PEORIA, IL
*
“No.” Jonah doesn’t shout it, roar it or growl it. He just drops it, sad-bastard: “No. Don’t go in there. Not like this. Don’t give yourself to it.”
Dolores scowls, “It’s not your choice. Why did you come this far?” Because he loves you. “For fuck’s sake, Abbott.”
“No, I do love you.” I like girls, Jonah. “I got that vibe and its not entirely like that, and its dumb.” She punches him on the arm. Hard. He’s looking at the spot where she punched him when she hugs him.
“Please come back?” If you give me all of the explosives you are carrying Jonah, I will promise to come back safe and sound and alive.
“I have no way of holding you to that.” She starts trying to tug the bandolier of grenades up and over his head.
“Accept it. Look. I can’t explain it but there’s something wrong with Abel.” That’s my gifted girl. “Shut the fuck up, Abbott.” She turns back to Jonah, “I’m not going to let him eat me. I’m coming back.”
“I really want to believe you.” He’s definitely not crying.
Abbott waits while Jack is deep in conversation with, it seems, herself or a being they cannot perceive.
*
“Take us to your leader” The first robot dog the two find cocks its head as if confused. The whip-tail, tazer-tipped scorpion thing swings lazily behind it. FOLLOW. “Ok then.” FOLLOW. FOLLOW. “Yes. We are doing that.”
Abbott, hands up, Dee the same. No visible weapons, just a backpack of sundry explosives and a hand grenade in her pocket. Normal things. ASSESSING FAUNA as they pass patrol dogs in the cracked streets. FAUNA. FAUNA. Each pack member announcing the visitors as they pass rubble and neglect and green plants gnawing on it all.
The long walk leads to and through the tall grass that used to be a golf course. There is a pristine-trimmed serpentine winding path through the grass. The bunker’s entrance is built up and fortified, no longer needing to be hidden. The drone dog takes them to the bot in charge, a big thing. It’s an ARC, the bison bot with the big weapon on its back. Before the big canid even bothers to ‘assess the fauna’, before it scans for weapons–the gold lights behind its eyes flit and flick, go green. The thing leans back on its haunches, not to strike but to sit.
The robotic head lowers and leans forward from the bison-body. The beast shivers and speaks, not the harsh shout of an ARC or dog-bot drone. It’s Abel’s voice, a self-chosen baritone calibrated to soothe: “Welcome, Dolores. I’ve been waiting.”
The thing pivots on its haunches, gesturing with its front hoof/arm toward the entrance to Abel’s bunker–the freight elevator to hell or a hole beneath Peoria. The rest of the dogs present, rear up on their hindquarters either side of her path to the silver elevator doors.
“Nothing creepy about that intro, Abel. Nothing at all.”
“Apologies, this way please.” And two dogs, ahead and behind, escort the old tardigrade and his daughter–half prancing, half marching.
The elevator music is Mozart’s Requiem, the volume a little too high. The sound glitch-hissing, reverb, reverse a few times. Too fast or slow, not even a beat either way, but too-off. It sounds magnetic tape distorted dragged down and back.
Dolores “Could you turn it down a little Abel.” Yes, my dear. The music reaches a more appropriate level, still glitching. “Okay. I was going to save this for later, but ‘my dear’ did it for me.”
Dolores pulls her hand from her pocket, shows Abbott and Abel’s escort dogs a grenade without its pin. “Call me “dear” again.” Abbot is making a series of high pitched squeel-gasps, wincing, trying to back as far into the corner of the elevator as he can. The two dogs appraise her calmly.
Abbott: “You are crazy like your mother.”
Dee laughs bitterly. “Ohhh.” She’s shaking her head and holding the grenade high, the palm of her hand the only thing holding the clip in place. “Keep talking asshole. Abel, you had better turn the music back up.”
The requiem plays almost-too-loud-again and magnetic distortion drags the tune almost off key as the elevator glides silently down and deep into the great well.
*
Jonah and Jack mope and snack and hydrate and wait.
“Jack, which bag are the special mushrooms and which are the food mushrooms?” Jonah’s watching the water jug wiggle and stretch, listening to the cicadas in ways he thought not possible. Beginning to taste their music. “I can taste music.”
The wild woman creeps uncomfortably close, still wearing her whimsy, her beard. “There is no distinction, Jonah.” Oh god. “I make no distinction between my food and medicine.” Oh god. “Oh, we will see the most high together” Very close laughter, so very close to Jonah’s face. “We shall see the most high” She grabs his face and presses the front of her football helmet to his forehead.
It’s then that they’re interrupted by the hum-hiss of of a Shulzie. Overhead “He thinks he is imagining it.” Jonah self narrates aloud.
“No he’s not.” Jack pulls him by the arm to cover just as the source of sound glides over: a helmeted human dressed in all black, weapons on their back–riding on an an airfoil, standing astride. Their head is on a swivel, the blacked out visor searching for something. The rider aims some tiny hand held antenna, aims it at the bunker entrance, heavily fortified.
“What are they looking for?” Jonah wonders, I mean really wonders.
“Probably the back way into the bunker” At that the big man tries to leap to his feet and does not succeed. “Here’s where you get mad at me, big soft boy.”
“Why the fuck didn’t you tell anyone?”
Jack becomes deadly serious: “Because I saw that version. The one where you go with them. Where I go with them. All at once” He’s too confused to be angry, and the distances in between everything are so miniscule and vast. Jonah is expending too much energy not falling off the concrete into the sky to be angry. “In that version we all die. Or we all did. Die.”
“We gotta’ help.” We will. Jack offers Jonah her hand and braces to help his bulk stand up.
The wild woman’s helmet clanks and clacks as she vigorously shakes her head ‘yes.’ She helps the big man learn to walk in this state. She leads him down the skeleton of the parking garage.
“Gird your loins, man” and Jack hands him a pipe wrench from her cart. She swings her arm nodding as if to explain its purpose. She grabs a metal rod, a bit of rebar and the two follow the flier–quiet and crouched and giving the bunker’s entrance a wide berth.
*
SOL SYSTEM. ARRIVAL.
The ship whose body borrows the lines of a slender wasp ‘looks’ quite quiet and dead on the outside. In terms of radiation I mean. Its builders are gifted in the realm of camouflage, that art and science. The ship’s skin crumples and crinkles like some withered fruit until the thing appears an odd shaped rock. No glow from the engines. The thing slowed itself already, and they’d like to not startle anyone on Earth. If you spotted it and were curious enough to bounce LADAR/RADAR off it, you’d see rock or comet. No great heat signature in the infrared either.
As the great consensus dance of debate hums and vibrates and shimmies on inside, the ship’s ‘ai’ sets the thing tumbling. The ship with the wasp’s aspect comes, not roaring or rumbling, but silently tumbling end-over-end twisting and rolling about its center of gravity–like a piece of junk or a couple of rocks orbiting one another in the void. It was the ‘ai’ that told the crew no space stations or moon colonies, no orbital weapons or space docks appeared in Earth’s orbit. And it will be the ‘ai’ that uses thrusters and the song of the spheres, the mechanics of the orbits of the rocks round Sol, to put the thing and its precious sentient cargo right where it needs to be: low Earth orbit.
*
PEORIA, IL
A Barrage Balloon with a rail gun. Several shots, probably from multiple angles. The thing, the old facility, the one dug out during the first Cold War. The barrage collapsed the vaulted ceiling of its great common area.
She’s patient, Anne, the private security goon, the henchwoman of Lee Lucius. She makes sure no drones are close enough to beat her little deceptive IFF decoy. When it’s clear, she descends into the dark pit that was a civilian shelter.
A great hall. A gathering space. A hub of the old long-term shelter program–baby Greenbrier bunkers everywhere they could discreetly gouge the Earth and throw a carpet down over the scar. We’re talking the lead-up and afterward of the Cuban Missile crisis, when thinkers really put some flesh on Mutually Assured Destruction.
They realized how little time they actually had to skitter off to the spider holes where they kept the Prussian blue and iodine, where they horded art and stories and hard tack and water filtration systems and replacement parts–so many replacement parts.
The things to “rebuild the world” thrown haphazardly into too-shallow holes like a child’s cluttered toy box. In this case, only to be destroyed. Anne works her way through the maze of the half-collapsed shelter with a flashlight and an old recovered floor plan on the display strapped to her forearm.
She passes the “multi-faith chapel”, it’s holy symbols scattered and charred by the bombardment that cleared this hole. There above the door, written in a bold hand in blood-red paint: “When priests are more in word than matter.”
Finally, after cussing and stumbling and starting at shadows and piles of collapsed concrete, Anne finds a door. The old steel thing with the the wheel, like a ship’s door. She trains against the thing and batters the mechanism until it gives way.
*
The elevator doors open deep underground. Mozart’s requiem leap-scratches like an old vinyl to peak pathos at five minutes into the track. Outside the doors in the deep is bible black, save for the quiet lightning of static electricity leaping wall-to-something she cannot yet decipher. Light-drinking dark beyond the light from the elevator. Dolores crosses the threshold, stands in the pool of light.
She holds the deadly thing high, steps into dark. Fae lights flick on to guide her path–in time with her step at first, then faster. The lights, the little blue spark guide path races on ahead. The music swells, the choir joining. Dee halts and the lights continue flip, clat, clattering to life to reveal the holographic representation of Abel.
Humanoid form and the barest impression of a man. It’s standing with it’s back to her and it turns in time with the tune. “Welcome, Dolores.” No firm facial features, the thing is projected from somewhere, green ghost static, arranged light arrayed in the silhouetted impression of a man.
“You should have been playing a pipe organ.” The man made of light and noise and static, congealed ghost light. The thing seems to bristle at that statement.
The music dies. Sickly fluorescent strips light the cold concrete place, the smooth cave. Dolores is in a large room, elevator at her back. Steel doors with wheel’s like a ship’s at the left and right end. Before her the room opens up onto the great cylindrical well, the floor falls away to a hole dug geothermal-deep.
Behind the hologram, and floating over the pit: a black slate platform wafer thin that cradles a one-meter-diameter silver sphere–a quicksilver liquid thing, surface roiling. Static leaps from antennae on the smooth cement wall to the orb and from it, silently, at random intervals. There is the ever-present hum of the Shulz-Warren generators hidden somewhere. She knows the orb is Abel’s “body” so much as there is some portion of it here.
The ghost outline of the man, of Abel. His proxy hovers near the ledge of the hole, two industrial robots behind him. They’re just arms really, metal-and-ceramic-skeletal things that are as delicate and precise and swift and brutal as he requires. They are his hands. They are the bunker’s machinery for maintaining that bit of his “brain.”
“Dolores, or perhaps you prefer Dee?”
“Call me Dee again. I fucking dare you.” Silence.
Dee gives her instructions: “The dogs get back in the elevator. Abbott goes to fetch his body. Then we talk.” We should not split up. “You are not on my team, and I am not asking.” She steps closer, gauging the reach of Abel’s ‘arms’ on the ledge, determined to stay outside their arc.
Abel nods and little yellow holographic sparks snap into being. “They will guide you to your Tun.” The old man shuffles off through the ship’s door to her right.
“We are alone. Dolores, I know you. I’ve watched you your whole life.”
“I’m going to stop you right there. You failed a really important Turing test: not seeing how creepy that is. What, you saw me read the Phantom of the Opera as a girl and decided this would evoke fond memories?”
The thing laughs and attempts a smile. The holograms unface stretches and distorts deaths-head. “My, you are brilliant.” Thank you. Also fuck you. “You all narrate your existence. You know yourselves through stories. Even Dolores, she who rejects the story she is offered.” Stubbornness is a virtue. Tell me what you want.
“I want your body, Dolores. I want your soul.” At that, a panel in the floor near Abel’s ‘arms’ opens. A pod, egg-shaped, rises and clanks into place. The thing hisses, opens, reveals the medusa tangle of wires and microsurgical probes at the ready.
“No.” She takes off her pack, digs out the satchel charge and fiddles one handed with the timer.
“Dee” She raises the grenade higher to remind him. “Dolores, you’re brazen and stubborn. But audacity is not enough. Do you really believe I will let you harm me, free your father and waltz back to, what, life on the farm?”
“That is absolutely the plan. And if you fuck with me or my people in any way?” She gestures. “You. We. Get the grenade.”
*
Jonah follows Jack. Jonah follows. “I flow from thing to thing, just following.” Yes yes, keep doing that. And it’s down and deeper into the dark of the ruined civilian bunker. Birth canal in reverse is wrong. He’s crawling into “Leviathan’s asshole.”
“These visions are sacred, Jonah. Sacred.” She feels his face in the dark. “Record that bit about Leviathan’s asshole later.” They stagger on, blind witch leading the big man in the dark. Deeper and deeper into Leviathan’s asshole.
*
The Tun, the desiccated hibernation husk looks like a rock, nothing remarkable or alive. Grey high-silica stone. “Oh my baby.” Abbot kisses the-thing-himself in the storage room in the bowels of the bunker. He lays on the rock, presses his face to it–flat and flatter still. Snot wets a rock till the thing begins to shake and quake and jiggle like jam-or-worse.
The thing rises eight legged, segmented, glorious and sexy as it ever was–a tardigrade in all it’s majesty. But being tired and dehydrated, and old in a way you cannot fathom, Abbot immediately sags back into human form–a slightly younger and less paunchy version of the same man he’s been (in a more expensive suit).
He tries to “be” what he is: flex into his superb, superior, and nigh un-killable form, but the best his uncomfortably human body will do, can do, is fart and glow. “My powers have abandoned me.”
*
“Move gramps.” Ow fuck! Anne bops Abbot, back of his head with her pistol. “Take me to the other freak. Do anything other than glowstick? You die.” Alrightalright.
Anne does not see the two figures, the antlered witch and the massive man on mushrooms peeking round the corner of the corridor behind her. They creep, kinda quietly, behind her as she marches Abbott back to Abel at gunpoint.
*
The door groans open. “Dee, we have a problem.” Shutthefuckup. “Ow. You’re gonna concuss me. Yeah guys. Dead eyes here wants in on the game.” Abbott the slightly younger, slightly less paunchy man-tardigrade ceases glowing in the full light of the room. Shrugs with his hands up.
“Abel, I represent Mr. Lucius and I will be taking that freak. You’re welcome to this one.”
“You will not touch Dolores.” Neither will you, asshole. “She is mine.” Eat shit, no I’m not.
Anne continues: “I know what you found. The little tardi-babies. We know you want them. Take dad. No fight left in him.” My best days remain. Ow fascist. “He’s just as good as she is. Almost.”
“Nobody’s taking anybody anywhere but home.” Jonah leaning heavily on the doorway. Jack is already in the room, wielding a piece of re-bar like a war club.
*
Every ground based observatory that caught a glimpse of the comet or debris or bunch-of-space-rocks concurs that the thing will pass between the Earth and moon some time today. It’ll be one of those near miss extinction events that happen all the time and only the over-anxious really think about. Worst that could happen is that a bunch of space rocks fly right through the Kessler cloud–all our old satellite debris zipping deadly fast like a shotgun blast in low Earth orbit. To rid the Earth of any portion of that debris? Would be to do the planet a favor.
Other kinds of anxious ones, the ones in uniforms with hardware on their chests that tell tanks and trucks and planes and people where to go, the ones that got all itchy and full of map-lust when Abel seemed to falter?
In places like Washington, Nairobi, and Beijing state security apparatus people scurry and generals get briefed by people who were previously briefed and have just been re-briefed. Their task: quick-curate and collate and all kinds of -ate information. They make a sort of “glance at the big board” update for some kind of leader in Tokyo, Brussels, Seoul, or Brasilia. And then a president or prime minister or party chair-person gets that brief. The leader, be they capable, overtaxed, megalomaniacal, too-tired, a clown, or any other number of things, they all hear the same thing: odd behavior, drones turning on one another.
Everybody who makes decisions sees the same footage everyone on re-emerging social media has already seen: two barrage balloons over the Indian Ocean, weapons blazing, missiles and rail-guns and directed energy razing each other to debris on the water. Robot dogs tearing each other to shreds in the distance in other vids.
And everywhere from Delhi to Ottawa, an advisor makes a certain kind of sales pitch that ought to reek of brimstone: “crisis is opportunity by another name.”
They won’t say it yet, likely because they don’t know it’s what they want to say. It’ll start with “we can take our territory back.” And then they’ll remember that they (or their fathers) never got to finish WW3. And though there are less of them, and far fewer humans as a whole, they know the dance well and are eager to show each other. They are eager to show each other even if it means trampling the rest of the species on the dance floor, or at least they were and will be again.
And none of them, not one of these leaders and military men–be they virtuous or ghoulish or some combination–none of them has any idea what’s happening in a bunker beneath Peoria.
None of them, not one of these important people who has eyes and ears and microphones and cameras supposedly everywhere knows that Abel is fueling every “end of days” missile he has because if he can’t have Dolores no one will have anything ever again.
*
Anne side steps. Her pistol on the newcomers Abbot as a shield. She keeps the bot arms and Dee in her peripheral vision. “Here we go. Daddy’s girl. Dad. You two. That’s the order I shoot, and I promise you I will get two of you.”
“Will you though?” Easy jack.
Abel speaks with sociopathic calm: “I do not take kindly to threats.” Dee distracted, Abel’s hand is almost silent, the skeletal-mechanical thing lunges at its target with such force it nearly rips itself from its floor mount–just barely catching Dolores by the hand.
Dee screams. Abel yanks her, holding the whole of the hand that holds the grenade. She pounds at it with her right fist. The metal arm pulls and lifts, squeezes-keeps-squeezing. She’s off the ground, dangling, screaming.
Anne’ shoots, hits Abel’s free hand. Shoot’s again same. Abbott’s head catches her in the chin, he’s wrestling her for the gun. “That’s my fucking kid you harpy.”
“Cry Havok!” from Jack. Jonah beelines the pod like it’s a mission from god, and the wild woman with the re-bar club rushes the industrial robot itself, the base.
Jonah’s wrench meets the great metal forearm like a sword against a shield. The skeletal thing seems to give, shoves back and shrugs, disarming him.
Jonah snatches the hand over his head, determined to rip it from tthe arm. A great mechanical fist, too-strong begins pressing, slow and firm and relentless. “Jack!” Every muscle on the man strains against the crushing thing.
Jack screams “Die motherfucker!” and beats the the base that powers the arm again and again again. The thing sparks and arcs and its innards grind.
Abel squeezes Dolores’ hand so hard she hears bones pop, so hard the grenade casing cracks, precisely hard enough to bend the clip permanently into a ‘safe’ position. He does this and drops her in a sobbing heap with a shattered hand. His claw free, Abel lunges, grasping at Jack and Jonah.
*
The cephalopods didn’t hear the impacts at first. Just alarms. The cloud of razors whipping at twenty-something-thousand KPH is thicker closer to the planet, and the ship with the slender body of a wasp is tumbling directly through that cloud–now completely out of control.
Frozen brine from another ocean that circles another star, Keppler 22, drains from a million tiny wounds on the ship. It drains from hull breaches in the habitat pods and flash freezes in the void. Spy satellites, the last bits of the International Space Station, GPS. They’re all weapons or hazards now.
*
Time stretches. Like taffy and past it. It will snap back faster than rubber or really anything, but not quite yet. She simply knows this. Dolores sits up, clutching the crushed hand and battered arm. All present are moving, she is certain of it, but at the speed the glass in a cathedral drips toward the floors.
One of Abel’s arms is frozen-flinging Jack, her face barely surprised, the rebar club about to strike the surgical pod meant to mangle Dee’s brain. Jonah’s face is stuck in a grimace, tearing the other robot arm from it’s base.
Abbot, he is under Anne who just pulled a red knife from his armpit. His face a snapshot of honest surprise. Anne’s face an imitation of a smile.
For no reason she could explain, she feels the band starting to snap back, time pushing and the conveyor belt angrily kinking. Before time snaps back, before her friends are crushed by words and forces like ‘inevitable’, Dolores steps to the ledge and leaps off it and into the pit.
Whatever field the Shulzies make catches her, like bouncing on a soft bed, and her momentum carries her out–lightning flicking off her body, off her fingertips and hair and the very air around her. Dolores glides into the sphere. Into that bit of Abel’s brain.
*
Blue, the cephalopod that spoke so passionately in favor of honest first contact. She’s strapped in, crash webbing holding her tight to her indentation in the hazard pod. Across from her, the old timer, the one that said “kill the primates and be done.” He’s not shouting/dancing curses or “I told you so” at her. He’s just staring. And his rings, and the history of their people tattooed on his skin, pulse and shift in ways that one-octopus-to-another signify. She gets the elder’s message: you did this to us, your curiosity was our doom.
*
EARTH, ALL OF IT
*
The drones that began the day destroying each other the world over, halt, and receive new orders. Barrage Balloons lurch and lunge, they bee-line for some patch of sea out in the Pacific, or above it.
The craft, the great motherships and drone carriers and whatever else Abel added–they move at a speed humans thought impossible or at least forgot in peacetime. Every drone with a Shulz-Warren that has a hope of reaching the destination, if only a fool’s hope, rushes to this corridor of air.
There they formation fly and build geometrically. A chute, a tube, a windsock. A swarm. Like a gaggle of mechanical birds or bees writhing and dancing around Barrage Balloon bee hives.
The ship that looks like a wasp spins and tumbles right down the center of that chute. At great height the ship is fast and hot, and the drones that overload their Shulzie’s in it’s path do nearly nothing to slow it. The tumbling ship obliterates them.
The big Shulzie’s on every Balloon blow as the cephalopod ship passes, the timing perfect, calculated with precision. And each mothership shudders and falls dead into the sea after it does its bit to slow the crashing cephalopods.
Some great portion of the drones that held the world hostage destroy themselves. In doing so they very gently deposit the ship with the slender, graceful body of a wasp on the surface of the South Pacific.
The remaining drones seem to guard the thing, two Barrage Balloons using their fields to help float the ship on the surface.
*
“People of Earth” The speaker picks a hell of a time to address them. They’re standing still, all of them.
“My name is Dolores. And I am a one woman world power. I am your guardian. I am what comes after Abel.” And there, projected on or holographically above every screen on the planet, by code or her will or some combination, stands a woman. Flesh-made-metal, or maybe the reverse. Silver, tall, beautiful with sad eyes that see somewhere else (and nothing else).
“My predecessor was a broken toy fashioned by sociopaths and sadists. He understood strategy and tactics. He was a tortured thing and in turn he tortured and threatened and murdered and menaced all of you. I will never do that. Yes, I see those fighters fueling, unnamed nation. I will defend myself. Unnamed country, knock it off before I say your name in front of all the people of the good Earth. Thank you.”
She continues, “Our neighbors have come to visit. We know with absolute certainty that humans and our little ‘ai’ gremlins are not alone in the universe. They are friendly, curious, and they love our music.” Dolores does perceive jubilation (mostly).
“Earth, I am your protector, and my guests are here under my protection. No nation or group or person will harm them.” The figure on the screen winces. Twitch glitches and goes to static at intervals. “That didn’t take long. Stand by.”
Centurion. That’s the first military AI that attacks. The “five eyes” and friends, every world power let’s its shackled-AI dog off it’s leash at once. They rush across airwaves, transatlantic cables, and server stacks to attack the thing that bested Abel.
Dee-transcendent visualizes a too-long kung-fu film beatdown in which her drunken boxing befuddles every foe. In non-dilated time, the world waits exactly 1.21 seconds. That’s all it takes for her to consume every AI on that planet that could threaten her.
“People of Earth! More good news.” Great cities halt. Nations wait. People’s hold their breath: “No WW3. I will not allow it. Not today. Not ever.”
*
END DOLORES
EPILOGUE TO COME