The Apocalypse Watch

by J Foster Ward

  The green-striped things were batteries.

  Jacob rummaged through his gear and found a similar battery. When he loaded it into the magazine; it looked like there was room for four more of them. When he re-inserted the mag and he depressed the charge indicator the light went red. The number showed a numeral 3 and flickered before dropping to 2. Implanted memory said it was the ammo indicator; how many shots the gun had on current battery life. He switched what he now was sure was the battery with the one from the life-force detector. That one was a 4GJ and the ammo counter shot up to 19. He put the 2GJ battery in the detector.

  “Can you explain the markings on these batteries?” Jacob showed the android the dead one.

  Synthetica recited an answer like an encyclopaedia: “GJ, or giga-joule, is a unit of measurement of energy, work or the amount of heat. It is an expression of-”

  “Okay. Got that. ‘Giga’ is ‘big’ right? Like really way bigger than a joule?”

  “A giga-joule represents one billion joules.”

  “Fuck me. In something that small? How much energy is that?”

  “I’m assuming you want an example: one giga-joule is about the amount of potential chemical energy in a barrel of oil, when combusted.”

  “How?”

  “The base model for all so-called ‘gig-slots’ or ‘gigs’ is the use of superconducting UE-242; or Cometite. Prior to its discovery a similar sized battery could hold between twelve and sixteen thousand joules.”

  So that’s why Cometite was so valuable.

  Jacob looked at the battery with new respect. “I can’t scale it to anything real. How many joules are there in a bolt of lightning?”

  “Typically, about 500 megajoules. The capacitors of this weapon are not rated for discharges of that power. It has a 200 megajoule capacitor rating per discharge.”

  “Fuck. Me.”

  “For that type sexual relations, it is suggested I’m modified with adaptor model Moby XY.”

  Jake gave her the side-eye to see if she was messing with him and she gave a tight grin. “Uh, pass.”

  “You need to be very careful with that,” Synthetica said about the gun.

  “Yeah, I could melt the whole room.”

  “I mean the battery. The gigs were not intended for such long-term storage and may have suffered integrity loss over the years, leading to UE-242 contamination.”

  Jake didn’t like the sound of that. “You mean radiation?”

  “I mean the tocks,” She replied. “Turn you into a freak. Like them,” she indicated one of the dead wylers nearby.

  “What’s a tocks?”

  “A ‘Tox”. A toxiphage. That’s the term that came up for people who suffered from UE-242 contamination. It’s erroneous, but it stuck,” Synthetica explained.

  “Some weird unknown element they make the batteries out of, causes that?” Jake asked incredulously. “Seems like a pretty major design flaw.”

  “Cometite proved to have a wide range of applications and hazards if handled without precautions. Due to the quantum nature of UE-242. They discovered that when a living organism was contaminated, they could perform certain eventuations. The more contamination, the greater the ability.”

  Synthetica produced a device and scanned the wyler’s body. The device then projected a 30% sized hologram of the internal structure of the body and the android girl deftly dissected the virtual model, revealing some sort of spots or granularities in the beast’s throat. The exact spot Jake had seen it glowing green when the monster sucked the life out of one of the tribesmen to heal itself.

  “You’re saying that stuff gives you psychic powers?”

  “Yes. It was illegal in the 23rd century to knowingly expose yourself. If convicted, you could be subject to summary reclamation of the Cometite.”

  “They sucked it out of you?”

  “Yes, from the slurry of your corpse once you had been processed.”

  “Damn. Talk about a harsh punishment. Not exactly like in the comic-books huh? If you got super-powers they turned you into a protein shake. Did the same thing make the dogmen?” he asked the android

  “The dogmen, as you call them, are chimeras.”

  “Mythological Greek beasts?”

  “Chimeras in the biological sense. An organism with a mixture of different genetic tissues. Not long after your original death genetic modifications became childishly simple, commonplace, and often horrific. These ‘wylers’ were probably an unpatented garage-modification cooked with a gene drive the size of a suitcase.“

  “Fast, cheap and out of control.” Hefting the gun over one shoulder Jake sighed. He shrugged off the creeping dread and his body’s natural talent for pursuing positive action kicked in. “I guess we better get this show moving and find Milan fast.”

  “That sounds wise.”

  As they walked back through the stone-age rooms of the tribe and painted halls, Jake had a thought.

  “Hey, does anyone else in here have the whatever you called it. Tox?”

  “While scanning the injuries of the inhabitants I only discovered one subject with small amounts of UE-242 contamination.”

  “Who?”

  “The leader; Tesla. It’s small, but measurable.”

  Jake considered a moment. “Best keep that just between us for now. Understand? Don’t let anyone or anything else know. Last thing I want is that poor kid ground up because of some two-hundred year dead laws.”

  “I understand. I have encoded the information in an encrypted interaction protocol.”

  “You what?”

  “I am keeping it a secret,” she rephrased.

  ***

  Chapter 10

  : The Trapmaker

  “This is a terrible idea!” Tesla said.

  “But it is our best idea,” Jake pointed out.

  The filth-covered barbarian girl didn’t look happy but she bowed her head. Behind her the rest of the blue tribe looked on, each of them bearing improvised packs of the equipment they’d put together. Jake had distributed a bunch of items from the wyler’s stash among them.

  “Here’s where we are,” Jacob showed Tesla the hologram wrist-buddy map. “And here’s where we want to go,” he pointed to the main doors. “I sealed these, but wrist-buddy says there’s a personnel door nearby.”

  After a minute for her primitive mind to get over the magical mystery of the hologram, Tesla was able to add some details.

  “The wyler’s once controlled all these areas,” she poked several rooms and the wrist-buddy helpfully colored them amber. All told it was about a quarter of the module.

  “Not long ago some sort of flying insects nested and took over much of it. And if that wasn’t bad enough there is the trapmaker out there eating anyone it can catch.”

  “The what?”

  “A terrible beast. No one who has seen it lives. One of our tribe saw it once, from a distance. He said it was like a colored mirror.”

  Jake remembered the thing that had chased him and Milan and refused to meet Tesla’s gaze. Thinking about Milan in the hands of the crazy cultists made an angry white noise fill his head.

  Tesla was still talking, although she had a habit of addressing the wrist-buddy instead of Jacob. He was sure she assumed it was a god. Or at least a divine messenger. He barely listened as she described a couple other points that were safe, one being the little shrine outpost Yanco had made and the other being the domain of someone or thing they just called ‘Lisstik’. To hear her talk about this Lisstik not even the giant dogs had wanted to mess with it.

  “Wait, that’s in Alpha module,” Jake stopped her.

  “I don’t know what that means,” she said quietly.

  “It doesn’t matter. Too late to worry about that now.”

  Here was his first hint what might have happened in Alpha module. Lisstik might be between him and curing Cool Breeze. More importantly Jake now knew the entrance to Alpha module had been breached and was located in dangerous territory.
>
  Worry about that once you have Milan back.

  Tesla had spoken about a few other things too, while they were packing equipment for the tribe. The temple of her god, the Voice of Sentrak, was located a few days pilgrimage from here. She’d been part of the first expedition to this place, as a representative of the local chieftain – her father - when Yanco commanded the force of Holy Wayfarers tasked with searching for more of the lost gods. Three of the obeyers had been killed during the trek, which told Jake a lot about how dangerous it was out there.

  It was Yanco who had first made peace with the wylers already living here. Yanco who had started trading followers of Sentrak for more artefacts, and Yanco who had betrayed Tesla, selling her to the dogmen and telling everyone she was dead. While she talked, the look of fury grew. Jake didn’t have to worry about her enthusiasm for tracking down the cultists who had taken Milan; she had her own reasons for wanting them dead.

  “Lord Jacob, there is one more thing that must happen before we leave.”

  “Tesla, every minute we wait is a minute they get further away,’ Jake tried not to show how impatient he was.

  “It is important. Follow me.”

  ***

  With a solemn nod the barbarian girl headed to the hallway and led him to one of the big side chambers of the wyler’s lair, motioning him to follow inside. What he arrived to was a dimly lit chamber, with the obeyers arranged in a circle and some sort of altar made from overturned supply crates and Tesla stood, lit by glow rods.

  The barbarian princess dropped her filthy jacket and loincloth and was wearing nothing but dirt until she donned a few priestly accoutrements out of scavenged equipment her little cousin handed her. She wore a necklace made of copper wire and reflective shards of optical array. The crown on her blue hair pulsed with a slow green light and was made of carefully frayed fibre optics. A six-foot length of aluminium pipe had been hammered with odd bits of electrical panel which were too broken to be used and the barbarian girl held it like a ceremonial staff.

  As the door closed behind him, Jake tried not to flinch as the room full of blue primitives turned and bowed to him.

  “Please, ranger of blue power, lord of the iron throne and emerald city, stand by me and bear witness to our sacrament,” the girl beckoned him.

  Feeling like the longest walk of his life, Jake crossed the room with all eyes on him and greeted the chieftain’s daughter.

  “Hey, Tesla. What’s going on here? You guys seem… worked up.”

  “Great changes have been happening,” Tesla agreed. “We are no longer simply content to be the followers of the Voice. You have taught us much about how the world truly is. And we were ashamed for our past ignorance.”

  “Oh! Okay… well don’t feel too bad. Knowledge is power, and all that. I’m glad you’re feeling positive about the changes.”

  “It has opened our eyes and now we see truly,” Tesla said proudly. “I ask that you bear witness as we praise our new beginning.”

  Jake checked his wrist-buddy chronometer.

  “Sure, why not? Will this take much longer?”

  “Not very, my lord.”

  Tesla started the ceremony and with a sinking feeling, Jake realised it was in their native language and he didn’t understand a word of it. It seemed to go on forever and he soon got so bored he had to fight to pay attention while the barbarian girl chanted and waved her staff and talked (emphatically) about things that seemed to please the entire tribe.

  He passed the time by planning the trip ahead, but his thoughts drifted back to the naked chieftain’s daughter. Tesla was muscular but looked like she might have been curvier before the wylers starved her. Her sky-colored hair was a knotted rat’s nest so filthy it looked closer to black in color. She reminded him a bit of old anime characters which he supposed might have been part of the inspiration for her ancestors when they had genetically modified themselves with cosmetic changes.

  Jake wondered if it had been the smartest move, in evolutionary terms; there was a reason that men with teeth and claws and weird psychic powers had sold them into slavery and not the other way around.

  He was so busy thinking about mutations, psychic powers and the evolution of humans that he almost missed when Tesla began shouting and gesturing at him, crying his name. She came to stand beside him and in one last impassioned speech she held her staff over his head and one by one the rest of the tribe shuffled forward, knelt before him to recite something, then move on.

  “Uh, Tesla?”

  “Shhh!” she hissed. “It’s very rude to interrupt!”

  So he waited until she was done and had dismissed the crowd before her pulled her aside towards the door and tried not to be put off by the way everyone smiled at him.

  “What was that all about?” he asked her.

  “You are concerned?”

  “Yes! I don’t like being part of some ritual I don’t understand.”

  “You are worried we have gone back to our old, ignorant ways. Please be at ease, my lord, we have not.”

  “M-my lord? I’m not your lord!”

  “But of course you are! We were wrong to worship the false idol of living metal, or the insubstantial spirit of the Voice. Such ignorance makes us regret our actions. And worse, we bear much hatred for the priests who took advantage of us and gave us a false prophet.”

  “Oh. Okay I was worried for a moment,” Jake let out a sigh of relief.

  “Yes, we are reformed now. Machines cannot be gods. But you, Lord Jake, we believe are a living god, who dies many times and is always reborn. Who can control the metal man. Who is a savior to our people. And we have pledged our devotion to you now.”

  “Listen…” he began to say.

  “And I have pledged my devotion as your wife.”

  “Oh, fffffuuuuuuck,” Jacob moaned.

  There was a general amount of bowing and genuflection that involved sticking their arm straight out with wrist bent and moving it up and down. The kindof motion someone might make if they were wearing one of the coloured wrist-band access keys.

  The filthy urchin who was his new wife grinned at him.

  ***

  There were twenty-three of the primitives, counting the toddler whose legs were nicely on the way to growing back. Twenty-four if you counted Jacob, seeing as he had somehow married into their noble family. Whatever possessions they had amounted to an armload of garbage each, as well as the hastily bundled items Jake had pulled out of the wyler’s junkyard. Tesla lined them up at the exit from the wyler’s lair. Making sure they understood to be quiet, Jake had the barricade pushed aside and the eerie dark of the ruined corridors waited for them.

  “Tesla, we have to talk,” Jake tried to convince her again in a whisper.

  “About the monsters?”

  “No.”

  “About the hunt for your other wife?”

  “Milan isn’t my wife. And no.”

  “About the metal man your other wife built?”

  Jake looked back at the hulking metal figure standing near the barricade. The serial number affixed to one shoulder said FLX-18 so Jake had begun thinking of the bot mentally as ‘Flux’. Synthetica had successfully transplanted the working brain into the security bot, but it was immobile, running a system integrity check, for the last 30 minutes. The android nurse said it was going to take more time and had programmed it to meet them at the bunker exit. Strapped onto Flux’s back was a cargo rig filled with dismembered replacement body parts for Synthetica, courtesy of the headless gynoid Jake had found.

  “No, not that either. We have to talk about you and me.”

  “We do?” she smiled brightly, suddenly overjoyed.

  “Yes. We have to talk about how we’re not married, you and me. I barely know you.”

  “But this is how it is done. My mother never met my father before the day of her wedding. And as much as my father is a great man and powerful chieftain, he is not an immortal who controls metal men and wields the magic
of the ancients, like you. Any one of the women in my tribe would fight for the privilege of being your wife. Even now, I can see some are envious and complain you only chose me.”

  “I didn’t choose anyone!” Jake tried to get a word in edgewise.

  “You are modest as well as powerful. Do not worry, Lord Jacob, even if I am a humble third wife, I will learn everything I can about serving you and supporting my sister-wives.”

  “Dammit, Tesla. I didn’t know I was marrying you! I didn’t understand a word of it!”

  “Hush now, Lord Jacob. I will teach you the language of your subjects while we lay together on the fang-cat skins beside the hearthfire of your hut, as we lay exhausted by the union of our two bodies in slippery, moaning passion.”

  Tesla’s expression was that of a lovelorn virgin schoolgirl, fantasising about the mysterious wonders of her wedding night, and it was all the more strange on a dirt-covered savage wearing an armored hide jacket and wielding a pair of curved hand-made swords. It was so unnerving that Jake couldn’t even formulate a response before the girl spoke to her people in their native language then waved the crowd forward towards the service crawlway. He had to move to catch up as she led the way.

  Tesla swore she had scouted Bravo module many times and used to make trips down to the sublevel. She said there was a crawlspace that led below the hallways right to the blast doors sealing off the exit. Since Jake couldn’t move twenty-three religious zealot savages through the halls without losing some or all of them, he’d decided that was the best plan.

  “This way,” Tesla levered up an entire meter-wide section of floor grate with the two ground-down curved swords she’d taken from the dead wyler and wore on back sheaths.

  Jacob took one look down into the close quarters, slung the big plasma gun and took out the automatic slug pistol instead. He tried to imagine the effect of the 200 megajoule energy discharge in a closed environment on the mostly naked obeyers. The collateral damage would barbeque the entire crawlspace. He was momentarily distracted by the parting crowd as Synthetica appeared, suited up in her armor again, and adjusting a backpack of gear. She smiled at him and Jake felt a spike of reassurance. He wasn’t in this mess alone.