Apocalypse
Part 1
The Man in Black
1.
It was a Tuesday in late December, 2045, and The Devil was explaining to a young man, just out of college, why they’d faked the moon landing.
“Pretty obvious, if you stop to think about it for a half moment but, of course, the beautiful thing about people is that you can always count on them not to. It was stealing heaven, simple as that. For years and years, millennia even, the great thorn in our side was the promise of transcendence. Going up. Before 1969 we could tempt people with all sorts of pleasures, and the only problem was all of them were earthly. If a soul ever wanted more than that, and at some point they all do, we were up shit’s creek without a paddle. But after? Once we had the whole world believing that two guys walked on the moon, then we could also offer them the stars. Heaven. Transcendence, of a kind, and all of it without the slightest hint of morality or spiritual transformation. A purely technological salvation. Couple of renamed prisoners from Alcatraz, Kubrick, some cameras in a warehouse and a few hundred people convinced it was their patriotic duty to keep up the lie to defeat the Russians, and bingo-bango my friend,” the Devil made finger-guns while he said this, “now I can offer Man Infinity too.”
It was surprisingly dusty. The set for Mars obviously had to be. They were on a rocky island off the far northern coast of Canada that had an abundance of natural red rock. Camera crews were hard at work all around them, presently concerned with keeping the otherwise very convincing habitation module from flapping about like cardboard in the wind. Most of them weren’t in on it. They just thought they were filming a movie. There was an unsafe level of radon in their trailers that was statistically likely to give most of them fatal cancer sometime in the next twenty years. The footage wouldn’t be used for at least forty, The Devil enjoying the long con.
“Right.” The young man hesitated. “Yeah, that makes sense.”
It didn’t, obviously, but he wasn’t going to let his new boss know that. Despite The Devil being quite open about who he was, what he was doing, and why he was doing it, Blake had yet to put two and two together and realize that he had joined forces with the personification of darkness. How could he? Blake Shelton, no relation to the singer, was a good, educated, modern person, and it’s hard to realize you’re working for The Devil when you don’t believe in him. Blake thought he’d taken a job with the Central Intelligence Agency, the letters “CIA” being displayed quite prominently on the application, and the interviewer who’d screened him having worn a dark suit, an earpiece, and sunglasses blacker than midnight.
In truth CIA was not an acronym at all, but The Devil found it useful for people to think that it was. “Cia” was simply the legal name of this particular shell company, one of several hundred which The Devil owned, his favorite being a financial trust called “In God We”. He always operated like that. Hiding in plain sight. One of The Rules that God had placed on him so long ago was that he couldn’t lie to people, as that would be unfair. He could skirt the edge of lying, sure, and he often did, but an angel able to tell mortals outright falsehoods would simply be too much of an advantage. At first he’d been bitter about it but he’d grown to like the limitation. It forced him to be creative. If anything, he’d found that that limitation had perhaps made him an even better deceiver in the long run, for he’d had to master the art of letting men and women deceive themselves.
“I guess I’m just struggling to see why we’re keeping the ruse going? At this point, wouldn’t it be easier just to do it for real?”
The Devil smiled. Such naivety. Such stupidity. This one was going to work out real well.
“All in good time!” The Devil gave Blake a friendly clap on the back and shook him slightly by the shoulder. He winked. The Devil had an incredibly American accent that was hard to place. “Right now, what I need you to be focused on is…” The Devil mimed pointing a gun and squeezing the trigger, “pest control.”
Blake’s heart skipped a beat. He stopped short mid-pace and went imperceptibly rigid. This soon? He’d known, based on what the interviewer had showed him, that working for the CIA might well involve some dirty work but he never expected… I mean… not in his wildest dreams would he have imagined…
He remembered the man with the earpiece showing him a video of Blacks being gunned down in Mogadishu. Families being burned alive in Sudan. A surreal supercut of violence set to The Rolling Stones interstitched with images of apple pie and The American Flag.
Pleased to meet you.
Hope you guess my name.Could he do it? Now? So soon? His first week?
“Okay.” He swallowed hard. He made the decision rapidly and expended all his available mental energy to prevent the uprising of any feelings of guilt. It was make or break time. Was he gonna be a man or a fucking pussy? Images of power flashed through his head. His fantasies of political ambition. Senator. President. MORE. He was going to make it dammit. He was going to be somebody.
“Okay I’ll do it.”
The Devil, who was incredibly perceptive but who could not actually read minds, not unless he was in them, cocked his head to the side, confused by the sudden gravitas in Blake Shelton’s voice.
“Good.” The Devil said after a moment, nodding. “There’s a heck of a lot of ‘um out here. Can’t have a bird or a mouse or what have you showing up in the background scenes of Mars can we? Judy keeps a paintball gun in her trailer to pop them with. I just need you to keep a patrol on the perimeter and scare off any critters.”
“Oh…” A sweat broke out on Blake’s forehead from the instant adrenaline dump. “Right. Yeah. Yeah, sure. Of course.”
“Hey,” The Devil smiled, once again patting his employee on the arm. “I know it’s probably not the glamorous gig you were hoping for but you’re young. We all gotta start somewhere.”
The Devil took a cigarette out of his shirt pocket and started walking away, his black jeans contrasting against the backdrop of red soil.
“Sure.” Blake said, mostly to himself. Then, realizing his boss was already leaving, he called out after him, “Yeah! No critters! Yeah, you got it Mr. Resucca!”
The Devil turned, pointing at the young man with a glowing cigarette between his fingers and smoke rising from his lips. “Hey, call me Stan.”
The Transcendental Object at The End of Time
2.
The gun in Perceval’s hands unloaded at a rate of sixty thousand rounds per minute. He panted inside his helmet, reloading every four seconds. Before him, entire stretches of forest exploded into splinters as the twenty men on either side of him each took their turns doing the same. Forty-one.
That was all that was left.
They kept coming. Wave after wave after wave of scorpions racing over the hills between them on eight legs. Innumerable. Uncountable. Spindly limbs and tails exploded with black trails of goo off their bodies, the ground littered with severed claws still snapping. Each man furiously worked his weapon, pulling drum after drum of ammunition up out of the trucks and attaching it to their rifles. The ground around their boots was littered with empty drums and spent shell casings, glowing red hot in a pile up to their knees. Still the bugs came. Crawling continuously over ever larger piles of bodies.
“Running low!” Ahmari screamed from his right and, instinctively, with the well-worn practice of repetition, Perceval let his rifle fall and hang from his shoulders, reaching into the truck beside him with his metal encased arms and hurling an entire crate of ammunition to his friend.
The servos in Ahmari’s armor whirred as he caught it.
“Thanks!”
And then Perceval was back. Firing and reloading. Firing and reloading. Firing and reloading. The same state of mind he’d existed in for the past twenty-four hours.
“MOVE!”
The squadron’s leader’s firm voice boomed out over the fray, his body, encased head to toe in steel, came running along the line behind them, slapping at the hood of each truck.
“GETTING TOO HOT! EVERYBODY ROLL BACK!”
Then they were in their trucks again. The only brief respite from the fight. Ten minutes. The thirty-foot tall machines would fall back at ninety miles an hour for ten minutes. Then they’d abruptly swerve, do an about-face so the cargo was facing the enemy, and then the men would exit their vehicles to do it all again.
Thankfully it wasn’t Perceval’s turn to drive. The enormous engines roared beneath his feet as his body was jostled violently inside his armor. He fell asleep. They had trained for this. Active duty Chevaliers were kept on the Überman Cycle, a polyphasic sleep system that allowed men to drop into REM almost immediately, drastically reducing the amount of sleeping time required for the brain to remain sane. The typical cycle was a twenty minute nap every two hours and forty minutes, reducing the amount of unconscious time a Chevalier needed to less than three hours every day. The short term benefits of this were enormous, individual soldiers being able to operate for over twenty hours every day with full lucidity. Long term abuse did tend to manifest in negative externalities however, so the military kept Chevaliers on duty for only one year at a time, giving them twelve months “back home” to recover. It was the dreams. Abusing REM sleep like that resulted in incredibly vivid dreams.
The truck next to their own broke down and stalled in the mud with a pillar of black smoke. Ahmari shouted over the radio, pleading with the commander to let him stop and help them. He cursed. He screamed. The engine roared on because the commander said “No.” and, behind them, five men jumped out of a thirty ton vehicle and prepared to buy their comrades some time.
Perceval heard none of this.
He’d trained not to.
Perceval dreamed.
“People always assumed it would be a moral teaching or, maybe a spiritual revolution. You know, Jesus come back, set the world to rights. Drive out all the sin.”
Perceval’s Mexican grandmother was talking to him. He was four years old and very small, looking up at her bony knees. They were sitting outside on a hot summer day and she was in jean shorts, a floral tank top, and sporting a golf visor. They were at her house. Her basset hound was laying on the stoop, panting as hard as it could to survive the sun. Upon waking, Perceval always found these dreams weird because his grandma had never had a basset hound and she wasn’t Mexican.
“But what everyone missed was New Jerusalem. That’s what they missed Percy. The Good Book promises us an object. An artifact. A machine. Something made. It descend from the sky and we don’t need the sun no more and it makes everything gold and beautiful forever. That’s what it is Percy.” She leaned forward, continuing to say his name over and over again in an accent she didn’t have. “That’s what it is Percy. That’s what it is Percy. That’s what it is.”
His grandmother leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes, letting the rays of sunshine hit her face. As they did so, little Perceval watched her face transform, and her whole body grow. Larger. Larger. LARGER until she was bigger than the house behind them and seemed on fire, a Living Angel on a throne instead of an abuela in a plastic chair.
“PERCEVAL!” The god-like being from the throne cried out, its voice rolling over the sky like a thousand oceans. “TAKE CARE THAT YOU DO NOT ASK THE SIGNIFICANCE OF WHAT YOU SEE.”
Perceval’s head banged violently off the interior wall of the vehicle as it swerved and skidded to a stop.
His eyes popped open. Ahmari was there, handing him his rifle.
“Wakey wakey eggs and bakey sunshine. Time to kill us some bugs.”
I like it
Cowabunga!