Doomsday Minus One

by Andrew Dorn

  That was good.

  She had to learn to be on her toes at all times if she wanted to survive because what they were up against went beyond what he had dreamed of... or planned for.

  And it had begun messing with his head.

  The dreams had started weeks ago.

  He remembered walking alongside the creek, following the trail of a large buck out by the mine’s no man’s land. He had been distraught that day, frustrated by the lack of faith from his fellow SComm brothers. Few grasped his reasonings behind what he called, the dawn of the New Future. His diatribes about a different ecosystem replacing the old one was too out there, too esoteric, for most of them to accept. He had allies, of course, but they weren’t the kind to step up for him, choosing to lie low and remain hidden behind the anonymity of their avatars.

  Being outspoken about such a subject had more cons than pros but that was the nature of the business.

  Change was coming, it was inevitable, and it was a known fact most people feared it. Change could disrupt their comfortable lives. Lives made up of frozen dinners, cheap beer and reality TV. He was better than them, for sure, but he needed their esteem, their audience, their wills. Needed them to understand that if they didn’t follow his lead, they would be doomed to extinction. Just like the thousands of species that vanished from the face of the Earth every single year, with no one noticing or caring.

  It had taken some time, but he had managed to get the buck back in his scope. He needed a better angle, so he decided to go around a bunch of trees obstructing his view. That was the moment everything changed. He slipped on a rock, lost his balance and hit his head on a tree stump.

  The impact knocked him out instantly.

  Then, the dream began.

  The dream about the after.

  He wandered about a vast forest of dead spruce trees, hunching low under dust-filled clouds. The sun was a faint red disk in the sky while scrawny wildlife limped away in panic, seeking refuge where none existed. Ahead, on the nearby horizon, he could see vast valleys of ice, fractured by gigantic crevasses. There were cities in the valleys but they were in disrepair, crumbling apart, and as he watched they, along with the millions of inhabitants, disappeared beneath the ice. Supersonic winds, the likes of which had not been observed for billions of years, scoured the surface right down to bedrock, annihilating what remained of the biosphere. There was a burst of golden light, a moment of vertigo and he found himself alone in a new, alien, world.

  Roy woke from his dream with a renewed sense of what he had to do. His vision was proof a new future was at hand. There had been a before, and a present, but it was the after which he was interested in.

  The after was the key.

  The key to his destiny.

  A destiny he had to nurture and protect.

  “Let’s go, Gwen,” he said, the gash on his forehead appearing to simmer from beneath. “We have work to do.”

  She acquiesced in silence, fearful of setting him off.

  34 Survival

  10%.

  THE NUMBER flashed with insistence in Frank Curtis’ peripheral vision. In bright red digits, it indicated the percentage of remaining battery power.

  Ok, I see you, number.

  The display screen, along with the rest of his surroundings, was upside down. The spud lay on its side, a battered vessel, which at the moment looked more like a discarded washing machine than a survival container.

  The power issue was joining a list of other matters he had been facing since the great toss up. He had no idea what had triggered the huge upheaval, but it must have been linked to that godawful sludge. He had switched off both the internal lighting and the radio gear to conserve the remaining watts of electricity. Without power, the pumps inside the oxygen tanks, two separate containers attached to the exterior of the hull, would stop working. And he needed to keep those working the longest, if he wanted to breathe. It had been a miracle those tanks had not been ripped off in the first place when all hell broke loose.

  Thank God for that.

  Sitting on what used to be the ceiling, he spotted a packet of dried raisins sticking out from the crushed storage cabinet.

  Shit! How did I miss those?

  It was the only item of his food supply he could get to. The rest, along with the water, was locked inside the cabinet. A cabinet with a door jammed in so tight, nothing but a blowtorch could open it up. He had tried everything he could think of to get inside the steel cupboard.

  But it was impossible.

  He ripped open the small packet, cursing the gods of packaging for such a masterpiece of simplicity. The raisins arced in the air and fell to the aluminum-clad floor.

  Dammit!

  He bent down, wincing from the pain in his left side, and picked them up, one by one. They were like small pearls of life, so small in his palm yet so important for his survival. He popped one in his mouth, masticating with deliberate slowness, aware these were probably going to be the last thing he ate.

  He wondered how it had all gone wrong so fast.

  The pain in his upper torso was indicative of broken ribs and other internal injuries. He wasn’t a doctor but his body had its own ways of telling him something bad was going on. Like droplets of blood when he coughed.

  And he was so thirsty.

  For the first time in as long as he could remember, he yearned for a tall glass of water over his beloved addiction to java.

  His thoughts went back to the moment when all went awry. He remembered the panic in Emmeline’s eyes, the futile efforts to pull him out of the sludge, the fear racing through him, the loss of consciousness. The darkness and the light followed by the realization the world around him was breaking apart. The ground, the walls, the ceiling, the entire tunnel jiggled about, as if possessed by inner demons. Then in stupor, he no longer felt the sludge on his body... it had vanished as quickly as it had appeared. He got to his feet and raced off to the one place he knew would provide his best chance for survival: the spud.

  And it had worked. He had survived. But then his world turned upside down and he found himself fighting for his life once more.

  There was no question in his mind he was going to die.

  What a miserable way to go... sitting alone, at the bottom of a hole.

  He coughed. Blood splattered the floor between his legs.

  Anna.

  She was the pride of his life, the reason he continued to fight, refused to let go. Although Molly had opted for another life, as far away from Northern Maine as possible, Anna had come back to him. And he was grateful to have been able to work alongside her, of getting to know her as a grown adult, one he had loved since forever.

  Please God, make her safe.

  He shouldn’t have to die alone, in the dark. It was senseless and cruel. No one should have to endure such an end.

  No one.

  No one who had the capacity to dream, create and love.

  Anna, I’m sorry. Sorry for the moments I’ll miss. For all the good days and the bad. For not being there with you.

  Frank plucked the last raisin from the cold metal, hands trembling.

  Anna.

  The flashing number changed to 5%. Frank’s right hand went limp, and the raisin rolled away.

  35 The Weapon

  EMMELINE GRABBED SIMON’S hand and pointed out a spot where they could sit, free of the scrapped remains of the spires.

  “Let’s sit down.”

  Simon followed Emmeline to the back of the pit and plunked himself on a flat rock, legs crossed under him. She sat across from him, gave him a warm smile then looked up at the top of the pit, beyond their reach. He ventured the question burning his lips. “Ok, so now what?”

  “I must inform you about what’s coming next,” she said, eyes glued to the top of the chasm. “Even though I’m not sure it’s the right interpretation.”

  She settled into a relaxed seating position, hands knit together in a harmonious display of poise.

 
“If you’re wondering,” she grinned as if reading his thoughts, “yes, I’m into yoga.”

  Simon grinned back at her, aware his own posture lacked in grace.

  “So, here goes,” she said, after he stopped fidgeting and found a position to his liking.

  “I had a lot of time to think about this, before you freed me from the spires. I fear the entity is planning a second phase.”

  Emmeline watched Simon react to the news. His jaw flexed, and he shook his head from side to side.

  “Soon, I believe, it will have amassed enough matter, stored enough energy, to extend its reach way beyond what we’ve witnessed.”

  “How?” He said, interested.

  “By creating a new kind of weapon.”

  “A weapon?” There was a look of complete surprise on his face. “What kind of weapon?”

  “My take on this, is that what we are dealing with—

  “The entity,” he interjected.

  “Yes, this entity,” she continued, “... could be some kind of self-replicating machine.”

  “A machine?”

  “That’s what I sensed from my brief contact with it.” There was a look of wonder in her eyes. “When I was under its spell, for lack of a better term, I had this vision of a large spire, higher than the tallest trees, coming out of the sinkhole.”

  “Wow,” he said, eyes wide. “And you believe this spire is some kind of weapon?”

  “Yes,” she nodded, her mouth a thin line. Simon could hear the hesitation in her voice. What she was telling him was hard to accept.

  “I’m afraid this weapon will soon be deployed.”

  “What?”

  “And it will rise up right about here,” she indicated a spot on the ground, not 20 meters away.

  Simon got to his feet with a lurch, legs weak from the uncomfortable posture.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Afraid so,” she said with a shake of the head. “I can assure you my vision was, huh, quite detailed.”

  “We’re screwed!”

  “Uncertain at this point,” she replied, with a noncommittal shrug of her athletic shoulders.

  “Uncertain?”

  “Yes, uncertain,” she said, staring straight at him.

  Simon returned her stare, concern playing across his features. After a brief hesitation, he sat back down close to her, his hip touching the side of her leg. He noted she didn’t move it.

  “Ok, so what will this weapon be like?”

  “I think it’s a cannon.”

  Simon’s eyes widened in stupor.

  “A cannon? You mean a type of heavy gun like those used by the military?”

  She agreed in silence, giving him time to digest the information.

  “This is how I see it,” she began, hands clasped together. “This weapon has been developing, unnoticed, for some time now.”

  Simon nodded, all ears.

  “I’m theorizing here, but I think the sludge acts as a catalyst in the formation of the spires. Like a weird type of didymosphenia geminata.”

  “Didymos... huh?”

  “You geologists have zero knowledge of biology,” she said with a chuckle. “Didymosphenia geminata, commonly called rock snot, is a diatom, a single-cell algae that attaches to rocks on river bottoms. At its worst, it can bloom and cover the river bed like a green, slippery carpet.”

  “But what we are discussing here, this rock snot of yours, is not the same stuff we witnessed.”

  “Right,” she agreed. “But maybe the mechanism behind it is similar. Think of it, Simon. The entity manipulates and transforms, on a molecular level, an algae to carry out its bidding. This algal bloom transforms into a thick snot before evolving again, this time into the sludge we saw. The goo erupts from the bottom of the mine and sets out to take over the landscape, duplicating itself at a tremendous rate of speed. That’s why I believe the entity is a self-replicating machine of some kind.”

  Simon nodded in silence, working to wrap his mind around the complex ramifications of Emmeline’s theory.

  “But why does it need a cannon? I mean, it’s obviously capable of doing a lot of damage. Look at what it did to the mine.”

  “To go global.”

  Emmeline’s words reverberated around the rough walls of the chasm.

  To go global.

  Simon could not get the three words out of his head.

  “So it’s gonna shoot toxic goo all over the place?” Simon asked, a distressed look in his eyes.

  “Not just goo. You forgot about the self-replicating part.”

  Simon shook his head in disbelief when he worked out the true scale of Emmeline’s words. He processed the possibilities of such a calamitous scenario in a rush of half-formed thoughts, his mind on overdrive.

  The entity wanted to scatter itself as efficiently as possible. To do this, it would use some type of weapon, a cannon according to Emmeline, to launch copies of itself all over the place. These copies would reproduce the process, creating more weapons to discharge even more copies. The end result would be a total takeover of Earth’s ecology, of its environment, of what made it habitable to humans. How much time they still had depended on the efficiency of the process. If more of these seeding machines were introduced, the harder it would be to kill the process. There would be a tipping point, eventually; a time when one of the two systems, either the original or the new one, would triumph over the other.

  The cannon is the key.

  “We have to stop it.”

  “Yes,” she agreed. “But it’s not the only problem.”

  “No?”

  Emmeline marshaled her thoughts. “There’s something else we have to worry about.”

  Simon’s hands shot up in the air. “What else is there? What could be worse than fighting off a seeding machine hell-bent on rewriting Earth’s ecosystem to its own design?”

  “Us.”

  “What?” He exclaimed. “I don’t understand.”

  “Us,” she said with a mournful shake of the head. “Human beings, if you prefer.”

  Simon stared at her with consternation.

  “Listen,” she began. “We need to stop this thing, this process, before it’s too late. Agreed?”

  “Yes.”

  “But there are people who might believe the opposite, that the process should be allowed to develop, nurtured even.”

  “What?” Simon said with stupor. “Who would do that, anyway? Can’t they see what’s at stake here? We are talking about a terraforming process going on, right now, on our very own planet!”

  “I know, but believe me, some have been waiting for this event for the longest time. They have been getting ready for it. Many people have called for a radical change, be it political, social or financial and this event might be the perfect time to take action, to rise against what they believe is their legitimate right for a just world.”

  “You’re speaking of a lunatic fringe.”

  “Yes,” she said with a small nod. “I have sensed another presence nearby when I had my vision. One that frightens me. One that doesn’t want us to interfere, doesn’t want us to eliminate the threat.”

  “But,” he began, a shadow crossing his features. “Surely we can reason with whoever is out there and make him or her understand.”

  She looked up, eyes misting over. “Let’s pray we can.” A single tear fell on her cheek. “But we might have to do more than talk.”

  The despair in her eyes matched Simon’s own distress.

  I can’t believe we’re alone to fight this. The army will surely come to our aid. Before long we’ll be rescued and they’ll take over.

  The army.

  Damn! They’ll take more than over. They’ll take the surefire way to eradicate the threat. They will bomb it to smithereens... and us with it.

  Simon glanced at Emmeline. Her eyes had not left him as if she knew what he was thinking. She realized they would probably not make it out alive, mirroring Simon’s own train of thoughts.


  “Here it comes,” Emmeline said, straightening.

  The ground began to shake and Simon jumped to his feet. The vibration grew in intensity in the confined space of the chasm, doubling with each passing second.

  “What should we do?” Simon called over the din of the rumble.

  “Hold on!”

  The ground swelled up in a great burst, like a volcanic cone cracking and splitting apart from an eruption. The object emerging from the breach was a dark mass of knotted conduits, shrouded in stiff branches of thickened sludge. It was an imposing monstrosity, a grotesque version of a plant stem making its way out of the dirt. The trunk of the object was of a deep grayish color, festooned with a compressed layer of rocks and shards of dirty yellow crystals. It gradually rose from the ground, inch by inch, like a hellish version of a colossal tree.

  Simon estimated its width at over 10 meters, larger than General Sherman, the giant sequoia tree he had once seen in a national park outside Fresno, California. The real surprise, though, was its deliberate and steady rate of growth. Simon was reminded of a 3D printer he once owned, an early model that took ages to print out even simple objects. Each deposited layer of material would be stacked upon each other, the process taking hours before the full piece was revealed.

  The cannon was undergoing a comparable evolution. It was solidifying its base before pushing upwards, cementing its structure as it kept rising. He had not expected this odd process, but it made sense. The Seeding machine was creating a weapon using the materials at its disposal, taking advantage of different material, organic or not, for the purpose.

  Simon smiled up at Emmeline and she returned it.

  “This is the break we hoped for!” she said, her voice muffled by the continuous rumble. “We still have time on our side!”

  She’s right, he thought. They could use the time factor to their advantage. Use it to stop the cannon before it rose from the pit.

  “There!”

  As the cannon continued to emerge, the intense pressure, along with the ground’s upward momentum, caused the bottom of the pit to split apart, fracturing the rocky strata into a hodgepodge of gaping holes and deep crevices. Emmeline’s gaze turned to a rift opening up at her feet, a fissure scarcely large enough for a person to squeeze inside.