Doomsday Minus One

by Andrew Dorn

  “We have to go down that crevice!” she called, gesturing at the hole.

  She can’t be serious, he thought. Not again, not another damn hole.

  The ground rolled beneath his feet, flinging him to the ground. The rumble increased in intensity, creating a great undulating wave which surged up the sides of the pit at tremendous speed. A split-second later, the wave rebounded from the top and raced back down, knocking loose a barrage of rocks and turning the pit into a deadly funnel of heavy projectiles.

  “Watch out!”

  He rolled out the way as a huge boulder tumbled right next to him, showering the area with a salvo of splinters. The whole pit was being wrenched apart from the forces at play as the cannon continued to rise from the ground.

  “Go, go, go!” Simon called out, waving Emmeline away.

  He darted towards the crevice with his hands over his head as rocks of all sizes crashed around him in a huge uproar. Like a baseball player seeking to steal second base, he threw himself towards the opening. He kissed the ground hard, the impact jarring him from head to toe. There was a shudder, and the ground heaved with even more force. Twisting his head around, he tried to spot Emmeline amid the surrounding chaos. The crevice widened with a deafening noise of crushed rock and he toppled into the void.

  Emmeline!

  His head hit a particularly hard surface and everything turned dark.

  36 The Cavern

  SIMON SWUNG AROUND to take in the surroundings. Blood was trickling down into his right eye and he wiped it off with the back of his hand. A wave of nausea rolled over him and he sensed he could plunge into unconsciousness with the slightest jolt.

  I must have suffered a concussion.

  His head and neck area were sore, but they were still attached to his body, a reminder things could have been even worse. The throbbing pain, however, was something he could do without.

  I need aspirin or better still, some oxycodone.

  He was standing inside a large cavern, a broad and open volume of considerable dimensions. The cavern was dotted with both the thick upward-growing mounds of mineral deposits known as stalagmites and their counterpart, the icicle-shaped stalactites hanging from the ceiling. It reminded Simon of an underground mall parking: wide and deep, yet low-ceilinged.

  Aside from the light thrown from his headlamp, there was only one other source of illumination... and it was coming from the deep end of the grotto. There was a shape there, standing up in the path outlined by the light.

  A humanoid shape.

  Can it be?

  “Emmeline!” Simon called out, his voice ringing across the cavern.

  The shape’s right hand shot up and gesticulated a reply. Simon ran, and so did Emmeline. Their footsteps reverberated in the spacious cavern but otherwise it was eerily silent in the open space. After the fracas in what he had come to call the cannon’s keep, Simon embraced the serenity of the grotto, the exotic beauty of its stark grandiloquence. Four minutes later, he fell into Emmeline’s outstretched arms, head reeling from both the effort and the heat. He embraced her, their bodies meeting in a tight hug, but he could feel the tension in her posture, the nervousness she fought to restrain.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I thought I had lost you.”

  She noticed the blood on his forehead.

  “You’re hurt,” she said, delicately picking a few strands of hair from the deep gash in his scalp.

  The injury to his head was not pretty, and she proceeded to fashion a crude bandage from the sleeve of her shirt. She wrapped the cloth around his head but the cut still bled more than she liked.

  “Don’t worry,” Simon said. “I have a thick skull.”

  “Not thick enough it would appear.” Emmeline frowned. “We have to get a doc to look at you.”

  He shrugged. “You won’t be rid of me so easily, you know.”

  She smiled at him but there was a veil of fear in her eyes.

  “From now on, we stay together,” she whispered, her voice breaking. “Understood?”

  “Yes.”

  Emmeline’s head turned to the far end of the cavern where a subdued glow could be seen, reflecting off the glistening stalagmites.

  “The Seeder isn’t far now.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because of the vision. I... I can feel it.”

  Simon nodded without understanding what she meant. The vision she had conveyed had without doubt left a powerful impression in her mind. He feared her run-in was just a prelude to a bigger, more dangerous encounter. Shouldn’t they wait for qualified people to take over? Didn’t the Government have special teams formed to deal with these kinds of things? A team of specialists, selected from a wide pool of scientific disciplines that would know how to proceed?

  “Shouldn’t we wait for help?”

  Emmeline turned her head to him, eyes far away, like a thousand-yard stare.

  She heard the question, taking in all the uncertainties lurking within it. There was a host of interrogations and possibilities, from the craziest to the most fundamental. Ever since the intelligence had touched her mind, she had racked her brain to find a definitive answer.

  There wasn’t one.

  It extended beyond rationality, beyond her education and training. The Seeder’s intentions, its programming per se, was to modify the Earth’s environment in a fundamental way. The organisms living within the new matrix, if it came to be, would inevitably suffer the consequences. Yet, the ensuing modifications were still, for all intent and purposes, an unknown factor. There could be a possibility that what the Seeder was doing could be helpful, beneficial, perhaps even critical for Earth’s survival. Each year, thousand of species fell prey to Man’s irremediable march towards progress. There were reports half the world’s wildlife was destined to oblivion in the next decade. Man’s onslaught on Earth’s biome was a tragedy with yet unknown consequences. Maybe the Seeder was the solution, instead of the threat.

  Everything and anything is possible.

  Still, could they risk it? Could they stand by, waiting for help, while it went about its business? While it deployed copies of itself all over the land? While they were, maybe, hours away from doomsday?

  She didn’t think so.

  They needed to learn more about it.

  To be involved.

  “No,” she said at last. “We can’t risk it.” She stared at the distant glow. “We have to do something, if only to witness the inevitable.”

  He nodded in silence, conscious of the turmoil in her voice. After a last minute of contemplation she took a step forward in the direction of the glow.

  Simon watched in silence as she picked her way among the stalagmites. There was nothing else to say, to do.

  He followed her deeper into the unknown.

  Elijah Roy could not have wished for a better view.

  “This is what I’ve been waiting for. Let’s go.”

  Gwen nodded, turning away to avoid eye contact with the man. She was gazing at a giant circular hole in the ground that had not been there the day before, a hole which, according to Roy’s enthusiastic appraisal, would lead him to the source of power.

  The man scared her.

  And it was getting worse.

  She had tried to get away.

  In the wee hours of the night, she had left without noise, working her way in silence around the rocks and hardened gobs of sludge, keeping to the shadows as a gray mist floated over the landscape like a thick drape.

  But it was not to be.

  He had circled back on her position, a black panther in the dark. Even before she became aware of him, he jumped her, eyes glinting with rage.

  Then, as if to make a point, he slapped her hard across the face.

  The sting of his calloused hand on her cheek rang thru her body like red hot burning coal. He seized her arms in a strong lock, digging his dirty fingers into her pale skin. She tried to fight back but Roy applied more pressure on his hold, almost b
reaking her arm. She grew limp, but he propped her up, hissing at her while he dug his fingers deeper. He began a long monologue about what he was ordained to do, about his responsibility to her, about the futility of what she was trying to achieve. He went on and on, the spittle flying from his mouth, as he spoke about the actions he was compelled to carry out. About his, and her liberation from their current and ho-hum lives. He would not let her opt out of what he regarded as their destiny. She had to understand it, and more importantly, conform to it.

  There was no other future than the one he had envisioned.

  His words jarred her to the core. Once again, she had been tricked. She had succumbed to the charms of a snake oil salesman, to a smooth talker, to a nut job. Because in His future, she was an accessory to the king, a tool to be used, or discarded, according to His wishes. Roy was like the other men she had crossed paths with, a man consumed by his own self-righteous importance and blind to the needs of others. A man in love with the notion of being his own king, his own judge, his own executioner. He dreamt of a future which echoed back to the distant feudal past, a past which demanded to be resurrected.

  A past she vowed to escape.

  The rest of the night had been a lesson to her. He had not hit her again, choosing to sit alongside as she kept guard until sunup. He had not slept a wink, dashing her hope that after his long tirade he might have felt the need for sleep.

  But the man was wired, energized by what he was seeing.

  It had arisen from the pit, a towering cone of coiled tubes and weird conduits. Staggering in size and quite alien in appearance, it went up as they stared, growing taller with each passing minute.

  Roy was ecstatic. The long-promised future was, at last, taking root. It was all as he had planned. This was proof what he foretold hadn’t been a fallacy. His visions signified the truth.

  Gwen watched Roy’s fascination with disdain. He was oblivious to the danger arising from the depths, blind to anything but the power coming his way. His eyes burned with the glimmer of those beyond rational thinking.

  She understood he was even more of a threat now.

  Now that his prize was at hand.

  She would need to be on her guard, to be prepared for anything.

  If she wanted to stay alive.

  37 Ground Zero

  “RIGHT THERE,” EMMELINE said. “Can you see it?”

  Using hands and knees, they crawled up a large slab of rock propped up in such a way it allowed them a direct view of the cavern’s far wall, half a football field away. Simon wriggled his way alongside her, his head a hair’s width away from the mineral-crusted ceiling. She was pointing down into the gloom, to where the glow came from.

  And there it was.

  The Seeder.

  The thing was perched on a throne of dry sludge, like a refined and ornate sculpture among the more common mineral inhabitants of the cavern. It’s dark skin, metallic in appearance yet oddly pitted, throbbed with a dull yellowish light from shallow grooves carved along its shell. Its shape was oblong, unexceptional, save for the sharply defined extremities, which tapered out to a wafer thin width. Simon estimated its size, at its thickest point, at well over 5 meters in girth. The whole object was as long as a city bus, but with a larger breadth and a flatter appearance.

  From his perch in the shadows, Simon studied the object with attention, trying to figure out how it worked. There were no moving parts he could see. The bands of pulsing light were the sole external cues to indicate the thing was in operation. Numerous thick strands of the ubiquitous veins, common throughout the underground maze, curved their way across the ground and under the object. Simon thought they plugged into the object’s underside but from his position, he couldn’t be sure. There was a mess of holes and fissures encircling the machine and he was reminded once more of the sheer strangeness of the sight.

  The Seeder was the centerpiece, the primal node, of its vast tentacular empire.

  “This is interesting,” Emmeline whispered, eyes fixed on the object.

  Though they hunkered in the shadows and out of sight, something about the Seeder’s presence commanded respect and a propensity to be as silent as possible. Emmeline catalogued the sensation as awe mixed with fear and it was clear Simon felt the same way because his breathing had ramped up.

  He turned to her. “Now what?” He mouthed.

  She directed his gaze to the left-hand side of the object, the one nearest them. Simon wondered what had caught her attention. It took a few seconds of steady observation before he found it.

  A way inside.

  There was a hole inside the shell, a kind of circular porthole. Even though the object defied conventions, the hole called to mind an opening of sorts, an aperture.

  “If that’s what I think it is...” Emmeline said with a grin.

  “... Then there’s a way inside,” Simon completed.

  Thinking about how they should proceed next or even if it was after all an opening, Emmeline watched in silence the pattern of light play across the machine’s hull. To her surprise, she realized the light was in flux, continuously shifting, the pattern building in intensity.

  It was growing faster.

  She felt a churn in the pit of her stomach.

  “I think we’re too late.”

  Even as he struggled to decipher the meaning behind her words, Simon realized with shock she was telling the truth.

  The Seeder was entering a new phase.

  The pattern of light was speeding up its travel along the shell, the yellowish glow growing stronger. It now blazed with bright bursts of golden eruptions, negligible in scale but powerful in intensity. A low hum accompanied the transformation, echoing inside the cavern like a deep growl. Everything, including Emmeline and Simon, shuddered in harmony as the frequency got stronger, the power surging in a palpable way. Emmeline watched in awe as the glow surrounding the Seeder changed into an intense bubble of pure light. A minute went by then another, and still the light continued to grow, immersing the cavern in a brilliant, oppressive hue. Then, without warning, and as swiftly as it had begun, the hum ceased.

  “Oh! No, no, no!” Simon cried out.

  Emmeline watched, stupefied, as a sliver of light burst forth from the head of the machine.

  Something was coming out.

  38 Iceberg

  A HISS OF superheated gas burst with a loud pop in the cavernous lair of the Seeder. Emmeline backed down from the edge of the vantage point, staying in the shadows. She locked eyes with Simon and the dread in his eyes reflected how she felt.

  “What the hell is going on?” He whispered.

  Emmeline shook her head.

  “I don’t know,” she mouthed back, a frown creasing her forehead.

  A sharp and pungent odor wafted up from the cavern’s floor, forcing Emmeline to stuff the sleeve of her sweater into her mouth. Simon covered his own mouth using the same technique, eyes watering. He focused on his breathing, regulating his breaths to curb the hyperventilation.

  I sure hope we aren’t breathing anything toxic... because we’re as good as dead.

  The foul air lounged about them for five long minutes then dissipated, carried away by the air currents moving in the grotto. Satisfied the worst was behind them, Simon and Emmeline inched their way, once again, to the edge of the incline and peered down at the Seeder. As they feared, a second object had come out from the machine. They couldn’t be sure if it had emerged from the front end or the back, but in any case, it was the extremity nearest to them.

  “Oh, my God,” Emmeline said.

  The smaller object, about a quarter in size, was an exact copy of the larger one.

  Simon saw fear flicker across Emmeline’s face.

  “It’s the warhead.”

  Simon understood it all now, how it all made sense. The cannon was a distribution system. Like any cell-based organism, the Seeder was programmed for survival by duplicating itself, by creating copies. What organic life did with sex and biolo
gy, the Seeder did with a process of its own design, taking advantage of the materials around. It had used the minerals in the mine and extracted what it needed from the surrounding flora to produce a seed. The native life was inconsequential. The Seeder could adapt to any environment, any ecology. The new seed was the ultimate proof of its sophistication.

  But it wasn’t just another seed.

  It was another self.

  Another Seeder.

  Doing math in such a situation wasn’t easy but Simon tried anyhow. It had taken days for the initial machine to produce another copy of itself. Could he assume a corresponding rate for the copies or would the pace speed up, similar to the way the sludge proliferated? Could the new Seeders be even more efficient than the first one? The more he thought about it, the more it became obvious. The new Seeders would be more potent, more effective. The original machine would make sure of that. It would have learned much about what it needed from Earth’s biome and would therefore use the data to maximize the effectiveness of its offspring.

  “We’re in trouble,” he said, turning to Emmeline.

  She nodded in agreement, her gaze locked onto the second object.

  “There’s got to be a way to stop it.”

  “Perhaps,” he said with a hesitant nod. “But how?”

  Below them, the process was beginning. An armada of tubules oozed out from underneath the machine, bundling together to create a large net-like webbing. The assemblage of veins, wriggling and swelling as it crept about the surface, folded itself tight around the second machine. Simon couldn’t help but marvel at the way the strange conduits teemed around the second Seeder, enfolding it inside a cocoon-like wrapping.

  Emmeline nudged Simon with her elbow. “Have you noticed something unusual about the Seeder’s pedestal?”

  Simon raised an eyebrow at her. What is she talking about?