Apocalypse Machine

by Robinson, Jeremy

  So when the first ship—a yacht—arrived, its seven Japanese occupants nearly out of food, he welcomed them with a bright smile, feeding them and providing water from the small pond he’d built in the trash island. The sailboat was tied into the floating mass, and once again, the island grew. Since the Japanese couldn’t speak Spanish and knew only limited English, communication was reduced to hand gestures while they learned each other’s languages. The first word Lopez taught them was ‘Captain,’ and that he was it.

  As more months passed, more stragglers arrived, one ship, boat and yacht at a time, each one becoming a new way station on an interconnected mass of trash and ships that could rise and fall with the waves, no matter how vast. They picked up vessels and crew from New Zealand, China, Russia, Fiji, Hawaii, and the mainland United States—all people who thought to flee to the open ocean before the waves came. Within two years, their community had grown to a hundred. They collected rain water, and syphoned it from the humid air itself. Fish were abundant. Colonies of edible seaweed grew from the fringe of the expanding six-acre garbage and boat patch, which Lopez had deemed the Red Sky Flotilla.

  It seemed they would not just weather the end of the world, but they would flourish through it.

  Until it found them.

  The wave came first, more powerful than any they had experienced before. They lost two ships recently connected to the flotilla, but no people. Lopez realized too late the wave’s power came from the fact that the monster was headed straight for them. It arrived early the next morning, its spines cutting through the ocean like mile-high dorsal fins. And they sliced the flotilla in half, destroying ships and years of work.

  Thirty-seven people were lost, some killed by the creature’s passing, some lost at sea and drowned and others consumed by the sharks that had made their home beneath the floating island.

  But Lopez rallied his people. Using small boats, they brought the severed halves of the island together, closing a miles-wide gap that had formed. They fought for their homes, against the monster and the elements, and eventually, they won. Lopez was revered by the people. He married a Russian woman. He had a son.

  And then, the world changed again.

  Floating organic debris left in the creature’s wake clung to the flotilla’s edges, growing spindly white tendrils. They attempted to tear it away, but it spread too fast, moving beneath the water, filling in the cracks. After a year of this strange growth, the flotilla was stronger than ever, bound by living roots. New life grew up from the trash, lush, green and soft underfoot. He could almost feel it pumping out fresh oxygen. Soon, Red Sky was growing on its own, expanding miles, bulging with terrain, all of it rising and falling with the waves, and all of it kept at the Pacific’s core by the same cyclical currents that helped form the original garbage patch.

  That was the beginning of a new prosperous life, and in the many years since, Red Sky had grown into a small town of three hundred forty-seven souls. They lived like a commune, with each person doing their share of the work and reaping their share of the reward. No one went hungry or starved. Crops, actual crops, grew on the spongy terrain, which was moist with fresh water. The white roots dangling hundreds of feet down sucked up the water and filtered out the salt, forming a small lake at the island’s core, partially submerging the original Red Sky vessel.

  There had been threats to their colony in the past, rising from the ocean. Strange beasts with bulging eyes. But the sea life around them, who now called the island home, reacted to the new creatures’ arrival with territorial aggressiveness. And those too large to be chased away were trapped by the island’s roots. At first, Lopez thought the creatures, some fifty feet long, were getting trapped in the twisting system of roots the way dolphins used to find themselves coiled in his fishing nets. But then he saw it for himself, watching through a fishing hole one day. While all of the fish and sharks, and other new species of smaller ocean dwellers, swam in and around the roots, they never came into contact with them. When the larger creatures tried to swim beneath the island, the roots reacted to their touch, wrapping around the large bodies and paralyzing them, and then slowly consuming them.

  The island wasn’t just growing, it was alive.

  A new symbiotic world.

  So when Lopez woke to the jarring sound of a fog horn, it took him a few confused moments to remember what the sound indicated.

  It was a warning.

  They were under attack.

  He stumbled from his cabin below-deck on a yacht they had collected five years previous, its occupants long dead. The boat was now fully enveloped by the island, a half mile from the coast. “Stay inside,” he said to his wife and five year old son. “Don’t come out until I get you.”

  The early morning sun was just over the eastern horizon, casting the sky in a violet hue. Lopez looked to the coast beyond his home. There were a dozen more vessels between them and the shore, but they were close enough that something large could pose a threat. He saw nothing there. Aside from other members of the Red Sky clan emerging from their homes, armed for a fight, he saw nothing. No threat.

  If someone sounded a false alarm...

  He heard shouting in the distance and headed for it. The voices came from the far side of a cargo ship. It was small by cargo ship standards, but the largest vessel on the island, and it had brought them many amenities and supplies, not to mention several tons of plastic and rubber goods that had been adapted for life at sea. Ping pong balls became fishing bobbers. Toys became bait. And tire tubes became floatation devices and buoys.

  The raised voices echoed off of the metal hull, urgent and afraid.

  Lopez rounded the bow, spear in hand, with a dozen men now behind him.

  “Captain,” Pietro, the Russian who was on watch, shouted. “They took Harry.”

  Lopez noted the crazed, fearful look in Pietro’s eyes. He had been with Lopez for eight years, and he had seen and survived some horrible things. But the man was terrified. And Harry, a large Hawaiian man, could not have been carried off by anything small. Lopez searched the land around them, looking for something still dragging the man back to the sea, but he saw nothing. He looked to the nearby fishing holes, but the water was calm.

  “Where did they go?” Lopez asked.

  “Go?” Pietro asked, sounding bewildered. “They have yet to leave.”

  That was when Lopez noticed the pale Russian was looking up.

  At the sky.

  Lopez craned his head up and saw them right away. They looked like manta rays, with broad, undulating, fleshy wings, and sacks of flesh on their backs propelled them like breathing jets, sucking in air and then squeezing it out. There were six of the creatures, circling like vultures. And one of them held a man in its jaws, revealing the truth behind Pietro’s story and the creatures’ size—at least fifteen feet long, with a thirty foot wing span. Lopez didn’t see any limbs on the creatures, but he soon understood why. When the flying ray carrying Harry passed the shoreline, it dove down and plunged into the ocean.

  “Get everyone inside!” Lopez shouted to Pietro. The Russian wasted no time climbing back into the cargo ship. He’d be safe behind its metal walls. And with its fog horn, he could signal the entire colony to stay indoors.

  “The rest of you, come with me!” Spear in hand, Lopez ran out into the open.

  A handful of the men followed him, less sure, but loyal. The rest remained hidden in the cargo ship’s shadow.

  “Captain,” Jones said, “we can’t possibly hope to fight creatures that big.” Jones was a skinny man. A hell of a fisherman and cook, but not a fighter. He was also right.

  “I don’t intend to fight them,” Lopez said, watching the skies, waiting for the creatures to notice them. “Not all of them.” He held his spear at the ready. The five-foot metal rod, tipped with a razor sharp harpoon, could slay a whale if thrown with enough force. It would work on the flying monsters, too, if he could hit one. “Aim for the first of them that comes. Wait for my signa
l. Then throw.”

  “To what purpose?” Kai asked. He was a Korean man and one of their most skilled hunters, taking down mammalian sea creatures when the colony felt the need for red meat.

  The fog horn let out three quick blasts, warning everyone to stay inside, and giving Lopez time to consider his answer.

  He had a secret. He’d kept it from everyone. Mostly because he didn’t want his wife to worry, but also because he wasn’t entirely sure how the others would react. Fear of the island on which they lived helped keep everyone in order. He’d been fishing, alone, when something large and deep caught him sleeping and pulled him into the fishing hole. He had plunged thirty feet down before he’d fully understood what had been happening and let go of the rod. That was also the moment he’d become tangled in the long white tendrils dangling beneath the island. He had seen them before, from a distance when diving off a boat, but he had never been so close, and he had certainly never touched them.

  The roots meant certain death.

  Only, they didn’t.

  Not only did the coiling tendrils not kill and consume him, they had held him in place for a moment, twisting around his body, gently, almost like a caress. The moment was almost intimate, and he’d returned the roots’ affection, rubbing his hand over the undulating vines. They then had lifted him back to the surface, sinking down again only after he was safe, back on shore.

  He wasn’t certain what the colony offered the living roots—nutrients from their waste, a habitat to cling to, company—but they weren’t just carnivorous plants. They were intelligent. They were protectors. And he needed their help now.

  One of the flying creatures dove at the group of men before Lopez could explain the plan. They might not have believed him anyway. The ray swooped low, and cruised over the landscape, jaws open to reveal broad, flat teeth meant for crushing and chewing. Poor Harry, Lopez thought, and then he opened his mouth to shout the command to attack.

  But he never got the chance.

  He was interrupted when one of the ray’s undulating wings slapped against the green, spongy island surface. The reaction was immediate and violent. White spears punched up through the ground and then through the creature’s body. The ray’s momentum turned into a downward arc, smashing its face into the ground, where more white tendrils snapped up, enveloping the creature, pulling it down.

  “You knew this would happen?” Kai asked, eyes wide.

  “I hoped,” Lopez replied. “Red Sky is alive. And friendly.”

  The group of men looked down at the squishy ground beneath them, aware for the first time that the pile of trash and boats had become much more than their home. It could, at any time, slay them all, but instead, it protected them, and provided for them. The colossal monster had destroyed continental humanity, but at the same time, it had provided a protector.

  Far in the distance, Lopez saw the land rising up.

  The fog horn blasted again, warning of an incoming tsunami, which they had no trouble riding out now.

  He and the men ran back to the cargo vessel, climbing inside the cabin and holding on, while the big wave rolled beneath the island and moved on its way. Given the wave’s direction, he guessed the monster was headed back toward the West Coast. If there was anyone still alive on the mainland, he wished them luck, but what they really needed was to adapt, and to make a new life for themselves, like the people of Red Sky had done, and would continue to do.

  30

  Abraham

  Hope, like what little remains of humanity, has become nomadic. Elusive. Always on the move. Never where you left it, or where you think it will be. And on occasion, it surprises you. Like the Nepalese mountain people living in caves. The Iranian desert dwellers, their tents never in the same place. The Egyptian raft villages outside the ruins of the now coastal Cairo, subsiding on the sea, ready to float away. And then, at the base of the Loma Mountains in what once was Sierra Leone but is now part of the Atlantic, we found a seaworthy vessel, cast aside by one of many civilization-crushing waves. The sailboat had the name Daisy, but I rubbed it away and duct taped a new name to its aft: Hope, the nomadic ship with three passengers.

  “Abraham.” Graham sounds tired, and he should. For weeks, he has piloted us through a storm-ravaged sea and over a rolling tsunami that carried us miles backward before setting us back down into the ocean. Waves like those sweep across the oceans every time the Apocalypse Machine enters and exits one, reminding us of its presence. We’ve only seen it once since Ukraine, watching it from a mountaintop in Nepal, with the mountain men who took us in. It lumbered over the horizon, its miles-tall spines visible for a full day.

  For years we dodged its path and the natural disasters created by its passing, pushing us further east, and then south, and then north again. Our lives became nomadic. The longest we stayed in one place was for a year, recovering after nearly starving to death. I’m not even sure where in the world that was—somewhere in southern Asia—but the tropical jungle provided enough food for the three of us. Until it dried up. All of it. Starvation nearly claimed us again as we headed back west for the first time, stopping our travels long enough to recover from them.

  Sometimes we found ourselves uprooted by the Machine’s chaotic influence on the world, sometimes by lingering humanity, many of whom didn’t want to share their now precious resources. But we three, bolstered by each other, never descended into the animal-like life we saw in others. I came close, the first time I killed a man. It nearly broke me, but I did it to save Mayer’s life. And it wasn’t the last time. The world had turned violent, and the three of us, lacking a tribe, were always in danger.

  It was many years before we got the chance to head west again, and our journey to the coast was two steps forward, one step back. Sometimes ten steps back. But we pressed on, mainly for me. My family has never been far from my mind, and every step in the wrong direction felt like torture. But traveling isn’t what it used to be. You can’t just pick a direction and strike out. For a time, we thought heading east to the northern Pacific was the answer. We could have crossed to Alaska in summer and worked our way southeast toward home. But a drought forced us west again, to Africa.

  “Abraham,” Graham says again. “Do you see that?”

  He’s sitting behind the wheel of the outdoor helm station. He doesn’t sound concerned, but it takes a lot to ruffle his feathers these days. Mine, too.

  I’m seated below in the cockpit, which sounds official, but it’s really a nice back deck with a dining table and navy blue-cushioned lounge benches. Over the past fifteen years, we have struggled to survive, pushing through the Machine’s—and humanity’s—worst offerings. We are perpetual refugees, without homes, countries or families, in search of a way back to the United States, more curious about its fate than hopeful about what we’ll find.

  After cutting across northern Africa, which is still primarily barren desert, the Leopard 48 dual-hull catamaran is a luxurious change of living situations. It took months to prepare for our cross Atlantic journey, but we have managed to enjoy the trip—when not fighting for our lives. The galley, stocked with fruit, game and fish, has a working propane stove for cooking. There are multiple quarters with actual beds, and soft blankets. The polished white interior and stylish accents are almost futuristic, making it easy to pretend that the rest of the world hasn’t reverted back to a primitive, pre-civilized state. And when the winds die down, or there’s a tsunami to overcome, the propane powered engines provide all the kick we need to continue forward.

  It’s what we do now. We push onward, no matter what lies ahead.

  We live.

  We explore.

  And occasionally, we hope.

  I climb up into the small helm station, standing beside Graham, who has one hand still on the wooden wheel. His long dreadlocks that I have deemed his ‘Marley do’ wiggle in the wind, but they’re too heavy to really blow. My salt-and-pepper hair is still cut, but sloppy, with a knife. Completing my bedraggled look
is a bushy beard that matches my hair, and a pair of sunglasses straight out of the 1980s, with neon green temples.

  He points again, and I see it right away. There’s a distortion in the ocean ahead, almost invisible, but imperfect enough to see. We’ve come across more than our fair share of deep sea trouble, including large and hungry Machine spawn that have no fear of mankind. I called them Scion, short for Scion Divergentibus, the quasi-Latin name I created for their phylum, which basically means ‘Divergent Descendants.’ On the surface, they’re completely different from the animals that populated the Earth before the Sixth Great Mass Extinction was kicked into overdrive and the world was reset. But I’ve come to believe they’re not completely different from us, primarily in that we can trace our origins back to the same source: the Apocalypse Machine.

  There is one thing every single mass extinction has in common—nature out of balance. Starting with the first mass extinction, triggered by a worldwide bloom of photosynthetic, oxygen-pumping micro-plants. This time it was humanity who had kicked things off. I don’t think it was our pollution, global warming or the rape of the natural world that triggered the Machine’s rise. It certainly wasn’t Kiljan’s toe. I think it was the combination of humanity’s effect on the planet. We reached a tipping point. Scorch the Earth and start anew, or let the world die. Those were the options we created. Had we known about the Machine’s existence, I’d like to think humanity would have made different choices. But I’m not sure it would have mattered. We saw the writing on the wall. We knew where our destructive lifestyle was leading the planet. But we continued forward, comfortable with our blinders on—until they were torn away and most everyone died.