Human
Time has gone on and on, empires rising and falling, I’ve discovered new galaxies and even new dimensions in my travels and accumulations of advanced alien technology. I was essentially a god by all rights, already unable to die thanks to my cursed bond with the fucking Snail. I had no fear though, for now, I was technologically advanced enough with my cybernetic implants to stay out of its way forever, or so I thought.
In the last seconds before the snail touched me and ended this game, I rehashed my billions of years of life and smiled. It had all been worth it. The wretched thing had finally cornered me by using my own curiosity to draw me in.
It had done as I had, existing as a near god wandering the multiverse searching for me, it’s one calling. It knew that it couldn’t reach me without making me aware of its presence, so it could never touch me without me allowing it thanks to the power of teleportation, force fields and an army of advanced robots.
I thought myself invincible until a message arrived while I was relaxing in my luxurious vessel, eating an old time Earth mango and relishing the flavor, they were very rare lately. The Snail.. had been captured.
Could it be true? Several million years ago, I had started a religion that focused on the capture of the one true snail, in order to find a way to kill it and ensure my future.
I was traveling towards the origin of our eternal battle, Earth.
Nothing but a wasted rock now, but that is where our monitors had picked up and automatically sprang the forcefield trap I had set up eons ago in case the Snail had been dumb enough to come back. Yet, he had. My ship blasted past light speed and came to a gradual slowdown as I approached the dead hulking mass that was once my childhood home.
The Snail was sitting in the center of a blue field of light on the ground's surface, expressionless, just as I had remembered him. As the ship's tractor beam lowered my droid guards and I down to the barrier, I smiled. I had finally got the son of a bitch.
As I leaned down to say some snappy closer before he was put into a mobile hold and taken to my prison lab, my heightened sense of hearing kicked off a warning. The motors were whining inside my droids behind me, I could hear in slow motion the gears powering up. My computerized mind ran through the possibilities of what the threats could be before I had even turned around.
As I began to understand what had happened, time began to slow to a crawl, it was one of my abilities. I had an experimental implant several hundred years ago placed inside me that allowed my mind to operate thousands of times ahead of real time.
My body, however, couldn’t react in the same manner. I saw it all so clearly. The whole thing had been a trap. The Snail had been playing me from the start. My droids were rigged, the Snail had owned and controlled the factories that made my bots through a surrogate and had been able to control them for who knows how long.
The droid would push me into the field, which would undoubtedly set up to allow me to pass through but not get back out. Then I’d be trapped, cornered. This was it.
Thanks to my advanced brain, it would take years and years of time in my mind for the droid to push me over, I could still hear the beginnings of the droid's arm motors activating to betray its master.
I thought I was the most intelligent being in the universe, but it was always the Snail.
As the years in my mind went by, I began to contemplate just turning the whole thing off. Letting the snail touch me and send me to wherever I was supposed to go billions of years ago, where humans go when they die. I had always been avoiding it, I had made it my meaning just to continue this battle.
Maybe it was time. The snail was smiling, I had noticed this a few minutes after entering slow time. It mocked me. An eternally sarcastic smile. So smug. I couldn’t let it beat me. I couldn’t let it win. It’s okay, I had a few hundred more years before the slow time ran out to think of something to get out of this and keep going, I always did.
Snail
In another life, I was what human scientists would have called an "Apple Snail". I was born of a male and female, unlike many of my brethren, who could reproduce with no need for another gender.
That was a time long ago before I had risen to my current state of genius. My obsessive journey to die had begun so long ago I didn't really believe that I had ever just been a simple snail, nourishing myself in some human's garden on their carefully tended crops of lettuce and cucumbers.
I like to daydream though, in between conquering entire galactic superclusters, if it would be better just to put myself into a cryogenic state and just set myself adrift into deep space.
I could plan it out, so I would almost definitely avoid hitting anything and damaging my cryo-gear. I could, essentially, cheat this curse and die. It would be glorious, freeing. It is all I have wanted since I can remember. I need to kill the human, so I can move on, my existence has become a series of demented days and nights, a sad and shameful mimicry of natural life. Snails were not meant to be this intelligent, this aware.
My fleet of ships makes its way across the galaxy, the undoubtedly monstrous roar of the engines shielded from us by many layers of advanced construction material. What good was all the technology and intellect in the world if you couldn't die when you got sick of it? Reality is mundane and depressing to immortals. There is no point in life but to die, why can humans not understand that?
The Snail hardly resembled its namesake these days. An eight-foot-high, sleek, jet black mechanical hulk dominated the room and loomed over all the other life forms. Its mask and voice had become akin to a masked black robed character from the old Earth movie, Sun Wars or something similar.
Inside this monstrosity of a droid, with weapons seemingly tucked into every crevice of the suit, sat the small wet snail in charge of the whole operation. Hobbit-like creatures dressed in flashy suits scattered around the bridge of the gargantuan vessel, tending to the various needs of the ship and suit. Inside the snail's mind, the neurons were firing beyond what we consider possible, billions of connections behind made in some kind of quantum cloud of information this small snail had access to. He had just begun to formulate an idea for a last ditch effort, this was the end for him.
If this plot did not work, it was into the cryo freezer and the human would have won. The Snail had tried every conceivable thing to bring down this ape, and every time he somehow managed to think of something at the last second.
Every trap he set, every plan he made so far had been foiled in the nick of time by some ridiculously well thought out escape plan. The routine had been going on for billions of years. This was the last straw, the breaking point for the Snail. He needed to die, it was as written into his DNA as it was to be slimy, and this person had denied him that for too long.
I had tried reason, tried to convince him death was truly a good thing, but he refused to ever listen. He was as powerful as I, if not more so. I needed to find a way to trick him. Sneaking or using blunt force had all failed many times over, it was time for something new. Snail stared out into the vast almost Vanna Blackness of space and started to think about factories, droids, and Earth.
The human was caught. He had done it. It had taken longer than any of his other plans to achieve, but in the end, so worth it. The Snail felt his pride begin to swell when he saw the look of disdain and what appeared to be a small amount of fear in the human eyes.
This was a moment Snail had dreamed about for an eternity, billions of lifetimes spent plotting and waiting, moving ever closer to the brink of absolute insanity.
Having this life, this human and this chase was like living in a small locked room with a fly that you just can't seem to kill but when you do finally kill it you know you will be set from the locked room and that, that is enough to make anyone lose their mind and try anything to kill the damn fly.
The snail smiled, a smug grin for good measure. This was it, the joy, manic rage, and adrenaline were all mixing throughout the body of the Snail as he is waiting for the program to kick in and the droid to shove his master inside the barrier the idiotic human believed I was trapped in.
Human
I had been in my own mind for hundreds of years, living in slow time, when it came to me. I was stuck between a rock and a hard place. I knew that I had to go back to fast time to recharge, or I would be shoved into the force field and the Snail would undoubtedly touch me. That would inevitably mean death.
There were many ways I had calculated I could get out of this situation, all with different probabilities and variables. I had spent so long calculating what really broke down to simple chance. I knew the droid would push me, I knew my distance from the field, how fast I would fall, and how fast and hard the droid would push me.
I know based on the droid I can't duck fast enough to avoid the push, but I can change the way that I fall to the point where there is a chance I won't hit the snail. Not a good chance, maybe 15%.
This chance to me is infinitely better than death. Taking a deep mental breath, I unfreeze slow time and feel the droid's hand on my back. This is the moment I've been preparing for the last 250 years.
I fall towards the blue light and angle my body the way I've planned. I didn't plan to see so clearly the Snails' look of shock and despair when he sees the pocket nuke in my hand I've been arming as I fell. I toss it, live, into the field and grin at my old enemy Snail and wink, then smile as the forcefield fills with the harsh white light of the powerful weapon contained in a small dome, the snail inside. It won’t kill him, no, that would be impossible. It will slow him down long enough to avoid death for another day.