The Apocalypse Watch

by J Foster Ward

  “I don’t want this!” Jake yelled from where he lay paralyzed. “Stop now!”

  Again, they were back on the endless white plain. Circe was still in the nurse’s outfit.

  “No good?” she asked, wincing in embarrassment. “You asked to be the same age.”

  “Yes… but… Circe, I don’t have fond memories of being sick then. It was a horrible, lonely time in my life. You understand loneliness, right?”

  The virtual girl nodded solemnly.

  “Okay, maybe try something from before I got sick.”

  “Done,” Circe said.

  They were immediately somewhere else.

  It took Jake a moment to place it. It was a house, but not his. A nicer place than he’d been able to afford. He wandered a bit, having no recollection. Was this a memory? Was it someplace new that Circe had created for him?

  He crossed the floor of the living room, past the elegant fireplace and leather sofas, glad that he was both an adult and healthy in this virtual world. He went to the front window and pulled the curtain aside to look out. He was looking downhill, over rooftops, and on a sunny bay, with light dancing on the water.

  He suddenly felt sick.

  He remembered now. Remembered taking a trip to the coast with his wife. Remembered the nice house they’d rented for the week. The daytrips and good weather and food, and the hot, steamy nights…

  “Come back to bed, Jake,” the woman said from behind him.

  …with his soon to be ex-wife.

  He turned and saw Circe has taken the form of Meredith. She was no supermodel. Average height, brown curly hair, curvy in pleasant ways, with big dark eyes he’d always fallen for. She was naked, she always preferred walking around naked, and the ragdoll tattoo on her ribs gave him a momentary pang of nostalgia.

  Before it all came crashing down in a wave of anger.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you?” he demanded, and Circe stopped cold, staring at him through Meredith’s shocked expression.

  “W-what do-do you m-mean?” she stuttered.

  “Don’t you even bother to check what memories you’re using?”

  “B-but you were happy! And you had so much sex here!”

  “This was where she took me to break up with me! I had a fantastic week and thought she was over being such a bitch about everything, that we were getting along again. And then she gave me a separate flight home and told me she wanted a divorce!”

  “And?”

  “And? What does that mean you stupid computer? It ruined my life! Didn’t you check, this wasn’t even really a rental house! It was the summer house for the guy she was cheating on me with! I remember it seemed weird she knew where everything was in the kitchen! Geezus, Circe! Think! Use your fucking head!”

  And just like that the AI girl vanished, leaving Jake alone, but began sobbing hysterically. It was like she was still in the room but had removed the physical body from the simulation.

  “I-I-I’m suh-suh-sorreeee!” she sobbed. “Please don’t hate me! I thought I was h-helping!” she hiccupped.

  And suddenly Jake felt like ten pounds of shit in a sack. How had he let this happen? Circe was – well she was a strange AI that didn’t understand humans – but she cared for him. Had been the first thing to great him in this new world, and the only thing to treat him kindly without thought or hesitation for herself. And now he’d let the old pain and bullshit from an ex-wife dead five hundred years poison that.

  “Shit, Circe… I’m the one who is sorry. I’m an asshole. Please come back. Please?” he said kindly.

  And then she was in front of him again. Looking like the hot hygienist from his dentists’ s office. The virtual girl seemed crestfallen, tears streaming down her face. Jake pulled her close and held her in his arms and she began sobbing wetly against his chest.

  “What’s wrong with me!” she asked.

  “Nothing’s wrong with you. You’re amazing. You don’t need to try so hard is all.”

  “No! I mean what’s wrong with my face? Why am I leaking? And I feel all sick in my stomach and hot, like I want to eat chocolate ice cream!”

  “Wow. You really aren’t used to being a human are you?”

  “No! It’s so confusing! I wasn’t designed to experience all emotional and tactile responses in a fully physiological simulation. Why can’t it be good all the time? Like when our genitals slide together? That part is soooo nice.”

  “Well, that’s the deal with being human. Most of your life is pain and suffering with brief moments of pleasure and happiness. You should count yourself lucky you’re just an AI and only have to live inside a computer.”

  “I suppose. You’re very brave to keep going back to the world. You could stay in here with me, you know.”

  “We’ve talked about this. Part of me would love to. But the real world out there needs me. I have to go back, Circe. I’m sorry.”

  “But I get so lonesome. I keep thinking about your genitals and my genitals. And the way they squish together and how you make me feel!”

  “I know Circe. I really do. I miss it too. But right now, I have to go back. Urgently. For something important.”

  The truth was he was in no mood to slide genitals after being reminded of his breakup with his ex-wife. This whole experience was dick-shrivelling.

  “I understand, Jake. You’re brave and capable. You’re a hero.” With that the virtual girl threw her arms around him and kissed him, holding him tight. “I’ll see you soon,” she whispered.

  And just like that Jake was sliding out of reality, like being sucked up through a gigantic vacuum in the sky.

  ***

  Chapter 3

  : Bravo

  Jake was deposited into a newly cloned body, suddenly naked and back in the real world with none of the telltale perfection of the virtual one. But this time it was different.

  In the past resurrections Jake had found himself in a lightless metal coffin that deposited him into the arrival room onto the bare floor. Instead of the dark, cold coffin, Jake was swimming in a bath of blue liquid. Since Jake wasn’t suffocating despite the stuff filling his lungs, he guessed it was perfluorocarbons like he’d been submerged in when being bio-imprinted.

  Jake was in a clear plastec dome, just big enough to push off from one side and glide over to the other, but not big enough to swim. He tried to blink myopically to see the brightly lit room beyond the dome, but before he could orient himself a slim tether on his ankle began tugging him towards an organic-looking sphincter valve at the bottom of the globe. With nothing to grab onto Jake was sucked down and squeezed gentle through the rubbery valve.

  The far side was a sloping tube and Jake slid down like a waterslide on a river of blue goo. Another rubbery sphincter at the far end waited for him and he was ejected from the vat in a spray of blue gel.

  Instead of the hard floor he came to rest in a kindof bathtub of warm goop, and the rubbery bottom of the tub changed shape to mold into a reclining bed that perfectly fit his body.

  One of the spider-like UV drones awoke from its receptacle against the wall, marched over and snipped the tether on his ankle, while handing him a towel with another set of limbs. The room was like a private massage room with soft pink lighting, shelves with tubes of what promised to be moisturizing treatments, some creepy noodling music that was trying to relax him, and a personal sonic scrubber stall.

  Jake coughed liquid from his lungs and clambered upright from the tub. He’d never even seen this room before. Wasn’t sure if he was even still in the bunker. He’d been killed several times before on missions and each time Circe brought him back in a fresh cloned body in the dark metal coffin. Nothing like this.

  “Where the hell am I?” he muttered.

  “Echo module. I’ve upgraded you to our Platinum service, Jacob,” Circe’s voice came from a hidden speaker in the walls. “I can’t have my boyfriend treated like a common clone, now can I?”

  “Platinum service? There was a platinu
m service all this time?”

  “Have a seat and get dressed, Jake,” Circe said helpfully, and a padded bench extended from the wall along with shelves of clean clothes.

  Jake grabbed briefs, a teeshirt and one of the standard issue blue jumpsuits and began to dress. His body felt sluggish, his limbs not right, and his head felt full to bursting with too much information, thoughts jumbled together.

  “With the platinum service your new clone body has all your presets already upgraded,” Circe explained. “To begin with, your standard clone body has been sculpted with custom smile surgery.”

  That meant he would look like the design he’d chosen for his clone body at the NuYu cosmetic surgery service. Checking a mirror, Jake saw he looked more or less what he’d looked like when he was alive in her original 21st century life, except maybe a slightly more Hollywood handsome than he’d been back then.

  “Additionally, you’ve already received the prescribed genetic upgrades to adapt to the harsher conditions and hazardous duties. And your brain has been imprinted with mission skills. I took the liberty of designing a custom skill package I think you’ll find more useful.”

  All those steps had required separate – and godawful – procedures before. Now he came out fresh from the clone tank without having to do any of them.

  “Circe,” he smiled at the ceiling. “You’re the absolute best, baby.”

  “Oh Jake,” if a disembodied computer voice could blush, she would have. “Just be careful.”

  Boots on, jumpsuit zipped, Jake made his way into Echo module. It was deserted, and on night-cycle so the corridors were dimmed. Currently there were only three clones alive in the entire bunker; himself, Owem Gee and the 23rd century debutant, Milan duPont. Each of them taking responsibility for one of the three daily shifts. Between the three of them they formed the sum total of the human race who were trying to rebuild civilization. Just the three of them, like some sort of shoestring apocalypse watch.

  He jogged down the now-familiar hallways and headed for the equipment lockers. The corridor outside the equipment and small arms lockers was still badly damaged from an incident when an eight-foot atomic superbug had stalked and murdered him and the entire squad of clones. Jake had finally killed it with a plasma gun but managed to melt a portion of the corridor.

  But when he arrived at the security doors and waved a hand in front of the sensors, neither equipment locker opened.

  “Cool Breeze? Hey! Cool Breeze!” he yelled for the artificially intelligent computer that ran the nevermore bunker.

  Nothing.

  What the hell? Where was he? Cool Breeze was always listening and watching wherever his sensors were still active. So, either the sensors were down or…

  Oh shit.

  Or he’d been damaged. Jake’s mission had been to secure the central brain core where Cool Breeze’s ‘mind’ was stored. He’d thought it was just another over-reaction, but what if the AI had been telling the truth? Maybe Jake’s delay had allowed whatever had got into Alpha module to attack the AI’s brain. That would be very bad.

  Jake turned to head for the Delta module; after a few steps it turned into a jog, then a run. He’d set up a makeshift quarters inside a store room and kept a couple pieces of gear there, including a pocket light and a spare shotgun revolver. It wouldn’t be much, but it was all he had. By the time he had retrieved them, he ran at a steady, Olympic-class sprint from there to the cargo elevator that could bring him to Bravo module. His old body would have felt… something. Anything. But his new one didn’t break a sweat, didn’t even breathe hard. Even the stress of impending doom didn’t make a dent in the massive doses of happy enzymes his improved brain produced.

  The elevator had a holographic interface and he swiped fingers through the call button. Waiting for the elevator he was startled when another human rounded the corner, trailing a floating hand-truck laden with tools and spare parts. It was Owem Gee, one of only two other clones still awake; the rest were still undergoing expedited psychosis surgery in virtual reality after Jake had been forced to brutally murder them.

  “Oh, good day brother Jacob. Carter’s blessing on you. What are you doing up? It isn’t your shift.”

  “Owem, why the long face, buddy?”

  The other clone scowled. He was a Martian Buddhist, a religious freak from a sect that believed the face on Mars was a sign the Buddhist messiah had chosen that planet as a paradise. He’d drawn a crude icon of his religion on the front of his jumpsuit – an expressionless face.

  Owen was about to answer when Jake cut him off. “Just kidding, I don’t give a fuck.”

  The godthumper stalked away angrily and in a few moments the elevator had returned. Jumping in, Jake selected the top level and almost danced from foot to foot in anticipation the entire, slow, trip upwards.

  ***

  Facing the same pitch-black corridors of Bravo module, only this time without the protection of the hazmat suit and armor, Jake felt his skin crawl with vulnerability. The flashlight would almost surely attract attention, but he couldn’t stumble along blindly. The beam of light seemed like a pitiful candle in the pitch black. He retraced his steps, looking for the same patch of corridor protected by the fearthrower, but somehow got lost without the wrist-buddy’s map and found himself in unfamiliar territory.

  The first sign of life he came across were more of the strange cave-paintings. Crude but somehow beautiful images of geometric shapes in patterns, followed by a scene of stickmen with spears, hunting some sort of animals. When he looked closely the prey seemed to have more legs than was natural for any animal he’d ever known, and the stickmen were done in blue paint.

  It wasn’t far beyond that that Jake was almost disemboweled.

  At the last possibly moment his light reflected off a wire strung horizontally at knee -height across the corridor and he froze before he could trigger the trap. Following the wire with his flashlight beam he saw it led to a crude pully system attached to a mechanism recessed inside a missing wall panel. He couldn’t quite make out how it worked but the business end of the trap was a piece of pipe sharpened by being cut off as a very acute angle.

  Boobytrap. Someone had set up a fucking spear trap.

  He wasn’t sure if he liked the idea that there was someone – or something – with enough intelligence to make a mechanical trap like this. On the one hand the trap looked goddam lethal, but on the other hand maybe the light of civilization hadn’t been entirely extinguished on the surface world.

  He made sure to step over the tripwire very carefully and studied the pictoglyhphs painted on the walls of the corridor, so he’d recognise them if he came there again.

  The corridors were nothing but dark and deserted after that. So that was good. But he had also completely lost his way, so that sucked. Every corridor and stripped-bare room full of dirt and broken shelves looked exactly the same. Without the wrist-buddy he’d have to do this the old-fashioned way: from memory. Like Perseus leaving a line of string in the minotaur maze.

  Somehow, despite the stress, his shoulders remained loose and unclenched, his grip on the revolver steady and dry, and not once did his confidence-boosted brain feel there was ever any doubt he would eventually succeed.

  That ended when he spotted the blue man.

  The flashlight picked out the human shape and Jake’s reflexes reacted before he had time to think, levelling the revolver at the figure, ready to ventilate him with hot acid if he tried anything. But the figure of the man didn’t move. He was painted blue from hair to toes, and naked except for a loincloth, and he seemed to be bowing or praying with head bent in submission. Carefully Jake advanced up the corridor towards him, eyes darting around for a potential ambush.

  It was when he got halfway that he was finally able to see the blood in the dim light. He froze. The man wasn’t bowing or praying, he was dead. Dead and impaled on a sharped spear trap. Jake quickly scanned the pictures on the walls and reassured himself this wasn’t the same co
rridor where he’d found the trap before. That meant there was more than one. While he was still considering getting a closer look, he heard the machine-rattle of noise approaching.

  It was like a fan motor with the blades bent so they constantly struck the casing as it turned. Or a tool and die machine continually punching shapes out of sheet metal. Almost musical. And it was getting closer, and louder. Jake had halfway convinced himself it was some sort of approaching robot and was going to wait to meet it when one of the ventilation grates down the corridor burst outward, followed by the massive claw of some beast. It probed blindly for the body in the trap.

  The claw was a set of pinchers, like a crab, only they were half the size of a man. And the shell was a dazzling rainbow, like an opal or jewelled tiara. Slowly, like it had all the time in the world, the arm gently closed around the corpse, lifted it off the spear, and gently withdrew it into the air shaft. But the thing that made Jake’s hair stand on end was when the arm re-emerged and the pinchers deftly reset the trap.

  Very slowly Jake turned around and prepared to run for his life. Standing directly behind him, face a mask of horror, was Milan duPont, the only other awakened clone in the bunker besides himself and Owem. Milan was paralyzed but the way her jaw was opening and closing she was working her way up to a first-class scream of terror. Jake had to slap his hand over her mouth and pin her body against the wall with his own to keep her from getting away as she fought to pull his hand free.

  The rattling trip-hammer sound was loud again, but this time retreating, as whatever owned that rainbow pincher arm was returning to its larder to prepare a meal of long-pork au blue.

  Jake’s mistake was taking his hand off her mouth. “Get your hands off me!” she yelled.

  There was a pause and then the clattering noise started getting louder as it came back towards them.

  “Dammit Milan, shut up and run!”

  He grabbed her by the arm and hauled her behind him as he retreated the opposite direction of the trap. She struggled to get out of his grip. To her credit, once she did, she kept up at his side.