Story

### LAZARUS

It’s the far future and due to reasons that will hopefully become clear with time, the universe is continually playing out its final seven days. The climactic struggle between humans and a vicious alien race is stuck in a ceaseless loop. This is where you come in.

##### THE BEGINNING OF THE END

Here’s how it happened. Everything seemed to be going well. Mankind had expanded into the stars and was beginning to prosper. Interstellar travel became the norm, nice planets were colonised, and all kinds of wonderful technology came into being. We still suffered from the occasional bit of human infighting, but nothing was really getting in the way of everyone having a grand old time…right up to the point where we met the neighbours.

The neighbours, who we eventually dubbed the Apophis, are nasty, mean, genocidal, vicious, unpredictable aliens, unwilling or unable to communicate with us. They are ugly too. Far more worryingly, they began winning every single fight. They started nearly all of them, but even the ones they didn’t, they invariably finished. It would have been impressive if it hadn’t threatened our very existence.

* A Robogpug floating in space unit after a catastrophic incident.

##### A STRANGE DISCOVERY

Our best & brightest minds were summoned and given the task of building a fighting force that could stand up to this seemingly unbeatable menace. After a few failed attempts, and some near misses, they came up with the ‘Scheherazade System’. By combining some ancient tech created by a long dead race, they stumbled across a new material that even our military boffins could not fully comprehend. We were desperate enough not to ask too many questions...

The new material was light, incredibly tough, and seemed to enhance everything and anything it was applied to. Our teams soon ramped up production and began deploying the Scheherazade tech on the battlefield.

As a basic technology, it allowed us to build (amongst other things) a small but capable fleet of craft, including the famous SR-15, an incredibly nimble fighter craft that could go toe to toe with anything the aliens threw at us. The problem was that the kinds of people who could pilot these wonder-craft were always few and far between.

* An SH-15 approaching an anomalous Xenotaph in deep space.

##### THE END OF THE BEGINNING

Then the unthinkable happened - the Apophis brought their most horrendous weapon to bear. A device that, when triggered, destroyed the known universe. We tried our best to stop it. We threw everything we had at it. We never stood a chance.

But even though we failed, something unprecedented happened - one famous pilot got within a rat’s whisker of destroying the weapon at the moment it fired! And here we come to the killer question.

How can I be telling you this story, if the whole universe died?

Well, unbeknownst to us, that last pilot - a girl whose real name has been lost in the mists of time, along with everything else - had made an accidental discovery at her moment of death: the alien-enhanced material we’d been using was more than we ever imagined. It was alive, and it was the Ourobean race itself!

Then it all made sense. We hadn’t really been applying the tech we’d found. It had, in fact, awoken and decided to become co-operative! We had accidentally wrought a symbiotic alliance with an ancient race, a super evolved colony-creature comprised of what amounts to transdimensional nanomachines (trust me). They exist both inside and outside of the flow of time, and right before the universe got blown up, they must have used their powers to reset everything to seven days earlier.

We’ve been calling this weekly ‘hard reset’ the Lazarus Event ever since.

* An SH-15 in combat with three Drone fighters.

##### THE BIG RED RESET BUTTON

So even though the universe had just ended, everything returned to how it was seven days before, well, except for a few things: the famous pilot was still missing, and we were somehow aware of what had happened.

It wasn’t much of an advantage, but for the first time we had the chance to learn, adapt and try to stop the Apophis again.

* Will we ever see Ki again?

##### THE END BEGINS AGAIN (AND AGAIN)

Hundreds of years of repeated conflict have now passed since the first Lazarus Event. Sometimes we used our seven days to edge close to victory, other times we were beaten even more miserably than before. But with every retread, the collective desire to win seemed to wane until finally we have stopped working together properly.

Humanity is in fragments now. Some people seem to have way too much fun in the seven day killing sprees that now occur and live only for combat. Others just want to spend the time exploring. But there are still those who stick together and keep trying for whatever reasons, united by a common cause.

So all that remains to say is - which of these are you? Welcome to Lazarus.