The Apocalypse Watch

by J Foster Ward

  Well, now he knew why this corridor was in better shape; the security system was still wired to a power source and made whoever tried to enter crap their loincloth. Some poor bloody primitive screwhead makes his way down here from the surface and suddenly is terror-fucked by a 23th century riot control device.

  Several of the chambers off the hallway were almost undisturbed. Doors were stiff but opened and even some of the furnishings were intact. He found a water-fountain and when he turned the taps only a green-brown sludge burped out. So foul-smelling he wanted to barf and quickly put the hazmat hood back on. From there he found a lounge of some kind, filled with faded yellow-orange upholstered chairs in weird organic shapes that looked uncomfortable to sit on. At the far side was an equipment locker with an open airshaft dripping a toxic-looking green slime. Out of curiosity he popped several of the lockers open until the last one exploded with hundreds of centipedes as long as his hand and they raced in every direction, including up his legs. Jake stumbled back, dancing and slapping them away, but they seemed harmless and unable to get into his hazmat suit. In moments they’d scattered, and the room was still again.

  “Next time, Jake, don’t be so fucking curious,” he vowed.

  The far end of the corridor had another fearthrower unit, and Jake gritted his teeth before walking under it. He expected the horrible, butt-clenching terror. But whatever artificial hormones had been dumped in his system from the first time were still working and he felt nothing but a mild discomfort as he passed it by. Back into the pitch-black corridors he used the darkscopers and navigated carefully but didn’t encounter anything else. At one point he thought he heard the clicking of something on the floor, like a dog’s paws on kitchen linoleum, but when he paused and listened the sound was gone.

  When he reached the end of the mapped route, he found himself at the entrance to a vast underground space. Twenty metres tall, supported by interlaced columns of plastec girders. A huge, warehouse-sized chamber all the more strange because it was completely empty. And somewhere out of visible range on the far side were the main doors to the bunker.

  He considered the pros and cons of hugging the wall all the way around the chamber versus cutting straight across. In the end he just wanted it over with and set out into the big sea of dark, the infrared vision of his goggles only letting him see an indistinct pool out to about ten meters. It felt like walking across the floor of the ocean, nothing but emptiness until the occasional girder or support beams loomed out of the dark like the mast of a shipwreck. There was life, showing up as the occasional moving heat blob, but nothing bigger than a finger, and all of it retreating as he approached. With the indistinct infrared vision, he couldn’t see if it was insect, animal or maybe even some rootless plant that hopped on puffs of compressed air.

  The click-click tip-tapping noise made him freeze.

  It was distant. Too far outside the infrared range of the darkscopers to see where it came from. Jake fumbled inside a satchel and came out with a chemical light-stick. Snapping it and shaking it to life, the darkscope goggles switched to low-lite vision and the room sprang into more detail.

  The click-tap-clicking got louder. And there was way more of it.

  Taking a best guess Jake tossed the glow stick towards the loudest noise. He watched it arc through the dark in a blurry circle before skidding to a halt on a patch of completely empty ground. Nothing.

  He unholstered the acid revolver. Where the fuck was the noise coming from?

  The movement caught his eye. Not from ground level, but above.

  Dangling down from above the range of the darksope vision was a cable or line. He watched, fascinated, as it seemed to unravel and open into a cluster of smaller filaments. Another line followed, and other. Then a half dozen, all dangling directly above the glowstick. The lines curled and probed.

  They weren’t ropes. They were tendrils of something living. Jake unshipped a pocket light from his equipment vest and aimed upwards.

  The light revealed the creatures. They looked like… human heads. Clinging to the ceiling with spidery limbs, long tendrils extruding from the open mouths. Jake froze at the sight, unable to process what he was looking at. He dialled up the lumens of the pocket light and widened the beam, revealing dozens of them.

  And they didn’t like it.

  A series of wailing murmurs erupted from the severed heads. Seeming to wash back and forth like a wave. Jake raised the revolver and fired into the biggest clump of them.

  The gel pellets made a wide pattern at 20 meters. Aiming at that range was almost useless. But there were so many heads he couldn’t help but hit some of them. The impact made them scatter, wailing even louder, making his skin crawl. He fired again and a third time, and several of the creatures flinched, twitching and ultimately lost their grip and plummeting down around him like so many ripe human headfruit. They met an unforgiving splat on the hard ground, cracking open and crushed. Dead, and still smoking from the acid rounds.

  By then he was out of targets, the other headfruit had vanished into the dark. Carefully advancing with gun drawn, Jake shone the big circle of harsh white light on the dead ones.

  They weren’t human heads at all. They were some sort of head-sized insect, or maybe land-crab, with a hard shell or carapace that was shaped roughly like a screaming human face. The ‘mouth’ was an orifice for a kind of spinneret, like a spider, that the extruded tendrils came from.

  “What the actual fuck?” Jake breathed out.

  What was it? Why was it? Forget even asking how. He’d seem atomic superbugs and mutated sea creatures, and god knows what other genetically modified abominations. Now this. Had some 23rd century bioengineer made these things? Or were they the result of random mutation in the intervening two centuries?

  Whatever they were, they seemed more scared of him than he was of them. There was nothing larger than a mouse to eat in the cavern; they were probably the equivalent to a cave-fisher. Snagging the occasional vermin from the floor below. With a last swipe of his light at the ceiling he clicked it off, submerging the cavernous room into darkness again except for the dim glow of the light stick.

  He set off again, leaving the circle of light and dead headfruits behind, until the far wall began to loom out of the darkscope fog, like a sheer cliff. He’d gone off course by a little and had to follow the wall for a dozen steps to find the doors.

  He was surprised how big they were. Wide as a tractor trailer. Tall as a house. And massively thick. Three feet, maybe. It seemed a bit like overkill, but for all he knew they were designed to resist a direct attack by some sort of future weapon. Somehow the doors were jammed, half closed, and covered in filth and corrosion so thick he couldn’t see the metal underneath. There was no way he would ever get them moving. But that’s what the backup doors were for.

  Beyond the doors was a tunnel, although that hardly did it justice. It was wide as a six-lane highway and stretched out into the distance quiet and empty. The air was still but not stale; that meant somewhere it was connected to the surface. For a long minute Jake just stood there, then he made himself step over the threshold into the tunnel. Where did it go? What was out there in the real world? Was it all atomic monsters and wastelands?

  He brought the wrist-buddy back online.

  “Buddy, these schematics show a secondary set of blast doors. Can you show me where I can access local controls to close them?”

  “We’re not supposed to be here,” the wrist-buddy pointed out.

  “What, like, in an existential sense? Go fuck yourself, we’re here now and I need to know where the manual controls are.”

  “We’ll see what Cool Breeze says about that!” the annoying thing replied, and then went silent.

  Jake waited a full minute. “Still there?”

  “Yes!” it snapped.

  “What does Cool Breeze say?”

  Silence.

  “You can’t reach him, can you? His comms and monitoring are entirely shut off up here.”<
br />
  “Okay fine, you win. But I’m telling on you when we get back.”

  The wrist-buddy painted a hologram on the wall of the tunnel, five meters out and again, ten meters out. “Those are the paired, secondary blast doors. They are linked through this common panel,” and the wrist-buddy shone another arrow on the wall between them, ten feet up.

  Great. Very smart design.

  “How do I reach it?”

  “There’s a ladder.”

  Following the machine’s directions Jake prodded a very seized catch on the wall and with a grating of dirt a set of bare, gridded steps folded out of the wall leading up to the panel. When he got the panel open it looked like a maze of plumbing on the inside. Hydraulic. Smart, in its way. You didn’t have to worry about gears or engines seizing up over the decades, so long as the fluid inside the system didn’t leak it was age-proof. The valve, however, was as corroded and frozen as the doors.

  “I can’t release the valve. What now?”

  “Uncover this gasket,” wrist-buddy painted a hologram on one of the pipes.

  Beneath it was a glass tube and his light showed it was filled with some sort of amber liquid.

  “Now break it,” wrist-buddy said. “When the hydraulic fluids drain it should release the counterweights and close the doors. You won’t be able to get them open again without full repairs, but nothing else will get in.”

  “Perfect,” Jake said. He rapped it with the butt of the revolver but didn’t even crack it. Standing back he switched guns, aimed the slug-thrower, and shot it out.

  The emergency release gasket gave way with explosive force, sending a high-pressure stream of fluidics straight at Jake that hit like a sledgehammer. He slammed to the ground, bent in agony, choking on a stream of bitter synthetic oil that was spraying out with fire-hose force.

  Both sets of doors began closing. Fast. A mechanical pounding like a triphammer began to sound.

  “Motherfucker!” Jake swore at either the wrist-buddy or the 23rd century engineer who’d designed it. He was about to be trapped between the doors!

  Fighting what felt like broken ribs Jake fought his way to his feet and, slipping on hydraulic fluid, and staggered for the door back into the bunker. But the more they closed the faster they closed and as Jake raced the last few meters, he knew he wasn’t going to make it. He threw himself the last length when the doors were only a foot apart.

  …and was caught between them.

  There was a brief, blinding pain, the sound of half the bones in his body snapping like kindling, and everything below his rib cage stayed on the far side of the door.

  Blood was filling his lungs. He choked and willed himself to black out from the pain. As he lay there dying, in the last few seconds of life, he saw the warning label on the inside of the doors, revealed now that they were shut.

  DOORS CLOSE QUICKLY

  OBJECTS IN PATH OF CLOSING DOORS MAY DAMAGE APERATURE WHEN CRUSHED

  ***

  Chapter 2

  : Bad Memories

  “Well, it’s about time!” the woman’s voice said. “Get over here and start cleaning these chalkboards!”

  Jake blinked awake – or perhaps awareness was a better word – inside another of Circe’s virtual environments. It was the loading screen he could hang out in like a waiting room before she could put his consciousness back into a new cloned body.

  He was in his high-school math classroom. Late afternoon on a crisp fall day. Yellow beams of sunlight slanting through the windows, painting long shadows of the legs of the desks, and catching the motes of chalk dust swirling in the air as the woman clapped two chalkboard erasers together, concealing her in a cloud.

  He marvelled again at how real the Resurrection Incorporated AI could make the virtual world. He could feel the warmth of the sunbeams, smell the chalk as it itched the back of his nose, and even half-remembered details of his childhood school were realized; the dog-eared textbooks, the graffiti carved in the desktop with a protractor in spiky straight-lined letters, the flag hanging at the back of the room.

  He’d been born at the tail-end of the 20th century. Gone to school when there were still chalkboards instead of laptops. And sometime in the early 21st century he’d died of viral Huntington’s, slowly wasting away alone and empty of hope, in some hospital.

  And yet.

  And yet here he was, back again. Alive in the 25th century by some bizarre twist of chance.

  Near the end of his original life, paralyzed and on a respirator before the Huntington’s shut him down for good, he’d been approached by some techs from the Gangle Corporation. Guys looked like teenagers and presented cards that said they were VPs in the New Consciousness Technologies division. Said they needed volunteers for a ‘human digitization’ project. Jake had no idea what that was, only that he was dying, and they would pay out a huge settlement if he consigned his body to human medical research.

  He’d agreed just so he could imagine his ex-wife’s face when she discovered he’d left the money to charity instead of her. Like she deserved anything after leaving him when the going got rough a year earlier.

  From what he could piece together of the events after his death, the Gangle teenagers had been successful in their attempts to download his entire brain into digital storage. And kept it, in storage, for the better part of two centuries while the world changed around him. Near as he could figure it the Gangle assets had been bought by a company called Resurrection Incorporated that specialized in reviving human consciousness into cloned bodies. And then Resurrection Inc had been bought up by the Nevermore Corporation. And Nevermore Corporation had been the ones to build this giant doomsday bunker.

  Because the world had been a sad place in the 23rd century; no sex, no drugs, no jobs and no balls. Everyone hooked up to something called a ‘tingler’ that could tickle the pleasure center of the brain and living in a world where everything was handed to them. But not a world without problems, apparently; the have-nots of the 23rd century, what the gelded tingler-sucking morons called ‘dirtworms’, had started hundreds of terrorist organizations to tear down the unjust idiocrasy that ruled the world with a feeble hand.

  So Jake, the human test-pattern, kept around in cold storage for the better part of 500 years, was brought back into the post-apocalypse to rebuild civilization. The only problem being he was surrounded by a bunch of useless fucking idiots from the 23rd century who were all virgins, had no idea how to actually do anything now that robots and computers couldn’t do it for them, and saw themselves as the specialist snowflakes of all the special snowflakes.

  Looking around the virtual classroom Jake felt a spike of homesickness so intense it almost choked him. He was almost certainly the only man alive who remembered the 20th century. He was, in a very true sense, the last real man alive.

  ***

  “Didn’t you hear me, young man? It’s almost like you enjoy being in detention!”

  Jake was brought back to the moment as the chalk cloud cleared and the all-too familiar shape of the teacher was revealed.

  Miss Finnigan. Ohhh god, Miss Finnigan!

  She had been a year or two out of teacher’s college when she started as his homeroom teacher. A narrow-waisted redhead with pretty blue eyes and the kind of perfect ass that filled out her skirts in a way that made Jake’s pants tight. He’d gone through an entire year of math in constant danger of having to go do work on the board while sporting an unstoppable erection.

  Miss Finnigan was giving him a stern glare. “Now I’ve got chalk all over my blouse! I guess you’re just going to have to help me clean it off!” she demanded and began unbuttoning her silk shirt to reveal the curve of her tits in a black lace bra underneath.

  “This can’t be happening!” Jake said out loud, and his voice came out in a high-pitched squeak.

  Horrified, he looked at his reflection in a window and saw Circe has made him twelve years old in this virtual fantasy. Oh no! The well-intentioned but inexperienced artific
ial intelligence had mined his sexual memories and uncovered his preteen fixation for his hot teacher!

  “Maybe you deserve a spanking! Corporal punishment is supposed to be banned at this point in history, but I don’t care! Because I’m so lusty and turned on by your sneakers and Pokemons!” the teacher moaned, advancing on him half-naked.

  “Oh god! No! Stop!” Jake demanded. “Circe! This isn’t right, you have to stop this!”

  The room froze and then vanished, leaving Jake and the topless redhead in an endless white plain of nothingness.

  “I’m sorry, Jake. Did I do something wrong? While I was reviewing your memories for exemplars of heightened sexual desire, I catalogued a number of times you were fixated on this female. I have to admit, I enjoy her red hair. So colorful!”

  “It’s, uh, not correct. I’m so young. You need to find a memory where me and the um, female are the same age, okay?”

  “You hate it!” Circe looked crestfallen.

  “No!”

  “You like it?”

  “No!”

  “I don’t understand!” she cried, lip trembling.

  “Listen, I appreciate the effort.”

  “Do you?”

  “Of course!”

  The virtual girl beamed at him in delight. “I’m so glad you liked it. I have others! What about…”

  And suddenly they were standing in a hospital examination room. Or rather Jake was laying in bed, muscles atrophied as his body was wasting away from the Huntington’s. Standing over him in a cute little white outfit was a nurse who worked the night shifts when he’d been in the terminal ward; a cute, curvy girl who he’d sometimes fantasized about when she gave him sponge baths.

  The nurse snapped on a pair of rubber gloves and squeezed a handful of lubricant into her palm.

  “Time for your…” Circe paused for a sexy dramatic moment. “…examination, Mister Mortimer!”