I was lying in a pool of my own spit when I heard her speak again.
“Do you feel any better now?”
I wanted to answer but I couldn’t make human noises.
"I see," Katya said. "Mick, would you like me to recommend that if
Dr. Malhan needs a new subject for ECT tests that he should get you?”
“N-n-no -o no,” I managed.
“Do you have any more jokes or unpleasant remarks?”
“No, Katya.” I had heard she liked to be called by her first name. I heard she was a reincarnated Siberian shaman. I heard a lot of things about Katya and the other sensitives who sat on the Council.
“Sit down in the chair, wipe your chin. Your SK tests have only gone up 4% since you began standard treatment. The medical specialists feel that you are still a recoverable resource. Would you like to be recovered? Do you want to be a patroller again?”
Oh yes, yes indeed. Respect, next to the Council and Katya herself. Action! Adventure! To get laid every night again.
“Yes, that would be nice. That is what I would like.”
Ordinarily, the doctors always make you fill out forms and papers whenever they give you a treatment, session, injection, or what have you. Helps them keep track of what works and what doesn’t. Katya wasn’t a doctor.
She reached up to remove her Class Four eye-shields.
The last human being’s eyes that I had seen were my mother's before I went in to get the VR rig bolted to my head. I looked down, almost instinctively. So many rumors floated around about Katya.
She pulled them off casually, folded them on her lap.
When someone has Reality Perception Disorder, or gets the gaze, their eyes are... different. The pupils are huge, and unsettling visions leap out and snare the mind of anyone who looks into them. Everybody wears shades now, because you never know when somebody suddenly goes RPD or Mad Hatter.
Her eyes were a beautiful nondescript brown. Cool and sturdy like the bark of a great tree. We still had some trees on the surface, pretty things. I clenched the arms of the chair.
* * * *
The mole dream goes something like this:
We’re tunneling underground, trying to go underneath a river. We’re all down there, digging, moving earth. Some have tools, some use hands, some use teeth. We’re all wearing the full gear. VR goggles, I knew via dream knowledge, don’t really work. Nothing we see is really what we see; it’s what the VR goggles tell us we should see. Lately, they've been cutting out more and more of what is really in front of us.
Anyway, there we are, gradually going blind and tunneling. You know, like moles. Sometime after we go blind, the VR sets start to show us what’s up on the surface. One of the Others, a big one, a really big one, is up there. The VR rig works well enough, so the Other just comes across as a big solid black pyramid. Sometimes it extends parts of itself out into the city around it. The crazies run all over the place, of course. It has a pitchfork. It waits until it feels the ground move – the moles digging around – and it stabs down into the pavement.
In our tunnels, we sometimes feel when the person next to us gets impaled, pulled up through the roof. We don’t see it of course, but we hear it: a loud crash, a rodent-like squeal, and the sudden rushing of bodies trying to escape.
We all try real hard not to think too much on the mole dream. Rumor is that you never, never, ask Katya about it.
After she visited, I had the mole dream a lot more. On the plus side, my SK score went up by a whopping 10%. Ten more and I’m back in the mix. The visits from the medics get fewer and farther between after Katya talks to you. The medics don’t really like Katya. But boy, the psychs won’t leave you alone for five freakin’ minutes.
* * * *
“Actually Angie, the only really tangible effects that I’d felt were that no matter how disturbing my dreams or memories were, they seemed distant, like they belonged to someone else. Sort of like having a VR assembly over my mind’s eye.”
She nodded, scratching at her chin before lifting her eye-shields and rubbing at the corners of her eyes.
As long as we were sharing, “So what got your arm?” I asked.
Angie dropped and started doing her one-armed push-ups.
“No, really," I said. "I’ve heard a lot of different things. Tell me the real story.”
“One of the Big Boyz came along," she said, dropping down.
She pushed back up, “Search-and-Snatch mission at the zoo.” Down.
Back up. “No way something the size of that thing could fit into the tank it came out of.” Back down.
“They’re bad about that,” I said, speaking from experience.
Up. “Probably two-hundred crazies, easy.” Down.
Up. “We unloaded on the crazies, I mean really let ‘em have it, grenades, shells, you name it.” Down.
Up. “What we didn’t know was there were three Pink-Spots.”
Down.
Nobody who was sane really knew what a Pink-Spot was. It was just some creature that the VR rig covered with a bunch of moving pink spots, thus the name.
Up. “Came out of the north end of the reptile house.” Down.
Up. “Six Nar Tips and four D-fluxes was all we had to start with. Most of those we use on the Big Boy." Down.
Up. “The pink-spots tore into us like a tank-car through crazies.” Down.
She stayed down. “Crazies pulled me to the ground and broke two ribs. One of them bit through my boot heel, even. One of the Pink Spots cleared ‘em off. I reached for my gun. I had to reach over two big pieces of rubble. It brought its foot, or tentacle, or whatever, down right on my arm, breaking both bones between the rocks. I think that someone set off a D-flux, drove the thing back. I tried to run, but the crazies got hold of me. I think they pulled the rest of my arm off while I tried to get away. I can’t really remember it all.”
“I see,” I said. Even though I couldn’t see her eyes, I knew she was lying.
The Others are dangerous to even look at. The crazies had been caught in the initial wave, turned and looked, and lost what little grip on sanity they had. The Others were dangerous to listen to. If they had crossed over, or spawned, or landed, or whatever the hell they did about fifteen years before they had, we would have all been fucked. Fortunately, our technology – my mom’s generation’s technology – had come so far that we didn’t really need to rely on our flawed natural senses. The VR rigs filter out all the Others, keeping your mind fairly safe.
The patrollers, fight, and secure resources from the surface. Sometimes, when things are going really well, they bump you up to Owsla and you get to go on a wide-patrol and search for a. . . a starport, or a temple, or something. Something to explain it.
I’ve never gone on a wide patrol. There have only been two since I became a patroller, and both right after Katya led her group from Four-Corners to us. Not bad for a ten-year-old.
Those were good times, busy times, making room for all the newcomers and doing good works for our fellow sane men.
* * * *
They finally came for Donny and Angie: two red-guards, one of whom was almost old enough to shave every day. They handed them the stylus. Donny just about shit himself, he was so excited, but Angie didn’t seem too happy about it.
She signed in, and the guard looked at her SK result.
“Please write your real name,” he said in as expressionless voice as he could muster.
“Go home to mama,” she spat back.
His partner tagged her with his Taser. She jumped about three feet off the ground, crashed into the cage wall, and slumped to the floor. Donny had a look of almost comical shock on his face as they gathered her up, cuffed her good arm to one of their belts, and slapped her around a bit to wake her up. The reds led them away. Donny was happy again by the time they left the light circle.
It gets mighty boring when you don’t have anyone to talk to, or share your perverted fantasies with. Group masturbation is, of cour
se, out of the question. Solo only does so much.
Like I mentioned, even the meds don’t like to talk to you once you’ve talked to Katya. The standard treatment was pretty dull, too. There were almost no other treatment candidates. Those that did come in during those long, awful weeks were what I’d risk calling unrecoverable.
One of them – her name was Jamie, I think – was in the circle of lights with me for a while. She didn’t sleep, not once in three days. On the third day, when she was on one of the exercise bikes in the rehab center, she suddenly spun around and held her water bottle in front of my face.
“Is this half full or half empty?” she demanded.
“Oh, a little from column ‘A’, a little from column ‘B’.”
“It’s half full!” she shouted at me.
I started doing push-ups, deciding that I didn’t really want to know anymore.
“It’s half full of half-piss!” she added. “Not a problem if you’ve got enough water! Enough minds! Dilution is the key! The big if, the plan!”
The red-guard Tazered her, and she lost her footing on her cycle. The pedals kept spinning and her legs got all tangled up in them. It was really funny in a disturbing way.
I don’t know where she got off to after that.
* * * *
I knew the reds were coming for me. They gave me the SK test. Didn’t bother to do a confirmation test, just looked at the result, smiled and told me I was ready to be a patroller again.
It was really odd, since I signed in under a completely different name, one that had all consonants. But then, these were the two reds that Katya usually had with her.
* * * *
I got a new VR set screwed onto my head. They didn’t use those special anchoring sleeves after all. It really hurt. I mean, it hurt a lot.
In my four months in the cage, things had really fallen apart. I could tell because nobody bitched about how bad things were. That meant things were fucked-beyond-funny.
I was outfitted and got my first patroller assignment before the blood had even dried.
It was nice to be back in the patroller section of the Underground again. I got to see it for about five minutes. Sinh Tong was still there, distributing the tools of our trade.
“Hey Mick, good to have you back. We missed you.”
“No need to shout Sinh, I’ve got a headache,” I said, pointing to the fresh anchoring screw.
“One standard patroller rifle.” He held up the beautiful thing, opened the main chamber, the spear-chucker chamber, and the grenade chamber to show they were all empty.
I took it, he handed me my ammo. It was less than I used to get.
I noticed that my ammo was all that was left in the boxes.
“Saber, knife, and of course – this!”
“Ah, Daddy’s missed his little girl,” I said, taking back my old socket wrench and sliding it into my boot.
* * * *
The disembarking room was a storm of orange and black. Patroller uniforms are stunningly ugly, but they keep us from shooting each other. Katya herself stood on the map table and fifty antennaed heads turned to look at her, mine included.
She didn’t have a VR unit, just those damn eye-shields. Someone handed her a microphone and she addressed the crew. It was all I could hear over my new headphones. Very touching speech. Something about one of the broadcast towers getting a distress call from the Albany area, our moral duty to come to the aid of our fellow sane men, that kind of thing.
I took advantage of the distraction to push my way up to the front of the crowd.
Angie R. was there, right in front. She was looking up at Katya, listening intently to her uplifting speech. I knew it was Angie because she had some sort of razor wire chainsaw thing protruding out where her right arm should have been.
I wondered if she would recognize me. I tapped her casually on the shoulder, the one with the real arm.
“Hey Mick!” she said, a huge smile splitting the lower half of her face. I wasn’t as surprised that she remembered me as much as I was that I remembered how to read lips so well.
I had no idea what I was going to say. I honestly didn’t. I mean, shit! What do you say to someone like Angie R.? Maybe something like “Hey, don’t go nuts and kill me like you did your other patroller unit,” or even, “Hey, why don’t you get out in front?”
What I ended up saying was, “How are you feeling?”
She watched my lips move, smiled and nodded so fast that one of her antenna thumped my VR rig. “I’m doing better. We’re all doing better. We’ll be even better when we get to the folks in Albany.”
Katya finished her motivational talk and we applauded.
We began to get into line. With this many people, it would take six separate trips to get to the surface.
* * * *
I stood in my old place in the line. It felt good, good to be back. Someone had told me that Katya herself was going on this one. The Council really wanted it to go right. Things were getting worse. We were getting worse.
Katya walked by us, looking us over. She pulled a handful of us out of the crowd, Angie and myself included.
She told me to stay close to her, no matter what else happened. Even reading her lips, I got the Russian accent. She said something to Angie too, but she was turned away and I couldn’t read her lips. There were about ten others. We were the first group in the elevator.
At the top, Katya took off her eye shields. She punched in the exit code, and motioned for us to go. Outside. How long had it been?
The ruins waited, quiet, patient, deadly. There were no crazies in sight, or any of the Others.
We unloaded the tank-cars and the bikes.
“Mick, cripple the elevator.” Katya said. “That’s an order. Donny, cripple the communications tower.”
* * * *
We didn’t tunnel after all. It took six days to get to Albany overland. I saw things that turn most people’s shit white. We got kinda crazy. . . and that’s saying a lot. I couldn’t tell if I never slept over those six days, or if I just never woke up.
Angie didn’t even shoot any of us. For the first two days, we sent her to take care of the other patrollers when they got too close. They didn’t try to follow us after that.
The folks in Albany were awful glad to see us, awful glad to look right into Katya’s beautiful brown eyes.
Katya let the madness – hers, ours, animals we had met on the way – out into the Albany colony.
I don’t think they noticed, what with all the good works and making room for us and all.
Some part of me felt pretty bad about it, but Angie R., who is an expert at not feeling bad, told me that Katya’s getting better at this each time.
Earth Worms
by Cody Goodfellow
Gary Caldwell awoke from a dream he couldn’t remember, except for the sound of his own voice telling him to be fruitful and multiply.
Cold, golden light poured like sand into his eyes, but he could not close them. Could not move at all. He could see nothing but the light and feel only a vague, universal aching which brought him to the edge of panic. He was still in his body, or he seemed to be. The sensations he felt were nothing like the deep meditation or the OOBE training that were supposed to prepare him for the end.
Something his wife said came to him, just then: the End isn’t when we die… it’s when we all get what we deserve…
Was this what he deserved, then? Was this the Limbo reserved for infidels and unbelievers? It would be far better if he could panic; if he could feel exultation, fear, anything.
Because the end had come, and what he believed had come true.
This thought cast his discomfort and confusion into a whole new light. He had seen them come down out of the sky with his own eyes. When the whole human race had succumbed to despair, he and the others who shared the vision had held out long enough to see them come.
He was with Joyce in the communications bunker, watching the torrential acid r
ain. The telescopes and pirate satellite feeds had found nothing, but their Big Ear had been pinging with anomalous radio signals for weeks. Someone had to be listening out there, and might finally be trying to speak.
Caldwell was the only one well enough to stand watch. A Gray Grids infection had wiped out half the group in the last week. Joyce was well into the terminal phase, the livid, circuitry-shaped rash branding every pallid inch of skin, but she came topside to bring him soup and spend her last breaths on accusations.
“Just admit it, darling,” she whispered, like begging for medicine. “Admit you were wrong.” It was unworthy of her, but it was easier than facing the real betrayal. She had followed him out here, and she was dying, and he was not.
“What did I do, now?” He busied himself with rebooting the sweeping radio receivers, but no outsiders broke into their argument. The constant atmospheric disturbances caused by the roving tri-state cyclone-cluster they called the Funnel, now a permanent feature of the Great Plains, had snuffed out all terrestrial communications.
No one on Earth had anything to say that was worth hearing, anyway. Night and day, the group tended their telescopes, their radio transmitters and their lasers, and sent out Dr. Scriabin’s message to the universe.
“All of this was a mistake. All the calculations, the predictions, the pilgrimage out here… just laser-guided prayer. Just another cargo cult pipe dream.”
That stung. The world had called them a cult, but what did they believe that was not written in the poisoned earth, the tainted skies, and the rising, dying seas? Their leader was not a wild-eyed crankcase or a glad-handing evangelist, but a soft-spoken retired college professor.
Dr. Scriabin predicted the end based on Malthusian charts and greenhouse gas curves, while the rest of the world clung to their fantasies of a universal Daddy who gave them the earth to eat like a pie in an eating contest. Was their retreat into the Montana badlands to try to contact an extraterrestrial intelligence any more insane than the infantile belief of a solid majority of Americans that they would be raptured away from the end by angels?
Apotheosis: Stories of Human Survival After the Rise of the Elder Gods Page 8
