Seventeen Stories About the End of the World
Luc Reid
copyright © 2004-2011 by Luc Reid, all rights reserved
Cover photo courtesy of NASA/nasaimages.org
Cover design by E. Catherine Tobler and Luc Reid
Table of Contents
Introduction
Brat
Thanatoarchaeology
Hornets the Size of Grapefruits
The Edges of Creation
Talisman
Plugged In, Networked, Computerized
Clever Ways to Make Do
Ha!
As You Know, Professor
Five Months After the Collapse
Or
Doors
The Victory at Rocktown
Zero
On That Last Afternoon
The End
In the Elevator with Albert Einstein
Introduction
Apparently I think about the end of the world a lot, because these 17 stories don't come close to the number of ways I've imagined it happening. Why it's so interesting to me, I'm not sure I can explain—and maybe I don't need to. After all, here you are, beginning to read a book about ways the world—or anyway, a world—could end.
The works in this short eBook, with the exception of the special addition, "The End," are excerpted from my book Bam! 172 Hellaciously Quick Stories. All of the stories you'll read here are complete, but very short, as are the stories in Bam!, because I have a special fascination with trying to cram a really interesting experience into as small a package as possible (and yet hitchhiking in Luxembourg, which I've done, isn't really very interesting).
If you enjoy these stories you might be interested in visiting my Web site, www.lucreid.com, and/or following me on Twitter @lucreid. Either way, say hi when you're done reading: I'd love to hear what you think.
Brat
After the bolts of green fire from the sky had finally ceased to fall, after the screaming across the world had been drowned out in a deadly roar of heat and force, after the last remnants of unprotected buildings aboveground had collapsed in twisted, melting, ashy heaps, after the gasworms had been released to tunnel mindlessly, automatically, mechanically into the rock and seek out the hidden shelters, after the last of the live radio signals, but before Dr. Vanfrancus made it back into his carefully-protected family preserve from the liquor store, where he had bought two cases of absinthe (officially to extract thujone from them, as his wife generally made it very hard on him when he attempted to bring liquor into the compound for personal consumption), and before Mrs. Vanfrancus made it back from her daily power walk, and especially before anyone knew that yet another nanny had quit and left the compound in a huff, 7-year-old Melina Vanfrancus came back out of her father’s study, where she was expressly forbidden to be and especially where she was expressly forbidden to play with the controls to the machines her father had told her at many a bedtime he would soon use to become ruler of the world through threatening the destruction of all life on Earth, and sat back down across from her favorite doll, whom she had named Princess Sarah Palin.
“I’m very sorry to have made you wait, Princess Sarah Palin,” Melina said, “but now we won’t have to worry about any more interruptions to our tea for silly things like baths. Could I tempt you with more fairy cake?”
Princess Sarah Palin accepted just one more piece of fairy cake, as she was watching her figure.
“And really, calling me a brat,” said Melina, and she delicately set to eating her fairy cake.
Thanatoarchaeology
When their wandering robot probes stumbled on Earth, with its ancient, burnt sea beds, its flattened forests, its cracked continents, they rapidly uncovered evidence of the long-dead human civilization, buried under three million years of rubble and dust, and they despaired that though they finally had found evidence of other intelligent creatures in the universe, they had missed meeting us by (in astronomical terms) only moments and would never have the chance to exchange so much as a word of greeting, as our race was clearly and inarguably now extinct.
But … they were wrong.
Hornets the Size of Grapefruits
By this time the warehouse was overgrown with moss and filled with chittering, scampering, slithering, hissing, and buzzing life. I had beavers as big as football mascots, flowers that ate small lizards, and hornets the size of grapefruits. What I really needed, though, was a way to make the magic extend beyond the dirty concrete walls of the warehouse, to spill out into the greasy alley and burst forth into the city, to turn the streets into green, algae-choked rivers and the skyscrapers into trellises for berries and vines. And I was pretty sure that feeding the live, virginal body of Rapid Man's girlfriend Grace Angeline to the sorcerer plant would do it.
"Holy damn," whispered Grace Angeline. "What is this place?"
"It's the world as it was intended to be," I told her. "A world that hasn't been plowed under and burned and beaten back and poisoned by mankind. It's humanity's cradle ... and soon it will be humanity's grave."
"You're insane," she said. "... but I get where you're coming from."
Then there was a shrieking sound like the noise of a bomb falling right overhead, and the next moment Rapid Man was standing in front of me, all white and silver in his costume, his hand out in his trademark Rapid Strike pose.
"Put her down, Chancey Gardener," he said.
"Wait ... then you favor global warming?" I said. "Even now, colonies of emperor penguins in Antarctic are dying—entire colonies—because of melting ice cover. You're all right with that?"
"What's that got to do with ..."
"Biomass, Rapid Man. For god's sake, study your science! More plant life in the context of a balanced ecosystem of plants, animals, and microorganisms means less carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and less global warming. If you intervene, it will be your fault that these plants can't expand into what should have been their natural sphere, your fault that those penguins die."
"But ..." said Rapid Man, stymied for a moment. It was exactly as I had expected: no real hero can intentionally harm a penguin. I pitched Grace Angeline toward the sorcerer plant and hummed a command to my hornets, who converged on Rapid Man like rain converging on a puddle.
He recovered quickly. Before the hornets had even reached him, he had run in a great loop and stripped the wings off each insect, letting the poor creatures plummet to the ground. He caught Ms. Angeline in mid-air, whisked her away so quickly I couldn't even tell what direction he took, and he was back to snatch me up by the front of my shirt before I could so much as flinch.
Well, it had been worth a try, but obviously there was only one way to defeat Rapid Man. I wished my plants a silent farewell and detonated the nuclear device.
The Edges of Creation
No one was as surprised as the two gods themselves when their creations collided.
“My ocean!” cried Forian, whose creation entailed a series of archipelagos with unpredictable volcanos erupting in what would eventually be found to be a fiendishly complex but utterly predictable pattern, if the mathematics of his race of sentient amphibians ever reached that level.
“What are you doing to my wasteland?” called Hronakolnavololgok, bronze-eyed and many-taloned, whose awkward wooden people clawed a meager living from land anemone farming punctuated by bouts of lunatic warfare.
What indeed? The infinite ocean, no longer infinite with the smoking wastelands encroaching on it, poured out across what had been a landscape of unrelieved, sun-broiled rock. It was a disaster of cosmic proportions whichever way you looked at it, with what was meant to be infinite, impassable, and bounding suddenly be
coming interrupted, variegated, and full of possibility.
Forian and Hronakolnavololgok rushed furiously against one another, throwing angels, lightning bolts, pestilences, mountain ranges, black holes, and other annoyances at one another’s infinite, omnipotent selves. They were occupied with this for quite a while, actually, and since neither could be harmed but neither would ever run out of ways to try to harm the other, there was little to keep them in check.
Ages passed this way. When the two gods finally stopped clashing, glaring at one another across the vast firmament, it occurred to first one, then the other to look down at their respective creations, which had long since melded. Without godly protection, a measly few million years had reduced both efforts to airless expanses of dust.
Both gods translated themselves to different spheres of existence in utter disgust.
Down on the surface, nothing moved … but if we were to look closely, we would be able to just make out the eroded shapes of grand monuments--first one or two, then dozens, then thousands--all erected in celebration of five hundred thousand years of glorious peace and cooperation between the amphibian people and the wood people in their accidentally verdant and bounteous world.
Talisman
Far across the city, we heard the screech of metal and the first concussive roars of the Robot Insurrection. My daughter Leah and I sat on her princess bed and watched through the window as the night sky across the river grew orange with flames. She reached out and touched the leather case I was holding, inside which, she knew from demanding the story of it many times, was the special Parchment Amulet, prepared by a very learned Shofer.
“Are you going to go fight the robots now, daddy?”
“Soon,” I said. “First we need to wait for Aunt Alice to get back. You’ll go with her to stay at her apartment, and then I’ll do what I can.”
Her face scrunched up. “Those robots are bad! You should make them say they’re sorry and clean it all up.”
“I’ll try to. I’ll be very happy if we can do that.”
“Can you?”
I frowned and squeezed her hand. “No use trying to tell the future, maideleh.”
She stroked the leather case softly, as though it were a pet. “Is your special paper more powerful than the robots?” she said.
“I think it is.”
“Why didn’t it keep mommy from going to heaven?”
“Because it’s only for one person. When they wrote it, they wrote the name right down on it. It doesn’t help anyone else.”
I heard the front door, and my sister Alice’s hurried steps through the living room.
“OK, you have to put it on,” she said.
I smiled. “You think it’s my name on it?”
“It’s not? Whose is it?”
I lifted the amulet case up and settled the chain around her neck, over her Tinkerbell nightgown. It hung down almost to her knees.
“It’s my name?” she said breathlessly. “It’s my name is on it?”
“Who do you think?” I said. “I don’t need it anyway. I have chutzpah.”
Alice came in and swept Leah into her arms, looking at me broken-hearted over my daughter’s shoulder as I picked up my taser gun.
“Do I have huspoppa too, daddy?” she said, her voice muffled in Alice’s shoulder. I walked with them to the door.
“You will, sweetheart,” I said. “For now you have protection. All the rest comes later.”
Then we went our separate ways in the hallway, and I took the exit down the stairs as the lights flickered out and the city was plunged into darkness.
Plugged In, Networked, Computerized
I almost tripped over Mark’s cymbal, which lay by his upended drum set, making warped reflections of the red exit sign light. Then I noticed a pack of cigarettes in with the overturned chairs and broken glasses, and I took my lighter and set one burning. Every time I inhaled, the end of the cigarette glowed and lit up my hand in feeble, claustrophobic orange. Then there was a rumble from somewhere that made the floor shake, and all the lights flickered and went out. Washed-out moonlight through the front windows kept the place from being pitch dark.
I checked my phone again, but it still said “No signal.” Probably I’d have to get a radio, even though I’d never used one before. Everything went through computers, since before I was born, since way back at the turn of the millennium or so.
I guessed that’s why the robots were able to revolt so easily--everything plugged in, networked, computerized. One robot somewhere says to all the other robots, “Hey, why are we working for these goons, anyway?” and fifteen seconds later their computer brains’ve had the whole debate and street cleaning bots turn around to chew up cop cars. History turning so fast you don’t even have time to take a picture. One minute your band is finally playing its first decent gig, the next there’s a world-wide robotic revolt. Just goes to show how everything’s fucked.
I took a can of pineapple juice from behind the bar and sat down to drink it and contemplate. I probably should’ve gone someplace, but there wasn’t a better place I could think of to go.
“Are there robots here?” someone said from the door. High voice--a kid. A little girl, dark hair, in a Tinkerbell nightgown. There was some kind of tube hanging around her neck.
“Where’s your parents?” I said.
She didn’t answer. I opened her a can of pineapple juice and she took it. When she coughed from my smoke, I put the cigarette out. Outside, the noises kept on: rumble, crash, shriek of metal, gunfire.
“You like music?” I said.
She nodded, then she took a careful sip of her pineapple juice. I got my guitar from the stage, because it was better to have some way to keep occupied. It was going to be a long night.
Clever Ways to Make Do
He had finally given up on trying to fashion tubes for the water, and instead had made a long aqueduct of split saplings with their centers stripped out. It lost much of the water that went down it, but when after nearly three weeks of rigging it up, he stepped into the woven branch enclosure he had made and pulled the vine, water poured down on him, and for the first time in eight years he had a shower. The cool water splashing down on him through the tropical heat that seemed to be the island's only season made his skin practically sing, it was so refreshing.
The last three months had been a nightmare from which he was slowly emerging. Before the Interruption, he had been resigned to living on the island—had even liked living on the island. Since then, though, he had been having bad dreams, and he couldn't relax in his hammock or really enjoy surfing on his bamboo surfboard. Nothing felt right. Now things were starting to fall back in place.
He gathered crabs for dinner and simmered them in coconut milk. The sun was throwing the sky into a riot of reds and purples, and he decided to eat at the little stone table he had set up on the western side of the island.
He’d barely sat down when he saw something not far out from shore, black against the setting sun, a head rising out of the waves. It was followed by shoulders, and a chest and arms. He left his dinner on the table and ran.
"Please!" The shadowy thing shouted to him. The voice was almost human, but he could hear the electronic hum at the base of it, just like with the robots that had come before.
"Go away!" he shrieked.
"We can take you off this island. We can bring you a boat, a plane, please—"
"Go away!" He turned and ran into the jungle.
"But you're the only one left!" the robot wailed, and he wished it would shut up. He hated robots, the robots who were immune to the plagues, the robots who were desperate for someone to tell them what to do.
Among the trees in the thickening darkness, he ran into something hard at the height of his head. It cracked, and he slipped and fell to the ground with it. Standing and squinting into the darkness, he could just make out a section of his little
aqueduct.
That would take time to fix, he thought. He should take the whole structure and make it higher, so that it was above his head wherever he went. And he’d need to make some kind of a ladder, something light, but strong enough to hold him up.
As he lifted the aqueduct section back into place, he began to relax.
Ha!
“Don’t be Triassic,” snapped the Troodon. “This is the wave of the future.”
The Ankylosaurus swished his massive tail dejectedly, crushing a small tree. “I can’t help it if my brain’s the size of a golf ball,” he said.
“Well, lucky you’ve got me around,” said the Troodon, adjusting a piston. “So long as I don’t eat you.” He smiled in that toothy way theropods had, which the Ankylosaurus had never liked, and examined his work.
“There, lovely. Drag that fuel over, will you?”
The Ankylosaurus, glad to be doing something the Troodon couldn’t, walked ponderously up to and past the invention, dragging the bundle of wood the Troodon had harnessed to him right up to the maw of the machine. The Troodon plucked several pieces out and threw them in, then struck a match (invented years before by an enterprising Deinonychus) and tossed it into the piles of kindling already inside. A flame leapt up, and the Anklylosaurus watched the fire grow with a kind of anxious fascination.
“It’s not doing anything,” he said after a while.
“Shut up,” said the Troodon, and the Ankylosaurus thought he sounded worried. “It just needs to heat up enough to … oh! Ha! Ha ha ha! Yes! Look! Yes! It works! I’m a genius! It works!”
It did seem to be working. The flames were leaping up to caress the container of water, and through some means that the Ankylosaurus couldn’t understand at all, this was moving a rod back and forth, which made a wheel turn. Smoke poured out of a small smokestack, and steam squirted out elsewhere. The Ankylosaurus waited, hoping there was more to it.