[ 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 .

*Stop, would you kindly? * 
 
 A sudden compulsion to obey. 
 
 *'Would you kindly'... Powerful phrase. * 
 
 *Familiar phrase? * 
 
 A sudden rush of images. A plane. A crash. A city. 
 
 *Sit, would you kindly? * 
 
 Again, the compulsion. Jack sat, as would a pet dog. 
 
 *Stand, would you kindly? * 
 
 Jack stood, entranced, involuntarily obeying the orders. 
 
 *Run! Stop! Turn. * 
 
 Jack obeyed once more. 
 
 *A man chooses, a slave obeys. * 
 
 The man handed Jack his golf club. 
 
 *Kill! * 
 
 Jack was compelled to obey. A moment later, the man lay, bloodied, on the floor, with a bent golf club in his skull. 
 
 ***** 
 
 It had been years since that day. Jack had been compelled to hand over control of the city to another man, one who named himself after a Titan who held the sky away from the Earth, but one who Jack recalled, excessive familiarity, by the name `` Frank''. 
 
 Brigid had erased the power that simple phrase, `` Would You Kindly'', had over his mind, so Frank's attempt to use it to order him to kill himself failed. The erasure also covered the order to kill, which had been poorly phrased enough to continue after the man's final order had been completed, but only temporarily. Jack had carried on, saving a few young girls from the horrors of the city. The men and women who remained in the city were left in horror. They had been promised a Rapture, but they had received quite the opposite. 
 
 Jack raised those girls as his own daughters. None had any families, but they became one. The girls became women, and they all joined together on Jack's deathbed to comfort him as he went. 
 
 But such was not his fate. As an embryo, they had rewritten huge tracts of his genetic code, stopping just short of erasing the required sequences for the city to recognize him as his father's son, and those changes had greatly impacted his biology. Here, the ultimate change suddenly arrived. 
 
 Jack awoke in the morgue, confused. 
 
 *Did n't I just die? *, he thought 
 
 A use of a little trick he picked up in the city shifted the cabinet out of place, allowing him to sit up. 
 
 *The girls... They were there. * 
 
 Jack had died before, being revived by the machinery of the city, but this was different. The morgue cabinet was not one of those chambers, and they only worked on traumatic deaths anyway, and Jack had just died of old age. 
 
 He looked at his hands. The chain tattoos on his wrists had returned, as if springing back from their sag. 
 
 For a moment, he entertained the idea that the girls had found a way to install one of the chambers in the hospital, and had killed him to give him a new lease on life. Watching the girls through the window, sobbing at the loss of the closest thing they had to a father, he knew that was n't the case. 
 
 He slid into a standing position, and moved to greet them, then stopped. He suddenly felt something. Something he had n't felt since... 
 
 He fought it. He struggled, and stepped towards them. 
 
 *Stop. Code Yellow.. Please*, he said, hoping to stop it. 
 
 They were gone, and the urge subsided. But Jack was left wondering. 
 
 He found a mirror, and looked into it, studying a face he had n't seen in so long. It was as if he had been reset to his activation. 
 
 And that's exactly what worried him. 
 
 He looked into the mirror, gazing into his own eyes. With a deep breath, he uttered the words. 
 
 *Sleep, would you kindly. * 
 
 Nothing. At least that was n't back. It was n't a common phrase, but the possibility for accidents was worrying. 
 
 He found a toolkit. He grabbed a pipe wrench, and swung it a few times. Experience had taught him that it might come in handy in a variety of situations. 
 
 As he turned, he saw something out of the corner of his eye. 
 
 ***** 
 
 Ever since that day, when Jack awoke in the hospital, he had worked with the Founder. He did n't know anything about the Founder, and he only saw him in pictures after that. The Founder had `` tweaked'' Jack's conditioning, made it smarter, and ensured that the same mechanism that resurrected him after the first time he died of old age would continue throughout billions of years. Jack had free will for bursts while it was dormant, but every once in a while it took over. It now fit in perfectly with his new job: Apocalypse architect. Ensuring the eventual end of life on hundreds of developing worlds also ensured that he killed more than any other human being ever had. Would You Kindly. Those three words, and their influence, had escaped the city, the Earth, and even the Milky Way. 
 
 On one world, Jack embedded a uranium trigger in several places in the planet's core. The triggers, when they underwent artificial fission, would trigger a sizable mechanism in the planet's core to bring several subcritical masses of an even more potent fissile material ( provided by the Founder explicitly to last long enough ), which would be compressed by the planet's gravity and contained by massive pressures until the planet's surface was fragmented by the weapon. The radiation alone would end surface life, and the wholesale destruction of the planet would seal the deal. 
 
 Surely enough, it happened. It felt like yesterday, but it had actually been twelve hundred years. A small conflict became global, and theoretical energy by fission release became weaponized. One bomb hit a trigger at a near enough range to force the pieces to come together. The planet was already well along its way to becoming an asteroid belt. 
 
 Today, Jack implanted another planet. But this time, he had enough. No chamber was left to resurrect him since the Sun's death, and finally he had a chance to kill history's biggest killer. He implanted genetic samples, unknown to the Founder. And he waited. One last apocalypse. It was the only way, to kill, and to end the killing. 
 
 Life developed. The genetic sample lead to a very rapid rise of life, and human-like life only took a few hundred million years. To the Founder, it was as a blink of an eye. There was plenty of time before Jack was due on another world, and the Founder knew nothing of the accelerated development tonic Jack had spliced into the sample. The planet should still be barren, with what the Founder thought to be a blight still dormant. 
 
 Jack died and rose again. This time was his last. The new wave of human-like life had developed a new technology - the antimatter reactor - and deployed it around the world. The fatal mistake, one which Jack had created in the guise of a `` Doctor Tenenbaum'', in honor of an old friend, was that all were dependent on a single control system, which all ran through a single circuit, for containment. The region of space where they lived was rampant with drifts of antimatter - and it was profitable to go mine them. Only a few ships needed to be out at a time, but it was finally here - The antimatter reactors were common enough to end all life, and all ships were home for a period of dangerously high concentrations of nearby particulate matter. It would n't take many impacts with the high velocity wanderers to destroy a ship, and stores on planet were large enough to last. 
 
 Jack made his way into the control facility. Sneaking through a series of vulnerabilities he had introduced, ones he had taught society to pass over during thousands of years of advancement, he arrived at the critical circuit. 
 
 Jack carefully, and quietly, removed the shielding. Security was scrambling to get to him, but the only way in that they knew of was through hundreds of blast doors, installed to prevent exactly what Jack was about to do. 
 
 The shielding was gone. The circuit that kept the planet hosting life was vulnerable. 
 
 Security was only ten doors away, now nine. 
 
 It did n't matter. Jack pulled out his trusty wrench, that he had kept since the hospital. He had n't used it as much as he hoped, but he remained very fond of it. 
 
 Eight doors. Jack raised the wrench. 
 
 Under his breath, Jack murmured to himself. 
 
 *End it, Would You Kindly* 
 
 Jack chuckled, and spent a moment reflecting on his life. He thought of his girls, and he wondered if they had lived good lives. He wondered if they had children, if any of their descendants still survived. Humanity was one of the only space faring life forms left, although Jack had never been allowed near their Empire. Indeed, Humanity did the job for him. 
 
 Suddenly, the last security door slid open. Jack heard them yell: 
 
 ***Freeze! Away from the machine!! *** 
 
 No bother. He had been shot before, many times. He barely felt the first shot. He was too focused, the imprinting had taken over. 
 
 Jack brought the wrench down. The panel sparked, and failed. World containment began to destabilize. Jack knew they all had only a few seconds. 
 
 The security officers screamed in horror. Jack paid them no attention. He waited for the flash, knowing a life stretched many times too long had ended.
