The Signs of the Apocalypse

The Citadel

Three years ago this day, young Alex Salmon would be announced dead when the police found chunks of his body stuffed inside a barrel that had sunk to the bottom of a lake. A few days before that, his suspects had hijacked the airwaves, wearing filthy, rubber costumes holding rusty spoons and branding sticks while someone with a bag over their head screamed. Over the next course of days they would keep breaking into the regular broadcast, showing themselves stabbing non-lethal holes in the boy before pouring bleach on the wounds, sodomizing him with a spiked baseball bat, feeding him vermin-infested rot, among other things. In the end they had killed him by sitting on his stomach, his emancipated body putting up final, feeble attempts of pushing the men off. There was no way to find the murderers; by all accounts, it was almost as they though they'd disappeared into thin air.

For the rest of the country it was a nightmare, but for one house - the Salmon house - it would be the end of sanity.

Three years after that, today, the world welcomed satellite NEMESIS, the greatest technological marvel the world had ever seen. Led by Alex's older brother Professor Dean Salmon, the Sign of the Citadel, the project was a collaboration between the brightest and richest men and women from all over the world. It was a machine beyond political borders, created not by governments but by individuals with seemingly infinite wit and resources, outfitted with solar-powered laser beams and a super-effective scanner that meant it could obliterate anyone who grew past its karma threshold. Few people knew exactly how it worked, but Professor Salmon noted that it could analyze data at an unbelievable rate, and had the power to judge if specific actions would have repercussions leading to intense, intense human suffering, be it collective or individual. It couldn't stop people from doing bad things, of course, but it would absolutely obliterate anyone who stepped too far: which was the moment they did it. Again, after the fact, but it was better than nothing.

This would be it, after all. If it worked, if the simulations were correct, then this would be the end to the overwhelming evil that plagued the world, a guaranteed punishment free from political and corporate manipulations. 

The world drew a collective breath as it was launched into outer space.

It rose higher and higher. For once, it was as though the world stopped, a moment of calm before whatever storm followed.

Once in orbit, NEMESIS - also dubbed as the Justice Machine - activated.