Lessons on Destroying the World

by Gant, Gene

  “I’ll accept whatever happens,” I answered.

  Monica didn’t look happy with my response, but it brought a smile to Titus’s face. She walked over and took the orb from Antonio.

  “Two more things before we get started,” I blurted just as we were about to set ourselves to our task. Titus threw his hands up dramatically, turning away in frustration, and even Monica gave a weary sigh. “I don’t want anybody suffering,” I went on quickly. “If the machine has to… take some people out for breaking any of the Bible’s laws, we’ll have it erase them. That’s it. No violence, no suffering. The other thing is, I want the machine to show us exactly what happens after we start this.”

  “Fine,” Monica said. “Now, let’s get this done.” Still holding the orb, she went and seated herself in the recliner. Antonio and I sat on the sofa facing her. Titus moved to stand behind Monica. Antonio, Titus, and I joined our minds to Monica’s, forging a telepathic link through the orb that became a single, unified will. Using that link, Monica sent the agreed-upon instructions to the machine. Frighteningly, at least for me, the orb processed the instructions and signaled its readiness.

  Monica looked back at Titus, then looked at Antonio and me. “Are we ready?” There was excitement and just a little fear at the edges of her face.

  Titus and Antonio nodded. I had never seen Antonio look so sad.

  I sat there, motionless, eyes staring blankly at the wall above Titus’s head. It was a very good impression of someone who just didn’t give a damn one way or the other.

  Monica sent the command for the orb to execute our instructions.

  27

  THE AGGREGATE of human existence was already contained in the orb’s computer, every thought and feeling of every hominid who ever lived. Here was all our art, literature, religions, doctrines, and ideologies, recorded in a machine made by a being that was far more than human. We all saw this as the orb accepted Monica’s command and responded. It promptly severed the link through which the instructions had been given, a command Reverend Titus surreptitiously sent on the heels of Monica’s transmission to prevent any of us from stopping the machine from completing the task it had been given.

  “Are you insane?” I screamed at the old man. “Why did you do that?” The terror that filled me was so stark it made my nerves tingle. Goose bumps rose up on every inch of my skin.

  Reverend Titus’s face was full of grim, dark triumph. “Did you really think I’d ever trust you, girl? Did you think I believed for one moment you were going to subject yourself and your kind to God’s law? You were able to keep us from hearing your thoughts through the machine today, but I knew you planned somehow to stop what we’re doing here. Now I’ve made sure that won’t happen. You will be judged, you little fool, you and all homosexuals, molesters, and sexual deviants. You will be judged under the full weight of God’s law!”

  My final scheme, my final hope, was that once we set their plan into motion and they saw the actual effects of it, Antonio or Monica would understand the unprecedented level of murder we were committing and work with me to reverse it. I’d actually expected both of them would side with me, and the three of us would be able to take Titus down and out. Antonio’s and Monica’s horrified reaction to what Titus had just done was a clear sign the plan would have worked.

  But the old man had made it impossible for the four of us to act on any second thoughts we might have. The orb was going to follow its new programming to the very end, and we could do nothing except watch.

  The orb sent forth a burst of radiation that passed harmlessly through the walls and roof, tendrils of yellow-green energy sprouting from the house like gigantic spider legs. The four of us, when we referred to the Bible, meant the King James translation, the only version any of us had known. The original writings that mankind eventually came to call the Bible, as well as the musings of their authors, were also recorded in the computer. As one, Monica, Antonio, Titus, and I gasped at the knowledge none of us had realized was within our grasp. There was no chance now of our studying the thoughts of the Bible’s writers. Following Monica’s instructions, the orb, in one billionth of a second, weighed the life histories it contained of every living human against the laws of the King James translation. Then it acted to carry out the prescribed sentence, sending those green-glowing tendrils of energy across the face of the world.

  It would take only three passages to undo all of mankind as the orb carried out its instructions. The first one, randomly selected by the orb, was: “Speak unto the children of Israel, saying, ye shall eat no manner of fat, of ox, or of sheep, or of goat.”

  The Rock of Christ Church was a small building with yellow siding on the northern rim of downtown Memphis, converted from a shotgun house that had stood on its half acre of land for ninety-three years. It was only a mile away from the Reyeses’ Harbortown home. There were thirty-six people in the tiny auditorium of the Rock of Christ at the moment, more than half the membership. They were holding a prayer vigil on the well-polished wooden pews for an elderly deacon who lay dying in a suburban hospital. Each one of them had eaten meats with gravy on several occasions and had also consumed milk, foods containing significant portions of animal fat. The auditorium flashed green around them, and that perception was their last. With the passing of the verdant light, their bodies disintegrated, leaving thirty-six sets of clothes to slump shapelessly onto the pews, Bibles plopping on the carpeted floor with muffled thumps.

  The energy swept on, moving with increasing speed through houses, cars, and aircraft, across bridges and streets and fields. Everyone it touched, from children sleeping in their beds, through casino patrons gambling their paychecks away, to elderly priests preparing for rosaries, had consumed gravy at one time or another, had eaten hotdogs and hamburgers and cheese. For that, they were wiped out of existence in a trice.

  Monica shivered, misunderstanding the events she was witnessing. “Is this the Rapture?” she whispered in awe.

  Even as she spoke, Titus staggered away from her chair. “No, those people were destroyed. Look again, their bodies are being erased.” He swung around to confront me. “What have you done? The orb is killing the Christians, the innocent, as well as the heathen.”

  I shook my head in feeble protest, as shocked and frightened as Titus was. We all sensed more people dying on the basis of a second verse accessed by the orb: “I said therefore unto you, that ye shall die in your sins: for if ye believe not that I am he, ye shall die in your sins.” Across town, in the minds of twenty-four newborns sleeping within the maternity ward of Saint Francis Hospital, the orb had found neither a belief in nor a commitment to Christ. The green energy blazed through the ward, and twenty-four infants vanished from their cribs.

  Monica and Antonio rose with the apparent intention of going to their families. The orb was far too quick for them; the energy had already breached the bedroom walls where Antonio’s parents lay sleeping. As Antonio had feared, his mother was destroyed for violating both verses selected so far by the orb. His father died for eating animal fat. Monica screamed as she saw her own parents, her sister, and brother-in-law vanish for the committing the same sin as Antonio’s father. And even her sister’s unborn baby was swept from existence for having no belief in Christ.

  Reverend Titus’s face contorted with rage and grief, on top of which boiled a consuming hatred of me. He screamed. His emotions translated into overwhelming desire, to which the orb responded. His body flared into a red-hot pillar of radiance. I reacted without thought, my own body dissolving into a spear of photons that shot skyward at the speed of light. Titus hurled himself after me as the orb, in its random cycling through the life histories it contained, selected those of Antonio and Monica.

  The third verse accessed by the orb was, “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.” The orb sifted backward through Monica’s memories, stoppi
ng at the one of her slipping a gold bracelet, to which she had attached a tiny cross she had fashioned out of tin wire, over her wrist. It stopped her heart in the middle of a beat, and she died, her body evaporating, because she had made a Christian symbol.

  Antonio managed an agonized prayer, begging forgiveness for what he had helped set in motion. Then he too died and disintegrated, the orb having reviewed his memories and found him in violation of the same commandment for sketching crude pictures of his parents in clay as a project in his art class. Anyone who had ever made sketches of anything—be it humans, clouds, trees, fish—or sculpted any object out of any substance was doomed.

  If I had been flesh then, I would have screamed. Fleeing earth, I desperately stabbed downward with all my consciousness, trying to establish a connection with the orb and stop it. If I could do that somehow, if I could bring it under my control again, I would reverse the destruction we had set in motion, take away the power Reverend Titus had absorbed, and physically remove the orb from the planet. Then humanity could at least return to the status quo. It might have worked if Titus hadn’t ordered the orb to block any countering instructions.

  I lost speed by making the futile effort to link with the orb, and the ragged lightning bolt that was Titus started gaining on me. Still, I continued hurling down useless mental commands as I raced for the edge of the solar system, frantic to stop the destruction. It wasn’t enough, and the orb’s death wave kept up its crackling march across the planet.

  Once again, Micah McGhee, you have messed up. Only this time, all humankind would pay the price for my stupidity.

  I stopped fleeing and took bodily form in the cold dark of space. I spread my arms wide. There was an eternity in which to watch Titus reach out for me. His hatred had beauty, and it had grace. I would have smiled, but eternity was done, and Titus embraced me.

  People in North and Central America were treated to the blossoming of a new sun in the early morning sky. For them, it was an awesome last sight.

  WHEN THE stream of energy Titus had become smashed into me, my physical body was blown apart, liberating the power I embodied and, until that moment, controlled. The shock wave of our collision propagated outward, a sphere of superheated plasma expanding at nearly the speed of light. The explosion was brighter by far than the sun, and those humans on the earth’s surface who dared to look up at it were struck blind.

  Blindness was the least of their troubles. The orb swept the surface of the entire planet in a little more than six minutes. When it completed its function and shut itself down once again, there wasn’t a single human left on earth. There was worse in store for the world’s remaining life forms. The explosion Titus and I generated was like a supernova. It would consume the entire solar system, vaporizing the planets and literally blowing out the sun as it continued its inexorable expansion.

  Miraculously, I was still aware, my consciousness a part of the neutrinos, radio waves, x-rays, cosmic rays, light, and heat that were ripping through space in all directions on the force of the explosion. Hell, I was the explosion, and it was, I have to confess, glorious. Everything I had been to that point was so small, so limited. Now nothing, not even Sol itself, was safe from me. Nothing in creation was as great as the force I had become.

  Then the universe blinked.

  It was as if a photographic shutter had clicked, momentarily blotting out every celestial object visible from the region of the doomed earth. Something had suddenly flared into existence—no, that isn’t the correct way to put it. The impression I got was that this something had always been there and chose now to make itself more prominent. It was darker than space, yet brighter than the greatest light. It was less substantial than mist, but more dense than the core of a black hole. It was void, and without form, and darkness moved upon the face of it. So did comets and stars and great glowing gas clouds light-years wide. So did supermassive galactic clusters and phenomena teeming on the very edge of the universe that were utterly incomprehensible on the human scale of perception.

  I knew all this was only the tiniest fraction of its being.

  Then the universe blinked again, and I knew nothing at all.

  Epilogue

  THAT WASN’T the end, of course. You are here, after all, reading this on a very solid Earth populated by billions of living humans.

  There was another beginning.

  For me, that was my mother’s singing. It was a beautiful sound to wake up to.

  I sat up in bed, my bed, in my dark, roach-laden little house. Mama’s voice still echoed in my ears, the last remnant of a dream, but it wasn’t her I found when I tramped to the living room. My dad lay on the sofa, asleep under the blue glare from the television.

  Oddly, I experienced a moment of exhilaration, mixed with a liberating sense of relief at the sight of my old man. I wanted to grab him up, hug him, cry against his chest. If I did that, he would think I’d either lost my mind or attacked him, and he would shoo me off with his hands. The television set was tuned to the Weather Channel, and a scroll running across the bottom of the screen told me the time: 11:56 p.m. And the date: Friday, June 16.

  My first thought was that the strange memories in my head had all been one hell of a dream. I was dressed in my black designer jeans and blue jersey and black Nike sneakers. I stuck my hand in my right pocket and found two twenty-dollar bills.

  I looked at Dick again. Hadn’t he taken this money from me? I cleared my throat and called, “Dad?” There was no response. I crossed quietly to the sofa and leaned over him. He looked robust. His arms, chest, and legs were full and muscular, the way they had been before he lost himself in alcoholism. There wasn’t so much as a whiff of liquor about him. The discovery shocked me, and I must have gasped or something because the sleeping man’s eyes popped open.

  He looked at me for a second, eyebrows cocked questioningly. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

  I was absolutely dumbfounded, frozen, blinking down at him stupidly.

  Annoyed, Dick reached up and waved a hand in front of my face. “Helloooooooo.”

  I backed away from him, turning away and shaking my head in an effort to get my confused mind in order. Behind me, Dick sat up and stretched. I could hear his joints pop.

  “I must’ve dozed off in the middle of the ball game. I didn’t even hear you come in.” He yawned, and then he reached down and switched off the television. “Did you have a good time downtown this evening?”

  “Uh… yeah?”

  “Come here, sit down,” Dick said, motioning me to the sofa. “I want to talk to you.”

  I obeyed, moving like a sleepwalker. When I sat, the old leather covering the sofa creaked soothingly.

  “I stopped by your school today and talked to the guidance counselor.” He knelt down in front of me so he could look me in the eye. The man wanted me to know how serious this discussion was. “She said that the summer session has already opened, but if you start Monday, you can get credit for the whole session and go into the eleventh grade in the fall. I know you’re frustrated, son, but I want you back in school. I promise I’ll do whatever I can to help you with your studies. We’ll get you a tutor if that’s what it takes. And until you get yourself back on track, I want you to let that job at the barbecue joint go—”

  I held up my hand. “Wait, hold on.” My brain seemed to have completely betrayed me. Was I in the right house? Was I talking to the right man? I wanted to slap myself in the head to jar the world back into some semblance of the reality I knew. “Did you just call me… son? You always refused to call me that.”

  He looked away for a moment. “I know. It’s taken me a while to come around. But you’re you, and I accept that.” Dick reached out and took me by the shoulders. His expression was a blend of sincerity and contrition. “Look, I know I was a complete bastard in the way I treated your mama, and I’ll never stop kicking myself for not doing better by her. God knows she was a good woman. And I’m sorry I wasn’t a better father to you. I can�
��t do anything for your mama now, but I can take care of you. Will you just let me do that, Micah?”

  There was stunned silence on my part, for several seconds. Sadness began creeping into Dick’s face, and I realized he thought I was rejecting his offer. I quickly nodded. “Yeah. Sure.”

  Dick smiled, relieved. “Good. Now why don’t you go on to bed? You look like you could use some sleep. In the morning, I’ll make us a nice big breakfast, and we’ll go out and get you some school supplies for Monday. How’s that sound?”

  “Okay….” I got up slowly, still feeling dazed.

  Dick stood up and stepped back. “Good night, son.”

  I turned to go. “Good night, Dick.”

  He snagged the collar of my jersey with his finger. “What did you call me?”

  “Oh. Sorry. I meant Dad.”

  “That’s better.” He gave me a rough but somehow affectionate stroke over the top of my head. “Get outta here and get some rest.”

  SATURDAY MORNING, my dad and I climbed into his midnight-blue Lincoln (the car that I seemed to remember had been repossessed in another life) and we drove to the Walmart in Whitehaven. We loaded a shopping cart with spiral-bound notebooks, pens and pencils, a backpack, underwear, socks, five pair of khaki shorts, and five white polo shirts. (The school system required students to wear the official uniform even in summer.) I pulled out my wallet at the cash register to pay, but my old man gave me another affectionate hair tousling and told me he’d take care of it.

  After Dad brought me back to the house, I took the bus to Germantown, where there was indeed a two-story, red-and-white Colonial house owned by one Tyree Jacks. Tyree answered the door when I rang the bell. There was no braided goatee hanging from his chin, and instead of cornrows he wore a conservatively close-cropped Afro, giving him a look more suited to the corporate climate. He said he didn’t know me, giving me the kind of suspicious look that said I might be casing his house for a future breaking and entering. I apologized for disturbing him and left, incapable of bringing myself to ask him if he was or had ever been a murdering drug lord.