The Boy at the End of the World

by Greg Van Eekhout

  “Combustible means …?”

  “Large explosions,” said Click.

  “Why is he so interested in cryonite?”

  “He is not,” said Click. “But the paint used on cryonite tanks smells similar to grass. As usual, the mammoth is hungry.”

  Protein nudged a tank with his trunk.

  “Hey, try not to blow us up,” Fisher hissed.

  The mammoth grunted and dumped dung.

  “If you know so much about the technology here, why didn’t you know about the Southern Ark’s existence?”

  Clicked whirred. “I … am not certain. Perhaps my builders did not have friendly relations with the builders of this Ark. Perhaps my knowledge of it was lost in the damage I sustained during the Ark attack.”

  Fisher continued across the floor to a cluster of pod beds. Raised on pedestals, they were higher off the ground than the ones in his own Ark. He would have to stand on his toe tips to peer inside them.

  He approached one. It was large enough to hold a modest-sized animal. A goat. Maybe a large dog. He stretched and looked in. The pod was full of gel, but the gel wasn’t bubbling.

  Through the gel, he saw the face of a human, younger than himself. A girl. Her lips were white as marble. Delicate veins were visible beneath pale flesh. The veins moved, like languid pond grass.

  They weren’t really veins, Fisher realized, watching in horror. They were strands of nano-worms.

  Fisher lowered himself. “She’s human,” he said with a rough voice. “Can you wake her up?”

  Click was examining a control panel on the pedestal.

  Fisher held his breath, waiting for an answer.

  Finally, the robot said, “No.”

  The small word felt like a kick to the stomach.

  “She is un-alive,” Click continued. “No vital signs. But yet, on a cellular level, she is intact.”

  “That means …?”

  “She is dead, Fisher. Yet perfectly preserved.”

  “Yes, broken automaton,” boomed a cheery voice. “I have devised the best means to protect Ark-preserved specimens.” The Intelligence came out from around a bank of equipment.

  “You killed them,” said Click.

  “Yes. I also injected cell-repairing nano-worms into their bodies. I have found this to be the best method of protecting Ark-preserved species. I have removed the threat of death by removing their lives. They will continue forever. It is very clever. Hello!”

  There must be dozens of pod beds in the Ark. Maybe hundreds. Fisher thought about all the perfectly preserved dead things they contained. Dead and preserved like a salted squirrel.

  One of the pod beds sank on its pedestal to ground level. The lid opened. It was empty.

  The Intelligence’s face split apart in a wrap-around smile. “I have prepared a place for your protection, Fisher. Step inside the pod bed and we will begin your preservation process.”

  Fisher wanted to scream his rage at the Intelligence. He wanted to use all the profanity in his collection of words. He wanted to rip the Intelligence apart with his bare hands, worm by worm. But none of these things would help him survive.

  “Run,” said Fisher.

  The three companions broke for the elevator-platform, but flowing like a gleaming black mudslide, the Intelligence blocked their way.

  “Fisher, you are going in the wrong direction. Your preservation pod is behind you. Hello!” The Intelligence formed two of its arms into long, grasping appendages. They telescoped out, coming toward Fisher’s face.

  Fisher backed up.

  “My goals are the same as yours, Fisher. Without me, you will last only a few decades. Given your primitive state of development, probably much less than that. But with my assistance, you will exist forever. Please let me help you.”

  “You want to help me by killing me? Is that what you did to the Stragglers?”

  “Yes. To preserve your existence, I must first end your life, as I did theirs. It is very clever!”

  Fisher continued to back away from the wormy appendage hovering before him. His heel struck something. One of the cryonite tanks. He fumbled for his fire-starting kit and withdrew one of the resin-tipped torch sticks.

  “Very well, Fisher. If you will not comply by lying in the pod bed, I will improvise. I am capable of change.”

  The arm rushed out and encircled Fisher’s throat. It didn’t squeeze hard. Instead, worms began to separate from it. They crawled up the back of Fisher’s neck.

  Fisher stuck the torch stick in his mouth and grabbed for his flint chips. Holding the chips above his head, he struck them together. Once, twice, a third time.

  “You will not need your tools, Fisher. I will provide for your every need.”

  Worms tickled the back of his ear. If they got inside him, there’d be nothing he could do. The Intelligence would have him.

  On the fourth try, the chips sparked, and the sparks fell on the tip of the torch stick. The end glowed with flame.

  “Do you fear the dark, Fisher? Fear is a useful survival tool. It helps you avoid dangerous situations. But there will be no danger in your pod bed. Nothing will ever happen to you there.”

  A worm crawled up Fisher’s earlobe.

  In a swift motion, he reached down to the cryonite tank and turned the valve all the way to the left. He hoped that was the correct direction. He wouldn’t get a second chance.

  Gas hissed into the air.

  “Hello, Fisher, what are you doing—?”

  With all his might, Fisher hurled the tank into the Intelligence’s face. Then he flung the torch stick like a dart. Twisting around, he covered his head with his arms.

  The Intelligence widened its body and engulfed the tank and torch, just as it had done with the gadgets’ missiles.

  Bad move, thought Fisher, breaking loose from the worm-appendage. But maybe it was the Intelligence’s instinct.

  He got himself a few steps away before the cryonite tank exploded. Most of the flame and force were absorbed by the Intelligence’s body, but a hot wall of wind singed the back of Fisher’s head and shoved him to the ground.

  The Intelligence came apart into thousands of flying fragments. Scattered worms wriggled violently. Fisher scraped them off and scrabbled to his feet. He staggered over to Click and Protein.

  Click took a position at the elevator platform’s controls. “Quickly,” he said, “before the Intelligence reforms itself.”

  Already, the worms were reorganizing, flowing into each other. Fisher saw the beginnings of an arm.

  “You are being unclever, simple human.” The Intelligence’s multivoice sounded different, sharp-edged as glass shards and no longer in synch. It sounded angry. “Your only chance was with me. With us. You will never survive. You will perish alone. The earth will reclaim your flesh. You will be forgotten. You are nothing. You will never find the Western Ark before the gadgets do. You will never survive long enough. And if you do, all you’ll find is burning wreckage. It is hopeless, Fisher. Hello.”

  Fisher and Protein rushed over to join Click on the platform. Click touched a control and the platform lifted, but not fast enough for Fisher. He wanted away from here, from this vast Ark full of death.

  He and his friends rose up into the light.

  “Good-bye,” Fisher said.

  CHAPTER 15

  The way west was not easy. Kudzu grew everywhere, swallowing the earth in vines and broad, green leaves. Fisher found the jawbone of an antelope and used it to hack away at the plants, but he was like a minnow trying to swim up a waterfall.

  For the mammoth, though, this was heaven. The only thing slowing him down was his desire to eat everything in sight.

  The deeper they pushed into the jungle, the stranger the plants got. They ivy wasn’t just green, but also bumblebee yellow and robin’s-breast red. The leaves came shaped like spades, or dagger blades, or perfect circles. The buzzes and clicks and trills of birds and insects made the jungle seem like a boiling sea of life.
And sometimes Fisher heard other noises too: the snap and crunch of twigs that sounded like footfalls.

  But these sounds couldn’t compete with the noise of his own thoughts. Again and again, he replayed the Intelligence’s last words as its little voices died, mocking him.

  It had told him of another Ark. A Western Ark. One that wasn’t yet destroyed. One it said Fisher wouldn’t survive long enough to reach.

  If the Intelligence had tried to kill Fisher’s hopes by telling him all he’d find was ruins, then it had failed. Fisher would find the Ark. And he would find it before the gadgets did, no matter what it took.

  So Fisher and his friends went west, away from the impassable cliffs bordering the marshes and ocean shore, and inland into thicker plant growth. Fisher kept expecting Click to warn him against this course of action, but for once, the robot appeared to accept Fisher’s plan.

  The horrors of the Southern Ark seemed to have struck them all. Protein plodded on. He’d stopped bringing sticks and plants to Click and even seemed nervous around Fisher.

  They spotted occasional gadget patrols overhead, but it seemed to Fisher they weren’t searching for him and his friends, but for the Western Ark. At least that’s what Fisher hoped, because if it was true, then the gadgets didn’t yet know where the Ark was.

  After several days of travel, the jungle floor revealed huge slabs of concrete. Gray pillars stood like trees, sprouting mushrooms and flowers in a riot of colors.

  “This appears to have been a road once,” Click said. “They were called freeways, or turnpikes, and they were elevated above the ground.”

  A bird landed on one of the pillars and picked at a bright orange pod on the end of a thick stem. The pod split open like a yawning mouth. It engulfed the bird and snapped shut, leaving just the tip of a tail feather poking out. In seconds, even the tail feather disappeared. The bulge of the bird’s body traveled down the stem, like a mouse being swallowed by a snake.

  “That plant just ate a bird,” said Fisher.

  “Yes,” agreed Click, “it did.”

  “Click! The plants eat birds!”

  “Carnivorous plants have been around for a long time. They come in a considerable variety. There are snap traps, such as the Venus flytrap. But also pitfall traps, and flypaper traps, and bladder traps, and—”

  Fisher cried out. A purple tendril with thorns was curling around his ankle. Small bugs wriggled, impaled on some of its thorns.

  Fisher used his jaw-hacker to hack the tendril to bits. Then he hacked the bits to smaller bits, and he hacked those bits into even smaller bits until the bits were too small to keep hacking.

  “Very interesting,” said Click. “The plants seem to have evolved a great range of movement. This could happen as a result of predator and prey species engaging in a biological arms race, each surviving by evolving more and more elaborate adaptations.”

  Meanwhile, Protein chewed writhing plant stalks. He seemed to find them delicious.

  The longer they trekked through the jungle, the more certain Fisher became that something was following them. He awoke every morning expecting to find himself covered in nano-worms. Every bug that landed on his neck gave him a violent start. Every tangle of kudzu gave the Intelligence a place to lurk.

  On the tenth sunrise since leaving the Southern Ark, he woke to find a set of small, clawed paw prints stopping at the edge of their camp. Not a machine, but an animal. And judging from the placement of the prints, an animal that walked on two legs.

  Fisher tested the thin branches around him for strength and flexibility. He ran through his catalog of knots and fishing lures. An idea formed in his mind.

  “Click, those wires in the back of your eye socket—”

  A hiss. “What of them?”

  “Since they’re not really doing anything anymore, I wondered if I could borrow some …”

  Click’s empty eye socket yielded about a foot of data conduit cable, which, when unwound, came out to almost four feet of thin metal wire that held whatever shape Fisher bent it into. He twisted the wire into a loop, fed the loop through a larger loop, and tied the whole assemblage to a strong green vine.

  A fallen log provided the perfect place to put it. He leaned some half-sawed-through leafy branches up against the log and tucked the snare beneath them. Atop the log went a gathering of berries and seeds as bait.

  The scenario played out in his head. The two-legged animal would climb up the branches to get to the bait, the branches would break, the animal’s legs or entire body would fall through the snare, and Fisher would have it.

  In case that didn’t work, he pushed the stem of his slingshot into the earth, stretched the band all the way back, and pegged it in place with sticks. He tucked more berries between the pocket and the sticks, so that, to get to the bait, the animal would have to move the sticks. Doing so would trigger the slingshot and, if not kill the animal, at least startle it enough to make noise.

  “I am impressed, Fisher,” said Click, watching him work. “This is the most work you have ever done in an attempt to catch food.”

  “I’m not trying to catch food.” He scattered all the crunchy leaves he could find around his camp. If anything approached, the noise would wake him up and maybe he could at least club something.

  “If not food, then what?”

  He stopped to rub his ear, which had ached for the last few days. He hoped he wasn’t getting sick.

  “I keep feeling like we’re being followed.” He dropped his voice. “Like something’s been watching us from the forest.”

  “You fear a predator?”

  Of course Fisher feared predators. He always feared predators. But this was a different feeling.

  The next morning Fisher checked his traps.

  They were untriggered, but the bait was gone. Paw prints stopped mere inches from where Fisher had slept.

  “Do you still have your broken eye?” he asked Click when the robot came up from his power-saving mode.

  “Yes. Why do you ask?”

  “Because,” Fisher said, “something stole my flint chips and torches.”

  The next day as they continued westward, Fisher occupied his mind with thoughts of nets and pit traps. He imagined spring mechanisms he could make from saplings that would fire deadly poison darts.

  “Hey, Click, why didn’t my personality profile include a knowledge of poison?”

  “You are better off knowing how to fish. Poison is not very nutritious.”

  Protein came to a halt. He growled and shook his head. His haunches shivered.

  Something was coming through the jungle, pushing aside bushes and tree limbs. Tree branches cracked. A flurry of birds took to the sky, squawking. Whatever was coming was big.

  And then it was upon them, a sphere about Fisher’s height, studded with thousands of squat, twisted spikes. It rolled and bounded across the jungle floor, knocking over trees and bowling over anything in its way.

  This couldn’t possibly be a plant. Not even an animal.

  It changed direction, heading right for Fisher and his companions. Fisher gave Click a mighty shove and leaped away, just as the huge spiky ball smashed into a tree mere feet from them. The ball rebounded into the air before thunking back down. It changed direction again, and, again, Fisher was in its path. He dove for cover and somersaulted as the ball knocked him hard into a tree. Pain flared in his hand, caught between the tree trunk and the full weight of his own body.

  He could only watch now as the ball cut a destructive path across the jungle floor, crunching, snapping, bashing. When it struck the trunk of a broad, solid tree, there was a great pop of air and the ball exploded. Thousands of little brown globes clattered across the jungle.

  Leaves and twigs settled back to the jungle floor. Birds fluttered their wings, resuming their perches, and the jungle returned to normal.

  “Ah, I believe it was a seedpod, propelled by internal gasses,” said Click, examining the little globes. “When it hits a large
object, it breaks apart and spills its seeds to grow more of its own kind. A very interesting adaptation. Or perhaps past humans engineered it as a method of expanding the parent plant’s range … Fisher? You are not responding. Are you in distress?”

  Fisher slumped against a tree stump and looked at his right hand. His index and middle fingers were wrong. They were bent at odd angles.

  Broken.

  Click came over. “Fisher?”

  Protein nudged Click away and made to sniff Fisher’s head, but then changed his mind and went off several yards to stand by himself.

  Huge pain radiated from Fisher’s hand. The pain was bad. It felt even worse as he thought about all the things he used those two fingers for.

  To make fishing hooks.

  To tie knots.

  To start fires.

  He used those two fingers for everything. They were as important to his survival as the legs that carried him.

  Now they were injured.

  Injured animals were weak.

  Injured animals failed to survive.

  CHAPTER 16

  Useless. Mangled. Hurting.

  Fisher sat curled up, his right hand loosely cradled in his lap.

  He couldn’t stop thinking about all the things he used his fingers for.

  Digging worms to bait his hooks.

  Climbing trees to raid birds’ nests.

  And while he sat there in pain, he also thought about gadgets. He wasn’t afraid of them finding him here, helpless. He was afraid of them finding the Western Ark before he did.

  “I have returned,” said Click, stumbling back into the clearing. Protein let out a small growl.

  “Did you find what I asked for?”

  Click showed Fisher what he was carrying: a bundle of twigs and some tough flower stalks.

  Fisher took the twigs. Tucking the ends between his knees, he used his left hand to snap them into segments as long as his fingers.