Abaddonian Dream

by M. K. Woollard

  Asha Ishi trusted her, he reminded himself. There must have been a reason for that.

  Eva had taken thirty eight calls to answer; Hetty took more than a hundred. “Where have you been?” he asked when she finally picked up.

  “Fact checking,” Hetty said. “You sent a lot of information.”

  “You can’t take forever, Hetty. Everyone will be dead already.” He pulled back the curtain and looked out of the window, but he couldn’t see the carriers from here. “It’s now or never.”

  Hetty mumbled something he couldn’t understand.

  “What?” Hammell asked as he nervously picked at the scab on the back of his hand until it finally fell off. “What are you saying? What’s going on, Hetty?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What do you mean?” he asked, his heart already sinking.

  “I’m sorry, but I can’t put my name to this,” Hetty said. “My journalistic integrity would be ruined.”

  “Your… integrity?” Hammell said, confused. “But it’s the truth. Your integrity should force you to publish.”

  “I don’t draw the same conclusions as you.”

  “What?” Hammell said again. “How can you not?”

  “You’ve got something wrong. I don’t know what exactly, but this isn’t right. This isn’t what Asha believed.”

  “Asha was wrong,” Hammell said, though he was certain it wouldn’t help.

  “How?” Hetty asked and he could hear the note of anger creeping into her voice, the all-too-familiar outrage that came from being accused of being a thing. “How could it happen, the entire replacement of humankind, without anyone realising?”

  “Were you alive during the war?” Hammell responded, his own irritation getting the better of him. “Did you see it with your own eyes? How do you know what you read on the networks is what really happened?”

  “I’m an andromorph?” Hetty said. “I am? I can’t accept that, so how could I ask my followers to?”

  “It’s all there,” Hammell said. “The evidence. That’s how.”

  “No,” Hetty said. “It’s not enough. It’s not even appropriate for me to publish this. If there’s anything in it, then it’s for the authorities to investigate.”

  “Did you give it to them?” he asked. “Did you hand it to the police? To I.T.F.?”

  Her silence was answer enough.

  “You’re going to trust them?” Hammell said, incredulous now. “They killed her, Hetty. They killed Asha Ishi. How can you be on their side?”

  “There are no sides,” Hetty replied. “It’s the right thing to do.”

  “Hetty, please…”

  “There’s an arrest warrant out for you. I have to report your call.”

  “Don’t do this,” he tried, making one last-ditch attempt. “For Asha’s sake, don’t do this.”

  There was a long pause on the other end of the line. “Where are you?” she asked finally and Hammell cut the connection.

  “Fuck!” he said as he put his face in his hands. “Fuck fuck FUCK!”

  Turning around at a noise, he found Eva standing behind him. She smiled sadly but the look on her face told him that she knew what he’d been up to, and that she had expected this.

  “Don’t fret,” she said. “It’s been tried before. It’s already out there on the networks, if you know where to look. It’s dismissed as one of a thousand conspiracy theories.”

  “Asha Ishi must have had another plan,” Hammell said. “There’s no way she would have relied on her.”

  “You don’t know that,” Eva said. “Love blinds people.”

  “What?” Hammell asked, before his brain kicked in. Oooooooooh, he thought, feeling suddenly stupid. A few things about Asha Ishi started to make sense. “I still don’t get it though. How can Hetty react like that? That makes it worse.”

  “She’s a newer andromorph,” Eva shrugged. “She’s more able to compartmentalize, to accept. If Hetty was told to die for the greater good, she would, willingly. Maybe that’s better in the long run, when you think about it.”

  “It’s… inhuman,” Hammell said, aware of the irony.

  “Is it?” Eva asked. “Uncontrolled population growth resulting in ten billion people hogging all the planet’s resources and crashing the entire ecosystem - isn’t that worse?”

  “So that’s it, then,” he said as he sat back in the chair, listening to the distant sirens, the image of the small boy and his crying mother looming large in his mind’s eye. “There’s no way out.”

  “There never was,” she said as she kissed him and then looked him squarely in the eye. “Except for you.”

  “What? What do you mean?”

  “It’s time for you to leave.”

  “I will if you will,” he said but Eva was already shaking her head. “Why not?” he asked. “You’re a legal citizen, an andromorph. We could go together, go to Abaddon together.”

  “And who’s paying for the tickets?” she asked, a playful glint in her eye.

  “You are.”

  “I belong here,” Eva said, “even if there won’t be a here soon.”

  He sighed, knowing that he had even less chance of convincing Eva to leave than he had of convincing Hetty to publish. “I know,” he said as the sound of a distant explosion drew his attention. He walked over to the tall windows at the end of the room, from where he could see down the hill to the distant city. I could never go alone, he thought as he watched the first bombs falling. I could never leave her to die here. At least we had a few good days. It was more than he’d expected, more than he deserved. And this is still my city. He turned to look back at her. “I think I do too.”

  Eva stared at him hard, but then nodded tersely. “Everyone has a right to choose their own end.”

  They rode on Eva’s motorbike down twisty country lanes, heading for the old satellite town where Ettore had decided to make his last stand. No matter how many times she told Hammell to hold onto the bar on the back, he still kept his hands locked tight around her stomach. “If I had a car…” he called out as she again tried to unclamp his hands. She still hadn’t forgiven him for giving away her other bike away at the power station, even though she hadn’t provided explicit instructions to leave the key under the wheel; apparently it should have been obvious. She’d since refused to even try to find him another vehicle, telling him he would be a passenger throughout his time in the Reserves and would learn to take better care of other people’s things. So then she has to put up with this, he thought as he clung to her back like a baby monkey.

  They crested the top of a hill and he dared to glance up, catching sight of an outpost close to the Reservation Line from where someone was shooting up at one of the carriers. The hovering battle platform moved into position and released a robot bomb. Eva sped them down the other side of the hill and the scene disappeared behind the trees before he saw the explosion. The boom reached Hammell’s ears, closely followed by another; the gap between explosions was decreasing steadily, like a storm coming closer.

  They arrived at the town before the carriers and Eva had to prise his hands from her waist. He clambered off the bike stiffly, without the slightest semblance of Eva’s grace. When his legs stopped shaking, he looked around, seeing a town in surprisingly good order with more buildings still standing than anywhere else he’d seen in the Reserves. People were gathering on the rooftops, no doubt thinking they stood more chance of hitting the carriers from up there. Others were spreading out on the ground, forming into clusters behind rudimentary barricades, armed with whatever they could find.

  A wave of guilt washed over him as he realised there wasn’t a single heavy weapon in sight. The best they had were machineguns and the odd rocket propelled grenade launcher, but most were as good as unarmed. There were kitchen knives, crowbars and baseballs bats - one man even held a pitchfork, like he would be chasing a monster from an old movie and not fighting semi-intelligent robotic bombs. A few androids were scattered around, but even t
hey were armed mainly with stun guns; they were almost the only androids Hammell had seen recently which weren’t carrying deadly weapons. It won’t even be men against boys. It will be soldiers against babies.

  “This is really happening, isn’t it?” Hammell said.

  “Yes,” Eva replied as she reached into her bike’s side saddle and plucked out two small pistols. She offered one to Hammell, who made no move to take it. “Are you staying?”

  Hammell nodded. “But that won’t make the slightest difference.”

  Keeping her eyes on him, Eva shoved the second gun into her belt. With the other in her hand, she rolled her bike to the side of the road into a parking spot; a ridiculous thing to do since in a few minutes there wouldn’t be a road nor any buildings left around it. “Come on,” she said, leading him behind a sturdy looking barricade made from piled up bricks from fallen buildings.

  And there they stood waiting, Hammell experiencing a cocktail of emotions, composed mainly of fear and guilt. He had to fight against his natural urge to cut and run, especially since one of the more cowardly voices in his brain was silently screaming at him that he could survive this, that he didn’t have to die today.

  A few agonizingly long minutes later, a large group of men and women dressed in combat fatigues strode onto the main street, flanked by a dozen androids. At the head was Ettore, yelling out instructions to everyone around him as he came, and Hammell felt a momentary surge of hope; these people at least looked like they knew what they were doing. Maybe Ettore can make a fight of this, he thought, before he caught some of the words as they drifted in on the air. Ettore was telling everyone to drop their weapons and run for their lives. Way to fucking inspire.

  Hammell snapped. “This is insane,” he said finally as he looked up and down the street, seeing nobody moving. “Why don’t they run? They’re all going to die.”

  “They know,” Eva said. “But they’re tired of running. The few who had the means and the will have already gone. Those left are the ones who couldn’t get out… and the few like me - like us - who only want to live in a human society.”

  Living in any society is better than dying, he thought, but he kept it to himself. “But there are still kids here,” he said, looking over at a small blonde girl who was perhaps eleven years old. Her expression showed she knew exactly what was coming. Nobody that young should have knowledge like that. “Even if it’s futile, they have to try.”

  “The smallest children were packed off together in pods the moment the carriers were sighted,” Eva said. “The cut-off age was twelve. There’s some hope for them… in the short term.”

  “The short term?”

  Eva nodded. “Even if they escape today, they’ll be forced to grow up in the shadows, without their parents, fearing always for their lives if they’re discovered. They’ll be split up for safety reasons, so they’ll never be able to find one another to procreate. Whatever happens, they’ll be the last generation.”

  “Fuck,” Hammell said, shaking his head. This is so wrong.

  “They’ll level every building with robotic bombs!” Ettore called out as he came closer. “If you’re really stupid enough to stay, remain at ground level. Do not enter the buildings!”

  Hammell scanned the rooftops, seeing all the people ignoring their leader. At least everyone up there had a gun of some kind, though they were mostly pistols, ancient shotguns and hunting rifles. Weapons like that might knock an android or two from the hold, but they could never hope to bring down a carrier.

  “Stay as widely spread as possible to avoid the bombs!” Ettore shouted. “When the town falls, run for the parks, the greens, the waterways.” He spotted Eva and marched over. “Are you listening to me?”

  “As much as anyone else,” Eva said.

  “Them?” Ettore said. “They are all dead anyway. They have no choice now. The ones who stayed voluntarily are right now realising their mistake. They would run if they could, but it is too late for them. Not for you, though. You can still escape.” He looked at Hammell. “Both of you.”

  “This is my world too,” Eva said, defiant. “These are my people.”

  “They will destroy every building in the town, one by one,” Ettore said, stepping up to her aggressively. “They will not use nukes because it would make the area more difficult to clean up, so they will bomb conventionally – machine thinking. Then they will send in androids to mop up the survivors. They are already crawling over the countryside - sniffer robots - and the river and coast are covered with ships, submarines and carriers, all ready to take out anyone who makes it to the water. You’re not staying to fight. There won’t be a fight. It will be an extermination, an extinction event, the final end of all the cells of humans left in the world.”

  Cells, Hammell thought and the last piece of the jigsaw clicked into place. “You were herded here,” he said. “Rounded up from all over the world and driven here.”

  Ettore looked at him with cold eyes. “They were going to level this place anyway. Machine thinking.”

  “My mind was made up a long time ago,” Eva said. “You won’t change it now.”

  “What if I still had a use for you?” Ettore asked, turning back to her.

  “Go on,” Eva said cautiously.

  “Preservation,” Ettore said. “You two may be the only ones left after today with knowledge of what really happened. In some way, however small, you have to preserve the real history.” He smiled at Eva. “Maybe by writing one of your outdated books that nobody reads.”

  A tear had formed in Eva’s eye, but still she shook her head. “I have to stay. I can’t just leave you all.”

  “You can and must,” Ettore said and he turned to Hammell. “For all your sins, convince her. Whatever currency you have with her, whatever sway you have, use it now and make her run.”

  Hammell swallowed and nodded. “I’ll try.”

  “Good man,” Ettore said, clapping him on the shoulder.

  “And for what it’s worth,” Hammell continued, his voice running on uncontrollably, “I’m sorry… I didn’t know. I wouldn’t have done... any of it, if I’d known.” And he surprised himself by choking up, his own tears threatening to fall.

  The sincerity seemed to affect Ettore. “This was coming,” he whispered, “with or without you. You just helped speed things up... For what it is worth on my side, I am sorry about your partner.” He held out a hand and Hammell looked at it a moment and then took it. It felt strange to be shaking the hand which had slashed Asha Ishi’s throat, and stranger still to feel empathy with the man it was attached to.

  “And for drilling into my head and threatening to execute me,” Hammell said.

  “I did not execute you,” Ettore said. “Be thankful.”

  The wind changed direction and they all looked up as they heard the dreaded sound of a carrier.

  “You must really hate us,” Hammell said as he saw the great dark block appear in the sky at the end of the street, bristling with androids, guns, and bombs. Nervous murmuring broke out all around, punctuated by the sounds of pistols cocking and rifle bolts sliding into place.

  “No,” Ettore replied as he too stared up at the slow-moving battle platform. “You are better than us in a lot of ways. You are, in a sense, our children. Too cold and calculating sometimes, but you are still young as a species. You have the capacity to do whatever we could, to be whatever we were - and more. It is natural for us to be replaced. You too will design the systems which will replace you, I think. It is how we evolve now.”

  Hammell nodded, seeing the truth of it.

  Ettore’s sharp eyes snapped back to him. “Your penance is to survive and endure with the knowledge. Someone must always know the truth. It is all that matters in the end.”

  The gunfire started, little pop-pop sounds coming from the rooftops. The carrier ignored it, a stalking lion ignoring the bites of mosquitoes.

  “Goodbye, Eva,” Ettore said. “I’ve said all I can say.” And with that he
set off back down the street, his entourage falling in behind him.

  “So?” Hammell asked as he turned to Eva.

  “I don’t want you to die here,” Eva said quietly. “There’s no reason for you to die here.”

  “I have no reason to die anywhere else either.”

  The tear finally escaped, running down Eva’s face as she nodded. She took the second gun from her belt and walked over to the young blonde girl who was armed only with a rolling pin, stood behind a barricade made from a dining table and chairs. Eva took a deep breath and then placed the two pistols down on the table in front of her before turning away.

  “We have to see it,” she said to Hammell. “We owe them that.”

  Hammell nodded as he took her hand. Together they walked back up the street as carriers and nats fanned out above them and the bombs began to fall; robotic balls on spidery legs hitting the ground and smashing or gunning their way inside the buildings before detonating. Different sized robots were used for different sized buildings. It had all been calculated efficiently. The buildings collapsed in succession, regular as dominoes.

  They came to a halt at the end of the street, the end of the town, and turned to watch the battle. The fight was predictably one-sided, though one of the carriers did fall, taken out by a homemade bomb strapped to the back of a man who had somehow shimmied his way up a zipline and got into the hold. Hammell felt a grim sense of satisfaction as he realised from its designation that it was Nieder’s command vehicle. The gigantic metal hulk ran clean through a building and then folded like a concertina into the ground with an ear-bursting crash. Hammell didn’t wish for anyone’s death, as a rule, but he would shed no tears if it later transpired that Nieder himself had been on board.

  Considering it was humanity’s last battle in a long and distinguished history of such things, it didn’t last long. In less than twenty minutes the final building had toppled and the town became nothing more than another pile of broken stones in the Reserves.

  A line of androids appeared on the street, emerging gradually through the dust-laden air. Eva and Hammell raised their hands, but they had both already been pinged from afar. The line parted as it passed them and closed in again behind, and they watched as the androids worked their way down the street, searching through the rubble, executing anyone they found still breathing. At last, when the area was considered safe enough, the I.T.F. Agents themselves began sliding down their wires to stride arrogantly through the ruins. Hammell could feel his anger threatening to boil over as he watched them slapping one another on the back for a job well done.