[ WP ] Jack is an apocalypse architect . He travels the galaxy to barren planets , pre-intelligent life , and makes subtle changes to ensure that when life evolves , the planet 's inhabitants ultimately meet an apocalyptic end .

It's lonely work, killing the future. Jack, an Apochitect of the 1st Rank of Doomhead, had an intimate familiarity with this fact. Seventeen systems lay behind him, each riddled with the traps of inescapable cataclysm, scentless timebombs triggered by sentience. He hoped the eighteenth would be his last. 
 
 Three planets in the Quamba Sysetm met the preruquistes for life. Which meant, of course, that each would inevitably come alive. The route to the first, classified as Q-71a in the briefing, had been long and sightless - fourteen lightyears through the outer-arm of the galaxy - and Jack was glad to feel the gravity of his destination, gladder when he felt the rock beneath his feet. 
 
 Oxygen atmosphere, water oceans, geological activity, a gentle star - Q-71a would be blooming soon. It was just a matter of time before some random atomic event sparked the revolution. Jack wondered, as he always did, what new form this particular revolution would take, which paths it would pursue through the darkness, which solutions it would find to survive. He saw the red rock fall away to planes of green and brown and blue, genetic bursts of legs and wings, the first wild hunt. He saw the dawn of sentience: tools and agriculature and then roads and villages, war and the formation of states, the development of technology and industry and the bright eyes of wonder searching the stars. He saw the light go out of those eyes when they happened upon the work of Jack, Apochitect of the 1st Rank of Doomhead. 
 
 Lonely, lonely work. 
 
 The Hegemony had their reasons, some good and some bad, but he did n't care much about why they did it. He did his job quietly and took the pay. Today's job, the beginning of his last job, was Q-71a. 
 
 *** 
 
 The planet was cool and the mild weather suited his taste. He was accutely aware of the contrast between the jeans and T-shirt that he wore and the doom that he carried with him. The doom was in a box with a handle that he carried in one hand. The contents were of his own devising, a professional secret he'd kept to himself, keeping it even from others in the trade. 
 
 *A conversation, from a long-ago pit-stop in the Nova System ( or had it been nearer to home? ) *: 
 
 *How did you knock out the Quaro System so fast? I heard you laced seven rocks with doom before the Alpha Moon made its turn. * 
 
 *Just got lucky. Smooth terrain. * 
 
 *Come on, man. I know you got a secret. I'm barely hanging on to 3rd rank here. I'm desperate. It took me two turns just to get the volcanoes on R-42e rigged for doom. They're gon na take my license. Our skills are n't exactly marketable, you know. * 
 
 *You're wasting your time with volcanoes. * 
 
 *Do n't I know it. * 
 
 *You're lighting the wrong fire. * 
 
 *What the hell does that mean? * 
 
 *It means you're lighting the wrong fire. * 
 
 Maybe it was the smoke rising over the horizon of Q-71a that made him think of it. Maybe knowing that this was his last doom was making him nostalgic. He smiled thinking about that dumb anxious kid, got up in the Hegemony colors, toiling by the book and coveting disasters. The contents of the box rattled as he walked. 
 
 *** 
 
 He had been a floundering Apochitect of the 2nd Rank when he discovered the fire. It happened in transit between dooms as he streamed a live holocast of a Professor he'd admired while attending the University at Sigma. Professor Day had always been fond of teasing his students with a singular riddle, the answer to which he never admitted. He told it again on the holocast. 
 
 *There are two fires in this universe that, once they are ablaze they can not be extinguished - unless they extinguish themselves. One of them is time, the other one its keeper. * 
 
 When Jack hit upon the answer, solitary in the cabin of his cruiser, profoundly alone in the space between points of light, he did something he'd never done before. He laughed. He really laughed, deep hars and hoots that started in his belly and scraped his throat. He laughed until tears came, and they blurred his vision as he looked out into the void at all those vulnerable pricks in time. Before the Alpha Moon turned thrice he was of the 1st Rank of Doomhead. 
 
 *** 
 
 It did n't take him long to find a suitable place to dump the box. In actuality this was all completely unnecessary, and he might have simply thrown the box out of the cruiser's window without ever touching the ground. Billions of years would pass before understanding eyes looked upon it, billions of years of continental upheaval. Its initial placement was irrelevant. But something about the flipancy of such a delivery revolted him, and he figured these walks along the surface were his version of paying respects. Yet, as respectful as intentions might have been, the clanking of the box as it tumbled down the ravine made echoes in his conscience. These were, after all worlds, and he doomed them for a paycheck from the Hegemony. 
 
 The box tucked safely in the planets jaws, he return to the cruiser and set a course for Q-71b. Eight light years and three days out. He'd be finished with the Quamba system, and with it the Doomhead, in less than a week. 
 
 *** 
 
 Something shook the cruiser, violent and sudden. Jack rattled in his sleeping restraints. Panicked and sleep-dumb fingers unbuckled them and he was thrown hard against the side of the ship. A flash of light and the metal straining against pressure. Red bulbs of emergency and malfunction. Another flash. Then a jolt and a compression that left no air in his lungs. The sadness of dying alone so near the end. 
 
 Then stillness. Jack collected himself and checked the instruments. There was damage but nothing catastrophic. He was apparently still on course. Not trusting the readouts he looked out the window with his own eyes and for just a moment saw a white rip through darkness and the shuddering strangeness behind it. A blink and it was never there. 
 
 *** 
 
 Q-71b and Q-71c both accepted their doom without a fight. For the last time, Jack punched in the coordinates for home. 
 
 *** 
 
 Many years later, as Jack sipped black coffee through dying teeth, the news came across his feed. A mysterious box unearthed in the Hegemony's capitol, estimated by carbon dating to be at least three billion years old. He thought of the rip in the darkness and the old professor's riddle, and for the second time in his life, he laughed. 
 
 
 

