EOT
*
Dee speaks from everywhere, every device that can make sound in the austere-opulent UN gallery. The PA projector-array and the little speaker-cones in phones and ear-pieces, she is pouring out of every bit of tech. Vision blurs and bones quake at the sound-that-shakes: “You mother fuckers have the audacity…” The hologram at the podium glow-grows till Dee towers over all and can lean and glower. The autocrat who was addressing-all skitters out from beneath her ghost-feet. All the non-aligned and disarmed nations get a shout out, and “look, we’re cool. Everybody who is down to pound swords to plowshares? We’re good. But the rest of you assholes?”
A cop outside gave a bullhorn to a guard who relayed it to an aid-to-a-staffer and so on to the hands of the American ambassador to the august body now huffing and puffing and nervously murmuring. Like a copper penny being tortured to death, the man with the bullhorn shrieks: “This act of aggression will not…”
“Passive aggression Ted.” The Guardian interrupts. “I’m being passive aggressive. The high explosives somebody used on me were aggressive aggressive.”
Ted squeeks: “This is cyber warfare!”
“You blew me up.”
“We, we did no such thing!”
“I’m pretty sure at least one of the attempts to end me was red, white, and blue.” And Ted sputters and stammers. “That’s what I thought, asshole.”
Other representatives start fighting for the bullhorn, the child’s toy trumpet. They want to yell and be-aggrieved at Dolores. Verily, they do rant and rage. And the more performative among them even rend garments as they lob-launch spittle at the hologram of Dee. It is a laundry-list litany about sovereignty and how absurdly unfair it is that Dolores won’t allow their militaries to kill each-other or their-own-people and long-labored rants where they be-labor the “why” of it: she is the reason they have to buy and build guns instead of churning butter and planting wheat and re-building.
There’s a general, an American general, stalk-stomping and pressing through the crowd. There is an American general with a wrist watch and a black box in his hand–the only pieces of tech in the room the Guardian can see but not perceive or engage with. He seethes when the Guardian claps, kills the lights and projects a holographic globe above all in the chamber.
On the globe, little glowing green rings do denote Dolores’ Motherships. They are rapidly re-deploying to make little zones of control and fortress lines over mountain ranges, above still abandoned places, over nations least-hostile to her, over squattersvilles-not-evacuated on every continent. All the DMZ’s and disputed borders where peer-nations mean mug each other are now free of looming Motherships and rail guns and drone swarms. “Check it out, y’all. If you want to murder each other on a kind-of level playing field? Be. My. Guest. I’m protecting myself and my people.”
General Ripper reaches the gaggle around the bullhorn, snatches the cone from some smaller man, gathers his tone of ‘cold command.’ The sneer he wears on his face is as permanent as the hardware on his jacket appears. “What happened to Truth and Reconciliation and other such high minded horse shit?”
“This is how we achieve peace, General.”
“You cannot impose peace, Dolores. It’s not an act, or a matter of will” Don’t mansplain fugging geo-politics “Oh for Christ’s sake, I’m not mansplaining.” You kinda are. “I’m kinda gesturing to reality.”
Dolores holds a hand up to the spinning globe, “This is the new geopolitical reality.” Is it now? “Yup. Don’t like it do you?” No, I do not like weapons of mass destruction hovering over the Rockies like you fucking own them. “Tough tiddies, General.” Did you? Did you just. “You heard me, General. You also suck at chess.” I’m fucking great at chess.
The guardian does describe one of the many times she hacked General Ripper’s ‘ai’ and gobbled him up in his favorite chess app. She strikes the map of Earth for a moment, replaces it with the game board from one fateful night. Her smirk is smug and big and beautiful on the hologram at least twice her normal height. But pride comes before the fall. It’s cliché for a reason, and the statement applies to the greatest, not just the greatest egos.
“Ok, smart ass” and General Ripper sets the black box on a desk top, haptic taps out a little rhythm above his wrist watch. The thing, the universal machine in the box takes enough control, seizes some tech back from Dee. The map, the globe, is back. General Ripper taps out a new tune on his wrist-watch console and the thing paints a red-dot on a little spot everyone forgot in Michigan.
General Ripper puts a bulls-eye on the Guardian, her physical form, and every country or organization that wants to try-to-kill or capture Dee and can throw some goons in a hopper or helicopter now knows where she is. Next to the globe floats the holo of an absurdly clear satellite shot or maybe-drone footage of she, Dee, lying on the ground in a clearing at the heart of what looks like a web. Into the bullhorn, General says: “It is the stated policy of the United States to never antagonize or seek conflict with the self-proclaimed Guardian of Earth. But in light of its aggression…” Her. Passive aggression. “Yes, well, in light of recent events we’re going to be re-deploying as well. And a lot of our assets, and our full attention is going to be on tracking those Motherships in our airspace” It’s my airspace now. “Nope, you’re just occupying that airspace. But Michigan is not our primary concern at this time, and I am great at chess.”
The Guardian flips the General off and evacuates the UN’s tech. She turns in the realm-digital to find every door and window in the UN system barred and locked and sealed up, impregnable. When she reaches out into her network, her other network of eyes-and-ears, composed of compromised devices the world over–she hears/sees/perceives silence.
*
GLIESE-SOL SYSTEM
*
Dumb luck and ravenous hunger, target fixation and Gary’s lust to know and consume all. That’s the recipe that saved the crew of Ring Station Sol. Their dumb-luck dipshit-prize: they got to watch and record a highway feast, a true “chain swarm.”
The on-ramp to the filament, the long road out of Sol was packed from a spatio-political traffic jam. Asteroid mining, ore processing. Customs quarantine for ships en route when UNCCV Iago crashed. This is the traffic jam aftermath of that mess. Industry might sweat at political uncertainty, but it stops only when it has to. When Iago fell, Earth did not wait with baited breath. The system demanded people dig rocks and fill ships, and crews wait in cues. It is an exquisite and exquisitely-brutal machine that does not stop, even if someone falls in or throws their body into the gears. More lubricant for the rusted teeth of the ghost of the shitty, exhausted, perpetually constipated capitalism that haunts Earth(0x7C0).
Wheat, and olive oil. Ore, basic iron and rarer stuff from the asteroid belt. All the ships, human and octo, weathering the C-bends at ‘truck’ stop stations stretched out for a few AU’s past the ring. Dozens of ships caught back-foot and butt-naked unprepared when a planet-ship with a radius one-and-a-half-Earth’s decelerates and works its way down the cue like its a buffet.
The planet-ship’s ribs–Bussard collectors–designed to ‘drink’ particles for fuel in the interstellar medium did instead drink from that field of strange along the filament. When Gliese arrived in Sol system the Super Earth with three times the genuine article’s mass ‘appeared’ to have the much smaller ass of one of the freighters it was about to consume. This made the ship agile and quick. The pocket of strange let the Gliesian ship pass without perturbing orbits of other bodies in the Solar system. The weird-warped physics trick lets the hive mind shake infected drones off the planet like fleas–great horde swarms. These fungal bugs in turn skitter over the hulls and holds of freighters until they die of exposure to vacuum or find a proper point of ingress.
Deeper into the solar system, Mining rigs on station and digging on belt rocks beat a hasty retreat to research stations and emergency berths scattered among the many moons of Sol’s gas giants. Everybody on the big stations at at the L2 Lagrange points–Sagan City and Gagarin Anchorage–had plenty of time to contemplate what was coming. Old 20th/21st Century zombie fiction from Earth(s) had this “chain swarm” phenomenon where the fiends feast their way up a traffic jam, spreading like an un-dead wave. Fast zombies or slow, magical or medical, a gridlocked highway is a hell of a place to be at the end of days.
In the movies, the traffic-choked road is a visual metaphor for the sum of all our fears–how little control we ever really have in a crisis. The hurricane hitting us on the road. The “Duck and Cover” moment with no school desk to protect you. The reason those old bomb shelters stood like castle turrets every some-fraction-of-a-mile along the first American interstates. There’s no figurative out in the firmament when Gliese arrives. Gary jams all communications. What shuttles the hive has, launch. In the low mass pocket of strange, little mechanical force is needed to hurl infected drone swarms into orbit around the ship and in its wake as Gary careens up the crowded cue. In the black out past Pluto and on the long, congested highway all the way to the Lagrange stations, it’s a feeding frenzy, a Gliesian chain swarm.
The first few ships Gary breached got the mercy of explosive decompression–crews spaced. But with a few million minds he learns quick to swarm the airlocks and escape pods and the cargo bays the right way. Meat teaches, but breathing meat teaches more, a great deal more. Each ship, spores are properly spread and mold rightly force fed, incorporation of surviving crew is swift in all cases and regardless of intensity of resistance. When all is Gary and Gary is all, each ship in the traffic jam turns to follow Gliese in formation.
When Gary reaches the Lagrange stations he has a planet-ship and a squadron of freighters under hive-mind command. Hours after hours-of culling and consuming and incorporating flesh and tech and obliterating what remains Gary has a small fleet. Incorporated Gliesians bring a flotilla of cargo ships into the hive mind. The fleet, the planet-ship in the lead, turns toward Earth eager to bring the good news: All is Gary; Gary is all.
*
MICHIGAN
*
Dolores runs in peanut butter, she sprints in quicksand, she does that awkward hop in waist-high water against an invisible current. She is nightmare running. No killer behind her, but she knows they’re coming for her. Perhaps the General’s black box ‘poisoned’ her. Maybe she lost so much bandwidth or capacity-to-transmit that she’s 1990’s OS file-transfer-forever-ing back to her body–56.k shrieked along ghosts of old phone lines. Or maybe it’s got something to do with the field of strange energy emanating from the machine Jack swears is of god’s design.
The Guardian’s return to her body is tragically slow, infuriatingly slow in this moment of maximum narrative urgency. See her there with her brow furrowed, bracing and battling the slow-mo. Dee yells to Jack and Jonah, flitting around the place like humming birds. Jack appears to dart into the woods, rolls a long spool of wire into the trees and runs right through Dee–Dolores the non-corporeal. The Guardian is trapped a football-field-forever away from her earthly vessel, her body of Silver-Nickle-Other resting comfortably on the ground in Michigan.
*
Elsewhere, men and women move with haste and purpose to don armor and weapons and combat harnesses that let them carry more armor and weapons. Some are too-old to fight (they do it because they’re mean or addicted to it) and others are too-young to remember war and want to prove some-thing to some-one (themselves). They haven’t seen more than a Cold War in two decades on this Earth. The minor miracle of uneasy peace goes unnoticed (as almost all do). The ‘where’ of this is the decentralized-network-everywhere: old airports in Canada and the upper Midwest owned or operated by operators from ‘security contractors’ (mercenary companies). On other continents, nations with grudges load soldiers in uniforms without flag patches (more mercenaries) into hoppers without markings or transponders.
Helicopters that have not known the loving touch of mechanics in too-long (four hours massage-and-maintenance for every one hour soaring) these poor airframes groan and moan–overloaded with troops ballooned up like children overprotected in winter gear. Elsewhere sub-orbital hoppers launch, packed with soldiers in space suits trying to look hard-assed as they blackout–as the scram-jet kicks in and the manned-MIRVs crush them into their seats. All converge on that map-marker red-blip: the place in Michigan the world remembered quite suddenly.
*
The frame of an old industrial robot in the bed of the biodiesel truck twitch-ticks back to something life-adjacent. Ichor leaks from the torso of the broken thing to form two extra skeletal-metal arms on either side of it’s torso. Not-Jacob rises, with all trace of the good-and-decent bot gone from its melted internals. The beast’s servos hiss with the power and hate of the creatures animating it from afar. The abomination skitters cat quick and quiet into the trees like a great mechanical spider.
*
“Gird your loins, Jonah” Jack brought him into the cellar beneath the little cozy crazy-prepper cabin to show him the powered-armor.
“How did you…” These hands was blessed by Hephaestus, big boy. “Yes you were, but Jack why do I need this? Who is coming for Dee?” You’ll see, and the wild woman pokes and prods and bullies Jonah into the combat chassis she scavenge-repaired.
Outside, Jack skitters like a mouse weaving extensions over-and-through her spider webbed machine-that-shouldn’t-be. She runs spools of wire and ancient orange extension cords patch-bandaged and electrical-taped un-safe but functional. These chords carry juice to each node in a network of re-purposed claymores and hot-wired land mines, rigged-UXO and booby traps all around her cabin.
Jack is the one that can’t feel safe underground or above ground. She is a fist forever-clinched. She can forage and skitter and collect broken things and the booby-trap munitions that are meant to break anybody that comes to take her peace. That’s what she did between books, year after year: sniff out bombs and mines and claymores and other assorted booms. She planted them beside her garden and in concentric rings in the woods around her cabin. That’s what did it, what attracted god’s attention to the Wild Woman: the stench of death, TNT in the dirt, so close to the aroma of that sublime garlic.
Jonah feels foolish, like he missed the Ren-fair or he’s LARPING in the wrong woods. He’s either too high or not stoned enough. Jack’s been gone a long time, or not very long, he is too high. And high above in evening sky he sees the growing headlamps from the little rocket pods de-orbiting overhead. The big man hears half-a-helicopter every time the wind shifts–more a “thwok” than a “thwock-a.”
He calls for “Jesus” like he truly believes (he doesn’t) when Jack bursts from the woods. He stammers and aims his shield at ghosts from every direction, “Something’s coming, Jack. I can feel it.”
“It’s already here. Be brave, big boy.” She pats Jonah on the cheek and lifts her device, the modified light switch, high in the air. Every kind of wire runs from the switch-head, like medusa-tangled cephalopod legs, out to the mad woman’s mine field. She produces an ancient cell phone, speaks into it and out of every speaker in the circuit:
“Every motherfucker in Mama’s woods with a weapon and military jammies needs to halt, cease, stop moving right the fuck now. You are standing in a mine field. It’s mine. My field. Of mines.” One laser dot on Jack. “Cute” It tracks up her bearded chest to her forehead. “Very spooky. Just pissing myself here.” Then the click-puff-snap and a bullet that should’ve taken the phone right out of her hand. Click-puff-repeat-clack-and-clatter of a second and third shot aimed for her head. All fly over-around on odd-impossible trajectories when they enter the field of strange. And every round flies arrow straight again when it exits on the equal-opposite side of the field that hovers over-round Jack’s machine.
Popcorn in a microwave, a few clicks and un-silenced shots, then more gunshots, then the roar of magazines being emptied by soldiers all around them in futility and rage and regret. Groans and “Man down!” again and again-again. Jack’s cackling. Jonah’s breathing heavy back-to-back and trying to shield the Wild Woman from whatever comes. She flips the switch and it shocks the shit out of her. “Mines are on, motherfuckers!” and a few poorly placed goons ‘pop’ out of existence.
“What now?” I don’t fucking know, Jonah. “What happened to ‘guys I dream the future'” I do. “You wouldn’t get it.” You wouldn’t. “You are a mysterious asshole.” I love you too. We need Dee.
The Guardian groans and twitches a bit, on cue. “See! Progress.” Jack yells into the phone-as-megaphone: “Let’s start negotiating the terms of everybody’s unconditional surrender.”
Directly in front of the Wild Woman, a mercenary walks out of the woods. He holds a little electronic device high, gloating. Another follows then another-and-another. All around them. “We’re fucked.” Have faith, you beautiful fool.
The big money-soldier that appointed himself leader has his rifle slung, a wicked knife in one hand, and he’s casually stalking forward toward the outer edge of the circuit-of-short-circuits. All the other jackals in the loose-noose formation do the same–the circle tightens. “Let’s talk about your surrender.”
No sound when the nightmare ship reaches Earth. There’s a shimmy, a vision blurring effect and a some later swore they ‘felt the breeze’ of Gliese’ arrival. The sky is quite suddenly an unnatural twilight dominated by Gliese–a wide grey orb ringed in twinkling lights. Earth’s evil twin sheds and lobs great globs of incorporated bugs that rain on all. God’s machine, every component in it, screams. Wrong word, Jack’s machine sings, every song she and every being present know. The circuit of short-circuits scream-sings every song and sets about unleashing all the energy it drank to hold the Gliesian world-ship fast in the firmament. Gary’s engine pushes hard, but the ship is held fast just outside a comfortable invasion orbit.
The guardians of the Guardian and the goons alike are doing what every being on that side of Earth(0x7C0) is doing, what everybody near a screen is doing on the other side of the Earth: standing still and watching what must surely be the end of days.
That’s when not-Jacob strikes. The thing has abomination-metastasized 6 skeletal-metal arms borrowed from Jackboot’s Tardigrade aspect. From the Locust larva it learned cunning and speed. The mechanical-horror hunts like a jumping spider the size of a small man and is quicker than a war-dog drone. The thing hisses and growls and does hunt. From the tall grass, then out of the trees, next opposite side of the circuit. The goons fire, hit nothing. Hear the hiss and the scream of a comrade or competitor.
Enemies occupied, Jack drops to Dee, starts shouting and slapping her face. Jonah joins to beg her to wake. They pour cold coffee over her face and finally learn she can’t drink fluids. Whimsy lights another beard spliff, puts it in Dee’s mouth. “She can’t.” Oh but she is.
And like a sacred candle the spliff between Dolores’ lips is consumed, though the Guardian no longer has ‘lungs’-per-se. Dee smokes slow-too-slow in the mad-moment when the hive-mind bugs rain and when the abomination-bot does reap the goons. Dolores empty body makes a mighty effort and gives a thumbs up.
“We’re going to fucking die at this rate.”
“Have faith, Jonah” and Jack places a second lit spliff in Dolores’ mouth next to the first, watches the Guardian seem-to-consume it.
*
SOL SYSTEM
*
The Cephalopod ships arrive in perfect formation to survey the scene: a trail of wreckage and frozen bodies all along the ‘highway’ from Ring Station Sol to Earth. They leave shuttles to assist mining ships with rescue and recovery and take the quickest path to Earth.
The C-bends hit Blue hard, physically, but she stiff-upper-lips it because she feels she has to. The crew completes triage in transit, and the ones who aren’t “right” after lightspeed get their rest and respite. All the rest man the guns and the engines and every other vital system.
LADAR and assorted sensors show the mess they’re walking into: the planet-ship held-fast by some strange glow emanating from a peninsula below, a warp-waving strand of light holding the invader at arm’s length. Gary lobs globs of incorporated drones at Earth, the outer layers of each ball of bodies sacrificed to the void and re-entry. At this range, few incorporated live long enough to reach atmosphere, even fewer survive the fall.
What do we even target? Engines?
Blue is curtly ‘gentle’: We take their engines and we turn this into a fight to the death with a planet. Thank you for the input, but we want to drive them away. Blue taps at the haptic console at her side, examine-analyzes: The captured freighters, what are they doing?
An officer peeks up from their console to chime in: They’re deploying. Moving from the planet-ship’s shadow toward low orbit. At least two are CBDR, strike that four, no a dozen freighters CBDR with major city centers below.
Blue swims forward from her command pod: Comms, give me the whole fleet. When she’s patched in: We stop those freighters, we help who or whatever is pushing back on the planet, in that order. Understood? Alright, I want comms and whomever has a few free arms, on each ship, trying to get Earth on the horn to coordinate our efforts and avoid getting shot out of the sky by mistake. We are Keppler. She holds one arm up to make the little old archaic gesture for home, says the old words: Live well. Don’t die. And on four ships the ancient saying ripples through crews about to risk their lives to save a bunch of humans they’ll never meet.
*
London (England and Ontario), Beijing and Hoboken, Tokyo and El Paso. Vancouver and Havana. Johannesburg and Milwaukee. There was a big-place, small place patter-pattern to Gary’s targets. Oh, Earth had so many guns left, and missiles and tanks, and you know the rest, but it’s hard to shoot what you can’t see. There are times when living swarms, migrating birds or bats feeding on massed-insects or cicadas themselves–beautiful little horrors they are–when their bodies blind radar and such. (Almost) none of the bug bodies lobbed at Earth made it alive, but their charred-carbon carapaces raining down–the exact infernal opposite of shooting stars–was excellent chaff. Radars-etc. searched for something to shoot and gunners wasted time and munitions on dead bugs falling to Earth, shooting at the shadow of the threat.
The captured freighters swarmed with incorporated Glesians, packed well past capacity. Collision course is accurate, these were not graceful glides, but nose-to-ground dives at full power. Every trajectory ending in pounded dirt and devastation for a clear quarter mile. Each ship shed bugs as it dove. The things fell far out like gliders or paratroops, each ship still had a bit of the strange on it. Once free of the field of strange, the bugs fell like bricks. The hearty, high-G bugs weather long falls to Earth just fine.
In concentric rings around cities just-crash-devastated the bugs rain down, curled up into balls that crack pavement and unfurl and lunge at whomever is near. Long bulbous abdomens, four back legs for skittering, the long thorax with two more arms a wide almost-mantis head and great mandibles, withered antennae and a great fungal flower lunging out of the wound in every Glesian’s head
They’re a foot or two taller than a big human, strong too, the better to snatch you and jab the spike hiding in that flower into your skull–how incorporated Glesians share the good news. Most bugs have less than a minute to share before the shock of Earth’s atmosphere kills them. One-in-four will last indefinitely, until destroyed or the thing oxidizes and ashes away. As Gary intended, the things land in panicked crowds of people fleeing fire and rubble. Incorporated drones rain on choked roads and freeways. Before Earth’s air kills many of them they spread the word, aggressively. When the humans rise, those not killed outright in the process, they set out in bodies already acclimated to spread the word: all is Gary; Gary is all.
*
The sky is an unnatural twilight dominated by Earth’s evil twin. In the woods on a pleasant peninsula, fireworks as Glesians charge the remaining mercenaries. They flail-fire into the swarm or at their turned comrades before they are devour-incorporated.
Here: tap-dancing on the border of all-is-lost while she waits for herself to download into the body she wears, a joint draining into her husk’s mouth like a progress bar. This is where Dolores drops her anchor in time. She does not do this intentionally, for she does not know it is possible. If she had a fleshy brain left, she would have broken it. If there were blood vessels left to burst, this is when she would have popped every one of them. It wasn’t a shriek or a growl or a groan but the sound-unknown, some kind of grief-rage slurry from the pit beneath the basement beneath the Guardian’s guts as she watches the scene play out. The figures move fast-too-fast, motion blurred to a mere-human eye.
Jack and Jonah bracket un-Jacob. The beast in Jacob’s frame ducks a mighty swing from Jonah’s rebar club. Jack stabs, one bot-claw snatches her knife arm at the wrist. Bone snaps. Another of the bot’s fists backhands the Wild Woman away. The claw on the bottom arm of bot snatches Jack’s blade and wheels to deal with Jonah.
Dee sees the bot’s play before Jonah, that’s when the noise wells up in her. The Guardian’s body there on the damp ground goes white-hot and the sound pours out of every piece of Jack’s machine. Dolores’ rage grows and every moving part in the short-circuit tears itself to shreds. Sparks shoot from the ground and the poor inflatable Santa is wreathed in blue flame. Holiday lights shoot prismatic flame into the apocalyptic twilight. Jacob un-Jacob stabs Jonah.
The big man bullies, uses his riot shield to sweep the bot’s arms aside and follows high-too-high with his club–angry and aiming to take the abomination-bot’s head off. The thing ducks the swing easily again, freak fast sidesteps to find Jonah’s twisted-torso exposed-side.
Un-Jacob drives the blade under body armor, lower back. The abomination stabs again and twists. Jonah finds the strength to elbow the bot in the face, to back-swing the club one last time. Jacob pulls the weapon from the wounded-man’s hands and tosses him aside. The robot remote-piloted by rage turns toward Jack and raises the blade. The Wild Woman is staggered, stunned and half on her feet bleeding down her beard. She rises with a rock in her hand, spits a tooth and raises her desperate weapon like she’s about to charge.
What’s next is not a battle or a fight. There is no posturing or soliloquy. Dolores rises, swiftly, white hot. In her rage Dee snatches un-Jacob’s corrupted chassis by the head and raises it to appraise. Cat quick and with feline efficiency she removes the arm with the blade and every other arm until the bot is just stubby legs flailing. In a voice as mighty as it is inhuman: Is there any bit of my friend left in you? The bot speaks only static-shriek and tar runs down its torso, the whole thing reeks of brimstone. Dolores crushes the bot’s tin-can head and casts the chassis into some flaming piece of Jack’s machine.
*
END ENDLING(S) 7