Doomsday Minus One

by Andrew Dorn

  The red hairs in the crossbow’s scope glimmered in the fading light of the early evening. The man wearing a blue shirt underneath a wind jacket with the word Aerios embroidered in big white letters across the back was easily distinguishable, despite the distance.

  Elijah Roy adjusted his position, raising his weapon a few millimeters from the rocky pedestal on which it sat. The man hanging onto a rope ladder swinging from underneath the airship was busy securing a line to the roll cage of a stranded SmartDozer, one of those big models used in roadwork. He was finishing off the work, getting ready to climb back to the ship. Elijah had no idea why the airship needed to be tied down. It was true the wind had picked up, but it was a long way from what he guessed would pose a risk for the ship. Then again, he knew next to nothing about these crafts. What he did know, however, was that he could put an arrow in the man’s chest if he wanted to.

  Perhaps I should.

  It had been on his mind ever since he had observed the craft flying over his property, oblivious to his sovereign space. Then, when the ship had to all appearances followed him to the mine, he knew it was a problem he would have to deal with.

  The ship was an obstacle to his goal.

  An obstacle to eliminate.

  The crosshairs bobbed along the man’s upper body, dancing in the scope as Roy tried to keep his target lined up.

  He had to take the man down.

  But was it the right time?

  He had to think of the power waiting for him at the bottom of the hole.

  Rutledge had informed him two other individuals, a man and a woman, had ventured down into the hole. She wasn’t sure though if they had come back or not, or if they were even still alive.

  When the sludge had gushed forth like a lava flow, they had been forced to scramble for their lives. He and Rutledge had managed to flee the torrent of goo, pushing the Polaris to its limit as they took refuge atop a narrow promontory, the only spot out of the sludge’s reach. They had overcome confusion and danger but Roy had promised himself it wouldn’t happen again. The surge had been unpredictable... that was a given. But he couldn’t let other sources of unpredictability ruin his chances of success.

  Those, he had to get rid of.

  Like the ones the airship represented.

  His finger rested on the trigger. The shot would be challenging. His angle of sight was not the best, and he was 150 yards from the target, much further out than when he hunted game. Light was falling and with the wind shifting in intensity, from nonexistent to gusting, he would have to make the best shot of his life to hit the target.

  The man in the rope ladder had climbed up two more rungs. He had to shoot now, despite the bad odds.

  He pressed his finger harder on the trigger.

  At once, the coiled energy of his crossbow was unleashed. The pulleys flexed with an energetic snap and the steel reinforced arrow streaked out towards the target. Eye glued to the scope, Roy’s breath caught in his chest. He watched as the arrow passed a hair’s width away from the man’s right elbow, vanishing out of sight.

  The man in the ladder froze, turning his head left and right, as if searching for something. The moment dragged on as the man stared at the sea of rocks and boulders surrounding the hole.

  Roy hunkered down, observing Declan Penney with calm detachment. The man stared his way but Roy knew he was virtually invisible amid the boulders lying about. It was too bad he couldn’t attempt a second shot. Doing so would call for him to get up from his position, which could alert those onboard the ship. That was the drawback of using crossbows: the time needed to draw again and the gymnastics involved as you pulled on the string with both arms.

  The fact he only had a handful of arrows left in his quiver was another critical factor. If he wanted to be successful, he would need to be closer... much closer. For the moment, he would stay low and wait.

  At last, the man made his way up the ladder and slipped back inside the craft.

  “You shouldn’t have done that.”

  Roy turned to the voice hiding in the dark.

  Gwen Rutledge, peeking from underneath a frayed blanket in the driver’s seat of the Ranger, was shaking her head at him.

  “Those people aren’t our enemy.”

  Roy hunched down and made his way to the UTV, concealed underneath a stack of branches. Walking up to where Rutledge hunkered, he thrusted his arm out and grabbed her by the throat.

  “Shut up,” he hissed, his voice full of spite.

  Rutledge flinched, eyes bulging out from Roy’s strong grip on her windpipe. She reeled back in her seat, clawing at his hands with savagery. Seeing this, Roy squeezed even harder. Rutledge was not in an ideal position to defend herself. She couldn’t use her feet, couldn’t run away, and had no weapon at hand. Panic rushed inside her. Roy doubled down on his efforts to strangle her. Rutledge’s wild thrashing only succeeded in making Roy even more pitiless. Her vision blurred, and she felt her strength weaken. In desperation, she managed to turn on the engine. Reacting at once, he punched her hard with his left hand.

  Rutledge’s eyes rolled over.

  Roy froze, watching her suffocate. Then, as if deciding he had played enough, relaxed his grip.

  Rutledge jerked sideways, drawing deep pulls of blessed air in her empty lungs.

  “I’m starting to wonder if you really understand what’s at stake here, what your role is in all this,” he said, staring at her as if she was putting on a show.

  Rutledge, rubbing her throat, looked up at him with fear in her eyes. The man had almost killed her for Chrissake. She fumed in silence as he stared at her with the air of someone who had suffered through too many interruptions.

  “I’m starting to wonder if you aren’t my enemy.”

  Roy pulled a small flask from his utility belt. He took a step towards Rutledge. She flinched against her will. Roy bent down and dropped to one knee.

  “Here, drink this,” he said, handing over the bottle.

  With quivering fingers, she accepted the bottle. The soothing water trickled down her throat, easing away some of the lingering soreness.

  Reassured she was functional again, Roy recuperated the flask and shoved it back into his belt.

  “So, what will it be Gwen?” Roy’s voice cut across the silent darkness. “Are you friend or hostile?”

  Gwen Rutledge stared at him, flummoxed.

  She didn’t know what to answer.

  32 Out of Phase

  “ALL RIGHT, NOW, so how do we get out of here?”

  Simon craned his head back to look up the blackened pit. Emmeline raised her shoulders. She had no idea. Her brain was still struggling to understand what she had gone through. She felt as if her memories had been stockpiled in a seldom used corner of her brain. There had been a bad headache and mental anguish followed by a strong sensation of liberation. After Simon kissed her, she had begun to feel much better, more alive and less anxious. He had been quite attuned to her well-being afterward. She smiled to herself, playing back in her mind some of last evening’s highlights. It had been a red-hot interlude, ardent and lustful, and the warmth they shared still resonated within her.

  “Huh, Emmeline? Any ideas on how to get out?”

  Her brain whirled back to how she had found herself imprisoned by the spires.

  It began with the impression of being defenseless against a force she couldn’t identify. There was a contact with her skin, a quick touch, followed by paralyzing fear, and the cold embrace of the ooze on her body. She was denied the right to move, the right to think. She couldn’t run, couldn’t fight. Her body was imprisoned, confined inside a tomb of radiating golden light. Her mind, however, remained free to roam, discover, communicate... and after a beat, make contact with the nearest mind available: Simon’s.

  “We don’t,” Emmeline said, turning to Simon.

  “What?” He said in disbelief.

  Fixing his attention to Emmeline, he wondered again, for about the millionth time, if she was ok.
He couldn’t put his finger on it but she seemed fragile, less assertive than usual. It might be a normal reaction, he thought. Being alone by yourself in a cramped underground chamber for an extended period could screw anyone up real good. Emmeline was brilliant, no doubt about it, but she wasn’t immunized against psychological trauma or anxiety shock. Nobody was. He was worried about her and with good reasons. He wanted her, no, he corrected himself, he needed her to be ok.

  “There is still something we have to do.”

  Simon took a step forward and peered into her eyes, a deep frown on his forehead.

  “What are you looking at?” She asked, stepping back.

  “Huh, nothing.”

  Simon had elected not to tell her about the yellow membrane coating her eyes. She had put up with enough strangeness for the day, indeed for a lifetime, and there was no reason to trouble her with more bad stuff. Stuff that he had no explanations for, anyway. Stuff that would give anyone nightmares.

  “Nothing,” he said, smiling at her. “You said we have something to do. What did you mean by that?”

  She glanced sideways at him, suspicious of his sudden subject change. She knew he was hiding something from her but for the moment, she let it pass. The time would come when he would open up about it and she knew from experience that it was better that way.

  “I have spoken with the... Huh...”

  “What?”

  “I still don't know what it is, but I talked to it.”

  Simon froze in place, struck dumb by the news. She had communicated with it?

  “Let me try to explain,” Emmeline said, a faraway look in her eyes.

  After a moment of concentration, eyes closed, she began talking. There had been an out of phase, a moment in time when she lost consciousness. During this phase, she felt a presence, an intelligence lingering in the background of her subconscious self. The intelligence wasn’t standing idle, however. It was playing with data. At least that’s the interpretation her brain was making of the deluge of knowledge pouring forth. There were flashes of biological material in the data stream, bits of information she recognized and hung on to deflect the barrage submerging her senses.

  There were patterns in the data itself. She could see them, visualize them but they were incomprehensible and beyond her understanding. She knew from her studies that life itself is a data set, on a fundamental basis. A set assembled at a molecular level that goes back to the elemental foundations of the universe itself. She also knew that if one was to rewrite the basic assembly instructions of said life, you could achieve something else.

  The data flowed along the intelligence’s communication system like an underground network, complete with nodes, entry points and terminals. Instead of analyzing the data, she decided to understand how it moved and where it came from. The network was an extension of the intelligence’s own private system.

  And she could use it.

  Time followed a different line, a divergent path, in the out of phase. It has been a constant companion to humans, to all living things, even the stars and the universe itself, but to her private, built-in clock, time had broken off. In the vastness of frozen time, she scoured the network for minutes, hours, years, decades. It was as if eternity had given her a reprieve so she could use it to find a way out.

  And she did.

  First, had been the breakthrough with Simon. She had hit upon a way to send messages by taking advantage of the intelligence’s own conduits. It had given her hope that all wasn’t as doomed as she had feared, that at the very least, she could issue warnings to others. Then, as her communication skills increased, she aimed to gain control of specific bits of the network like a hacker exploiting flaws in the million lines of codes of a program.

  Her initial attempts were disregarded, the specificity of her requests too human-based to be incorporated and carried out. But she kept at it, and in time imposed a successful set of instructions. That was how she was able to command the tubules and pull Simon out of the antechamber. She had willed the conduits to her hand, directing their movement in the tunnels. Simon’s escape had been her doing all along, from beginning to end.

  But it had come at a cost.

  The intelligence had noticed.

  And touched her mind.

  It had lasted but one, single, millisecond. An infinitely small amount of time, but an eternity for Emmeline. The intelligence’s probe was overpowering, a possession of mind and soul. So profound was the contact that her heart stopped and the synapses of her brain short-circuited and shut down. It was a full collapse of all senses beyond even the mechanical ones which governed the human body. In the protracted moment when she fell into nothingness, she became aware of it.

  The intelligence.

  It was probing her consciousness, cataloguing each neuron, each synapse of her brain. It was at that moment she spoke to it.

  (Stop it!)

  And it did.

  She sensed its utter puzzlement as it recognized the actuality, the physical existence of Emmeline’s consciousness. There was a brief burst of light, a sharp pain in her head and she found herself staring up at Simon’s worried face.

  “So you ordered it to stop, and it did?” Simon asked, pondering what he had just been told.

  “Yes... and no. Basically I think it was surprised. It might not have been aware that I could sense it. Maybe it stopped what it was doing by curiosity. I have no idea why though. It’s still a mystery to me.”

  “If it’s a mystery to you, imagine to me!”

  Emmeline smiled, a gleam in her eye.

  “Well, we’ll figure it out someday.”

  “You really think so?”

  “Yes, because we will find and stop it.”

  Simon shook his head in wonder.

  “You sound so sure of yourself.”

  It was Emmeline’s turn to shake her head. “I’m not. But it’s something we have to do.”

  “So where do we start?”

  “We wait for its next move.”

  33 Dilemma

  GWEN RUTLEDGE BENT down to avoid the razor-edged metal strut jutting from the slab of concrete. The path ahead of her was an image straight from what Roy had warned about. The whole area at the bottom of the vast sinkhole had been churned inside out, transforming the landscape into a nightmarish vision of debris and chaos.

  Chaos.

  It was the key word in her mind as she sought to make sense of what she’d seen. The last hours had been a whirlwind of crippling doubt matched by deep introversion. She had always been proud of the fact her survival skills had kept her safe, and sane, from all the lousy things life had served her way.

  But now she wasn’t so sure anymore.

  And the number one reason for her doubts was marching alongside her.

  Roy was nothing like the man she had set out to meet. He was way more unpredictable than most of the people she had known, and her past was loaded with people she wished had never come into her life.

  The man was dangerous.

  Plain and simple.

  Not only to himself, but to those around him. She had seen it in his eyes, in the way he voiced his grand ideas and postulations. His plan was the only one worthy of pursuit. His plan was life and his life was his plan. There were no other considerations.

  A side of her knew this was all her fault. That it was a punishment of sorts for longing a different future, for the big change that would make her life so much better. She should have learned to work with people, with real honest people, not lunatics lurking online on discussion boards. She should have learned to trust her colleagues instead of undermining them, and to make them pay for something they didn’t do, for crimes they didn’t commit. Her life had been one of hardships and she wanted payback but she was coming to the realization that Elijah Roy wasn’t the solution.

  His new future wasn’t the solution.

  It was a tragedy.

  But it was too late now. She had gone down the rabbit’s hole and would hav
e to follow it to the bitter end. She had abandoned her post, left the others to fend for themselves, and there was no way she could ever work for LTI again. Her professional life, whatever it had been, was over.

  To the bitter end.

  She wasn’t sure how deep the rabbit’s hole went. There was still so many unknowns, so many mysteries. Had Frank Curtis met his creator at the bottom of the hole? Had Simon Macomber? Or even Brochu? Their fates played in her mind in a constant loop, powered by her own fears. She too could have fallen down a crevasse, and disappeared from the face of the earth, never to be seen again. And who would have looked out for her? Who would have risked life and limb to rescue her? Elijah Roy? He only cared for his so-called pre-ordained future. The rest was accessory, superfluous, discardable. The coming times had no tolerance for losers. Only winners need apply.

  Was being on the winning team so important? What kind of life awaited her once the sludge reigned supreme and turned the Earth into God knows what? Would she be doomed like all the rest of humanity? Or, as Roy believed, would they be able to gain control of it, and make it do his bidding?

  The more she thought about it, the less certain she was. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. There were way too many gray areas. She wished it was more black and white, good or bad. That way, she would know what to do.

  “You shouldn’t think so much.”

  Roy’s words jolted her from her reverie.

  It’s as if he knew what I was thinking.

  She nodded, staring at his fingers as they drummed along the shaft of his knife.

  “It’s not good thinking too much. Makes you open, vulnerable,” he said, with a sidelong glance. “You don’t want to be vulnerable.”

  Roy knew she had doubts about him.

  It was apparent in the way she darted her eyes, and the way her jaw tightened. He was making her nervous.