The Boy at the End of the World

by Greg Van Eekhout

  “Yes,” said Fisher, surprising everyone. “The plan is, you help me get inside the Ark.”

  Now it was Red Top’s turn to cluck a bark that couldn’t be anything but laughter. “Human is crazy, sister,” he said to Zapper, not even bothering to look at Fisher. “Red Top is thinking best plan is to let rovers have human, and while they is taking him apart, we is making our retreat.”

  “Hear me out,” said Fisher. “There’s no way we can beat the gadgets, and no way they’ll let us out of here alive. And even if they did, then it’d be the Ark guns’ turn.”

  As if to illustrate Fisher’s point, a gadget missile struck the rock they were standing behind, sending a spray of pebbles and grit into their faces. Fisher and the two prairie dogs ignored their stinging flesh and took aim at the offending gadget. Together, they blew it out of the air.

  “Like I was saying,” Fisher continued. “We can take cover inside the Ark. Maybe Click can take control of the Ark guns.”

  Fisher couldn’t read Red Top’s expression. It was too prairie dog.

  “Human is right, brother,” Zapper said, pausing to fire at a striker. “Is smart tactics.”

  Fisher was only going to give Red Top three seconds to make a decision before breaking off for the door on his own.

  “Prairie dogs is not retreating,” Red Top said. “And Red Top is never leading his dogs into forbidden place. Nai, we is finishing these rovers, once and for all. But getting you inside Ark so you can use big guns … Ai, is making sense.”

  Red Top let out a series of yips. Other prairie dogs took it up and repeated it, and with great efficiency, a plan went into effect. Fighters converged on Fisher and his companions and formed a circle around them. As a group, they all ran for the Ark door, Click rattling and Protein trumpeting. Gadgets honed in on the group, concentrating their fire, but other prairie dogs shot at them from outside the circle. The Ark guns, taking advantage of the clustered gadgets, took out more of them.

  The prairie dogs ganged up on the most lethal gadgets, blowing them up on the ground, shooting them out of the sky. Catches-Big-Bugs, armed only with a steel-tipped lance, jammed his weapon between the treads of a rolling metal monster with scorpion claws. The treads came loose and the gadget ground to a halt. The big prairie dog ripped open a panel and chewed circuitry until the gadget was dead.

  The canyon was now littered with broken gadgets. Many of the remaining ones were out of ammunition, their guns uselessly clacking. There were still enough to pose a great threat, but maybe Fisher could save the Ark. Maybe without any prairie dogs losing their lives.

  They’d almost reached the door when Fisher heard a sharp squeal just to his right.

  “Zapper!”

  She was down, clutching her leg with both forepaws. Blood streamed between her fingers.

  Fisher rushed over to help her, but Zapper waved him away. “No, keep going,” she gasped. “Finish your mission.”

  “I will,” said Fisher, hoisting her over his shoulder. “But first I’m getting you to safety.”

  The Ark door was set back several feet into the cliff wall. Fisher found a nook in the rock and carefully lowered Zapper. Red Top got out a medical kit and began examining her wound.

  She shivered. “Leave me here. Zapper is defending this position.”

  Fisher shook his head. “No, I’ll find a way inside the Ark. You’ll be safer there. All of you.”

  But leaning on her weapon, Zapper forced herself to her feet. Her legs shook, and her face expressed her pain. But she wouldn’t relent. “We each has job to do. Fisher is protecting Ark from inside, Zapper is with her colony, protecting from outside. Now, go, before you is killed and all is for no purpose.”

  “Stay with her,” Fisher said to Red Top.

  The prairie dog captain nodded once, spread his legs, and with bristling fur, stood before Zapper. Fisher couldn’t imagine anything getting past him.

  Reluctantly, he turned his back. The door loomed before him, cratered and scorched, but still standing.

  “How do we get in?”

  “I do not know,” said Click. “This Ark’s entrance is as different from ours as the Southern Ark’s was.”

  Looking closely, Fisher noticed an unmarked panel to the side of the door, shaped like a hand.

  He knew what to do.

  He spread his fingers and placed his palm flat against the panel. There was the barest hum as light from the panel outlined his fingers. Then, a sharp poke. Startled, Fisher pulled his hand away. Pin drops of blood beaded on each of his fingertips.

  “Ah,” said Click. “I believe your DNA has just been sampled. The builders of this Ark must have designed it assuming that someday an Ark-preserved human from somewhere else would find this place. It makes sense that they would give you the ability to make contact.”

  With a whisper, the massive door slid aside. Fisher could make out a dimly lit corridor ahead.

  He gave one last look at Zapper and Red Top and Catches-Big-Bugs and the other prairie dogs. Gadgets formed up in the sun-bright sky, gathering for a final assault. The prairie dogs stood, snarling and yipping and barking. The captain hefted a shoulder catapult.

  Guns thundering, the gadgets came at them.

  “For the last time,” Zapper barked, “go!”

  Fisher and Click and Protein stepped into the Ark.

  The door slid shut behind them.

  CHAPTER 23

  The din of battle faded to distant thunder once the door shut. A single strip of light overhead cast the corridor in a weak glow. The air felt untouched by warmth. Fisher and Click and Protein rushed down the corridor, until they came to a closed door with another hand-shaped panel beside it. The blood on Fisher’s fingertips hadn’t dried yet, and he hoped the building wouldn’t demand a fresh supply any time he went through a door. Who knew how many doors there were?

  “The building appears to be in good functioning order,” Click said. “It should now have your DNA imprinted in memory and should not require more blood.”

  Fisher liked hearing things were working, but he didn’t dare hope too much. Finding more dead humans would be a disappointment he’d never recover from.

  He placed his hand in the indentation and the door opened with a whoosh onto a semicircular room. A set of control panels lined the wall, and screens and monitors hung above them, all dark.

  “Can we control the guns from here?” Fisher asked.

  Click fiddled with controls, waving away Protein’s trunk.

  “I believe I can turn the guns off, but I see no way to actually control them.”

  “Do it,” Fisher said. “That’ll at least give the prairie dogs an even chance against the gadgets.”

  Click touched some controls, and the panels came to life, with monitors and meters displaying data for temperature, chemical balance, and dozens of other factors. With a hum, shutters over the windows raised, revealing a cavernously vast, bowl-shaped chamber below. Fisher could see hundreds of pod beds. Or thousands. Blue light glowed through thick, bubbling gel. Behind the uncracked, clear lids of the pod beds lay the forms of animals. Fisher made out sheep and pigs and cows. There were musk ox and donkeys and llamas and tapirs. Gnus and kudu and beavers and skunks. The Ark teemed with specimens, more than Fisher had ever imagined in his visions of what the world before the Arks must have been like. Enough life to make him dizzy, like millions of stars spinning in a moonless black sky.

  “Ah, yes, I have managed to deactivate the guns,” said Click.

  “The specimens,” Fisher said. “Are they alive?”

  After an agonizingly long time, Click said, “Ah. Yes. Good. The specimens are all in good shape. They have not been tampered with.”

  “Should we wake them?” Fisher was anxious to see the humans awake and moving. He wanted to hear them speak. He wanted them to be people, not specimens inside boxes.

  He didn’t hear Click’s response. His left ear flared with fire-hot pain, and he fell to his knees. It felt li
ke his brain was trying to escape his head, and it hurt so bad he wished it would.

  Click was there, leaning close and warbling on about something—probably asking Fisher what was wrong.

  Fisher wanted to tell his friends that, if he died, they should wake the Ark, that the people might know how to protect themselves and defeat the gadgets.

  And then, like an unraveling knot, the pain went away. All that was left was a tickling sensation traveling down his ear canal. A gleaming black worm wriggled on the floor before Fisher’s eyes.

  A nano-worm. One must have gotten inside him when he’d blown up the Intelligence. It had been living in his head ever since, like a parasite, using Fisher as transportation. He’d brought a piece of the Intelligence to the very last place he wanted it: the Western Ark.

  Fisher tried to smack the worm with his palm, but still dizzy, he missed.

  Trumpeting, Protein stamped toward it, but the worm scooted away and began crawling up Click’s foot.

  Finally, the robot noticed. He reached down, but the worm corkscrewed right into Click’s metallic ankle, leaving behind a tiny hole.

  Click whirred, not in his usual way. This noise was too loud, urgent, as if the robot would come apart.

  “Click …?”

  “I believe … I am concerned that … ah, yes. The Intelligence is inside of me. We are struggling for control of my primary motivators.”

  The robot turned to the control panel and began touching switches.

  “Ah, this is very bad,” he said. “I appear to be shutting down life support systems. I am attempting to resist, but it wants to shut down the humans, and then inject itself into their flesh. Yes. Yes. This is bad. Please try to stop me, Fisher.”

  Fisher scrambled to his feet and grabbed Click’s arm with both hands. The robot smashed a fist into Fisher’s jaw. Fisher staggered back and looked at his friend in shock.

  The numbers on the monitors were changing rapidly. Green lights turned to yellow.

  “Fisher, your survival is at stake, and that of all the Ark specimens. You must destroy me.”

  Fisher lunged for the robot. He dodged Click’s elbow once, but a second strike caught him in the nose. Blood spilled down Fisher’s face. The prairie dogs’ repairs had made Click fast and strong.

  Protein snorted and stamped, his belly rumbling with a deep growl.

  “I … cannot stop it. I am rerouting as many functions as I can … I cannot stop it.” Click’s fingers continued to dance over the controls. “It wants the humans. I am rerouting. You must destroy me, Fisher. I insist. Before it is too late. Use your blaster ball launcher. There is no other way.”

  “I’m not going to blow you up!” said Fisher. He came at Click again, but Click effortlessly shoved him back. On the monitors, yellow lights went orange, then red, and from red to black. Through the windows, Fisher saw pod beds below grow dark.

  “I just prevented it from killing forty of the humans. But we lost the Bactrian camels,” Click said. “Shoot me now, before there is nothing left alive.”

  “Click, I can’t …”

  “You must. I have now shut off life support systems for the Arabian camels as well. They are extinct.”

  Fisher raised his blaster ball launcher like a club and aimed a mighty swing at Click’s head. The robot nimbly ducked, spun, and grabbed Fisher.

  “I do wish you had listened to me,” he said, as he lifted Fisher over his head and hurled him through the window.

  Fisher plummeted amid a rain of glass.

  CHAPTER 24

  He landed atop a dark pod bed. Inside lay a juvenile Bactrian camel. Every dark pod bed meant a dead animal, and if all the animals of a kind died, its species would be extinct. Not because it was a weak animal, or because the kind of food it ate stopped growing, or because the world changed and the species didn’t adapt to keep up. No. This was the doing of the twisted machine occupying Click’s body. And humans had built the machine.

  Groaning with pain and dread, Fisher slid feet-first to the floor and retrieved his blaster ball launcher.

  Click’s head appeared through the shattered window of the control room above.

  “Do not come back up here,” the robot called down. “If the Intelligence is given another chance, it will make me kill you. I am attempting to foil it by rerouting my motor systems, but you must use the manual controls on the pod beds to awaken as many specimens as you can before I shut them off. Quickly, Fisher. The Intelligence is making me kill the donkeys.”

  “Where are the humans?” Fisher shouted up.

  “Three levels down. Hurry.”

  Fisher took a dragging step. His left ankle throbbed and wobbled when he put his weight on it. The fall had hurt him. He wiped blood from his forehead and limped over to a set of descending steps. Downstairs, row after row of pod beds contained humans, curled in their gel, with umbilical cords connected to their bare bellies. They looked so defenseless. Until now the only humans Fisher had ever seen were corpses. The skeletons of Stragglers, the un-alive Southern Ark humans, and the crushed humans back in his own Ark.

  He brushed his fingers over the lid of a pod bed with a girl inside. The bubbles rising in the gel waved her hair.

  A set of controls was inset at the foot of her bed. Click hadn’t given him instructions, but it didn’t look complicated: there were some meters, and a single, green button so big that it practically begged to be pushed.

  So Fisher pushed it.

  “Initiating awakening sequence on pod HS4B, adolescent human female,” said a soothing voice from the bed. “Does operator wish to disconnect umbilical?”

  Operator?

  Oh. The pod meant him.

  “Click!” he shouted up to the control room. But Click didn’t answer. The only sounds from above were Protein’s agitated snorts and growls. Then, a distinctly angry squeal from the mammoth, followed by a clang of metal and a plasticky crunch of impact, and Click came sailing through the window. He landed in a crumpled heap on the floor, a few pod beds away from Fisher. His arms and legs were folded beneath his torso, which had a tusk-sized hole gouged into its side. But it was the robot’s head that had taken the full impact of the fall. It was bent so far behind him that the back of Click’s skull was resting between his shoulder blades.

  “The Intelligence is running a damage assessment on me, Fisher. Motor systems are suboptimal but functional. Balance and navigation units are suboptimal but functional.”

  Click’s legs straightened. He slowly unbent one of his arms.

  “Fisher, load your weapon with all the ammunition you have and destroy me.”

  “You mean kill you,” screamed Fisher. “I’m not going to let the Intelligence force me to do that.”

  Click unbent his other arm. His fingertips scraped the smooth, glossy floor. “You must listen to me. You have risked your own death numerous times. You have ended the lives of fish and small animals and used their resources to continue your own existence. Death is a necessary component of survival, Fisher. You know this. Kill me, before the Intelligence makes me kill you.”

  Yes, Fisher had killed and hunted. But this was different. Click was a friend. If he could kill Click to survive, that meant he could kill anything, use anything, destroy anything. And that wasn’t survival. That was just doing what his ancestors had done.

  “There has to be another way,” he said. “Help me figure it out.”

  With a metallic groan, Click’s head rose. His multifaceted eye glowed blue in the reflected light of the pod beds.

  “I am coming for you, Fisher. Please run.”

  Fisher lurched away, fast as he could along the curving walkway. He tried to ignore the searing pain in his ankle as Click’s footfalls gained on him. Stumbling more than running, he hurried down the steps to lower levels.

  “You are escaping at insufficient speed, Fisher. I urge you to hide.”

  Fisher ducked down and slipped between two pod beds. He couldn’t outrun Click, and he doubted he coul
d hide from him for long.

  “I need a way to disable you that won’t destroy you,” he called out. “Like the way the prairie dogs did back at the mall.”

  “They shot me with a shock claw,” said Click, clanking after Fisher in pursuit.

  “All I have is blaster balls!”

  “I am aware of that. You must use them, Fisher.”

  But Fisher had seen what blaster balls could do to gadgets. He knew they’d blow Click to scrap. He had to find another way to stop him. But how? Thanks to the prairie dogs, Click was lethally fast and strong. And Fisher’s weapon was useless against him if he wasn’t willing to use it.

  “You must hide more quietly,” Click said. “The Intelligence is using my auditory senses to locate you.”

  Back in the domed city the prairie dogs had used a shock claw to jolt and stun Click with electricity. It had damaged him, but not destroyed him.

  Fisher had an idea. A terrible idea.

  “Where are the aquatic creatures?” he called to Click.

  “Four rows down, thirteen degrees to your left. Stop talking, please, Fisher. I can hear you.”

  Fisher staggered down more stairs and followed the curving wall to his left. He needed a fish with a strong-enough electric current. Eels would be great. Or electric catfish. Or … yes. Panting, he came to a stop before a cluster of pod beds. Inside floated a spotted, winged fish. A numbfish. If he awoke one, if he left its life-giving umbilical in place, if he placed it on the ground in a slick of gel and tricked Click into crossing its path …

  Click stepped into the corridor.

  “Drawing on your fishing imprint was very inspired, Fisher. I only wish you had thought of it sooner. You are too late. The Intelligence is willing to sacrifice you to gain unrestricted access to the rest of the humans. It will use my hands to crush your windpipe. Please flee, Fisher. I am running at you now.”

  And Fisher fled, down more stairs and between two rows of pod beds containing muscular breeds of dogs. These were work dogs, for shepherding livestock, for pulling sleds. Humans had bred animals for particular purposes, selecting traits they found useful or pleasing. The world had given them wolves, and humans had reshaped them into dogs. Humans had changed the world.