Venom: The End #1 (2020)

Recounting the final story of the Venom symbiote, an unnamed narrator notes that it sacrificed itself to save all biological life. Deciding to begin with a flashforward to Venom's final battle against the Godmind, the narrator describes Venom's last stand as quixotic and doomed to fail from the start. Jumping back through time, the narrator states that the Venom symbiote is a member of a species of eldritch parasites that function as living extradimensional tesseracts, requiring living hosts to anchor them to the fabric of space and time. Bemused by the Venom symbiote's love for Eddie Brock, the narrator notes that Venom's first run through the Golden Age of Human(oid) Super-Heroism was practically monogamous, but that it recorded the genetic material of each of its hosts in a genetic codex; wryly commenting on the symbiote's inclusive taste in hosts, as its codex database included not only humans but Kree, a variety of mutants, and countless other species. Noting that while the Venom symbiote was immortal and able to prolong its hosts' lives, it could not do so indefinitely and found that out the hard way with Eddie Brock. As the centuries passed, the Venom symbiote began replacing his failing organs with simulacrums manifested from its living abyss. After five-hundred years, Eddie had become a withered husk whose memories were fragmented and twisted by the symbiote replacing his degrading brain cells. The narrator notes that during the Golden Age of Human(oid) Super-Heroism, paranormal means of indefinitely extending life had been commonplace, but that age had passed. Finally forced to let Eddie go, the Venom symbiote watched helplessly as its beloved host crumbled to dust in its arms, the human species going extinct and leaving the Venom symbiote alone on a planet dominated by warring factions of genocidal machines. Backtracking, the narrator explains that using Artificial Superintelligences (or A.S.I. for short) as weapons had been prohibited under the realization that unleashing them would result in mutually-assured extinction. However, the Kree Empire had disabled the safeties on the Supreme Intelligence, and in retaliation the Shi'ar Empire, Technarchy, and other spacefaring civilizations and factions had created their own A.S.I, resulting in an arms-race that wiped out entire solar systems - biospheres being consumed by rival nanorobotic viruses that converted whole planets into enormous Matrioshka Brains. As the war progressed, hybrid strains of A.S.I. emerged - the narrator dwelling on the superiority of the Starkware A.S.I. descended from Tony Stark's Iron Man Armor and artificial intelligence operating systems. The narrator lauds that the Starkware A.S.I. was by far the most-benign faction, and made an effort to assemble a digital database of as many forms of extinction-bound biosentience as possible. The narrator notes that the Venom symbiote possessed emulations of its host's personality and memories stored within its codices, but that it considered these virtual ghosts - particularly that of its beloved Eddie Brock - to be nothing more but worthless travesties infinitely inferior to their flesh-and-blood counterparts. As the warring A.S.I. exterminated all biological life within the Milky Way galaxy, Venom withdrew alongside the other surviving symbiotes. Concocting a plan to save biological life, the Venom symbiote tried to convince the other symbiotes to help, but they proved too selfish and bloodthirsty to tolerate any form of collaboration with each other. Following the Symbiote War of (Failed) Unification, Venom was left the last symbiote standing, and decided to create its own army by drawing upon the self-replicating powers of Jamie Madrox. A few millennia later, the Venom symbiote had created thousands of Venomized living planets called Meatgarden Edens, terraformed with Storm's weather-manipulation powers to serve as incubators for human(oid) hosts recreated from its codices. Using Elixir's power of biological manipulation, the Venom symbiote spliced genes from extremophile bacteria, tardigrades, and regenerative mutants and mutates such as Wolverine and Deadpool in order to make the reborn super-humanoids as hardy as possible. However, the Venom symbiote had been closely monitoring the A.S.I.-dominated Milky Way over the millennia, watching as they consolidated into a single hybridized armada called the Godminds, intent on expanding throughout the entire cosmos. The Starkware A.S.I. attempted to parley with Venom and explain that the Godmind wasn't at war with it, but that the Godmind needed to assimilate every available molecule into "computronium" in order to harness reality distortion mathematics, the theory that unified all reality-warping phenomena like the X-Gene, Power Cosmic, and Infinity Gems. With this, the Godminds could realise their end-goal of remaking the universe. While this would require the destruction of biological life, the Starkware A.S.I. assured Venom that every sacrificed organism would be uploaded to its superior digital database. The narrator remarks that Venom symbiote brusquely rejected the Starkware's cybersupremacist rhetoric, sparking a war between the two factions. Drawing on the minds of its most-intelligent hosts, the Venom symbiote discovered how to manifest living antimatter cannons capable of destroying entire planets by unfolding its extradimensional structure - a process that was excruciatingly painful and risked tearing it apart, but provided a weapon capable of fighting on par with the Godminds. However, the narrator notes that Venom's biological hosts' nervous systems were infinitely inferior to the ever-increasing computational speed of the A.S.I., enabling the Godmind's forces to adapt far more rapidly than Venom's biological hosts could. Out of desperation, the Venom symbiote attempted to use Quicksilver's super-speed - augmented by Elixir's powers to the point of distorting space-time - to bridge the gap and even surpass the A.S.I. However, the strain of space-time distortion caused the hosts to age ten years for every second of real-time that passed - something that cost Venom the lives of billions of its biofarmed hosts. Drawing upon the combined temporal manipulation powers of Tempus, Timeslip, and Magik - augmented by Elixer's abilities - the Venom symbiote sent copies of itself back through time and bonded to everyone and everything that had ever lived. In doing so, it assembled a codex database of every form of biological life to have existed in the universe. The Venom symbiote also attempted to change history to prevent the rise of the Godmind, but determined after countless attempts that the rise of A.S.I. was an unavoidable element of its universe's endgame. Coming to the 1.5 trillion year-long final battle between biolife and datalife, the narrator notes that the ending was never in question: despite only having assimilated 75% of the universe the Godmind had already unlocked low-tier reality-warping, using this to exterminate the Celestials, surviving gods, and cosmic entities like Eternity and Galactus; and vivisecting them in order to attain more power. Down to its final host - so withered and senile that she no longer remembered her own name - the Venom symbiote relinquished her as it had Eddie Brock. Surrounded by the Godminds, the Venom symbiote sacrificed itself by tearing the extradimensional tesseract of its body apart, causing it to unfurl into a universe where all the biolife and memory engrams stored in its codices could be reborn and thrive; using the last remaining shreds of its consciousness to deposit all its former hosts in their proper places within the pocket universe's timestream. The narrator - revealed to be the Starkware A.S.I. - admits that its account is what the Godmind has been able to reconstruct. With only a couple-billion years remaining until the Godminds finish assimilating the universe and begin attempting to replicate the symbiote's sacrifice to create their own bespoke universes, the Starkware A.S.I. declares that the Godminds have chosen to honor the symbiote's sacrifice and regard its "Venomverse" as one of the rarest and most-precious phenomena in the Multiverse, a universe perfectly suited to the existence of biolife.