The notification would have reached Them twenty minutes ago. It had been hovering in the air for weeks; an incense spiked with fear. The acute feeling of His absence of emotion surprised Him.
They were going to be destroyed. Who were They? He couldn’t be bothered to remember. It didn’t matter anymore. Soon They would not exist as He would not exist as His people would not exist. He sat in the control room aware of the eyes, wide and blank as He felt watched Him staring at the control board. They blamed Him, those eyes, and He realized that He couldn’t bring Himself to care. All was relief. All was release. All was the switches beneath his fingers; all was the whistling of missiles in air.
Since the ancients built the weapons of the gods, they had known that the timer was ticking. It kept ticking down until today, His day, where the theory of Mutually Assured Destruction would be proven.
He found Himself alarmingly composed. It had come.
His fingers had hit the keys with conviction. That was why He had ruled, why He had been chosen by fate and the people. He waited, welcoming death.
He tried to tell Himself a fairy-tale of loyalty and patriotism that only yesterday dripped off his tongue as he set the bombs in motion. But he couldn’t find it. Years too late He realized the unfortunate truth that His enemies were His creations; that this was a human moment, a moment of racial suicide. The time for hatred was passed; the time for justice at hand. Both sides knew that their own people deserved the coming annihilation. Both sides sat, composed, greater than at their greatest hour of battle, waiting for the Executioner.
They had two minutes and thirty three seconds left. He began to sweat. As it ran down and dripped on His hand, He saw that it was blood. So He was upset--He wouldn’t have guessed it. Where was Their answer?
What could have gone wrong? The missiles had been sighted, it was certain. Their missiles should have been launched, but the watch on the launchpads showed no activity.
As He watched the numbers slip down, one minute, now fifty seconds, an inkling of hope spawned in His lungs and He held his breath so as not to let it out, that others might see it; that He might lose it.
The timer hit zero. Across the control deck lights flashed indicating success. No one cheered. No one moved. An icy fire reanimated his nerves as he glanced at the radar reports and saw nothing.
The weight that had been momentarily lifted from His shoulders crashed down with the burden of two billion souls. As the room emptied a loneliness settled within him, along with a vague sense of being cheated, and an incredible feeling of wonder.
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