Eschaton - Season One

by Kieran Marcus

  Connor shrugged. “Could be a lot worse. These are just accidents, and accidents will always happen, no matter how hard you try to prevent them. There are other programs where people intentionally hurt and humiliate others for the sake of entertainment. Now those are really pretty ugly.”

  “I know,” Harrison said. “Don’t you dare let me catch you watching one of those.”

  “Nah.” Connor waved his hand dismissively. “Not interested. They can’t teach me anything I don’t already know.”

  “Such as?”

  “People are cruel,” Connor said.

  “Right. And watching other people’s deadly mishaps for your entertainment is not cruel?”

  Connor shook his head. “I think there’s a difference.”

  “I don’t know, son. Laughing at people who accidentally kill themselves does sound pretty cruel and heartless to me. And that’s what you’re doing, isn’t it? You do laugh when you see a kid fall from a tree and break his neck, don’t you?”

  “Of course I do. Watching people fail is fucking hilarious. I think you’re just offended by the fact that some people don’t get what they deserve or get what they don’t deserve or however you want to put it. You know, some people get away with murder and mayhem while others live a life of decency and kindness and get run over by a car. Is that fair? Of course not, but it’s life. Life isn’t fair. Fairness is a human concept, and as far as the universe is concerned, it’s non-binding. The universe doesn’t give a shit about our sense of fairness, and in that respect it is indeed a very cold, dark, and cruel place. We as humans carry the seed of cruelty within ourselves because we’re the children of a cruel universe. It’s in our genes. But unlike the universe, we have a choice. We can choose to do good things or bad things. The universe doesn’t have a conscience. The universe just is. And there’s your difference. Watching telecasts of stonings and beheadings in the West Arabian Caliphate is watching people being assholes. Watching people having accidents, on the other hand, is watching the universe being itself. There is nothing remotely funny about watching people intentionally kill other people, but I think humor is a perfectly acceptable way to cope with life’s random little atrocities, with whatever the universe throws at us. And cope we better, because we’re all gonna die one day, and for many it’ll come sooner than expected.”

  “Son,” Harrison said, “you’re way too young to be such a pessimist.”

  Connor shrugged. “Pessimism is realism. Can a person be too young to be a realist?”

  As Connor leaned back in his chair and looked at the starry sky, Harrison pondered the question. He was impressed by his son’s academic prowess, his ability to argue a point, but it also scared him a little. Why did they have to grow up so fast? He and Abby had made a point of raising their children in a way that would best prepare them for a life in a world that kept changing at an ever increasing pace. From an early age they had taught Connor and Lily how to tell facts from fiction, to question everything they saw, everything they were being told, to always seek for the truth, to use their own minds and to try and find their own answers even to the simplest of questions. Harrison wondered sometimes if he and Abby had taken their own idealism too far. Had their celebrating Christmas without employing the legend of Santa Claus taken away from the magic and wonder of childhood that children were entitled to? Did he have the right to be surprised that his son would use what was supposed to be TV entertainment as source material for his social criticism, or that Lily liked to negotiate her bedtime like a defense counsel in front of a jury? Wouldn’t it have been better if they were just normal kids trying to get away with things in some more age-appropriate, childish ways? He and Abby were academics, and they had tried to raise their children to be academics, too, in order to give them a head start; to prepare them for life in a country—a world even—that was going to the dogs, that was unrelenting in its economic pressures and brutal in its social coldness. They were living in a world where the middle class had long since ceased to exist, where you were either part of the 0.1 percent that made up the ruling elite or part of the 99.9 percent—those whose lives resembled those of ants or worker bees with endless toil and suffering from the cradle to the grave. The one defining factor that set the two apart was money, the kind of money you only had if you were a corporate executive or a politician, or an heir of one of those. The rest of the people actually had to work for their money, and even those earning top salaries could no longer consider themselves rich, not with the way taxes and living costs had been skyrocketing for the past thirty or forty years. The only reason why Harrison and Abby were able to maintain a reasonably decent lifestyle was that they didn’t have to pay rent or a mortgage. They had inherited their home, a five-thousand-square-foot residence on the outskirts of Boston, from Abby’s grandfather. David Warner had been a professor his entire adult life, teaching linguistics and philosophy at MIT in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries at a time when a professor could make a very comfortable living by teaching no more than two or three courses each semester while his wife stayed at home and took care of the kids. Those times were long gone. Abby was teaching six courses this semester, and Harrison spent his weekdays in D.C. taking care of the president’s medical needs. Prestigious jobs, both of them, but if they had to pay for housing, they’d be struggling like everyone else.

  As a teenager, Professor Warner’s firstborn son—Abby’s Uncle Phil—had made a small fortune as one of the most prolific YouTube vloggers of the 2010s. His Phililoquy videos with his musings about life, the universe, and everything had attracted millions of subscribers from all over the world. Harrison and Abby had watched some of them—they were still online sixty years on—and were astonished at his zest for life, his vigor, and most of all the amount of spare time he seemed to have had. How different his life as a youth must have been from that of Connor, whose entire childhood had been filled with studying and learning. It had been playful learning at times, but it had undoubtedly lacked the kind of idle freedom and creative chaos that his grandparents and great-grandparents used to enjoy. Thinking about it all filled Harrison with a profound feeling of melancholy and sadness, and he wondered if telling Connor about the upcoming summer vacation on Popponesset would make him—Harrison—feel any better.

  Then, out of nowhere, came the burst.

  It started as a warm glow from above. For a moment Harrison thought it was the searchlight of a police helicopter, but there was no noise, and by the time he heard Connor say, “Dad!” with an alarming tone in his voice, it had turned into an intense bright light, so bright that everything around them vanished in a sea of white. Harrison instinctively closed his eyes and covered them with his hands, but the light seemed to penetrate even his hands and eyelids and continued to singe his retinas. Then he heard Connor scream with pain.

  “Connor!” He jumped out of his chair, but in his desperate attempt to reach out for Connor he toppled over the garden table as the boy kept screaming at the top of his lungs. Disoriented, Harrison fell to his knees and crawled in Connor’s direction. Blinded, he kept reaching out for his son until he finally got hold of his leg. Connor kicked back violently, desperately, so Harrison pulled the shaking body towards him and restrained the boy’s kicking legs with his own.

  “Connor, it’s okay!” Harrison said, holding his son in his arms and pressing his face against his chest to shield it from the burning brightness. “It’s gonna be okay!”

  “My eyes!” Connor cried, hugging his father tightly. “My eyes!”

  “I know, son. I know. It’s gonna be all right.”

  After twenty or thirty seconds, Harrison noticed through his own closed eyes that the surrounding light was getting dimmer. As he cautiously opened his eyes, he saw the trees and the house slowly reemerging from the silvery white. Moments later, the night was almost—almost, but not quite—as dark as it had been before the burst. He saw the shadow of his body on the grass, and when he looked up, he saw an object in the s
ky. It was the size of the full moon, only brighter, but it seemed to be shrinking very slowly and losing some of its blinding brightness.

  “A star exploded,” he said. “A fucking star exploded!”

  He pulled his cellphone out of his pocket, but when he tried switching it on, its screen remained dark. He hurled the useless gadget away in anger, and it landed on the grass with a thud.

  “Abby!” Harrison shouted towards the house. “ABBY!”

  Connor was still clutching his father’s body, wailing and shaking.

  “It’s over,” Harrison said and slowly pulled back from their desperate embrace. “It’s over. Look at me.” He took Connor’s face in his hands. “Connor! Look at me!”

  When the boy finally opened his eyes, Harrison was shocked to see that his pupils had all but disappeared. All that was left were Connor’s dime-sized blue irises on his glassy and unmoving eyeballs.

  “Dad,” Connor said with a frightened voice, “I can’t see!”

  “Abby!” Harrison shouted again. “ABBY!”

  “I can’t see! I can’t see!”

  “Shhhh,” Harrison said and put his arms around Connor again. “It’s gonna be okay, son. We’re gonna sort you out. Everything’s gonna be okay.”

  He put his hand on Connor’s head and gently stroked the boy’s hair, fighting back his tears as he realized that nothing was ever going to be okay again.

  1.2 Dixon Can Do

  WASHINGTON, D.C. – MAY 28, 2079

  “Our father who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come …”

  Mason Dixon stood by one of the two windows of the master bedroom, wearing his pajamas and staring at the ball of fire that lit up the sky and the earth below with a blazing light. The strange object was less bright than the sun on a cloudless summer day but considerably brighter than the full moon. It was so bright that Dixon hadn’t even noticed his bedroom lights going out. He had been sitting on his bed—their bed—that always seemed too large and empty whenever Daisy, his former high school crush and now wife of twenty-seven years was traveling, and he had just begun to skim a few documents when all of a sudden a burst of light coming from the windows had lit up the room so brightly that he had to raise his right arm to shield his eyes. It didn’t have much of an effect: for a moment Dixon even thought he was seeing the bones through the flesh and skin of his arm. He closed his eyes and waited patiently for the shockwave that had to be forthcoming and that would disintegrate the structure of the building and bury him alive—or, more likely, dead—under a pile of rubble. Surely, the only source of light that was powerful enough to pierce through the thick, heavy curtains that Daisy had picked for their bedroom had to come from a thermonuclear explosion. Those damned slit-eyed yellow bastards, Dixon thought, they finally did it. But that shockwave—much to his surprise—never came, and when after half a minute that had felt like half an hour the bright light finally began to dim, he made his way from the bed to the window to cautiously peek outside. That’s when he saw the fire in the sky and began to pray, because what else was a reasonable man like him to do upon the realization that he was in all likelihood—shockwave or not— witnessing the beginning of the apocalypse? Dixon wasn’t an overly religious man. He didn’t believe in the virgin birth, and he had some serious doubts as to whether Jesus Christ had actually walked on water or risen from the dead, but he did believe in a higher power that directed the universe and gave his life purpose. Either way, he figured a prayer wouldn’t hurt.

  “… and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass …”

  Behind him, the door to the hallway burst open, and when he jerked his head around, he saw half a dozen men in heavy armor storm into the room with machine guns pointing in all directions, followed by four men wearing expensive suits and sunglasses.

  “Jesus Christ!” Dixon said. “Can’t you guys fucking knock?”

  “Sir!” one of the suits shouted as they approached him. “Step away from the window! Now!”

  Dixon sighed, and before he could even move, two of the suits grabbed his arms on either side, put their hands on his head, and dragged him out of the room, led and followed by the two remaining suits and the uniformed gunmen. The group rushed through the West Sitting Hall, turned right into the Central Hall and then immediately to the left towards the stairs. Dixon tried his best to keep his feet on the ground, but the men dragged him along so vigorously that it almost felt as if he was floating down the stairs, six flights, three stories all the way down to the basement. Down here, it was completely dark. The power had gone out, and there were no windows to admit any of the gleaming light that lit up the night outside. The soldiers switched on their helmet lights and kept pushing and pulling Dixon down the hallway until they finally reached their destination.

  After the heavy steel door had been locked and sealed behind them, the suits let go of Dixon and respectfully stepped aside. Dixon looked around the room that was lit by candles and flashlights. About a dozen people in varying guises ranging from business to military attire were staring at him, obviously waiting for him to say something meaningful. Their bemused looks made him painfully aware of the fact that he was still in his jammies.

  “So I guess this isn’t a pajama party then, is it?” he said.

  Behind him he heard one of the suits whisper to one of the marines, “Go get the President some clothes.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  The freshly sealed steel door was unsealed with a hiss. The soldier slipped out, and the door was sealed again.

  Dixon looked around. “Any of you guys ever go to sleep?”

  “No, Mr. President.”

  “Right,” Dixon said. “Well, somebody tell me what the fuck is going on! Roger?”

  Roger McDugan, head of the Secret Service, cleared his throat. “I’m sorry, Mr. President, but we’re not entirely sure.”

  “Let me guess, ‘not entirely sure’ means you have no fucking clue whatsoever, is that right?”

  “Yes, Mr. President.”

  “Then why the hell did you drag me out of my bed and bring me down here?” Technically, he hadn’t been in his bed, but he was a politician. He liked to exaggerate.

  “Standard procedure, sir,” McDugan said. “Whenever we have no fucking clue whatsoever, the president is to be immediately taken to a safe location in accordance with the PSA.”

  Dixon frowned. “The what?”

  “The Presidential Security Act of 2074,” Brent Carter, Dixon’s chief of staff helped out.

  “Right. Well, whoever signed this crappy piece of legislation into effect deserves to be strung up by his balls!” When Dixon’s remark was met by awkward silence, he added, “It was me, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes, Mr. President,” Brent said, looking at his feet.

  “Never mind then,” Dixon said and walked around the long table at the center of the Presidential Emergency Operations Center. As he took his seat, he quipped at the men and women still staring at him, “Stop standing around as if you’re waiting for cocktails. Take your seats and fill me in on what we know. Surely we must know something, no? Ellie?”

  As the members of the National Security Council followed Dixon’s example and took their seats around the conference table, the Secretary of Defense Ellie James remained standing and addressed the president.

  “Well, we don’t know a whole lot at this point,” she said, “and it’s difficult to gather more information because as you can see, the power is out. Some of us have cellphones that still seem to work but can’t get any service. From what we can tell, the power is out all over the capital and probably well beyond. We’re completely cut off from everything.”

  “What about the emergency generators?” Dixon asked.

  “We’re working on it,” Carter said. “They were supposed to kick in immediately after the power went out, but for some reason they didn’t.”

  “It’s because of the EMP,” General Justin Belling, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of St
aff said. “The electromagnetic pulse fried everything.”

  “EMP?” Dixon asked. “So you’re suggesting we got nuked?”

  The general raised his hands and cocked his head. “An EMP would be consistent with the detonation of a thermonuclear device is all I’m saying. “

  “Yes,” Ellie said, “except the complete absence of a shockwave is not. That would be a strange kind of bomb.”

  “It could be just the start of the attack,” Belling said. “They take out our power grids and render us completely paralyzed and defenseless. For all we know the enemy might be invading the country as we speak.”

  Dixon looked at him. “And what enemy would that be?”

  The general shrugged. “Arabs, Chinese, I don’t know. Could be anybody, really.”

  Ellie shook her head. “Except nobody we know is able to put a second sun in the sky. Have you looked at this thing, general? If it were some man-made device, it would have to be outside of the earth’s atmosphere and magnitudes bigger than any device any nation in the world—including us—is able to build.”

  “You’re suggesting, Ellie?” Dixon asked.

  “Mr. President, I’m suggesting we’re not looking at any type of device at all but rather at some kind of natural phenomena.”

  “Phenomenon.”

  “Mr. President?”

  “Phenomena is plural,” Dixon explained. “Unless we’re looking at several different phenomena, this is a phenomenon.”

  “Yes, Mr. President. Phenomeon.”

  Dixon smiled contentedly. He was very proud of his classical education.

  The steel door opened with a hiss, and the soldier returned, carrying a stack of clothes and a pair of shoes.

  “Ah,” Dixon said and rose from his chair. He took his clothes from the soldier and squinted at them. “Look down?”

  The soldier bent his head so that his helmet light shone on the clothes in Dixon’s hands.