Twenty thousand years ago, a sphere of Iron a kilometre in diameter fell into a star.

Surrounding this star lived a trillion humans on a ring shaped world made out of silica and graphite. It was not unlike the Ark, which surrounded Halcyon and it's companion star. It plummeted through the photosphere, onion skins of computational substrate, atoms thick, boiled away; processing an algorithm only this particular machine, at this particular star and at this particular moment, could solve. Smaller and hotter the machine became, feeding on the energy and chaos from within the tumultuous solar atmosphere. As the last layers of substrate evaporated, quantum fluctuations unseen since the beginning of time realigned one of the broken symmetries that defined the universe.

For a moment lasting less than a second, gravity no longer existed within the star ending 3 billion years of nuclear equilibrium. Fusion ceased as the escaping plasma created concurrent shockwaves that ripped apart the stars outer layers. Within minutes, spacial waves from the gravitationally absent star had traveled the radius of the ring-world fracturing it like a glass ribbon. Soon after, the habitat's atmospheres and oceans flash heated into iridescent plasma as its superstructure, worlds thick, evaporated in a super nova wind that outshone the combined brightness of the Milky Way. Few within the world survived, whilst many worlds far beyond the star became uninhabitable.

Wayok sat looking at the soon to be doomed sun. Fields of fern, moss and dense lichen covered a flat bed of loose rock and pebbles. Beyond it, the distant crashes of waves and the churn of the sea cycled with the breeze. This was his virtual diorama of the perfect burn. An hour of time transposed in near atomic detail, the star and it's sun spots, the ring world and it's continents. Oceans, mountains, forests, trees and leaves, for the most part, as they were twenty thousand years ago. He could explore every facet of every individuals existence within the star system, explore their thoughts and emotions or delve into their very own virtual constructs of equal complexity and become lost in worlds within worlds. Wayok had assembled it all. It started as an innocent, youthful fascination with the seminal moment of human history. He had mashed public records and hobbyist recreations together generating the broad strokes. Later, he began to stumble upon a growing number of revelations and departures from the canon. He had torn down Legends, seen myths disproven, or proven to have been so antithetical to the actual evidence, he had struggled to reconcile how those myths where born. He browsed or founded forums trading information anonymously, often with people engaged in similar projects. Ceaselessly, he had used every iota of acquired privilege and kleptomania to gather the information to simulate or reverse engineer this virtual world. He was offered with the opportunity of joining Arkaedian Sy-Op's, one for which he had nearly turned down, doubting his own ability to control such an obsession within an environment rich with classified information from that era. In the years since joining, Wayok often attempted periods of abstinence, avoiding his virtual construct for  months before, after gorging on new information from the archive, building entirely new installations or adding thousands of new people all at once. Often this information came with inconsistencies, ones that became harder to resolve as time went on. Even after the tens of thousands of subjective years Wayok had spent within the virtualities run-time, some areas did not have the resolution he desired - and best guesses or artistic licence were taken.

Here was one of these places, the blood red star hovering over the beaches horizon washed the sky in a lilac hue. The warm, languid, breeze carried some of the saltiness from the sea. He had thought about bringing someone here many times, someone close, someone he trusted or someone he thought would understand, but he had no one. Instead he had kept this a secret. As his personal stature increased, and his security clearance rose, he spent ever more time spent hiding his obsession in a way that had forced him to create a divergent personality. As Cellishi had noted, some of his behaviour had become harder to ignore. He had always been mindful of what pattern-heuristics would uncover but the simple observation that he had never been been to the Ark, a decision linked to his obsession, had reminded how difficult major oversights could be to avoid.  Lately, reality had begun to take the lions share of his attention. As he sat on the rocky beach that within an hour, would no longer exist again, he began to wonder which world was the distraction.