Hello, loyal readers.

A quick note before we get the story started: I'm working extra hard on this story so PLEASE review. Seriously, I haven't gotten reviews in a while, and the number of review I get will directly affect how long I'll update this story.

Happy fanficing!

Time is a concept that we are really not too familiar with.

Let me put it in perspective: The universe began fourteen billion years ago. A billion is a thousand millions.

The universe is 3500000 times older than the pyramids. It has been around longer than 200000000 human lifetimes. Eight billion years after the beginning, a massive cloud of hydrogen gas began to collapse under its own weight, eventually forming a massive lump of gas. This lump of gas was so big, that at is core the nature of matter was changed by the pressure. Two Hydrogen atoms would fuse together and become one atom of Helium. This simple reaction created so much energy, that the finer particles of the dust cloud were blown away, leaving behind bigger, rockier chunks in the middle, and some very large orbs of gas farther out. These rocky pieces collided with each other, eventually getting big enough to pull themselves into spheres, and subsequently pulling themselves into the paths of other rocks. Entire asteroids, which a few thousand million years ago would have been unimaginably large, were swallowed up whole by four enormous mini-planets that dominated this primordial solar system.

Eventually, the great gassy titans of the colder outer regions made smaller rocks go around them, and the rocks in the middle were used up. Only a thin region of rocky chaos remained, dividing the small, warm worlds from their icy brothers.

It was in this end of the era of chaos that an object the size of Mars slammed into a certain planet in the warm, inner region. This planet will become recognizable when we learn that the material ejected by this collision first formed a ring, before eventually coalescing into a large, white object that still bears the scars of is violent past. This moon, the only one to be made from its parent planet, still hangs in the sky of the planet Earth.

It is now time to get into the history of life, which began some five hundred and fifty million years after the formation of the Earth. Perhaps life began in the vast oceans, impregnated with the strange mix of chemicals that dominated the early world. Perhaps it began in great fissures in the Earth, where intense heat and strange chemicals provided the spark of life. Perhaps it rode to the planet on a meteorite. Perhaps we will never know.

All we know can know is that suddenly, the oceans were filled with fascinating, simple little orbs of chemicals that learned how to absorb simpler chemicals and make copies of themselves. The secret behind these little cells were the genes: Long, complex chains of molecules that built the cells simply with how they linked up with other cells. Now, with every copy, the genes got distorted. Perhaps, out of every hundred copies, one had a defect, and one out of every hundred defective cells had a defect that was good for it.

Nevertheless, there were trillions of cells, all copying and re-copying merrily for the next two and a half billion years. Those mutations which served the genes (allowed them to make more copies) were passed down to the next generation, who then began to copy in better ways. The genes waged all out war for supremacy in this early world: Cells devoured cells, cells developed defenses, and one day, the shape of the cell changed. A larger cell devoured a smaller cell, but did not digest it. Instead, it used the mini-cell to process different kinds of food for it. The two cells became one animal, dividing at the same time, serving each other for the rest of eternity.

Cells also began to join forces without eating each other: The stromatolites, great lumps of rock, began to be built up by the cyanobacteria, who discovered photosynthesis and filled the air with oxygen. Oxygen, while deadly to many early forms of life, was extraordinarily useful to a select few. And then, the genes did something incredible: They partnered up permanently. Cells now had it encoded in their genes that they must be a part of a body of other cells, all helping each other to get the food to reproduce, and help their genes to dominance.

This event changed the future of the world: These new 'bodies' wielded immense power, nearly invulnerable to their old foes. More multicolor animals developed, and a billion years after the first bodies were made, the so-called 'Cambrian Explosion' rocked the world: Jellyfish, sponges, strange water animals, and other bizarre creatures graced this early world.

Eventually, fish reigned supreme, and some of those fish lived close to shore. These fish had fins they used to push along the bottom rather than through the water. These fish could also go without water, the cradle of life, for long periods of time. Eventually, there were kinds of fish that could live both in water and on land, growing up submerged and living their adult lives hunting the insects of the land. Eventually, they learned how to take the ponds they needed to grow up in, and store them in hard shells, called eggs.

The result of this invention was the reptiles, who could spend their entire lives without seeing more water than a drop at a time. The reptile grew bigger, harnessing the sun's rays for their warmth, until a group of them could harness the fires of food for warmth. These creatures, the synapsids, represented the most ingenious development in surviving cold in all the innovations of the genes, but for the next two-hundred million years they were eclipsed by the enormous, often vicious Dinosaurs. They held unchallenged dominion over the Earth for countless eons, diversifying and propagating across the world in thousands of forms. And then a comet struck the Earth, and the Dinosaurs were dead.

Life is funny like that.

For a while, there was fierce completion between the descendants of the synapsids and Dinosaurs: The mammals and birds respectively. Each possessed an upgraded version of the reptile's scales, warmth giving fur, and lift giving feathers. For a while, the birds reigned supreme, but eventually were over competed by the little mammals, who were taking to the trees. While some used their claws and teeth to invade bird nests, others grew long arms and large brains to solve their arboreal problems.

Eventually, these monkeys took once more to the ground, bulkier and brainier. Eventually, one of these creatures lost most of their fur, grew bigger brains, and achieved the shining jewel of intelligent, rational life.

Developments came quickly now: The blink of a geologic eye that spanned a hundred thousand years suddenly saw the humans in hyper-evolution, and not using the genes. They developed a kind of claw that you could simply take off at the end of the day to better manipulate things (a knife), the gained symbiotic animals, mimicking the partner ship of cells that had so long ago changed the face of the world (the domestication of the dog); they even figured out how to get plants to bear fruit for them, and then humanity became sedentary.

Extra food meant that some members of a tribe could do other things besides forage and farm, and writing, mathematics, and philosophy appeared. By now, human kind has spread entirely around their planet, and within the space of a few thousand years, evolved strange exoskeletons which could take them huge distances in a matter of hours, developed a method of hurling death at whatever they chose, and finally unlocked the power of the genes.

Mankind today wields the power of the eons: They are making their first tentative steps into the world of genetic engineering, giving them the power to change animals with specific goals, not random copying errors.

Today, man can fully know and comprehend the vast distances of time that separate them from the dawn of time. They can fully appreciate the weight o the near eternity of development that gave their little world life…

And they have the gall to call ten years 'a long time'.

Planet Lemaxa hung in the starry void of space, a planet whose outer crust was one continuous, unbroken field of flat ice. The thin atmosphere above the ice gave the planet a little halo of light as the bluish sun slowly dawned over the western horizon. There was nothing living on Lemaxa. Nothing at all.

Of course, I didn't say anything about life in Lemaxa, now did I?

Suddenly, a patch of the forty-foot thick icy shell grew bright. Slowly, the ice melted, even in the twenty-below temperature, and a shiny bullet of metal shot out of the ice like a cork from a bottle. This was Lemaxa's first faster-than-light spacecraft, the first of its kind in the history of the universe.

The Lemaxans, frankly, are the last species you'd expect to be the first to break the great universal speed limit. They are little more than green slugs, possessing no natural defenses except for some nasty electric shocks. They lived in the warm ocean beneath Lemaxa's outer layer, warmed by the swirling currents of magma in the core. The Lemaxans had spent most of their history on the hot ocean floor, where no light from the Lemaxan sun ever penetrated. No light from the sun ever penetrated the icy shell to begin with, but the sea was lit by the thousands of luminescent bacteria that gave everything in the planet a purplish tinge.

The Lemaxans were not first because they developed faster than other races (it actually took them twice as long), but because they had achieved intelligence three time earlier.

The Lemaxans had a long, noble past under the ice: Millennia of advancement, war, trade, passion, and vicious corporate competition had given the Lemaxans incredible technologies and a surprising knowledge of the workings of the universe.

The small metal pod, filled with water, carried the bold slugs beyond Lemaxa's gravity field, to a series of metal stations waiting for them. The captain of the ship contacted the other Lemaxans, to make sure everything was ready for them. The metal station would focus beams of energy at one focal point, warping the fabric of space and time through the sheer amount of energy present. They would twist space until they finally tore through halfway into another dimension. The strange region they would enter, not a universe, but rather, a divider between ones, would allow them to finally achieve superluminal travel.

The target destination of this bold venture? Lemaxa's farthest moon, 252000 miles away. Not very far, actually, but far enough for the observers at the moon base to figure out their speed.

The five laser stations fired, and the special focusing piece of metal they were firing at collected the tremendous energy. The Lemaxan captain checked the gravity readings on the control panel: They were nearing critical mass…

Suddenly, the immense energy of the beams was too much for the little piece of focusing metal, and the atoms that made it up collapsed into a singularity. It was unstable, yes, but it was what they needed: A black hole.

The Lemaxan craft shot forward towards the portal, and the crew felt their little green bodies shiver with delight. Then, abruptly, they entered the wormhole and the ship was filled with blazing blue light that stunned the crew for the instant they were in the tunnel. And then, so quick you could have missed it if you blinked, they were hovering in space a few miles from the moon base.

The Lemaxan captain shakily extended a feeler, and hit a button to contact the observers down below.

"H-How fast were we?" He said shakily.

The answer came back, excited, "250000 miles in 0.5 seconds! You did it! Three times faster than the speed of light!"

Massive cheering broke out on the ship, back on Lemaxa, and on the stations that had created the wormhole. Feelers were shook, Lemaxan champagne was poured into the rooms for people to absorb, and the scientists hailed this as the beginning of an era.

How, you may ask, does this have to do with Invader Zim? Well, it doesn't really. In fact, the purpose of the preceding paragraphs was to explain the old, decrepit Lemaxan pod that was still floating through space over Irk when Tallest Vio was holding a secret meeting in his space station, two million years later. The pod was a leftover from Lemaxa's prime, when it had been sending out pods to study all forms of sentient life as they could. The pod had marked the progression of the Irkens, and then shut down, its purpose fulfilled.

The pod was unable to see the meeting that would cause much, much grief in the universe, and even if it had, the Lemaxans would be rendered impotent by the distance to stop it. The meeting was held in a simple, long room on the station, filled with eighteen Irkens. The Tallest, and the Control Brains. You may already know what a Tallest looks like: Thin, imposing, tall (duh), and probably levitating. You may not know what a Control Brain looks like, though: They are essentially Irkens, but in a metal suit that takes away everything familiar about them.

The nearly useless arms and torso are simply kept in the thumb-shaped metal tube that really only serves as a place to connect the four long metallic tentacles that a Control Brain uses to manipulate its physical surroundings. The head of a Control Brain suit is monstrously elongated backwards: It thickens to four feet wide behind the Control Brain 'face' (a metal plate that contains the breathing and feeding equipment that automatically sustain the Control Brain, and two large green viewports), and extends back ten feet, tapering to a point. The massive segmented head also tapers height wise form the base, but the head is still huge. This head contains the massive computers and communications equipment that the Control Brain is always connected to. The Control Brains were the ultimate cyborgs, moving their limbs with mental links, not even using their eyes to see (they simply had images sent through wires into their heads). Their bodies were useless at this point: It was merely a support system for the brain that ran everything.

Tallest Vio entered the meeting room, and the Brains gave him the only kind of salute they could still do: Their faceplates slid to the sides, revealing the pale face of the Irken inside. They opened, and then squinted their eyes, which had gone dark from under usage.

Vio gave them a quick little salute, and they thankfully slid their faceplates back into position. The Tallest took a seat, indicating that the others should do so.

"My friends," he said, acting as if they were equals, "We have the power to do something previous Tallests and nobles, such as yourself, have only dreamed of: Total control over the Irken Empire."

Div, the most important of the Control Brains, asked in confusion, "Don't we already control the Empire, my Tallest?"

Vio nodded, "To a degree. I give the orders, you manage the InterPAK and stuff, but that is not enough. Suppose too many politicians visit Vort and come back thinking that the Tall aren't any better than the short, and try to set up a democracy or something? Besides, I think we want more than nominal loyalty… We want power. We want complete control, without a chance of rebellion, or any opposition."

He paused dramatically, watching the Control Brains looking amongst themselves and murmuring approvingly. All but one.

"My Tallest," Mev, perhaps the only uncorrupted of the Control Brains said, "I would not want to be a tyrant. Besides, even if we are all fine with controlling our citizens completely, there is simply no way to do it. What you are suggesting would require having our citizens, from the day they are born to the day they die, hearing nothing, thinking nothing, or even considering anything that would go against the Empire."

Vio frowned. "Are you suggesting my plan is unethical, Mev? Are you ordering me to stop?"

The crowd of Control Brains hushed immediately, and Mev sunk further into his chair. "No, my Tallest."

Vio leaned back in his chair, and once again addressed the crowd. "Nevertheless, Mev brings up some important technical problems. How are we to control our citizens? Well, every Irken in the universe wears a PAK, do they not? And a PAK can be easily set up to control an Irken mind through the spinal connection… What do you say to that, Mev?"

Mev looked around the room, gave a small electronic sigh of defeat, then answered the Tallest. "It… might work. Of course, you'd need some sort of system to keep the PAKs feeding them propaganda, and anyone who isn't wearing a mind control PAK will realize what's going on, and take their's off. After that, all any rebellion would have to do would be to run around yanking people's PAKs off."

Vio smiled. "Already done: With the Control Brains' technical skills, I can easily build a transmitting network to control PAKs. I've also guaranteed that we'll be able to control every Irken from the day they're born to the day they die. And they most certainly won't take their PAKs off."

This was just ridiculous. Nobody could possibly do that. Mev straightened up in his chair, but Vio held out a hand.

"Don't be so quick to criticize me, Mev. You don't know what the plan is."

The Control Brains, minus Mev, leaned forward in interest to hear their leader's brilliant idea.

The tallest smiled, and leaned back, enjoying the attention. "Well," he said slowly, "You know how every Irken nowadays is being born in birthing tubes?"

They all nodded eagerly.

"We'll just take control over those facilities. The instant a smeet is born, we can tell it what to do, what to think, what to believe…. We raise the smeets in government centers, and they'll never hear anything we don't want them to hear from their parents."

The Control Brains all agreed this was a wonderful idea. Mev just shook his head.

"PR disaster," he said, "Do you really want to kidnap every smeet in the Empire? People will riot."

"The genius is," Vio said smugly, "That everyone will be getting brainwashed by then. It won't be perfect with the older generation, but at least it'll keep us in power until the next wave of fully controlled soldiers grows up. Besides, there won't be any parents when we're ready to take over: From now on, the computers will randomly combine male and female Irken DNA, make a smeet, and send it off to training. No more smeets will be made except for those needed by the Empire."

"Even then, how will you control people? They'll get suspicious, and end up ripping the mind controlling PAKs off people."

"Everyone will be wearing a PAK. They'll have to. I've edited the Irken genome. Not only is it impossible for Irkens to have smeets naturally, their Squooch glands have been damaged. As you probably know, the Squooch gland makes a certain chemical: Na-3Cl-5. We need this chemical. It's in practically every compound in our bodies. If an Irken is cut off from it, they will be dead in a matter of minutes. I've already made sure that all PAKs can compensate for this, but it's imperfect: The PAKs will have to think for the Irkens half of the time. But anyways, we'll be completely in charge."

The control Brains sat there in silent shock.

"Don't believe me?" The Tallest said. He snapped his fingers.

Immediately a guard stepped into the room, and saluted the figures sitting there as the door shut. "Yes, my Tallest? Is there anything you need?"

"Yes," Vio said, "Please get up on the table so the Control Brains can see what a good soldier you are."

The guard arched an eyebrow, but climbed up on the table.

Vio smiled, "Good. Now take your PAK off."

The guard obediently pulled the pod off, though it took some effort, and handed it over to the Tallest.

"Now what?" He asked.

"Oh nothing. Just stand there."

The guard turned back around, and for a few moments, all was well.

Then the guard frowned, and put a hand over his Squeedlyspooch.

"Something wrong?" Vio said with mock concern.

"Ow… I just feel weird, my Tallest. I'd like to put my Pak back on."

"Oh, no, no, no! Its imperative you don't put your PAK on."

The soldier stood back up for a minute, but they could all see the pain on his face.

Mev, who saw where this was going, said, "Alright, my Tallest, I believe you… Please give the guard his PAK back."

Vio didn't seem to care. "Unethical, huh? I've got to show you I don't care about ethics." He said darkly.

"M-my Tallest, I don't under-" The guard began to say, but his body suddenly had a spasm mid sentence.

He fell to the table, clutching at his stomach, the lights in his eyes dimming. Vio nonchalantly looked up at the clock and said, "Two minutes…"

The Control Brains watched in horror as the little Irken twitched involuntarily. His eyes had dimmed to maroon, and his antennae lay limply on the table. With a final jerking heave the Irken curled up into a ball, and died.

The room was silent for a few long minutes. The Tallest had just killed a loyal citizen of the Irken Empire to make a point.

"I think we understand each other…" Vio said.

Perhaps it is fitting that 2,260 years later, a young smeet would chose the name Zim in honor of that innocent guard who gave everything up in service of the Empire.

But most people think its ironic.

Fanatic Drone N presents:

Rise of the Smallest