When the World Ends

by J L Forrest

  More skyscrapers pounded into the waters.

  Water rushed from the intertidal zones. For a heart-stopping few seconds, whole neighborhoods of drowned San Francisco revealed themselves. Seaweed beds. Nascent coral, unbleached. Sunken houses and sunken lives.

  Then the tsunami struck. Thirty meters high, it devoured streets spared during the Pulses. The waves roared, a million lions in unison.

  Still, my wife and I climbed. I tugged her with me. We weren’t alone. Thousands made it to Mt. Davis or the Twin Peaks, scrambling for high ground. I glanced over my shoulder.

  Dirty brown water scoured every historic building, every warehouse, every street-level storefront or market. They’re saying the death toll is thousands.

  For so many survivors, it’s just another tragedy. One more punch to the gut. Cailín and I collapsed next to a half-buried, cracked, century-old concrete wall. The graffiti on it reads:

  WE DIE ON EARTH.

  Down in the city, Avidità’s carbon-tensile super-towers did nothing more than wobble, the tsunami merely dabbing their toes. The Moribund brought the Corkscrew down, but San Francisco will live on.

  It took hours for the water to drain back to the sea. Bots and volunteers wasted no time in the search for the injured and the trapped, in the collection of the dead.

  We returned to our apartment in the Avidità Corporate Tower, one hundred ten storeys up. The dog—returned to us and healthier than on arrival—peed on the carpet while we were gone. It’s almost midnight, and thankfully Cailín is sleeping peacefully.

  An hour ago, the door chime rang. A visitor, our liaison. He dressed as smartly as he had the first time we’d met.

  ME: Late, isn’t it?

  LIAISON: I was quite glad your name didn’t make it onto the list of the dead.

  ME: Us too.

  LIAISON: Do you need anything?

  ME: Only sleep.

  LIAISON: I’ll let you be. But first I come bearing a message.

  ME: Yes?

  LIAISON: Mr. Avidità requests your company in the morning. Breakfast will be served.

  ME: Requests?

  LIAISON: Perhaps “requests” isn’t the right word.

  The liaison is long gone. I fixed myself a cup of chamomile, and in a few minutes I’ll join Cailín. The dog will sleep at our feet. One hundred ten storeys down, rescue operations and cleanup crews are working in earnest, still counting the dead, remaking order for the living. From this height, the loudest machinery produces only a faint, unreal hum.

  One more crisis. One more collective refusal to give up.

  Survive long enough, through enough catastrophe, and neither survival nor death much surprise anymore. Day by day the shock and overwhelm fade. All these near-death-experiences leave me with is gratitude for this moment.

  In the morning, we’ll have breakfast with a New God.

  XXVII. Breakfast with God

  Day 246—

  I’ve been thinking about eggs Benedict.

  Mr. Avidità’s penthouse struck me as restrained and tasteful, in the way the ultra-rich can exhibit a refined palate with the ability to spend tasteless sums on simple things. We ate in a spacious dining room with four-meter-high ceilings. Two walls of reactive pigments shifted by imperceptible degrees between images by Gustav Klimt and Geørg Fritz.

  Along the facing walls, a sequence of delicate, silver mullions clasped slender, vertical windows. The delicacy and slenderness were illusory—the panes were several layers of diamondide separated by vacuum, missile-proof and insulated. Nearly two kilometers up, the penthouse’s height inured it from humdrum, horrific, everyday events. The coastlines stretched a hundred sixty klicks north and south, the California interior shown on the other side of the Central Sea, and the Pacific glittered to the horizon.

  We wore new dresses of blue, lab-grown cotton. Cailín braided her hair.

  Mr. Avidità took his seat at the end of the long table. His neatly trimmed navy suit, his tie, his brown monk-strap shoes—these fit him as comfortably as pajamas, as if he’d slept in them but then awoken perfectly groomed, as if he never wore anything less. He looked no more than forty—impossible because my dead parents talked about how Avidità had become powerful when they were teenagers.

  He was goddamned handsome. Two robots accompanied him—four-legged things like headless mastiffs, surfaced with mirrored chrome. They sat obediently behind him.

  No shit—he called them Ares and Apollo.

  I got my eggs Benedict. Cailín ordered bacon rashers, pork sausage, two fried eggs, white pudding, buttered brown-soda toast with fried tomatoes, baked beans, and potatoes. Our host had a salad with poached eggs.

  A chef conjured everything we wanted. Dressed in actual livery, kitchen staff served us as if we were queens.

  CAILÍN: It’s not every day I meet someone famous. Avidità was a household name in Dublin.

  AVIDITÀ: I used to be a household name everywhere—I doubt that’s true anymore.

  ME: Certainly true in San Francisco.

  AVIDITÀ: San Francisco, my own little fiefdom.

  CAILÍN: The breakfast is excellent, Mr. Avidità. Can’t remember the last time I tasted rashers but, putting that aside, why have you brought us here?

  AVIDITÀ: It’s not every day I encounter something new.

  ME: Something new?

  AVIDITÀ: Biologically, neither of you are entirely human.

  ME: Of course we are.

  AVIDITÀ: You’re not. You remember we collected blood samples?

  CAILÍN: What’re you saying?

  AVIDITÀ: Please don’t play coy, ladies. More than a few San Franciscans have commented on the unusual color of your lips, and I noted it the first time I encountered your images.

  ME: Spying on your citizenry?

  AVIDITÀ: Keeping tabs on anomalies. My Director of Research drew my attention to your blood results, and since then we have watched you extremely carefully.

  ME: Why?

  AVIDITÀ: He wanted to quarantine you, but the data didn’t support his fears.

  CAILÍN: What fears?

  AVIDITÀ: That you were carrying a new pathogen, something on the order of Blight, that you’d infect the population. I thought he might wet himself over it, but you’ve been here two months, and my hypothesis has won out.

  ME: What was your hypothesis?

  AVIDITÀ: That what you’re carrying is sexually transmitted, and that you’re not the most promiscuous young women on these islands.

  ME: What are we carrying?

  AVIDITÀ: An adaptive parasite. Symbiont might be a better word. Jury’s still out on that one.

  CAILÍN: What does it do?

  AVIDITÀ: I was hoping you could tell me.

  We explained that, there in the artifice of his tower or walking the city’s streets, our senses told us little. In San Francisco, the tether between Cailín and I remained strong—we walked in each other’s dreams as often as we walked together on the city’s avenues—but our connection to nature became fraught.

  In the open wilderness, though, amongst the grasses and trees, the land suffused us. Like spiders in our web, we knew the footfalls of men before they reached us. Beasts announced their presence, and their migrations stretched across the horizon, filaments which conveyed faraway events to our inner eyes. The winds delivered news from every direction.

  Neither of us went as far as to tell him how we glimpsed the future, that we had foreseen the fall of his precious Corkscrew. We didn’t explain projecting dreams into other people’s heads. We didn’t mention Old Gods in the north.

  AVIDITÀ: You’re basically communing with nature?

  ME: I suppose.

  AVIDITÀ: How very Dungeons and Dragons. Too bad. In case you hadn’t noticed, Earth is dying, and soon there won’t be much nature with which you can commune.

  Tree limbs overarch us, darkening the light. The leaves and needles of oaks, tamaracks, cedars, birches, firs, lodgepoles, and maples brush the flanks of
our ship.

  Earth isn’t dying, I thought.

  Earth just underwent chemotherapy.

  Earth is feeling like shit, but it’s purging its cancer.

  “I’m sorry the terrorists blew up your Corkscrew,” I said, wanting then to flee the penthouse, to run back into the wilds, to travel as far north as I could.

  AVIDITÀ: The real loss is human life. No exact count, to be honest, but three hundred thousand people died yesterday.

  ME: So many?

  AVIDITÀ: Thousands killed in the tsunami, but the Corkscrew was like Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. Eight Carriers a day, a thousand people per Carrier, a thirty-three-day trip. The math is straightforward. Even with this elevator, realistically, it was going to take us another four years to evacuate the islands. At least the incoming refugees have slowed to a dribble.

  ME: Poor Sadzie.

  AVIDITÀ: Sadzie?

  ME: A friend of ours—on your Corkscrew.

  AVIDITÀ: I’m sorry.

  ME: Earth is dying, you say. Why do you care? Why so motivated to get that many people onto your proverbial lifeboats?

  AVIDITÀ: Since you mention lifeboats—when the Titanic struck its iceberg, the engineering crew stayed at their posts. If they hadn’t kept the pumps working, the ship would have sunk all the quicker. They kept the electricity on, too. Without it, the emergency radio couldn’t transmit. Had those engineers shirked their duties, everyone aboard the Titanic would have died—the engineers included.

  CAILÍN: I’m guessing the engineers died anyway?

  AVIDITÀ: In a sense, the engineers were dead the moment the liner collided with the ice.

  CAILÍN: Are you an engineer, Mr. Avidità?

  AVIDITÀ: From the start of my career, madame.

  ME: What will you do now that the Corkscrew has fallen?

  AVIDITÀ: I have five more, other locations. I’ll increase their security, since Salem’s Moribund obviously discovered a weakness. We’ll learn from this incident, improve as we always do. We’re weighing whether rebuilding this Corkscrew is worth the expense, or whether we can funnel San Franciscans to the other locations, pick up the slack some other way.

  ME: What about the Moribund? If they strike again, keep bombing the city, keep up the propaganda?

  Avidità ate the last of his eggs, then mopped the yolk with dry toast.

  “Salem, Oregon no longer exists,” he said. “At four o’clock this morning, my drones wiped it from the map, along with every military facility within two hundred miles of it. We scorched the fields.”

  ME: There were women there. Children.

  AVIDITÀ: I know, right? Terrible.

  ME: And still?

  AVIDITÀ: When a few thousand moronic religious zealots murder a quarter million innocents, I have no problem putting them down. I should have razed Salem months ago.

  ME: That’s a lot of death. Eye for an eye?

  AVIDITÀ: To survive this year, how many people have you killed?

  Our silence told him all he needed to know.

  “For two years,” he said, “I’ve been perfecting a facial-recognition map of everyone living along the coast between here and the Seattle Islands.” He gulped the rest of his coffee. “Using that map, I trained my drones and two thousand K-bots—” He gestured to Ares and Apollo, by way of example. “—and these are now hunting the coast for anyone associated with Preacher Johnson or the Moribund. One or two may escape, but the Preacher and his sheep are extinct.”

  The waitstaff whisked away the plates, then refilled our water glasses and coffee cups.

  AVIDITÀ: The disease you carry is fascinating. It’s engineered. How you came by it, Cailín, up there in the north with those Horned Lords—that’s only part of the story, and I’d like to unravel the rest.

  CAILÍN: Which means you want to study us?

  AVIDITÀ: I’m not talking about rats in a cage here. Consider yourselves my most special guests. You’ll never have lived more luxuriously.

  ME: Thank you. A generous offer.

  AVIDITÀ: It’s not really an offer.

  Again, our silence spoke for us.

  “If you’ll excuse me,” he said, standing, folding his napkin and placing it on the table. “The fall of the Corkscrew has created an enormous amount of work, and there’re details to which I must attend. Take your time, enjoy the coffee, order anything you wish.”

  “Except a ride out of here?” I asked.

  “That,” he said, “and a few other things. I bid you good morning.”

  Before we departed his home, I ordered a stiff Bloody Mary. To go.

  XXVIII. Tooth & Talon

  Day 262—

  We’ll get one chance.

  If we screw it up, we figure, Avidità will definitely be “talking about rats in a cage,” and our odds of survival will drop near zero. He’d probably hold the dog hostage.

  We consider the transmitters beneath our skin, the CopBots flying their unending grid, and who knows what other surveillances. For now though, other than confining us to San Francisco, Avidità has given us leeway. Not confined to our apartment, not even to the building, we can wander the island edge to edge.

  His Big Brother vision cannot be perfect, or the Moribund would never have succeeded. If anything, their terrorism tested the thresholds of Avidità’s power, uncovered chinks in his omniscience. The destruction wrought by their attack, too, gives us cover, draws away precious Avidità resources, and improves our odds.

  Returning to Golden Gate, we explore the intertidal western edge and its fancy docks. Some of these import goods from other Avidità facilities along the Bay and Central Sea, but imports are not the only things which pass through the permeable barrier at the Pacific edge.

  Here there are residents who come and go as they please.

  Zeus’s realm contains within it a pantheon of lesser gods. Many travel by boat—these yachts double as quasi-military ships, most on hydrofoils, some with fancy engines that process seawater into drinking water.

  Or fuel.

  We target one vessel in particular. The Potestatem.

  It’s undamaged, wasn’t here when the tsunami hit. The mega-waves tore whole arms from the wharf, though, including security gates which control access to the water. Destroyed more than a thousand vessels, too, many which patrolled the archipelago and coast.

  At will, the Potestatem’s elderly owner comes and goes. A half-dozen bodyguards accompany him everywhere. Four more remain on the boat, along with a woman who could be the old man’s pet or his pilot. We can’t decide which.

  The boat’s security systems and engine appear to respond only to the owner’s biometrics—palm, retinal, and voice, near as we can tell.

  Through my binoculars, we observe our quarry, along with the rest of the waterline, park, and city. We are terrible spooks, improvising our spy-craft from every James Bond movie we saw before Blight—keep your eyes on the mark, but don’t look like you’re keeping your eyes on the mark.

  CAILÍN: This is one of the dumbest ideas I’ve ever heard.

  ME: It can work.

  CAILÍN: Avidità is a man with drones and robots. He recently burnt a city to the ground. What do you think he can do to us?

  ME: A city is big and sits in one place. Hard to lose track of a city. You can burn it down anytime you like.

  CAILÍN: So?

  ME: A boat is small and the Pacific is gigantic. A mote in the eye of a hurricane. You’re sure about this kind of yacht?

  CAILÍN: My old employer had one similar.

  ME: You’re sure about the autopilot?

  CAILÍN: All these boats, the ones like this, they’ve got it.

  ME: It’d take us to Anchorage?

  CAILÍN: Easily.

  ME: We’re stealing it.

  CAILÍN: This is one of the dumbest ideas I’ve ever heard.

  It wasn’t my idea. It was Raymond’s. Make it to the coast, to Anchorage, into Fairbanks. Only now I don’t give a shit about Fairba
nks. It’s the standing forests I’m after, the islands of my row-a-boat dream. The dream doesn’t tell me where to go, but the imagery suggests Glacier or Berners or Chilkoot.

  Cailín knows the dream too, but the details differ for her. In her version of the dream, I wear red and she wears blue.

  Nevermore circles far overhead, lazing above Golden Gate.

  Earth is dying, Avidità said.

  Equatorial furnaces, the tropics spew carbon dioxide even though human pollution has dropped near zero. Tundra and seabeds fart methane. Lower temperate forests burn. The Hothouse. How could anything ever survive this?

  Honestly, maybe Blight was the best thing that ever happened.

  Cailín and I bought hotdogs. She doused hers in relish, mustard, pickles, and mayonnaise. We sat by the shore, a thumbnail of sand lapped by high tide. Though muted by the city and the thrum of technology, the park grasses spoke to us. The trees groaned. The water ached. The jellies and red algae rocked in rhythm to the waves. Pigeons thrive in San Francisco, like the rats do, living off human detritus. The cockroaches outnumber everything. Vultures ride the thermals above the Bay. Seagulls scavenge more than pigeons and rats. Dormant locusts bide their time. Out on the Wastes, coyotes make do, and snakes have resurged.

  A vulture lands near Cailín and hops to her. She offers it the remainder of her hotdog, which it gobbles. Passersby gave this scene a wide berth.

  Teeth and talons. Plenty. Everywhere, if we’re patient.

  ME: Maybe let the vulture go.

  CAILÍN: I suppose you’re right.

  She shooed it away, and it took flight. In the nearby cottonwoods, the conspiracy of ravens had returned. Dozens, at quick count.