END OF TIME
“You deceived me.” The demon hiss-spits his words, gripping the edges of the terra cotta pot.
The weak, frail dandy, laying there sipping broth and recuperating smiles. It is that smug angel smile, as if he knew the outcome all along (he did not).
“I did no such thing. You happened to find me in a bad way. Why did you think I brought these worlds here?” I was thinking secondary crime scene, honestly. “Something is profoundly wrong with you.” I know.
“They come from there” and the angel points up. Where? “Right there.” The frienemy leans in close over his shoulder. What-that little black spot?
There an absence, a hole, the barest spot gone missing from the whole great glowing cosmos above.
“It’s a particularly violent and bad-luck patch of space. And I thought they deserved an honest chance, Earth.” The demon scoffs. “What comes next should be right up your alley.”
SAN FRANCISCO
Feds in in windbreakers wait to maybe-today execute a raid on Lux-Tech headquarters. The kind that’s polite, honestly the only kind they do anymore, the kind where they wear windbreakers.
The fed in charge watches surveillance feeds, bored, waiting for a series of other people on both coasts to assemble a case against the asshole at the top of the brutalist block. “Guy’s a patriot, this is political man.” from the DEA cowboy who does nothing but fart in the surveillance van. Job pooling. There are a lot less feds because there’s a lot less everybody. But, job pooling and inter-agency, everything? “Thanks, Sanders.” Amen, brether.
They wait, bored, until they aren’t–until the thing that was a man comes raging out of the basement lab, headed elevator-fast to the top. “We gotta get in there!” From the cowboy, echoed by a few other also-eager feds on the radio.
“We most certainly do not. We do not have to get in there or anywhere else.”
*
Rumor mill and conspiracy theorists tried to blame Dolores for what happened at Lux-Tech, but that never stuck. Her actions proved her intentions: space. Our space, our land. She gave it back, all over the Earth, to grow crops and rebuild. She helped from de-mining and rebuilding from the metal things that terrorized our parents. She’s been a friend to humanity, as have the cephalopods.
Legit press would speculate, years later, that Ishmael (the “emergent” AI that served as Dolores’ ambassador the UN for a few years) that he had something to do with the the “tragedy.” I call it a tragedy, but I do firmly believe the man deserved it.
*
Upstairs, at the tip top of the brutalist block, Lee Lucius sits across from a reporter selected to softball him some questions for the benefit of an ever-greater-portion of the American electorate. They’re sitting there in comfy chairs, you know the shot. The ‘great man’s work desk and the Reagan portrait loom in the background.
That’s when the emergency lighting kicks in, I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know if you watched the telecast no one could seem to interrupt–the thing some devious software magic allowed/insisted be broadcast.
Lucius tried to evacuate, but every door locked firmly and every device in the building or on its networks refused commands. “Holy light” was the only thing the man, named Shelly in life, said as he walked through Lucius’ bodyguards. It’s like a renaissance painting, the iconic screen cap of Shelly holding Lucius by the throat, lifting him off center to the left of the shot–camera man having abandoned his post.
He put the man off the wall, tossed him like a toy into the portrait of his hero, and dragged him by the ankle to the window. Two cracked sidewalk slabs below, and that’s all she wrote for the Reagan Man that tried to buy transhumanist immortality with a dozen human lives.
*
MICHIGAN
Jonesy purrs, accepting the offering of the evening meal. His enormous caretaker scratches the thing as it rubs at his leg. Thanks before devouring the kibble. He tends to the litter while something old and sentimental lilts from the radio.
It’s a spring day so beautiful, so goddamn pretty it would break your heart to see it. And it’s the kind of day when for no reason at all, everything, even the light is heavy. Jonah grieves her, Dolores, though she is alive.
It’s crazy, so he keeps it to himself, no rumors or conspiracy theories. It’s not like that anyway. But he saw it that first day in those eyes that see someplace no other being can. Dee is in pain. He sees it in the eyes and the elsewhere-expression–there is a weight, a great weight, to being what she is now. No one talks about it.
He considers texting Jack, hidden away at some prepper’s cabin Dee handed to her. But the no-punctuation rants of religious ecstasy and what not in her replies are a bit much.
Some kid sent by Gabriel hollers outside, inviting him to the big communal dinners they do every evening. “Just a minute.”
He plays it, the same clip of Dolores on First Contact Day he always plays when he feels like shit:
“I’m not a god. I’m not entirely human, but to be honest I never really was. I am of you and apart from you. Not omnipotent, but this I promise you: ‘Say Dear Dolores,’ in earshot of a phone’s mic. Don’t compose me a prayer. Write me a note, and I’ll do what I can–even if all I can do is listen.”
Two years, his throat has closed whenever he tries to say the phrase. “Dear Dolores” kinda rushed and choked out, but the phone beeps. It’s recording. There’s laughter and the clamor of a big table and many mouths. “Hey Dee, it’s me. I miss you. Listen to this. He holds the phone up, angling the mic at the gaggle of families and friends and frienemies. “You know them right? Isn’t that just the most beautiful sound you’ve ever heard?” He approaches his place at the group of tables on the long wrap-around porch. He is definitely not crying.