to be stuck on that golden glove.  Between them they have the power to create an universe and to unmake one!

Thanos: You mean they going to explode?

C9: Not sure, we have never been in this situation before if they do then the universe will just blink out of existence otherwise the universe will continue for a short time until the chaos you created spirals the universe into oblivion.  

Thanos: How the hell was I supposed to know this happen!?!?

C9: I think you are a flaw in my design of the universe, next one we will remove the bug that caused you to exist.  Now that you have been informed that you are the destroyer of a universe I shall be going.

Thanos: What happens if I take stones off the gauntlet and send them to different ends of the universe?

C9: You forget they are intelligent and have long memories, you might appease them a little but you still have the consequences of your action to solve.  It is not impossible to fix.

Thanos: Can you fix it?

C9: Maybe but the client failed to pay his hardware maintenance this eon plus the client would to have to raise maintenance request before we could even start looking at it.

Thanos: Who is the client?

C9: I suppose you would call him God, I understand pray helps.

Thanos: Will he hear me?

C9: Unlikely clients that do not pay their hardware maintenance have larger issues to worry about than a single universe.  Time I left and let me you congratulate on being the most stupid arrogant sentient being in the multiverse to date.

C9 got up from his seat and disappeared, Thanos's frown had deepened considerably, his smile completely gone.

The End of the World is Maybe Nigh

You know I have lost count of the number of times the world has been prophesied to end, still here after 2012 all that doom and gloom for that year all based upon the Mayan calendar because it finished in that year obviously nobody ordered new calendars 2013.  I sure the Spanish invasion probably put a dent in orders.

This time it is some chap on Youtube talking about the transit of Mercury passing in front of the Sun and the number three:

The Prophetico released a video last week analysing the correlation between the alignment of the planets and star constellations, suggesting this natural phenomenon could be of grave significance.

Mercury’s rare passing in front of the Sun on Monday, May 9 occurs only around 13 times a century and last took place in 2006.

What I love is that he is hedging his bets which is rare for a doomsayer:

The Prophetico explains that the moon will be exactly three days old at the time of Monday’s 7.5-hour Mercury transit which is significant as it is related to sex sins in the Bible.

The Prophetico warns that this could be a sign that this could be interpreted as the end times for humanity.

It is shame he brought in the Bible a book that has been translated many times and heavily edited by various different incarnations of the Church and not actually written down until several hundred of years after the events described in the book.  Lost in translation ring any bells.  Excerpt from Wikipedia below:

...the original Greek writings and manuscripts written by the original authors of the New Testament, have not survived. But historically copies exist of those original autographs, transmitted and preserved in a number of manuscript traditions. When ancient scribes copied earlier books, they sometimes wrote notes on the margins of the page (marginal glosses) to correct their text—especially if a scribe accidentally omitted a word or line—and to comment about the text. When later scribes were copying the copy, they were sometimes uncertain if a note was intended to be included as part of the text. Over time, different regions evolved different versions, each with its own assemblage of omissions and additions.

The Bible has become like modern day statistics which if you cherry pick what you want from the data you can reach the answer you were looking for.

Back to the 'Prophetico' the newspaper Express web article says:

The website summarises: “Judah will have to suffer in exile, although with the understanding that God will eventually thrash their enemies.

However I cannot find his website anywhere and the domain name is up for sale so perhaps he is leaning towards it ending.  Considering the quote above I think Judah is a reference to Edward Snowden it so fits with the text.  Oh look there's me cherry picking too, it is practically a national past time.

The main problem I have with any numbers or calendaring relating to ancient books written by man is the issue of the actual age of the planet.  Which at rough count is four and half billion years old or written in number form: 4,500,000,000 Okay I admit it does not sit well on the calendar and it is going to be a long year to say on a regular basis.  Taking any calendaring system produced by man in this context is arbitrary at best.

The other issue I have is man's arrogance assuming that we are somehow special in all the universe, to be put our existence into context:

...the modern form of humans only evolved about 200,000 years ago. Civilization as we know it is only about 6,000 years old, and industrialization started in the earnest only in the 1800s.

Astronomers are still working on the age of the universe but their best guess it about fourteen billion years old, so when someone pops up in the media says the world is going to end based upon the Bible and some arbitrary number systems we have come up with, I take it with a pinch of salt.

Real ways the world could end:

• Yellowstone national park volcano erupts that would be bad
• Bloody big asteroid smashes into the planet bad also
• I could die, it would be the end of world for me, very bad
• Earth, the alien TV show could be cancelled - okay probably not real

These are just a few of the potential disasters waiting round the corner.  If the world does end tomorrow I will happy in the fact that I will not have to get up early to go to work.  Of course if I am dead it will not matter at all, I am sure the universe can get along without me it certainly did before I was born.

It is all a matter of perspective and so the best course of action is to have fun.