Reaper: The Novel

Mr. Gellan

"Urrgh..."

Dr. Xhargreg was no stranger to unexpected meetings. But for some reason, everytime he finished a meeting with the Overseer Council, his stomach always churned. Apparently, being the smartest person in the Andromenoid Galaxy Cluster had its pros and cons. Everyday, he was grilled to the bone with questions about the nature of the universe, life, and everything else.

"Hey Dr. Xhargreg!". Lily's cheerful voice filled the hallways. For some reason, Xhargreg felt annoyance everytime he ran into Lily. To be precise, Lily ran into him. It had been that way for 2 years.

"What do you want?", Xhargreg spat. For whatever reason, Lily seemed oblivious to the doctor's state of mind. That was her key quality. She could be ignorant of practically anything until someone gave her the full context. For people like Xhargreg, who rely on insinuation for their daily dose of sarcasm, Lily was a stain they couldn't remove from their lab coats.

"I just wanted to say that the neon sign in the R.A.S.C corridor isn't working. Would you mind checking it out?" Lily cheekily said. "Fine", the doctor said, giving up. Apparently, if he couldn't do sarcasm on her, it would be useless to argue.

You see, Xhargreg is the lone member of a now extinct humanoid race known as the Gellan. The Gellans lived in a Galaxy Cluster not far from our own, aptly named the Gellan Cloud. This cloud was unique because all the excess brainpower of everyone in the Universe gathered there because the gravity of the resident black hole was extremely intense. This intensity was so extreme in fact, that it was able to attract concepts. This was the only instance of a black hole which spat out everything it consumed. Due to this continuous loop, every planet in the system was showered with pure, unprocessed brainpower.

Of course, the atmospheres of the planets nearby shielded their lands from the brainpower, but only for a little while. The electrical discharges of the brainpower storms were too much for any ozone shield to handle. Eventually, the atmospheres gave out, and with them, the protection they provided.

As the brainpower ravaged the lands of the Planet Kíłj, the hydrogen atoms started to change. They started to gather, to build, and to think. They had become alive.

True enough, the hydrogen atoms started to become sentient. In a way, they were the first conscious indestructible beings. But this immortality did not change anything. As atoms, their actions were greatly restricted. They had 4 options. The first was to merge with other elements, destroying their sentience and reverting themselves into simple elements once again. The second option, and the most entertaining one was to wait to be blown off the planet surface, eventually being sucked into the black hole, and enjoy a free ride back home, and repeat it endlessly. The third was to jump off a cliff, hoping to catch a ride on top of a brainpower cloud and die, and finally, just keep living forever.

This option restriction did not do well for the sentient atoms. They tried to wage war, in hopes of an entertaining death, but to no avail. The kind of death that was considered a luxury was when a batch of anti-hydrogen atoms on vacation arrived. No sooner had the anti-atoms landed on the ground, the hydrogens forced themselves onto the antimatter, giving themselves immense pleasure and an explosive death, the resulting annihilation causing a miniature nuclear explosion the size of a throw pillow. If they had hands, they would've clapped.

All this repeated for a long time, until eventually, a human body plopped onto the surface. Inspection of the body (Not that they were able to back then) revealed that the body was jettisoned off from a Pirate Scout doing routine surveillance of the system. The hydrogen atoms were overjoyed. By the time the body landed they had already constructed a mini-society, made out of the efforts of hydrogens that decided to use the nearby elements as walls (when you're an atom, you can build with anything). They didn't know it was a body yet, but they new that foreign matter meant new elements to work with. One atom volunteered to explore. Entering through a pore, the atom had just entered, when suddenly, a bolt of brain electricity hit the body. The resulting chain reaction gave the body revival opportunity, but without consciousness it would die unaware. But there was a consciousness. The lone atom was the groundwork of the body's revival.