"In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes", a phrase my father used to say, took it from a movie he liked I think. I never really did like it, mostly because I had seen pleople dodging the second part of the statement and it made the first one look plausibly avoidable too.

Luckily, the world likes to prove people wrong every now and then and most of the people I've known to skip taxes got the warm metal taste of death's scythe on their throats.

Guess they got the lucky draw of the bunch, died their own good kind of deaths.

Mine, apparently, was going to be about the same as another several billion people, at around the same time too.

I vaguely remember the night of the event, I was just getting out of work, the air was cool and my head was hot. A long day and all I was thinking about was the cold beer with my name on it waiting at my place. My lazy and half hazed eyes were looking at the clear sky, not a single cloud in sight.

I remember wondering one thing or another about some stuff I'd have to do the next day, considering which would be the best way to get around doing it probably.

Then there was a flash of light, barely larger than my thumb, just inches above the horizon, one of the few stars in the sky suddenly became incredibly brighter and in what I'll forever consider one of my greatest moments of stupidity, I thought it to be a comet exploding in the atmosphere or some other shit that wasn't really of my concern.

After all, astronomy was never one of the subjects I was interested in and the small lightshow lasted about three seconds and could've been easily covered by my thumb.

The next day was… weird.

I kept hearing people talking about some big event that had happened last night, something about mars or some such. Didn't care much about it since I had that thing I really had to do. Don't even remember what it was.

It wasn't until that night that I turned the news on and saw that every news channel was talking about some big thing happening, apparently some sort of asteroid had hit mars really hard, thing was going way faster than anything ever recorded on our solar system and had packed enough of a punch to crack the red planet.

There were even images taken from several official and unofficial sources, showing how all of a sudden this shinning ball of light smacks against a side of the red ball like a bullet against a watermelon, the whole thing lights up and big chunks of rock or whatever start flying out the other end.

Apparently had that thing hit Earth we would've all be dead before we even realized what was going on.

Oh well, humanity adverted being hit by some flaming chunk of space-rocks and the robot population on mars became a multi-million dollar space-wreckage.

I remember doing a comment about NASA wasting good tax-payer money and went to look for something more interesting to watch.

A week later, by the time the stupid news about mars was starting to die out, my usual channel surfing was suddenly interrupted by the face of a president I didn't vote for but that I didn't particularly hate, though that might change if he made it a habit of putting his face on every single channel.

This night was one I wouldn't forget, it was a speech about ten minutes long, he explained how the news regarding mars had a continuation, how the past week had been spent checking and re-checking with anyone and everyone that had a telescope and basic understanding of math, physics, and astronomy, and that each and every one of them had come to the same conclusion: Mars was coming to Earth.

The impact had knocked the red planet out of its usual orbit and was on a direct crash-course with ours.

We had a year at best, though some areas would get hammered first by some of the faster traveling pieces of the red planet.

It didn't take long for people to start rioting after that. First it was just a few crazies off in big cities throwing moletoves at high profile buildings of politicle figures and celebrities they didn't like, then it was everywhere. People all over our doomed planet were saying 'fuck it, lets go raise hell'.

It makes me sick. Just because things are going to hell doesn't mean you have to go savage. I chose to retain my humanity, and go out with dignity.

I work for an agency, our original purpose was overseas military practices. We dealt in weapons and soldiers, making, buying, training, and selling. I was part of the soldiers division. Me and the others in my division researched information on different forms of combat, both armed and unarmed (there were separate divisions for tanks, planes, ships, and other vehicles). We studied the techniques, learned what worked and what didn't, then matched the methods to the soldiers based on the missions they went on.

I spent more time looking over lengthy descriptions of the pro's and con's of each method than I liked, but I enjoyed my work.

After the doomsday countdown started, the agency switched gears completely. Now instead of researching how to kill, we were researching how to save everyone. Ways to break up the coming pieces of Mars, ways to throw them off course, ways to relocate to a new planet. There were no weapons in our arsenal strong enough to do any real damage. The most we could hope to do was crack the biggest pieces in two or blow up the smaller ones and buy ourselves a couple extra hours before impact.

And jumping planets wouldn't work either. The biggest, fastest ship we could build in the time-frame would get maybe two percent of the population into space, and even then we'd only have enough supplies for about two decades, not nearly enough time to get to the closest habitual planet.

No matter what angle we looked at it from, we were boned.

But I still came into work everyday, sat down at my desk, and poured over all the information. I no longer believed we had a chance, this was just what I was doing to keep myself sane. If I had an objective, I didn't go mad. I stayed calm. I stuck to the route.

I planned to keep to this method until the last day. If I had the time table down right, it would hit shortly after I went to bed, and I wouldn't have to face the end of the world.

That's not how it worked out though.

I'd fallen asleep at my desk. That happened sometimes, guess its a side effect of knowing full well that what your doing has no point.

I was awoken by a stack of papers being dropped on my desk. "Your next assignment Damien."

I looked up at the man who'd given me 'my next assignment'. I didn't recognize him, but he wore a uniform from the relocation division. 'Guess they think they've found a way off the planet.' I thought, looking over the papers he'd given me.

Well, I hadn't been completely wrong.

As I read the assignment, it described the new dimensional displacement technology the Techies had been cooking up. We'd all known about the stuff, but it was useless in our situation. When they first told us they'd invented a way to move between parallel universes, we were all hyped, thinking it would save the day.

Then they explained that they could only send one person at a time. Only about five people a day. And had no way knowing where they were going or communicating with them once they were there. Frankly, I think they should have led with that instead of getting out hopes up.

At the time, the stuff had been impressive, but useless. But according to these papers, they'd found a way.

They techs found a way to teleport a large amount of people, in the billions, all at once. They could do it by essentially setting off an intentional power surge. Problem is, it would blow the whole thing hell after, so they only had one shot. That wouldn't be a problem, if they had a way of knowing where they'd be sending us.

That's where me, and about a hundred others from the various divisions on the agency, came in.

They'd developed a way to communicate with the people they sent away. That way, when they sent someone to another world, that person could research the world they'd been sent to and report back if it was a stabile environment for our population to move to. They put together these devices, they looked like cyberpunk anklets to me, that would let them lock on to someone in another world who was wearing it. All they had to do was send a bunch of people wearing the trackers, wait for one of them to report a stable area, then gather the people on our world together and blow the circuits.

For the first time since this whole things started, we actually had a plan.

I, and the other dimentional scouts as we were being called, were given all the supplies we needed. A standard supply of rations, the dimentional communicar, the tracker linking us to world prime, as well as a few weapons, a simple lightwieght kevlar armor, and a few specials. Air capsoles in case we wound up on a world with no air, gravity counter weights to keep us centered on worlds with more or less gravity than ours, etc.

I won't even pretend I wasn't anxious when we were sent out. I mean honestly, I was being sent to another world. And there was no telling if I'd die the moment I did. And the fate of the world was dependent on my success. No pressure.

I stepped up to the machine. We'd all taken to calling it The Rift. It looked like one of those old timey computers that took up a whole room.

None of us scouts could make sense of the thing, and a lot of us thought that the damn thing was just for show; a big prop that didn't even do anything outside of maybe giving people a little hope.

When the first guy essentially dematerialized on the podiem, we changed are tune real damn fast.

I wound up being the third scout sent. It had been easy to handle all of this when I didn't think it was actually real. But now, I was actually going to another dimension. One that could kill me the instant I stepped into it.

What if I got sent to a world that didn't have any planets and wound up floating through an empty void? What if I was sent to a world made of fire? What if none of us found a suitable world in time?

I shook my head, trying to clear it. Mars was litterally going to crash into Earth, I didn"t have any time to waste on paranoia; regarless of whether or not it was justified.

I stepped onto the podiem and braced myself. I was expected that maybe the trip would sting, maybe it woukd burn or feel like being eletricuted, maybe it would be a tingling sensation.

But it wasn't really anything. No sensations of any kind. One minute I was standing on the podiem in my world, the next I was on a glacier in another.

Quite awhile later

I'm gonna be honest, I don't even know how many worlds I'd been on. I think it's in the ball park of six or seven, but after the world with the metal people who had faces on their backs, I lost track. All I really knew is that I'd been at it about three months, and still no success. Every world proved either inhaspitable, or too hostile to deal with.

When I reached the newest world, I went through my normal ritual. First, I checked the air. I didn't kill over or start panting, so that was good. Next, signs of life. I could see grass, flowers, trees, and even a river in the distance. I'd need to run a test on the water, but overall things were seeming promising.

I took put my communicator to report the new world, but a message flashed telling me my communications had been cut off. This wasn't good. If I couldn't contact world prime, I was stranded here.

Then, before I could start working on a solution, one of the only things I can think off that's weirder than a tech fail happened.

I was attack by a girl. A naked girl with bunny ears.