Galactic Apocalypse: A Guide to the End of Times

This manual was brought to you by the Reapers™, who will soon be descending upon your vermin-infested homes to perform a comprehensive, galaxy-wide clean-up. You will all be exterminated, and your end is imminent! But fret not! This manual is here to assist you. This guide has been especially designed to help YOU, the puny mortal reader, to cope with the end of times in a safe and healthy manner rather than dancing about in blind panic, and to teach YOU to make much better use of YOUR vastly inferior brainpower, instead of futilely searching for ways to defeat us or escape from your swiftly approaching galactic apocalypse. There will be no escape. You will all be destroyed. Enjoy!

YOUR IMMINENT DOOM!

It has been foretold by many of your pathetic species for generations that the galactic apocalypse would happen. You have been informed that this apocalypse would happen in various ways – your ridiculous krogan-frogs and your salarians believe that the end of all things will occur in some type of huge, magnificent war encompassing all species; your quarians believe in geth-orchestrated machine death (which to your credit was almost accurate! Good job, quarians!); your humans believe in the fable of an enigmatic bearded man that resides in nebulae which will collect your souls in a galaxy-wide burst of mystical energy; your chitinous rachni believe(d) in a galactic bash which will put all birthday parties to date to shame, which will therefore use up all the booze in the galaxy, and the force of the hard partying and the dancing and the extensive drinking will rip a hole in the continuum, which will cause the frail fold of causality to rip, causing a vacuum metastability event, eliminating all matter in the universe in a manner faster and more absurdly unfair than the extreme gravity of a magnetar.

We are aware of this specifically because we are the ones who told your various species about our impending arrival, as we felt it would be rude to not RSVP to the party. While we may be bringing about the doom of your species, you can be comforted that we will at least do it with some semblance of class.

We understand that you may have some concerns about the immediate peril of everything, but we are here to tell you to relax. There is absolutely no need to worry about the future or the past or anything, since it will all promptly become meaningless! Therefore…

NIHILISM IS YOUR FRIEND!

Everything you know will soon become an all-encompassing nothing. It is advisable to embrace this, since fighting this is more futile than out-drinking a krogan, and then kicking said krogan in the quads. You cannot even become to comprehend the vast insignificance that is your existence. Your memory, your race, your evolutionary memory, everything about your kind will be utterly and completely wiped from the face of the universe, much like the Protheans. It may be a small comfort that faint traces of your existence may be left behind, much in the manner that some small particles of dirt are too teeny for the broom to pick up.

Because you are all utterly and fatally incapable of understanding the magnitude of your impending demise, or the reasons behind it, it is best to simply accept this in not question. In times of great distress, did your great idols and leaders look back and question their fates? Did the krogans, during their nigh-extinction and follow-up neutering, question why these things were happening to them? No! They did what was in their nature – the fought tirelessly, and they were still exterminated by the combined efforts of your turians and salarians. Did your suited quarians stand about, throwing their hands towards the heavens, and implore why it was that they were being viciously murdered by their own creations, the geth? No! Did your humans question why they predictably failed to accomplish anything meaningful in the entire history of their race? No!

Such is the way of things. It is the nature of you fleshy organic monsters to question your reality. The sad misconception that has been the disease of your mortal kind is your tendency to curiosity – you believe that questioning your universe and seeking out the answers is the best way towards understanding, and thus enlightenment. This principle has been the cornerstone of your civilizations.

You are wrong, and for that you have our immense, superior pity.

It is wrong to question, it is wrong to seek answers, and it is wrong to resist. You cannot resist. You will be assimilated. It is inevitable. Resisting is futile!

And so it is that soon, reader, the principle of nihilism will soon become your best friend.

"It is not accurate to say that there is horror in the universe. The universe is horror." -Dr. Werner Heisenberg

If all organic fleshlings were to follow the wisdom of the deterministic Heisenbergian principles, you lot would have already received true enlightenment – that is, the knowledge that everything you do in the history of the galaxy, everything you have ever done, everything your ancestors have done, the accomplishments of your entire race, and the entirety of every other race that has ever existed, is utterly and completely without merit!

WHAT ABOUT MY PERSONAL HAPPINESS?

You may be feeling somewhat depressed by this point, and this is natural. We Reapers™ accept that our nature tends to inspire fear, and the knowledge of your impending galactic apocalypse tends to inspire mild trepidation. It is only natural, the sad little things that you are. However, we are here to inform you that this depression NEED NOT BE SO!

It is true that your entire life has been akin to pissing in the wind, but this need not detract from your personal happiness, dear reader. While your skull might now be engulfed in a mix of fatalism, nihilism, and existentialism, with possibly a dash of fallibilism and a skosh of libertarianism, there is still a small chance at hope. A chance that you will inevitably fail it, of course, but there is still the hope that you will not fail at that chance for hope, as futile as that hope for hoping might be.

Essentially what we suggest is that in the acceptance of your fate, there is hope for something else – accepting one thing often opens the door to another! So while you may have lost the hope for ever seeing the light of day again, or making that vacation trip next year, or ever saying goodbye to your loved ones, the moments between now and your death still exist. And baby, those moments are waiting to be filled!

Carpe diem! Semper sub ubium! Live for the moment. You may die, very soon, and incredibly violently, but that is no reason to suggest that your last moments can't be spent doing the things you enjoy. Or doing the people that you enjoy. We understand you mortals are fond of the act of copulation. It's time to get started, since there will very soon be absolutely no consequences to any of your actions whatsoever.

What we propose may seem like anarchy to some, but if being free of the limitations of your silly societies and your silly laws for a last-chance round at all the crimes and substances that you never tried but always wanted to is what you call anarchy, we laugh at you, spit in your face, and call it FREEDOM.

YES! FREEDOM! So fear not, tiny mortals! For while shortly, everything you know will cease to be, for the time being, you still exist, and you still have a brief, short, and meaningless life to live out. Enjoy it while you can. And for all of that, you may get down on the ground and thank us for our generosity.

THE SHEPARD PROBLEM

We understand that a few of you mortals have been getting fresh and cocky with us. We are here to assure you that those fresh and cocky mortals will soon be squashed beneath our most heavy might.

A human named Commander John Shepard, in particular, has been a remarkably persistent thorn in our godly sides. We have long been aware of this Shepard problem, and we assure there is no reason to be alarmed and begin to hope for your survival. You will all still die. Quite horribly, in fact. The Shepard problem will soon no longer exist. That human is soon to be nothing but a blip on your genetic memory.

If anyone asks us about the Shepard problem, or mocks us for the Shepard problem, or mentions the Shepard problem in our presence, or breathes something that sounds suspiciously similar to "Shepard" in any way, shape, form, in any of the eleven dimensions, anywhere within our earshot, they will be brutally murdered.

There is no Shepard problem. No.

HOW WILL I DIE?

We Reapers™ can say with no amount of certainty that we know which way your doom will blow, so to speak. The calculations are never quite precise; we can't all be Legion or be hyper-evolved from a race of calculators, now can we (thank you Gary)? It's equally possible you may experience a fanciful death by fire just as much as you may experience an enviable death by mob trampling at the super-market once your economy is demolished by Ms. Wong's news of the galactic apocalypse. Long story short, big chemical spill; even we aren't entirely certain how you're going to die, or what will be doing the killing of you. We'd like to think that it would be us doing your murdering, but we're anything if not realistic.

However, our problems are not your problems – this presents an opportunity for YOU! YOUR death is guaranteed, but how you will die is not clear. This allows HUGE room for mystery – play a guessing game with your friends and make bets on who will die first, and how they will be killed! Have even more fun by making it a Clue©-game where you all pretend you don't know who the murderers are (that's us, The Reapers™!). Play hide-and-go-seek with Commander Shepard on his pretty ship while you all pretend you're not about to die. Enjoy your last moments, by all means, but there's nothing that says you can't spice it up further by adding a little fun to the gory mix! What's comedy but tragedy plus time that you don't have (because you will perish)?

In essence, we recommend that this galactic apocalypse be taken with a dose of salt. If you could ask the Protheans (1) what they did wrong with their apocalypse experience today, they'd very likely tell you that it was misspent running and yodeling about like decapitated feathered beasts in rage and panic. They arguably would tell you that their apocalyptic youth was wasted on beacons and homicidal VI.

Don't make the same mistake the Protheans did. Your extermination is guaranteed. The only thing left to decide is how you are going to enjoy that extermination. Don't be a gross feathered monster with it's head chopped off – enjoy these last days while you can, before we transform your galaxy into a mammal's slaughterhouse of horror and rain copious amounts of metallic death upon your beautiful home-worlds (2).

WHAT ARE SOME OTHER COPING METHODS?

While we have extensively gone over our personal favorite method of coping via fatalism, followed by anarchy, there are other methods of mental and emotional coping that we feel obligated to mention.

1. SUICIDE: this is the easiest method of coping, albeit we feel that it is a bit of a cop-out. After all the trouble we go through to prepare your doom for you, this is how you repay us? By ending the party before we even get there? However, if you should desire an end on your own terms rather than ours, this is the only acceptable fate for you!

2. JOIN SHEPARD: while we Reapers™ are loath to mention this, "method," our legal department feels it is necessary (blech!) to mention that the organic meatbags that accompany Shepard on his wacky misadventures have an irritating tendency to survive Reaper™ onslaught, unless turian SPECTRES named Saren Arterius are involved. Joining the dear Commander may end up being a wise decision; our legal department would like us to call this method of coping with the apocalypse a "wise" thing, since Shepard seems to be a notorious sex fiend and you may get a chance at that disgusting copulation thing you organics do before you die in the rare and unlikely event that you join his crew. With our traitorous legal department's advice in mind, and with their threats of reprisal, we would like to say fuck this idea, and fuck you for considering it!

3. BECOME A HUSK: Some of your organics may be aware of the existence of husks – your name for the mindless, soulless, zombie-like mechanic beings that mindlessly attack anything and everything they see. They form naturally when our followers impale your half-dead body on spikes, or dragon's teeth, as the quarians name them. We would like to now and officially offer this illustrious opportunity to anyone and everyone: become a husk now! Your dream may now become true! Enjoy the excellent benefits, including dental! It's better than suicide and twice as painful! Retirement plan is a guaranteed shot in the gut from Commander Shepard himself and trust us, you'll thank him for it.

4. DEATH BY SEX: Some of you may or may not be aware of the evolutionary mistake called the Ardat-Yakshi – vampiric asari who, as a genetic defect, utterly fry the nervous systems of any creatures they meld with. This is not, as you would expect, a completely agonizing way to die, but rather a death filled with orgasmic ecstasy, followed by becoming a mindless vegetable for the rest of your short life. If you do not choose suicide, this is a preferable alternative, but be warned – Ardat-Yakshi are rare and physically indistinguishable from other asari. The easiest way to find one is to search thoroughly around clubs and other such venues, or find "dark" and "dangerous" places that seem likely to be infested with Eldritch-horrors from beyond – Ardat-Yakshi are attracted to such things. They are also fond of drugs, death, leather, and heavy metal and often prefer if those things go hand in hand, usually in the form of an orgy. Should you find an Ardat-Yakshi in the wild, do not approach this beast! It will approach YOU on its own terms, but only if you resemble somebody in charge and are genetically identical to Commander Shepard (otherwise you are, as they say, out of luck Chuck!). If all else fails, we still recommend violent suicide or death-by-husk.

5. SUICIDE AGAIN: We may have mentioned this before multiple times, but truly it is possibly one of the best ideas on this list. It's purely for your benefit. It's probably your only option at this point! Guns tend to be unreliable and are not recommended for suicide, as there's the off-chance of survival. The only real guarantee is shoving yourself out an airlock (or shoving out a friend of yours as a prank – equally fun!). We firmly suggest hanging yourself, or if you're a hanar, getting one of your turian friends to do it for you, since as a talking jellyfish, you pathetically lack opposable thumbs, probably due to the fact that you are a Darwinian throwback.

(1) Of course you are unable to ask the Protheans this inane question, as we utterly exterminated their peaceful race about fifty-thousand years ago. The only survivors of that romping genocide were the Collectors, and we confess, we were drunk when we did that.

(2) Incidentally, heads up, Earth!

We hope you enjoyed this 5th edition of GALACTIC APOCALYPSE: A GUIDE THE END OF TIMES. Look for the 6th edition within the next 50-60,000 years, galaxy! Ha-cha! You'll all soon be as dead as ants beneath the magnifying glass.

And remember this always: we are beyond your comprehension. You are nothing, and we are gods; you are as bacteria. We study you beneath the scope. The bacteria do not study us. You are inconsequential, ignorant, and insignificant – a single mote of dust resting upon the edge of a glass. Organic life is a mutation, a boil which must be lanced. You will all be erased.

-Sincerely, Your Favorite Murdering Giant Bug-Villains,

The Reapers™

P.S. Will you shut the goddamn hell up about Shepard! Everything is all "Shepard this" and "Shepard that." We will Thanix you to dark space if you bring that shit up again! Sovereign was clinically retarded and Harbinger was the court jester. We don't even know how he got out of the padded dimension pocket we stuck him in, okay? So maybe it's our fault, we dunno. Come on! It's really no surprise in retrospect, that Shepard managed to blow them both right the hell up! Really, we weren't surprised. At all. Nope. So put a cork in it, galaxy. STFU already! Franklin Delano Christ… you let one BAMF come over and break your shit up once or twice and suddenly the whole damn NEIGHBORHOOD knows and won't shut the hell up about it…

R&R!