Eupocalypse Box Set

by Peri Dwyer Worrell

  “Stop at the next crossroads and drop me off,” she said abruptly.

  “What?” Alfred was driving.

  “I want to go spend a couple of days by myself on the beach.”

  “But, D.D., I thought we agreed it would be better for you to spend some time catching up with your old friends?” Alfred wheedled.

  “What are you, my husband?”

  “Hardly.”

  “Well, fine. None of your business then, is it?”

  “Suit yourself.” Alfred knew when it was useless to argue with his friend. He whoa’ed the team by the next crossroads shop and watched her walk around the vehicle’s rear and grab her backpack. “Damn, you’re stubborn!” He looked down at her and shook his head.

  “Tell me something I don’t know. Hey, asshole, I love you.”

  “I love you too, D.D.”

  She extracted her controller from her pack and slung it on her back, clicked her tongue at the dog, and walked eastwards towards the beach on a foot trail that was probably once the asphalt driveway of some private seaside retirement village.

  The drones lifted off the carriage and she flew them ahead. She expected to find dilapidated, unoccupied homes, perhaps a squatter or two, or some recluse who refused to live closer to the rest of humanity.

  Which is what she had a half-formed hope of becoming. She had failed so spectacularly at every aspect of her life’s project: marriage, family, kids, and finally, at the brink of what seemed her greatest success, her career.

  She intended to struggle through all that in solitude, salvage what she could from the ashes, and learn to love whoever the hell she was now.

  ###

  Half an hour or so later, Alfred pulled up to the front of Jeremy and Gaby’s home. Gaby was talking to another woman in the yard, surrounded by miscellaneous children. She turned to see who had come. Alfred was startled to recognize Jessica. He smiled quietly to himself. D.D. certainly would have been flung straight into her pot of crazy if she’d been blindsided by seeing Jessica unexpectedly. D.D. could take care of herself; he’d go check on her and break the news gently.

  It looks as though the Goddess guides events after all. He smiled and waved at the women walking his way to open the gate.

  XXXIV.

  Snuffed Out

  Mountain Breeze, once a golf resort, now thrived as a writer’s colony. Almost overnight, the second-gen ctenophores enabled a new era of uncurated peer-to-peer art and journalism, and the arts were beginning to reemerge. The Highfield crew now had neighbors. The busiest building on the hillside was the former back-nine lunch counter, now converted to a tank facility where strains of ctenophores attuned to a particular publication or artist’s feed were grown for distribution. The old Highfield Register was one of several publications with a more local focus, but the bulk of the tanks overflowed with Global Oracle ctenophores.

  It was fortunate that blockchain cryptography had surged into the world’s awareness before the eupocalypse, because it had primed the transition to spiral-chain quantum cryptography. Every peer-to-peer information transfer was verified and traceable, and those trails disappearing into anonymous sources were accorded the respect such rumors deserved. Which is not to say that the wheels of rumor mills were eternally stilled; far from it. But propaganda would be orders of magnitude more difficult to create and sustain in this decentralized environment.

  At the door to the tank facility, Esther bumped into Lou.

  “After you,” she gestured, since he was closer to the door.

  They went in and found the tanks burbling happily. Ctenophores pollywogged between the shaded indoor portions and the parts that extended through the wall, allowing the creatures to float in the sun outside and recharge or cool off as their needs dictated.

  “Helloooo?” she trilled. Nobody answered. Lou rang a bell that sat on the counter.

  A groan came from the floor, and the two exes came around to check it out. A figure lay supine. They recognized the day worker at the tank farm—a young woman named Daisy, whose courtesy and efficiency made her invaluable to the enterprise.

  Daisy did not look courteous or efficient now. Her eyes were sunken in purplish pits, her mouth was dry and her swollen lips were peeling. She gave off a sour, fermenting, febrile odor. Esther bent over her, and she coughed.

  “So cold. So cold.”

  “It’s a lovely warm Fall day, Daisy.” Lou bent over her. “Her forehead’s burning up.” He unconsciously wiped his hand, damp with her sweat, on his pants leg.

  Lou and Esther’s eyes met over the sick woman’s body. Esther pulled out her ctenophore. “I’ll call the doctor.”

  They brought Daisy some fresh water and held her head up while she drank it. The doctor walked in just as Daisy brought the water back up. She coughed and gagged, splattering her benefactors.

  “Thanks for coming. She’s bad.”

  “I’ve seen a couple of these, just today. Looks like some kind of twenty-four-hour bug. Help me get her to bed.” Dr. Chaprata, a Pakistani woman, was temperamentally suited to this type of small-community medicine. Once they’d basically dragged the sick woman to her little suite in the rear of the building, she bent over her and assessed her more thoroughly.

  “She looks really bad off,” Esther said.

  “Not as bad as the guy I saw earlier. He had three wooden horses in his rectum.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, but now his condition is stable. Really, though, this is a bad virus. Can one of you stay with her? She needs to drink fluids. We could take her down to the infirmary,” a small hospital Dr. Chaprata and some other practitioners had established in the valley, “but she’ll probably get better faster if she just rests.”

  “I will,” Esther said. Lou and the doctor left, and Esther sat down with a wide-backed ctenophore to work on tagging the uploads for the day.

  Lou, in the meanwhile, walked downhill to his own cabin. The lovely Nora was arranging red leaves and pine cones in a vase on the table. A cinnamon fragrance wafted through the air. Nora kissed him distractedly. “I’m a little tired. I think I’ll lie down.” She rubbed her eyes. To Lou’s dismay, her fingertips left purple bruises behind. She suddenly had two black eyes.

  “Are you alright? The doctor says there’s a twenty-four-hour flu going around.” He caught her hand. Hot.

  She coughed.

  “Just leave me alone. I need to lie down!” Nora said with uncharacteristic irritability. She stumbled down the short hallway and barely got herself under the covers before she was asleep.

  Lou frowned, but he still went off to work. The quantum spiral-chain Highfield Register might only have a few thousand subscribers, but he was still a publisher and commentator, and always would be. He took his pad and pen and began to write.

  He became absorbed in his work; hours passed. Someone knocked on his door, and he looked up and realized he was hungry. Nora usually fed him, so he’d gotten out of the habit of feeding himself.

  He rose and opened the door to Esther. She had a devastated expression. “It’s Daisy. She’s not breathing. No pulse.”

  Lou said, “You’re kidding!”

  Esther’s expression told him it was no joke. “Let me just check on Nora; she’s sick too.” He went to the bedroom, where his recent bride was huddled under the covers. He touched her forehead, which was still hot, and told her, “I’m just going up the hill to check on Daisy.” She murmured something.

  He and Esther walked quickly up the steep mountainside together. Esther paused at the threshold, then followed Lou in. Lou checked Daisy, and confirmed she wasn’t breathing and had no pulse. Still warm, but then she’d been feverish. Her black eyes had spread further down her face, and her lips were pulled back to reveal teeth rimmed in blood. Her arms showed deep black bruises where they’d supported her while bringing her to bed. He flipped the covers back. She wore a sleeveless shift, and he saw her legs were as purple as a soccer player’s who’d forgotten to wear shin-guards.r />
  “What should we do? Should we do CPR?” he said.

  “No point in that. She’s been without pulse for at least as long as it took me to walk down and us to walk back up. Half an hour? She’s gone.” The scene had a grim, unwanted familiarity; Lou and Esther had seen so much death and illness together in the past few years.

  “Let’s call Dr. Chaprata. She should know who can handle the body. I’ll call Danny,” the owner of the tank farm, “and see if he’s got a family contact for her or anything.”

  They made their calls. Daisy had a brother in the valley who was called and would be here soon. Dr. Chaprata was not answering her ctenophore, which was not like her at all.

  “I never saw a dead person before the eupocalypse,” Esther said.

  “Yeah, we’re more able to be matter-of-fact now. Death comes to us all.”

  “But still, it hasn’t lost its sting.” She sighed.

  They looked down at the cadaver that had been their acquaintance. Lou’s mind began to wander, and he realized he wasn’t hungry any longer. He also felt the chill that had swept over him when he saw the dead body grow more intense—despite the unseasonably warm afternoon sun that streamed in the window.

  Esther coughed.

  ###

  Global Oracle

  Mountain Breeze, South Carolina

  Mountain Breeze Extinguished

  Cindy Nguyen

  With the death of its last resident, the village of Mountain Breeze in the Semihawa region of South Carolina died out today. Cindy Nguyen watched all eighty of the village’s other residents die of a mysterious illness. Nobody who’s fallen ill has survived more than 36 hours. The village has been effectively quarantined and the illness so far shows no signs of becoming a spreading epidemic. Ms. Nguyen remains alone in the village, bedridden, and plans to continue streaming video as long as she is able.

  XXXV.

  Flotsam

  Once Li dropped into the water, he clung to his float and let the soft current pull him away from the boat. The dark mass of the vessel on the horizon grew smaller and smaller beneath the gleaming orb of the moon and its dazzle on the water. His anxiety subsided. He had figured the tide correctly, so it was washing him towards the mainland. He looked north, and then down at the water that supported him.

  To his surprise, as his eyes adapted to the loss of the moonlight and its reflection, he saw patterns of light that swirled here and there. There seemed to be more of them closer to him. It only took him a moment to recognize the patterns: they were the same as the patterns inside the ctenophores. He watched them bob and dip about in the water around him for a few minutes, and became quite convinced that he was seeing the aquatic beasts. They were moving in a loosely Brownian motion, but amongst the randomness, they unhurriedly formed into a school about him in a reversing and concentric spiral.

  He felt one run into his right calf, and he flinched. Not that it was painful; the small animal’s soft body lacked the capacity for the slightest violence. Then another brushed by his lower back. His upper back. His left buttock. The bumps grew more and more frequent, and they all came from roughly the same direction, even when he spun in the salt water. No single bump was enough to change his direction appreciably, but the relentless soft taps slowly and surely propelled him shorewards.

  Eventually, the bumps tapered off, and he straightened his legs experimentally. His toes touched solid sand, and he found his footing. He was in water up to his armpits. He waded ashore, gravity aggressively claiming his body and wet clothes and gear.

  Li fell heavily on the sand. He panted a bit as his heart and lungs caught up with the changes in weight and pressure. He took his ctenophore from its pouch and prodded it awake.

  “Meala?” Meala. Send.

  He waited and waited. No response. He could not—would not—believe she was dead. But then, why isn’t she answering?

  The landscape was not inviting in the moonlight: short shrubs and dusty sand. He made for a blasted tree, the closest thing to shelter or concealment in sight. He put his float bag between its thorny trunk and his back, and leaned against it to ponder his next step.

  XXXVI.

  The Register, September 20, Year Three

  Wendy Harkavy

  Sacramento, California

  [Archived edition found in the abandoned village of Mountain Breeze]

  We stopped for a hiatus of some months in Sacramento. There, we met a woman by the name of Sarah Lavoie, who was kind enough to spend several days recounting her tale of the fall of San Francisco and the refugee crisis of the Central Valley. This account will intersperse our own observations of conditions in San Francisco and the Central Valley area with her first-hand records.

  We crossed the San Mateo bridge with trepidation. The Bay Bridge was destroyed in the catastrophic earthquake of July 12, Year Two. Since that time, the reputation of the area that once constituted what was surely one of North America’s loveliest cities has become a place of unimaginable horror and misery. We were sure the stories were exaggerated: some of them even involved supernatural occurrences or alien presences. However, we were concerned enough to dip into our dwindling resources to hire a team of professional bodyguards to escort us.

  The bridge itself was a rust-and-concrete skeleton, its asphalt and paint components long since consumed, its long concourse formidable. Yet it was deserted, and our crossing was uneventful except for an aggressive osprey defending the territory beneath its nest.

  Once we approached the end of the bridge, though, it was a different story. Our escorts had to negotiate our transit through a permanent checkpoint constructed by the dominant group in the region, the Zeta Thuggs. It was quite costly in terms of our negotiable trade goods.

  Once we moved north into the formerly great city, down muddy trails that were once broad highways, we saw the effects of twin disasters: first, the looting and subsequent arson fires that occurred the year the machine sickness struck; and then, the Giant Earthquake that struck the following year. The beautiful luxury homes of Silicon Valley are piles of blackened rubble spilling down the ridges that once overlooked the rest of the area. We carefully picked our way among these ruins until we reached a vantage point overlooking the entire Bay area.

  The devastation stretched for miles, but the most dramatic thing about the landscape was what we did not see: there were no signs of human movement, no smoke rising from household fires, no wagons, nor people on foot gathering in public places. Nothing. The sun was descending towards the Pacific Ocean at that time, and the Zeta Thuggs had warned us to be out of what they called the Zona Muerta before dark. We trekked into the checkpoint as darkness fell, reflecting over a long, silent walk on what had been lost.

  The Thuggs tasked us with escorting a guest to the Central Valley. Slight, with a sleek brown ponytail and kind eyes that belie her inner toughness, Sarah Lavoie had spent the prior week exploring the Zona Muerta under the protection of Funesto, a lean, tall man with many scars, dressed in leather armor.

  We left early the next day, crossing the bridge uneventfully. It was a journey of ten days to reach Sarah’s home in Merced, in California’s Central Valley. During that trip, we had the opportunity to get her story, which is presented in much-abridged interview form below.

  WH: Were you in San Francisco when the machine sickness struck?

  SL: Yes. I was at my home in Outer Mission with my three kids. My husband had a long commute…he worked as hospitality manager at California Golf Club…and so I was home alone as usual when the power failed. I worked at home doing web design, so I just took it in stride and did my stuff around the house, then played Robot Turtles—that’s a board game— with the kids. You’d been hearing about all the strange goings-on, but it was the weekend. The kids and I were just doing our own thing and didn’t worry about it. Maybe we should have.

  WH: When did you realize what was happening?

  SL: I think it was when my sister came over and banged on the door. “When did y
ou last fill up the car?” she asked. It had been almost a week, because Sally—that’s my oldest—was home with the flu, and the two younger ones weren’t in school yet, so we hadn’t gone much of anywhere. Lori—my sister—had both of her kids with her, and they were carrying backpacks. “We’ve gotta get out of here!” she said. I thought she was kidding around, talking crazy, you know, but she finally convinced me that people were rioting downtown and it was spreading in our direction. She’d filled up at an infected gas station, so her car wouldn’t run.

  WH: So, did you evacuate to the Central Valley at that point?

  SL: No, we tried to shelter in place. Lori had some signal and some charge left on her cell phone, and so we called Walter at the country club. He said he’d heard things were going nuts, and he was on his way, so we hunkered down—just me and my sister and the five kids in our two-bedroom house. Walter showed up two days later. The house was pretty gross by then, because the PVC pipes to the street had collapsed and we couldn’t flush the toilets or take showers, so we were glad to pile into the minivan—Lori was divorced, so there were eight of us—and head inland.

  WH: You went to Merced?

  SL: Yeah, it was slow going…the roads were starting to melt, you know, and abandoned cars everywhere. We ran out of gas around Vernalis. That’s when they got Lori and her littlest girl…

  WH: It’s okay if you don’t want to talk about it.

  SL: No, it’s okay. Heather. Her little girl’s name was Heather. I almost forgot somehow. I never thought I’d forget my own niece’s name. Heather. Heather.

  WH: Heather.

  SL: Lori took her behind a bush to pee. I heard Heather scream, and she came running out. This big dude ran out and grabbed her and pulled her back in the bushes. I started to run after her, but Walter grabbed me. He was right. Lori had to be dead already, she’d’ve never let somebody treat her girl that way. We had four other kids to worry about, including Cody, Lori’s oldest. But I still have nightmares about that day. What if Lori wasn’t dead? What if she woke up and found we’d left her?