by Tom Upton
“Well, tell me now,” he said, as though the matter could be of little consequence.
“The artifact began to-- express its wishes to me.”
“Its wishes? It has wishes?”
“Oh, yeah,” I assured him.
“That’s astonishing. An artificial intelligence with wishes. And what would these wishes be?”
“Actually, just one,” I said. “It wants to go home. That’s why it has been looking for a pilot. It was never preprogrammed to return to its planet, so it needs a pilot to give it the command.”
“I see,” he said thoughtfully. “And is it aware of our problem, or is that irrelevant to it.”
“No, it’s very aware of it,” I said. “It conceived a plan that would fix everything. It wanted me to set the coordinates to a time just before you discovered it, and then give it the command to return home.”
Doc leaned forward, and placed his elbows on the desktop. He stared at his laced fingers as he considered the option at length.
“That would mean we would never remember ever finding the artifact, and that the artifact would no longer be on the planet.”
“That’s right,” I said. “It would restore the timeline that would have occurred had you never found it.”
“I could live with that,” Doc finally said.
“Then you agree it’s a good idea,” Eliza asked.
“Yes,” he said. “It’s an excellent idea.”
“You’re certain.”
“Yes.”
“Absolutely certain?” Eliza double-checked.
“Yes.”
“Good,” she said. “Because we tried it and it didn’t work.”
Doc frowned. “You tried it without telling me?”
“I seemed like the perfect solution,” I said.
“And it didn’t work?”
“Nope?” Eliza said.
“Why not?”
“We’re not sure,” I admitted.
“But there were consequences,” Eliza added.
“What kind of consequences?” Doc asked, lowering his voice, guarded; you could just tell he didn’t like the word ‘consequences.’
When neither Eliza nor I said anything immediately, he repeated the question, this time his voice filling with anxiety. “What kind of consequences?”
“Well…” I started, and then hedged.
“We broke the moon,” Eliza blurted out.
“You broke the moon!” Doc roared, jumping to his feet faster than I would have thought him capable. “You broke the moon?”
“Well, we didn’t actually break the moon,” Eliza explained. “But, for some reason, what we did change something, and the moon is now broken.”
“Fractured, really,” I put in.
“Oh, it’s only fractured,” Doc said, sarcastic. “Well, that’s different. That’s not so terrible. I’m sure I have a tube of moon glue around here somewhere. We’ll get that fixed up right away. Did you break or fracture anything else?”
Eliza and I looked at each other.
“Well…” Eliza started.
“Everything isn’t looking too good outside,” I said.
“But that’s just around here,” Eliza pointed out. “That doesn’t necessarily mean the whole world is the same.”
Doc’s eyes darted back and forth between Eliza and me. They were beginning to fill with pure panic.
“The whole world isn’t the same as what?” he demanded as though he really didn’t want to know.
“As outside here,” Eliza said, and started chewing her thumbnail.
“It’s sort of deserted,” I explained, watching Doc’s eyes start to bug out of their sockets.
“Yeah, deserted,” Eliza agreed quickly, “And, um, dark.”
“Yeah, and cooler,” I added.
“It’s just generally messed-up,” Eliza summed up the matter as though she were talking about a school schedule.
Doc was already pushing past us through the doorway, and heading upstairs. We followed him meekly as he clumped through the house toward the front door, which he threw open in a fit of despair, and beheld the world outside as it now existed. He slowly took in the gloomy tableau of the street-- the treeless, grassless, flowerless ground that surrounded the houses that were shadowed with soot and grime. He stared up at the unnaturally black sky, then, and when he looked at us; his eyes were glazed with shock.
“What could possibly have happened?” he murmured.
“No idea,” I said.
“Not a clue,” Eliza concurred quickly.
It took a long while before he spoke again, but as the initial shock wore off, his reasoning returned.
“It had to be something catastrophic,” he commented, and then asked me, “What does the artifact say?”
“It’s not communicating with me at the moment,” I said.
“It’s not?”
“It seems to be very frightened,” I said.
“Well, it’s not the only one,” Doc said. “This is just awful. Look at the sky, will you… and that chill in the air… if all of this doesn’t appear to be what was once called ‘nuclear winter’ I don’t know what does. When Krakatoa erupted, it was the most devastating volcanic eruption in history. Countless tons of volcanic ash was spewed into the atmosphere, creating a pall around the entire planet. The sun was blocked out to such an extent that temperatures dropped, crops were affected. It took years for the ash to clear out of the atmosphere. This has to be a thousand times worse…. Have you searched around for people, or are you just assuming-- because of how everything looks-- that nobody is still here?”
I told him the only place we checked was my house.
So the three of us spilt up, and for the next hour, went door to door up and down the streets. When we regrouped to compare findings, it turned out that none of us ran across another human being. All the houses-- that must have totaled more than a hundred-- seemed deserted. Eliza had run across a house whose mailbox still held letters; the last postmark on any of the letters was dated April 16th, 2003, over three years ago. Doc, having checked down the nearest main street, had run across a newspaper box and purchased the local paper, which was dated April 13th, 2003. The headline of the paper didn’t scream out of any impending disasters, though, but rather covered the relatively dull story of how a looming autoworkers strike might affect the local economy. However, on page thirty-nine, just opposite the daily obituaries, Doc found the most intriguing story in the entire issue; it was entitled “Io Mystery Baffles Astronomers.” The story-- probably just thrown in at the last minute prior to printing in order to take up empty space-- was no more than three hundred words long. It was basically about how astronomers around the world struggled to determine what had happened to Io, one of Jupiter’s moons, which appeared to have suddenly vanished. The article also mentioned that this was the second solar system mystery in as many months; it had been discovered that Pluto, for reasons yet to be determined, was not circling the sun in its established orbit but instead was thousands of miles too near the sun.
“Isn’t it just like a newspaper to bury the most important story in the back of the paper,” Doc commented wryly. We were sitting shoulder to shoulder on the sofa in his living room, with Doc in the middle, the three of us repeatedly going over the skimpy story. “It makes you wonder how these editors think, always putting up front what they believe people will think is important-- auto worker strike, hah!-- while never bringing to the public’s attention those stories that people ought to worry about. Think about it. You have a planet, my god, that has strayed from its orbit. Didn’t anybody realize how significant that is? And if that’s not bad enough, you have one of Jupiter’s moons-- which is just about the size of earth, if I remember right-- you have it suddenly and inexplicably vanish.” He folded the paper, and in disgust, tossed it onto the coffee table.
“Doc, where does this leave us?” Eliza asked.
“It leaves us precisely nowhere,” he said. “Don’t get me wrong
-- we’ll be all right. The artifact’s energy source is intact. We’ll have electricity and water and food and everything we need to survive-- that’s not a problem. But look outside… where are we?-- we’re in limbo, some place just this side of purgatory. We don’t have a clue how all this happened. We don’t know how much of the world is affected. We don’t know whether we’re the last humans on the planet. Unless the artifact starts talking to Travis, the only way were going to find out anything is if we discover it ourselves. Now, I can dig out my old Hamm radio equipment and get it up and running. My operator’s license expired years ago, but I hardly think the FCC will mind. Maybe I can reach somebody somewhere-- I don’t know. Basically, though, we are all alone in the dark. What we do know is dismal. We know the utilities are down, at least locally. We know that none of the nearby television and radio stations are transmitting. It boils down to this: we do whatever we can to gather information.” He pushed himself up off the sofa, and looked down at us. “I’m going to dig out the radio equipment, and see if the antenna is all right. You two,” he said, as though a reluctant general taking command of an army of pathetic troops, “you two I want to go out and check the emergency facilities-- the police stations, fire stations, hospitals, any place that might have a fall-out shelter-- schools, public buildings…. I’m assuming they will all be deserted, but you might find something to give us a clue what happened, where the people went, emergency orders left lying around.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a set of keys, which he tossed to Eliza, saying, “Those are to my last vehicle. It has no scratches on it and a full tank of gas. Please do not drive it off any cliffs. And, Travis, if the artifact starts communicating to you, even in the vaguest way, come home right away. Now, everyone has something to work on, right? Just be careful out there.”
We split up, then, Doc retreating to the basement to dig out his old Hamm radio, and Eliza and I going out to the car.
Becoming mobile wasn’t going to be very easy. The vehicle, a late model black four by four, although scratch-less and fully gassed up, was layered with black gunky material. Also, its tires were flat and its battery dead. It took an entire hour of scrubbing with a stiff bristled brush just to clear the junk off all the windows. While I scrubbed until my arms ached, making first small circles and then large circles with the brush, until the blackness finally eroded off the glass, Eliza labored to fill the tires with a bicycle pump. Once or twice, I accidentally splashed her with warm soapy water, and she shot me a dirty look and literally growled. When all the windows were clear and all the tires fairly filled with air, I pushed the four by four back into the garage, where electricity, supplied from the artifact’s power source, ran through the sockets. Doc had an AC jumper, which I plugged in and used to jump start the car. Mercifully, the engine hadn’t seized from lack of use; it started, running very roughly at first but then slowly smoothing out into a healthy hum. We let the car idle for about twenty minutes, so that the battery would become somewhat charged, before we climbed inside and started out on our mission.
“You know the air pressure on these tires is still very low,” Eliza warned as she shifted into drive and we started to roll. “It’s not like I have the arms of a gorilla and can get it up to forty pounds with a bicycle pump.”
“Just try to avoid potholes,” I told her.
We started exploring by slowly driving down the side streets. The eeriness of not seeing any other human beings soon became almost overwhelming. Every house or apartment building we passed was shadowed and gave off the air of lonely abandonment. Some buildings had been fled with such haste or in such a panic that front doors remained open. Forgotten toys-- a big wheel, dirt bikes, a baseball bat and mitt-- left on front lawns now devoid of grass were disturbingly sad sights. When we reached the main street, we could see the small storefronts of the neighborhood business had fallen victim to the same rushed retreat of humanity. Some stores were locked down and dark. Others had their doors wide open. Even the florist shop, owned by the two elderly sisters who eternally trimmed rose stems and baby’s breath, stood coldly as an ancient tombstone. There were more cars on the main street. While some were neatly and normally parked beside the curb, other stuck ass-end out into the street so that Eliza had to navigate round them. A conversion van was abandoned, with all doors open and hood up, in the middle of the street. A station wagon had jumped the curb and crashed into a light pole, which tilted threatening to fall; it seemed only the electric wires run to it, strained by the weight of the post, were the only thing keeping it upright at all.
Eliza drove along slowly, silently gaping at the desolate images. I started thinking about my family. Oddly enough, I felt closer to them now than ever before. I wondered what had become of my mother. I wondered whether my father was on the road, alone, when the catastrophe-- whatever it had been-- had occurred. I even wondered what my brother had been doing, and did he have a moment to record some pithy prose to describe the chaos that must have taken place on the campus. In their absence and in the wake of a disaster, they seemed more of a family than they ever had when everything was normal.
On the corner ahead to the right, there was a gas station, and I instructed Eliza to pull into it. The hoses from the self-service pumps lay discarded on the ground, looking like thick black snakes. Eliza drove up to the front door, whose safety glass was filled with a network of cracks that looked like a large spider web. I jumped out of the car and entered the station. Inside racks of candy and other junk food were nearly empty. Old candy bars lay strewn on the floor and had been stepped on, flattened, as though a herd of munchies-craving college kids had stampeded through the small station. The coolers were empty except for a couple lonely cans of diet soda of an off brand. I went to the back wall, which was lined with shelves of overpriced automotive products-- plastic bottles of oil and transmission and brake fluid, gallons of anti-freeze-- all scattered or fallen over like dead soldiers. I found what I was looking for: cans of condensed air to fill your tires in an emergency. I grabbed a couple cans, and went out to the car and filled the tires until the air pressure was about what it ought to be. Before I got back into the car, I went back into the station and retrieved a few extra cans of air, in case we had a slow leak, and a five-gallon plastic gas can. With the electric out, I knew it would be impossible for us to pump gas at any of the gas stations we happened across, but I figured, if need be, I might be able to siphon gas from the tanks of abandoned vehicles. All I would need was a hose, which we could get from the yard of any house.
When we left, the car rode much more smoothly now with the air pressure raised in the tires. Eliza didn’t have to be so careful about avoiding potholes, and for a while even seemed to be aiming for them.
We came across an area of complete destruction. There had obviously been a major fire, and nearly every building within the square block area had burned. The walls of the brick buildings were charred and in varying degrees of collapse, creating a jagged landscape broken only by the gaps where wooden structure had burned down to the ground, leaving piles of ashy remains. The fire must have occurred at a time of high winds, which carried the fire from structure to structure, from the retail buildings in front to the garages of private residences in the rear, from the garages to other garages and then finally to the homes themselves. Through the gaps between the burned out hulks, you could see in the distance the yards of the homes, where metal storage sheds and here and there a kids’ metal swing set or plastic play set miraculously survived what must been a ravenous conflagration.
“Omigod,” Eliza said, gaping at the ruins, instead of watching the street ahead. “What do you think caused that?”
“Just a small fire,” I said. “Watch where you’re going, huh? It would be a heck of a thing for two of the last three people on earth to get killed in a one-car accident.”
“But how could a small fire burn down block after block of buildings?” she wanted to know, still so mystified at the huge charred area she couldn’t take her
eyes off it.
“It probably started after the fire department stopped operations, and then went out of control,” I guessed. “Now, will you please watch the street?”
It was true. There wasn’t a single fire truck in sight. No emergency call had gone in, and no response had been made; it was clear that the fire had occurred after the area was vacated.
“You know, we should look for the nearest fire station,” I suggested, a thought occurring to me. “The fire department was probably the last functioning emergency department.” That was always the way it was with firefighters: the first to respond to danger and the last to retreat. This was why they were such heroic figures. And yet when they weren’t facing great danger, their presence was so low-key that they were nearly invisible to the community. They were the living embodiment of peace of mind, but, really, if you asked everybody, how many people would know the location of the firehouse nearest their home? “Yeah,” I said, “I’m sure that they would have been operational longer than the police department-- maybe even longer than the hospital emergency rooms and local trauma centers.”
I watched Eliza as she drove. Once or twice, she started to turn her face toward me, as though about to speak but then thinking better of it.
“What is it?” I asked.
“What’s what?” she said innocently.
“What’s on your mind?”
“Nothing, why? Oh, you’re reading my mind now?”
“No, if I were, I wouldn’t have to ask.”
“It’s nothing, really,” she said. “Just a passing thought.”
“What is it?”
“Just an observation,” she explained. “I’d rather not say.”
“Why?”
“Well, it might sound a little ghoulish. I don’t want you to think I have a creepy mind, you know?”
“I already think that,” I said. “So what’s the observation? Give it up.”
“Well,” she said, and hedged long enough to get in a bite at her low lip, “I was just thinking that we have covered pretty many blocks already, right? We still haven’t seen another living being yet, right? Well, considering that some kind of disaster occurred, there is something else we haven’t seen.”
