For the five thousand, two hundred and twelve souls aboard the 'Serenity of the Seas', it was just another idyllic Tuesday. The sun was a warm, golden promise in a cloudless sky, the sea a vast, glittering expanse of turquoise and sapphire. On the lido deck, children splashed in the pool, their laughter a bright, tinkling counterpoint to the gentle strains of a live steel drum band. Couples lounged on deck chairs, their skin slick with coconut-scented sunscreen, sipping on colorful, umbrella-adorned cocktails. It was a floating paradise, a hermetically sealed bubble of leisure and blissful ignorance, a world away from the grit and grime of ordinary life.
Linda Mae Thompson, a retired schoolteacher from Ohio on her first-ever cruise, was trying to frame the perfect picture of a dolphin leaping alongside the ship. "Oh, just look at that, Harold," she said, her voice filled with a childlike wonder. "Isn't he just the cutest thing?" Harold grunted from behind his paperback novel, not looking up.
That's when the world ended.
It began not with a sound, but with a sight so impossible, so utterly alien, that Linda Mae's brain simply refused to process it for a full two seconds. A silver and blue… thing, sleek and metallic and moving with a speed that defied belief, shot past the ship. It wasn't a plane. It wasn't a helicopter. It was a giant, man-shaped machine, a robot from a movie, and it was chasing a… a monster. A black, winged creature with horns and a lashing tail, a literal demon torn from the pages of a medieval manuscript.
Linda Mae's phone slipped from her fingers, clattering to the deck. The steel drum band faltered, a discordant clang hanging in the suddenly silent air. All around the lido deck, a collective gasp was sucked from five hundred lungs at once. Drinks were dropped. Books were forgotten. A thousand cell phones were raised, their lenses desperately trying to capture the impossible battle raging in the sky above them.
"Harold," Linda Mae whispered, her voice a reedy, trembling thing. "Harold, look."
He looked. And the paperback novel slipped from his grasp.
The demon dodged and weaved, a frantic, desperate dance against the relentless, silent pursuit of the machine. The sky, which had been a placid blue, was now scarred with the smoky white contrails of tiny missiles exploding in concussive bursts. The passengers flinched at each distant BOOM, their vacation reverie shattered, replaced by a raw, primal fear.
Then, the machine stopped its chase. It hovered in the air, a silent, silver god, and something in its arm began to glow. A star, impossibly bright, was being born in the middle of the afternoon.
"It's going to shoot!" someone screamed.
And then the demon did something that would be seared into the nightmares of every soul on that ship for the rest of their lives. It turned to face them. It spread its hands, and a swirling, chaotic vortex of black and red energy, a miniature black hole of pure, concentrated malice, formed between its palms. And it spoke.
Its voice was not a sound that traveled through the air. It was a psychic assault, a wave of pure terror that washed over the ship, bypassing the ears and drilling directly into the primitive, reptilian core of their brains. It was the sound of a billion years of suffering, the promise of an eternity of pain.
"STOP! OR THESE SOULS ARE MINE!"
The passengers screamed. They didn't just scream; they shrieked, a collective, animalistic sound of pure, abject terror. Linda Mae collapsed, her legs giving out from under her, and curled into a fetal position on the deck, her hands clamped over her ears as if she could block out the voice that was already inside her head. Harold, a man who had stormed the beaches of Normandy, felt his bladder let go, a warm, shameful wetness spreading across his linen shorts. The children on the deck were silent, their faces frozen in masks of catatonic horror.
Then, a new voice entered the psychic battlefield. It was not a sound of terror, but of calm, resonant authority. It emanated not from the demon, but from the machine.
"Let them go," the machine said, its voice a synthesized, powerful baritone. "This is between you and me."
The demon laughed, a sound that grated on the soul. "They are the disease! And I am the cure!"
"What do you want?" the machine asked.
The passengers, who were now huddled together in terrified clumps, their cell phones still, unbelievably, recording, held their breath. They were pawns in a cosmic chess game they could not comprehend, their lives hanging on the words of a robot and a demon.
"You will let me go," the demon declared, a note of triumphant, evil glee in its psychic voice. "You will not follow. Or they will all burn."
A terrible, eternal silence stretched over the lido deck. They were going to die. The machine, this hero, would have to sacrifice them. It was the only logical choice.
But then, the hero spoke one last time. Its voice was not angry, not sad, just filled with a profound, weary weight.
"Go."
The passengers watched as the sphere of dark energy in the demon's hands dissipated. They watched as the creature, with one last, contemptuous glance in their direction, turned and flew away, a black speck disappearing into the vast, indifferent sky.
The machine hovered for a moment longer, a silent, silver guardian angel. And then it spoke again, its voice no longer a booming, psychic command, but a soft, human whisper that seemed to emanate from the phone of every person on that deck. It was the voice of Elliot Hayes, though they did not know his name. It was simply the voice of their savior.
"You are safe now," the voice whispered. "It's over."
And then, with a silent flash of its jets, the machine shot up into the sky and vanished, leaving behind only a stunned, weeping, and inexplicably grateful shipload of tourists, their lives forever changed by the ten minutes they had spent as hostages in a war between a devil and a god from the machine. Their camera footage would break the internet, but it would never capture the true terror, or the profound, unbelievable relief, of that moment. They had looked into the abyss, and a hero had refused to let them fall.